1850MOD Day 2

Well, not sure things were any better than yesterday, but I'm much calmer about it all :) .

Let's see. We started with Bible, and that went fine (except me crying through half the story). Then we split off. Rabbit went to do her independent work, and I went to work with the boys. We got through Spelling and English (Rosetta Stone and Math Drill were their independent work while I worked with each boy). We finished all that by 9:30. I used a timer today for a 10 minute snack break, and that was definitely a good idea. Then we did Reading time. The boys each read to me for 10 minutes, while the other one played on the typing software.

Next was History. We played the song some more and worked on the states. The kids really enjoyed playing state rummy. I think I'm going to see if they can name states again tomorrow before going on to the Southern states. I had a dentist appointment, so we took a break next. Rabbit is old enough to babysit, so it was not a problem.

After lunch and a quick visit from a friend, we started back up. We did Science first. Now that took a while - about an hour. But, we read the books, and talked about the science notebook, and then we did the two experiments. The first was an experiment with milk. My tip on that one: put in the food coloring BEFORE the vinegar. Here's our results:

It doesn't show up well here, but the blue wasn't well distributed, so it was more white and blue, almost marble-like. We ended up not letting them set up because they were making my kitchen smell. The second thing was to make meringue cookies. It worked pretty well. I have a Kitchen Aide mixer, so that made it pretty easy. I should have whipped the egg-whites a little longer.

They aren't super tasty, but we broke one apart and looked at the air-bubbles. (Next time I make these, I'm going to add cocoa powder and make them yummy.) Both of these experiments were to show how you can change molecule chains. The boys drew pictures in their notebooks. While we were cooking the meringues, I did Math and Handwriting with the boys. They did better today about not saying their answers out loud. And of course, Pooh did the second page first, and Tigger did the first page first, so they were on different problems as they worked through the workbook. I got out the Math-U-See blocks to work the problems, and that kept things going. For handwriting, I showed them how to do the lowercase f, and then I went to work with Rabbit on Science and Math. We finished up the first module in the General Science book. I think we'll spend the next two days reviewing science for the test, and taking the test on Thursday. I have a link to a class that has study cards online and I'm hoping to convince Rabbit to use them. In Math, we didn't finish the lesson before Rabbit had to get ready for dance class, so we'll just do it tomorrow.

Like I said, we didn't get everything done. And the boys didn't exactly get the states memorized, yet (they'll repeat this in 8th grade). But, I don't feel as stressed about the day, even though I forgot to turn the crock pot on this morning, and didn't realize it until 2:00 or so. We had pizza and salad instead.

I am thinking about tweaking the schedule. Last year we did Bible, then all the 3-R's type stuff, then History, Science, and the rest. I'm trying to decide between that, or doing Bible, History, and Science first, then devoting the rest of the time to 3-R's. Then doing Music/Art as the last thing. I did that when we did ECC, and it worked pretty well. I just feel like spreading the 3-R's through-out the day disrupts our rhythm.