What makes a great day? 

1.  Peace in our home – things rolling from one to the next, regardless of whether those things are planned or not.

2.  Meeting my priority goals for the kids lessons

3.  Having laughter in the house.

 

Monday – Daniel was pushing me for his lessons from about 7.30 this morning; he is so bursting to learn.  I had to get other things done so he was well and truly ready by our regular starting time at 8.30am.  Some of the other kids were still doing their chores so we started with Daniel’s Discipline studies – Reading Made Easy.  He read various word family words really well.  (“at” words, “an” words, “ap” words etc)

 

For our Discipleship Studies we started with a review on our Character trait of Thoroughness.  I am going to post our lesson on Thoroughness in a separate post but I will comment on the effects of this lesson.  Briefly, I used the points of thoroughness to help the kids break down all that needs to be done to keep the family room in its tidy state.  We worked for about 5 minutes and the room looked great.  At our 5.00pm Chore time I reminded the kids to be thorough with their chores and they remembered our lesson, applied it again, and now the room is truly looking great.

 

We followed this with a family devotional thought around the story of Cane and Abel – am I my brother’s keeper?  This is a hard one for kids, as they want to encourage their brother’s heart yet they step over into being bossy.  We then continued with our review and catchup with our Notebooking (Old Testament).  Josh and Jess worked on the Faith of Abraham while Nomi and Daniel worked on the Tower of Babel.  Later on in the day I was reading Daniel’s unit study book and there were Spanish words included in the text.  It was a great opportunity to confirm the beginnings of nations and languages.

 

Keeping in line with my decision that Daniel is my priority at the moment the time slot after morning tea has become Daniel’s Discussion Studies and the others need to work by themselves. 

 

Daniel started a new literature study “Hill of Fire” taken from HomeschoolShare www.homeschoolshare.com which is written in the style of  FiveinaRow.  He was very excited to be learning about Volcanoes.  We spent most of our time today though looking at Mexico.  He was with me as I searched for some information presented at his level both on the Internet and a CD Encyclopaedia.  This was a good opportunity to expand his understanding of where we can get information and how we can then use that information in our own notebooks!  In his notebook (Scrapbook) he started on his cover page, he made a little book with the photos we saw of old buildings in Mexico, the flag, and a map.  We also printed a chart with counting in Spanish.  This took about 1 hour by the time I dealt with interruptions.  During those interruptions he continued to sit on the couch reading Magic School Bus Blows Up (Volcanoes).

 

Nomi has been talking about learning more about monkeys.  I haven’t had anytime to find a living book on such a topic so she spent her time in an encyclopaedia taking notes.  Later in the day she started to type those notes to a notebook page.

 

Jessica spent her time putting together the family Lapbook on our Homeschool camp.  This lapbook holds work from all the kids.  She tried to design a cover page but was uninspired so that will happen tomorrow.

 

Joshua has been reading two books from his Reading List:  “My Australian Story, New Gold Mountain” which is about immigration and discrimination in the gold rush days especially towards the Chinese.  This has opened up discussion on the Aboriginal history/issues especially the White Australian policy.  The second book is “Be Intolerant become some things are just Stupid” by Ryan Dobson.  In reading these two books together he is seeing issues in balance – or in tension as they should be.  He is seeing the consequences of moral relativism and seeing how our reaction to our history – such as white Australia policy – is affecting our thinking today (not necessarily in a totally positive way).  It has been an amazing coincidence that he is reading these two books together but it has been sooo good!