Monday – today started a little late due to early morning visitors.  Even still, there is learning that happens in such a situation.  Nomi offered to read the visiting preschooler a story.  Then Nomi and Daniel and Stephen played “Trouble”.  Daniel then moved onto an activity by himself while Nomi continued to play board type games with Stephen.  Jessica wrote for her blog and Joshua wrote a couple of poems.

After our visitors left the kids and I had another discussion on school days.  It seems as we have got more and more focused on our learning being a way of life, on going with opportunities and being flexible with our routine the children have started to resent being called for a routine lesson day.  It is just a little resistance but resistance non-the-less.  So we discussed the concept of having a routine to fall back on when “life” doesn’t call you.  This routine is set by things that we do have to do – we need discipline in these times to work through the lessons which then gives us the freedom to go with life at other times.  We discussed again the structure of our days – Discipleship (the study of God’s Word and God’s ways that prepare us for His service), Discipline studies (the drill of skills such as Math, Latin, Typing and piano.  Each of the children have a mixture of these types of things to practice daily), Discussion Studies (these are General Knowledge areas as well as particular knowledge the children want to pursue- History, Science, etc with the concept of reading and writing to learn in the back ground.)  Discretion studies (this is where you spend productive time on project that are close to your heart, where you practice further the giftings that God has created you with – writing, art, craft, domesticity, building etc This is also where I will call you on in areas that need training.)  The children all responded well and we continued on with our day trying to achieve as much of the 4 D’s as we could.

We began a new devotional – Psalm 1.  We are going to discuss this verse by verse from the perspective that this is how God wants us to be.  We will use our verse each day for learning cursive copywork.  Daniel is learning to print.  I am using StartWrite for this. 

Over the weekend Peter took the kids down to their Sandalwood tree to measure its growth.  So math for today was looking at Graphs – their function and their structure.  We are going to make a “Layered” book with a Line Graph, Pie Graph and Block Graph examples, today we only managed to make our sample Line Graph.  At the end of the week we will then create a Line Graph, which will store our actual tree growth data.

Daniel had his Reading Made Easy lesson while the other’s started with their Discussion studies.  Joshua is reading a history title, Jess wrote a historical piece based on Cleopatra for an oral presentation later in the week, Nomi researched and wrote more about Monkeys.

Our afternoon was a bit bitsy – and mainly relaxation.  I visited with my friend all afternoon while the kids played on the computer, played table games and played outside with the dog and skateboard.