Monday –

After chores were completed this morning the kids headed down to the mangoes to see if there were any ready for picking.  Over the next few weeks it will truly be Mango Season were things go a little tropo! 

We will be focusing on picking as many mangoes as we can.  Joshua will be responsible for picking most of them and then we will be donating them to a fellow Christian who is raising money for Missionary organization.   This is going to be a good project for Josh to show some leadership in.  He may even get the opportunity to pay his workers their due.  His workers being his siblings!

Once they are picked we will donate some, as mentioned, and keep some for ourselves.  We will eat as many as we can, then we will cut and cut and cut as we dehydrate them and freeze them.  In years gone past it has been really tough homeschooling plus having the mangoes come on.  This year the family project will be the mangoes for as long as we need to.  Josh will be able to continue with his studies while the girls and I work in the kitchen.  No doubt Daniel will like to be in the kitchen too – can’t be too discriminatory!

But as for this Monday – no mangoes just yet!  Though the trees are laden.

Joshua has set up a Notebook Planner document.  With this document he plans to keep track of any notebook pages he needs to complete (generally raised from books he finishes reading).  At this point he is also deciding on the “genre” he can record with – a poem, report, a pop-up book.  I have been trying to get him to stretch his wings as far as his written expressions go so it was good to see him pick this up.  The next thing he is recording is a bit of an outline of how he envisages his notebook taking shape, and the research he still needs to complete before he can go ahead with that.  I may talk to him about seeing if his Diary will do this for him.  Maybe in the note-taking section. 

Jessica has continued with her computer studies.  The book she has chosen to read giving her background to computers and how they work is proving to be a bit of a challenge with her vocab.  We will look at this again tomorrow but in the meantime she has been using the dictionary to help her with the words she doesn’t know.  Today she created a mud-map giving directions to get to our place from town.  She used the drawing elements on Microsoft Word for this.

Nomi continues to write her story.  She is writing this by hand and it is proving to be a story of considerable length.  This shows to me that she really needs to up her exposure to Microsoft Word and her Keyboarding (Typing) needs work as well.  So as from next week I will pull these two things into her Required Studies for every day.

Nomi’s big toe has an infection set in.  Five weeks or so ago she whacked her toe and the toenail came off and the toe split in two places.  Very painful.  Now infection has come along.  This has been a good time to review how the body fights for us to be well, fights infection etc, which was something the girls and I studied a few months ago.

Daniel spent some time working on his “Workbooks” and then playing with blocks, cars, marbles and plenty of masking tape!