Today Daniel decided he just wanted to ride and ride and ride his bike.  It was great to see him take this on, as he really studies better after a lot of exercise.  He had several “croppa’s” but a band-aid always fixes that and he was off again.

Jessica had difficulty with her piano.  It was great to see Pete be able to pick it up and help her through that.  Pete hasn’t played for many, many years so he is enjoying it coming back to him, as he tinkers around when she needs help.

Peter also back-paid Jess as she had been stockpiling her invoices for her “work for pay”.  I helped her work out the different amounts – percentages according to her budget plan; Tithing, Long Term Savings, Project (Short term savings), and Allowance.  Pete then transferred the banked money directly to her account, which is a part of banking that kids have to understand these days.  That was her math done for the day!

With our Family Devotions, we are trying to work out the best way for our memory verses.  We have never done family memory verses before because Josh and Jess have always been committing to memory verses from their own personal devotions and we have left it at that.  But we have wanted to memorise, or become familiar, with the verses in “Our 24 Family Ways” each week.  The difficulty is that Josh and Jess still want to memorise it during their personal time, from their own bibles.  We all have different translations.  We don’t really care what translation it is memorised in, the idea is to get it from head to heart anyway!  We have come up with a solution.  We all memorise it in our own time except Daniel (he gets a re-phrase anyway to make it easier to articulate).  At our Family Devotion time the children will recite as much as they have learnt from whatever translation they have chosen.  This is putting the onus on them to work on it.  Nomi needs to write hers out on a card – it will be her copywork/handwriting for Mondays, which is when we introduce a new verse.

I got caught up with office work this morning so the kids went on with their own work.  Daniel was outside with his bike again, Nomi did her typing lessons, Jess piano and Josh Science.  Joshua actually started his science early since he finished his chores early today.

After morning tea we had our Family Bible study.  We are going through the New Testament, chronologically, not so much book by book.  Today we started our reading with the story of John (the Baptist) being born.  We are using several resources, and several methods for our Bible study – maybe that is another post – so the next few days will be finding our feet as we pull this all together.

For today’s table time though the children worked on a story time line (as just showing the events of this story), the younger ones had an opportunity to do a colouring sheet while listening to the Bible reading (Josh doodled a cartoon), they also had to finish yesterday’s mapping activity.  We set each one of them a few research topics.  Josh used the Internet.  Jessica used Bible dictionary and other study books.  Nomi used children’s Bible Dictionary and Concordance. 

During the week they will have to record their research on various notebook pages.

Jigsaw puzzles have been a big thing in our house over the last few months.  Jessica finished a 500-piece puzzle she has been working on all by herself.  The recent challenge has been to be able to do a puzzle “all by yourself”.  Consequently we have about 3 puzzles on the go – you do have to be careful where you walk down in the family room!  I have been so blessed to see the kids do this, they spend hours sitting on the floor, working on their own puzzles and yet still enjoying each other’s company.  They are listening to Narnia again!  I really must get some other audios for them to listen to!

I did catch up with Daniel with his phonics lessons today though I don’t have a clue when that actually happened!  Since he is starting to blend (something I was about ready to give up on due to his speech difficulties) I have decided to go back to the beginning of “Reading Made Easy” and see how he goes with working on more than one sound family.  Eg we have been working with “at” words but not “at” and “an” at the same time.  As we did the first 5 lessons – most of which is simple review for him – I was surprised to see that his hearing sound discernment has come a long way.  I think his time online with “Study Dog” has really helped here.