The morning started out of whack because of some extra family projects we had to work on. By 8.30 we sat down for a moment of prayer – and to calm my emotions!

Daniel couldn’t wait for study time today – in fact he started early! Yesterday A.BB sent him a few books – one on lions and one on sharks and he can read them!!! Oh this is so exciting it needs a post of its own to celebrate. He has been reading and copywriting facts down in his reading journal!! Yay!! He has been so waiting for this day. I wanted to get a science lesson in with Jess and Nomi early this morning so this activity kept Daniel’s focus.

The girls and I sat down to discuss what my plans are for Science for them this year. We are going to do Apologia General Science together and I am going to read it aloud. This is a complete change from what we have done in the past but we feel it will suit both girls and it would be a good thing for me to be involved as well. Daniel will work on some different science with me in another time slot, on another day.

We are going to use Knowledge Box Central lapbook/notebook as a guide to our recording. So our plan is to read the text, to talk about anything we need to as we go along, and then to do the recording – as per the study guide questions – independently. The girls aren’t sure about the lapbooking – so they may tweak the lapbook prompts to notebook pages and use the graphics etc to illustrate their pages. We will see what works for them.

We then had to jump in the car and head off for the girls piano lessons. Our piano teacher goes to another homeschool family’s house and we join them there. While Jess has her piano lesson I take all the kids from both families for a Character lesson and then the younger set for a living math lesson.

As I said yesterday we are studying sensitivity, so today we talked about using all our senses to collect enough information about how a person is really doing. We also talked about “putting ourselves in another persons shoes”. I asked a 7yo what were the senses and he mentioned the heart – he was so spot on…. God has given us our heart to be able to use to observe how people are doing – often we miss that. Good lesson.

The older girls went and did some independent study and then Nomi had her piano lesson. Meanwhile I had a living math lesson with the boys (7yo, 5yo, and my Daniel at 10yo). We read a story about chance and probability, played around with a few hands on examples and that was that! The boys each understood something about what we were talking about. It is a good group to work with – I enjoy it.

Then I had a nice visit with my friend – we haven’t seen much of each other since we’ve both  been family focused with all that happens in  December / January around here so it was a nice catch up.

We were tempted to stay for lunch but decided a swim and then back home was the best thing to do. Only thing was we stayed so long in the pool – we may as well had lunch!!

Once home we spent a little time with Peter / daddy and then worked on some independent studies – math, reading, writing etc (each child had a different priority to work on.) I had some writing to do and needed to focus on that.

Later in the afternoon we practiced our concert item/s. Then I sat down with the girls to watch a Christy video, Daniel had a dvd on the computer (he only watches Christy if he has to!) and Josh kept on with his studies.

Which reminds me – in my reporting of yesterday (and today) I haven’t said anything about Josh. That is because he is pretty much totally independent in his studies and he is not on my “to do list”. He joins us with character studies but the rest of the time he works by himself conferring with me when he needs to. He has been working on math, science, Latin, blogging/writing, and reading several different books: The Fallacy Detective, Money Matters for Teens, Prayer by Phillip Yancy, An Authentic Life (Francis Schaeffer).

Today he also spent time putting a control journal together. (Read my previous post). I presented to Josh the idea and gave him several different models (Jess has her way, I’ve made on for Daniel and I have my own personal binder) and he was to think about how it would best work for him. The goal is for him to manage his time and his many studies, projects and responsibilities. He decided to go more for my model which includes a diary/to do list in the control journal. As part of him setting this up he is re-setting the assignment sheet to a form that will help him. I am very pleased with this. The first step in any system is making it your own (plus he gets experience at working with Excel!)

Today was good – I had to tweak as I went along, I had time to talk/conference with Josh though there are things from last years routine that are missing and it is becoming obvious we need to them bring back. Keep tweaking!