This has been a week where those lovely habits we want desperately to pound into our children’s heads (and yet they only truly bear fruit after lengthy seasons of diligent care and attention) showed some fruit. We’ve had some big things going on that have taken my attention from them, but they just kept the ball rolling and moving from subject to subject. They know the drill and while they normally are pretty independent I am usually a lot more present than I was the last few days this week. But their attentiveness and diligence had an opportunity to shine, and I was thankful to see fruit there.
I mentioned last week that we have added some additional books to our oldests reading schedule. One of them was a biography on David Livingston and I asked him if he wanted to do a video narration on his life for fun. (He had orally narrated it.) I LOVE what he made for me! Well – mostly. It made me sad when it ended – I wanted to see more! But he spent several hours working on it and was proud of his hard work, and I am too. I kind of love this idea for the boys to do when they complete a book!
Speaking of books ending, we wrapped up week 8 (of 12). But because we leave for Nigeria in the middle of week 12 we are moving along a little bit faster to be done with the whole term before we leave. We are hoping to squeeze in our beloved Feast for the Famous we do at the end of each term before we go, too. It’s starting to feel like a lot of things piling on so there’s a chance we will just drop it and eat something in Paris to commemorate term one ending. I feel like that would be pretty memorable.
Have I mentioned that the boys are loving their math? We didn’t start a formal math program until grade 4, so they are now both “doing math” and loving it. I started them with Teaching Textbooks (at grade 4 level when they started) and they have eased into it without complaint. It has been a lovely thing to have had such a delightful experience with math – of course time will tell if this hurt them more than helped, but so far I don’t think it has hurt a thing.
They bake a lot in the kitchen and we have had a few mishaps when recipes have been tripled and they have gotten confused tripling fractions – but they were good life lessons on the absolute importance of multiplying fractions correctly.
Next weekend I head off with a girl friend to a homeschool conference so our week likely won’t be updated until the following one- which will be the end of week 10 and SO close to our trip!
