Back to the grindstone, again.

It seems that we just get into a routine and then it gets thrown out the window, lol. But now we are back and have no plans for travel again until late September.

Monday morning we got up and Cameron did a math exercise on adding things like 67+5, where you have to add tens. He did an amazing job. Meanwhile, Cassia starting doing some work in her ETC primer but she still needs a lot of direction and it was too distracting to try and help them both. Instead I got her working on a dry erase alphabet book which is pretty much just tracing and puzzles. She was very happy with that. I need to find a time of day to work with her one on one. She's ready to learn to read and I want to continue with OPGTR and I'd also like a time of day to read aloud to just her. We started reading Raggedy Ann stories this weekend and she really liked them - especially because I have some Raggedy Ann and Andy paper dolls that she plays with while I read. The problem is that she just wants to be with Cameron all day doing whatever he is doing so if I took her aside, she would probably spend most of her time pining for him. Maybe it could be when he's playing video games because she does get bored with watching that fairly quickly...

Anyway, next Cameron did a phonics lesson on reviewing the long /oo/ sound. He said he didn't want to do it and asked me why we had to and all that and I very calmly told him that reading takes practice, like riding a bike, and one day - if he keeps practicing - it will suddenly be easy and fun. He actually seemed to understand and accept that and if we both just look at it as slow and steady practice, I think it will be much less frustrating in the end.

For history we finished up with dinosaurs by reading the last of our dino library books (he still refuses to try the dinosaur readers though!) and then wrote a narration about the subject. Next I moved on to early man and we read about Australopithecines, Homo hablis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals in the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia. I have a few books on the evolution of prehistoric man but I haven't been able to find anything simple and fun so I don't know how big of a hit this will be. I'm sure I can find some fun websites though. We had the best time playing the games on the BBC website on dinosaurs. They probably have early man things too. I have a link for a virtual tour of the Lascaux which I hope will be really interesting and then I plan to have them make their own cave paintings on crumpled paper bags. That's the plan for this week and then it's back to SOTW (nomads and the first farmers) next week. I also have several juvenile novels on cave dwellers that I'm hoping to get some interest in. I don't have high hopes though. Cameron's been really good about listening to me read non-fiction books about history. I don't know if his patience will hold out for fiction too.

Anyway, all this was done by 11:30 and then we all did our respective "whatevers" until it was time for me to take Cassia to gymnastics. Cameron is still too sick for it so he stayed home with DH. When we got back, we took a plastic dinosaur and encased him in a big blob of clay-ey mud (the only kind we have, luckily in this case) and set it out to dry. Hopefully, when dry, we can crack it open, pull out the dinosaur, and have a "fossil" imprint. We'll see how well it works, lol.

OK, 15 minutes to straighten up the kitchen (another routine already gone to pot because of too much variability in our lives lately!) and then I'm going to try and sneak in another chapter of HP. Or maybe I'll read first, because then I can nurse Greyson at the same time and maybe he'll fall asleep, and then my 15 minutes will be much more productive. Hmmmm, see what happens when I try to schedule things?? ;)