I won! I won!!

WooHoo!! I won a blog make-over from Life With My 3 Boybarians! I am so excited. I never win anything. :) What a great way to start a day. :) Better than coffee. Almost. I miss coffee already.

Yesterday school was so-so-ish. It started out well. I was all gung ho to get started again after being sick. Cameron wanted get started early too so that we could play Star Wars Monopoly. We started with a review of the /aw/ sound in phonics. Next was a money chapter in math and I realized that, despite getting a quarter each day for making his bed, Cameron had almost no concept of what the different coins were. So we went over the lesson in the text and then rather than doing the workbook exercise, we got out his piggy bank and played dice. Each roll of the dice earned him that many pennies. Whenever he wanted he could change up his pennies for something else. I tried to vary it so that he was getting practice in exchanging all the different coins. After about half an hour of that, he was ready to go back and do the practice exercises in the text. We decided to save the workbook for another day.

Next we moved on to History and that is where things started going downhill. I tried to finish reading the biography of Charles Darwin and Cameron was politely, but disinterestedly, listening but Greyson was a little maniac. He would NOT stop crawling into my lap, pulling at the book, climbing on Cameron, screaming, etc., etc. DH was working from home so going into the school/computer room (with the baby gate!) to escape him wasn't an option. I finally gave up in frustration and said History would have to wait until Grey was napping.

Fast forward a couple hours to nap time. I brought the Darwin book back out and tried to start reading it but Cameron was so incredibly disinterested that I just couldn't bear to finish the book. It was a waste of my time and my patience. And so I moved on and got out SOTW instead and read the first story in Chapter One, The First Nomads. This time Cassia was the one causing a huge disruption so I angrily sent her out of the room and would not let her listen. The story was short, less than three pages, and Cameron was vaguely interested in it but by the time I was done reading it I barely had a voice left. By the time we got home from gymnastics later in the afternoon, I had almost none at all! Luckily it was back by dinner time.

Tuesday went much better. We had a slow start to the day but once we started with school it went great. We did the "ow" sound (really /au/) in phonics and Cameron read like a champ. Next we did the workbook exercise on money and it was obvious that our little hands on drill the day before did the trick. He had a little trouble at first with half dollars, because he didn't have any of those in his piggy bank, but he caught on to them quickly. His money counting in our Monopoly game this afternoon showed some gain from that too, I think.

Next was Science and we read a chapter in MPH-3B on magnets. Actually we read two chapters and a theme introduction! The kids were really into it. Greyson started in with his regular shenanigans but since we had started so late in the day, it was actually his nap time so I just dumped him into bed and he went right to sleep. Phew! After the first chapter on magnet shapes we did a workbook page on matching the shapes with the name. I thought it looked boring and was going to skip it but they wanted to do it. Cameron said, "I'm a really good reader now so I'll read this part," and he read every single one of the magnet names! The only one he had trouble with was "bar magnet" because we haven't gone over r-changed vowels yet. I was quite proud. We learned about the poles and how different magnets have different strengths, all the while experimenting with our little magnet collection, a handful of paperclips, and a box of nails. We were sending Cassia all over the house with a magnetic letter testing the magnetic properties of various things. We finally just ended up in a giant magnet/nail sculpture building frenzy. It was fun.