Busy Day!!

Wow, I can't believe the day we've had today. Busy, busy, busy, but it was all good. We got school done nice and early. Cameron started with Spelling. We decided to get a subscription to Spelling Time and Cameron just loves it. I set him to work on it while I took a shower and he completed four of the five stages for this week's lesson. It's designed to be one stage a day, lol, but I was going to have him do two or three of them on Tuesday and the rest on Thursday anyway. I'm glad he likes it. I just hope the like keeps up enough to justify the $35 a year!

Next was Phonics and we breezed through that.

Math went pretty well too. He was ALL over his chair, lol. He was working in the office in the spinning "executive" chair and it was so comical watching him. He was hunched over the desk with his forearms basically stationary and his feet in the chair. Spinning and climbing and contorting all over the place! I almost took a picture at one point because I couldn't believe the position that he felt comfortable working at, but none of them lasted long. Constant movement of his lower body, but his upper body and brain were (mostly) focused on his work. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is when he spins around in the chair in between each word of a sentence or something which is why I have forbidden the Spinny Chair for any phonics or reading work. ;)

Next came a quick Grammar lesson on proper nouns. It was actually just a review of common and proper nouns but it was a fun one because we got to name all sorts of different professions and people who did them. I did decide to skip one of the lessons before that one. It was a review of common nouns which we've already reviewed once or twice. I don't think we really need to review that many times. I haven't really looked, but I have the distinct feeling that since we are currently focused on common and proper People nouns, that we will spend an equal amount of time on the Place, Thing, and Idea nouns. Lots of lesson skipping may be in our future.

I was pleased to find that Cam does indeed have the definition of a noun memorized. I'm thinking we should be writing those down somewhere. I haven't decided yet if it will be a "Definitions" page in his Language Arts notebook or a file box of index cards with definitions. Maybe even both? After that we had about half an hour for him to play with work on his LEGO Gear set. There was a challenge activity to design a machine to make targets pop up for a shooting gallery. He really couldn't fathom how to even get started, so I let him just build it from the picture of the sample solution. Once he built it though, he was able to modify it to move faster and I'm sure that given more time to mess around with it, he would've come up with more creative things. But we had no time. We had places to be!

So we were off to the monthly 4-H meeting which went pretty well. Cameron's actually mostly interested in what goes on during the meetings which is a big change from last year when he could barely follow them. He was especially interested in the fundraising project which is selling cookie dough. You get club recognition for selling at least two batches of dough which make 40 cookies each. Cameron said, "But that's 80 cookies!!" LOL, I think he thought we had to bake the cookies before we could sell them. He's really excited to start earning those selling incentives. Anyone want to buy some cookie dough? ;) But speaking of club recognition, they passed out the club awards today and Cameron walked away with an armload of them. He was thrilled and gave me a big ole thumbs up from the stage. Included in that was a cheesy little trophy for completing a record book. All the younger kids who do the record book get this trophy because 4-H doesn't believe in kids under 9 competing. Everything they do gets rewarded equally. Well Cameron saw his trophy and said, "Hey this is a gold trophy! That means I must've won first place!!" LOL, so much for young kids being non-competitive.

The after meeting activity was a really fun one where the kids make and pass formal motions for the ingredients of a punch. It was a lot of fun last year. Unfortunately, we couldn't stay. We had to rush off and get Cassia to ballet. And then from there we had to rush off and get Cameron to gymnastics for a make-up because he had missed his evaluations while we were on vacation. I was so proud of him. He worked really, really hard and earned himself five stars. Last time he only got three. You need to get eight out of ten stars for being able to do certain skills before you can move on to the next level. Unfortunately, one of the stars that Cameron got was for a skill in the next level so he only has seven stars in Level 1 and one in Level 2. Too bad that he doesn't get an advancement ribbon but "WTG, Cam" for working hard and earning so many stars. Forgive my gushing, but he has been so apathetic to this class up until a couple weeks ago. It's so nice to see him really trying.

Finally we got to come home around 6:00 pm. I don't see how "normal" people can be on the run all day. That was way too much for me in one day, lol. And this post is way too much too, I'm sure. Hasta pasta, mi compadres.