Wasted Day

Ugh. I've said it before and I hope I never say it again: when we don't do school first(ish) thing in the morning and put it off until the afternoon, everything goes wrong. It happens every time. We didn't start work until about 1:00 today and everything was a struggle. Whine, whine, whine.

First was Phonics. Verge of tears again and I had to feed him practically every word. Next was Grammar and it was all whines all the time over a simple story narration. Even though he was laughing his head off over the story, narrating a summary to me was "too hard" and such an ordeal. For math, he completely forgot how to measure something. When using a yardstick to measure the dining room table he lay it along the edge, said "one," moved it about three inches and then said, "two," and continued that way until my head literally exploded. OK, my head didn't literally explode but I think my temper did. So I backtracked to stuff he learned in Singapore Earlybird (aka preschool) and showed him how to use a ruler to measure something. In retrospect, I just think the sudden switch from metrics to English measurement threw him. He didn't really get that a yard was a unit of measure like a meter. I guess my patience was already too thin by that point and I rushed the explanation, thinking it obvious. So we finally suffered through that too.

And then we got to the only reason that I managed to get him through his other work as well as I did - LEGO science. We pulled out a new kit today that was Pulleys. But even this was "too hard" and I ended up helping him with the construction of the models much more than usual. I guess it was just an off day. Would it have been any better had we started earlier? I'll never know, but I'm guessing the answer is yes. No more procrastinating the start of the school day no matter how nicely they're all playing or how interesting the message board conversations are. No more.