Monday, Monday

We started the day today with copywork for a change. I've been asking some people about it and have heard enough good cases for it that I think we're going to give it one more try. I also had made a trip to Staples this morning for mailing labels and picked up some new writing paper so we just had to try that out. I bought the 2nd grade paper. The first grade paper just looked so huge! The 2nd grade still felt big to me, but Cameron seemed to do OK with it. I wrote out the first two lines of their latest poem for memorization and he did really well with it. He forgot all the punctuation the first time through, but I circled it and had him add it in. I think the problem I was having with copywork before is that I wasn't demanding perfection from it. It was just something to do - busywork, really. Making him correct his mistakes and encouraging him to do his neatest work and try to copy my letter shapes exactly gives it much more meaning. At two lines a day, this poem should get us through the week with Friday off.

Next we did Speling and he insisted on doing Spelling Time. I let him do the first section of the lesson but then made him come back and do the first half of the Spelling Workout lesson too. Next was an ultra-short Phonics lesson on silent "h," followed by Grammar.

We did Grammar outside to enjoy some of the last few nice days of fall. Today's lesson was a story narration of the fable of the Goose that Layed the Golden Egg (except it was a hen). This narration was not quite as good as some of the others he's done because in his attempt to be brief (which still didn't work, lol) he left out several very important points. Things like the fact that the eggs were made of gold and that when they killed the bird to get the gold inside, it was just a regular hen. But that is how you learn, right? We also reviewed our poems for memorization. We've skipped so many lessons that we're overlapping a bit on the poems. I wasn't too thrilled with the Hearts Are Like Doors poem anyway, so I'm kind of breezing over it. I'm also not sure if I like Sara Buffington's version of Monday's Child but that's the version we're learning. Maybe later we'll learn the "tough love" version where not every child is perfect, lol.

Lastly came another Math review and Cameron was kind of annoying with that. He's suddenly developed an aversion to word problems and every time he sees one he starts in with, "Am I adding or subtracting?" without ever taking the time to think about the problem. If he keeps this up, I'm going to order the Challenging Word Problems book and make him do even more of them! (*Insert evil laugh here*) But when he was thinking, he did great and finally, finally, finally(!) remembered that you have to borrow when you see 0 - 7 and not just put 7.

Then we had to rush off to gymnastics before we had a chance to do any History reading. I plan to read another Gilgamesh story to them after dinner, if I can keep Greyson from going ballistic at the same time. He's not usually very cooperative with read-alouds, but we'll see.