Sunday October 26, 2003

Well, we skipped mass again this Sunday, due to the kids both having the colds, now. We started lessons instead, which I can do even when they're sick. It's probably a good idea to have started today anyway, since we'll be at my parents house this week, which will make it tough to have school.

We again read from the book of Matthew, and discussed good trees and fruit and what that means. Then we read about Gods Law in "Leading Little Ones to God" I really like that book.

We started by identifying complete sentences. He seems to, as most of us do, just be able to sense when a sentence has all of the necessary parts to make it complete. He then copied the correct sentences on a separate sheet of paper. I sat right there to make sure he put spaces between his words, etc. but he did a beautiful job with very little coaching from me.

Spelling has finally become challenging. Words like "sail" and "wait" don't sound quite the way they are spelled. He was shocked he didn't spell every word correctly. But he copied each word that was missed properly without getting frustrated!

We discussed verb agreement and root words. He identified the root word out of several groups of verbs I had made, and we discussed why each one had to end differently. He didn't seem to have any trouble with the ideas.

For Math we made a graph on the floor with shoes. It turns out that I have more brown shoes than any other color. And I don't have many white shoes. We talked about more and less and comparing.

In Science we discussed living and non-living things and completed a worksheet.

We reviewed our phone number and address. He is making progress, but we can't stop yet.

We got into maps today. We discussed how maps use symbols to represent other things. To demonstrate, we made a map of his room. He had a little trouble in the beginning, but by the end he really got it.

We read about the unification of Sumer/Akkadia under Sargon. Reagan tends to want to make historical figures good or bad. I'm just trying to talk about what they did and what happened. Apparently Sargon had the king of Kish murdered and himself set as the new ruler, but winning the favor of the army. He then used the army to begin attacking other city-states, fighting and winning over 50 wars. We also learned the definition of a military dictatorship.

We began reading the book "the Magicians Nephew" which already has Reagan hooked. He's impressed that the little girl has disappeared after putting on a magic ring. I'm looking forward to finally getting into the Chronicles of Narnia.

On his own, Reagan read 3 or 4 different books. For structured reading he began a 3 chapter I CAN READ book called "The Fire Cat" which was given to me by my kindergarten teacher.

Total School Time: 3 1/2 hours