Today was just the kind of day where lots of little things happened, one after the other.  So much so that I can’t bear to put it all in one post, so today’s post is a multi-parter!

Flipper was going to a friend’s house at lunchtime today, so he did most of his schoolwork this morning.  Since we’re following a kind of Charlotte Mason approach lately, most of his work is very short little things… he read a couple pages in an archaeology atlas and told me about them, read a chapter in his new book Island of the Blue Dolphins and told me about it, did a science lesson (NOEO, which involves reading a couple pages then writing a short summary), did a wordsearch puzzle on Canadian provinces and capital cities… really the only thing that is usually time-consuming is his math, and that’s only because he’s so distracted and fidgety it takes forever to get through the lesson.

The warmup wasn’t too bad today, he enjoys the puzzle numbers challenge.  The division facts practice sheet, however, is the big time killer.  He’ll start off with “I don’t know how to do this!!” (he’s known how to do division for at least 3 years), then start saying “what’s 4 divided by 24!!!  That makes no sense!!” (the question is 24/4)… before finally settling in and doing one question.  Rinse, repeat.  Or he stops to talk to his sister, blaming her for distracting him.  Etc etc.

Eventually he gets it done, and we move to the main lessons.  Millimeters today, and writing decimals to thousandths.  We love RightStart, how it has interwoven fractions, percents, decimals, and measurements in a beautiful way showing the interrelationships and having it all make sense.  He’s got it mastered to hundredths so far, and yet when we started by me writing 3.28 and asking him to read it, he said “three twenty-eighths.”  Sigh.  This is the frustrating part, when he knows how to do something but doesn’t stop to think, just randomly starts guessing as though it’s something he’s never seen before.

He did remember pretty quickly this time.  I wonder if the glare of death I shot his way had any accellerative action on his mental recovery.  I’m a good mommy.

The lesson itself went fine after that, he already knew that there were 10mm in 1cm, and 1000mm in 1m, so all seemed fine.  Until the first question on the worksheet… it asks to shade in on a picture of a ruler: one dm, plus one cm, plus one mm.  No problem, quickly done.  Then it asks how many mm that is.  He looks at it and starts thinking out loud… “let’s see… 10 hundred and…”  What?  Ten hundred?  Okay, how many mm are in a cm?  “A hundred!”  What?

Glare of death to the rescue again.  I’m a very good mommy.

Finally, he was set to finish the worksheet on his own and I went to do some housework, telling him to come get me when he was done.  It was not more than 10 minutes later he came to me, completed math in hand, cheery and chipper, saying “That was actually fun!!”

Oy vey.

I’m looking forward to the day when he remembers that he finds math fun before the lesson starts, rather than not until close to the very end.  Because this happens Every. Single. Day.

Anyway.  The other schoolish tasks on the schedule today were postponed until after he got back from his friend’s.  So we had a french lesson at suppertime — right now I’m just doing oral french with him for at least a few months, building up vocabulary and ease, before starting over with L’art de lire.  We had previously got into book 2, but it wasn’t “sticking” for him and it was torturous.  I believe that with a confidence in the basics of the spoken language already under his belt, all that writing will be less intimidating.

So far, he’s learned to count to 100, tell time, all the colours, how to say “I love to play the guitar”, a few foods, and some adjective opposites (thick/thin, big/little, tall/short, heavy/light).  He likes doing it this way, and especially the “big” numbers like 97, which literally translates to “four twenties and seventeen”.  Gotta love it.

Finally, his poetry-writing book had him writing a popcorn poem today, so he suggested we make some tonight and he would recite it to us, which we did, and he did.  Grandiose as all get-out in his delivery.  It was a silly little poem and missed the point of it being an exercise in sensory description (how does popcorn feel, smell, look, etc)… It was more like instructions on how you yourself could pretend to be popcorn by curling up into a ball then jumping up high.  But… coming from a hyperkinetic kid, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

What we didn’t get done today… his cursive, because he couldn’t find the book.  Daily Grams, because he’s done 10 pages since I last checked it so now I have to check it and tomorrow we’ll review any glitches.  And a few things that weren’t on the schedule for today… logic puzzles, Aesop’s fables, art, music.

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