We’re trying to do math before Kit leaves for work, yesterday he did it with Christopher while I was out exercising. Math first since we’re getting the most resistance to that one. 🙂 And because we find it’s easier for one adult to run interference with the other kids while the second adult gives focused attention to the math kid.

We did math, we did the first spelling list in the SWR program and the kids loved it! They were sitting at the table with pencils ready when I told them it was time for learning logs. They both started out writing their lists in print but then asked to switch to cursive. I did the same spelling list for both kids since I want to introduce the concept. We’ll be keeping Mo at the start but letting Christopher skip ahead to a more age appropriate spelling list soon.

We did a grammar lesson with each child, read about our artist (since we skipped that yesterday) and read from our history. We got so much done! It feels great.

And I write this because it’s a rare day I get the language, math & special subject done plus anything extra.

I’m finding the kids all adore the salt box – a shoebox lid with black paper glued inside of it and salt poured over it. All of them ask for turns with the salt box and I’m storing the salt in an old prescription bottle. That way they must ask me for permission before they play in it. The big kids practice cursive, Bennett practices his version of cursive, and Emy draws pictures and tells me, “I drew /a/!” Which means she’s listening well when we practice phonograms. 🙂 (The kids say, “/a/ /A/ /ah/” while writing the cursive letter a.)

I still love SWR. It’s only been a week or so but I really love it and I feel like it’s going to be a huge help for all of the kids with spelling, writing and reading. Well, duh – Spell to Write and Read. 🙂 But I see how holding up my fingers and giving them the phonograms makes such a difference. Three fingers held up, point to each one as I say the sound /c/ /a/ /t/ and Mo is really clicking with it. Even for much trickier words, I can break it up into syllables (one per hand) and C’s able to figure it out much faster when he needs help spelling a word with that simple visual reminder of my fingers. (If a phonogram has two letters, like /ch/ then I hold up two fingers together. Like chip – two fingers together for /ch/ then one finger each for /i/ and /p/ and they know the word has four letters with three phonograms. Does that sound so complicated? It’s really easy if I show you what I mean.)

We’re also having some talks about habits we need to work on – as in, you cannot tell Mommy, “NO!” You may say, “No, please,” or “No, thank you.” But you don’t get to yell at me, “No!” or you’re going to be in trouble. (Can you tell I’m tired of the sass? I’m getting sass these days…) And we also instated a policy of you must have eye contact with Mommy for it to count as telling me something and after you complete something you MUST return and report. Don’t do an assignment then wander off, it doesn’t count as done unless I’ve seen it.

I said that language and math for both kids was only taking about an hour? Right, that’s changed. Christopher’s third grade math and language are both getting much more intense and while Mo’s 1st grade stuff is still brief, I have to give C sit down one-on-one time to get his work done and it’s far more extensive. Which is tricky because he’s only 7, he’s still first grade and I know he doesn’t have the attention span of a 9 or 10 year old yet but he’s academically there. I’m trying to keep the lessons brief (Charlotte Mason!) and keeping his attention focused and breaking the lessons up if we need to come back to it to finish up. His math text now has several pages of work per lessons instead of a couple so I’m not making him do them all and we’re trying things like one he’ll give me the answers verbally, another he writes out, etc.

With the SWR we’re following a friends’ trip – Monday is preliminary stuff (like new phonogram blends or spelling rules) and Tuesday we do half of the spelling list entering it into their learning log and a quiz to see what they retained. Wednesday we do the second half of the spelling list and quiz. Thursday is the enrichment activity for the spelling words (like games) and Friday is the spelling test.

Slow and steady. I’ll get the hang of this. 🙂