August 12, 2008

Today was a day of grammar review and swimming! I used one of our Learning Resources "games" for today's review lesson. They are called Reading Rods and are pretty cool. The kit we used was called Sentence Builders. All of the different words are color coded. We played with nouns and pronouns built compound words and played with punctuation. I was pleasantly surprised with how well this "lesson" went. Here the boys were truly learning and none of this was down on paper. J helped pick up with a huge smile on his face. It's moments like these that I truly know I'm doing the right thing!

After our lessons we discussed household chores, duties etc. I need help keeping this house clean. When it's really messy it puts me in a terrible mood and I feel like I just can't function properly. So J decided he wanted to help me in the kitchen (he also very cutely told me that when I am stressed to please tell him so he can kiss me and make it better), K said he would cover the living room and poor A got stuck with the bathroom again. Of course, I will help A keep the bathroom up.. it's not like I'm going to let him hang out in there alone with all sorts of cleaners. I feel a little better about the cleaning setup now. I think I may print off some chore charts of some sort, I'll ask the boys what they think about that.

We finally left the house around 2:30 this afternoon. Today was our Tuesday swim day. We left the house (I was a bit irritated and flustered) and were met by a tractor in front of us. He was traveling at a exceptionally slow, for my irritated self, 20 mph. I followed him for quite awhile of course because that was just the way my afternoon was. Then there was a cop behind us. After that, there was a caravan of trucks crossing the road. AND after that! There was a freight train.. I then proceeded to hit every red light the rest of the way there. I was practicing my patience for sure. The boys thoroughly enjoyed their swim.. there's only a few more weeks of warm weather left now.


Things that still need to be done:

*finish organizing the astronomy lesson.

*finish writing up the August 25th lesson plan for each boy, K's is done.

*get our schooling areas clean and organized. Things just work out better when I have some semblance of order.