Nicky has a stye, so we had to tweak today a little bit so that he could rest his eye.
1. Meditation
2. Journals
3. Current events - Stormy read about a fish fossil, Khy read about Laura Bush
4. Nicky helped me with library prep
5. Ender's Game
6. Nicky was excused from school, while Stormy and Khy continued with Math. We practiced division and multiplication on the dry erase board, followed by an introduction to fractions that went well. Then I assigned ten problems of math - 5 multiplication and 5 division.

Spring Break was a bust - two weeks was too long. It's good to be getting back into a schedule, even if we're all tired.
1. Meditation
2. Journals
3. Baby check 22 weeks
4. Current Events: Khy read about protests in France while Stormy read about the President of Liberia.
5. Nicky read from a Disney storybook that I'm too lazy to check the title on right now.
6. Math review - Khy and Stormy had 10 problems of multiplication that they both had some trouble with, while Nicky and I worked on fact families in his new math workbook.
7. Nicky played Jumpstart Kindergarten Math while Khy and Stormy did A to Z Geography sheets A & B.
8. Listened to about twenty minutes of Ender's Game.

1. Meditation
2. Journals
3. Current Events (Khy read about Groundhog's Day and Stormy read about the space probe to Pluto) while Nicky read to me from Dick and Jane. With Khy and Stormy we were unschooling when they learned to read so it was a much more organic process and that's cool, but it's been a really neat experience, too, being more involved in Nicky's reading.
4. Khy and Stormy both did multiplication on the dry erase board, Nicky tested for his tens (addition) and covered them over with stickers on his number chart.
5. Two minutes of Shakespeare - we listened to the first track of When Love Speaks. It was a short little bit from the Tempest (Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises) read by Joseph Fiennes. (Yum.) The kids liked it so much they asked to listen to it a second time. I think this is going to be a great way to acclimate them to Shakespearean language without shoving it down their throats.
6. Oral Spelling Test and written vocabulary test (I made up myself) for Khy and Stormy. Stormy missed none, Khy only misspelled "distance."
7. Phonics test for Nicky with Letter G.
8. We did library prep for tomorrow.
9. We played some acting games. First we did vocal and physical warm ups. Then we stood in a circle and passed a pantomimed ball around, pretending it got heavier, then lighter, then hotter, then smaller, then bigger. Finally we played a walking game, where we walked in a circle and then pretended to walk through different substances. Mud, jello, ice, snow, water (different levels), leaves, slime, oobleck, mashed potatoes, rocks, fire, swords, a minefield, the moon, quicksand, clouds, bubblegum and a tightrope, to be exact. Big hit. At one point as I was explaining something Nicky said with awe in his voice, "Mom, did you used to be an actor?" When I said, "Yes, actually, I suppose I was." he ran over and hugged me fiercely.
10. We finished up the day by listening to another half hour of Ender's Game. I'm MAD for audiobooks.

Again, today we didn't do anything radically different, but it was still a much smoother day. The biggest difference is that I played a lot of it by ear, and I think when I do that I'm automatically more in tune with what's going on with the kids and what they're open for.

1. Meditation/Journal
2. Stormy looked up a current event article to share (she read about Mozart's recent 250th birthday) while Nicky read Dick and Jane to me for ten minutes. Khy had used a sleeping-in coupon, so he was just eating breakfast at the time.
3. Math review - each kid got one difficult math problem to work out on the dry erase board.
4. Wright Tasks - Today Stormy did a task that involved brainstorming ten different wild and creative jobs that a kid could do for money (since the Wright Brothers were young entrepreneurs) and Khy chose a geography task - looking up the capitals and finding on a map all the states and countries that the Wright Brother's visited. I let them do their work on Wordpad and then taught them how to save the files, make them email attachments and send them to me so that I could print them out from my computer, so we got a little computer lesson in as well.
5. Meanwhile, I had drawn specific shapes on construction paper for Nicky to cut out. We reviewed what the different shapes were called, and when he was done, he used the shapes to make a picture of an airplane flying in the sky.
6. Spelling Bingo - Stormy won.
7. Snack break while everyone did a drawing sheet.
8. 30 minutes of the Ender's Game audiobook by Orson Scott Card.

You can't really tell by today's schedule, but I'm working on implementing some changes to our homeschool structure. My lesson plans went from well planned and organized (last term) into the realm of completely anal and strict and no longer fun. And I also think I'm trying so hard to stick to schedule that I'm not paying enough attention to what the kids each really need. I'll be working on individualized learning goals for each of the kids soon, and until then I'm loosening the strictures of my lesson plans and playing it a little more by ear each day. Hopefully that will help pull us all out of the rut we seem to be in.

1. meditation/journal
2. baby check and email.
3. current events - Khy and Stormy looked up an article to read on one of the kids news sites listed on the educational web portal.
4. multi-digit multiplication practice - first on the dry erase board together and later on worksheets individually.
5. quiet reading time
6. I cut the spelling list down to ten words and made them vocabulary words. The kids looked up definitions in their dictionary and on-line.
7. We voted for an audiobook to listen to. The options were Book 12 of the Lemony Snicket series and Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game won.

Nicky used a coupon and took the day off.