Weeklyish report:: August 11-15

By the end of the week, I often can't remember what on earth we did all week. Stuff makes me tired.

Reading! I need a sidebar thing with a list. Must work on that. Ari is a frustrating boy to find books for. He will read non-stop when he has a book he likes going, but he has a hard time finding books he likes, and is resistant to suggestions. This week he read Little Eddie by Carolyn Haywood. I was a big fan of her books when I was a kid, largely because my mother gave them to me and told me SHE liked them when she was little. He read a couple of the Betsy books last year, so I got the Eddie book thinking it would go over well, too. But he refused to touch it for months. Finally he picked it up last week and zoomed through it. Now he's on to Eddie and His Big Deals, which I found at the thrift store recently. And as soon as he started that, the next Magic Tree House book arrived in the mail from Nana (he's onto the only available in hardcover ones now, and I refuse to pay $12 for a book he's going to read in 2 hours, so it's the library or Nana these days), so he read half of it this weekend before going back to Eddie.

Ari and I are still working through The Wheel on the School, but Milo and I finished Moomintroll last week and just started Ramona the Pest tonight. Ari's listening in on Ramona, too, even though he's heard the whole series. He likes Ramona. And Dave listens from the other room and laughs aloud from time to time at Ramona's antics. Ramona is fun for the whole family around here.

Ari's still working on multiplication and division in Singapore, and Milo's been doing days of the week.

We finished the first week from year two of Writing With Ease, and then I got an e-mail that the release date has been pushed back on the workbook, and I won't have it until next month. argh! I guess I'll go ahead and do without until then, since I don't want to stop abruptly right after we started. Ari has no problems whatsoever with dictation and copywork, but getting him to do narrations is like pulling teeth. When he's writing on his own, he writes beautifully--long, creative, mostly correctly spelled and punctuated stories. So I know he CAN do a simple two sentence narration...the problem is getting him to see that he can do it. It went okay this week. In the past, I've tried narrations and then backed off when he resists, thinking it'd be easier if we waited awhile. But really I think it's only going to get easier when we just keep doing it until he gets the confidence.

Milo's Headsprout program has taken a weird and frustrating turn. They have all these sections where you have to click on the right word or part of a word, and you have to do it a certain number of times in a set amount of time. Used to be, if you didn't get enough, they'd give you more time. Now suddenly they send you back to the beginning to start over if you don't click fast enough. Milo is very frustrated, and I'm a little annoyed. He's getting the answer right; he's just not that fast with the mouse. It also means I've been needing to sit with him while he does it, which messes up my carefully orchestrated plan to do other stuff while Milo does Headsprout.
History is going well. I'll post a bunch of pictures of projects we've done next week, I hope. The other week the kids decided to put on a play reenacting a scene from Pedro's Journal. Ari made a giant poster for the wall and wrote out a script for me to read as narrator. I'm already trying to decide whether we'll go with Winterpromise again next year or if I'll try to put a schedule together myself. leaning toward option number 2. I know. It's early. But I do want to get stuff up on my paperbackswap wishlist if I'm not going to buy something prepackaged.

I said pictures this week, but this will be the only one. The 13th marked one month until our Disney trip, so we made a countdown calendar to put a Mickey head on every day: