Aidan really liked these Jan Brett alphabet handwriting pages — I printed out the cat one today and he filled the whole page with traced C’s. A milestone! — he can trace all by himself and hold the pen correctly. I have to keep noticing these little progress points!
It was one of those friction days — don’t know if it was me or the boys, or both. Probably partly due to them both staying up till midnight playing Viva Pinata (sigh). Sean was at the low point of his cycle with math and couldn’t seem to get rise over run. He didn’t remember what he had read yesterday, either. He had to take a break to recover but then managed to get through the rest of the work pretty fast: Latin, Greek, Logic, and Story of the Church. He has finished Black Horses for the King, so I need to find him some more books. I have some coming from the library but they are not here yet. He gave a first-rate narration of Story of the Church — interesting because we had had some tension about not remembering the readings from yesterday. I gave him a short talking-to about it, which I HATE doing because I remember them not being very helpful to me when I was growing up; but maybe keeping it short and constructive helped. I told him that some people have trouble with retrieval because it sinks down too deep to pull up again easily (I’m one of those); and some people may not read carefully enough because they want to get through it rather than understand.
Kieron was also struggling with an issue, a life one rather than an academic one. This took up some time and emotional energy. We did chapter 60 and 61 of Saxon 65. Then he took a break. Then: Story of the Romans (about Numa Pompilius and the temples he built and his character, plus we did a bit of general review); Bible History (Joseph in Potiphar’s household); and Simply Grammar. He just finished working on Greek and I called it a day because of the emotional turmoil. He couldn’t give much of a narration of the Romans, either because it was an expository rather than narrative bit, or because the noise level in the room had suddenly gone up.
I am most of the way through reading MacBeth, and then I will listen to it on tape in the evenings while I’m making dinner. I’m also reading Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason; very interesting.
