whew

I just finished most of the lesson plan for the next 3 weeks. Now because I did it this far in advance most surely something will go amiss and half of it will be scratched out and moved to subsequent days, I'm sure of it.

We are going to take a one week break from Story Of The World so that we can read Indians Who Lived in Texas by Betsy Warren for the next 5 days. Since we went to the State Pow Wow yesterday it seemed fitting to read that book at this time. In SOTW (as people tend to call it) we just read about King Tut tonight - we are on Volume 1: Ancient Times. Both the kids and I are really enjoying these books and we look forward to our daily chapter. I've yet to pick up the other volumes but that's only because our local B&N only had Volume 1 in stock. I really like getting the Educator Discount on all of our purchases.

Our spelling words for this week will be Brought, Carry, Check, Could and Covered. Giselle now has fewer words each week but instead of just writing each word 2 or 3 times each day, she now has to write a sentence for each word every day. She has to come up with the sentence herself and if she doesn't know how to spell a word she figures out the first part and uses the Children's Dictionary to find out the rest. The first day she gets the words, we look them up in the dictionary to read their definitions and we underline the word, as we do with any word that we look up to see what it means. Any words that she looks up for spelling purposes are highlighted with a yellow highlighter.

Two months into the school year we are now in a pretty good rhythm and both of our attitudes are doing well. The house isn't as clean as it was before, the laundry takes a few days to get put away and the dishes now get washed during my free time at night instead of during the day but what's more important?

I'm tired, I'm going to bed. Tomorrow I've got laundry in the early morning, school in the mid morning until lunch, ballet and shopping at 3 until 5. Somewhere in there we're supposed to go see Luke for his birthday. I think that we'll have the rest of the spaghetti & meatballs and fresh green beans for dinner instead of the usual fish. The fish can wait until Tuesday.