a temporary change of course.

Feb 8, 2008
I will be late with niece’s card. I always am. Brian always acts like he’ll take care of it and never gets to it. Why should he? He’s busy too. I should just do it and not pay heed to the fact he says he’ll do it. Just do it anyway.
At least they are always cute handmade cards.
Spelling Tests. Connor asked if they’d be writing them or using sign language. I asked which he preferred and he wanted to do sign language. Gavin said he didn’t care one way or the other. I asked he’d write them. He was fine with that. I think he prefers that. Both boys have the same word list so if they both finger spelled I’d have to do one at a time.

We were doing irregular verbs. Our spelling tests aren’t soley for speling. They are for grammar and writing pactice, so sometimes they are easy words to spell, but there is a different lesson.
This week they have verb sets. Like “catch-caught” and “bring-brought”, “inlay-inlaid”. So for the test I said the present tense and they had to spell the past tense. So if I said “fight” they spelled “fought”.Gavin sat at the table and has his back to me. Connor sat between Gavin and myself, facing me. So I could watch Connor finger spell and gavin wouldn’t be distracted by it.
Ki asked to do fingerspelling for his words. He thought it was fun. I’d saw “swim” and he’d say “ AH-HA! That means I spell SWAM!” it was like a game. And it seemed a good exercise for them to have think of the spelling word with the clue word I gave them. Using Sign Langauge for our spelling has been a great thing for their dyslexia. It helps them make physical connections to the abstractness of letters and sounds.

Then we read some of Story of the World and talked about the blue, naked, fighting Celts with their magical blue armor.

I then read through the rest of what they need to do for school today and set out for the coffee shop to do some planning. The boys have asked to have a weekly chart like we have used before. A weekly chart lists what they need to do every day (read and play a multiplication fact game on the leap pad and write 12-25 minutes) and has a list of work they just need to have done by Friday. They can do that work whenever they want to do it. They can get it done by Tuesday if they work hard or pace themselves and be done Friday. Because I want to teach classes/lessons with them I have listed that in their weekly list.
For example on Ki’s chart it says:
“Read Peoples of the World book with mom and visit links. 3 times. 30-45 minutes each time.” And I have the numbers 1……2….3…. for him to cross off each time he does it. We will still have Story time and Brain Gym together in the morning.and the boys will have to schedule time to do their "with mom school work" .

I told Gavin I’d play Battletech with him when I get home. This is the ULTIMATE of “spending time in their world- esp when you don’t enjoy it.” He will teach me how to play a short game of Battletech. I want to cry just thinking about it. But he asks me to play it from time to time and I haven’t yet. So today is a good day for it. It’s a short school day and I don’t have to make dinner tonight.

http://www.hakujin.net/Games/BTech/btechq-a.html how to play Battletech and about the game. Read it and weep. it's not the difficulty, it's that it is one of those games that takes too many hours to play. I asked for a short sample game.

**Kimberly**~7th year homeschooling 3 boys~