Somber

Not a very good morning for me as I apparently had an altercation that should have taken place almost a year ago. but was only brought up today, due to my prodding.

The school day however, started out as usual. S did her work very dilligently, intent on finishing up as soon as possible.

While I went downstairs to eat breakfast, the kids sat at their table ready for school, and i think, in trying to please me and to show that he is doing what he could to start by himself, H shouted,

"Lives of the Prophets! Lives of the prophets!" while fist tapping on the table with such rancor that it made me giggle downstairs.

They had fallen asleep last night listening to the audio cassette. Since H couldn't really do anything independently that much, he chose to do what he could, and that was reviewing yesterday's Phonics lesson of counting syllables.

S did her handwriting and soon proceeded to do her literature. She's getting quite good at her practice tests too. When she started out, she would have small red marks all over the paper, but now, I can only find less than five mistakes. Her writing had improved significantly too.

Leaving her to her independent work, I went on to N for her math. Today she was to work on related facts, both subtraction and addition. I prepared myself for some intensive teaching. i expected some confusion. meanwhile, I made H take out his math book and work on them since it was just on More, Fewer and Equalizing Sets. he breezed through it, with a LOT of chatter.

N as opposed to my expectation, also somewhat breezed through her math, surprising me pleasantly. At first she seemed to have trouble switching the order of addition sentences with suctraction ones but soon after got the hang of it. She even worked on some extra worksheets.

For Language Arts for H, we did the continuation of Jack and the Beanstalk and i had some trouble making him understand the meaning of the word betray. I had him recount to me the story so far and after he did so successfully, I read the remainder of the story.

Then it's back to grammar for S. Today it was Simple past tense and past progressive. Finally I managed to see the diference and she did too apparently. As that was done and over with, she movd on to math, which was counting change the American way. I say the American way because they do it by counting up as opposed to subtracting.

At first S had trouble understanding it, and she was even driven to tears by the sheer work.

"It makes my head hurt," she wailed when i asked her why she was in tears.

"Okay, go take a break," I said.

We had lunch. H and N were done with school. it was just S now and all that was left was math and history.

She resumed her work on math after lunch, with no complaints and even came up with no mistakes. I made sure to lavish praise on her for that. For history, she read independently and as I ambled downstairs for whatever it was that i wanted to do, she finished up.

Now here I am supposed to be writing down what they are to do on Monday on their individual white boards. i also have to make sure i don't forget to log in the hours they did in the Online school. I'd better do this now than Sunday because my weekend class with Al maghrib is going to be full throughout this weekend.