Day Three

Ok, day three. I am realizing that home-schooling is like having a job. My co-workers act like children.

Anyway, we had circle time, sang a song and read a book. 

Clink, by Kelly Dipucchio and Matthew Myers. It is a super fun book that the boys both love.

Then we fed the guinea pigs. This is Milky, he likes to peek at us. Marshmallow is still in the house. He waits until we walk away. They are still young, and still getting used to rowdy noisy kids.

 We talked about the day of the week, date, month, and weather. I forgot to talk about seasons. Whoops! We also had a lesson about time for our Lifeskill. We went through important times of the day, only changing the hour hand. C is really starting to get how to tell time on a dial clock.


After Daniel Tiger and a snack we went outside for recess. I found some 6 inch rulers that I let the boys play with outside, measuring everything.

"Plum tree is about 2 inches wide," says C.

D wasn't too concerned with the rulers. S was measuring sand? Ok, go for it!

D made a cake for us to share.


Back inside for centers we shook the sand off, and got to business. D was so excited for centers! She kept shouting "Center time, center time!"

Here she is at the game Perfection, to help with shape recognition and fine motor skills. She was quick to point out that we are missing a piece.

S is playing Boggle Jr. where you place a card in the holder, then have to spell the word with the letter dice.

C is working on drawing the hands on some clocks.

Then he did the block math. The numbers are color coded to the blocks, so that he can understand the syntax of doing addition problems that are written this way.

S was super excited about the candy math center. Don't worry, they only got to eat a couple of skittles, not all of these!

Here is C with the finished bar graph. We used the graph to determine the color that had the most, least, how many colors there were total, etc.

They also played on the computer for a center, and there was a shape sorting game as well.

Lunch time. Fish sticks, broccoli, yellow peppers, watermelon. I realized that the yogurt would be a bit much, and left it off after taking this picture.

D and S enjoying lunch.

We read chapter 8 in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe during lunch.

Well... The boys were being bad listeners and defiant for rest time, so instead of it taking 30 minutes, it ended up taking from 1pm to 3pm, just to get them to lay still and quiet for 30 minutes. That pretty much wiped out our single subject exploration, so I made them do their daily chores and finish up for the day.

I guess that's how it will go sometimes, though. I am the teacher, but still their father. I had to be the father today, and they lost out on some school fun. Maybe we can pick it up again later in the week.

Tomorrow we are going to add in Hour of Power, and it will be the most structured we have ever been, so I hope that I can guide their attention just long enough to get everything done. The one thing I don't want to do is to force them to sit and learn, because then it becomes a game of riding out the clock, and I doubt they would learn anything that way.

So far we've had two good days, one okay day. All in all, an alright first week so far. I need to go find some wood to knock on...