Home Economics

Maggie has been making Christmas presents with me in a joint effort this year. I'm so proud of her and happy that she's taken to sewing. I think after the first of the year, I will teach her how to cut out a pattern. I have been embroidering and she has been sewing. I can't say what we're making (for obvious reasons) but I'm so pleased with her efforts.

Homeschool Friday

Today, Maggie went with me to a client's home to since Christmas Carols and visit the girl. She is 15 and homebound and always says that Maggie is her best friend. It's probably true, since she doesn't get out much. I try to bring Maggie with me whenever I go on Fridays.

Maggie and I have made up a new schedule for us to do her work by. We were getting stuck and not getting enough work done each day because

Beyond the Code is the book we are starting to use for reading and I have ordered book 8 of Explode the Code for her to continue in phonics. Today she also read Little House in the Big Woods and read aloud to my client while I gave her massage. Both Maggie and client really enjoyed this.

When we came home, we set the timer for 30 minutes and Maggie worked on Bible. She wrote a story (which I haven't had time to read yet) about a girl living outside of Jericho in the time of Joshua. Maggie loves to write stories, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

She has been working on math for the last 45 minutes... and it's giving her fits. I actually am finding I understand math a lot better this time around...at least for now.

More later. I have a client to see and she is going to put up the Christmas tree.

The habit of neatness

Today, the first thing we did was clean up Maggie's desk. She had been getting it messier and messier and finally I had had enough. I vacillate between making her be clean (in her room) and just saying "oh well, it's her room, I don't care" I have decided that I am going to have to get in there and clean...everything needs to come out and we will have to start from scratch...but that's not really about homeschool.

Today she cleaned her desk and now we are about to embark on a history lesson. I'm going to do part of it with her to get her started. We have to move along faster. Her work is very thorough, but takes her a very long time to complete.

Language Arts

Maggie spent a large portion of today on Language Arts, including spelling. She was very proud of her spelling test, as she got 100% on it. She then worked on sentence construction, adjectives, nouns and articles. She found it to be a lot trickier than she thought it would be.

Rainy, Blessed Friday

Today Maggie and I were tired b/c we went to see a midnight movie. We slept in and then got up and got busy. Maggie did Language Arts and Math and we had some lovely teachable moments. Maggie also made some banana bread. We are starting our Christmas baking.

Joseph

So far Maggie is best at Bible. She had to write a report on Joseph and what Egypt was like at the time of Joseph. There weren't a lot of books on the subject, but I did find a DVD called Joseph. I think it was a mini-series. So today, while Maggie was pretty tired, we watched the DVD. It was actually quite good and then she wrote her report. I'm having trouble with Maggie's computer program not letting me grade her papers exactly right. I have to work on that, but otherwise, it went well. She did some History and tomorrow she will write a report on Icebergs.

Finally getting back to it

The month of October was extremely busy with outside activities, so our school work has been a bit sporadic. Now we are hitting it hard to make up what we've gotten behind on. Maggie has completed all her assignments for the day. We have studied all the subjects today and done a little cooking today. We took a break for lunch and then she is going to do some more math. In about an hour we're going to take off to pick up Jena at her school and then go ride and maybe go to the Y. Not really sure where the day will take us.