1st Grade - check

So I suppose I had ideas of grandeur last year when I said I'd update on a regular basis.  That was before baby #4 arrived.  It's now almost a year later, and no updates.  Well, that's a good thing I suppose in another way, because we've just been sailing along all year and have had no major (or even minor) glitches that I can recall.

Luke is right on track with his learning, and typically a day looks like this:

Mom folds laundry, James does preschool coloring book, Elise colors, Luke does lessons

After breakfast we clean up the kitchen table.  I go through his books and decide what he should do each day.  This includes journal entry, phonics lesson and math lesson.  After he concludes them, I go through them with him and correct any errors (spelling, grammar, math).  He is also learning Bible verses from The New England Primer for memory work.  At lunch we read a devotion that teaches a Bible verse as well as character traits which we then discuss.  We also have started listening to Bible stories and Character Building tapes during our work each morning (thanks to a gift of them).  Then during afternoon quiet time, he is  reading books of interest, but they must be "learning" books.  He also reads aloud to me out of his Eclectic readers.  At bedtime Dad reads  Uncle Arthur's bedtime stories as well as Egermeir's Bible Stories.

Lately he's been reading alot of stories from James Herriot's Treasury for Children after we watched the Incredible Journey last week.  He also has bird books, science books (weather, animals, how our body works, etc), history books in his stack to choose from.

We haven't done much literature reading this year, and I plan to get back into that next year.  It's all we can do these days to get basic reading in with a baby that either won't sit still and likes to eat the pages (or is napping and housework neeeeeds to be done!) Next fall we'll have more time for history and literature since he'll be bigger by then.  (We did do lots of reading last year before baby was born.)  We plan to do school all through the summer since I've had a few moms tell me that it works better to just stay on schedule all year, rather than break it completely and then try to get back into it.  Since Luke does his work every morning while the rest of us are doing morning chores, I see no reason to stop.  He's usually done it all in less than an hour, so I think we'll just keep at it.  Then I feel like we can take more days off during the year for field trips, sick days, town trips and just lazy days.

We also have been delinquent members of "Keepers of the Faith" homeschool group here in Kalama.  I say delinquent because we rarely get there.  It's in the afternoon twice per month, and if we go, then baby gets a 15 minute nap (while I carry around the 20 lb cutie) instead of his 1-1.5 hour one we'd get at home.  Most days I just am not up to a crabby baby all evening, so we skip out.   We do love going though, and hopefully we'll get back into it next year.  This year we learned about goats, did some crafts, math games, rocket science and now are studying Native Americans.  There are about 6-8 families in the group with 30-40 kids of all ages.  We do plan to go on a couple field trips in June, one to a wildlife refuge and another to the local museum.

Mom folding clothes with baby Isaac in carrier while kids do school work

Hopefully it'll be less than a year before I update again!!