Begin Week 9

This week is beginning a day late. We had our backyard fence put in yesterday, and I'd have gotten all of nothing done, so I figured to start on Saturday instead of Friday.  Good plan.

Of course, no good plans come without their challenges. It took about half an hour to get Monkey settled into his reading lessons this morning. He spent a large portion of time resisting anything that wasn't throwing toys around, which he's not allowed to do anyway.  Sigh.  However!  Once he settled in, he blitzed through Unit 2 without any problem.  I typically sit with him and 'help' him sound out words, as if there is too much repetition, he loses interest and is easily distracted.  So I sound out one word (today, things like "m-i-lk"), and then he sounds out the next. He goes through these units so quickly.

Again, in the "challenges" department, we had L pop by to see if Monkey could come out to play.  At 10:30. And 11:00 and 11:10, and 11:20, and I finally told him we would come out when we were done and refused to answer the bell or knocking any more after that.  This, of course, made everything take tons longer.

Today being Saturday, when we finished our reading, we hooked up Skeeve's computer, and got going on a video call to Hammie.  This is a great deal of fun for us (and for Hammie!), and helps Monkey keep track of his weeks, and keeps him from missing his Hammie and Buppa too much.  This takes about an hour, which I consider time well spent.  We eat lunch while we chat, and then move along.

Math took a whopping 10 minutes.  We did a review of Lesson 25, as we've not done any math in several weeks.  He blew through it like I couldn't believe.  It was a bit of a struggle when we left, but this time he flew through it. I'm looking forward to tomorrow!

Now, we also have history today. This will be our first lesson out of Story of the World. I'm actually rather looking forward to using the book, though I'm a little unsure why.  Monkey, on the other hand, found this to be the most traumatic subject in the history of EVER.  There was a page and a half to read, and it was a fight to get through it. We also did the student pages, which he colored while we talked about what went on the pages. The topic was "My Family History," so at least it starts out with the familiar.  I strongly suspect this will take us double time to complete.  However, as I have us planning for about half an hour of history on each of two days per week, it isn't exactly hard to spread it out. We'll see how the pace goes for him, and adjust from there. I don't want history to be awful for him, but I do want him to learn it, so it's really just a matter of getting it together - it's not like we're behind, so I'm not particularly worried, even if this year's history curriculum takes two years to go through.