So this is what it is like....

to get all our school work completed. Hmm, it's quite interesting to know that all it takes is a few hours of uninterrupted time and voila, school work is Finito!!

I was worried that the kids would mutiny on me because I have actually added more work to their lesson plans to try and make up for all the stuff we didn't do because of the YMCA. But they didn't. They actually did their work. Now, just let me say today may have been a fluke, but it sure was nice.

I am experimenting with a few new things. After great debate and frustration, I decided to keep up with SOTW but we are going to work on the rest of Vol. 1 from last year for now. It has more interesting activities in it. I am hope to purchase Vol. 2 after Christmas along with the CD's so that we can listen to them in the car if we need to. That is the year we need to be in for the 4 year rotation cycle. But when am I ever where I am suppose to be;)

I also added a little extra math for both of my little darlings. Poogie has been so bored with MUS Alpha. She loves math, but wants to do more. So I purchased Math Mammoth Time, Money and will be purchasing 1st grade for her. She loved the Time lesson we did today.

For TT I purchased Decimals 1 from Math Mammoth. I just feel he needs to see how fractions are also decimals and vice versa. He did the first lesson today and he did extremely well. He even said he liked the lesson. WOW! I haven't heard that in a while.

The Math Mammoth ebooks were inexpensive and from all the lessons I have read ahead seem to be quite through. I mean they don't have a huge teacher's manual, but I still like them. I hope to purchase Teaching Textbooks 6 this spring and have TT work through it this spring and summer. Or I might start in the fall with 7, but I will really have to work with him outside of MUS to get his knowledge built up. He took the placement test for Teaching Textbooks a few weeks ago and it placed him in 6. He couldn't do several of the decimal problems, and a few others that won't be addressed in MUS for him to move up to 7. The worst thing to get behind in is math. We are going to do everything we can to keep that from happening.

Anywho, I am also planning some fun lessons for Christmas. Most of them are based on my Jan Brett Christmas collection. We will be doing a cute and fun lesson on The Mitten, in which we will make our own paper mittens and little critters to put inside. For Who's Knocking on Christmas Eve we will be studying polar bears with the help of Enchanted learning. Finally, for The Wild Christmas Reindeer we will study, reindeer. The kids love these stories and the beautiful illustrations of her books. I will add the link for my Mitten activity later, can't seem to find it now.