My Thursday went very well--the self-look I did helped make me determined to do something. Not that Thursday was a perfect day by any means, but it was one of the best so far this year. Today was all quirky, though--the 16yo was with her mom last night at the Beyonce concert (so was tired this morning) and her brother was with their dad, but I don't know what he was doing. They did not arrive together this morning. The 16yo sort of got started on chemistry, but fell asleep. When I pulled dd to come work with me, the 13yo curled up on the couch and fell asleep almost immediately. It really threw off the whole morning, but I was okay with it today. I had decided that I need to look more through the library books I have out on underachievement, do lots of journalling and thinking and praying this weekend and really get things in place for Monday.
One thing I mentioned to dd was the possibility of 'scheduling' her and the 13yo to do the same type of work at the same time. She actually thought it wasn't a bad idea. We'll discuss more Monday morning during a 'class meeting'--talk about what's been going well and what we can change to make things even better. I don't want to focus on the negative; you just breed more of what you focus on, right? I need to remember that here and in my journalling. Problems can be brought up, but the focus has to be on solutions and positive things going on.
One success this week was a sudden inspiration to have ds do a page of Phonics Pathways with me. Not sure what prompted it, but I guess my enthusiasm was catchy because he didn't balk at all, did the whole first page, did great and we did that page and a second page again yesterday and it was great. He knows they're not words (syllables), but he's so pleased with how much he can read. I don't know what I'll do once we get to actual words; maybe set up a list of French words (which is a hard thing to do--only so many short phonetic words in French!) to read. I'd like to pull out the sandpaper letters for this coming week and match them up a bit with what's in the book. (He likes the sandpaper letters but for some reason HATES the movable alphabet. Okay. Follow the child!)
I'm not sure what to do about dd's math. She wants to work in her Batman math book, yet she finds so much of it frustrating or the stuff that's too easy boring. *sigh*. If the book had some sort of sensible order to it, it'd be easier, but it doesn't really. I probably need to keep in mind it's designed as an extra practice book. I should maybe suggest to her that we do math lessons on the side for a little bit so that the pages in the book will be practice instead of new stuff so much.
The 13yo has gotten quite a bit of math done so far this year. It's been going very well! He's using the gr. 8 MathPower text, with me, for now, copying examples and questions from his text to his notebook. He gets lost far too easily, so I want to gradually work on strategies to keeping things straight instead of having him go constantly back and forth from text to notebook.
Enough for now!
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