Back to School

We started school again this week, and I think it went pretty well. It was a little off beat, punctuated by breaks for watching the Olympics (but hey - there's tons of learning there!) and going to the chiropractor. Highlights of the week included:

1. Something clicked with Ethan on the piano this week, because he opened up the book after not playing all summer (some things you just let go) and played his last piece with little effort. I knew he was encouraged when he went back and played the whole book to that point, and practiced his new song without complaining. Megan is determined to be better. The competitiveness comes from Erik.

2. We started a new language arts program in the spring called Spell to Write and Read. The kids both placed at 2nd grade, 7th month in May, so we started the program a bit into it. Even so, the first day this week Ethan said, "Mom, can you give me something harder to do?" It's fun to see that he's feeling confident.

3. Ethan is highly motivated to write in cursive, and he's quite good at it too. For a boy who, at the end of 1st grade, was still writing in huge block letters, this is amazing.

4. I decided that we'd have a more flexible schedule this year, where each day the kids can choose in what order they want to do their subjects. We just did it yesterday and today but it's cut down grumbling considerably.

5. Megan is turning out to be a bit of a sanguine (where this comes from I don't know). Everything is, "This is the BEST __________ EVER!!!!" or "I LOVE __________!!!!!" We actually heard a few of those comments this week in regard to some of our activities.

6. My personal favorite - today when I picked up the Bible (we've started reading the New Testament) Ethan decided he wanted to read along, so Megan grabbed a Bible too. Ethan stopped me after two verses and said he wanted to read the next one. Of course Megan didn't want to be left out, so we ended up taking turns reading the whole thing. It was wild to hear my kids read scripture like that. When we were done Megan wanted to keep going. I told her she'd just have to wait for our next day of homeschool.

Well, so far so good.