Perseus, King Narmer & The Land of Nod

Today was a long day. I'm not sure what went wrong. We did use one break time to go to Hicklebee's to do an exchange but it didn't take *that* long (even though someone parked us in). On the way home we listened to "The Tale of Despereaux". I may need to buy this book. I'm loving it.

So, longer than necessary but no blow-ups and not too frustrating.

Henry is still covering nouns in First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind (hereafter, FLL). He did some copywork and reviewed the poem he is memorizing. He has it down cold so we might move on to a new poem before the end of the week.

Sadie should have it memorized by tomorrow. Eleanor and I happened to overhear her reciting the whole poem while she was coloring nearby. Kinda super cute.

Eleanor was introduced to sentence diagramming in FLL3. She did dictation and worked on her poem, "The Land of Nod" by Robert Louis Stevenson. She should have it down by Wednesday.

Henry did some printing review and Eleanor learned cursive 'n'. She did 3 pages in her spelling workbook.

Directed reading for both kids was the story of Perseus and Medusa. Henry read the version in Usborne's "Greek Myths for Young Children". Eleanor read the version in "Greek Myths" retold by Geraldine McCaughrean. Then they watched a super cool online short of the story. Each kid then did a narration. That's when they retell the story in their own words and I write it down for them. Typically, this is a painful process with directed reading. Their reading comprehension is not great. Today was no different but we didn't fight and I was more generous with my prompts than usual. So it took a looooooong time but it ended well.

Then we did a funny project:



History today was set in ancient Egypt and discussed when Egypt was forcefully united by King Narmer. They did a narration and map work. This generally does not go well with Henry and I was about to let history go until next year until I got a super suggestion from Penny. She said I might let him do the map work while I read to him. The nature of the map work didn't allow for that but I found things for him to look at while he followed along including maps and pictures. He really listened and narration was a breeze. Eleanor is using the same text as Henry but then reads additional pages and I require a longer narration.

Map work:



Henry is learning his doubles facts in math. Eleanor learned about the fraction bar. Easy peasy as usual. That's why I save math for last. We always end on a good note.