Busy days!

It is cool and crisp outside, perfect weather.

Today we didn't get up until 8am. 8am! That's really late for us. The kids are usually up at 7 (Ray and I drag ourselves out of bed around 7:30). So we got a late start and were consequently late for Rachael's gymnastics. She loves gymnastics and it's cute to watch her! This isn't a *real* expensive class. This is just through the parks n rec center. It's taught by the daughter of dance class teacher who Rachael had for dance last session. Right now Rachael is walking backwards and forwards on the balance beam, doing forward rolls, backwards rolls (aparently there is a proper way to do them and the teacher helps with form), they jump on the trampoline, and do some sort of little mini type vault over a low soft mat. When they are done their round of gymnastics moves, they hold their little arms up like "tah-dah!" It's way cute.

Friday's are always busy mornings because after Rachael's gymnastics comes a quick stop at home for lunch and then we rush out to Trevor's old school for his speech therapy. Normally the girls and I take a walk for the half hour Trevor is in speech, but everyone has colds right now so we opted to stay inside and work in little Target workbooks. Since it's lunch time at the school while we're there, we saw Trevor's old K teacher who got all excited to see Trevor and gave him a hug, then we saw his old K classmates filing by for lunch (they all waved at me), then saw his old friend from K who he still plays with sometimes, then his neighbourhood friend. We saw lots of kids we knew in our 30 minutes there!

Sometimes I skip school on Fridays just because everyone is tired by the afternoon. But I felt like we missed a lot this week, or I'm a little stressed or something. So we "did school" this afternoon. Learned about Ireland today in our quick tour of Europe. So far he's learned about Spain, England, France and Ireland. It's all been very brief so I don't know how well he will retain this knowledge. At least he knows Europe is full of countries and, with some clues and help, he can point to the countries we have done on the map. In math he is learning addition facts. I KNOW he knows these, but he wasn't keen on math today and so struggled to write the addition sentences down. Basically he had, for instance, 3 frog counters (Thanks MOM!!!) and he groups them into various groups and writes the addition sentence based on the groups- like 1+2=3. I think he mainly struggles with it because he has so few counters to begin with and it would be easier if he had larger groups to work with. Trevor tends to THINK about his problem too much and reads way too much into the answer. He ends up making it harder than it is. We did phonics and he continued reading in phonics and is making good progress there. He read me his phonics reader again today and then yesterday read me a little of "Hop on Pop".

Once we finish Europe in history, I am going to skip to America (rather than head through just about every other continent listed in the lessons between Europe and North America) so we can do a unit on Native Americans, Thanksgiving, etc. K12 does not have seasonal aspects to its curriculum, so I'll be supplementing this month so we can learn about Thanksgiving.

And that's about it from us for this week! Next week everyone should hopefully be over their colds so we can quit feeling so run down!