Rythmn to my days

We're in the middle of our second week back to school and our days are starting to have a flow.

The girls get up and watch tv while Wander does his morning routine. Wander leaves for work and I get up. I do my morning routine as the girls do their morning routine. I throw a load of laundry in the washing machine.

We have a set start time for school. If the girls don't finish their breakfasts by the start time, they don't get breakfast. (Given that they've usually been awake for over two hour, they get little sympathy for choosing to play instead of eat.) If I don't finish my breakfast or anything else by the set time, I suffer the same consequence.

We start with our morning meeting. Glitter looks up the date on the calendar. I tell the girls the plan for the day. We draw sticks to see who will lead the rest of morning meeting. The leader gets to lead prayers, memory work, and movement.

After morning meeting, Sparkle starts her independent school work, and I work on teaching Glitter to read. When I'm done with Glitter, I swap out the laundry and head over to Sparkle.

The next few hours are spent doing school with Sparkle. She has a list of subjects for the day and gets to choose which she wants to do next. Most subjects are teacher-intensive, but occasionally there is something she can do by herself for a few minutes. I slip away to take care of some household task, like laundry or dishes or sweeping or one of the multitude of things that always seem to need my attention.

Eventually Sparkle finishes school, and it's lunch time. It's been taking Sparkle a while to get all of school done, and as a result, we've been having very late lunches. I try to keep lunches simple: leftover and sandwiches are the most common fare.

After lunch, our days are more varied, depending on whether or not we have out-of-the-house activities.

If we don't need to go anywhere after lunch, we have an area cleaning. We pick a room, I give the kids dusting cloths, and I get the vacuum cleaner. I set the time for fifteen minutes and the three of us clean until the timer goes off. Well, I clean; Sparkle dusts random things that often don't really need dusting; and Glitter rolls around on the floor. After the timer beeps, I release both girls to their "own time," which usually involves making mayhem and strewing toys all over the house. I catch up on more household stuff, which often involves finishing laundry.

If we do need to go somewhere after lunch, we skip the area cleaning, pack our bags and go. The girls have their own book bags, snack bags, and water bottles, so they can be responsible for their own stuff when we got out.

We're usually back home (or still home) when Wander calls to say that he's coming home from work. His phone call is the trigger for the girls to stop playing, clean up, and have quiet reading time. For Sparkle, quiet reading time usually means that she has to do her assigned reading because she hasn't done it yet. For Glitter, quiet reading time usually means that she wanders around the living room, sometimes with a book in hand, announcing that she's already read the whole book and is done.

Finally Wander comes home, and quiet reading time is over. The girls return to their play, with a trail of toys in their wake.

I'm still trying to see how to fit in a few more activities into our days. It's like putting together a mosaic. I know what I want the final picture to be. I know that I want to use certain tiles. However, I can't quite figure out how to fit all the pieces together, or even if it is possible to fit all the pieces.

Theater District Open House

I don't have a talent for writing. I type stuff that falls from my brain to my fingers and sometimes I try to organize the words. But usually the only stuff that comes out is boring factual stuff. Still, I enjoy watching the arts.

We went to the Theater District Open House today. For the cost of parking, we were able to enjoy world class ballet, opera, stage combat, and symphony, all in the space of a few hours. I even managed to drag myself away from the enticing ticket prices by reminding myself of all the $$$ that we've recently spent repairing and replacing appliances in the house.

The girls had a fabulous time, and Wander even came along. He slept through most of the performances, except for the sword fighting. Sparkle enjoyed dressing up in all the costumes, and Glitter's dancing in the seats had the couple behind us smiling at her for the entire show.

A rare picture of all four of us.


Sparkle with a dancer from the ballet company.


Wander, Glitter, and Sparkle watching a show.


Glitter in one of the most expensive seats in the house. Please don't fall over the edge.


Sparkle and Glitter romping in fake flowers on stage.


Sparkle in dress-up again.


More dress-up for Sparkle.


Face painting! A pink and purple butterfly for Glitter -- her favorite colors.


An orange and green butterfly for Sparkle.


Theater games. I had to prod Sparkle to join the group, but once she did, she had fun.


Wander awake -- it's the sword fighting.


Sword fighting!


The finale was a concert featuring songs that Sparkle and Glitter actually recognized, thanks to Themes to Remember.

The girls, especially Glitter, have taken to walking up and down the 3" wide backs of the sofas. At first I tried to discourage it. Then I remembered the battles I had with a one year old Glitter standing up on a swaying rocking chair. Those battles only ended when I got rid of the rocking chair. So now I simply tell the girls to not let daddy catch them doing it.

Sparkle sidetracked

Can you tell I've caught up with the photos off my camera?
I now feel free to take more random kid pictures.

Here is Sparkle. She was having some trouble drawing the braces in the bar diagrams for math, so I told her to practice drawing braces during her free time.

I expected her to just draw some wavy lines, but instead she decided to come up with her own math problem. I commented that it was a very nice word problem, but there were no braces. I then got a scrap piece of paper and demonstrated drawing braces. Sparkle nodded, and I went on my merry way. A few minutes later, Sparkle showed me a picture of a character in her word problem, Molly. The only braces on the page were mine. A few minutes later, Sparkle has completed the bar diagram for her word problem with some nice looking braces.

I decided to take a picture of Sparkle with her word problem. Then I decided to take a picture of the accompanying illustration. Alas, Glitter has taken the paper and cut it up into pieces. We salvage most of the pieces, but cannot find the piece that shows the pie that Molly was smelling. (Hum, there are no erasers in the picture, contrary to what I would expect, given the word problem.) I take a picture of the pieced-together picture, and then Sparkle insists on drawing another picture of Molly for me to photograph.







BTW, the word problem is ...
"Sally had 2 erasers after giving 3 erasers to Molly. How many erasers did Sally have at first?"

The answer is 2+ 3 = 5. "Sally had 5 erasers at first."

school for Glitter

After three years in preschool, I finally brought Glitter home. This school year Glitter is in pre-K. My main academic goal for the year for her is learning to read.

I'm using the textbook "The Reading Lesson" with Glitter, just like I did with Sparkle.


Here is Glitter reading today's lesson. You can see how she uses the notched card to keep track of which word she is on. When she has trouble with a particular word, she also backs-up the notched card to better sound out the individual letters.



I am also teaching Glitter the phonograms that she will eventually use when we start spelling after she finishes "The Reading Lesson". Once again, the flashcards are leftovers from when I made them for Sparkle.


In between the Reading Lesson and phonograms, I read Glitter a story of her own choosing. I figured that wasn't worth video-ing. BTW, today's lessons went abnormally smoothly. Glitter so enjoyed the idea of being on video that she was remarkably on-task during the lesson.