Grade 4, Lesson 4, Day 4 ~ Taking It Easy

I had a migraine last night and am in the postdrome phase although I feel like another could be easily triggered at any time. I filled the workboxes last night while I was battling the headache so I knew we'd need an easy day today. Unfortunately, I had to cancel a planned field trip to see local animals at the museum.

Math practice today was more division using Miquon lab sheets. T-Guy is still struggling with the language of division; it's a concept he understands in daily life but is having a hard time taking from the concrete to the abstract, so we are utilizing manipulatives and the manipulative bridge (an Enki concept).

The boys are really enjoying making long sentences with the word cards. Today I told them to make a scary sentence and to remember to use adverbs. When I give an assignment like this I either change their penmanship exercise to writing numerals or I leave it our completely. If I had given penmanship they would have balked at writing the long sentence and the fun and learning of the exercise would have been lost.

Reading is on their own today ~ I don't think I could manage it.

For social studies we're reading a book I found at the library titled The City Kid's Field Guide. We don't live in a big city but this is Southern California and our cities, suburbs, and small-towns-turned-suburbs have more in common with urban areas than rural areas. The book appears to be out of print but it may be available at your public library.

J-Baby is already giving me grief about the book. He hates having reading assigned to him even though this is exactly the kind of book he would choose to read on his own. Some days I don't know what I am going to do with him!

The boys started writing their own novels last night ~ I think they were inspired by listening to an interview with Christopher Paolini, who wrote Eragon. Today I gave them a couple of worksheets; one on adding "ing" to words and one on silent letters. I need to get a spelling program ordered but in the meantime I am finding plenty of material in the BrainQuest workbooks we bought last year.

I'm passing on guitar today ~ I want to be far, far way from the family room when they start strumming!