Grade 4, Spring Term, Beowulf Week 3, Day 1 ~ The Best Laid Plans

Listening to Beowulf with Papa simply didn't work, and the boys and I lost most of a week of main lesson work because of it. Our evenings are just a little too tight to fit in another time commitment.

So this week we start again with our regular routine of doing all of our main lesson work in the mornings. I'm a little disappointed that Papa won't be sharing this with us, but actually planning when we will get the main lesson work done is more effective than hoping that we'll have time for it.

I worked very hard yesterday, planning our practice work for the next (and final!) six weeks of our school year and gathering the necessary materials for math skills practice, grammar practice, and multiplication table practice/drills. I now have everything I need to fill the boys' lesson binders each week through the end of our school year.

I made a decision to stop copy work for the rest of the school year; the grammar practice involves a good amount of writing and I know that J-Baby will balk at it if he is already tired from having done his copywork.

In addition to our main lesson work on Beowulf the boys and I will be preparing for our town's annual Shakespeare Festival by familiarizing the boys with the three plays that will be presented this year: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet. Can you imagine a better line-up? This isn't meant to be an in-depth study; the goal is for the boys to be able to follow the plot lines as they watch the plays. T-Guy is familiar with some of Shakespeare's works via the Lamb collection, however J-Baby really hasn't had any interest as of yet. I'm on the hunt for good picture books and will probably get the Jim Weiss Shakespeare For Children and Romeo and Juliet CDs.

Today's lesson work: long division practice, pronouns, timed multiplication drill, Beowulf, assigned reading (The Earth Dragon Awakes), free reading, and American history, with a long lunchtime discussion of binary and decimal (base 10) number systems.