St. Francis, Part Two

Hooray for Christmas Break!  I feel like I've run a marathon the past couple of weeks. We finished up Dallin's St. Francis block.  All in all, I think he really enjoyed it... at least every other day he was asking when the next Francis story would be happening.  We did the Sermon to the Birds and the Wolf of Gubbio stories. 

 At the end of the block, we read together this book by Tomie de Paola.

 St. Francis is famous for his Canticle of the Sun (we know it as the text to All Creatures of our God and King).  I wrote out the entire poem, complete with illustrations, and posted it on the wall.  Each day I had Dallin copy a verse in his best handwriting (at least, that was the idea) and illustrate it in a special book.

This was a good exercise in developing Dallin's will (and mine, too, to an extent).  It is challenging to do something like that every single day for six days and stick with it!  Even I was tempted to bag the project at times, but no, we persevered to the end of this very long poem.  Between this and his main lesson book work, I have realized, however, that for the next semester we need to place a huge focus on helping

Dallin learn what it means to "do your best work".   For student coming from a culture of scribbling in workbooks, the idea that every single thing you put on paper should be your best, neatest drawing and handwriting, free from spelling errors, is a big change!

 Since our work with verbs got preempted by Preston's arrival last November, we had Verb Week this past week.  I got the idea from a woman on a message board I'm on.  Each day we chose a different animal (related to our Francis stories, or related to the Nativity, or related to our homelife--in this case our dog, Zoey) and wrote on the board everything we could think of that that animal could do.  We really focused on the idea that verbs are "doing words" that show action.  Even Sariah could participate in this.  Of course she hadn't a clue about verbs, but she had a blast thinking of all the things that dogs could do.

Here Dallin copies our work into his English Notebook.  He got creative and wrote the letters DOG really big, then wrote all the verbs inside the letters.

We had a couple of great homeschooling moments this week.  One was when we were doing our daily math.  Each day we do one times table (of his choosing), one addition problem, one subtraction problem, one multiplication problem, and one division problem.  These are mainly word problems and all must be done mentally, so he has to think a bit.  We have also been doing one place value problem per day, but he likes these so much he usually asks for more.  We've been doing a lot of number dictations, where I say a number, and he has to write it down correctly.  He loves this!  Anyway, the other day we were doing some big numbers, in the 10,000's.  And Dallin kept asking what was the next number up in place value.  So we went to 100,000's, to millions, to billions, etc.  And he kept wanting to know what came next, and he wanted to practice and see how big a number he could write.  So we kept going and going.  I was thrilled that he was begging for more math, more problems!  I think we ended with oct-tillions or something like that before I said, "enough!"  We also had a great discussion about how numbers never end, and about infinity, and google.  And he wanted to know if the number google came from Google on the internet.   I had a good chuckle about that!  Then he agreed that we needed to stop right then and go on to other things, but could we please, when everything else with school was done for the day, do more place value problems?  Please!

The other moment was not necessarily a "school" moment per se.  It could happen to anybody.  But I was nursing the baby, and feeling especially tired and overwhelmed, and Dallin volunteered to make me lunch.  Now, you have to understand--this is a child who thinks he needs help getting a drink of water!  And he was offering to make me lunch!  He made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with baby carrots on the side.  And a drink to go with it.  And he even let Sariah help him make the lunch--without fighting!  Simply amazing!  It rather melted my heart!