I got up on time for the most part. My kids were up too late last night because I hosted the Educating Ourselves Study Group (moms studying math and Latin), and I let them sleep until 8am. In between, I made and drank coffee and took care of a few necessities. When I did get them all up, I started off by yelling at a half-awake kid who spilled water so that it went under a bookshelf. What a good mom am I. There was a flurry of trying to get it cleaned up without moving the shelf, and then another in which the little bookshelf was emptied and scooted so that the water could be soaked up. I apologized for yelling. We reassembled it, and we got back on track.
By 9am, we had all gotten ready for the day and eaten. I was proud of us for starting on time. It was a pretty routine Wednesday school day: Memory work binder, 1 Samuel 28, a poem from Rossetti, a lesson from Plutarch were all done by 10am. Micah moved on to algebra, and I read the end of our last term’s geography read aloud to Josiah and Gideon.
We finished Russell Freedman’s The Adventures of Marco Polo. I was completely intrigued by Marco Polo’s discovers, but for some reason, my one adventurers were not as interested as I expected them to be. I think that is probably because all the things Marco Polo saw in Asia in the 13th Century aren’t as cool if you can’t compare yet what you know about European, American, and African history with what was going on in Asia.
We had a little mathematical conflict. It really had more to do with a kid stuck in perfectionism than it did with math. We had a discussion about how to receive constructive criticism. (I can hear my mother laughing. That stupid perfection struggle I am very familiar with.) The kid was able to learn the math lesson afterwards, so we’ll put math today in the Win column.
Micah moed on to Latin, and the younger boys and I did the first lesson from Phonetic Zoo. That went better than the last spelling program we used. We shall see how we feel about it in six weeks.
There was lunch and company and a fish fry and golf lessons this evening.