Monday

Another full day for us! Yay us!

Today we read about Jubal and Tubal Cain in Mystery of History. It points out how they are only mentioned in a couple verses in Genesis but they have an important lesson to teach us. If we don't read our Bibles carefully, we'll miss out on their important lesson (as well as others). I'll admit I'd never heard of them so I guess I didn't read Genesis very carefully. Jubal and Tubal Cain's important lesson is one that helps disprove evolution. They were early men, only a couple generations from Adam and Eve, and yet they were very intelligent. If the theory of evolution were true, early man wouldn't have been evolved enough to do the things these men did.

History was followed by math. The boys are starting to slow down on the review pages. There are some things they need to review so rushing through it won't be much benefit. I know it's wrong but I was so excited when Evan had trouble understanding place value. It gave me an excuse to use the counting frogs and their little logs. We did groups of ten frogs with some singles and he caught on a little too quickly. I didn't get to play with the frogs for long. LOL He was very excited about his eights today. He made a nearly perfect eight and then he didn't want to do anything besides writing eights. I want him to be excited about numbers but it was very frustrating when I was just trying to get through one math page! And yes, he's doing math in his Spider-Man pajamas. :)

For reading, the older boys read the first chapter of Created for Work. This is an awesome book for instilling a Christian work ethic. It's well written, easy to read, and very encouraging. I recommend it for boys in upper elementary grades. Adam and Ryan also did lessons in spelling and language.

Evan is zipping through his first A Beka reader. I'm having trouble keeping up with the book work that goes with the stories. Do we really need to do phonics if he already reads? He just naturally knows the words so I see no reason to stress all those rules and special sounds. I just think maybe he'll hit a roadblock later and we won't know what's happening in our phonics book b/c we didn't do any of it. Would it be too difficult to start the book in the middle if he needs help with new rules later?

The dryer is beeping and I need to go catch up the laundry. Housework is suffering since we started school. I need to work on fitting some cleaning into our routine.... for all of us! ;)