Spring Fever

Spring fever has hit us big-time this week. It's been kind of hard to be immensely productive...the beautiful weather outside keeps beckoning and I keep relenting. I keep telling myself that as long as we're making bits of progress, combined with the fact that we're pretty far ahead, it's ok. I taught Madison absolute value in about five minutes on Tuesday and David has been making progressively harder problems for her to solve and it's gone well. Absolute value is one of those things that is easy to teach initially, but apparently really trips up his college students when they have to actually use it in more complicated situations. Ella and I have been doing general multiplication work for the last month, and we decided that this was the week for her to buckle down and memorize. So she's done the 5's and the 2's this week. A bribe with a dollar for when she's done a set of 10 has totally worked.

We've been reading a nice kids' version of The Odyssey, a set of 10 illustrated books I picked up at the free book giveaway that the Rochester City School District does every year with books they're getting rid of. Madison wrote a report of sorts -- really a photo-essay -- of our trip to Boston. Madison has been working through an "Editor-in-Chief" workbook from Critical Minds and, while she doesn't love it like she loves their logic books, at least she's managing and it's self-teaching her some grammar and punctuation and capitalization. Ella has a nice logic workbook that is just a hair too advanced for her reading level, but she's stumbling through it. And her reading is going great -- what a difference from the beginning of the year! She still doesn't want to read chapter books on her own, really, but last night read about 4 picture books to me in bed.

I need to get another "Handwriting without Tears" set of cursive books, for both of them. We haven't been doing handwriting at all.

We've had Spring Fever in another way, this week, though. Ella started throwing up Monday night and while that ended around 4 on Tuesday morning, she's been mildly under the weather ever since. And last night I starting thinking I might have strep; it was a miserable night and not much better this morning. I'm going to go to the urgent care place later this morning and get a strep test to see if antibiotics should be my friend for the next 10 days. Who needs a Primary Care Physician when the urgent care is right down the street for a lot less waiting? Of course, it was rather nice of Mother Nature to hit us with this after the Boston trip and before Ella's birthday next week.

Next project: Reorganize the school room downstairs so we actually want to, you know, do some schoolwork in it.