A few quick highlights:
- Our rusty old furnace (heater) finally died. A very good thing it wasn't a couple of weeks ago when the high was 20 degrees. But it sure made getting out of the toasty bed in the morning rather difficult, so our school days started late every day this week.
- Lindsey started tumbling class and loves it.
- Kathryn started learning to crochet in GA's (Girls In Action) at church, and loves it.
- We got a new furnace.
- Lindsey got strep throat and has felt miserable the past couple of days.
Figuring out how to do school with both girls is proving difficult, but in ways I hadn't anticipated. So I'm still tweaking things, still praying for direction about specifics. I know this is where they both need to be, but I just have to figure out how to make it work well for them both. For instance, Kathryn loves me to read certain things to her, but it's distracting if Lindsey's doing something else. I'm not yet accustomed to having to work around things like that. Kathryn is very thorough; in fact, she tends to be a bit of a perfectionist, which is something we're working on. And she tends to dawdle. Lindsey, on the other hand, tends to rush through things; she does her work, and I can't find specific fault with it, but I know it's not the best work she's capable of doing. So I have to help Kathryn learn not to get upset if she makes a mistake, and I have to help Lindsey learn to take her time and do things to the BEST of her ability.
For the time being, they are both still doing Winter Promise "Children Around the World" for geography and culture studies. We just began Barry Stebbing's "Wonderful Art of Drawing Horses" for our art lessons, and I think they're both going to enjoy that. I might do it along with them, because it looks fun. Kathryn and I loved his "Joseph the Canada Goose" last year.
Kathryn is close to finishing up Horizons 3 in math, so we'll start on Horizons 4 when she's done with that. I stumbled across a math curriculum called "Life of Fred" for Lindsey, and although I'm not yet convinced that it is the most effective program, she doesn't hate it, which is saying quite a lot. It's math told as a rather amusing story about a boy named Fred; we're doing "Pre-Algebra with Biology."
Last year we did quite a few things that we haven't been doing this year -- yet. So we're working on adding them back in. Things like poetry, copywork, and more Bible study. I'm letting the girls choose a poem they like (for now) to copy and asking them to memorize at least part of it; by reading it aloud every day, that's pretty easy to do. We're using Lamp and Quill for our Bible curriculum, plus adding a weekly memory verse. We're also trying to start having family Bible-reading time most evenings.
And now, because every post is better with pictures, and because anything we spend this much money on deserves to appear in a blog post, I give you this photo of our brand new furnace in our lovely attic...
(If you haven't already, check out yesterday's post for Kathryn in our take of a Norman Rockwell painting!)
