A Great Day to Work

I bet you can hear me singing, wherever you are. "Alleluia!"

Homeschooling is a journey with highs and lows. Some days go pretty well, others are really not good and include some raised voices, or some defiance and frustration.

Today is Veteran's Day. Sean has had years of Veteran's Day celebrations and assemblies at the public Montessori School, and though we talk about what it means, we don't do anything all that special for Veteran's Day.

While the rest of the school world in this country is on what my son calls an "off day," Sean was not at all upset when I told him we were not on an off day today.

Last year he was very aware of all of his friends' off days. And he has friends in different school districts, so their days off are all different, except holidays like Veteran's Day, of course.  I had a hard time getting him to understand that we couldn't follow every district's schedule because we'd never get any school done.

But last night, when I said we were doing school today because we started school a month late, he was fine with it. He even argued with a friend on the phone saying that unless you're a soldier, you shouldn't have the day off anyway, because all a kid is going to do is play video games all day, and they wouldn't be doing anything to do with Veteran's Day.

So today we did a full day of school.

We have started learning Greek root words and their meanings, and how we use those root words in our own language. I introduced six yesterday, and another six of them today. I will continue until we get through the material I have on Greek root words.

I begin by introducing the root word, and see if he can guess the meaning. A lot of times he can guess. And then I have him find it in the dictionary and read me what the word is and its meaning. If it's an ending root, such as logy, then I encourage him to think of as many words as possible with this in it. We discuss the root of those words, and how their meanings are related to the root word. For instance, ast, aster, astro mean star, stars, outer space. We haven't studied Greek, so we aren't sure, but we discussed how Greeks use plurals, and ast means one star, aster means more than one star, and astro means outer space. He is flying along with this work. It makes me want to introduce another language, but I'm not fluent in any other languages.

We are still finishing up Ancient Greece, but there seems to be one more thing, and then just one more thing that we can research or read about Ancient Greece. We aren't done yet. I plan to use it a little more to go back over the election process.

Another work on our list today was math. We've been doing math since the start of school, but I told the Story of Numbers today, and he was enthralled. I'm pretty sure he has heard this story in school, but I admit I don't think I got to it last year. No matter, he really liked it. It is the last of the Five Great Lessons. I love these stories so much. I got mine from Moteaco.com. They are AMI based.