School Break

FINALLY! It took an extra seven days, but the princesses are finally on break. Which means I am too. I checked out a bunch of books from the library today to read instead of what I usually do - correcting papers and such. Princesses E and S are going to a horse class through 4H tomorrow morning, so I get to do some shopping with only two kids instead of 4. Those of you with more kids than fit in a shopping cart will know why this is a big deal. But I'm not totally without schoolwork. I discovered when I rescheduled the school work from the week before Thanksgiving that it rescheduled everything to the end of the year instead of the end of the quarter. So, I have to go back through and reassign the due dates on the second half of the year by hand, because although I know how to do it going forward, I don't know how to do it backwards. Oh well.

Princess S has been working on a display board. This has been a six week project for her writing. This is a big deal because she is quite ADD. Pull-out-my-hair and grind-my-teeth-raw ADD. So to keep her on task with anything is a chore. I had to narrow this assignment down quite a bit. She was to make a display board featuring the various cultures she has studied thus far with TOG. I had her focus on three of her choice. She chose Ancient Greeks, Ancient Mayas, and Nez Perce. (The latter isn't totally a focus, but they did live on the western end of the Ancient Americas and this is where her Kaya the American Girl Doll is from. So I just rolled with it.) She had to come up with a list of the things that would be interesting to know about these cultures, and then research through her books and the internet to find the answers. Then she had to narrow the categories down to the most important five things so that she could write a paragraph on each. She had a lot more information, but I figured she would lose focus. She wrote her rough draft paragraphs and then I went back to help her edit them. I told her that it would work best to have her information in the same order with each paragraph.f

We still have a lot of work to do on writing in general. Princess S is very creative if I let her just go at it. She's written some wonderful books with great pictures. But left to her own, she won't use capitalization or punctuation. She'll run all her sentences together. So, to get as far as we did with this was a big improvement. I have to remind myself all the time with her that although she is an excellent reader, with a seventh or eighth grade reading level, her ability to translate that to her own communication via writing or speech is much closer to her age or grade level. I think I also have this problem because although they are 20 months apart in age, both Princess E and Princess S have been the same size physically for about three years now. (Princess S has way bigger feet.) Most people often assume they are twins. In my head, I also tend to think that what Princess E can do, Princess S should be able to do as well. My bad.

So without further ado, here is Princess S's Display Board project.

Now, to enjoy a somewhat quiet half hour before I have to get dinner started.
Blessings.