Kids!

Still waiting...
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Sometimes my children, Jeremy in particular, are so honest that it makes me take a few steps back. Last night, Kevin and I were sitting in the living room talking and playing with Joe. Suddenly we hear, from the depths of the basement, John yelling, "JEREMY-AA." Did you ever notice how, when we are in glass shattering volume mode, that we always add that extra vowel to the end of the name we are screaming? (Just making observations)

So I call down and ask, "Jeremy, what are you doing?" Without missing a beat, he calls back, "Being annoying." Kevin and I just laughed, at least he was honest. We asked him to please stop being annoying and he said that he would, in fact, stop being annoying.

About a half hour later, both John and Jeremy emerged from the basement. I could tell there had been some sort of scuttlebut and I wanted to stay out of it to see what would happen. Jeremy is begging John to, please play air hockey with him. John is telling him, no. Jeremy says, "John, please play with me, I promise I won't cheat this time!"

John didn't buy it, because next thing I knew they were sitting in the living room watching Animal Planet and noshing on Tostitos.

I really do love to listen to their brotherly banter, I get a lot of my blog material from them.

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Jeremy had an awesome school day. We are working in his Saxon 2 book and we have come to the doube facts, I introduced them yesterday. The book recommends using the counting tiles that Saxon makes but I like to use my own. (Read: I'm cheap.) The boys love to use chocolate chips as counters, they're perfect. They are small enough to count with, they rarely get lost, and they are (bonus!) edible!

We started with the lower numbers, 1-5 and he did very well. Today was a different lesson, more of a review of what we had been doing before hitting the doubles. Well, he saw the doubles from yesterday and wanted to do them again. I told him he could, after his real lesson. I copied the facts that he did yesterday onto another piece of paper and he asked me to time him, that's his new thing, racing the clock. I said, of course I would time him.

I have to stop here and say, I really didn't think he would do that well on the facts. Not because I don't think he is smart but because he has a short attention span and I find myself repeating the same things over and over. I, foolishly, thought he didn't get it.

He grabbed that paper and began ripping through those problems like nobody's business! I was amazed, simply amazed. It was all I could do to not jump up on the table and scream, "By God, that boy's a genius!" I praised him, highly, and he wanted to do it again. I said, no, you' ve done enough math...nooooo! Are ya kiddin' me! Do it again!

He did the first page in 1 minute 30 seconds and the second page in 1 minute 10 seconds. He was so proud of himself. The way it's really supposed to be done is, the children are given 1 minute to answer the equations. Fifteen problems correctly answered is the goal, the page has 25 problems. I know I did it wrong, but even doing it wrong, he was still on his game. A joyful, successful, homeschool day!