All’s well at Faith Christian Academy

Our devotion today was “Good verses Good.” Like good means: tasty, pleasant, healthy, and finally morally good.

Our 40 Days of Purpose Driven life was about bringing glory to God. We can do this five main ways. We can bring glory to God by worshipping Him, loving Him, becoming like Christ, serving Him, and telling others about Him.

There was a LONG bathroom break…and then he came back begging for Language Arts again. He learned about suffixes today. He worked his way through two lessons and two quizzes. He mastered this task.

I told him to take a five minute break and he started playing the organ. Instantly he started playing “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee.” This is simply amazing to me that he can play by ear. Oh course I had to call Jeff and “Da, da, da, da…” the tune because I did know the words (or name of the song) only the notes by “Da, da, da, daing…” Jeff didn’t know so I enlisted Grammy to track down the name. We both had our hymn books out and she found it. (Whew, now I can sleep tonight. Don’t you hate it when you can’t remember things?)

Math became an instant frustration point causing JD to become moody. We learned about “Exponents” today. (Ex: 3x3 is 3 squared.) And the second lesson was the power of 10 squared. I was really understanding it but JD got frustrated because he wasn’t. I again tried to get from him what he was “feeling” but he didn’t tell me. He only wanted to press on and get through the lesson.

JD had fun with his computer keyboard (typing) lesson. He earned a special certificate from the website and now knows: A,S,D,F,G,H,J,K,L, and ; (home row) and E,R,U, and I. The certificate says, “Level 1, Top Typist!”

I knew I would have struggles trying to get him into the “Edit/rewrite” lesson but the fundamentals of editing really need addressed. His option was to either rewrite the “printed” journal entry or the one in “cursive.” The catch was if he picked the “printed” one today, then next Friday he has to rewrite the “cursive” entry. He of course opted for the shorter journal entry. And you guessed it…this lesson took a long time to complete. I was busy getting ready after my shower and I found him at the kitchen table where I left him. The only difference was he stood up to write. I had him tell me all the letters he was writing to make sure he wasn‘t just sitting there. (Like his public school teacher let him do.) Saying the letters out loud seemed to speed up the process. Then I tried having him chew on gum to distract his mind.


He was happy even though he would never tell me because he was whistling and singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” for most of the writing. Which tells me even though his dislikes writing, he’s a happy child!

In health today we learned about STRESS! (We’re not feeling near as much stress as some would imagine as we embarked on this home school thing.) I thought, “Hey if the lesson can teach him ways to relax then it’s worth the lesson.” It talked about good stress and bad stress and of course ways to relax. (It’s going to be hard to teach him yelling out tasks from my bubble bath though.) He also agrees that a hot bath really relaxes him too.

There’s a cool website out there that I can type in the spelling words and then JD can play games with “my” spelling words. He loves “Hang Mouse.” After he played Hang Mouse I asked if he wanted to look at his words one more time before the test. He said, “No.” So onto the test we went. He was on a roll until the word predetermined tripped him up. He had it spelled correctly and then changed his mind. He kept looking at me for approval and I had to get my poker face on. (I don’t even know how to play poker.) I said, “Sorry buddy, I can’t help you.” (Oh that was hard to do, but I did.) He scored a 90% on his test. He mentioned his normal scores at public school were 3-7 correct. He also mentioned never receiving a 100% on a spelling test. The nice thing about this website is you can print 100% certificates. I told him, “That’s a goal to work toward.”

Again, thanks for your support and prayers. Keep it up! I have been taking pictures and plan to download them into a slide show. But it’s a some what difficult process and I need a few more pictures.