A good day

The devotion today talked about a day at the beach. (Oh I want to go to the beach…) Anyway it also talked about building sand castles and forts. The problem with them is they don’t last long. The wind and the waves wipe them out. Jesus made an important point when discussing the type of foundation to build on. Matthew 7:26-27 says, “But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash." (I still want to go to the beach!)

Today’s bible reading was Genesis chapters 32-34. Chapter 32 was when Jacob was on his way back to his homeland. He send many gifts ahead for Esau. One night Jacob was all alone in his camp when he wrestled a man. They wrestled all night and the man finally broke Jacob’s hip. The man blessed Jacob and said, “From now on you will be called Israel because you have fought with God and with men and have won.” In chapter 33 Jacob and Esau made peace. Esau completely forgave Jacob. Then, in chapter 34 Jacob and Leah’s daughter Dinah was seized and raped by a local prince named Shechem. BIG mistake! But he also fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. There was some discussion about being circumcised in order to allow that to happen. All the men of thee town were circumcised. Dinah’s brothers tricked the men and while they were recovering Jacob’s son’s went into town and slaughtered all the men. Then they took all their animals and looted their houses. Jacob yelled at Simeon and Levi saying, “You have ruined me!” And that’s where we left off.

We started a new lesson block in math today. It is the first of three lessons on statistics. So we learned terms like: mean, median, mode, and range. We also learned different types of plot graphs like: line, stem and leaf, and table. The lesson was not at all difficult to learn it was terribly difficult to answer the questions. We knew the process and the terms it was the fact that the lesson offered four answers so we had to solve each question four times in order to find the answer. VERY time consuming. It took almost 1 ½ hours to do both the lesson and quiz.

The word bank words today were: perpetual, plausible, and piquant. It kind of kills two birds with one stone. I pick words I have difficulty with so that we both learn to expand our vocabularies.

We went online today to the Mad Libs story maker and typed in the necessary words to make a silly story. He loves those stories. I picked the shortest story for him to copy in cursive. This set the brakes on. The attitude changed and it was pretty much down hill from there. I was moving around the house doing things and I had to have him call out what letters he was writing. I heard “B… e… something… n…” Wait! “something?” Do you know what letter you are writing? No. I thought public school did that. (Another set back…ugh.) I guess I need to have him practice cursive more often…after I teach him all the letters, again.

We did not do music or history today because 1.) we got a late start 2.) math took too long 3.) I had errands to run this afternoon. So it was mostly a good day just long.