A good test day

The devotion was about today being the anniversary of the first postage stamp. Did you know that at the beginning of the postage stamp era the receiver would have to pay the postage? The receiver would often refuse the letter. It got to where the sender and receiver would send secret messages on the envelopes. The United States came up with our stamp in 1847. It only cost $0.05 back then. Then, the devotion transitioned into the stamp of the Holy Spirit, being our guarantee. It says we be belong to God and will receive all the benefits. (And for free!)

We finished up the book of Genesis today. Only 65 more to go. Seems so long, but if we pace ourselves we can absorb more. We read chapters 49-50 today. Chapter 49 was Jacob’s blessings to all his boys before he died. Some seemed more like a curse than a blessing. But before Jacob died he instructed them to bury him in Canaan with his first wife Leah, his grandfather and his wife, and his father and mother. Chapter 50 was about hem traveling to Canaan with a parade of Egyptians officials to carry out Jacob’s final instructions. The very last part of Genesis was where Joseph’s brother were worried about Joseph getting revenge on them for what they did years ago. He assured them he intended no harm. He would take care of them. (Joseph is a symbolism of Jesus. Thanks Jesus for forgiving us…) Then, Joseph dies after having his brothers swear to take his bones back when God comes for them.

Today we did an algebra review. After the review JD took the goal 5 quiz consisting of 13 questions. I don’t know exactly what his problem was but he was REALLY delayed in answering each question and claimed not to know how to find the missing pattern link on some of the problems. I tried my best to encourage him by telling him, “You were all over this when we learned together. You were always the one that discovered the pattern first.” This didn’t help. So I assisted him for one of the questions, emphasized a clue on the next, and got up an left him for the third question to see if he was depending on me. By the end of the quiz I realized he didn’t want to write down the information to “keep track of the information.” He still did well on the quiz.

Today we finished up the Reading EOG during the language arts and email/snail mail time periods. There were 24 comprehension questions and JD only missed 2 questions. So when I total Tuesday’s quiz with today’s quiz he made a 93% on the practice EOG. I only hope the state assessment I ordered will be very similar. If they have editing, punctuation, parts of speech, and so on I don’t know how JD will do. It’s been baby steps this semester and I have worked on editing, punctuation and the parts of speech but JD misses a lot of those details I see clearly.

We tried to have a somewhat easy school day today because of the algebra EOG and the reading EOG. So for science today I allowed JD to continue to watch a Discovery program that explained the process of bringing down a huge structure with explosives. He watched them bring down a 40 story apartment building, an old shipping port building with four cranes, and four huge smoke towers. JD learned that there are only three women explosive managers in the world. I tried to Google that for verification but I was unable to find anything. (You can’t believe everything you see on TV.)

Civics was the last topic of the day. Today he learned about the exchange of goods and services. More specifically, trading goods for goods or goods for services. I love that they are still using the lemonade stand for examples. They said, “If you have lemons and no sugar, but the stand next to you has sugar but no lemons you can barter or trade for the items you need.” They talked about fair trading and trading with other countries as well. We crammed two lessons into one so that he can finish the civics lessons before school ends. He took the chapter quiz and got a 100%.