Momma bear has had enough

It was a difficult morning. JD felt the need to debate everything I told him to do. I finally sent JD to his room. (It was one of those moments where I started speaking in cut off sentences and an unknown foreign language because I was so mad and I feared for his life.) When he came out and apologized I explained about my massive headache last night, the good sleep daddy let me have, and the fact that talking back is rude and disrespectful. Once we got over the morning bump it was a better day.

The devotion today told us in the year 1999 news broke about the retirement of the Peanuts comic strip. After 18,000 strips it officially ended Feb 13th, 2000. Charlie Brown was the lovable loser that never seemed to get it right and ended his misadventures with, “Good grief.” What an odd expression. What’s good about grief? The bible points out how sorrow can actually be good for us. 2 Cor 7:10 says, “God can use the sorrow in our lives to help us turn away from sin and seek salvation.” For example…what if you were injured in an accident and realize it could have been worse, then you actually feel glad about the injury even though it hurts.

We love the math lessons recently. It was just the break we needed from fractions and then integers. (Yuck!) Today we reviewed bar graphs. There are bar graphs and double bar graphs. The lesson also reviewed the needed items in each graph like: title, x axis, y axis, and the legend or key. JD scored a 100% on his quiz.

I back tracked a bit in science because of the workbook. So today we reviewed the three main groups of rocks: sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. We put a definition to each one and identified common rocks in each group. This proved to be much harder to research that I thought. But it turned out to be a problem solving moment for JD. I asked him to sit in the “great internet drivers seat” for our research time. We had the hardest time looking for those rocks with the groups they belonged to. That’s when I asked JD, “If you had to do this for homework and I wasn’t here what would you do?” He finally found an interactive game that helped us considerably. (Imagine that…a game.) We also watched a few videos on a site called BrainPop. It’s very kid friendly and teaches only the basics. But we go information about mineral identification, crystals, the rock cycle and the carbon cycle.

I ended up laying down today for a short nap. I was beginning to feel my migraine creeping back to haunt me. So we did not do a social studies lesson today.

But after I woke up we pressed through a “sentence diagramming” lesson for language arts. It broke sentences down word for word and taught JD subject, predicate, verb, direct objects, articles, possessives, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. It‘s all those words we use or write daily without even thinking about it. But JD needs help giving descriptive sentences. So I wrote down “Jonathan jumped.” and together we came up with a modified sentence of “Jonathan jumped high on the grey hard rock. The lesson asks the writer to ask himself questions like who, what, when, where, and why to help give details. We did nine sentences together and by the end of the lesson he changed my sentence of “Cookies are good.” to “Peanut butter cookies made by my grandma are the best in the world.” (Now that’s what I’m talking about!)

JD really likes the Max Lucado book called Grace for the Moment and decided to read that again for his thirty minutes. He even reads excerpts to me and has questions too. Yippie! Read little book worm, read.