The Happenings of Life and Love Learning Center

We started our new "school year" July 23rd.

With the whole natural learning thing I'm not sure about how to keep attendance. We used to keep track up to 186 days of school completed (and I only counted a day as a school day if the 3r's had been completed.) Then we would consider ourselves on summer vacation until August first or so, at which point we would start our school year over.

But when we started thinking differently about learning we started thinking differently about attendance. Now we consider every day to be a school day! So when our attendance from last school year hit 237 days I decided we didn't need to wait until August 1st to start our new year.

So here we are a few weeks into 2nd and 4th grade. (I cringe as I write that...I wish I could magically eliminate grade levels.) Things are going well. I've set up a bit of a rotation as far as what kind of activities to set out and offer the boys. We've refocused our attention on learning the stories of the Old Testament and writing in our Bible/Prayer journals and we've set aside some time each day to read to each other. I'm pleased with our routine and feeling generally content right now.

W has really immersed himself in the world of graphic novels. We're reading the graphic novel version of Black by Ted Dekker right now. (The first book in my favorite trilogy of all time!) But even more exciting to me as his mom is that he wants to write his own graphic novel. He's spending hours a day drawing characters and thinking up story lines and he's written a few one page stories complete with illustrations.

J is feeling a bit lost to be honest. With W focusing so intently on one thing J finds himself without his best friend to play with and not sure what to do about it. It's not that he doesn't have his own interests, he's just not used to so much free time outside of the context of his relationship with his brother. He'll find his way but until then we're experiencing some growing pains.

Hope you're having a wonderful day,