Our morning began, as usual, with grammar and math. T-Guy was struggling with the concept of combining sentences and using prepositional phrases but then it clicked and he got it. Knowing that I had planned some writing for later in the morning we did the grammar lessons orally; I find that it works just as well and allows us to do more examples. Math was more practice on long division and long multiplication.
As we've been settling into our morning routine I hadn't asked the boys to do any writing Monday or Tuesday, so today they wrote simple summaries in their main lesson books. I told them that since they are both now middle schoolers that I expect more writing from them. There was some complaining, but I expected and ignored it. The writing was far from perfect but this is only day 4 of our homeschool year.
We started the main lesson by talking about frescoes (which they already knew all about) and looking at one specific fresco, The Toreador, which is a Minoan work from 1550 -1450 BCE. It depicts bull jumping, which is believed to have been a sport or religious ritual from the ancient Minoan culture. That led us to the real fun of the day: bull jumping. Okay, ottoman jumping, but it is really fun when Mama lets you carry the ottoman outside and jump over it. We had:
Leapfrogging
Missed take offs
Bad landings
Cartwheels
Somersaults
... and several other attempts to leap the bull, all of which were very fun. The boys spent at least 20 minutes on this activity and returned to the house huffing and puffing, but very happy. We were able to talk about modern gymnastics and how the vault is similar to bull jumping (minus the live, moving bull, of course).
We finished out the morning with Spelling City on the big computer and multiplication fact drills on the iPad (a sneaky way to get in extra math practice). This afternoon the boys have their PE class; this session is flag football which has been fun so far.
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