January 2008.... off to a good start

My mom called today and asked how it was going.... Great I said.
She was shocked. Not too often heard around here mid-day lately. So much bickering and fighting, arguing and hitting.

Praise God... We are off on a good start back to schoolwork.
I'm going to pray that we can have many if not all days to go as well as today! (Those Divine Mercys are helping)

10 a.m. Yoga. Borrowed a tape from the library: "Yoga for the Rest of us"
It was in 3 - 20 min sections. James Katie & I started out and Katie made it thru a few minutes. James & I kept going thru the1st & 2nd sections and then the first section of sun salutations. But we lost steam and turned it off. We made it about 50 minutes.
We'll try again tomorrow.

Next it was introducing our New discipline program.
Each child gets 10 coins. It was going to be all dimes so it came to a $1 a day.
I think my sanity is worth $3 a day. But I decided on 3 different coins so I can tell whose is whose. They all have cute little boxes they rec'd Christmas money from Auntie to use for their coins. At the end of the day I chart how many coins they have and after we decided on a goal we'll cash them in. Like $3 ice cream, or $7 movies or $20 for anything they want at Disneyland. Overall everyone only lost 1 coin. This might cost me some money.... but at this point my sanity is worth it.

Next I pulled out the flip chart and we reviewed our prayers & Mass responses.
Concentrating on the first 6 words of the Our Father with Derk and the 1st 5 words of Hail Mary.

Next handwriting time. I was doing it to work with Derek but everyone joined in.
Derek worked hard and did well writing both big & small letters from A - J. That was enough work for one day. James worked on print and cursive. Katie had a bit of a trantrum that cursive was too hard and I wasn't praising her enough.. so I have to work on that.

Next.... Henri Matisse. I read the book from the "Getting to know the world's greatest artists" series. I borrowed it from the Charter school. It is a good biography for the kids at their level and there are a lot of great picures.

Then an Art Lesson on video... sort of goes with Matisse, but it is a video from the library that has to go back, so we have to do it sooner than later. "Art Lessons for Children.. vol. 1 with Donna Hugh" The kids cheered and loved it. A very nice woman ... "Everyone has art inside of them" she says twice! An easy watercolor lesson.

Here are our results. I watched in on Saturday and painted mine so I would have a sample, but they didn't need to see it at all.
Mom's picture.
James' picture.


Derek's Picture. He did it all by himself.

Katie's picture. (i don't know if she is going to do the black outlining or not) She wanted to add the Flicks of paint and then the running paint after doing the "flowers".

The kids painted and I worked on cleaning the kitchen. We had a big dinner yesterday (turkey stuffing & fixins) and not all of the dishes were done. Filled the dishwasher, cleaned the pots, turkey platter, baking sheets and the roasting pan. Cleaned the microwave... ewwww.

Moved the dining room table and mopped under there and vacuumed the living room.

Guess I'll add in the load of sheets and a load of towels.

Time for lunch. We looked up the manual on how to use the convection and crisper options on the microwave oven. I cooked up some popcorn chicken for the kids and the oven worked great. Always interesting to figure out new ways to use things around the house.

Time for some more schoolwork. Everyone got new assignment charts. James & Katie did some Seton religion. James did English. Derek wrote more alphabet. He's acting weird about working in the MCP Phonics book.

James got him to do a couple pages in the Usborne Sticker Math Fun book and then a couple in the phonics book.
I had to wrestle with Katie to get a page of her math book done.

That was enough.... around 4 they got a call from a friend and all started playing webkinz.
That lasted a good while.
I was able to watch "Dog of Flanders" It was a good movie. I'll have to look for the book.

Now we are watching "In the line of Fire".... James Geoff & I (Derek is passed out, Katie's upstairs). We were discussing Secret Service agents a while ago and I brought up the movie.
And then some other time we were discussing something and I think James asked if a gun could be made out of something else. I have no idea, but again I mentioned the movie and that the guy makes a gun out of wood (OK the movie said that it is made of a composite).
It arrived in the mail today.

Time for Project Runway... gotta go.....

I must include in my prayers that tomorrow we get as much work done in a joyful manner.