First day of *work* done

So, we got a bit of work done today. I think we actually did pretty well given we have such bad habits built up. ;) Joe did some handwriting, Sequential Spelling, we talked about novels (setting, character types, point of view...) and then I read aloud a bit from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." He is loving it. :) Naturally, that set the desire to watch the movie again, which they are doing right now as the day wraps up. Other than that, I got him to verbally work through part of his first trigonometry lesson; I already have some things put together for him to review the stuff tomorrow and finish up the lesson.

Dd got to work on art this morning. It's not her course work, but that's okay. She had printed off a picture of a rose from the internet, traced around parts of it, then put a white sheet of paper over top, placed it on a window and traced the lines she had made. She then pulled out the tubes of watercolours (which haven't been taken out in months and months), complained to me that they weren't doing what she wanted them to do, added water to thin them out, then was happy.  After that, she worked in one of her new French workbooks. She was going to do some math, but I don't think it happened.

Ds did some cursive and read in a book on animal facts. He also did Garage Band, which he is counting as music time. lol. He is right, of course, but he needs to get some work done on writing and math, too!

The little one was content to do a puzzle with dd first thing, then followed ds into the den to listen to his music creations. After that, she did some of the activities I had put on the little table for her (pouring beans, a cylinder block and a Discovery Toys Mosaic Pegs activity) and kept herself busy with all 3. After that, she got kind of goofy and noisy and wandering aimlessly, so I brought up the preschool kitchen and she very contentedly played with that until ds decided he'd done enough work, made a fort in the family room and played with her.

That was all just this morning! :) We decided to go out for lunch since I had errands to run anyhow, had lunch, hung out at the Apple Store for a bit (always fun), finished the errands, including a brief stop at the library where I discovered that a mechanical engineering book I requested for Joe, thinking it might interest him since he wants to go into mechanical engineering, was actually at least a 2nd-year university textbook. lol. I'll keep it around a bit; maybe he'll decide to have a look at it. It did give me the idea of changing how I refer to his subject work. All the math he's doing for the next few years, and the physics, is all used in engineering. He might quite enjoy thinking of it all as his pre-engineering program. Which, really, is a good way to look at it to make sure we are focused on him learning what he needs to be able to do what he wants to do.

In any case, we stopped at his place on the way back home to grab the movie, got home, little one was asleep in the van, the others went to watch the movie, and I kind of flitted around between school prep, cleaning, checking in on the hermit crabs...

All in all, a good day. To make tomorrow better, I think we'll need to have a little talk in the morning about the level of talk and what they will do about it, and the need to get a minimal amount of work done each day. I know in the past, we did a thing where they decided the consequences of "breaking the rules" and it worked rather well. We have slipped so far away from that kind of thing, it might not go over so well. I just know that I can't be the police officer keeping them on task!