The garden looks like it's starting to wind down a little bit. We have a lot of tomatoes on the plants and I saw that one of our buttenut squash is almost ready to pick. That's good because in one of the recipes I'm making this week, I'll need it.
School started and we are still trying to settle into a good routine. I am finding it easiest to work with Aidan first and spend a couple of hours with him and his lessons and then work with Connor. I tried a couple of days to try and work with them both at the same time and it didn't work. Connor would be trying to work on his work and would get distracted listening to Aidan and I and then I would be working with Connor on something and Aidan would be badgering me to help him. So I've split them up and it seems to be working better.
Connor's work load has tripled since last year. He's in a gifted program this year and is a year ahead in math. He has gone from cutsie little elementary workbooks to full fledged textbooks. He's gone from figuring out multi choice answers to having to write 25 answers down in a notebook for eath math lesson. His reading work is insane. He has 20 new advanced spelling words each week. He has a very intense writing program and the reading work is very advanced. He's not having a problem with the reading and comprehension. He's far ahead of his grade level. What he has a problem with is writing. He hates it. Yesterday on his science test he asked if he could just tell me the answers instead of writing it out. I think he gets frustrated because I've drilled it into him that I want neat handwriting and now he's editing his writing while he's doing it. He'll write a letter, and get frustrated and erase it and say "that's not good enough" and then do it over again. So, on the one hand, I'm happy that he recognizes that he can do better, but on the other hand I don't want him to obsess about it to the point where he doesn't want to do it at all (which is where I think we are right now). I'm pondering letting him write a little less neatly on things that I'm grading and on things he has to send to his teacher he has to have it perfect. I don't know about this though. I want him to do his best all the time. It's going to be interesting trying to figure this out and hopefully I won't mess Connor up in the meantime.
The other interesting thing I'm finding is that Aidan has a completely different way of learning than Connor does. Connor does not like the sit down/listen/write way of learning. He is much more into the go and do and figure things out. Kinesthetic. I try to let him do a lot of his work on the white board and let him look things up on the internet to find answers. Aidan, on the other hand is very happy and content to sit with a worksheet and learn this way. When I had him get up and do different kind of movements last week to show him different body parts and how they moved, he freaked out. He didn't want to do it. It's so interesting to see the difference between the two boys. Both of them are insanely smart and it's fun to see them grow.
I should be getting started with Aidan's school here now so I'm going to sign off. I hope I have a little bit of time over the weekend to update our gardens. I might have to change the name of my blog as the season changes. Maybe it should just be "Busy Bee's Notes". I hope everyone has a great day/week.
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