I chickened out on my idea of having Sterling backtrack through world history.  It is so much easier to follow the American Story TM for which I paid through the teeth.  I might have assigned it anyway, but he has so much other reading to do right now.  I don't know.  We'll see tomorrow.

As for being behind, we're now back to where we are supposed to be in our yearly schedule.  I can cram one week into one day if I cut out the non-essentials.  Verdi, who really thrives on those non-essentials, is content to do them all day for fun. 

So while Sterling caught up on his penmanship, math and history readings, Verdi made an elaborate paper model of Roanoke with a scroll telling Roanoke's story.   Bear tried to draw his own story in the blank part of the scroll.  In retrospect, I probably should have given Bear black squares numbered just like that and had him doodle in his own story.  Another idea for tomorrow.

It was the very first day of Bear's expanded homeschool program!  He loved it.  We  sang the alphabet song, pointing to a chart the whole time.   We then played "Muffin Match" from Happy Phonics.  Basically it's matching the capitals to the lowercase.  He did better with the matching, only mixing up the Q and the G.  He did pretty miserably with the ABC song.  It was hard for him to remember the tune AND which letter was which.   He also had a hard time counting out five, six and seven objects when I did some math work with him.  He surprised me, though, by using two of the double-sized manipulatives to represent four, instead of four of the single-sized ones.

Sometimes Bear seem brilliant, absolutely genius.  Other times I wonder if something is wrong with him.  He is so thoroughly different from every one else.   He never draws the same conclusions from any given scenario that another person would.  He's always three steps ahead in his thinking, and he picks up all of the subtle clues.  Told to find his socks and get them on, he'll say, "Can I pick out the cereal?" because he already is ahead of me, predicting that shoes come next, then jacket, then a drive, and he overheard me murmur to myself this morning that we need groceries.  Normally, I'll be responding, "No, we're about to leave, you can't have cereal now," and thinking that he's got weird requests at odd time with weird phrasing.  It takes me too long to figure out what he has figured out.