Now that our Telling Time worksheets have been completed we're moving on to our Math-U-See Beta book.  I feel very confident that Joshua has a strong grasp of telling time.  He knows the important parts of a clock and knows quarter-hour, half-hour and the number of minutes in an hour, seconds in a minute and hours in a day.  I believe that with just a little more coaching he'll become very proficient in understanding time and clocks.  So we're moving into Beta and doing a little review on place value using the famous "Decimal Street."  Joshua loves this activity and I have to literally pull him away from it to move on to other lessons.
    Joshua is also enjoying The Story of The World book we're using as a read aloud for history.  I am finding it very interesting as well.  I have been reading twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays--one chapter each day.  This has worked out well, but I almost want to do it more often.  The thing I like about this material (as well as our science book) is that it's not about knowing the material as much as it is becoming familiar with the terms and the ideas and concepts.  I believe what these types of curriculums do for the early grades is to create little hooks in the child's mind/memory that they can use later as foundations to hang more information on as they get older and learn more.  I don't have a good analogy for this idea right now off the top of my head, but the hook idea comes to mind.

   Speaking of science, I have decided to cover our science material in the mornings.  Caleb will benefit from hearing about what we learn.  He has seemed so "into" it everytime we've been discussing vertebrates and backbones and animals.  So I'm very willing to do this material with him.  Daniel comes and goes during this lesson time.
    And speaking of little Caleb, he just LOVES doing his lessons.  He's always asking me every morning when we're going to start our lessons.  I bought him a simple, but colorful preschool workbook from Wal-mart.  He basically gets to look at pictures and circle what object is different from the others.  Or he is instructed to color the triangles red and squares blue. 
    It also gives suggestions for fun activities. We've sorted toys and traced feet.  And today we got to play Hopscotch.  Everyone got in on this activity and we had a great time learning an age-old game.  I chalked this up as good P.E. time, too!