i woke up this morning, like every other monday - preparing our lessons for when the boys fianlly wake up, get breakfast, make their beds and get dressed.  yes, i'm one of those moms that MAKES their children make their beds every morning. well, okay, i give them saturday and sundays off (i usually make their beds on sundays - a small gift of grace on our day of rest...every once in a while, i try to give them a lesson that they'll eventually "get" one day. maybe... :) they are dressed as well before we start school. i work better that way, and by the time they finally get all of that done, they're much more alert and awake.

any way...today was just like every other monday, until i remembered that it was columbus day! everyone else has the day off, so we should too, right?

well, not really.

while they were getting dressed, i printed off a few coloring pages of the ships that columbus sailed, dug up an old book i found at a library sale a few years ago ("A Man Called Columbus") and put the crayons in the middle of the kitchen table. i wrote the famous, "in 1492, columbus sailed the ocean blue" on the chalkboard and found an old globe in our basement. the boys were so excited to see crayons on the table instead of their sharpened pencils and learning logs for spelling. and then we dug into some columbus-learning!

i gave them a morning snack while i read them the story of columbus. we looked at the globe, tracked all the trips he took going west from spain, and then east from spain to find india and china. we talked about maps and globes, a flat world versus a round one (they thought a flat one sounded so funny...like i was silly for even suggesting such a thing!), and then they colored their pictures.

one of the coloring pages ships had a cross on the front mast while the other ship did not. sawyer informed his brothers that was because the "pirates" on that ship were good pirates, learning about jesus and the other ship (without the cross) was a bad pirate ship. he even did his little pirate voice, "arrrr! we're good pirates, because we love jesus! arrrr!"

who's teaching this kid, any way? :)

for the record, i still did a lesson in spelling/reading/phonics after lunch. but we skipped math and latin until tomorrow... after all, having school on a day when others aren't in school gives us the choice to take off an extra day before or after thanksgiving! a time i'd rather be "off" any way!