All this talk of country music

Must be rubbing off on Charlie. He has incessantly been listening to the rather fabulous Faith Hill cd for days now and insisted on having it on whilst we started Sonlight this afternoon. He likes it because it's "relaxing" apparently. Actually she's a bit more of a pop/country infusion which leads to it not sounding like country at all, but I love her music.

Monday was the @Bristol trip, I will gloss over the nasty bits at the beginning and just say that it was fab to see the couple of people I know already from South Glos HE again and really lovely to meet Alison,Merry and Joanna. Josie and Isabelle are both gorgeous, lovely babies and Charlie really enjoyed playing with the older ones. Alison - I am still shocked that he gave into T's authority! Such a sucker for the girls obviously.

I worked exceptionally hard yesterday and no education was undertaken, unless you can count trying to explain an issue estoppel? Always good to start his legal education early I suppose.

Just after lunch a rather large box from Sonlight arrived - so we now have the complete Core 1. Charlie was extremely excited, and after I spent 20 minutes or so filing all the schedules/papers in the IG binder and sorting the books out, we were ready to go.

We started with reading the first two pages of Usbornes Peoples of the World (grrr at the american use of the word Peoples) I got Charlie to write 3 sentences about what we'd read and he decided to choose Kenya as his country collection. I printed out some maps and flag sheets from the Enchanted Learning members site.

He then read the first 7 poems in the reader out loud to me, chose his favorite, wrote a sentence about it and drew a dog using DWN as his chosen poem was "My Dog"

Then we moved onto Charlottes Web which I've never read. I read one chapter to him and he read the second to me. He answered the comprehension and natural studies questions easily and already knew that untimely meant too soon - so that was the vocabulary covered and he can spell it too.

We then went off to my parents to pick up more work - groan. After dinner Charlie decided to start the Miquon maths. All I can say is wow. I was a tad confused initially about how to use it all but the workbooks are so flexible I love them. Basically each page in the workbook has about 3 or 4 different ways you can complete it, hard to explain but exceptionally useful. Its like getting 3 pages for the price of 1 each time. He used the cusinaire rods for the second two pages, and I can't believe he has memorised the values of each rod already - woohoo. He begged to do 3 pages and would have done more if I hadn't stopped him.

I found another maths curriculum which I think looks pretty good - and good value too. Its called Math U See and seems really good. I may consider getting this as well as the rod type systems seem to go down very well with Charlie.