Well, I'll be.

After spending the past week or so fighting me tooth and nail about "reading words" (while simultaneously screaming that "I WANT TO LEARN TO READ, MOMMY!!!"), today LP flew through his lesson.  He has been reading one line of the practice each day for the last week and change - be it the "review" or the "practice."  Today, I put the book in front of him, and he went through two lines of words, only stumbling over one.  Now, granted, he's still reading "/sh/-/e/-/l/, shell!" and not reading each word straight up, but I'm of the opinion that fluency comes with time, and he'll learn it as we go.  ^_^  As long as he's not forgetting everything he learned to get here, I'm fine with it.  He is now watching his Hooked On Phonics lesson DVD, which he loves.  Today, we watch the unit introduction, the first lesson (which is what he blew through today), and then the second lesson twice (he will start that probably on Friday, as Wednesday and Thursday are our weekend).  This is usually about 20m of TV time, which is totally within 'acceptable' and doesn't see my kiddo bouncing off the walls.

Days like today, I really wish we were able to have the basement set up as a schoolroom.  Today, at 10 am, it is already 75* outside, and I suspect that we will meet or exceed our predicted high temp of 86*, and with my not wanting to face the ridiculously high electric bill that would come from turning the air on all day?  Yeah, I wish we could work in the basement, where it's nice and cool.  We have a plan, though.  We will ask MIL and her boyfriend if they "have any advice for us" on how to build this wall thing.  With any amount of luck, this will end with a practical lecture that I can use to take to Home Depot and actually assemble a wall that will hold up, have a door, and be cat-proof.  Or, perhaps, some ideas on how to divide up the basement for the purpose, and moving on from there.  We'll see how it goes.

Math, I expect to see go rather well.  I have to rearrange a little, as I forgot to put up the big calendar last night, and my only other calendar isn't a "standard" calendar (we use Sandra Boynton's Mom calendar), and we're supposed to cover days of the week.  The rest of the lesson, with the exception of needing to write tally marks, looks like it will be fairly easy for him.  I am still carrying forward "numbers in order," though.  We have squares that have tally marks, finger representations, and abacus representations on them for the numbers 1-10.  It is to be LP's job to put them into order, whether it's 1-10, 10-1, evens/odds, or whatever.  He is having a hard time with it.  He knows all the numbers, all the representations, and the order in which they go, but he is having a hard time putting the cards into any discernible order.  I suspect this is because he doesn't care what order the cards are in, so he's not trying, but I'm carrying on as if he doesn't know it until he demonstrates that he does - I don't want him to miss that skill.

Anyhow.  A bright and beautiful, albeit HOT, day ahead of us, and school has gone swimmingly thus far.  LP is even requesting to watch his lessons, which is a nice change from "No, I don't want to... Oh, THIS?  We can watch THIS?!?  YAY!!!"  o.O;;