Week 3, Tuesday

This morning, at 9am we had a meeting with the director of the American School of Barcelona to talk about how we could get Ciara registered in school and still homeschool at the same time.  The meeting went pretty well.  The director is supportive, but will not sign a document saying that Ciara is attending school this year, when she really isn't.  So he came up with a compromise:  we register Ciara and she attends school part-time and then I homeschool part-time.  We agreed that this could work for us.  How exactly it will work, we won't know until the director meets with the elementary principle.  Since grade 6 is pretty full, she might have to work with the grade 5s.

In any case, I am kind of relieved that we at least have a solution in the works that will allow me to continue homeschooling while also allowing us to comply with Spanish laws.  Ciara may benefit from attending school part-time as well.  It will mean that I will have to redo our awesome homeschool schedule, but at least I wrote it all in pencil.

Today we continued to work on improper fractions, this time the questions were word problems.  Word problems are a difficult for all of my kids.  Nathan, who works so hard in math, just can't seem to figure them out.  When Rylan and Ciara encounter a word problem they just look like deer caught in the headlights.  The word problems we did today, were pretty difficult.  Ciara has the skills to solve them, she just has a hard time determining which equations to use.  We did all of our math work on the chalkboard so that we could draw pictures and break down the problem into small steps.

For social studies, we are still looking at Greek mythology.  Ciara is fascinated with the stories about the Greek Gods.  Today she learned about Pandora's box.  Ciara was so excited about Pandora, that she had to recount the whole story to Verina when they began their Skype session.

Tonight, I took Ciara to her judo class again.  She was a bit apprehensive as we entered the gym.  I think that she always feels a wave of anxiety whenever she enters a crowded place.  Since she liked her first class, we signed her up and bought her a judo-gi.  She felt good about wearing her new judo-gi and when I picked her up after class, she said that she had a good time.  I was so relieved.  Nathan also decided to try a judo class and he liked it too.  So we will probably have two kids in judo.  I also signed Cole and Rylan up for swimming lessons at the local rec. center.  I feel like we are really broadening our horizons.  This is the first time any of my kids have attended extra-curricular classes outside of the school.