Going to get better!!

I used to be really good about taking a few minutes each day to write in my blog and I enjoyed it, but I let life get in the way and I am behind.  I am going to try to improve!!  Today was not a perfect homeschooling day, but we are salvaging what we can.  I had to work (transcribing from home) to get my work in by noon and we got a very late start.  I let Dakota sleep in and then play for awhile and then he sat beside me reading while I finished.  The baby played and slept and after lunch I had Dakota watch a video on music with great vocabulary called Magic Musical Voyage while I got myself together and had my own lunch.  He read a book to the baby while I opened my computer and prepared and then he hopped up in the recliner with me and we read/discussed the thirteen colonies and the French and Indian war.  He had some great questions!  We stopped after briefly touching on the Revolutionary War, which will be our topic for the rest of the week.  He took a blank map of the United States and colored the thirteen colonies and we discussed when the border looked like it did (the Appalachian Mountains were in the way!) and then answered some simple mapping questions.  He is great at geography, thanks to some intense learning over the past couple of years in fun ways.  After history and geography, he wanted to finish his tall tale from Friday when he wrote it up on a graphic organizer.  He wrote about a man who was in a band who sang a song in one breath that lasted from day to night and it was titled Rock On :-)+

I tend to lose Dakota's attention around 3:00.  It doesn't matter if we start at 9am or 2pm, at 3pm, he's finished.  Since we got such a late start I skipped Science and Health and we only did two pages of our math unit.  We are working on more complex parts of telling time and I know that he has to really think hard about hit so I didn't want to ask too much, especially after writing his own tall tale.  We got in our Spelling 9 introduction and the two workbook pages and then he was out of there!  I added religion from our Sunday School class activities from yesterday and his PE time wrestling in the leaves with the neighbor boys.  As I try to decompress a bit now, deciding if I should do what I NEED to do and work or what I SHOULD do and coupon and plan or want I WANT to do and read my library books that have been just sitting unopened for days.  Decisions, decisions...Anyway, I am here, writing in my blog currently while The Scrambled United States plays on the DVD player so I can pre-screen it and see if it's worth our time for tomorrow.  It's a little crazy, but cute.  It is probably great at teaching the names of the states, but Dakota already knows those.  Time is always very valuable and I would like to squeeze in watching Pocahontas tomorrow afternoon if at all possible.