Yesterday morning J had Creative Writing class. She really likes it, and I'm so happy there's something like this for her. The woman running it is a children's book author and knows how to get the kids excited about writing. They'd left off before the summer with some "homework" that I completely forgot about. So I mentioned it to J before the class and told her not to worry about it, she could hand it in next class if she wanted to. J said, Oh, I already did that a long time ago. I was totally shocked. She pulled it up out of the MS documents and I printed it for her. It was really good, too. It was basically character description built into a 3 paragraph story. It was about orphan children, the nuns who ran the orphanage, and the relationships between the characters. Blew me away.

Today the kids couldn't wait to get onto the academics. They're both excited to finish The Witches so we can rent the movie. We're about half-way through. J's copywork was 2 short poems - one by D.H. Lawrence and the other by John Fuller. W is doing the Kumon Writing Sentences workbook and today we discussed nouns, verbs, adjectives, capitalization, and periods. J's math was subtraction with large digit decimals, perimeter, and calculating time lapse in her head. W's math was some more single-digit addition and I introduced him to the number line to help with it. He loves that and this evening, showed B how he does it. He also drew hands on clocks to show the correct time.

The afternoon was spend running errands and J had dance from 4-6:30pm. Today was Acro and Junior Company Jazz. The instructor announced to the class that J was the only one who got the routine right "because she seems to be the only one concentrating and paying attention". My J, who was told over and over that she has attention problems, can't focus, and surely needs medication, was complimented for paying attention. I've always said her "problem" was only apparent in school and they wanted her on medication because God forbid a child in their mecca of conformity tends to think outside the box and has her own way of doing things. Drug her up so she can be the conciliatory robot they want her to be. Ugh, I cringe when I think about it. She is the one who requested a structured homeschool morning. She focuses completely on what she's doing, never whines or complains about it, is incredibly proud of it all - then asks for more. She is an amazing example for her brother, who also is excited about his work. He does most of it on his own while I do other things, and loves to "surprise" me when he's done. Every day they confirm for me why we homeschool. I couldn't be more proud of them.