October Highlights - Ethan

So the week-in-review posts haven't really been weekly. (Why yes, I do have a masterful grasp of the obvious! Thank you!) I am a bad mommy blogger, because I can't seem to manage *doing* things with the boys, taking pictures at the same time, and then blogging about it. (These people I live with think eating and clean clothes to wear are more important than blogging! Can you imagine?) Maybe if I conquer my time management issues, I will go back to the week-in-review posts. We have been doing school, though, so I thought I'd do a highlight post for each of the boys for the last month or so.

Ethan:

**decided that the middle of his spelling test was a good time to target practice with his dart gun. Mom was thrilled.

**is taking a break from doing his CLE math every day to do some intensive work on addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. He understands these concepts just fine, but he needs to build some speed and automatic recall with them. He's improving quickly, but if you have any good (fun) drill ideas, please leave us a comment!

**finished the first book in Geography through Literature (Holling C. Holling's Paddle to the Sea). He gave a presentation to the whole family, narrating the book and demonstrating the route that Paddle (the wooden canoe and Indian) took out to the sea. Note the laser pointer - that was Dad's idea. He's a cool dad - I would never have thought of that!

He's also been making great strides in his writing, both in content and willingness to complete his assignments - especially when compared with last year. He's been writing various types of paragraphs - how-to, descriptive, comparative, and persuasive. (He is sad to report, however, that his persuasive paragraph didn't convince us to let him get a poison dart frog for a pet.) This week he took a break from the paragraph writing and wrote some poetry instead! He wrote a funny one about penguins and then this one about one of the Transformers.

Soundwave

Warrior fast, warrior smart

Evil robot with no heart. 

Warrior silent in the night,

Soundwave, ruling in the fight.

(I probably would have chosen one of the paragraphs or the penguin poem, but he's pretty proud of this one and asked that I post it instead.)

He's been reading a bunch. He enjoyed Hatchet, has finished the Redwall series, realized that the library carries Calvin and Hobbes, and discovered the Mysterious Benedict Society series.

He would also consider the two squirrels he shot to be highlights of this month, so I'll leave you with a picture of Ethan and Grandpa and the dead squirrel. Because really, doesn't every blog need at least one picture of a dead squirrel?