Schooldays

Life has fallen into a pleasant routine now everyone is settled at school. Our elementary school has the shockingly late start time of 9.25am this year, but it does lead to happy mornings. Kids come in a bit after seven for the morning hug, Anselm heads to his room to do his daily homework (he has a "Daily Gazette" in which he writes something about what they did at school and the evening's homework-- maybe a math sheet, or a short writing assignment, such as "Read, and describe the characters and setting of your book", and spelling words to learn), then there's time for Lego before a relaxed family breakfast. The morning homework schedule seems to make better use of his alert hours than the afternoons, when they might go out to the park on the way home before he settles to read while Eliot and Patricia do some art-- then, Lego. Lego is the mighty obsession this year, most recently a Raiders of the Lost Ark set when we came home from Woods Hole, then "Lego Factory", an awesome present from Anne and Michael that has consumed the past week.

Eliot is on fire learning to read and, unprompted, spent half an hour when I came home going through a stack of cards from Junior Scrabble and sounding out all the words on them. When we were going through Anselm's spelling words at dinner, she felt that it was equally her exercise, and took a stab at them, with some success.