Serving others

The theme this week has been serving others as we have had opportunities to serve in the community and not because I said lets plan some service project. We did extra work on Thursday in order to free up Friday to help in the morning with the Food Drive put on by the Ministerial Association and then Friday afternoon we went Christmas Caroling at 2 nursing homes. Then Saturday morning we helped distribute food boxes at the food drive. There is a police officer in town that Caleb really looks up to. Caleb helped him, but Caleb did not recognize him without his uniform so he found out later who it was. Simeon and I helped a few others who were distributing boxes. While Simeon was not able to do some of the things that others have been able to do, he did carry loaves of bread to cars and wished them a Merry Christmas. Caleb said he wants to sing at the nursing home again so I think we will have some future projects of visiting their again.

Another thing I did with Caleb that I now wish I had done sooner is that I caught up on grading all his papers and went over his progress with him. We talked about how his math is really going well and how his hard work learning to read is paying off. Caleb beamed with pride while we did this. The we talked about what he needs to work on-- attitude or his temper might be more accurate, having neater penmanship, and not writing some of his letters and numbers backward. He decided he wanted to get better at these things too. I told him I was going to give him more penmanship work. He has cheerfully worked on this and even asks for more. I also told Caleb that one of the qualities I really appreciate about him is his determination. He does not like it when he can not do something so he works and works at it without giving up. Even when it has taken him a really long time weeks and sometimes longer. I have told Caleb from the start that he can and is supposed to do hard things in his life. I no longer have to tell him because now he tells himself out loud.

We finished reading The Jungle Book and started to read Tom Sawyer. Then Caleb read from two different readers one was Dick and Jane and the other was the Bible reader that came with My Father's World Curricula. Caleb practice a lot of addition facts and it is coming much more quickly. We read the rest of The Magic School Bus The Five Senses and explored each of the senses. Simeon practiced putting together three letter words with Bob Books, reviewed his letters so far, and had Mommy read him lots of Christmas stories. Caleb worked on Sh--, U_E, and --UE sounds in phonics as well as being introduced to a new list of spelling words. We got so busy doing school work that we did not take pictures and I regret that, but we had a busy week. We did not do Muffin Tin Monday since it was a review week, Sketch Tuesday was around things that make them each smile. Thursday we did extra school work to make up for what academic work we were not doing on Friday in order to do serve projects. That was pretty much our week last week in a nutshell. We had some Christmas celebrations over the weekend and Vic preached at an area church so this post is even being posted late. We hope you have a great Christmas week and keep Christmas about Jesus.