Weather: A day of contrasts: rainy/dry, cloudy/sunny, chilly/warm--we had it all today.

Reading: Ender's Game, though I'm nearly finished. Orson Scott Card comes up with the best nicknames. Ender is the nickname of his hero, Andrew. The protagonist of another Card novel was called "Step," as a diminutive for Stephen. When I was pregnant with the twins, I thought if one of them was a boy, we'd name him Stephen, but call him Step. Instead, we came up with our own unconventional nickname for Stephen: Reno, which was derived from Steverino.

Readin' and Writin' and 'rithmetic

I asked Daniel's teacher for the list of spelling words before class today. Here they are:

welcome animal computer globe leaf

branch teacher emotion student friend

Daniel's initial spelling of these words was so garbled that they were almost impossible to determine. As I mentioned yesterday, I was barely able to decipher the first five and gave up on the rest.

In an effort to make use of some of the wasted time we spend in the car, I went over the spelling of the first five words with Daniel during our drives today. He was surprisingly cooperative and has learned those words nearly perfectly.

Now that we know the remainder of the words, we looked them up in the dictionary after dinner tonight. Daniel copied down the correct spelling and a shortened definition for each word. This was a laborious, time-consuming project that took nearly an hour. He still has to write a story that contains five of the words, but since it is not due until Friday, we put that task aside until tomorrow and worked on memorizing the spelling.

Daniel had other homework besides the spelling work. For his science lesson, he had to gather at least four different examples of broad leaves and two different examples of needle branches. We also had to review a few pages and the end-of-chapter questions in his social studies book.

Tab was telling one of his co-workers about Daniel's homework, and she was shocked. Her son, who is also a first-grader but in a public school, has about ten minutes of homework each day, if that. Tab thinks the amount of homework Daniel is getting is excessive, but I don't agree, even though I'm the one who ends up working on it with him. Perhaps this is just my academic bias showing, but I'd rather he have too much homework than too little.

I just don't want to think of what life will be like when Matthew and Stephen are in school, too, and we have three sets of homework to do.

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