Breakthroughs!

We are settling into a routine of sorts here, and school is going quite well, most days. Two wonderful breakthroughs have taken place. The first and most exciting is with writing.
We've been working slowly through our Handwriting Without Tears book. Each day, we wrote a whopping 4 letters. Not 4 different letters. No no! 4 written characters, total. Everyday, there was yelling and throwing of pencils. Then, slowly, the yelling stopped, and the pencil throwing was halfhearted. This weekend (yes, we were so busy last week that we had to do school on Saturday...), we were working on some math problems, and Crumpet took the pencil from me and wrote the answers himself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They were a mess because we haven't gotten to numbers yet, but he wanted to do it!! Yay! Then he wrote a whole page of letters during our handwriting time. He is so proud of himself, because he's getting so much better. It is a beautiful, fulfilling thing to watch.
Our other breakthrough has been with narration. We are using First Language Lessons, and we've only done 2 story narrations and 1 picture narration, but Crumpet is starting to get the hang of it. He's learning to organize his thoughts, and tell me about the story he just heard. It definitely helps that they are familiar stories in a shortened version...
On other fronts, we finished up our prehistory studies with a trip to the Bishop Museum. They have a dinosaur exhibit right now, and we had a lot of fun there. It's so interesting to see the changes in science since I was in school. The baby T-Rex at the museum had HAIR. They now think maybe the juveniles had a bit of fur... Pluto isn't a planet... I have to relearn everything, right along with Crumpet...
Here's Crumpet with the apple pie we baked for our Expedition Earth intro to geography:
He was so excited for dessert, and then he didn't like it. Poor guy!

I hope you are all enjoying your new school year, and having exciting learning breakthroughs too!!