Mega Memory Month...Signing In

I think I was actually supposed to do this *yesterday*, but somehow the whole "first day back after vacation" thing knocked us for a loop. I was off-schedule all day until I found myself nodding off at my desk last night while working on last-minute prep for today's school and decided to give up and go to bed.

Anyway...we kicked off our Mega Memory Month challenge yesterday, a bit slowly, but with great enthusiasm. Basically I announced what our plan is (Psalm 1 and "My Shadow", by Robert Louis Stevenson), we read through both selections, and talked about *why* we are doing this. We had already begun working on vocabulary and comprehension on Psalm 1 before vacation.

This morning I printed copies of the Psalm and the poem for all three *big kids*. Each child will get a new portfolio this morning--one side will be for MMM materials, the other will be for papers from the study on *Holiness and Reverence* that we are starting. They will be able to keep their portfolios nearby to work on memorization at various points throughout the day.

To aid in our auditory learning, I pulled out this little gadget this morning. A friend recently passed on a brand new, still in the package compact cassette recorder and some blank cassettes. (Shhhh...my children have no idea that this piece of equipment is considered decidedly obsolete by many these days...they think it is the coolest thing since sliced bread!) I had decided the other night that we would make use of it in learning our memory work. This morning I got up and recorded our Psalm and our poem on it. Peter came in while I was testing the playback and said, "Ooo...we get to use that in school?? Cool!!" ;-)

I have a few other memory helps planned for this week...hopefully I'll have time to post a bit more soon.

Many thanks to Ann Kroeker for her encouragement in this challenge. Her blog is a delight...I'm letting myself have a few minutes a day to go back through her archives. I have gotten some great ideas from her Quiet Time Round-up post. (And I was very tickled to find a name for what my two middle children have been doing since before they could read in her "Scribing" posts.) Not to mention the fact that I feel a definite kinship for someone who has an entire blog category labeled "Nutella"! Yum!! :-D