One down, one more to go

We seem to have resolved the reading lesson problem. I've started setting the timer on my watch for 10 minutes, and Galen knows I start the timer as soon as we start working on the new material for the day. I've promised him that if he works hard for that 10 minutes, when the timer goes off we're done and can take a break. Yesterday we finished the lesson, including the optional activity, in 7 minutes. Today we finished the lesson, but NOT the optional activity, just as the timer went off. I told him we could do the optional activity (which he enjoys because he gets to play with the magnetic letters) later if he wanted. I got only the smallest amount of whining, which is to be expected while we're working to get to a point where it becomes more fun for him. I'm so proud of him. I just hope it lasts long enough for him to read his first book all by himself. That could be as early as sometime next week.

Now I need to figure out how to get him to take a nap. He doesn't want to take a nap (big surprise there), but he's so cranky by dinner time I know he needs to. If I wait and put him down for a nap later in the day he's much more likely to fall asleep, but we have to wake him up for dinner.

In other news, I wrote my first real Java program last night. I say "real" because the other one, which was actually my first, was the ubiquitous "Hello World!" program that everyone writes first regardless of what language they're learning. Honestly, the only reason I wrote the "Hello World!" program was to have something quick and easy to verify that I could write, save, compile and run a Java program with my current setup. My first real program was a nested loop that compares two condition, creates a table and displays the results of the comparison for each set of variables. I'm betting most programmers understood that, but no one else did. LOL!