Monday was the first meeting of my kids' book club...discussing From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It went fairly well, at least for a first meeting. I was a little overzealous in my planning and wound up really rushed for time at the end. As a consequence, I think the nifty point-of-view chart I handed out went way over their heads. But I'll know for next time. Less is more. The last few minutes, we taped paper to the bottoms of the tables so they could draw above their heads like Michelangelo, and that was a very big hit.
On Tuesday, Milo did NOT have to be dragged out of his science class at all! Success! He had a good time, as did Ari in all of his classes. Board game club was a little less hectic this week, I think. I tried to bring some games we could all do as a group, but the kids were not particularly interested in the "as a group" concept. But another mother stayed the whole time and helped out, and we survived the hour.
Ari stuff:
--he's really liking First Language Lessons 4. Too bad we took that detour into Growing with Grammar last year. He's memorizing "Ozymandias" right now, which makes me happy. I've always liked "Ozymandias." When he encountered a new line in the diagrams the other day, he exclaimed excitedly, "ooh--something new!" The boy enjoys a good sentence diagram, what can I say?
--We're not doing a great job, on the other hand, of fitting in our Michael Clay Thompson stuff. It may just be too much. But I'd really like to do it.
--Looks like our timing is excellent with Writing With Ease 2. We have about 5 more weeks to go, so we should finish up right around when the next workbook comes out.
--The new Singapore is going very smoothly so far. He did factoring this week, and I was a little worried about my ability to explain it and then about his tolerance level for the amount of division it required, but we had no problems. He's also doing Life of Fred: Fractions in the evenings with Dave:
He alternates between loving it and hating it depending on how he's done on the latest "Bridge" (the test sections at the end of the chapters). The deal is you have to get 9 out of 10 problems right to move on, but they give you 6 chances (6 different tests) to try. Except that Ari is not happy unless he gets all 10 questions right on the first try. Missing 3 questions on one test will send him into a week long period of intense anger at Fred and everything he stands for. Sigh. Perfectionist children. I think I have three. I keep trying to acquaint them with "the perfect is the enemy of the good," but they don't believe me. But this week he LOVES Life of Fred. So that's something.
Milo stuff:
--I had forgotten how lovely First Language Lessons 1 is. Five or ten easy minutes and we're done, no one has cried or complained, and yet Milo (and Gus, I think) has the definition of a noun and "The Caterpillar" memorized. Hooray!
--I'm liking Writing with Ease a lot with him, too. He is, predictably, not a fan of the copywork, but he gets through it, and the narrations are going well.
--"All About Spelling," on the other hand, drives me crazy. I thought about stopping it and I felt this immediate sense of relief just at the idea of not doing it anymore. So I'm going with that for now. I tried out Spelling City this week instead, using a list of first grade words I found online, and he did great with it. So I think I'm going to try that and see how it goes. I can always go back to AAS if I HAVE to. Ugh.
--but we still love Right Start Math! Milo learned about odds and evens this week. Here he is matching up dots with "odd" and "even" cards:
And what else? We learned about muscles in science and made some arms:
And in history we read more about the Civil War and then made landscape pictures out of torn pieces of paper. Papercrafts=very big in Civil War days. So says our book. My pictures did not turn out so well, though, so you'll have to take my word for it.
1 comment:
Looks like a fun week, perfectionist children are fun sometimes :), thanks for sharing
Post a Comment