The Lots of Books in a Year project

Last year I tried to do the book a week thing, and I made it...a few weeks. I am not going to try it again, for many reasons, (one of them is that I think it discourages the reading of long or difficult books. Another is that I don't enjoy failure), but I do want to read a lot and to write a little about the books I read. I am feeling especially inspired about this project right now because of two things: 1. I discovered that I can check out audiobooks online through my library and listen to them on my iphone while I walk the dog. This will cut into my This American Life, Fresh Air, and DisUnplugged podcast listening time, but I think that will be okay. I'm hoping it will encourage longer walks, which will be good for both me and the dog. and 2. I convinced myself that I really DO want one of those fancy machines that turns into a book after all and ordered a Nook with some Christmas money. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was very sure that I did not need any such thing. I was contemplating putting several new hardcovers in my Amazon cart the other day, though, and I think that's what changed my mind. That and that my grandmother gave me more money than I was expecting for xmas. And that they had refurbished Nooks on Overstock.com. So it's on its way. In fact, my tracking info tells me it's been in Georgia since yesterday afternoon, so I'm a little annoyed that it's not here yet. But it's okay, because I spent all morning trying to figure out how to get those audiobooks from the library, and now I have two of them loaded on my phone. My library does not have e-books, but the library system in county south of me does, and I'm considering paying the $40/year non-resident fee to get a card there (I've considered it in the past anyway for access to a better selection of actual books, so that wouldn't be the only reason, but maybe the thing that tips it over the edge).

I think I'm including books I pre-read for the kids here, too, because I also like writing about them. And that's it. Those are the rules. Read books and write about them. Oh, obviously I'm counting audiobooks. I have a relatively extensive Amazon wish list to work with. I've been scouring best books of 2010 lists. I check NPR's website periodically to see what books they're talking about. I have plenty of things to check off on the "books I should have already read" list. And I have a short mental list of books I've been meaning to read forever and haven't gotten around to (Shelby Foote's 3 volume Civil War history and Middlemarch are the ones that spring immediately to mind). My first audiobook is Alice McDermott's After This--because I like Alice McDermott and because pickings are relatively slim in the library's audiobook collection. But there are at least a dozen or so that I'm interested in, so that's a start. Next up for real reading is Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, which the kids gave me for Christmas. I might go start it right after I finish this entry!

Because I am such a go-getter, I have already started on my book reading project and finished book #1! Some might think declaring a book I read this week to be book #1 is cheating instead of go-getting, but I disagree, and it's my blog. Anyway....BOOK #1(!) is Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories by Mike Birbiglia. Another Christmas present. I love Mike Birbiglia. I am not sure exactly what to make of his book. I enjoyed it...but 90% of it is material I've heard him do, pretty much word for word in many cases,  in other formats, so it's kind of hard for me to judge it as a book. I could kind of hear his voice saying it all as I read it. This did not make it unpleasant or boring to read; it's all stuff I could listen to him do over and over again, so reading through it was fun, too. But I'm not sure how much value there is, for me, someone already familiar with most of the stories, in having them in book form. The parts I enjoyed the most were, predictably, the parts I hadn't heard before--largely some stories about the early years of his stand-up career. The book is based on his recent off Broadway show of the same name, and some of it is about his experiences dealing with a sleep disorder that causes him to sleepwalk and act out his dreams, often in dangerous ways. Stand-up comedians very often annoy the crap out of me, and I'm always kind of delighted to find one who doesn't, because I enjoy being made to laugh. I first heard Mike Birbiglia on This American Life (where he's a frequent contributor) and immediately became a fan. So I guess to sum up...I highly recommend Mike Birbiglia as a performer; I really have no idea whether or not to recommend this book to non-fans. I have a hard time figuring out how it would read to someone not at all familiar with his work. But there you have it anyway....BOOK #1!

Next year

Everyone is about to fail math for the semester, so Dave is tutoring non-stop lately, which means we keep finishing school when there are still hours and hours left before he gets home. And it's cold, so the kids don't want to play outside anymore (I already sent them out once today, but I think the window where I feel comfortable forcing them to play outside is something like between 45 and 87ish. It's 38 with a windchill of 30 right now). Anyway, so I thought I'd blog some more instead of trying to figure out what we can have for dinner. Inspired by Kash's recent post, I'm going to blather on for awhile about what the heck we might or might not be doing next year. Mostly for Ari, as the others are comparatively easy to plan for. Milo will be starting MCT Island, and I'm excited to see how he does with that.

Math: he'll be doing Singapore 6a/b. That's the only thing I know for sure at this point. I'm thinking I probably don't want Life of Fred's pre-algebra with economics to be his first introduction to economics; I haven't really gotten a full summary of the economics parts of it, but as far as I can tell it leans toward the libertarian side of things. Perhaps if Paul Krugman had written a kids' intro to economics to balance things out...

At any rate, this leaves me at a bit of a loss...if Singapore 6 is anything like 5, we're going to need something to supplement with. I'm thinking we'll backtrack and do LOF Decimals and Percents, since he never did that. Then I may find some more "fun math" to add in...maybe an online Duke TIP course.

Grammar, Writing, and Literature: MCT Voyage level. That part's easy enough. We're getting to the point in Town level right now where I can tie his assignments there in with his other subjects, so I'm hoping things will be the same in Voyage...he can do lots of writing about history (and maybe science and literature) with his MCT assignments, and he'll be ready to drop the summaries he's been doing in history.

For literature, I'm hoping MCT's promised literature studies--at least a couple of them--will be ready by then. Even better would be if one was ready by summer, so I could read through it and then crib from it as I pre-read some of Ari's other books for the year. Aside from that, I'm relatively happy with how things have gone this year--a mix of books that tie in with history and books that don't, some informal discussion, plus dictation and some close reading. So I hope to continue that, perhaps with a bit more intentionally and planning. Of course, what aspect of my life wouldn't benefit from more intentionality and planning?

History: we'll be doing Story of the World 2 together, so for Ari I just need to find stuff to supplement with. I just finally put History: The Definitive Visual Guide in my Amazon cart, so there! [and now it's the next day; I bored myself with all my planning yesterday and couldn't finish). So my very tentative plan is that he will follow along with us for SOTW and then do extra reading from the DVG (and extra writing). After Christmas I'm going to have him do Duke TIP's "Growing Up Heroic." If this goes reasonably well, I'll have him do their King Arthur course next year--so that will be a history/literature thing. And then I'm looking at Ellen McHenry's Mapping the World With Art. I think he will like that a lot. I think that will be sufficient to overwhelm us both.

Languages: Assuming Spanish is still offered at LEO, he'll continue taking it there. I'm hoping to start Galore Park Spanish with him after xmas, so he'll keep going with that. And then if I stay brave, I might have him start Greek, too (probably Classical Academic Press' Greek for Children; both of us sort of hated their Spanish program, but I hear good things about the Greek. And I think perhaps a lot of the trouble with their Spanish was that they treated it like a classical language instead of a modern language. Chanting verb tenses in Spanish made no sense to me).

Science: oh, yeah. Still no idea. Honestly, I really like outsourcing science, as we've done this year, so if there's a good opportunity to do that again, that may well be what happens. I may add in an online class, too, though, as the science this year has been relatively light for him. And having him do science somewhere else frees me up to put more effort into doing a good job with it for Milo and Gus (I'd like to keep working through the Nebel's with them).

Other: as always, I want him to focus more on piano. He's actually doing well with it now, but he's resistant to organized lessons (from Dave). He's teaching himself to play "Deck the Halls" and "Ode to Joy," and Dave helps him out and makes suggestions when he's open to it. He was picking out parts of "Little Drummer Boy" by ear the other day, which means he has about 100 times more musical talent than I have, so I definitely want him to keep it up.

One of the goals for the rest of this year is to get critical thinking stuff done more consistently. He's got Logic Liftoff and Building Thinking Skills to do; I just need to have him spend a few minutes on it at least a few times a week. And then I need to look into something or other for next year. Yes, something.

For other extra-curriculars...he really enjoyed homeschool soccer in the fall, so we'll plan on doing that indefinitely (Gus also wants to do it again, but I can't talk Milo into it. He's not so sporty). And he's doing basketball at the Y...he just started a couple of weeks ago, but so far he's really into it. I'm good with continuing that next year, too, if he wants to. Maybe Gus and Milo will want to try it, too. They're tall children, after all.

And there we have it. There's really not that much more to figure out, which is nice.

November 29-December 3, 2010: Week 17

The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are sort of weird...three weeks between breaks, so the first week feels off because we're just coming back from a break, then there's the second week where (perhaps) we'll finally get back into a groove, and then the next week is the last week before a two week break, so who can get anything done then? Plus, of course, it's almost Christmas and your husband is tutoring kids who are about to fail math every night of the week and there's too.much.to.do. You know how it is. Fortunately, we're pretty much on track with everything, so I don't feel too much of a need to panic over these three weeks being less productive than they might be.

My weekly review will also, at least this week, be less thorough than in other weeks. This is not everything we did this week; it's what I can remember/motivate myself to write about with the nasty head cold I woke up with this morning.

Milo: still working on Matilda; he should definitely finish it up before Christmas break, maybe with enough time to get in a couple of Usborne readers about Greek mythology that I have waiting for him. He's reading Harry Potter at bedtime, and probably will be for awhile. He has one more review in Singapore 1B, which he'll finish this week. Then I think we'll spend the rest of the time doing a lot of addition and subtraction practice.

Ari: still reading I, Robot; I need to go read it, too, as I'm pretty sure he's ahead of me now. He did a narration from it this week. He was supposed to do a history summary, but that was one of the things that didn't happen. But he did tackle the most ambitious writing assignment thus far in Paragraph Town; he had to pick and research a topic, then write an essay of at least 2 paragraphs about it. He chose....Mario. I turned him loose on Wikipedia. I'm not thrilled about Wikipedia being the source for one of his first research papers, but, at the same time, I'm not sure there's a better source of Mario history out there (and he was so freaked out about doing the assignment at all that I wasn't about to steer him away from a topic he was excited about). There is, in fact, a lot, of information about Mario on Wikipedia, so I talked him through whittling his topic down to something manageable. The final essay is passable, but it veers a bit too close to summary (something the assignment specifically instructed he not do). It's a little tricky for him, since most of his formal writing up until now has actually asked for a summary.

Gus: I think I'm not going to order Earlybird B for him. I pulled out the textbook from 1A this week and went through the first few lessons of that with him, and it went well. I think we're going to stick with that (and the workbook, which I need to order) and just go really slowly through the number bonds, and make sure he has them down before we move on. At least that's what I'm going to try.

And Gus turned 5 on Saturday. Five! I discovered a great new cake-decorating trick, whereby I can make a cake for absolutely any theme imaginable. All I need is a color printer, cardstock, and popsicle sticks!

....and the birthday boy with the cake (with flammable Mario figures removed for safety):

What's the opposite of mathy?

This post was supposed to be titled, "Mathy kids vs. ______ kids," only I couldn't think of what to put in the blank. Wordy? Literary? Language artsy? Anyway. When my husband, Dave, was in elementary school, they had to create a special math class for him and one other kid, so uber mathy was he. He spent the summer after his sophomore year teaching himself trig so that he could take Calculus his junior year (which he now remembers as something of a misstep since that meant there was no math for him to take his senior year). He majored in math. He is now a math teacher, after a few years' sojourn into the equally geeky world of web programming. We have an enormous "mathlete" trophy in our basement, reminder of his glory days on the math team. He went to math camp at BU the summer he was 16. What I'm getting at is that my husband is undeniably mathy. His father is a number theorist at Dartmouth, so one might reasonably surmise that there is some kind of genetic component to this mathiness of his.

I put "English" down as my intended major on my college application and never wavered (okay, there was that brief period when I flirted with switching to journalism...until I wrote for the college paper for a couple of months and realized that my crippling fear of chatting with strangers might get in the way of a journalism career). After college, I started an English ph.D. program because, well, what else was I going to do? I never won any trophies for literary analysis, but I did win the feminist colloquium prize one year for a paper I wrote on elements of masquerade in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague. The prize was $100, which didn't last nearly as long as Dave's trophy has.

To sum up, there's really no getting around it: Dave is mathy, and I am...the opposite. No one could try to claim otherwise. Our SAT and GRE verbal and quantitative scores are nearly mirror images of each other. I was not terrible at math in school (I somehow managed to win the physics prize my senior year of high school, in fact. I think this was largely because I was one of the only people who bothered to study for the tests), but my ill-conceived attempt at Calculus in college lasted only a week before I fled to statistics. Dave took and did reasonably well in AP English. But it's pretty clear where our respective strengths lie.

When we had kids, I sort of assumed that things would be equally clear cut for them. Some of our kids would ask for slide rules for their fourth birthdays; others would toddle off to bed snuggling up with a copy of The Collected Poems of WB Yeats (okay, neither Dave nor I did these things when we were little; but perhaps the mathy/wordy genes would intensify in subsequent generations). But then we got Ari, and one of the things Ari is best at is keeping people guessing.

When Ari was 4 and 5, we'd find elaborate sheets of numbers all over the house, playing with all sorts of patterns, experimenting with negative numbers. He liked to take a calculator to the bathroom with him to entertain himself. "Ah ha!" we thought, "he's just like his Dad!" But then he learned to read early. He memorized nursery rhymed easily and eagerly. Maybe he was more like me after all. I figured time would tell, but, so far, it hasn't. Some years Ari will tell you his favorite subject is math; other years it's reading. It's never been writing, but only because he doesn't like doing assigned writing. He already has an impressive library of original stories and novels filed away in his room. I just started to write a sentence about how if I absolutely had to guess, I'd say Ari would end up leaning more toward....and then I realized I couldn't finish the sentence. I absolutely have no idea.

The other kids are not much easier to categorize. Right now Milo's toughest area is math, but last year he was struggling with reading. This year his reading has progressed to the point where I don't think I could tell the difference between 7 year old Ari's reading ability and 7 year old Milo's, even though Ari got a 2 year or so head start. Maybe next year the same leap will happen with math? And Gus is not quite 5, so I won't even try to stuff him into any boxes at this point. He's determined to do absolutely everything as well as his big brothers do, and I'm pretty sure there's not anything he can't be good at.

So then, here's the question: is it that my kids simply aren't as easy to categorize as Dave and I were? Are their interests and talents broader? Instead of getting some mathy and some languagy kids, did we get a messy soup of both when we mixed our genes together?

Or is it that mathy and....not-mathy are not quite the neat categories that they might seem to be? Maybe there is something in the human or societal need to categorize that makes parents/teachers/etc. subconsciously push kids toward math/science or language/humanities. I remember as I was going into 8th grade, that kids were discouraged from taking all honors classes. We were supposed to pick either social studies and English or math and science. I had a high enough score on my math placement test to take algebra, but my teacher didn't recommend me for it, so I didn't take it.

Maybe what I'm seeing with my kids is in some ways a by-product of homeschooling and of the kind of ultra-flexibility that homeschooling offers. Maybe is has to do with my kids being the product of one math focused parent and one language focused parent: we didn't know which way they might turn out and weren't assuming anything (although we both come from families with "one of each"...my brother is a computer engineer, and Dave's sister majored in comparative lit), so our sub consciences couldn't steer them in a particular direction, because they didn't know which way to steer.

Separated from a need to pick a major or choose which honors track to take, mathy and languagy don't look quite so far apart. I took an online quiz awhile back (long after I'd graduated from college) telling me what my major should be. I got math. This might be a sign that one should not make big life decisions based on online quiz results, but it might also be that my approach to literature is, actually, a little more mathy than most. My personal statement for my grad school application actually, somewhat clumsily, made an analogy between computer repair and literary analysis: "we take books apart to see how they work," I wrote. So if Ari's mind appears, on the surface, to have a mathematical bent, and if it's clear that he's drawn to concrete answers and finding patterns in things, I'm hesitant to assume that this way of thinking must necessarily be channeled into engineering or computer programming or medicine. Nor that Milo's waaayyy out of the box perspective on things dooms him to a future as an unemployable philosophy major.

On the other hand, two of my three kids are Geminis. So maybe that's all it is.

And you? Could you tell from the cradle that your kid was going to be a mathlete or a precocious young novelist? Or do you have a Gemini, too?

November 15-19, 2010: Week 16

Apparently that Monday recap totally wore me out last week, as I seem not to have done a weekly review at all. Ah well. This week I'm going to do a combo recap/state of the homeschool post, wherein I note where we are in various subjects going into our Thanksgiving break, so that I can kind of see where we're on track and where we're not as we approach the midpoint of the year. Also--bonus!--perhaps some rambling about future plans. Stick around--it's going to be a very exciting blog post!

Ari:
Math: Ari's finished with Singapore 5A as of last week and just finished chapter 22 in Life of Fred Pre-Algebra w/ Biology. He continues to love and adore LOF as long as he's not doing a bridge. I think from here on out we'll do the bridges together (or he'll do them with Dave). When I look over the bridges he does on his own, he's mostly making careless mistakes rather than not understanding the concepts. We'll keep alternating LOF and Singapore from here, as it seems to be working pretty well. Unless he gets hung up on something, he's on track to finish LOF before the end of the (academic) year. I may have him backtrack a bit and do Decimals and Percents after that, saving the second Pre-Algebra book for next year, as he could definitely use some more practice with decimals (although I'm sure Singapore 5B will have more decimals in it as well).

For the looking ahead part, I'm pretty sure he'll do Singapore 6 next year along with the second installment of LOF Pre-algebra. That would put him ready to start LOF Algebra in 6th grade, but we'll see how next year goes before I jump that far ahead.


Reading: Ari started I, Robot this week. He read the introduction and the first story. We spent some time talking about stuff like frame stories, labor unions, the complicated relationship between when science fiction is written, when it takes place, and when the reader is actually reading it, and, of course, robots. He did a dictation sentence containing the Caesar's English word "profound." At bedtime, he's tearing through A Series of Unfortunate Events (he's on book 8), re-reading the 5th Harry Potter, and throwing in some Andrew Clements here and there.



So far this year for school he's read: Tuck Everlasting, The Boy of the Painted Cave, Summerland, The Egypt Game, and The Golden Goblet. So we're averaging about 3 weeks per book, but that's mostly because we camped out on Summerland for forever.


Next year I'm going to have him read War and Peace. Just kidding. I have no idea what he's going to read next year. For the rest of the this year, we'll continue with our eclectic mix of historical fiction, science-fiction, and random stuff I think he should read.


Michael Clay Thompson: As of today, he's finished Lesson 8 in Paragraph Town, Sentence 23 in Practice Town, Lesson 10 in Caesar's English, and we've read through page 47 in Building Poems. I think this puts us pretty well on track for the year. We have trouble getting around to Building Poems, but it's not that long, so I think it will work out fine. He just finished Lesson 16 in Spelling Workout, so we're doing fine there, too.


This week's lesson in Paragraph Town was on different types of paragraphs. His writing assignment was to pick a topic and write two paragraphs about it, either two descriptive paragraphs or one descriptive and one expository. Ari opted to write one descriptive and one expository about the first thing he happened to see, which was a little metal hourglass we picked up somewhere awhile back. He was super-impressed with his first paragraph (as was I):

My hourglass is beautiful. The copper-like color reminds me of pennies. The white, soft sand is like rain falling from a puffy, white cloud. The mountain formed at the bottom reminds me of a birthday candle that never stops burning. I admire the shining sticker reminding me my beloved hourglass was made in Taiwan. The marks on the bars that support this pretty, sturdy thing were so carefully made, it looks as if a great artist carved them with his own hands.

 The second paragraph, we both agree, needs work. It explains what the hourglass is used for, and it's mostly stuff like, "Also, it can be used for timing people on tests." So we'll work on a rewrite of that after Thanksgiving. Incidentally, there's really nothing that special about the hourglass. Ari is a funny boy. In other writing news, Ari is the only one who's really stuck with Nanowrimo, but he's REALLY stuck with it. He works on it every day, and has long since blown his word count goal out of the water.


Spanish: He's started the second session of his Spanish class at LEO, and it continues to go well. They're finally working on conjugating verbs, and so far it's not giving him any trouble.


Looking ahead: I think we're ready to get a little more intense with Spanish, so I'm planning to go ahead and order Galore Park's Spanish to start after the 1st of the year. My only concern about it is that it teaches Spanish rather than Latin American grammar, and I don't want things to get too confusing. But I started a thread about it on WTM and have been sufficiently reassured that he (and I!) can handle it.


Biology: the new session of Biology, focusing on dissection, started two weeks ago, and he's loving it. He came out after the first class, telling me they'd dissected flowers and announcing gleefully, "I found the ovary!" I don't know how he'll contain his excitement when they get to the sheep's brain.


Looking ahead: I have no idea what Ari will do for science next year. None. There you have it.


I think that's the main stuff for Ari. He works on Evan Moor's Daily Math Practice and Paragraph Editing, but I don't really worry about whether he'll make it all the way through the books this year or not. He'll probably get 3/4 of the way through, at the very least. And we haven't been keeping up with Logic Liftoff very well. We will try to remedy that after our break.

Oh--while I was writing this, Dave came in from taking the kids to a basketball game at his school and asked, "if there's like or as, is that a simile or a metaphor?" "Simile," I said. He paused. "Oh. Ari was right, and I was wrong." Hee hee.



Milo:
Math: Milo's a few pages away from finishing Singapore 1B, so we should definitely be ready to start 2A after Christmas. Which means I really need to order it. He started working with money this week, which he was very excited about until he figured out that it was essentially just more adding. He did well with it, though.


I'm still a little mournful about our "lost year" with Right Start. I wonder if he'd be a lot farther along now with math if we'd stuck with Singapore all along (and I also wonder how things would be going if we'd stuck with Right Start--I mean aside from how I'd be insane from spending an hour and a half doing math with him every day). Ah well--it's done now. I think I'm going to go ahead and have Milo take the ITBS this spring, even though he doesn't have to test until next year, so I can get an idea of how he's doing and what we might need to focus on for next year. I also wonder if I should take him to an eye doctor. His vision was slightly worse than 20/20 at his check-up last year...the ped said she wouldn't worry about it unless he seems to be having trouble seeing. And he doesn't, really, but I do wonder if he's having trouble in ways I'm not noticing. Ari spent who knows how long not being able to hear out of his right ear without any of us having a clue, after all, so I don't necessarily trust my perceptions of these things. And they're all genetically doomed to need glasses at some point. Okay. Randomness over.


Reading: He's been reading Matilda for the past couple of weeks. At bedtime he was reading the first Harry Potter, until he left it at LEO (and all the copies are checked out of the library). Now he's reading the same Andrew Clements' book Ari just finished. I am not going to make a list of all the books he's read for school this year. He's read quite a few. Finding books for him has gotten challenging. I'm finding the stated reading levels on books utterly useless for him. It seems like every one I consider is supposed to be 5th grade, but then some of them are completely appropriate for him, difficulty-wise, and some of them are over his head. Like, using the Scholastic Book Wizard site, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is grade level 5:3, and Matilda is 5:2. And he's reading both of those no problem, so I should reasonably expect him to read anything in that range. But he was absolutely crawling through The Indian in the Cupboard, and it's a 5:9. Perhaps I'm underestimating the difference between 5:3 and 5:9. Perhaps reading level is not all that useful of a tool. Anyway.


Other stuff: We just finished week 5 of WWE 2, and it continues to go well. I'm so relieved that, although he's occasionally frustrated, Milo never throws himself on the floor in tears like his brother did over doing narrations. I think it's going to work well for him. Plans going forward are to keep doing WWE (unless I get brave enough to really try pulling it together on my own again for next year, but I'm not counting on that) and start him on MCT Island level next fall. I STILL haven't ordered the Aesop books from RFWP, but I still plan to, and I think we can get through all of those by the end of the year. He's still working through Explode the Code 5; he's maybe 1/3 of the way through the book. I was thinking this was the last book I'd have him do, but I may go ahead and finish the series with him. It doesn't take long, and it certainly can't hurt anything.

Science (with Gus): We continued the Nebel/Discovery Education Science combo this week. The kids made little books about energy. They had a fabulous time doing it, which was always our experience last time we tried to do the Nebel book, too. Dammit! Why does something so effective and fabulous require so much prep time?! It's not fair! But I have a week break coming up, so I'm hoping to spend some time getting ready for the next few lessons. Ari's homework for this new session of biology has been pretty light so far; if that keeps up, I'd like to have him sit in on the Nebel stuff, too. Next year...who knows? I have the next Nebel book downloaded, so if things go well the rest of this year, I may renew the Discovery subscription and do the same thing next year.

Spanish (with Gus): They both started a Spanish class at LEO 2 weeks ago, and they both LOVE it. Milo couldn't wait to get the homework out and start on it when we got home after the first class. The teacher gave Milo extra homework since he's the oldest in the class. When Gus saw that, he cried, wailed "it's because she doesn't LIKE ME!" and insisted that he have just as much homework as his brother the next week.



Gus: Gus is almost finished with the first half of Singapore Earlybird. We're to that part where I have to get out a bunch of containers and let him spill water all over my floor. I guess I'll go ahead and order the next book for after Christmas. I need to take a look at it online and see if it has "pluses" as Gus is requesting. If it doesn't, I may go ahead and order 1A for him and just start going through it very slowly with lots of extra activities.


He's reading another Bones book to me. His reading is awesome, but he does tend to get distracted and start skipping words or substituting similar words, so I have to keep reminding him about that. He's doing well in ETC 1. We've been pretty slack about doing Handwriting Without Tears regularly. I need to pick up the pace so we can get through the book this year.


Next year I'd like to start him with all the first grade stuff: WWE and Singapore, maybe the RFWP Aesop books.


History: We're actually on track with Story of the World! We did Chapter 19: The Early Greeks, this week. We were having trouble getting around to doing history on Wednesdays (after our LEO classes), so we're trying out fitting it all in to Mondays. We usually listen to the CD in the car on another day, and some of our bedtime reading fits in with history, too, so it's not really all on Mondays. But we did the review questions and  the mapwork and read more of the D'Aulaire's book and did narrations (and a summary for Ari). We're still reading Black Ships Before Troy at bedtime.


And now I feel like I've been writing this forever, so I'm going to stop! I'm planning to buy a new card reader for the computer today, so my after Thanksgiving resolution is: pictures!

What a good (homeschooling) day looks like around here

I.e. a day where I feel like we get enough accomplished, the kids enjoy it, and no one cries (about school). Like today! Also because I've been meaning to describe a semi-typical day for awhile now for posterity (and anyone who cares). I feel like so many details get lost in the weekly review.

We got started at 9:30 this morning, after I had my morning internet (I don't drink coffee, so I use the internet as a substitute). I always mean to start earlier, but really, on Mondays when we have nowhere else to go, it doesn't matter much. I printed out Waker Uppers, and everyone got started on that. Gus is not really old enough for Waker Uppers (I think it's recommended for 2nd through 5th grade), but Gus does not tolerate being left out of things, so he does it with my help. Ari always finishes first and then, while he's waiting on the others, turns his paper over and works on the latest installment of his comic, "Mr. Can" ("He's in a Can; He's a Superman!"). When everyone finished, I read the last poem from Voices of Ancient Egypt, "The Marshman" ("Think of it!/A simple reed that grows in marshes/ means Egypt's story will not be forgotten...."). Then I read a couple of stories from the DK Children's Everyday Bible. It's supposed to be every day, but we actually only do this part where we get together at the table and read about 3 times a week, so I generally do several (very short) stories at a time. I've got my eye on the SOTW-esque Bible curriculum that Peace Hill Press is supposed to be putting out in February, but until then we just read through this book. For the last part of our version of circle time, we did a couple of activities from the workbook for Puertas Abiertas. Gus and Milo are on their second time through watching the DVDs this year, but we didn't do a lot with the workbook the first time, so we're concentrating more on that now.

Then we broke up for math. Ari went into the kitchen to finish the final few pages in Singapore 5A, and I set Milo up working on some subtraction in 1B. Gus draws or plays or looks at books or whatever while I get his brothers going. Sometimes Ari needs help with math; sometimes he doesn't. Today he handled everything except a couple of word problems; I took a look at them and decided we'd let DH help him with those when he gets home. Because I hate Singapore word problems. Today I sat with Milo and wrote down the answers for him, as I often do when the math is something that requires concentration. He still has trouble with reversals with his numbers and just a typical 7 year old boy aversion to lots of writing, so I figure writing the numbers for him gives him less to worry about so that he can focus on the problems. He got through the exercise fairly quickly, and I gave him a page of Explode the Code and a spelling assignment from Spelling Workout to work on while I checked on Ari. Ari was doing fine, so I reminded him to do his Evan Moor Daily Math Practice and Paragraph Editing and then review his spelling words once he finished math. Then I went back in and did a few pages of Singapore Earlybird with Gus. It was all about measuring, so first we measured how many foot lengths long and hand widths long various things in the room were, then moved on to talking about concepts like longer/longest and taller/tallest.

By now Ari and Milo were both finished with their independent work and off to read in the living room. Milo read for 30 minutes from Matilda and Ari read for 45 from The Golden Goblet. I read a library book to Gus, "Monkey Creates Havoc in Heaven: The exciting tale of the fearless Monkey, one of China's best-loved mythical characters." The book was a bit longer and more...episodic than I expected (not to mention full of rather advanced vocabulary like "martial" and "imperial steeds" and "brandishing"), but Gus was pretty into it. At the end, the monkey is imprisoned inside a mountain for 500 years. "They were mean to the monkey," Gus commented. But really the monkey totally deserved it; he was a giant pain in the ass. Gus read a (very) little bit to me from "Dragon Tales" (not the TV dragon tales). He wasn't feeling it today. He finished up his school time with a page from Explode the Code.

Milo finished up his reading and came back in to do Writing With Ease. Today was narration day, on a passage from Dr. Dolittle, and it went pretty smoothly...more smoothly than usual, even, probably because the narration was only supposed to be one sentence today. Like old times! (last year's WWE 1 old times, that is).

By then Ari was finished reading, so I set Milo and Gus up to watch Puertas Abiertas and do their piano practice, and Ari and I went back to the schoolroom for language arts. First we took care of the Caesar's English quiz that we didn't get around to last week. He couldn't remember what lofty meant, and wanted to sit there staring at the paper until he got it, but I finally insisted we move on (I haven't graded it yet, but I think he only missed that and maybe one other word). He did a sentence from Practice Town, and then we started reading the lesson on topic sentences in Paragraph Town. Then we had last week's spelling test. I have to make up a ridiculous story using all the spelling words, because I did it once and obligated myself to continue forever. Today's story was about a woman who was teaching a lesson on ladybugs to her class and wanted her father, who was a police officer in a ladybug village, to help out. But her father was still holding a grudge about an incident that happened when she was young, wherein she accidentally stomped on and wiped out an entire ladybug village. I make them up as I go, a sentence for each spelling word, although I know it sounds like a story that it took me weeks to compose ;-).  Then I left Ari on his own to write a 2 paragraph version of the story of the Minotaur. I came back when he finished, read through it and made some comments so that he can write another draft tomorrow.

Lunchtime! In theory we have an hour break for lunch and playing, but in reality I am more than happy to have this stretch on later if we're not in a rush and everyone's playing nicely. Today was one of those magical days; when the hour was up they were all out playing in the woods, so we probably wound up taking more of a 90 minute break.

When they finally came back in, we all sat down for history. We'd already listened to chapter from Story of the World (on Crete) in the car over the weekend, so we jumped right into the review questions from the activity guide. I mention this only because my kids, particularly Ari, hated history for so long: they LOVE the review questions now and fall all over each other trying to answer them first. We read through the corresponding pages from our Usborne encyclopedia, then started in on D'Aulaire's Greek Myths. They were kind of spellbound. I'm very excited about Greece! We're going to read Black Ships Before Troy as bedtime reading, I think. While all this was going on, I kept having to forcibly stop Milo from reading The Monster in the Maze and assuring him that he could read it later. I sent Ari out to start looking through the Usborne quicklinks on the netbook while Milo and Gus each did a narration. Then I took them to the real computer to look at quicklinks (we mostly looked at pictures from the palace at Knossos). And then we were officially finished, but the kids went into the playroom to work on making mazes, complete with Playmobil Egypt skeletons and a toy cow to represent the Minotaur.

And there it is--a successful day! Except Ari still needs to practice piano, I just remembered.....

November 1-5, 2010: Week 14

I have big plans to someday post some pictures here again. But first I need my refurbished computer to have a working card reader. Or I suppose I could see if I can figure out how to connect the camera to the computer, but I haven't done that in forever, and I have no idea if we even have the right cable and whatnot to do it anymore. So you'll have to make up your own pictures in your head again this week. I could have taken pictures with my iphone, I guess. Hmm. Oh well.

So what did we do this week? Aw, hell, I can't remember. It's been a long week. Thursday night DH and I went to see Mike Birbiglia while my brother played Wii with our kids and put them to bed for us, so that was fun. Oh, but the homeschooling....right. Let me think.

Ari returned to Singapore, the happy math that doesn't make anyone cry (in this house, anyway), and that was awesome. He's doing the final review in 5A now and just has a page or two left. He did cry about having to give titles to the three paragraphs in The Gettysburg Address for Paragraph Town, though. Well, maybe he didn't actually cry, but he didn't like it. He finished lesson 9 in Caesar's English and lesson 13 in Spelling Workout, but we didn't get the tests done today; we'll do them Monday most likely. He's still reading The Golden Goblet. He was reading a bunch of Lemony Snicket at bedtime, but I believe he's now re-reading the last Harry Potter in preparation for the movie. Perhaps I should do that, too.

He finished his first session of Biology and Spanish at LEO. They had a test in Spanish, and he got a 91; he had a bit of trouble with articles, I guess. He and DH spent hours and hours making a lovely poster about the differences and similarities in plant and animal cells for his final project in biology. That would have been a nice thing to put a picture of right here.

Milo also did Singapore, but it did not go quite as swimmingly with him. He's working on mentally adding numbers within 100, like 45 + 27 and such. As usual, he can do it, but it's agonizingly slow and he gets distracted very, very easily.

He's reading Roald Dahl's Matilda, having finished Socks early in the week. It's possible I've abandoned the idea of having him read the books used in WWE. I tried to get him to read Ginger Pye, and he hated it. "I hated that book, too," Ari told him. So maybe he can just read awesome books this year and that will be good enough. He's on a big Roald Dahl kick with bedtime reading, too. He read Esio Trot, The Magic Finger, and The Enormous Crocodile this week. We finally finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at bedtime, so I think his plan is to start reading Sorcerer's Stone to himself after we watch the movie (tomorrow, if netflix comes through for us). Tonight I started Lord of the Rings at bedtime (just for the older two), but I'm not sure if it's going to work or not. Ari wanted me to read The Hobbit again first, but I just it to them last year and don't want to again right now. I suggested he read it to himself, but he didn't think much of that idea.

Gus finally did some more math; it was measurement, which he thinks is really cool. He finished reading his Bones book and picked up where he left off months ago in Dav Pilkey's "Dragon Tales." He also says he's reading Ribsy to himself. I'm not really sure what's going on there.

I finally got around to more science with Gus and Milo. We started the unit on energy at Discovery Education. Then someone on the WTM boards posted about how the new level of Nebel's Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding is out, and the download is only $5. This, in turn, made me feel sad about how we abandoned BFSU after 8 lessons a couple of years ago, so I pulled it out and did the first lesson on energy (and bought the download. Because it's only $5!). It was, of course, terribly successful, and the kids were all into it, and, you know, maybe I should try to do it every week. Sigh. I'm very glad I got the Discovery Education Science, because it's working as intended--an easy way to at least get some science done every week (unless my computer's broken). Now I only have to feel guilty about not adding supplemental stuff in. And next week Ari gets to start cutting up cow eyeballs and stuff in his biology class, so no guilt there!

I signed both Milo and Gus up for a beginning Spanish class at LEO starting next week. I think last week I mentioned the preschool sewing class Gus wanted to take...not enough kids signed up for it, so it's not happening. But I managed to talk him into Spanish. I hope it goes well. Milo took Spanish with Ari (with a different teacher) last year; he was the youngest in the class by far, and there was a lot of writing, and it was kind of a hot mess.

History! Another two chapter week; we did chapters 16 and 17 in SOTW, and learned about Assyria and Babylon. We looked at the Usborne quicklinks and found a choose your own adventure type story about trade in Babylon. We built a siege tower out of legos. We also went ahead and started listening to our Jim Weiss Greek Mythology CD, because we just couldn't wait any longer. Well, something like that. Oh, also. We do a poem of the day most mornings, and for the past few weeks they've been from a book called Voices of Ancient Egypt that we found at the library. Each page has a poem told from the perspective of a different worker--dancer, stone cutter, scribe, et. al. It's really nicely done--lovely illustrations and text.

Oh, last thing: kids are all doing Nanowrimo this month. I think they set their word count goals too low; Ari said 800, but he's already over halfway done with that. Milo and Gus are both dictating to me, so it's kind of slow going. But they're excited, so that's lovely to see.

October 25-29, 2010: Week 13

I'm typing on my own computer! It's back! But without sound, so Milo and Gus still couldn't do their science this week. You know how I was all mad at RFWP because my Aesop books hadn't come yet? Well, I went back and looked at my checking account, and ....I think I never actually ordered them. Very devoted followers of my blog will recall that the same thing happened to me earlier this year with some stuff from Tin Man Press. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that I am losing my mind. Anyway, I guess I need to order those again. For real this time. But I thought I should clear RWFP's good name here. No shipping problems with RFWP! As far as I know. They aren't very good with imaginary orders, though.

We're finished with homeschool soccer, and this made Thursday much more restful, but we managed to fill the rest of the week right up with out of the house activities. Monday we went to see Toy Story 3 (again) at the dollar movie. Tuesday we had a playdate with some friends from Math Olympiad. Wednesday we had our usual classes at LEO and then stayed for the Halloween party there. Friday was park day as (almost) always. Things still felt a little less rushed than in weeks past, though, and I sat down yesterday and worked out a new post-soccer schedule to try out. But then of course Ari's basketball is starting up soon. And I think I'm going to sign Milo up for Spanish (different class from Ari, so at a different time) and Gus up for a preschool sewing class (he's SO excited about this; he's always asking to take a class) at LEO, so...there's always something to overwhelm us, I guess.

Ari: Got to the next bridge in Life of Fred, missed three questions, threw book in floor and tore up his answers. Rather than yet another talk about how it's okay to make mistakes, that's how we learn, I don't get upset when he gets things wrong, I get upset when he won't even try, etc. etc, I threw my own tantrum instead. Our conflict-averse dog was so concerned on Ari's behalf that he actually growled at me a little (I swear I wasn't going to hit Ari or anything!). So, with help from the dog, I got control of my temper and apologized, and we put Life of Fred away for the day. Sigh. It had been going so well up until that bridge.
Life of Fred should come with a warning sticker: "May destroy your family and turn your dog against you."

But everything else went pretty well, at least. He wrote two summaries from Story of the World and did some dictation from his new book, The Golden Goblet. We did the first sentence in the book for dictation; it has lots of prepositional phrases in it, so we played around with what the sentence looks like when you get rid of them. He took tests on Lesson 12 from Spelling Workout and Lesson 8 from Caesar's English, and did well on both. We read from Paragraph Town and Building Poems, then did an exercise from Paragraph Town wherein Ari rearranged the words from a sentence in The Gettysburg Address to make is as nonsensical as possible.

He had his penultimate classes of biology and Spanish for this session at LEO. He has a research project due next week in biology and a test (!) in Spanish.

In planning news, I'm looking at History Odyssey for him for next year. People seem to speak highly of Level 2, which is what we would get. I'm a bit terrified (yet also intrigued) by how much writing it calls for. But we're talking about 8 or 9 months from now, and, given how much progress he's made with writing in the past few months, I think it's possible he could handle it by then. I'm sort of floundering around this year with finding extra stuff for him for history. On the other hand, we've always done history all together, and I worry he might feel left out if he's off doing history by himself while I do SOTW with his brothers. Must think on it more.

Milo: back to adding (stuff like 48 + 7, 56 + 4) in Singapore. It's getting better. He understands it, can do it, no problem; it's just a speed issue.

He's almost finished with Socks, and then I think he'll read Mrs. Piggy Wiggle to go along with WWE. Except I guess we're pretty much finished with the Mrs. Piggy Wiggle section. Hmm...so maybe not. I'll see what else there is. Writing with Ease is still going well. He doesn't love narration, but he gets through it. I don't seem to have too much to say about Milo this week.

Gus: Is reading some detective book about a kid named Bones. It's by the same guy who writes Cam Jansen. There's a roller coaster in it. Gus is funny when he reads books. He can't stop himself from flipping ahead to look at all the pictures and try to guess what's going to happen. We didn't do any Singapore this week, as it required some prep work that I never got around to. Next week!

In history, we read about the Israelites leaving Egypt and then about the Phoenicians. We also read Robert Sabuda's "Tutankhamen's Gift" because I forgot to read it a couple of weeks ago when we read about Tutankhamen.

October 18-22, 2010: Week 12

My computer is all over our kitchen counter right now. Dave keeps buying (or being given, by my brother) new parts every day or two. I think at some point in the very near future we are going to cross over from "fixing my computer" to "making me a new computer." I'm not sure where the line is, precisely. At any rate, it had better be working by next week, or, umm....else? Yeah, it's really out of my computer illiterate hands.

I felt sort of sluggish and unmotivated this week and continue to feel this way today, so perhaps a briefish update this week:

Ari:
*mostly did Singapore this week, after we finally managed to pass the first bridge in Life of Fred. He broke out the protractor for the first time in awhile, and apparently he's become a big fan of angles, as he asked Dave if next week in Math Olympiad they could work on "something with protractors."

*finished The Egypt Game and started The Golden Goblet. We're just going to get all this Egypt out of our systems so we can move on.

*learned some new words and anaylzed some new sentences in MCT. He gets excited when he spots his vocabulary words in the books he's reading, which makes me happy. We didn't do the paragraph lab for this week yet, because "we'll just do school on Saturday" is usually not really true. It's still Saturday, though, so who knows?

*has to write a report or make a display about something for his biology class. He has tentatively chosen the similarities and differences between plant and animal cells for his topic. I predict tears in our future.

Milo:
*is going through his math much faster over the past couple of weeks. Numbers up to 100 in Singapore.

*was moving through The Indian in the Cupboard so painfully slowly that I told him he could finish up Socks for his school reading instead. Today we couldn't find it so he read a library book instead (we did do some of our planned Saturday school).

*loves doing dictation in WWE. Huh. Who'd have guessed it. Apparently, he sees it as some sort of fun puzzle. I am never sure whether to worry about his writing at all or not. He has a really funky grip, which I gave up correcting after Dave's sister saw it and commented that her grip is very similar and that she's always thought it was dumb that teachers spent so much time trying to change her grip and she always went back to her funky grip again. Anyway, so it looks uncomfortable to me, but his handwriting is quite good and he doesn't complain about doing an age-appropriate amount of writing. The only excuse I have for worrying is that he writes really slow-l-y. But then, he does most everything slowly. He takes after his father.

Gus:
*finished Mouse Tales and started reading The Secret Three.

*is flying through Explode the Code 1

Everybody:
*watched Lilo and Stitch in Spanish this week. Then, inspired, they watched My Neighbor Totoro in Japanese.

*Learned about the New Kingdom of Egypt in history. We got an Egypt Usborne Kid Kit out of the free box at LEO this week, so we're going to play around with that a bit soon.

*had their last week of soccer, complete with team photos and pizza party

*went to Halloween Hikes at the nature center and had a great time.

And now I'm going to go take a nap while the kids play Wii!

October 11-15, 2010: Week 11

My computer! It is broken! I am typing this on DH's work computer, but the problem with it is that it goes to work with him every day (also, I hate the keyboard). So I'm hobbling along with my iphone and our little, very slow netbook during the week. This makes science and some other stuff difficult, since we bought the netbook so that I could send Ari off to work independently on it while I sat with the younger kids at the regular computer. A new motherboard has been ordered after extensive diagnostic assistance from my computer engineer brother and after the purchase and return of a new power supply that did not fix anything. If that doesn't fix it, then I need a new computer I guess. I don't want to need a new computer because that will mess up my Disney fund. But anyway. We did school despite the hardship of only sort of having a computer. Actually, it didn't completely die on me until Wednesday, I think.

Ari: is reading The Egypt Game now and enjoying it considerably more than Summerland. He's enjoying it so much, in fact, that he's been inspired to create The Rome Game and play it outside with his brothers for long periods every day. It's a little odd since we've studied Egypt all year and haven't done anything with Rome yet (except what he gets from Caesar's English, but I'll take it. Time outside + imaginitive play + evidence that my kids are really enjoying history = me being happy.

His Life of Fred Pre-Algebra came last weekend, and he immediately took it upstairs and did several sections of it. It's all he's wanted to work on math-wise this week, so he took the week off of Singapore. He got through the first 7 chapters by Wednesday and tried the first bridge Thursday. LOF bridges are a problem for Ari, historically. Yeah--the still are. He missed 2 on his first attempt, tossed the book on the floor, and declared that he quit. We went over what he missed and he gave the second try a chance on Friday...and missed 2 again. Blast it all. There's a good bit of information in there that's new to him, so he's getting tripped up on fairly minor stuff like adding instead of multiplying when he's supposed to square something. Also, the book says it's okay to use a calculator, so he really wants to, but he's not used to using a calculator, so it keeps messing him up. But he still wants to keep using it. Monday will be attempt #3 at the bridge. I might try sitting with him and stopping him if he starts to make a mistake (if he'll let me); it's just a supplement to the Singapore, so I really just want him to have the exposure/practice.

He still needs to take the Caesar's English quiz for last week, because I always think we'll be able to get more done on Fridays before park day than is actually possible. But we did the third lesson in Paragraph Town; the paragraph lab was to write what's outside an imaginary window in a certain order (Ari picked left to right). He really enjoyed that one.

He had Spanish and biology classes at LEO. I haven't looked at the homework yet to see what they're working on in Spanish. In biology, they looked at insects under microscopes, and he learned that he's going to dissect a cow's eyeball in the next session. I'm so glad we're not dissecting a cow's eyeball at my house.

He had his penultimate soccer session. He continues to really enjoy it, so I went ahead and signed him up for basketball at the Y starting next month. It's a little annoying, because you  have to sign up not knowing what evening the practice is going to be on. I'm not sure if there's any flexibility if they give you a night that doesn't work. Also, one place it said "evening" for practices, and somewhere else it said 2-5, which I would call "late afternoon." I'm sure it will all work out somehow.

Milo: is reading The Indian in the Cupboard. I let him bail on Pippi Longstocking after 2 days of reasonable effort. Since he's liked pretty much every single other book he's ever read, I guess he's entitled to mysteriously dislike one. He's enjoying TIITC, but it's kind of slow going. I think it's probably the most challenging thing he's read yet.

Speaking of bailing, I lasted about a week in my "make your own WWE" plan. After all my big talk about how using the workbooks was kind of a crutch for people who didn't have the time or energy for picking their own passages...as some character or other says in Diane Keaton's directorial debut, Unstrung Heroes, "a crutch isn't a bad thing, if you need it." They were talking about religion, not homeschool curriculum. But you see, I had already bought WWE 2, so it was just there on the shelf, tempting me. So we're using it. I might, as a compromise with my guilty conscience, assign some of the books used in WWE for him to read. Anyway, we just did the first two days of week 1, and he did well. I was worried about the copywork getting longer, but so far it's fine. We haven't tried the first dictation yet, though...

Singapore was all about patterns and telling time this week, so he breezed through it. His spelling list this week focused on long O words...he missed "those" on the test, and promptly used it that night when he played hangman with Dave. I ordered the rest of the Aesop books from Royal Fireworks Press 2 weeks ago, and we're still waiting...I'm starting to get a bit impatient.

Gus: is reading Mouse Tales now, having finished Mouse Soup. Dave is reading Tale of Desperaux to him at bedtime, and sometimes he reads to Dave, too. I keep suggesting he try a Magic Treehouse book or something on his own, as I'm pretty sure he could handle it (I almost never help him with words in the level 2 I Can Read books, which I think are at about the same level), but he's not really interested.

Lots of work with patterns in math this week. He did several pages in Explode the Code, and we read bunches of library books.

We learned about the Middle Kingdom of Egypt in SOTW. Ari wrote a lovely summary, and the other kids did narrations. We read the last of our extra books about Egypt, and the kids watched Ancient Egypt: Engineering An Empire on Netflix instant viewing. (We recently switched from the 3 out at a time to 1 out at a time, but I think I may have to switch back; we've been doing lots of family movie nights, which doesn't leave any space for getting the non-instant documentaries, and it's kind of driving me crazy). We're all kind of over Egypt at this point, and I'm looking forward to getting to Greece in a few weeks. I'm thinking of getting the Duke TIP online course about Greek mythology for Ari.

October 4-8, 2010: Week Ten!

If this is week 10, that means we're over a quarter of the way through the year. How exciting! I went on a quarterly homeschool stuff spending spree last weekend; I ordered Explode the Code 2 for Gus, a couple of "You Wouldn't Want to Be..." books for history, Life of Fred Pre-Algebra for Ari, and the rest of the Royal Fireworks Press Aesop books for Milo. So something for everyone!

Ari and I both finally finished reading Summerland. Ari complained a lot less about reading it at the end than he did at the beginning, but it never really grew on him as much as I had hoped it would. I remain a fan, though it's kind of a hot mess of a book. "How about," thought Michael Chabon, "a great American Huck Finn-esque road novel about, like, believing in yourself and stuff, and then, in case that doesn't scream 'American!' loudly enough, I'll throw in baseball as an extended metaphor. But since it's a kid book, I don't have to be all subtle about it, I will just tell you, repeatedly, that baseball is just like life! Doesn't that sound amazing? But also! Sasquatches and fairies and Norse mythology and a dig at the designated hitter! Because why not?!" But I kind of love it anyway. When it's good, it's very good. Like here, one more block quote from Summerland, as I go through my withdrawal:

And in that moment he felt--for the first time that optimistic and cheerful boy allowed himself to feel--how badly made life was, how flawed. No matter how richly furnished you made it, with all the noise and variety of Something, Nothing always found a way in, seeped through the cracks and patches. Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time. Coyote was right to want to wipe it out, to call the whole sad thing on account of darkness.

But don't worry, Ethan perks up and gets back to the business of saving the world soon after. And the world being terrible, cruel, and unbelievably wonderful all at once is one of my favorite things for books to talk about. So, to sum up, Summerland, is kind of like life and baseball: messy and convoluted, losing almost as often as it wins, but a lovely thing to behold nonetheless.

Now, discussing Summerland with Ari was, predictably, like pulling teeth. Sigh. Maybe by high school he'll open up a bit more?

As if finishing Summerland weren't enough for the week, he also finished lesson six in Caesar's English (and got 23/25 right on his quiz), did a lesson from Spelling Workout, started reading Building Poems, and did lesson two from Paragraph Town. The paragraph lab from this lesson had him making lists a famous person he admired. He, of course, chose Milo. Sure, fine. And then he was completely stumped when it got to the part where he was supposed to say what he admired about Milo. Because Ari doesn't do sincere very well. Unless he's sincerely angry about something. I think we need to work on being funny but still actually completely the assignment. This is probably a more difficult skill than just saying something nice about your brother, but whatever.

He's got maybe another week or week and a half of Singapore 5A (and that's with some slowing down to give him extra time to work on his homework for Math Olympiad). Hence my Life of Fred order. I think we'll try doing 3 days of Singapore and 2 days of LOF and see how that goes. He is secretly excited about LOF; I can tell because he's not so good about keeping secrets. He really loved the story and the humor before (when he was doing Fractions); if I can just somehow keep it low pressure, it will all be good. Anyway, Singapore this week was all about ratios.

Milo is never going to finish Singapore 1B. This is probably not really true, but it feels that way. I am trying to fight my lingering fears that he's somehow behind. Singapore is, after all, a relatively rigorous math curriculum, and he'd be a very young second grader this year were he in school. And going at Milo's pace is the whole point (or one of them) of homeschooling, right? right. So. It's introducing multiplication and division now, and, mysteriously, Milo strongly prefers that to adding and seems to be faster at it. He STILL reverses numbers constantly (not letters ever), and I'm starting to wonder if that's something to worry about. Because, you know, I need things to worry about.

He finished up Sideways Stories from Wayside School this week and then read Tomie DePaolo's 26 Fairmount Avenue, which I gave him primarily because it's short, and I needed something I could read fast and pull copywork and narration from. Which I did, and that went well. Today he started Pippi Longstocking, and, for the first time ever, complained after a few pages that he didn't like it. He insists that it's not too hard; he just doesn't like it, so I had him push on, and eventually he said it was getting a bit better. So we'll see how he likes it after another day or two of reading. Ari LOVED Pippi when he was Milo's age or a bit younger; he read all three of the books in quick succession.

He's started on ETC 5 and is still moving through Master Reader (we haven't been doing it every day, so it's slowed down).

Gus is doing ETC 1 and seems to really enjoy it. He read "A Kiss for Little Bear" and most of "Mouse Soup" this week. He's doing a few pages of Singapore Earlybird a couple of times a week. He's a bit frustrated because there are no "pluses" in it, and he feels that stuff like learning the names of shapes is not really math. We got to a section on patterns this week, and he was delighted. "This is real math!" he said, "patterns!"

In history, we read about ancient Africa and watched some Anansi videos on Discovery Education Streaming.

Milo and Gus learned about compounds in science; Ari did more microscope stuff and had to draw and label a plant for his science homework.

We have two more weeks of homeschool soccer before I get my Thursdays back. The kids have really enjoyed it. I'm a bit surprised, particularly in Ari's case, at just how much they've enjoyed it. I'm toying around with the idea of signing Ari up for basketball for the winter (he's tall!), but we'll see.

We've had light attendance at the last couple Math Olympiad meetings for various reasons, but it seems to be going well.

And season 4 of Friday Night Lights is now available on Netflix instant viewing, so I'm off to watch that and drink wine and eat a brownie. Whoo hoo! Friday night!

NotAWeeklyReview

This is the part of the year where I get back from Disney and, apparently, need a month to regain the ability to blog. This might have something to do with the fact that I've spent much of my free time for the past week trying to figure out ways to get back to Disney World next September and reading Disney stuff obsessively (like Disney Travel Babble. She went to Tokyo Disneyland and writes about it with much humor and detail. Also, her husband's a puppeteer. And they got married at Epcot. I would like to go to Tokyo Disneyland and get married at Epcot, but both of those are pretty unlikely. Unless Dave dies and I find some rich guy to marry next).

Anyway. We went to Disney World, and it was superfun. I took 763 pictures and wrote captions for many of them. This is faster than a full-scale trip report.

We have managed to get some school done, despite the lack of documentation here. The kids wrote stories speculating about what happened to the people of Mohenjo Daro. I can only find Ari's right now:

 One morning, the people of  (city's name here) [sic] couldn't find their children. They searched all over (city's name here). They even ventured outside of their walls. Those who looked outside the walls never came back. They continued, stopping only to eat and sleep. After ten days of searching they gave up. The next morning, they woke up to find that the walls had fallen, the buildings on fire, and some houses destroyed. They left the ruins of a once peaceful city, never to return. They never found out that a very powerful empire had enslaved their children and burnt their city.

 And, again, miraculously, no tears. I think (knock wood) we might have a sort of breakthrough with writing going on here. He's regularly writing short summaries of history readings and the like with no complaining. Exciting!

And we did other stuff. Oh--on the way down to Disney World, Ari asked, "is it okay if I work on my Spanish homework while we drive?" Why, yes, son, I suppose that would be all right. He's very conscientious about homework (this is the first year he's really had any substantial amount of it). It's cute.

So now I need to be getting ready for the week. I managed to clean off the schoolroom table, and then I needed to take a break and blog. I mostly need to get writing assignments ready for the week. This week will be the first week of coming up with dictation and narration stuff on my own for Milo, which means I need to read what he's reading. But I'm also way behind Ari in Summerland right now. Milo's just about finished with Sideways Stories from Wayside School. I may give him Pippi Longstocking next. Must figure it out. Must get off computer.

Next week: a real update!

September 6-10, 2010: Week Seven

We had a sad end to the week, as we had to say goodbye to our 11 year old kitty, Norman. His liver has been shutting down on him for several months now, so it was not unexpected, but he was a great cat and we're going to miss him very much.

On a cheerier note, we leave for Disney in 6 days! My goal for the weekend is to get the house completely cleaned so that I can focus on nothing but school and packing next week. To this end, I'm going to be a little more...efficient in my updating than usual this week :)

We were slowed down somewhat this week by labor day and head colds, but we managed to be relatively productive.

Ari: worked a lot of word problems in Singapore. Hey--we might actually be getting the hang of these things! I think he's better at them than I am, actually. Still trying to figure out math supplementation plans. After a conversation with Kash at soccer this week, I'm leaning toward adding in Life of Fred Pre-algebra as a supplement. He got about 2/3 of the way through the fractions book last year, but then we decided to let it go because he found the bridges so frustrating (he wasn't doing poorly on them; he just couldn't stand getting even one question wrong on a single bridge). But he really love the humor in the book and the story aspect of it, so I'm thinking if we can keep it very low key, low pressure, it might work well. And, Kash pointed out, it would go along well with the biology class he's doing this year, too.

He's still working through Summerland, slowly but surely. It'd be nice if he could finish it up this week so that we could start fresh with a new book when we get back, but I don't think it's going to happen. At bedtime, he's been reading Andrew Clement's Things Not Seen.

We didn't get around to doing an Elementary Spanish lesson this week, but his Spanish class at LEO and associated homework is going well. And if I weren't trying to keep things brief, this is where I'd mention my college freak out last weekend, partially spurred on by thoughts about how to progress from here with languages. But onward!

His biology teacher was out of town this week, so no class. He worked on his homework, though. He was supposed to research Louis Pasteur, so I gave him some stuff to read and asked him to take notes. Instead, he went ahead and wrote a paragraph long summary of what he read. Well how about that? Okay then.

He got lots of smiley faces on his Caesar's English and spelling quizzes. He wrote a nice summary from Story of the World and did some dictation and copywork from Summerland.

Milo: has been practicing addition facts with flashcards, and I think there's improvement there. He did a review section in Singapore this week, and all went smoothly.

We did a section in his Aesop book, he started ETC 5, and he did Week 33, I think, from WWE 1. It was on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was nice since that's what he's been reading at bedtime. He finished up Beezus and Ramona and is ready to start Sideways Stories from Wayside School.

He and Gus watched a lot of Puertas Abiertas. They're nearly finished with the DVDs now, and I'm sad that it doesn't look like they'll ever actually make Level 2. We'll probably go back through it when they finish and do more of the workbook exercises this time through.

In science, they learned about physical and chemical changes and watched a Magic School Bus video about molecules.

History: We read about the Assyrians in SOTW and the Usborne Encyclopedia. We read Ludmila Zeman's Gilgamesh trilogy (I remember Ari being incredibly bored by this 4 years ago, but all three of them were very into it this time), "You Wouldn't Want to Be an Assyrian Soldier," and watched a Horrible Histories video about ancient Egypt on Discovery Education (I was not especially impressed with it).

Homeschool soccer went well. It was not quite as hot this week. Gus seems more satisfied with the rigor of the 4 year old program, and Ari read up a bit on the rules and seems to be feeling more comfortable.

And now...off to clean my house. Because I'm going to Disney World! (I always want to quote 3 year old Milo the first year that we went. He kept telling everyone: "We're going to go to Dis-a-ney World, and I'm going to be excited!")

Oh, I should probably put a picture of something happier than my dead cat. Let's see....

Oh! I forgot....we started our Mark Kistler online drawing lessons this week....BIG hit:

And homeschool soccer has inspired lots of front yard soccer practice:

August 30-September 3: Week 6!

Moving right along! I am impressed with us. First week of homeschool soccer, so we have reached the zenith of frantic running aroundedness (uh, for this year, anyway). And we survived anyway!

Ari: finished Exercise 25 (out of 40) in Singapore 5A today. At this rate he'll finish the book in a month or so (it's amazing what happens when we actually do math every single day). My plan was to add in Challenging Word Problems when he starts up 5B, but I'm thinking of taking a month or so off and doing some introduction to algebra stuff with him instead. I was looking at the samples from CWP online the other night, and I nearly cried trying to understand the bar models. Then I showed it to Dave, my math teacher husband, to see if he could explain it to me. "Why don't we just teach him some algebra?" Dave asked, nearly as frustrated with the bar model stuff as I was. Why indeed? If my extremely mathy husband (we have the enormous "mathlete" trophy in our basement to prove it) does not find the Singapore bar models at all intuitive, I'm not going to kill myself trying to figure them out. This plan is still in its infancy, so we'll see how it progresses. Anyway, he's been working on dividing whole numbers by fractions this week. He had another Math Olympiad meeting; we're taking next week off because a couple of people will be out of town, and he expressed disappointment about this, so I take that as a sign that he's enjoying it.

MCT stuff is going swimmingly. He took the Lesson 4 quiz in Caesar's English today and did beautifully. We have about 20 pages left in Grammar Town, so we're on track to finish that up before we go out of town and start up on Paragraph Town when we get back. We're still doing a sentence a day or so from our unfinished Practice Island (we didn't start that up until midway through last year, so we didn't manage to finish it). Ari's an enormous fan of 4 level analysis. In fact, he insisted on trying to analyze his dictation sentence from Summerland the other day:

Finer minds than my own have forever dulled their edges trying to explain the workings of clocks and calendars among the worlds.

Most of it is fairly straightforward, but we got hung up on "trying to explain," as it's outside of Island level's scope. We just read about all the various new kinds of phrases in Grammar Town, but I'm still not sure what to call the whole thing. Anyone? I picked the sentence for dictation because it's one of a few places where the narrative voice refers to itself like this in the first person, which is just sort of interesting, and also because of the word play with sharp/dull/fine.

So since I managed to cut short last week's panic about Milo's math curriculum, I decided this week I'd better start panicking about Ari's writing curriculum. I'm making him do narrations/summaries again. Sorry kid. I had a sort of revelation last week when I talked about picking my own passages for Milo once he finishes WWE 1 that I could do the same thing for Ari, and that this kind of relevance might make things more palatable for him. So far it seems to be working. We did three summaries this week, two from  Summerland and one from Story of the World. Damned if it didn't go really well! He did the first two without complaining and then--this is the really remarkable part--asked if he could do another narration instead of a dictation sentence today! I was shocked. But I complied. I didn't have anything ready, but we took a 9 page passage from Summerland which has tons and tons of description but very little in it as far as plot moving forward and summarized it. I helped with leading questions, and this is what he came up with:

Ethan made a bet with a giant named John that he could catch three of the giant's pitches. He caught the first two balls, but just barely because they were so hard. For the third pitch, Ethan gave a signal to the giant to throw a change-up. The giant didn't want to throw the change-up, but he had to.

There was no crying or whining at all! He just did it! Fingers tightly crossed for continued success. The fact that I am so amazed and grateful that Ari produced a serviceable one paragraph summary without a tantrum will perhaps give you some clue as to why I was reluctant to pick them back up this year. But, sigh, I do think he needs to do them. So I will do as much hand-holding as necessary this year, alternate history and literature, and work up to longer summaries with the goal that he'll be able to do them completely independently next year. He's also doing a good bit of research for his biology class (the assignments don't specify that he has to write anything down, just "research the history of the microscope" or "research one of the following scientists," but I'm having him write a few paragraphs). And now I feel better about writing!

He had his second week of biology and Spanish classes this week, and those went well. He worked on his biology homework today, which involved reading the beginning of his Usborne microscope book and doing a sort of "play around with your new pocket microscope" lab. Only we can't get the pocket microscope to work at all, so he used the one someone gave him for his birthday a couple of years ago instead. This might be the year to invest in a decent microscope for the family.


Milo: did a lot of games on the computer to drill addition and subtraction facts. I think I might break out some old fashioned flashcards, too. He really needs to get this stuff down. Today was a welcome break from "making tens;" he started adding 3 small numbers together, and this was considerably less time-consuming and frustrating.


He continues to read compulsively everything he sees. Right now he's reading Beezus and Ramona for school, some sort of mystery about ancient Egypt for his "daytime book" (his designation), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at bedtime (after I read the 4th Harry Potter, which we're never, ever going to finish, aloud). He also reads all of the picture books I check out of the library for Gus.


He just finished week 32 in WWE 1, so he'll be through week 34 when we go out of town. Because I like nice, clear divisions like that, I think we'll stop there and I'll start picking passages from books he's reading when we get back, loosely following the guidelines for WWE2 from the textbook.


Gus: built a tower of ten blocks for math:

and also some other stuff. Mostly we have a 30 or 40 minutes period every morning where we do as much math and reading as he wants to do and then I read him some library books. I'm trying to be a little more systematic about his reading....I mean, we usually do one lesson from McRuffy, but then he tends to want to grab some random book and read me anywhere from 3 sentences to a few pages from it before getting tired and never getting back to said book again. I have no problem with him only reading for a couple of minutes if he doesn't feel like reading more, but I would like to at least return to the same book the next time so that we finish a whole story eventually. This week I gave him Dav Pilkey's "Dragon Tales," which was a huge hit with Milo last year, and he read me the first story from it and started on the second over the course of about 3 days. I might have him work his way through some Little Bear and Frog and Toad from here. Little Bear rocks.

History: we did two chapters in SOTW this week, "The Jewish People" and "Hammurabi and the Babylonians." We listened to some of our Jim Weiss CD of stories from the Old Testament and read some more Egyptian myths at bedtime. Milo and Gus did narrations while Ari read David MacAulay's Pyramid  and the section on Hammurabi in Ten Kings and the Worlds They Ruled. I think we're giving up on The Story of Science. He just wasn't into it, and I'm not willing to lose his new found interest in history.

Science: Milo and Gus learned about changing states of matter this week. We did some reading, watched a couple of short videos, plus a Magic School Bus episode about water, and did an online exploration and worksheet. By then Ari had come downstairs after doing his biology homework, so he joined us to melt an ice cube on the stove for a real life demo. Exciting stuff. I'm really liking the Discovery Education Science now that I have an alternative for Ari. The kids love the explorations online, and they seem to be learning and retaining a lot. I just need to get better about doing more simple experiments to go along with it.

And, finally, homeschool soccer started this week!

Milo was tired. Soccer lasts for 2 hours, and it was 95 out. I liked the idea of homeschool soccer because 1. they could all do it at the same time 2. it doesn't require me to get up at 6:30 on a Saturday and 3. it's cheap. It became considerably less cheap after a trip to Target to buy soccer balls, shin guards, shorts, shoes, and soccer socks, though. Ari's analysis: "I liked playing defense best, because I just had to stand there and not do anything." Also, apparently most of the kids on his team had played before and there was not a whole lot of direct instruction (it's a really casual set up; there's one "team" per age group for boys and one for girls, and they just kind of scrimmage against each other I guess). He's determined to read up on the rules of soccer before next week so that he'll be better prepared. Gus was fine with his experience until he heard Ari and Milo talk about playing actual games, then he started wailing, "I didn't get to play anything LIKE soccer!" Milo said it was "fun, I guess." Gus has decided he wants to be called August for soccer, for some reason. Which is his name and all, so that's fine; I was just surprised.

The story!

Permission to post granted by the author ;)

The tall, old man ran on the street, and, yes, he quickly ran for the cinema. He walked in, bought a ticket and went into the wrong theater. On the screen was a sunny picture. He walked to a person watching the movie. He said loudly, "What movie is this?"
     "A boring day: a movie with nothing but a picture of a sunny lawn," the person replied, "shh!" The tall man went out the emergency exit.

After the movie, the man got hungry. He went to a pet store and bought some dog food. On his way out, he saw a cat in a cage. Next to the cage was a sign that said the cat was for adoption. The man got the cat and named him Slurp. He ate the dog food. He fed Slurp some too. They ran home. On the way home, the man saw a dog in a different pet store. It was also for adoption. Next to it was a whole dozen of more dogs. They were all for adoption. He adopted all of the baker's dozen. He named them Chuck, Chocolate, Cherry, Chap Stick, Chop, Change, Choo Choo, Chain Reaction, Cheronimo, Cheese, Chester, Chase, and Apple Pie. As they walked home the man saw a bird and a rabbit for adoption. He got them. He named them Cheeseburger and Cheeseburger. They walked home. When they got home a llama was at the door. On its neck was a sign that said: I am Horse the llama. Please keep me. I will not poop or pee in the house. I do not like fish. I will not eat cheese. If you do not adopt me, please give me your neighbor. The man took the llama.

(He asked me how long it should be, and I told him, "about a page." It stops precisely at the end of the page. I suspect he could have gone on for quite awhile with the tall old man acquiring more and more pets).

August 23-27, 2010: Week five

I just realized I totally put the wrong dates down for last week's entry. Doh. Apparently I'm pretty anxious for summer to be over. DH and boys are at a football game; I'm not sure if it's the first game of the year or not, but it's the first game he's taken them to (the school where he teaches is playing the school I graduated from, so it's all just terribly exciting). I love football season and my special Friday nights with a quiet house. Ari was asking why I didn't go tonight, and I said something about how it was nice for him to spend time with just his Dad. "But I like you, too," he said. That's sweet, kid, but don't you think we see each other enough already?

I'm going to go ahead and jinx things by saying this: I'm really having fun so far this year. I'm happy with (most of) the stuff we're using; I feel like the kids are learning a lot and enjoying themselves and making good use of their time; things feel considerably less frantic than last year, even though we're doing a good bit more. So, you know, yay.

Snapshot of school at our house: Milo practicing piano in his Harry Potter robe:

Ari: lost a day Tuesday because of a bad headache, but managed to mostly make everything up over the rest of the week. He's working on multiplying fractions in Singapore. Another Math Olympiad meeting on Thursday; DH reports that there was a bit more goofiness this week than in weeks past, but overall it went well (based on my past experiences with groups of kids that age, if this is the first goofiness he's encountered he's been very lucky).

I continue to be pleased with how discussion about Summerland is going. It's a really challenging book for him; the plot is dense, there are tons of characters with funny names to keep straight, and it's sometimes a little hard to follow. But there's so much in there, and I'm pleased to note that the more we talk about the book the more interested Ari gets in it. This week we did:

On a rainy day in winter, when the birches stood huddled, bare and ghostly, the birch forest at the very end of Clam Island could look extremely eerie and cold.

That was the dictation part of it, but then we read on for a bit to where the birches "stood, pressed together like spectators..." How nice! (I took a class on Yeats from Hugh Kenner once, when I was an undergrad and he was very old and finishing off his career with what was no doubt a cushy, well-compensated gig at the University of Georgia. He spent a lot of time reading poems aloud and then just exclaiming about how wonderful they were, a practice I would later hear referred to as the "Isn't it lovely? school of criticism." (Really, Kenner studied under Cleanth Brooks and was heavily influenced by the New Critics, but maybe as you approach 80 you just want to spend some time admiring how pretty Yeats' poems are). So I find myself slipping into the Isn't it Lovely? School sometimes with this book: "pressed together like spectators" Isn't it a lovely simile? Oh, also, there's a passage that talks about the father and son in the book spending every Saturday trying to make pancakes, which they call flannel cakes, just like the dead mother used to do, and it's referred to as "the weekly sadness of flannel cakes." Weekly sadness. Lovely. Told you I love parentheses). More personification! We talked about the different ways Chabon gives a spooky, otherworldly mood to the birch forest.

Ari did his first writing assignment of the year for MCT Town. He was supposed to choose words from a list of examples of all the different parts of speech, at least one of each kind of word, and write the first sentence of a story, then finish the story. I'm not sure what the problem was, but he managed to misunderstand the directions twice before he finally got it down. In the end, he got really into it and wrote a very goofy little story which has inspired me to name our next dog (whenever we get her and if it's a her) Apple Pi. I already had Pi in mind, but now I want it to be Apple Pi. Because you can't put puns in your kids' names. Now I have no idea where he put the story. I need it for his notebook, and I'll ask him if it's okay to post it here, too, if he ever comes back from that football game.

He started his biology and Spanish classes at LEO on Wednesday. All the kids seemed to love the Spanish class. It's supposed to be an intermediate class, since I think Ari's now learned all of his colors and how to count to 20 in Spanish approximately 359 times. So this week they worked on...colors!  I'm hoping she's just easing into things, though, and that the pace will pick up soon. I think for now we'll stick with watching one lesson a week of Elementary Spanish, then the class once a week, and a few minutes doing homework and reviewing the vocab on the other days.

The first 10 week session of the biology class is all about microscopes. This week they didn't actually get the microscopes out yet, but talked about classification and...stuff? Ari's not good with relating details to me. He has a fair amount of homework in that class (this week he's supposed to look up some vocabulary words and make flashcards, classify one living thing, make up a mnemonic for remembering the seven groups of classification, and research the history of the microscope). Word is there's also going to be a research paper required for the class. So I think, tentatively, that I'll let this be his main science for the year, and he can work on his homework while Milo and Gus do the Discovery Education science. I may also throw some extra reading his way if his homework doesn't take too long.

Milo: I had a bit of a crisis earlier this week and briefly flirted with switching to Math Mammoth from Singapore; it's all the rage on the WTM boards, don't you know? But. Deep breaths. I think really Singapore is working fine for him overall. I need to do a lot more work with him on memorizing basic addition/subtraction facts. He doesn't have trouble with the concepts; he has trouble with having to re-figure 5 + 3 every time he comes to it (which makes it really hard to do, say, 7 + 8, even though he has the make a ten thing down cold). This is Milo when I ask him 7 + 8: "Oh, that's easy! Let's see, I have to make a ten, so I need ....3, and then how many do I have left over? Umm. What was it again? 8? Okay, so I have....hmm....five? left over. So that makes....oh! It's fifteen!" And, yes, he narrates it out loud every single time. So. We're doing a lot more drill right now, in the form of some Right Start games and some stuff on the computer. No jumping ship! (this week).

I went through the list of books to read before you turn 13 from How to Get Your Child to Love Reading and looked up the reading level and interest level for each one and then sort of roughly divided them into books that will probably work for this year and books that we should probably save for later. I gave him The Iron Giant this week, and he finished it up just today and started on Beezus and Ramona. For his bedtime reading, he just finished Ramona the Pest last night and is working on the third Master Reader book now.

He and Gus are watching the 1st/2nd grade Elementary Spanish now, and alternating that with Puertas Abiertas (which they still LOVE).

He's nearly finished with WWE 1, and I'm trying to decide whether to use WWE2 or to start giving him passages from the books he's reading for school instead. It really makes more sense to me to do copywork and narration from books he's actually reading all of; I've always thought of the WWE workbooks as sort of a compromise to save time, so I guess if I feel like I have the time/motivation to pick out passages (and I think I do), I should go with that. Sadly, I already bought WWE 2 last year, but I guess I can sell it. He continues to do beautifully with spelling, even though I considered this week's list fairly tricky--different ways to spell short e (head, said, bed, etc). This is the first time either Milo or Ari has had actual tests at all (both in spelling; Ari in spelling and vocab), and they think it's awesome. I dole out smiley faces generously.

Gus: Gus was very interested in math this week, so he did a bunch of his Earlybird. He's writing all the numbers now, and counting and counting and counting. He did a few lessons in McRuffy, too, and read some Arthur to me. We read a bunch of library books and then made this:

It's a tree! The leaves are all the books we (collective we, or all the kids, anyway) have read this year. Since the walls in our schoolroom are already brown, I made an outline out of painter's tape. Then I thought, "I should probably stop using up all our painter's tape," and we ran to Walgreens for masking tape. When we get to 100 leaves, we're going to celebrate with frozen yogurt at Menchie's. I should maybe start putting down the books I read, too, because I like frozen yogurt.

Science: Milo and Gus learned about density on Discovery Education science.

History: We read about the first Sumerian dictator in SOTW. It was a short chapter, and I didn't have any supplemental reading to go along with it, so we kept reading from our collection of books about Egypt, too. It was kind of a short history week because we took Wednesday off to adjust to our first day of LEO classes. I need to work on writing out a new schedule taking all of our out of the house stuff into account.

Today it was only 89, so we went to the park with friends for the first time in ages. Kids are getting more outside time today than they have in the past 2 weeks put together, I think!