January 25-29, 2010

Everyone should be aware that Gus now has a blog!  http://gussieblog.blogspot.com/  A few weeks ago Ari decided he wanted a blog, so I got him all set up with one, and then he sat in front of the blank screen on and off for a couple of hours before deciding it was way too hard to try to figure out what to write about and giving up.  But the incident planted the seed in Gus' mind, and when he got HIS blog, he had no trouble coming up with ideas.  So far there are entries about geocaching, dragons, and our dog, Gable.

This week was not nearly so long as last week, even though it was actually longer!  This is a good thing.  Oh!  I sat down last night to really and truly catch up on my filing, and I'm almost finished now!  It turns out it wasn't as bad as it looked. 

Tuesday we started up our mini co-op with my friend Kristi and her kids.  We're making the Evan Moor Caldecott Winners pocket book and doing science together.  For the most part, it went pretty well. The first section in the Caldecott book was just talking about the medal itself (and about Randolph Caldecott. Good old Randolph Caldecott) and about children's book illustrations in general.  The kids decorated the covers to the pocket books, then we looked through a bunch of picture books and talked about the artwork, then they used whatever materials they wanted to illustrate a nursery rhyme of their choosing.  Next week we read "Ox-cart Man"! The plan for science is to buy the flowering plants and animal observatory Science in a Nutshell kits, but first we're finishing up our Vision and Hearing kit.  This week we started the hearing part of it, and learned about sound with the help of an incredibly exciting (to anyone under 10) tuning fork.  Later in the day, Ari decided to do some extra experimenting with the tuning fork and every possible material he could find.

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While you can't really see the tuning fork here, this is Lula listening for it with her ear against the wall.  I forgot to take any pictures until we were almost finished, but I'll try to do better next time.

Another good Michael Clay Thompson week.  I'm not regretting the switch from FLL at all.  A couple of times over the past few lessons, Ari's gotten frustrated that he can't immediately guess the right answer on his practice sentences. He's so used to being able to glance at the page in FLL and know exactly what answer it's looking for.  And a few times concepts or terms have come up in MCT that he's been hearing about for years in FLL...and he's seemed to have no recollection of it at all. So the main challenge has been getting him to slow down and think.  Read the sentence and figure out how it all goes together instead of shouting out the first part of speech that comes to his head.  Good stuff.  He did his first two writing assignments from Sentence Island this week.  For the first one, he had to write a short story with two characters: one could only speak in subjects, and the other could only speak in predicates.  Here's what he came up with:

Mr. S. and Mrs. P.

"Did you know that my pet lamb," said Mr. S.
"weighs 5 billion pounds?" said Mrs. P.
"Ms. Adjey," said Mr. S.
"Is celebrating," said Mrs.P. "Sir Inter's birthday!"
"Isn't Clausy," said Mr. S.
"turning five today?" finished Mrs. P.
"Let's"
"Go." 

...so not a lot of plot development, but he got the basic idea.  I like the way he craftily left the direct object, "Sir Inter's birthday" hanging out there, with no clear attribution, because he didn't want to commit to it being part of the predicate (we talked about that).

Otherwise, it was largely more of the same. More clocks for Milo in Right Start.  More decimals for Ari in Singapore (with some frustration; we might need to find some extra practice for him before we move on).  More immigration and life at the turn of the century in history.  More Frog and Toad.  Ari's reading Maniac Magee now for his school time reading and The Lightning Thief at bedtime.

Next week!  I keep meaning to add in a poem of the day to our little "circle time" (where we all sit at the table and do "Are They Thinking?" a Bible story, read about one of the states, and do word of the day).  So next week I'm going to try to remember to do that. That's my big goal for next week. It seems achievable.

Oh, and I nearly forgot.  I finally scanned in some of the drawings we've been doing with Commander Mark (I'm not sure he actually goes by "Commander" anymore, but he'll always be Commander Mark to me).  These are from the first lesson we did.  Milo spent the next week drawing baby dinosaurs on everything, including the thank you notes we finally finished writing from Christmas.

 

Gus' dinosaur.

 

Milo's

 

...and Ari's.

I won't post mine, but it was pretty good, too :)