January 4-8, 2010

Bulleted list:

*Gus got a set of silicone cupcake molds and a cookbook for making food that either is or is shaped like cupcakes.  It is adorable.  From now on everything we eat in this house will be shaped like cupcakes.  Case in point--cupcake calzones!

*Kids got a geocaching kit (put together by me) for xmas.  GPS, book on geocaching, stuff to trade, etc.  Back before Georgia turned into Cleveland, we did a bunch of geocaching.

*We went to Charleston, SC for a couple of days after xmas to see Dave's sister and her family, who were, in turn, there to visit her husband's family.  It was very educational and cold. We visited a plantation and an aircraft carrier.  Kids liked the aircraft carrier the best.

*It snowed! A little.  We haven't left the neighborhood in 3 days. We're going crazy!  Incidentally, Gable the dog is getting to be quite the well-behaved mutt.  He was out off the leash in the snow and came back when we called him every time.  It helps a lot if you have a whistle. And a can of cheez whiz.

*Our Tuesday homeschool co-op was canceled for spring session. :( 
*I used the money I didn't spend on homeschool co-op to buy an itouch :)
*My friend K and I are planning to do our planned Caldecott winners class anyway, just for our kids.  We might start doing science together, too.

Okay, so now we're all caught up.  I enjoy a good bulleted list every now and then.  You know what else I enjoy?  When the temperature outside hits 40 degrees. But I digress.

This was our first week back after our Christmas break, and it was heavily interrupted by SNOW(!) but we still got a good bit accomplished. Ari's well into the 7th Harry Potter now, so I'm letting him read that both for school time and bedtime reading.

Milo got another book of ghost stories by the same guy who wrote "In a Dark, Dark Room," so he took a break from Magic Tree House to read that this week.  I took a video of him reading with my new Flip (!) (it has been a very battery-powered holiday season around here), and maybe I'll figure out how to post such things at some point.

Milo finally got to break out the balance for Right Start just before the break, so he did some more work on that this week.

Ari started Singapore 4B and worked on decimals.  He's in a period of deep Life of Fred loathing at the moment, so we may drop it until summer and then try to finish Fractions and do Decimals and Percents before fall.  Or not. We'll have to see. I asked Dave if he thought Life of Fred was genuinely too hard for Ari or if he thought Ari just hates doing anything that's at all challenging.  Dave believes it's the latter.  Sigh. It's very tough to figure out how much to push Ari with academics. He's an enigma, that boy is.  But Singapore is going well, at any rate, so we'll just be happy with that for the moment at least.

We're still finishing up Gold Rush Fever in history.  We also finished reading a biography of the Wright Brothers and started "If Your Name was Changed at Ellis Island..."

In science, we did another experiment about vision with our amazingly fabulous, everything included science kit.  This one involved coloring different patterns on a spinning top (included!) and observing how your brain gets tricked and the colors all blur together when it spins. I tried to take pictures of it, but, fascinatingly, the camera was not tricked like my brain, and it just looks like a non-spinning, red and blue top in my pictures.  Then they watched a Magic School Bus about color on United Streaming or whatever they're calling it these days.