I'm back! Weekly-ish report and more!

jkReally, we got back a week ago yesterday, but I just unpacked today, so it's kind of LIKE we just got back.  In some ways. So since I last updated it snowed and then we went to San Francisco (well, mostly to Livermore, an hour outside of San Francisco). In California we: hung out with Dave's family, rode a cable car, geocached, went to a children's museum, bowled, and saw the longest burning lightbulb in HISTORY!  Also some other stuff.

Cousins watching TV.  In a strange coincidence, Dave's sister Amy has the EXACT SAME COUCH we have. So the kids feel very at home watching TV there. As you can see.

 

Blowing bubbles at the museum in San Jose.

There it is!  It's been burning for 109 years.  They have a webcam on it, so you can see it, too.  

http://www.centennialbulb.org/

Okay, so and then we came home, and, even though I didn't manage to unpack, we did get some school done last week. I am not thrilled with exactly how MUCH school work we're getting done lately, as the year winds down and sometimes feels like it should be over already, so I made a little checklist for Ari for next week.  If that goes well, I might even make one for Milo.  The thing about Milo, though, is that there's not much point in pushing him to do more once he starts to space out and stop concentrating.  So a checklist might be a not so good thing for him (or for me to have for him).

Monday we had book club. Any time we go to California, we have book club the Monday after we get back. I was frantically finishing up reading the book to Milo on Monday morning (in fact, Ari finished reading it to him in the car on the way over). This month we read The Landry News by Andrew Clements. I hadn't read it before I picked it, but it's on one of the lists in the back of Deconstructing Penguins, and Ari had enjoyed Frindle, by the same author.  I was surprised to hear that the majority of the kids liked it the most of anything we've read. Interesting.

Ari and Milo also had Spanish Monday. This was the last class for this session; now we have a two week break and then Ari will start up again.  I decided not to sign Milo up for it again; he's a full two years younger than any other kid in the class, and he's just not retaining much from it. Ari's really enjoying it, though. We have The Fun Spanish sitting around (he did maybe half the book a year or so ago, and then we kind of let it slip); he pulled it out the other day and eagerly did several pages.

Tuesday game class and then co-op.  Ari's enjoying game class, although he is, apparently, not actually speaking much during class. Ah well.  Maybe someday. We read "Where the Wild Things Are" in co-op and made our own wild things.  Did you know that, at least according to Evan Moor's researchers, "Where the Wild Things Are" was originally titled "Where the Wild Horses Are"?  But then Maurice Sendak couldn't draw horses very well, so he changed it to wild things.

Let's see....anything else of interest?  Milo had a bit of a bumpy week in Right Start...adding 9s onto things fried his brain on Thursday, so we'll have to give it another go this week.

MCT continues to go well, although the writing assignments continue to be a source of some conflict for Ari and me.  This week the conflict is that Ari wants to do them half-assedly, and I want him to do a good job. There was one assignment this week where he was supposed to write two descriptions of the same thing--one using all action verbs and one using all linking verbs.  His first draft was something like:  "Dogs are big. Dogs are furry. Dogs are loud."  and "Dogs bark. Dogs eat. Dogs growl."  Umm.  Well, hey, I guess that fulfills the requirements of the assignment, doesn't it?  Yeah. We did another draft, this time writing specifically about Gable and using more than 3 words in the sentences. This coming week he's supposed to be writing poems for Music of the Hemispheres.  That will be interesting. Of course, right this second he's off in the schoolroom composing a song about manta rays.  Because I didn't tell him to.

Gus has been doing phonics and math and doing very well with both. He's reading CVC words fairly easily now and still randomly surprising me by reading harder words ("garden" yesterday, for example).

AND....we're getting new chicks this week! I ordered them a few days ago, and they'll be here Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. One of Dave's students told him that his family is moving and giving away lots of chickens/supplies. We missed out on a little hutch that would have been nice, but got a lovely (and BIG) wooden brooder box to keep our fluffy babies in.  It's all set up in the basement right now. 

February 1-5, 2010

I kind of feel like we were on fire this week, in that we kept having extra stuff going on and still managing to get all our school work done. This has been a problem in the past; if we have somewhere else to be in the morning, I've felt like the whole day is shot and we might as well just hang out and eat popcorn in front of the TV when we get home.  We do love popcorn. But I think I'm managing to transition pretty well into having an older kid who needs to buckle down a little more than a younger kid.

Tuesday I took Ari over to Smrt Mama's house, because her DH is very generously doing a board game making class for a few kids (the class was supposed to happen at the canceled homeschool co-op).  Ari spends much of his life making games of one kind or another, so it seemed like an opportunity not to be missed. And, indeed, he seems pretty excited about it.  And then after?  We came home and did a full day of school, and I was proud of us.  I guess we could eat popcorn WHILE we do school.  Hmm....

Wednesday we went on a cookie making field trip.  Because...you know, cookies!  I thought maybe they'd actually show the kids how they make cookies or let them mix up the dough or something, but it was pretty much just "here kids, slap some frosting and sprinkles on these cookies!"  Another woman from defunct co-op has started a yahoo group to connect with people for field trips, and that's where this (and our police station tour of a couple of weeks ago) came from. Her kids are 5 and 2, I think, so the field trips tend to be better suited to that age group than my bigs.  But, of course, I DO still have one little guy, and it's nice to do something geared toward him for a change.  Poor kid. 

 

  

We had some scheduling conflicts, so we did mini co-op on Thursday this week.  About halfway through making the pocket for "Ox-Cart Man" with not very interested in the whole thing kids, we decided there wasn't a whole lot of point in making the entire pocket and that we'd pare down to what we'd been planning to do in the co-op class: read/talk about the book and do an art project.  The art project this week was a scratchboard drawing (which is not the sort of art found in "Ox-Cart Man" but in other Barbara Cooney illustrations; I think Evan Moor's reaching a bit with that one, but whatever). Then we did another Science in a Nutshell experiment about hearing (we might also, in future weeks, do two activities from the kits, since they usually only take about 20 or 25 minutes each).

  

  

  

 

Ari's Week:

This was the week of getting Ari to write more. For school, that is. He did three assignments from MCT along with WWE and some narrations for history.  One of the MCT assignments had him write a short story about two characters, one who could only speak one word predicates and one who could only speak one word subjects. This caused much agony for Ari, but we got through it.  I sat and brainstormed with him for awhile then sent him off to write it. Then he got frustrated and stopped for the day, then we talked about it some more and I sent him to work on it again the next day, and something finally clicked so that he finished the whole thing in a few minutes.  Here it is:

The dogs were having a party.  Evil Dog Guy said, "I am going to blow up this dog house.  I hate dogs." Evil Dog Guy dropped his explosive perfume into the doghouse.  "10, 9," said Evil Dog Guy.  Super Dog Guy flew to the doghouse. "8,7." S.D.G. told all the dogs to run.  All of them ran exept one that was looking at the perfume, "6,5." "Really, really, really, really good dog run!" said S.D.G. "4,3." "Spectaclar, amazingly greaty good dog GO!" said S.D.G. "2" The dog ran. "1." S.D.G. ran to the exit. "0." BOOM! "Ahhhhhhh!" said S.D.G. as he fell. "Ah nutsy-booboo, they ran really, really, really far," said E.D.G.

For the next assignment, I made a list of 10 predicates and he made a list of 10 subjects, then we matched them.  Then we switched and did it again.  This was much less traumatic for him (and therefore for me, too). 

In Singapore, he reached the first review section in 4b.  There've been a few tricky spots with decimals, but he's gotten through them and overall he's enjoying them.  I'm feeling fairly optimistic that he'll be ready to tackle LOF this summer, especially after listening to my thrice weekly lectures about how it's okay for things to be challenging; it's okay to need to think for more than 2 seconds to get the answer. 

He finished The Lightning Thief by staying up until almost 11 on Tuesday reading and has started on the second Percy Jackson book.  For school reading, he's almost finished with Maniac Magee, which means it's time for me to consult the list again and come up with another book for him.  I know we have The 21 Balloons, and it's on the list, so maybe I'll go with that.

Milo's Week
 I'm so excited about how Milo's reading has taken off lately! He's doing very well reading out loud to me during school time, and he's been asking to read before bed at night.  He's really enjoying the Dav Pilkey Dragon Tales book.  I might actually get Captain Underpants  for him; I managed to avoid this with Ari, but I can really see with Milo how motivating it is for him when he reads that kind of goofy stuff. The more interested he is, the more he wants to read, and the better his reading gets.

We finished clocks (for now) in RS and are on to round 2 (or 3?) of coins, this time with dimes. Milo's just about to take his mid-year test, which means we're terribly behind (or, well, a month behind, which isn't so bad I guess since I'd already planned to keep going through the summer).

Gus' Week
Gus' McRuffy phonics came early in the week, and he was really excited to start it.  So we've done a couple of lessons in it and he's read the first two readers.  It comes with a bunch of games, and I'm hoping Ari and Milo will play those with him a lot (Ari played one with him on Thursday).  He can sound out most CVC words now, although sometimes I have to remind him to slow down and focus on what's there (he tends to read the beginning and then guess at the ending). I ordered RS A for him, too, and that should be here soon.  Then I have to decide whether to start it now or save it for the fall.

History, et. al.
We started the Time for Kids biography of Henry Ford this week, along with "If you Lived at the Time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake."  Appropriate timing on that last one since we're going to San Francisco a week from tomorrow.  We'll actually be staying in Livermore, about an hour outside of SF, with Dave's family, but we should get into the city for at least a day.  In Livermore itself, however, is the longest burning lightbulb in history (!), so of course we'll need to go see that.  We somehow missed it last time we were there. I need to load the GPS up with geocache coordinates in the area, too.

I've started ordering for next year--an expensive enterprise, so I'm taking it in baby steps. Last night I ordered Ari's MCT Town level, plus Classics in the Classroom.  I also ordered IEW's Teaching the Classics DVDs and their poetry memorization book. I still need to think about history some more and then order some things for it so I can start getting ready.  I'm leaning toward buying Joy Hakim's  Story of Science for Ari's extra history reading (for he is generally more interested in science than history) and then buying Thames and Kosmos Milestones in Science kit for all of us to do together to go along with that.