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.
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