March 15-19, 2010

I don't have the energy for a full scale weekly report, so some highlights from the week instead:

*Another crying, yelling fit about how writing poems is "impossible" followed by another perfectly serviceable poem, only partially related to cheese. Last night Ari came downstairs to get his writing notebook because, he explained, he is now writing a book about cheese. I'm not sure, but it seems to be more or less an anthology of his cheese poems.

*We hid our first two geocaches!  At the Chattahoochee Nature Center. We just hid them on Friday, and two people have found them already. 

It was a really lovely day--sunny and around 70 (back down to 50's and raining today, so we enjoyed it while it lasted). The kids also brought some stuff to the Nature Exchange; kids can bring in things they find, ideally with some kind of research they've done about it, and get points to "buy" things that other people have brought in. We brought a rock from our quarry field trip of a couple of weeks ago and a broken box turtle shell we found at Callaway Gardens.  Turns out box turtles are a protected species, and it's against the law for us to have its shell.  Oops. But the woman gave them points anyway for learning about box turtles and for agreeing to put the shell back in the woods somewhere so other animals could get calcium from it. We really need to spend more time at the nature center, because it's cool and all. And my sister-in-law (who works there) gave us a membership for Christmas.  So no excuses!

*We all went to Dave's high school's performance of Once Upon a Mattress.  I was worried about this, since last year's trip to see Annie had been, as Dan Zanes might put it, a bit of a disaster. But the kids' appreciation for high school drama seems to have grown considerably over the past year, and a fine time was had by all.

Book #6: David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win

I followed the 2008 election closely.  Some might say obsessively. I'm fascinated by behind the scenes politics talk; I've watched The War Room at least three times. So I was pretty excited to read campaign manager David Plouffe's account of what went on in the Obama campaign. Here are some things the book is not: it's not full of scandalous, juicy, shocking details. As Plouffe is writing, Obama has just started his presidency.  Plouffe will go back to work for him just a couple of months after the book is published. Obviously, he's not interested in embarrassing the President or anyone close to him, and he isn't going to burn any bridges. The revelations are minor, and there was nothing that genuinely surprised me. It's also not especially...beautifully written.  Plouffe is not half the writer his boss is; his prose is sometimes clunky, overstuffed with sports metaphors, and he has no ear for dialogue.  The writing is competent, but nothing more.

This is a wonkish book. What it does well is explain the strategy behind the campaign and take the reader through why it did what it did, how the people involved came to make their decisions, and what everyone was thinking at the time. The sports metaphors are perhaps not so out of place, because Plouffe's topic here is, as the title suggests, how to win.  The book is much less concerned with anything grander than that; mentions of policy or the historical importance Obama's candidacy are incidental here. I was surprised at times by how little attention some topics that seem hugely important are given. But it makes sense, really.  Plouffe is a campaign manager; strategy is what he knows, and it's what he can talk about well.  So. I enjoyed the book; I'm glad I read it. But I can't think of many people I'd recommend it to; I think it's best for a pretty specific audience of politics geeks.

March 8-12, 2010

...and super eventful week is followed up by not particularly eventful at all week! We hung out at home a lot, did school, watched chicks grow...it was lovely.

Monday was the only  nice day, weather-wise, so we spent the afternoon geocaching with friends. I fell in the mud (going after Gus, who somehow got himself stuck at the bottom of a steep, mucky hill) and dropped my iphone.  The horror!  But I and the phone both survived.

Tuesday there was no games class, but we did do co-op.  We read "Tuesday" by David Wiesner and planted some bean seeds to start out our Science in a Nutshell unit on flowering plants.

Ari did lessons 20 through 23 in Singapore 4B and a couple of word problems from another book we have. It's not "Challenging Word Problems," but it seems to be along the same lines. We inherited a bunch of math stuff from Dave's cousin, and this was in with all that. He did three sentences in Practice Island, read from Sentence Island, Music of the Hemispheres, and Building Language, did a couple of writing assignments from Sentence Island, and did NOT write another poem about cheese. He was supposed to write a poem using lots of "sub" words for Building Language, but it didn't get done. He's still reading his Lizzie Stanton book for history, and he started Ida Early Comes Over the Mountain this week.

Adding 9s is going to be the death of Milo. That boy is difficult to understand sometimes. Dave was talking about how Milo saw some stuff he's doing with his algebra classes about plotting lines, asked some questions about it, and quickly grasped the concept. But adding 9s to things seems to completely melt his little brain. Except when it doesn't. One day he'll get it, the next day it's gone.  Sigh.  So we're averaging a lesson every two weeks in Right Start right now, I feel like. But that's okay.  We'll get through it somehow!

Maybe it's just because his brain's busy with the reading thing right now, because he continues to do just great with that.  I found him a Mercy Watson book at the thrift store, and he read a chapter out of that last night. He read "Kitten's First Full Moon" to himself the other day then read it again to Gus.  For school he's reading some Amelia Bedelia.

In history, we're still reading about Theodore Roosevelt, also about the 20's (from a Discovery Kids magazine on "the Roaring '20's").  We read a bit about WWI and started reading The All-of-a-Kind Family.

I'm expecting a lot of books for next year from Amazon this week, which is terribly exciting.  Although I'm not sure where I'm going to put them all.  And I've been working on next year's book list for Ari.  I'm putting around 20 books on it, and I think I'll schedule a couple of sessions a week for us to talk about them...nothing super formal; I just want him to get used to thinking critically about books and doing some close reading and all that sort of thing.

I can't believe the weekend's almost over.  Dave was at a math tournament all day yesterday, so my weekend was essentially cut in half. sigh.  Spanish starts again tomorrow!

March 1-5, 2010

It's been sort of a weird week, and the week's weirdness has come close to thwarting my plans for new checklist-assisted productivity.  Monday went smoothly; we have a break from Spanish this week and next, so we stayed home in the morning and did school, then met up with friends at the park in the afternoon. But from there things got...complicated. Our chicks were mailed express mail on Monday, so we were expecting them either Tuesday morning or Wednesday morning.  We didn't get a call Tuesday morning, but it did start to snow.  Dave went off to work while I fretted that our chicks would be stuck at the post office the next morning and we'd have no way to go get them. It continued to snow, so we didn't go to game class and didn't have co-op here. They let the schools out early, so Dave came home at 11:30.  And then we got the call from the post office....chicks! I didn't realize they could come in in the afternoon, too; I had always thought chicks only arrive ridiculously early in the morning.  The roads were nasty and slushy, but not too bad, so Dave went out to pick up our squawking box of fluff, and that effectively ended school for Tuesday. But chicks are their own lesson in science and adorableness, so we were not too upset.

Chicks!

 

  

The first picture is the very photogenic Easter Egger, whom Milo has named Galaxy. We're pretty sure we're keeping her, the Welsummer (Sunshine), and the Cuckoo Maran (Peach). We'll likely sell the rest, though we're open to keeping four if any of the others prove especially lovable and difficult to part with.

Then on Wednesday we went ice skating. We've been thinking of signing the kids up for lessons, so this was a testing the waters sort of thing. There was much falling and very little letting go of the wall, but they all seemed pretty into it anyway.  I didn't fall at all.

And THEN, on Thursday, we went on a field trip and toured a quarry. Everyone got to bring home a bag of rocks. Quarries are impressive.  Both the big hole they make in the ground and the trucks they use there are enormous. The woman who gave us the tour told the kids that they eat rocks every day (salt), so the next day the kids decided they were going to prove her wrong by not eating any salt all day. This led to much label reading.  They held out until about 9:30, when the call of pretzels grew too loud to ignore. 

 

 And today we're going to see They Might Be Giants! Crazy week!

So we fit in school around all of this and did a fairly good job of it, considering. The checklist was helpful, I think, at least for me.  I was a bit surprised that Ari wasn't more interested in checking things off.  But it helped me keep him on track, and now, at the end of the week, it helps me see exactly what he did when he wasn't off collecting rocks or falling repeatedly on a giant sheet of ice. He:

*did 4 exercises in Singapore

*completed a packet of multiplication worksheets from Teacher Filebox (I re-subscribed to TFB the other week using the discount from Homeschool Buyer's Co-op or whatever it's called)

*did 3 sentences from Practice Island

*read from Music of the Hemispheres and wrote a poem with lot of rhymes (more on our adventures in poetry later)

*read through page 129 in Sentence Island and did two of Chapter 2's writing assignments

*read from Building Language and wrote a poem using "re" words

*did 3 lessons from Writing With Ease (last day to be finished sometime this weekend)

*didn't practice piano as much as he was supposed to

*did 3 pages from Building Thinking Skills

*read some of You Want Women to Vote, Lizzie Stanton? by Jean Fritz

*didn't do his summary for history yet

*read from his book list for 4 35 minute sessions (finished The Twenty-one Balloons and started In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson)

*did four lessons from The Fun Spanish

I don't put the stuff we do together on the checklist, so it's missing some history (we didn't get to history much this week, but we did read about the Titanic and started a book about Teddy Roosevelt) and the stuff we do in circle time.

I was nervous and curious as I was making out the checklist about how the poetry writing was going to go. Well.  It was a mixed bag. Ari was supposed to write two poems this week; one for MOTH with lots of different kinds of rhymes (he's been learning about end rhyme, near rhyme, eye rhyme, and internal rhyme) and then one for BL with RE stem words. For the first poem, he moaned and complained for a couple of minutes, then spotted a container of parmesan cheese and became inspired.  He quickly knocked out this little masterpiece:

    Please can the bees give me cheese?
    Because I need to make cheese toast
    So I can give it to my host
    Who loves to boast about toast.

The second poem, however, was much more traumatic.  There was weeping and moaning.  He threw himself on the floor and declared that it was "impossible" to write a poem.  I had suggested a poem about the Titanic when he couldn't come up with any ideas.  I stuck to my guns and sent him to his room to come up with just one line.  He came back with dried tears and "The Titanic didn't reverse."  Before dinner, I suggested we sit down and work on it some more. "Why do I have to write about the Titanic?" he asked.  I told him he didn't.  "Why don't you write about cheese again?" I suggested.  This was all it took.  The poem was supposed to be four lines, but Ari explained that he would need much more than that.  I assured him that that was fine.
 
    We needed to remember
    one day in September
    because cheese is now extinct.
    We needed to recreate it
    so we could re-eat it
    or else cheese would stay extinct.
    Then one day in December
    we finally remembered.
    So cheese was recreated.

My son: cheese poet. G.K. Chesterton was able to note, "the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese," only because he hadn't met Ari.

Okay! As if all that wasn't enough, I have two OTHER kids.  They didn't write any poems about cheese, though. Milo revisited adding 9s in Right Start...and handled it no problem this time. At least the first time we did it.  We did more later in the week, and it was like pulling teeth again. I think I have to do math before 9:30 with Milo or it's just hopeless. He also got to pull out the geoboards for the first time this week, and those he loved. He finally finished Frog and Toad, and I think we'll be moving on to Little Bear next week. I love Little Bear.

Gus did a couple of lessons from Right Start A and then more from the McRuffy phonics.  I'm liking the McRuffy a lot so far.  The lessons are short and don't wear out his patience, but they mix things up a lot and don't get boring.  They have him cutting and pasting some days, playing games other days, etc. And it seems to be moving at a good pace for him.

And now I have to go get ready for TMBG!

Book a week (or so): #5--Sundays in America

Also, by the way, I am not trying to pretend that book a week does not exist.  I am behind, but perhaps not hopelessly. Earlier tonight, I had three books started and, in fact, pretty close to finished.  I just finished the first one.  So I will write about it, and then maybe I'll go read some more of one of the other ones.

Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, by Suzanne Strempek Shea, tripped me up.  I expected to really enjoy it; I expected it to be a page turner even if I didn't find it amazing and enlightening, for I am, as previously noted, a spiritual memoir junkie.  But I started to dislike it pretty early in and eventually began to find it uninteresting on top of unlikeable. The fascinating-in-theory premise is that Strempek Shea spends a year visiting Christian, mostly protestant, churches all over the country and writes about her experiences--a chapter per church, averaging about 6 pages each. Had I thought about the premise a bit more before reading the book, or had Strempek Shea thought about it a bit more before trying to write it, it might have become clear to both of us that short chapters about 52 different churches don't really fit together easily into....well, a good book.

From the beginning, it's never entirely clear why Strempek Shea (who I'm going to refer to as SS from here on out) decides to undertake this spiritual quest at all.  She grew up Roman Catholic, remained a steadfast and apparently largely unquestioning Catholic as an adult, and it's only well into her 40's that she goes off in search of alternatives.  Why?  Well, it has something to do with getting (and beating) cancer and something to do with watching John Paul II's funeral on TV and being impressed with the passion of his mourners.  Also priests who molest kids.  There's never really time to explain how all this led to an interest in protestantism, however, because there are those 52 churches to get to.

Now, is this a story of spiritual seeking or a sociological survey of the state of faith in America (how's that for alliteration?)?  Well, both.  And, so, neither is done very well.  SS is careful to note the racial makeup of every.single.congregation she visits.  But that's it.  Everyone was white except for this one Asian guy.  The church was almost entirely African American.  Wait--this one was equally split between black and white.  There's no commentary about this whatsoever.  Yes, isn't it interesting how racial integration seems to happen last in churches?  Why is this particular church different?  We don't know, and SS doesn't offer any theories. She notes the racial composition (along with average age of congregants and number of people in the room) and moves on. We generally get a short history or description of each denomination, and then she moves on to a description of the worship service.  At times I kind of felt like I was reading an interminable series of 4th grade book reports: summary of the worship service and then, invariably, a brief conclusion that boiled down to, "I liked it" or "I didn't like it." Her criticisms of certain churches annoyed me at times as well. She doesn't list being anti-gay or anti-abortion or excluding women from the priesthood among her reasons for rejecting Catholicism, but any church that mentions any of those issues in its service gets an automatic "didn't like."  This is fine, except that I'm certain only a tiny percentage of the denominations she visited, including the ones she liked, are actually gay-friendly. Apparently it's okay to exclude gays and lesbians from church life as long as you don't talk about it during the service.

And this is what we're left with at the end of the book: a list of characteristics that SS has decided her "ideal church" would include, and then a cliched rumination that no church is perfect but there is some value in all of them, even the ones she didn't like.

To be fair, I think the format is the problem as much as SS's approach to it. Obviously, this is not how people actually look for a church.  They don't find the city with the cheapest airfare (and, yes, this is how she actually picks many of the places she visits) and then find an interesting church on the internet.  They don't go to one service and then move on to the next place, not lingering long enough to get any sense of what the community is like.  They don't judge an entire denomination based on one worship service at one church. 

And, so, to sum up, I was disappointed. I've spent a good bit of time church hopping myself, so I had hoped for a more interesting or thoughtful account of someone else's experiences with it. 

This is why, by the way, I don't want to actually finish my books, I think. Because once I do, I seem to want to write ridiculously long reviews of them.

Next up: David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win and Michael Clay Thompson's Classics in the Classroom