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!