Spring Break! Dave's on spring break, so we sort of are, too! Really, we'll probably do some stuff next week, but not a full week. Mostly my goal for the week is to see where we are in everything and figure out how to get it all done so that we can have some semblance of a summer break. We'll still do math and writing over the summer, and Ari will probably still be working through Practice Island (though I hope to finish Sentence Island, et. al. and just have PI to do).
I can't really remember what we did all week, because I was so excited about spring break(!). Monday was my birthday, so I got to go do book club at LEO, of course. We were talking about The Phantom Tollbooth, which was a huge hit with all the kids. Then we were supposed to make dodecahedrons, but we ran out of time before we got a chance to assemble them (first they had to decorate them, and there are a LOT of sides to decorate. Like 12). I was sort of relieved that we ran out of time, actually, because I was anticipating some trouble with dodecahedron assembly, particularly from the younger kids, and, frankly, I didn't want to run around the room trying to avert geometric catastrophes on my BIRTHDAY!
Milo continues to have troubles with Right Start, so we continue to move through it agonizingly slowly. He's supposed to be adding stuff like 37 + 8 in his head, but...he's not. Well, sometimes he is, but it takes him forever. He can do it with the abacus, but then he's supposed to picture the abacus in his head and do it that way. He thinks for a minute and then says, "what were the numbers again?" So. I don't know. I think he gets the concepts okay, but his concentration is just not so fabulous. I don't know how much of it is Milo in particular and how much of it is six year old boy in general. I guess we'll keep plugging along for now and hope he gets past the rough patch.
On the other hand, his reading is still going swimmingly. He read an Amelia Bedelia book this week. He's gotten more interested in looking at/reading books on his own (he's always loved being read to), and asks to stay up reading a lot at night now.
Ari is either really interested in Practice Island lately or he just really wants to finish it and not have to do it over the summer, because he's been asking to do multiple sentences a day. I think he's really getting the hang of it now, and it's coming easier to him, so he's enjoying it more.
He should finish Singapore 4B well before summer; I told him if he finishes early, he can take a break from regular math and just do multiplication review until summer. 4B has been really easy for him; there's a LOT of practice working with decimals, and he caught on to it pretty quickly. It gets into some geometry toward the end of the book, so we'll see how things go with that, but I think it will be smooth sailing until I cruelly force him to go back to Life of Fred over the summer. I'm hoping all the work with decimals and fractions in Singapore will have paved the way, though, and he'll have a slightly easier time with it than when he left off in Fractions a few months ago. At any rate, it will be Dave's problem, not mine!
We're still stuck in the 20's in history, but I think we'll at least make it through the civil rights movement before summer, which is fine. We'll be starting American history (as part of SOTW) again in 2 years, so anything we miss this time we'll get to then. We're reading a biography of Harry Houdini (universally beloved), The All of a Kind Family, a book about money (in preparation for the Great Depression), and stories from The American Story.
I signed Ari up for the ITBS at the end of May. I'm a little anxious about it. I guess I should get a test prep book for him to go through so that he has an idea of what to expect. Ari's NOT happy about having to take it. "I'm not going to take it, and you can't make me," in fact, is what he tells me. Sigh.
Spring break! Spring break won't really start until after tomorrow, as tonight I still have to stuff Easter eggs and figure out what to bring to my grandmother's house tomorrow.
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