Week before last, as predicted, we spent a lot of time hanging out with my sister-in-law and her offspring, Benjamin and Louis, and only a little time on school. We went to the top of the tallest hotel in the western hemisphere!
We went to the park!
We went to the Nature Center!
Then they flew home to California, and we got back to work. I feel like there is not a great deal to report here; we continue to work feverishly at finishing up Ari's Singapore and Milo's Explode the Code and to come to terms with the parts we won't finish. I suppose the biggest academic news of the week is that I am waffling about Right Start with Milo. I pulled out Singapore 1A, which he had gotten maybe 2/3 of the way through way back when before hitting a wall with it. The wall (with 2 digit subtraction) has evaporated; he did a few pages this week, and it was sort of magical in that he could do it by himself; while I did something else with another child. I have many conflicting feelings about this whole math thing. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. The idea of doing Right Start with Milo AND Gus next year kind of makes me want to claw my eyes out. I've gotten to where I really dread doing math with Milo because it's so slow and painful.
2. I hate to jump ship on Right Start just because we've hit a rough patch. I was talking today to a friend whose son is in Right Start C, and she said he had trouble with the same part of B and eventually got through it.
3. Said friend also says she routinely spends an hour and a half a day on RS with her son, and that makes me want to cry. I don't think I can do that, and yet I fear Milo might need to do RS for that long for it to really work for him.
4. Jumping ship when we hit a rough patch, on the other hand, is exactly what I did with Singapore. So would it be so wrong to decide THAT was the mistake and go back to Singapore? IIRC, Milo started 1A when he was still 5; he may well have just been too young for it. If all the message boards are to be believed, kids in Singapore don't start 1A until they're 7. Milo won't be 7 until the end of the month.
5. He has a lot of trouble with the visualization RS wants him to do (they're big on "seeing the abacus in your head") I've always thought of him as more of an auditory learner. So it's possible RS just isn't the best fit. It's also possible it's a maturity issue, and he'd do fine if we slowed down for awhile. But if he'd do fine with either curriculum if we slowed down for awhile, maybe I should go with the one that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. I need my eyes!
6. I worry a little bit that my reluctance to spend an hour and a half on a RS lesson is just my own pro-language arts/anti-math bias. I mean, not an actual intellectual bias against math, just an I-don't-wanna-do-it-as-much sort of bias. I think perhaps we need to win the lottery, so that Dave can stay home and take over math for me.
Anyway. I don't know. My inclination at the moment is to go back to Singapore for the summer and see how it goes. If it's still awesome after a 2 month trial, I'll probably stick with it in the fall.
So there you go. Math! What else? We're still reading about the Great Depression, and we watched the Kitt Kittredge American Girl movie last night as an accompaniment. It was surprisingly not bad. It had an all star cast! Abigail Breslin! Joan Cusack! Stanley Tucci! et. al.! I'm thinking of getting The Journey of Natty Gann for next weekend. I haven't watched it since I was a kid, but I remember liking it a lot.
Oh! And re: history, we're planning our annual trip to Cape Cod this summer. We usually fly, but I want to drive this year so that 1. we can bring our bikes and 2. we can stop along the way for exciting educational enrichment. So far I'm thinking the Smithsonian American history museum, maybe the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and a couple of days in New York City. I want to see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and then maybe the Tenement Museum, and I'm not sure what else. We are already too late to get tickets to the crown of the Statue of Liberty, sadly (or maybe not so sadly, seeing as I am kind of claustrophobic and afraid of heights). I'm not sure what else in NYC yet. I'm excited!
2 comments:
you should do the math that doesn't make you want to claw your eyes out. what difference does it make as long as he is learning it? but then i have no idea what i'm talking about. however i will say i would hate any math that asked me to visualise an abacus.
you could have done lots of school every morning while you were waiting for me and the kids to wake up!
benjamin had me put a comment on gus's latest blog post but it hasn't shown up yet. where is it?
It's there now, Amy; I had to approve it! I could indeed have done lots of school in the mornings when you were here. However, I chose to pretend that I could not.
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