July 26-30, 2010: Week one!

While I never again got up quite as early as I did on Monday, we had a pretty productive week overall. This is good, since if we can't be productive for a single week, there's not much hope for us for the whole school year. Book learnin' was interrupted on Thursday morning by a snake (snake!), but other than that the week was fairly uneventful. Thursday morning Gus came in from letting the chickens out and announced, "there's a dead snake hanging down out there!" The snake was actually very much alive and "hanging down" from our back porch onto our steps, which Gus had just walked up and down twice. It was relatively small and solid black, so, I would guess, just a garter snake. We live in the woods. I accept that there are snakes. I don't mind them in my woods; I don't even really mind them in the front yard, since I can just go back inside until they go away. But I don't so much want them on my porch. Also, Gus had somehow managed to unlatch the gate to the chicken pen but not push it open, so the chickens were still locked up. And out of water. There was no way to get to the chicken pens without walking very, very close to the snake. I managed to do it anyway, with Dave on the phone to talk me through it. Then I made him come home for lunch to try to get rid of the snake. He succeeded in terrifying the snake and getting it to wrap itself tightly around our porch railing. Then he made fun of me for being scared of the snake. Oh well. Eventually the snake departed with little ceremony.

So there was that. Also:

Outlining=success! Ari likes outlining. So far. He's done it twice, with much handholding but absolutely no throwing himself on the floor and wailing!  Then I reread the section about 5th grade history in WTM and realized they want Ari to outline in addition to writing short summaries that sound suspiciously like....narration! Argh! I think instead of this we might work on turning the outlines into summaries. I think between that, continuing the dictation parts of WWE, and the writing assignments in Paragraph Town we might just be okay. Not to mention that my child who can't produce a three sentence narration without tears is busily working on a three part epic novel entitled The Witches, the Wizards, and the Nothings every night at bedtime.

History went really well. We did the intro and the first chapter of SOTW along with some other books (I'll get around to making a sidebar sooner or later with all the extra readings). We all did the mapwork and review questions together, then Ari went off to start reading Joy Hakim's The Story of Science while Milo and Gus did narrations. I think the long term plan is that we'll listen to SOTW in the car and do the rest of the stuff during our regular history time, but my friend who's going to let me borrow her SOTW CDs is out of town until sometime this weekend. Both Ari and Milo declared history their favorite subject, with reading as a close second. And we haven't even gotten done any fabulous projects yet!

Science needs more tweaking. We watched a few videos and did one of the online activities from Discovery Education Science (from the "Intro to Matter" section). It worked....okay. The problem is that we have one computer and three kids. So for the activity, they all fought over the mouse while I tried to end arguments and help them fill out the worksheet that went with the activity. If it were just Ari doing it, I think it would work pretty well. I might have to figure out some way to separate them so that he can do the activities and worksheets by himself, and the littles can do the activity and not worry about the worksheet at a separate time. Or we might need another computer. I'm thinking at the moment about just adding in experiments from the Janice Van Cleave books we have. This is all starting to sound like a lot of prep work for me, though, which is where science plans have fallen apart in the past. So I don't know. Right now I'm all pumped up and ready to pick out experiments and track down obscure materials for them. I guess I can go with that for now and just be ready to fork over the money for some kits when I get overwhelmed.

Reading: Ari is almost finished with Tuck Everlasting, and he's pretty into it after a bit of  a slow start. We'll be doing the discussing it thing next week, so I have to figure out how that's all going to play out. Tuck Everlasting might have been a dangerous first choice, as it's the sort of book I could get carried away doing reliving grad school type analysis on and drive Ari crazy. I guess we'll just talk and see how it goes.

Milo read Flat Stanley, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, and half of Fantastic Mr. Fox this week (in addition to a couple of Geronimo Stilton books at bedtime). He's still working through Explode the Code (almost finished with book 4) and Master Reader (still loves it), too.  We're reading the 4th Harry Potter right now at bedtime, and I've already told him this is the last one I'm reading out loud. I told him he needs to start over at the beginning reading them himself, and by the time he gets through the first 4 on his own he'll be ready (reading level and maturity-wise) for the 5th one.

Ari started Singapore 5a and is working on rounding and estimating. He's also doing Evan Moor's daily math practice book. I think I can see already what drove the math computation score down; he makes quite a few careless mistakes, like adding when he's supposed to subtract and that sort of thing.

Milo's still in 1A, but he'll finish it next week. He's working on measurements.

Gus is still working on McRuffy's phonics (he's on lesson 70-something right now), and he started Handwriting Without Tears this week, too. It was not entirely without tears. He just does it when he feels like it, and usually writes about 3 letters before he gets tired of it. He never gets tired of his Singapore book, on the other hand. He finished the first unit today (of Earlybird? Is it still called Earlybird? Maybe it's just called kindergarten now. Anyway, that one) and insisted on starting the next one. Other than that, he follows along in history and science (and poetry memorization, and Waker Uppers, and Bible stories) and spends a lot of time making up very elaborate games with the chess board.

Ari did the first chapter in Caesar's English and that went smoothly. We started reading Grammar Town together, and did some sentences from our still unfinished Practice Island. I figure we'll keep working on that until we start Paragraph Town, and then we'll switch over to the new book.

I think that hits the highlights. We also saw Marmaduke today. It's been so hot this summer that we've spent an awful lot of time at the movies. The $1.25 theater, mostly. We've seen every crappy kid movie that's come out and some of the good ones, too. Since spring we've seen The Tooth Fairy, How to Train Your Dragon, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Furry Vengeance, Toy Story 3, and now Marmaduke. You know who's in Marmaduke? William H. Macy. And yet I still can't recommend it. Although it wasn't as offensively bad as Furry Vengeance. I didn't feel nearly as disappointed in William H. Macy as I did in Brendan Fraser.