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The tall, old man ran on the street, and, yes, he quickly ran for the cinema. He walked in, bought a ticket and went into the wrong theater. On the screen was a sunny picture. He walked to a person watching the movie. He said loudly, "What movie is this?"
"A boring day: a movie with nothing but a picture of a sunny lawn," the person replied, "shh!" The tall man went out the emergency exit.
After the movie, the man got hungry. He went to a pet store and bought some dog food. On his way out, he saw a cat in a cage. Next to the cage was a sign that said the cat was for adoption. The man got the cat and named him Slurp. He ate the dog food. He fed Slurp some too. They ran home. On the way home, the man saw a dog in a different pet store. It was also for adoption. Next to it was a whole dozen of more dogs. They were all for adoption. He adopted all of the baker's dozen. He named them Chuck, Chocolate, Cherry, Chap Stick, Chop, Change, Choo Choo, Chain Reaction, Cheronimo, Cheese, Chester, Chase, and Apple Pie. As they walked home the man saw a bird and a rabbit for adoption. He got them. He named them Cheeseburger and Cheeseburger. They walked home. When they got home a llama was at the door. On its neck was a sign that said: I am Horse the llama. Please keep me. I will not poop or pee in the house. I do not like fish. I will not eat cheese. If you do not adopt me, please give me your neighbor. The man took the llama.
(He asked me how long it should be, and I told him, "about a page." It stops precisely at the end of the page. I suspect he could have gone on for quite awhile with the tall old man acquiring more and more pets).
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
August 23-27, 2010: Week five
I just realized I totally put the wrong dates down for last week's entry. Doh. Apparently I'm pretty anxious for summer to be over. DH and boys are at a football game; I'm not sure if it's the first game of the year or not, but it's the first game he's taken them to (the school where he teaches is playing the school I graduated from, so it's all just terribly exciting). I love football season and my special Friday nights with a quiet house. Ari was asking why I didn't go tonight, and I said something about how it was nice for him to spend time with just his Dad. "But I like you, too," he said. That's sweet, kid, but don't you think we see each other enough already?
I'm going to go ahead and jinx things by saying this: I'm really having fun so far this year. I'm happy with (most of) the stuff we're using; I feel like the kids are learning a lot and enjoying themselves and making good use of their time; things feel considerably less frantic than last year, even though we're doing a good bit more. So, you know, yay.
Snapshot of school at our house: Milo practicing piano in his Harry Potter robe:
Ari: lost a day Tuesday because of a bad headache, but managed to mostly make everything up over the rest of the week. He's working on multiplying fractions in Singapore. Another Math Olympiad meeting on Thursday; DH reports that there was a bit more goofiness this week than in weeks past, but overall it went well (based on my past experiences with groups of kids that age, if this is the first goofiness he's encountered he's been very lucky).
I continue to be pleased with how discussion about Summerland is going. It's a really challenging book for him; the plot is dense, there are tons of characters with funny names to keep straight, and it's sometimes a little hard to follow. But there's so much in there, and I'm pleased to note that the more we talk about the book the more interested Ari gets in it. This week we did:
That was the dictation part of it, but then we read on for a bit to where the birches "stood, pressed together like spectators..." How nice! (I took a class on Yeats from Hugh Kenner once, when I was an undergrad and he was very old and finishing off his career with what was no doubt a cushy, well-compensated gig at the University of Georgia. He spent a lot of time reading poems aloud and then just exclaiming about how wonderful they were, a practice I would later hear referred to as the "Isn't it lovely? school of criticism." (Really, Kenner studied under Cleanth Brooks and was heavily influenced by the New Critics, but maybe as you approach 80 you just want to spend some time admiring how pretty Yeats' poems are). So I find myself slipping into the Isn't it Lovely? School sometimes with this book: "pressed together like spectators" Isn't it a lovely simile? Oh, also, there's a passage that talks about the father and son in the book spending every Saturday trying to make pancakes, which they call flannel cakes, just like the dead mother used to do, and it's referred to as "the weekly sadness of flannel cakes." Weekly sadness. Lovely. Told you I love parentheses). More personification! We talked about the different ways Chabon gives a spooky, otherworldly mood to the birch forest.
Ari did his first writing assignment of the year for MCT Town. He was supposed to choose words from a list of examples of all the different parts of speech, at least one of each kind of word, and write the first sentence of a story, then finish the story. I'm not sure what the problem was, but he managed to misunderstand the directions twice before he finally got it down. In the end, he got really into it and wrote a very goofy little story which has inspired me to name our next dog (whenever we get her and if it's a her) Apple Pi. I already had Pi in mind, but now I want it to be Apple Pi. Because you can't put puns in your kids' names. Now I have no idea where he put the story. I need it for his notebook, and I'll ask him if it's okay to post it here, too, if he ever comes back from that football game.
He started his biology and Spanish classes at LEO on Wednesday. All the kids seemed to love the Spanish class. It's supposed to be an intermediate class, since I think Ari's now learned all of his colors and how to count to 20 in Spanish approximately 359 times. So this week they worked on...colors! I'm hoping she's just easing into things, though, and that the pace will pick up soon. I think for now we'll stick with watching one lesson a week of Elementary Spanish, then the class once a week, and a few minutes doing homework and reviewing the vocab on the other days.
The first 10 week session of the biology class is all about microscopes. This week they didn't actually get the microscopes out yet, but talked about classification and...stuff? Ari's not good with relating details to me. He has a fair amount of homework in that class (this week he's supposed to look up some vocabulary words and make flashcards, classify one living thing, make up a mnemonic for remembering the seven groups of classification, and research the history of the microscope). Word is there's also going to be a research paper required for the class. So I think, tentatively, that I'll let this be his main science for the year, and he can work on his homework while Milo and Gus do the Discovery Education science. I may also throw some extra reading his way if his homework doesn't take too long.
Milo: I had a bit of a crisis earlier this week and briefly flirted with switching to Math Mammoth from Singapore; it's all the rage on the WTM boards, don't you know? But. Deep breaths. I think really Singapore is working fine for him overall. I need to do a lot more work with him on memorizing basic addition/subtraction facts. He doesn't have trouble with the concepts; he has trouble with having to re-figure 5 + 3 every time he comes to it (which makes it really hard to do, say, 7 + 8, even though he has the make a ten thing down cold). This is Milo when I ask him 7 + 8: "Oh, that's easy! Let's see, I have to make a ten, so I need ....3, and then how many do I have left over? Umm. What was it again? 8? Okay, so I have....hmm....five? left over. So that makes....oh! It's fifteen!" And, yes, he narrates it out loud every single time. So. We're doing a lot more drill right now, in the form of some Right Start games and some stuff on the computer. No jumping ship! (this week).
I went through the list of books to read before you turn 13 from How to Get Your Child to Love Reading and looked up the reading level and interest level for each one and then sort of roughly divided them into books that will probably work for this year and books that we should probably save for later. I gave him The Iron Giant this week, and he finished it up just today and started on Beezus and Ramona. For his bedtime reading, he just finished Ramona the Pest last night and is working on the third Master Reader book now.
He and Gus are watching the 1st/2nd grade Elementary Spanish now, and alternating that with Puertas Abiertas (which they still LOVE).
He's nearly finished with WWE 1, and I'm trying to decide whether to use WWE2 or to start giving him passages from the books he's reading for school instead. It really makes more sense to me to do copywork and narration from books he's actually reading all of; I've always thought of the WWE workbooks as sort of a compromise to save time, so I guess if I feel like I have the time/motivation to pick out passages (and I think I do), I should go with that. Sadly, I already bought WWE 2 last year, but I guess I can sell it. He continues to do beautifully with spelling, even though I considered this week's list fairly tricky--different ways to spell short e (head, said, bed, etc). This is the first time either Milo or Ari has had actual tests at all (both in spelling; Ari in spelling and vocab), and they think it's awesome. I dole out smiley faces generously.
Gus: Gus was very interested in math this week, so he did a bunch of his Earlybird. He's writing all the numbers now, and counting and counting and counting. He did a few lessons in McRuffy, too, and read some Arthur to me. We read a bunch of library books and then made this:
It's a tree! The leaves are all the books we (collective we, or all the kids, anyway) have read this year. Since the walls in our schoolroom are already brown, I made an outline out of painter's tape. Then I thought, "I should probably stop using up all our painter's tape," and we ran to Walgreens for masking tape. When we get to 100 leaves, we're going to celebrate with frozen yogurt at Menchie's. I should maybe start putting down the books I read, too, because I like frozen yogurt.
Science: Milo and Gus learned about density on Discovery Education science.
History: We read about the first Sumerian dictator in SOTW. It was a short chapter, and I didn't have any supplemental reading to go along with it, so we kept reading from our collection of books about Egypt, too. It was kind of a short history week because we took Wednesday off to adjust to our first day of LEO classes. I need to work on writing out a new schedule taking all of our out of the house stuff into account.
Today it was only 89, so we went to the park with friends for the first time in ages. Kids are getting more outside time today than they have in the past 2 weeks put together, I think!
I'm going to go ahead and jinx things by saying this: I'm really having fun so far this year. I'm happy with (most of) the stuff we're using; I feel like the kids are learning a lot and enjoying themselves and making good use of their time; things feel considerably less frantic than last year, even though we're doing a good bit more. So, you know, yay.
Snapshot of school at our house: Milo practicing piano in his Harry Potter robe:
Ari: lost a day Tuesday because of a bad headache, but managed to mostly make everything up over the rest of the week. He's working on multiplying fractions in Singapore. Another Math Olympiad meeting on Thursday; DH reports that there was a bit more goofiness this week than in weeks past, but overall it went well (based on my past experiences with groups of kids that age, if this is the first goofiness he's encountered he's been very lucky).
I continue to be pleased with how discussion about Summerland is going. It's a really challenging book for him; the plot is dense, there are tons of characters with funny names to keep straight, and it's sometimes a little hard to follow. But there's so much in there, and I'm pleased to note that the more we talk about the book the more interested Ari gets in it. This week we did:
On a rainy day in winter, when the birches stood huddled, bare and ghostly, the birch forest at the very end of Clam Island could look extremely eerie and cold.
That was the dictation part of it, but then we read on for a bit to where the birches "stood, pressed together like spectators..." How nice! (I took a class on Yeats from Hugh Kenner once, when I was an undergrad and he was very old and finishing off his career with what was no doubt a cushy, well-compensated gig at the University of Georgia. He spent a lot of time reading poems aloud and then just exclaiming about how wonderful they were, a practice I would later hear referred to as the "Isn't it lovely? school of criticism." (Really, Kenner studied under Cleanth Brooks and was heavily influenced by the New Critics, but maybe as you approach 80 you just want to spend some time admiring how pretty Yeats' poems are). So I find myself slipping into the Isn't it Lovely? School sometimes with this book: "pressed together like spectators" Isn't it a lovely simile? Oh, also, there's a passage that talks about the father and son in the book spending every Saturday trying to make pancakes, which they call flannel cakes, just like the dead mother used to do, and it's referred to as "the weekly sadness of flannel cakes." Weekly sadness. Lovely. Told you I love parentheses). More personification! We talked about the different ways Chabon gives a spooky, otherworldly mood to the birch forest.
Ari did his first writing assignment of the year for MCT Town. He was supposed to choose words from a list of examples of all the different parts of speech, at least one of each kind of word, and write the first sentence of a story, then finish the story. I'm not sure what the problem was, but he managed to misunderstand the directions twice before he finally got it down. In the end, he got really into it and wrote a very goofy little story which has inspired me to name our next dog (whenever we get her and if it's a her) Apple Pi. I already had Pi in mind, but now I want it to be Apple Pi. Because you can't put puns in your kids' names. Now I have no idea where he put the story. I need it for his notebook, and I'll ask him if it's okay to post it here, too, if he ever comes back from that football game.
He started his biology and Spanish classes at LEO on Wednesday. All the kids seemed to love the Spanish class. It's supposed to be an intermediate class, since I think Ari's now learned all of his colors and how to count to 20 in Spanish approximately 359 times. So this week they worked on...colors! I'm hoping she's just easing into things, though, and that the pace will pick up soon. I think for now we'll stick with watching one lesson a week of Elementary Spanish, then the class once a week, and a few minutes doing homework and reviewing the vocab on the other days.
The first 10 week session of the biology class is all about microscopes. This week they didn't actually get the microscopes out yet, but talked about classification and...stuff? Ari's not good with relating details to me. He has a fair amount of homework in that class (this week he's supposed to look up some vocabulary words and make flashcards, classify one living thing, make up a mnemonic for remembering the seven groups of classification, and research the history of the microscope). Word is there's also going to be a research paper required for the class. So I think, tentatively, that I'll let this be his main science for the year, and he can work on his homework while Milo and Gus do the Discovery Education science. I may also throw some extra reading his way if his homework doesn't take too long.
Milo: I had a bit of a crisis earlier this week and briefly flirted with switching to Math Mammoth from Singapore; it's all the rage on the WTM boards, don't you know? But. Deep breaths. I think really Singapore is working fine for him overall. I need to do a lot more work with him on memorizing basic addition/subtraction facts. He doesn't have trouble with the concepts; he has trouble with having to re-figure 5 + 3 every time he comes to it (which makes it really hard to do, say, 7 + 8, even though he has the make a ten thing down cold). This is Milo when I ask him 7 + 8: "Oh, that's easy! Let's see, I have to make a ten, so I need ....3, and then how many do I have left over? Umm. What was it again? 8? Okay, so I have....hmm....five? left over. So that makes....oh! It's fifteen!" And, yes, he narrates it out loud every single time. So. We're doing a lot more drill right now, in the form of some Right Start games and some stuff on the computer. No jumping ship! (this week).
I went through the list of books to read before you turn 13 from How to Get Your Child to Love Reading and looked up the reading level and interest level for each one and then sort of roughly divided them into books that will probably work for this year and books that we should probably save for later. I gave him The Iron Giant this week, and he finished it up just today and started on Beezus and Ramona. For his bedtime reading, he just finished Ramona the Pest last night and is working on the third Master Reader book now.
He and Gus are watching the 1st/2nd grade Elementary Spanish now, and alternating that with Puertas Abiertas (which they still LOVE).
He's nearly finished with WWE 1, and I'm trying to decide whether to use WWE2 or to start giving him passages from the books he's reading for school instead. It really makes more sense to me to do copywork and narration from books he's actually reading all of; I've always thought of the WWE workbooks as sort of a compromise to save time, so I guess if I feel like I have the time/motivation to pick out passages (and I think I do), I should go with that. Sadly, I already bought WWE 2 last year, but I guess I can sell it. He continues to do beautifully with spelling, even though I considered this week's list fairly tricky--different ways to spell short e (head, said, bed, etc). This is the first time either Milo or Ari has had actual tests at all (both in spelling; Ari in spelling and vocab), and they think it's awesome. I dole out smiley faces generously.
Gus: Gus was very interested in math this week, so he did a bunch of his Earlybird. He's writing all the numbers now, and counting and counting and counting. He did a few lessons in McRuffy, too, and read some Arthur to me. We read a bunch of library books and then made this:
It's a tree! The leaves are all the books we (collective we, or all the kids, anyway) have read this year. Since the walls in our schoolroom are already brown, I made an outline out of painter's tape. Then I thought, "I should probably stop using up all our painter's tape," and we ran to Walgreens for masking tape. When we get to 100 leaves, we're going to celebrate with frozen yogurt at Menchie's. I should maybe start putting down the books I read, too, because I like frozen yogurt.
Science: Milo and Gus learned about density on Discovery Education science.
History: We read about the first Sumerian dictator in SOTW. It was a short chapter, and I didn't have any supplemental reading to go along with it, so we kept reading from our collection of books about Egypt, too. It was kind of a short history week because we took Wednesday off to adjust to our first day of LEO classes. I need to work on writing out a new schedule taking all of our out of the house stuff into account.
Today it was only 89, so we went to the park with friends for the first time in ages. Kids are getting more outside time today than they have in the past 2 weeks put together, I think!
Saturday, August 21, 2010
August 16-20, 2010: Week four
DH took the kids and the dog down to the big creek (we have a tiny creek right behind our house and then a big creek about a 10 minute walk through the woods), but I've squandered that time fooling around online, and now I suspect they'll be returning long before I finish this. Oh well.
In extra-curricular news this week, we acquired a "rescue chicken" on Thursday. My aunt's neighbor's teenage daughter picked up two chicks at a feed store on a whim a few months back. They live in a subdivision with small lots and, I would imagine, a homeowner's association that frowns on poultry. A neighborhood dog killed one of the chickens awhile back, and the other one has had numerous near misses. So we went to get her. I'm reasonably sure she's an Easter Egger...[pause to start thread on WTM about chicken social skills]...and she's very sweet. When I pick her up, she leans her head against me and closes her eyes. Only problem is the other chickens are not being nice to her. She spends a lot of time huddled in a corner all alone. The kids have named her Cupcake, and they're very fond of her.
And then there was school. Also. It's no new chicken or anything, but it was a reasonably productive week.
Ari: Adding and subtracting mixed fractions this week in Singapore. It took him a day to remember what fractions are all about, but after that he didn't have any trouble. He's also doing the Evan Moor Daily Math Practice book--mostly in a plot to improve the "math computation" troubles the ITBS told us about. I think the plot is going very well; the first couple of weeks he missed quite a few questions because of careless errors, but he's gotten much more careful and has been getting them all right the past couple of weeks. I just love it when things go according to plan. They also have a more "out of box" type of question on Fridays, which I like.
[I hear the whistle in the woods. This means they're almost here. eek!]
Ari's been working on outlining with Joy Hakim's The Story of Science. That's been going fairly well, but I'm thinking of getting a "how to outline" sort of workbook for him, too. It might help to have things very structured and clear to get the hang of things and then apply them to a real book. But really it's going okay, so maybe not. I still panic regularly that I'm ruining him by not making him do narrations anymore, but I'm trying to stave off the worry until the writing assignments start in MCT. Right now he's clearly not doing enough writing for 4th grade, but I think when we add the Paragraph Town assignments in on top of dictation and outlining (and his ongoing epic novel) we'll be okay.
He's reading Michael Chabon's Summerland, and may be reading it forever. He's not that into it still, but it seems to be getting a little better. He's about 100 pages into it; I'm about 75 pages into it, and I now have nearly 3 pages of notes. I gave him a dictation sentence from it this week, and we talked a little bit about what themes and motifs are showing up so far. I've always liked the idea of Bravewriter's The Arrow--so much so that I paid for a subscription to it one year (I had a discount code, as I recall). The Arrow assigns a book a month and then gives you 4 different passages from the book to use as dictation or copywork with notes on how to discuss it and link it to a sort of literary device of the month. My main issue with it, though, is that it's crazy expensive--$10/month if you buy individual issues, a little less if you pay for a year up front. And then I had other issues; I don't get to pick the books. It's one passage a week; what if I want 2? or 3? What I like about it, though, is that it encourages and instructs in close reading for elementary kids, something that's remarkably hard to find. I really like the idea of tying close reading of a passage in with dictation or copywork; it seems like the perfect opportunity. Writing with Ease uses dictation sentences to talk about grammar, which I also like, but doesn't really discuss them as literature (and it couldn't really, since it doesn't assign whole books). So I guess I'm making my own Arrow now. I have several passages from Summerland pulled out to talk about already. Ari's dictation for last week was:
This meant he got to spell and define flourish and practice using am em dash (perhaps my second favorite punctuation mark next to my beloved parentheses). We also talked about personification and what Chabon is telling us about baseball both here and in the book as a whole--baseball as so overwhelmingly important it's almost like a parent.
He watched more of Discovery Education's Spanish, did the worksheets that go along with it, and reviewed the vocabulary sheets. His Spanish class at LEO should be starting next week.
He did the third lesson in Caesar's English and did well on the quiz (he missed one of the stems; I can't remember which). He's chugging along in Spelling Workout and having no problems there. I have an MCT Town level schedule that I printed out somewhere that has us finishing Grammar Town and starting Paragraph Town in 4 more weeks; I think we'll stick with that. So we'll start up PT and the poetry book round about when we get back from Disney. Actually, I should check...I bet the schedule would have us starting the week before we leave, but I may push it to after. We have an extra 7 days built into our schedule this year, since I plan to stick to DH's work schedule (normally he's 190 days, but this year there are furlough days), so I can play around a bit. Oh--but I just checked, and we will indeed start the week we get back. How perfect!
Milo: Milo's doing well in Singapore; he's gotten a lot faster adding in his head since last year--which I think is just a maturity issue, since we certainly didn't do much in the way of math practice over the summer.
He finished reading The Boxcar Children and then read "Tut's Mummy: Lost and Found" this week. He's reading Ramona the Pest at bedtime now, apparently having finally tired of Geronimo Stilton. I may have to rethink some of his school reading, as I think he can probably handle more challenging stuff than I have picked out. I may pull out the books to read before you're 13 list that Ari worked through most of last year and start him on the easier ones from that. He could spend 2 years on that list (along with some stuff tied into his history) and then be on track with what Ari's doing now when he hits 4th grade. He likes pretty much anything I give him, which is a very welcome change from a certain older brother of his.
I need to order the next Aesop book from Royal Fireworks Press, as he's nearly finished with the first one. But there will be no curriculum ordering whatsoever until September (ah, the joys of the once a month paycheck). He'll finish up the orange level of Master Reader next week and then probably spend the rest of the week reading the book that goes with it. Then on to the red level, and then he'll be an official Master Reader.
Gus: Gus wants me to order Explode the Code for him, so I guess that will go on the September list. I suspect it won't be long after that that I drop the McRuffy and stick with ETC plus lots of readers (which is what ultimately worked best for Milo). He's moving along nicely in math, and has learned to write up through 8s now. Handwriting Without Tears has not made an appearance for weeks now, but I may finally pull it back out next week and see if I can get him to do a bit. We've been much better about reading library books. A strangely high percentage of the ones we've read lately feature a recipe in the back. Somehow we've avoided having to make any of the recipes, even though one of them was for cupcakes. I guess he's over his cooking phase.
My this has gotten long.
History: Chapter 4 of Story of the World, so more Egypt. I have too many books about mummies. We read "You Wouldn't Want to be an Egyptian Mummy," "I Am the Mummy, Heb-Nefert," and "Who Built the Pyramids." Then we played around for a while with a few of the websites the Usborne suggested for us, including an online game about building a pyramid that made Gus cry.
For science, we finished reading "How to Think Like a Scientist" then sat around and sighed about how we don't have two computers during the day. I'll have to come up with a better plan for next week. Ari should be starting his biology class next week, though, so that will help.
And now I need to go eat lunch and get ready for a birthday party (an ice skating one, so we have to find warm clothes--how novel!)
In extra-curricular news this week, we acquired a "rescue chicken" on Thursday. My aunt's neighbor's teenage daughter picked up two chicks at a feed store on a whim a few months back. They live in a subdivision with small lots and, I would imagine, a homeowner's association that frowns on poultry. A neighborhood dog killed one of the chickens awhile back, and the other one has had numerous near misses. So we went to get her. I'm reasonably sure she's an Easter Egger...[pause to start thread on WTM about chicken social skills]...and she's very sweet. When I pick her up, she leans her head against me and closes her eyes. Only problem is the other chickens are not being nice to her. She spends a lot of time huddled in a corner all alone. The kids have named her Cupcake, and they're very fond of her.
And then there was school. Also. It's no new chicken or anything, but it was a reasonably productive week.
Ari: Adding and subtracting mixed fractions this week in Singapore. It took him a day to remember what fractions are all about, but after that he didn't have any trouble. He's also doing the Evan Moor Daily Math Practice book--mostly in a plot to improve the "math computation" troubles the ITBS told us about. I think the plot is going very well; the first couple of weeks he missed quite a few questions because of careless errors, but he's gotten much more careful and has been getting them all right the past couple of weeks. I just love it when things go according to plan. They also have a more "out of box" type of question on Fridays, which I like.
[I hear the whistle in the woods. This means they're almost here. eek!]
Ari's been working on outlining with Joy Hakim's The Story of Science. That's been going fairly well, but I'm thinking of getting a "how to outline" sort of workbook for him, too. It might help to have things very structured and clear to get the hang of things and then apply them to a real book. But really it's going okay, so maybe not. I still panic regularly that I'm ruining him by not making him do narrations anymore, but I'm trying to stave off the worry until the writing assignments start in MCT. Right now he's clearly not doing enough writing for 4th grade, but I think when we add the Paragraph Town assignments in on top of dictation and outlining (and his ongoing epic novel) we'll be okay.
He's reading Michael Chabon's Summerland, and may be reading it forever. He's not that into it still, but it seems to be getting a little better. He's about 100 pages into it; I'm about 75 pages into it, and I now have nearly 3 pages of notes. I gave him a dictation sentence from it this week, and we talked a little bit about what themes and motifs are showing up so far. I've always liked the idea of Bravewriter's The Arrow--so much so that I paid for a subscription to it one year (I had a discount code, as I recall). The Arrow assigns a book a month and then gives you 4 different passages from the book to use as dictation or copywork with notes on how to discuss it and link it to a sort of literary device of the month. My main issue with it, though, is that it's crazy expensive--$10/month if you buy individual issues, a little less if you pay for a year up front. And then I had other issues; I don't get to pick the books. It's one passage a week; what if I want 2? or 3? What I like about it, though, is that it encourages and instructs in close reading for elementary kids, something that's remarkably hard to find. I really like the idea of tying close reading of a passage in with dictation or copywork; it seems like the perfect opportunity. Writing with Ease uses dictation sentences to talk about grammar, which I also like, but doesn't really discuss them as literature (and it couldn't really, since it doesn't assign whole books). So I guess I'm making my own Arrow now. I have several passages from Summerland pulled out to talk about already. Ari's dictation for last week was:
For a long time--so long that men were born, grew up, and died in the arms of the game--baseball flourished on Clam Island.
This meant he got to spell and define flourish and practice using am em dash (perhaps my second favorite punctuation mark next to my beloved parentheses). We also talked about personification and what Chabon is telling us about baseball both here and in the book as a whole--baseball as so overwhelmingly important it's almost like a parent.
He watched more of Discovery Education's Spanish, did the worksheets that go along with it, and reviewed the vocabulary sheets. His Spanish class at LEO should be starting next week.
He did the third lesson in Caesar's English and did well on the quiz (he missed one of the stems; I can't remember which). He's chugging along in Spelling Workout and having no problems there. I have an MCT Town level schedule that I printed out somewhere that has us finishing Grammar Town and starting Paragraph Town in 4 more weeks; I think we'll stick with that. So we'll start up PT and the poetry book round about when we get back from Disney. Actually, I should check...I bet the schedule would have us starting the week before we leave, but I may push it to after. We have an extra 7 days built into our schedule this year, since I plan to stick to DH's work schedule (normally he's 190 days, but this year there are furlough days), so I can play around a bit. Oh--but I just checked, and we will indeed start the week we get back. How perfect!
Milo: Milo's doing well in Singapore; he's gotten a lot faster adding in his head since last year--which I think is just a maturity issue, since we certainly didn't do much in the way of math practice over the summer.
He finished reading The Boxcar Children and then read "Tut's Mummy: Lost and Found" this week. He's reading Ramona the Pest at bedtime now, apparently having finally tired of Geronimo Stilton. I may have to rethink some of his school reading, as I think he can probably handle more challenging stuff than I have picked out. I may pull out the books to read before you're 13 list that Ari worked through most of last year and start him on the easier ones from that. He could spend 2 years on that list (along with some stuff tied into his history) and then be on track with what Ari's doing now when he hits 4th grade. He likes pretty much anything I give him, which is a very welcome change from a certain older brother of his.
I need to order the next Aesop book from Royal Fireworks Press, as he's nearly finished with the first one. But there will be no curriculum ordering whatsoever until September (ah, the joys of the once a month paycheck). He'll finish up the orange level of Master Reader next week and then probably spend the rest of the week reading the book that goes with it. Then on to the red level, and then he'll be an official Master Reader.
Gus: Gus wants me to order Explode the Code for him, so I guess that will go on the September list. I suspect it won't be long after that that I drop the McRuffy and stick with ETC plus lots of readers (which is what ultimately worked best for Milo). He's moving along nicely in math, and has learned to write up through 8s now. Handwriting Without Tears has not made an appearance for weeks now, but I may finally pull it back out next week and see if I can get him to do a bit. We've been much better about reading library books. A strangely high percentage of the ones we've read lately feature a recipe in the back. Somehow we've avoided having to make any of the recipes, even though one of them was for cupcakes. I guess he's over his cooking phase.
My this has gotten long.
History: Chapter 4 of Story of the World, so more Egypt. I have too many books about mummies. We read "You Wouldn't Want to be an Egyptian Mummy," "I Am the Mummy, Heb-Nefert," and "Who Built the Pyramids." Then we played around for a while with a few of the websites the Usborne suggested for us, including an online game about building a pyramid that made Gus cry.
For science, we finished reading "How to Think Like a Scientist" then sat around and sighed about how we don't have two computers during the day. I'll have to come up with a better plan for next week. Ari should be starting his biology class next week, though, so that will help.
And now I need to go eat lunch and get ready for a birthday party (an ice skating one, so we have to find warm clothes--how novel!)
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Umm.
I'm 24 pages into Michael Chabon's Summerland (Ari's latest reading assignment), and I have 2 pages of notes on it already. There's a lot in there. Ari's a bit further in than I am, and so far he says it's "boring." I wonder if his complete lack of interest in baseball (or sports in general) might be getting in the way. But I think once the fantasy parts gear up, he'll get into it. I hope so, anyway, because it's over 400 pages long, and that's a long time to be bored. I finally caved to his relentless requests for a Facebook account, and I noticed that he put Tuck Everlasting as one of his two favorites under books. Confession: I've never been able to get into any grown-up Michael Chabon books myself. Though I've only tried half-heartedly. I always start thinking about how his wife doesn't love their kids, and I get all distracted. (I know she didn't really say she doesn't love them. I was kidding). Anyway, I'm not bored with Summerland at all. I think I might go read some more of it right now! Then maybe I'll give that Kavalier and Clay another shot!
Saturday, August 14, 2010
August 9-13, 2010: Week three
Do you want to know what a problem is with my iphone? A problem is that it's much easier to post pictures from my iphone than from my camera, which takes better pictures. Well. Anyway. Also, now I remember why I have a hard time posting my weekly reports on Friday nights. We have playgroup on Friday afternoon, and I spend hours talking to people, which is great fun, but, being all introverted and whatnot, it also wears me out. But here I am anyway! If I finish this. [I didn't. I watched two episodes of Friday Night Lights, played around with our Disney dining reservations, and went to bed. Now it is Saturday]
Ari: Ari's working on the first review section in Singapore 5A, after a week full of complaining about long division and multiplication by 2 digit numbers. It also took him forever most days to do a full exercise, which wreaked havoc on nicely typed out schedule. In other math news, DH's Math Olympiad team had its first meeting this week. I was in the other room, talking to moms and stuff, so I don't know so many details, but it seems that it went well.
We finished the second lesson in Caesar's English, and he got everything right on the quiz. He slyly confessed at one point during the week that maybe he sort of kind of actually likes the MCT stuff. I continue to be very impressed with the progress I can see in his understanding of all the concepts. Until recently, his first inclination with the Practice Island sentences was to blurt out guess after guess when he got to a word and couldn't immediately identify the part of speech. I hate to bash on First Language Lessons, and I'm sure it's great for a lot of kids, but I think it really trained him to do that, because he COULD guess and be right in that book. Doesn't work in Practice Island, and he's finally stopping and thinking about what the word's doing in the sentence before he writes anything down now. Overheard: "...wait, this can't be a direct object, because it's in a prepositional phrase. Oh!" Worth noting that Ari has already had a more thorough education in grammar than I ever had, despite my 7 years of higher education in English.
I'm having him do dictation from the books he's reading instead of WWE now. I think. That's what we did this week anyway; he did two sentences from Tuck Everlasting, and I was pleased with this because 1. have I mentioned that the writing in Tuck Everlasting is gorgeous? and 2. it was a sneaky way for me to get in more lit. discussion, since I kind of feel like I didn't do it right last week. Or at least not thoroughly enough. So I am tentatively liking the idea of tying the dictation in to the reading both because it's more relevant and because it's a way to do some good close reading with him.
Neither of us is thrilled with Spanish for Children. I actually bought it over a year ago and wasn't thrilled with it then, which is why I haven't used it before now. He watched a couple of episodes of the 5th/6th grade Elementary Spanish on Discovery Education this week instead. I don't know. I guess I need to wait and see what the Spanish class he's taking at LEO is like and then reevaluate what kind of program would be the best supplement to that. I can't believe no one's come up with a really great homeschool Spanish program...one of those things everyone who uses raves about.
He's still reading The Boy of the Painted Cave. Reading time was cut short a couple of times this week for one reason or another...he's almost finished with it. He doesn't dislike it as much now as he did at first, either.
Milo: He continued to do 2 exercises a day in Singapore, and that went just fine. It was all adding and subtracting and working with the number line this week.
I just this second realized that we forgot to do his spelling test on Friday. oops. I'll do that Monday.
He's still tearing through books. This week he read My Father's Dragon, Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, and started on The Boxcar Children (on top of his relentless Geronimo Stilton reading at bedtime). He's got one more lesson in ETC 4, and then he'll start 5. I've already bought 5, so we'll go ahead and do that, but I think we might call the formal phonics finished after that and, Master Reader (which he'll finish in the next maybe 4-5 weeks, I would guess).
Gus: Gus can write all the numbers through 5 now, and almost never gets them backwards! I'm glad to be on a break from number writing in Earlybird right now (I haven't looked ahead to see how long it lasts). I mean, he's still writing numbers, but only when the number is the answer to a question.
He finished lesson 65 in McRuffy phonics. I am tempted to switch him over to ETC, as I don't think he really needs a particularly intense phonics program. He's reading stuff like "Did Dad dig a pit?" in McRuffy and then, at the same time, reading a level 2 "I Can Read" Arthur book with, "It was a rainy afternoon. Violet was looking at picture books. Arthur was reading comics." But he also sometimes stumbles over words like "did" and "pit" (mostly by putting the wrong vowel in), so I know that a lot of his more advanced reading is sight reading, and he definitely needs the phonics. I want to be careful not to give in to the temptation to drop formal phonics too early with him...but I also think ETC along with lots of readers would suffice. Eh, I don't know.
History: We did chapter 3 in SOTW, "The First Writing." We read a couple more myths from Egyptian Myths and read "You Wouldn't Want to Be a Sumerian Slave." Ari read the third chapter in The Story of Science (and outlined some of it during his language arts time). We did the mapwork, and Milo and Gus did narrations. We looked at the relevant sections in Take Me Back and the Usborne encyclopedia. The kids spent a long time sending messages to each other and writing their names in hieroglyphs, and we played around with cuneiform in play-doh (I thought we had actual clay, but it turns out we don't).
And our Nile is growing beautifully! Why is it so much easier to grow grass in a baking tin in my schoolroom than in my yard? I think we need to feed the Nile to the chickens pretty soon.
Science: umm, might need tweaking again. Ari is bored with it and says he knows it all already. Which is true of the stuff we've been doing so far (properties of matter, phases of matter, etc.), but I don't know that it will continue to be true for long. I let him try the middle school level instead last week, which he still wasn't wild about but did, I think, like somewhat better. The problem is we really need another computer if he's going to do that. We have another computer when Dave's home, so I guess he could do science in the evenings. We can probably get another computer for Xmas, but not before then. I'm also not sure how much longer our main computer is going to last. We're still trying to decide if we can afford the biology class at LEO. If he's taking a year long biology class I may just do science for the younger kids at home and not worry about Ari. That sounds kind of heavenly, actually.
All in all, a pretty good week. I'm enjoying this all to brief period when we can stay home all day most days, before all the outside activities start up and things get crazy. Looks like starting in a few weeks our schedule will be:
Mondays: home?
Tuesdays: home?
Wednesdays: out of the house from 10:30-mid afternoon for classes at LEO
Thursdays: soccer from 1-3, then math olympiad from 6:30-7:30
Fridays: park day in the afternoon
Somewhere in there I'll need to fit in lunch with my grandmother and getting together every other week with my stepmother and little brother/sister. All of this points to one inevitable conclusion: I need an alarm clock. This rolling out of bed whenever and starting school anytime between 8:30 and 9:30 thing isn't going to work anymore pretty soon. Sigh. I love sleep.
Ari: Ari's working on the first review section in Singapore 5A, after a week full of complaining about long division and multiplication by 2 digit numbers. It also took him forever most days to do a full exercise, which wreaked havoc on nicely typed out schedule. In other math news, DH's Math Olympiad team had its first meeting this week. I was in the other room, talking to moms and stuff, so I don't know so many details, but it seems that it went well.
We finished the second lesson in Caesar's English, and he got everything right on the quiz. He slyly confessed at one point during the week that maybe he sort of kind of actually likes the MCT stuff. I continue to be very impressed with the progress I can see in his understanding of all the concepts. Until recently, his first inclination with the Practice Island sentences was to blurt out guess after guess when he got to a word and couldn't immediately identify the part of speech. I hate to bash on First Language Lessons, and I'm sure it's great for a lot of kids, but I think it really trained him to do that, because he COULD guess and be right in that book. Doesn't work in Practice Island, and he's finally stopping and thinking about what the word's doing in the sentence before he writes anything down now. Overheard: "...wait, this can't be a direct object, because it's in a prepositional phrase. Oh!" Worth noting that Ari has already had a more thorough education in grammar than I ever had, despite my 7 years of higher education in English.
I'm having him do dictation from the books he's reading instead of WWE now. I think. That's what we did this week anyway; he did two sentences from Tuck Everlasting, and I was pleased with this because 1. have I mentioned that the writing in Tuck Everlasting is gorgeous? and 2. it was a sneaky way for me to get in more lit. discussion, since I kind of feel like I didn't do it right last week. Or at least not thoroughly enough. So I am tentatively liking the idea of tying the dictation in to the reading both because it's more relevant and because it's a way to do some good close reading with him.
Neither of us is thrilled with Spanish for Children. I actually bought it over a year ago and wasn't thrilled with it then, which is why I haven't used it before now. He watched a couple of episodes of the 5th/6th grade Elementary Spanish on Discovery Education this week instead. I don't know. I guess I need to wait and see what the Spanish class he's taking at LEO is like and then reevaluate what kind of program would be the best supplement to that. I can't believe no one's come up with a really great homeschool Spanish program...one of those things everyone who uses raves about.
He's still reading The Boy of the Painted Cave. Reading time was cut short a couple of times this week for one reason or another...he's almost finished with it. He doesn't dislike it as much now as he did at first, either.
Milo: He continued to do 2 exercises a day in Singapore, and that went just fine. It was all adding and subtracting and working with the number line this week.
I just this second realized that we forgot to do his spelling test on Friday. oops. I'll do that Monday.
He's still tearing through books. This week he read My Father's Dragon, Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, and started on The Boxcar Children (on top of his relentless Geronimo Stilton reading at bedtime). He's got one more lesson in ETC 4, and then he'll start 5. I've already bought 5, so we'll go ahead and do that, but I think we might call the formal phonics finished after that and, Master Reader (which he'll finish in the next maybe 4-5 weeks, I would guess).
Gus: Gus can write all the numbers through 5 now, and almost never gets them backwards! I'm glad to be on a break from number writing in Earlybird right now (I haven't looked ahead to see how long it lasts). I mean, he's still writing numbers, but only when the number is the answer to a question.
He finished lesson 65 in McRuffy phonics. I am tempted to switch him over to ETC, as I don't think he really needs a particularly intense phonics program. He's reading stuff like "Did Dad dig a pit?" in McRuffy and then, at the same time, reading a level 2 "I Can Read" Arthur book with, "It was a rainy afternoon. Violet was looking at picture books. Arthur was reading comics." But he also sometimes stumbles over words like "did" and "pit" (mostly by putting the wrong vowel in), so I know that a lot of his more advanced reading is sight reading, and he definitely needs the phonics. I want to be careful not to give in to the temptation to drop formal phonics too early with him...but I also think ETC along with lots of readers would suffice. Eh, I don't know.
History: We did chapter 3 in SOTW, "The First Writing." We read a couple more myths from Egyptian Myths and read "You Wouldn't Want to Be a Sumerian Slave." Ari read the third chapter in The Story of Science (and outlined some of it during his language arts time). We did the mapwork, and Milo and Gus did narrations. We looked at the relevant sections in Take Me Back and the Usborne encyclopedia. The kids spent a long time sending messages to each other and writing their names in hieroglyphs, and we played around with cuneiform in play-doh (I thought we had actual clay, but it turns out we don't).
And our Nile is growing beautifully! Why is it so much easier to grow grass in a baking tin in my schoolroom than in my yard? I think we need to feed the Nile to the chickens pretty soon.
Science: umm, might need tweaking again. Ari is bored with it and says he knows it all already. Which is true of the stuff we've been doing so far (properties of matter, phases of matter, etc.), but I don't know that it will continue to be true for long. I let him try the middle school level instead last week, which he still wasn't wild about but did, I think, like somewhat better. The problem is we really need another computer if he's going to do that. We have another computer when Dave's home, so I guess he could do science in the evenings. We can probably get another computer for Xmas, but not before then. I'm also not sure how much longer our main computer is going to last. We're still trying to decide if we can afford the biology class at LEO. If he's taking a year long biology class I may just do science for the younger kids at home and not worry about Ari. That sounds kind of heavenly, actually.
All in all, a pretty good week. I'm enjoying this all to brief period when we can stay home all day most days, before all the outside activities start up and things get crazy. Looks like starting in a few weeks our schedule will be:
Mondays: home?
Tuesdays: home?
Wednesdays: out of the house from 10:30-mid afternoon for classes at LEO
Thursdays: soccer from 1-3, then math olympiad from 6:30-7:30
Fridays: park day in the afternoon
Somewhere in there I'll need to fit in lunch with my grandmother and getting together every other week with my stepmother and little brother/sister. All of this points to one inevitable conclusion: I need an alarm clock. This rolling out of bed whenever and starting school anytime between 8:30 and 9:30 thing isn't going to work anymore pretty soon. Sigh. I love sleep.
Friday, August 06, 2010
August 2-6, 2010: Week 2
This week there were no snakes, and it continued to be a million, gazillion degrees every day. As a result (of the heat, not the lack of snakes), my kids spent too much time inside and were pretty much completely nuts much of the time. In theory, we have a rule that they have to play outside for an hour before they can have any screen time in the afternoons, but I have a hard time enforcing this rule when the heat index is 107 and we're out of bug spray. I expected that we would at least go swimming Thursday at my stepmother's house, but then she canceled on us because of an emergency dentist visit. Today I took a page from Smrtmama's book and had them all run down to the cul-de-sac and back before we started school and again before they could turn on the Wii. Ari really hated this. Too bad, kiddo. Show me you can sit still and focus on something for more than 3 seconds at a time and we'll talk about cutting out the compulsory exercise.
Ari: Ari finished exercise 10 in Singapore 5A today, which means we've done math every day so far! This week was an introduction to order of operations and then some of those fiendish word problems that it takes me almost as long as Ari to figure out. "Too bad I don't know algebra," said Ari. Indeed. Singapore word problems cry out for algebra.
I gave him an oral quiz over the first chapter of Spanish for Children, and he started in on the second chapter. He got all the words right on his second spelling test (he's doing Spelling Workout E). I have no regrets about not doing formal spelling with him up until now, but I think it's worth spending a few minutes a day doing it now. He's naturally a strong speller, but that also means he can get big rewards with not much effort in spelling, since once he learns a word he's unlikely to forget it. His other morning independent work is doing Logic Liftoff, Evan Moor's Daily Paragraphy Editing and Daily Math Practice, and...hmm, maybe that's all.
He finished Tuck Everlasting and we "discussed" it. Umm. I needn't have worried too much about that conversation dragging out endlessly, since getting Ari to give more than a one word answer is a monumental task. I think perhaps I need to get better about being flexible and spontaneous. I was all, "blah, blah, order vs. chaos, blah, personal choice, blah, what about the TOAD?!" while Ari was all, "yes. no. shrug." At one point, though, he said, "she never explains why the water makes them live forever. In Harry Potter they explain why things happen." Hours later, it occurred to me that this was an interesting observation and might have been the beginning of a great conversation about fantasy as a genre and why Natalie Babbitt made the choice not to explain why and J.K. Rowling didn't. So then I tried to bring it up again rather abruptly, but the moment had passed. Anyway, it's a start. I'd never read Tuck Everlasting before, incidentally, and I adored it. I might put it right up there with Charlotte's Web, which is the highest compliment I give to kid's lit.
Now he's reading Boy of the Painted Cave and is, thus far, unimpressed. He also started in on a Bible reading schedule for kids that someone on the WTM boards pointed me to. (http://www.pennygardner.com/bible.html)
Michael Clay Thompson stuff is going smoothly so far. He's getting more and more comfortable with doing the 4 level analysis. We're still reading through Grammar Town, and we started the 2nd chapter of Caesar's English.
Milo: Milo finished Singapore 1A and started on 1B. I'd like to get through 2B this year if possible, so I'm having him do 2 exercises a day in 1B right now. We may well have to slow down at some point, and that will be fine, but it's working for now. I need to take some time out to do some games with him to work on addition and subtraction facts. He can do them, but it's agonizingly slow sometimes.
He finished Fantastic Mr. Fox and started on The Strange Museum, which is a chapter book that goes along with Master Reader. The way Master Reader works is there are 4 levels, each one with 10 lessons. So Milo does a lesson on the computer, then reads a story card that goes along with that lesson, and then when he finishes a level, there's a book to read. So he's reading The Strange Museum during school time and also has three (count 'em!) books going aside from that--two Geronimo Stilton books and Stanley in Space. I'm not clear on how he can keep track of 2 different Geronimo Stilton books at the same time, but it seems to work for him.
He's also working on WWE 1 (he's on week 28, I think), RFWP's "Aesop's Fables: My Book about Reading, Writing, and Thinking," Building Thinking Skills, and Explode the Code 5. He's gotten everything right on his first two spelling tests in Spelling Workout B! I don't think of Milo as a natural speller, so I'm very pleased with this. Maybe he's more of a natural speller than I thought. Or maybe I should bite my tongue until the words get harder.
Gus: I was kidding when I said he was on lesson 70something in McRuffy. We just did lesson 61 today. But, anyway, yeah, that's going fine. He's gotten to practicing writing numbers in Singapore, which has slowed him down a bit. Today he told me he's already really good at 3's, so we could skip those. I suggested the practice would be good even for a master 3 writer like him. I've done a rather crappy job this week of finding time to read picture books to him, even though we made a library trip and have a full basket of shiny new books. He listens along with his brothers to all the history reading, and Dave reads chapter books to him at night (they're on Ramona the Pest right now), but I still want some dedicated sit and read story books time for him every day. Part of the problem is that he keeps tricking me into building a marble run or playing checkers instead. Little scamp.
History: Chapter 2 of SOTW. I got the CDs from my friend, but not before I'd already read the chapter aloud, so they listened to me read it and then listened to it again in the car. We finished You Wouldn't Want to be a Mammoth Hunter, read "Croconile," and made a model of the Nile in a baking pan, as suggested in my handy SOTW activity guide. We made a suspiciously similar model 4 years ago--the first time we went through SOTW--but no one except me seems to remember it. We also listened to our Jim Weiss Egyptian Myths CD. We've had it for awhile and listened to it several times before, but now we have a new appreciation for it. I guess. Since no one complained when I put it on.
Science: tweaked! It went pretty well this week. We did a couple more "explorations" online and watched some more videos. I mapped out the first 8 weeks of the year, and next week there will be an actual experiment type thing that doesn't involve the computer. But I'm fairly impressed with the online activities so far. We also got to read about the world's biggest ferris wheel (umm, because it's made of matter...this seemed like a stretch, but, you know, giant ferris wheel--whoo hoo!) We're also reading "How to Think Like a Scientist," which we've read before, but I think it's a good way to start the year.
Etc.: I sent in the forms for soccer, and that's starting up in September. I think I've decided to do swim lessons at the Y on Saturdays instead of doing the homeschool lessons on Fridays. It will be a little cheaper that way, but mostly it won't be another thing to do on a weekday. I was feeling a little overscheduled and panicky there for a minute. Speaking of that, the schedule for LEO came out. They have a new location, and it's 35 minutes away (last year it was just under 20). I was really leaning toward not doing any classes there this year because of that, but I think I'm going to just suck it up and make the drive. So we'll be going there on Wednesdays, and Ari will be taking Intermediate Spanish and maybe Biology. There's not really much of anything this session that I'm feeling inspired to put Milo and Gus in, at least not on Wednesdays, and I'm definitely not driving out there 2 days. And then DH's Math Olympiad club will start up next week. He has anywhere between 5 and 10 kids who are going to show up...it's all a bit in flux at the moment.
Ari: Ari finished exercise 10 in Singapore 5A today, which means we've done math every day so far! This week was an introduction to order of operations and then some of those fiendish word problems that it takes me almost as long as Ari to figure out. "Too bad I don't know algebra," said Ari. Indeed. Singapore word problems cry out for algebra.
I gave him an oral quiz over the first chapter of Spanish for Children, and he started in on the second chapter. He got all the words right on his second spelling test (he's doing Spelling Workout E). I have no regrets about not doing formal spelling with him up until now, but I think it's worth spending a few minutes a day doing it now. He's naturally a strong speller, but that also means he can get big rewards with not much effort in spelling, since once he learns a word he's unlikely to forget it. His other morning independent work is doing Logic Liftoff, Evan Moor's Daily Paragraphy Editing and Daily Math Practice, and...hmm, maybe that's all.
He finished Tuck Everlasting and we "discussed" it. Umm. I needn't have worried too much about that conversation dragging out endlessly, since getting Ari to give more than a one word answer is a monumental task. I think perhaps I need to get better about being flexible and spontaneous. I was all, "blah, blah, order vs. chaos, blah, personal choice, blah, what about the TOAD?!" while Ari was all, "yes. no. shrug." At one point, though, he said, "she never explains why the water makes them live forever. In Harry Potter they explain why things happen." Hours later, it occurred to me that this was an interesting observation and might have been the beginning of a great conversation about fantasy as a genre and why Natalie Babbitt made the choice not to explain why and J.K. Rowling didn't. So then I tried to bring it up again rather abruptly, but the moment had passed. Anyway, it's a start. I'd never read Tuck Everlasting before, incidentally, and I adored it. I might put it right up there with Charlotte's Web, which is the highest compliment I give to kid's lit.
Now he's reading Boy of the Painted Cave and is, thus far, unimpressed. He also started in on a Bible reading schedule for kids that someone on the WTM boards pointed me to. (http://www.pennygardner.com/bible.html)
Michael Clay Thompson stuff is going smoothly so far. He's getting more and more comfortable with doing the 4 level analysis. We're still reading through Grammar Town, and we started the 2nd chapter of Caesar's English.
Milo: Milo finished Singapore 1A and started on 1B. I'd like to get through 2B this year if possible, so I'm having him do 2 exercises a day in 1B right now. We may well have to slow down at some point, and that will be fine, but it's working for now. I need to take some time out to do some games with him to work on addition and subtraction facts. He can do them, but it's agonizingly slow sometimes.
He finished Fantastic Mr. Fox and started on The Strange Museum, which is a chapter book that goes along with Master Reader. The way Master Reader works is there are 4 levels, each one with 10 lessons. So Milo does a lesson on the computer, then reads a story card that goes along with that lesson, and then when he finishes a level, there's a book to read. So he's reading The Strange Museum during school time and also has three (count 'em!) books going aside from that--two Geronimo Stilton books and Stanley in Space. I'm not clear on how he can keep track of 2 different Geronimo Stilton books at the same time, but it seems to work for him.
He's also working on WWE 1 (he's on week 28, I think), RFWP's "Aesop's Fables: My Book about Reading, Writing, and Thinking," Building Thinking Skills, and Explode the Code 5. He's gotten everything right on his first two spelling tests in Spelling Workout B! I don't think of Milo as a natural speller, so I'm very pleased with this. Maybe he's more of a natural speller than I thought. Or maybe I should bite my tongue until the words get harder.
Gus: I was kidding when I said he was on lesson 70something in McRuffy. We just did lesson 61 today. But, anyway, yeah, that's going fine. He's gotten to practicing writing numbers in Singapore, which has slowed him down a bit. Today he told me he's already really good at 3's, so we could skip those. I suggested the practice would be good even for a master 3 writer like him. I've done a rather crappy job this week of finding time to read picture books to him, even though we made a library trip and have a full basket of shiny new books. He listens along with his brothers to all the history reading, and Dave reads chapter books to him at night (they're on Ramona the Pest right now), but I still want some dedicated sit and read story books time for him every day. Part of the problem is that he keeps tricking me into building a marble run or playing checkers instead. Little scamp.
History: Chapter 2 of SOTW. I got the CDs from my friend, but not before I'd already read the chapter aloud, so they listened to me read it and then listened to it again in the car. We finished You Wouldn't Want to be a Mammoth Hunter, read "Croconile," and made a model of the Nile in a baking pan, as suggested in my handy SOTW activity guide. We made a suspiciously similar model 4 years ago--the first time we went through SOTW--but no one except me seems to remember it. We also listened to our Jim Weiss Egyptian Myths CD. We've had it for awhile and listened to it several times before, but now we have a new appreciation for it. I guess. Since no one complained when I put it on.
Science: tweaked! It went pretty well this week. We did a couple more "explorations" online and watched some more videos. I mapped out the first 8 weeks of the year, and next week there will be an actual experiment type thing that doesn't involve the computer. But I'm fairly impressed with the online activities so far. We also got to read about the world's biggest ferris wheel (umm, because it's made of matter...this seemed like a stretch, but, you know, giant ferris wheel--whoo hoo!) We're also reading "How to Think Like a Scientist," which we've read before, but I think it's a good way to start the year.
Etc.: I sent in the forms for soccer, and that's starting up in September. I think I've decided to do swim lessons at the Y on Saturdays instead of doing the homeschool lessons on Fridays. It will be a little cheaper that way, but mostly it won't be another thing to do on a weekday. I was feeling a little overscheduled and panicky there for a minute. Speaking of that, the schedule for LEO came out. They have a new location, and it's 35 minutes away (last year it was just under 20). I was really leaning toward not doing any classes there this year because of that, but I think I'm going to just suck it up and make the drive. So we'll be going there on Wednesdays, and Ari will be taking Intermediate Spanish and maybe Biology. There's not really much of anything this session that I'm feeling inspired to put Milo and Gus in, at least not on Wednesdays, and I'm definitely not driving out there 2 days. And then DH's Math Olympiad club will start up next week. He has anywhere between 5 and 10 kids who are going to show up...it's all a bit in flux at the moment.
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