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:

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!