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!)
2 comments:
Aw, I wish we had a creek right outside our backyard! How fun! Sounds like a full week!
~Monica
I wish I had a chicken that would lay her head on my shoulder. A creek would be nice too, but messy.
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