August 30-September 3: Week 6!

Moving right along! I am impressed with us. First week of homeschool soccer, so we have reached the zenith of frantic running aroundedness (uh, for this year, anyway). And we survived anyway!

Ari: finished Exercise 25 (out of 40) in Singapore 5A today. At this rate he'll finish the book in a month or so (it's amazing what happens when we actually do math every single day). My plan was to add in Challenging Word Problems when he starts up 5B, but I'm thinking of taking a month or so off and doing some introduction to algebra stuff with him instead. I was looking at the samples from CWP online the other night, and I nearly cried trying to understand the bar models. Then I showed it to Dave, my math teacher husband, to see if he could explain it to me. "Why don't we just teach him some algebra?" Dave asked, nearly as frustrated with the bar model stuff as I was. Why indeed? If my extremely mathy husband (we have the enormous "mathlete" trophy in our basement to prove it) does not find the Singapore bar models at all intuitive, I'm not going to kill myself trying to figure them out. This plan is still in its infancy, so we'll see how it progresses. Anyway, he's been working on dividing whole numbers by fractions this week. He had another Math Olympiad meeting; we're taking next week off because a couple of people will be out of town, and he expressed disappointment about this, so I take that as a sign that he's enjoying it.

MCT stuff is going swimmingly. He took the Lesson 4 quiz in Caesar's English today and did beautifully. We have about 20 pages left in Grammar Town, so we're on track to finish that up before we go out of town and start up on Paragraph Town when we get back. We're still doing a sentence a day or so from our unfinished Practice Island (we didn't start that up until midway through last year, so we didn't manage to finish it). Ari's an enormous fan of 4 level analysis. In fact, he insisted on trying to analyze his dictation sentence from Summerland the other day:

Finer minds than my own have forever dulled their edges trying to explain the workings of clocks and calendars among the worlds.

Most of it is fairly straightforward, but we got hung up on "trying to explain," as it's outside of Island level's scope. We just read about all the various new kinds of phrases in Grammar Town, but I'm still not sure what to call the whole thing. Anyone? I picked the sentence for dictation because it's one of a few places where the narrative voice refers to itself like this in the first person, which is just sort of interesting, and also because of the word play with sharp/dull/fine.

So since I managed to cut short last week's panic about Milo's math curriculum, I decided this week I'd better start panicking about Ari's writing curriculum. I'm making him do narrations/summaries again. Sorry kid. I had a sort of revelation last week when I talked about picking my own passages for Milo once he finishes WWE 1 that I could do the same thing for Ari, and that this kind of relevance might make things more palatable for him. So far it seems to be working. We did three summaries this week, two from  Summerland and one from Story of the World. Damned if it didn't go really well! He did the first two without complaining and then--this is the really remarkable part--asked if he could do another narration instead of a dictation sentence today! I was shocked. But I complied. I didn't have anything ready, but we took a 9 page passage from Summerland which has tons and tons of description but very little in it as far as plot moving forward and summarized it. I helped with leading questions, and this is what he came up with:

Ethan made a bet with a giant named John that he could catch three of the giant's pitches. He caught the first two balls, but just barely because they were so hard. For the third pitch, Ethan gave a signal to the giant to throw a change-up. The giant didn't want to throw the change-up, but he had to.

There was no crying or whining at all! He just did it! Fingers tightly crossed for continued success. The fact that I am so amazed and grateful that Ari produced a serviceable one paragraph summary without a tantrum will perhaps give you some clue as to why I was reluctant to pick them back up this year. But, sigh, I do think he needs to do them. So I will do as much hand-holding as necessary this year, alternate history and literature, and work up to longer summaries with the goal that he'll be able to do them completely independently next year. He's also doing a good bit of research for his biology class (the assignments don't specify that he has to write anything down, just "research the history of the microscope" or "research one of the following scientists," but I'm having him write a few paragraphs). And now I feel better about writing!

He had his second week of biology and Spanish classes this week, and those went well. He worked on his biology homework today, which involved reading the beginning of his Usborne microscope book and doing a sort of "play around with your new pocket microscope" lab. Only we can't get the pocket microscope to work at all, so he used the one someone gave him for his birthday a couple of years ago instead. This might be the year to invest in a decent microscope for the family.


Milo: did a lot of games on the computer to drill addition and subtraction facts. I think I might break out some old fashioned flashcards, too. He really needs to get this stuff down. Today was a welcome break from "making tens;" he started adding 3 small numbers together, and this was considerably less time-consuming and frustrating.


He continues to read compulsively everything he sees. Right now he's reading Beezus and Ramona for school, some sort of mystery about ancient Egypt for his "daytime book" (his designation), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at bedtime (after I read the 4th Harry Potter, which we're never, ever going to finish, aloud). He also reads all of the picture books I check out of the library for Gus.


He just finished week 32 in WWE 1, so he'll be through week 34 when we go out of town. Because I like nice, clear divisions like that, I think we'll stop there and I'll start picking passages from books he's reading when we get back, loosely following the guidelines for WWE2 from the textbook.


Gus: built a tower of ten blocks for math:

and also some other stuff. Mostly we have a 30 or 40 minutes period every morning where we do as much math and reading as he wants to do and then I read him some library books. I'm trying to be a little more systematic about his reading....I mean, we usually do one lesson from McRuffy, but then he tends to want to grab some random book and read me anywhere from 3 sentences to a few pages from it before getting tired and never getting back to said book again. I have no problem with him only reading for a couple of minutes if he doesn't feel like reading more, but I would like to at least return to the same book the next time so that we finish a whole story eventually. This week I gave him Dav Pilkey's "Dragon Tales," which was a huge hit with Milo last year, and he read me the first story from it and started on the second over the course of about 3 days. I might have him work his way through some Little Bear and Frog and Toad from here. Little Bear rocks.

History: we did two chapters in SOTW this week, "The Jewish People" and "Hammurabi and the Babylonians." We listened to some of our Jim Weiss CD of stories from the Old Testament and read some more Egyptian myths at bedtime. Milo and Gus did narrations while Ari read David MacAulay's Pyramid  and the section on Hammurabi in Ten Kings and the Worlds They Ruled. I think we're giving up on The Story of Science. He just wasn't into it, and I'm not willing to lose his new found interest in history.

Science: Milo and Gus learned about changing states of matter this week. We did some reading, watched a couple of short videos, plus a Magic School Bus episode about water, and did an online exploration and worksheet. By then Ari had come downstairs after doing his biology homework, so he joined us to melt an ice cube on the stove for a real life demo. Exciting stuff. I'm really liking the Discovery Education Science now that I have an alternative for Ari. The kids love the explorations online, and they seem to be learning and retaining a lot. I just need to get better about doing more simple experiments to go along with it.

And, finally, homeschool soccer started this week!

Milo was tired. Soccer lasts for 2 hours, and it was 95 out. I liked the idea of homeschool soccer because 1. they could all do it at the same time 2. it doesn't require me to get up at 6:30 on a Saturday and 3. it's cheap. It became considerably less cheap after a trip to Target to buy soccer balls, shin guards, shorts, shoes, and soccer socks, though. Ari's analysis: "I liked playing defense best, because I just had to stand there and not do anything." Also, apparently most of the kids on his team had played before and there was not a whole lot of direct instruction (it's a really casual set up; there's one "team" per age group for boys and one for girls, and they just kind of scrimmage against each other I guess). He's determined to read up on the rules of soccer before next week so that he'll be better prepared. Gus was fine with his experience until he heard Ari and Milo talk about playing actual games, then he started wailing, "I didn't get to play anything LIKE soccer!" Milo said it was "fun, I guess." Gus has decided he wants to be called August for soccer, for some reason. Which is his name and all, so that's fine; I was just surprised.