October 25-29, 2010: Week 13

I'm typing on my own computer! It's back! But without sound, so Milo and Gus still couldn't do their science this week. You know how I was all mad at RFWP because my Aesop books hadn't come yet? Well, I went back and looked at my checking account, and ....I think I never actually ordered them. Very devoted followers of my blog will recall that the same thing happened to me earlier this year with some stuff from Tin Man Press. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that I am losing my mind. Anyway, I guess I need to order those again. For real this time. But I thought I should clear RWFP's good name here. No shipping problems with RFWP! As far as I know. They aren't very good with imaginary orders, though.

We're finished with homeschool soccer, and this made Thursday much more restful, but we managed to fill the rest of the week right up with out of the house activities. Monday we went to see Toy Story 3 (again) at the dollar movie. Tuesday we had a playdate with some friends from Math Olympiad. Wednesday we had our usual classes at LEO and then stayed for the Halloween party there. Friday was park day as (almost) always. Things still felt a little less rushed than in weeks past, though, and I sat down yesterday and worked out a new post-soccer schedule to try out. But then of course Ari's basketball is starting up soon. And I think I'm going to sign Milo up for Spanish (different class from Ari, so at a different time) and Gus up for a preschool sewing class (he's SO excited about this; he's always asking to take a class) at LEO, so...there's always something to overwhelm us, I guess.

Ari: Got to the next bridge in Life of Fred, missed three questions, threw book in floor and tore up his answers. Rather than yet another talk about how it's okay to make mistakes, that's how we learn, I don't get upset when he gets things wrong, I get upset when he won't even try, etc. etc, I threw my own tantrum instead. Our conflict-averse dog was so concerned on Ari's behalf that he actually growled at me a little (I swear I wasn't going to hit Ari or anything!). So, with help from the dog, I got control of my temper and apologized, and we put Life of Fred away for the day. Sigh. It had been going so well up until that bridge.
Life of Fred should come with a warning sticker: "May destroy your family and turn your dog against you."

But everything else went pretty well, at least. He wrote two summaries from Story of the World and did some dictation from his new book, The Golden Goblet. We did the first sentence in the book for dictation; it has lots of prepositional phrases in it, so we played around with what the sentence looks like when you get rid of them. He took tests on Lesson 12 from Spelling Workout and Lesson 8 from Caesar's English, and did well on both. We read from Paragraph Town and Building Poems, then did an exercise from Paragraph Town wherein Ari rearranged the words from a sentence in The Gettysburg Address to make is as nonsensical as possible.

He had his penultimate classes of biology and Spanish for this session at LEO. He has a research project due next week in biology and a test (!) in Spanish.

In planning news, I'm looking at History Odyssey for him for next year. People seem to speak highly of Level 2, which is what we would get. I'm a bit terrified (yet also intrigued) by how much writing it calls for. But we're talking about 8 or 9 months from now, and, given how much progress he's made with writing in the past few months, I think it's possible he could handle it by then. I'm sort of floundering around this year with finding extra stuff for him for history. On the other hand, we've always done history all together, and I worry he might feel left out if he's off doing history by himself while I do SOTW with his brothers. Must think on it more.

Milo: back to adding (stuff like 48 + 7, 56 + 4) in Singapore. It's getting better. He understands it, can do it, no problem; it's just a speed issue.

He's almost finished with Socks, and then I think he'll read Mrs. Piggy Wiggle to go along with WWE. Except I guess we're pretty much finished with the Mrs. Piggy Wiggle section. Hmm...so maybe not. I'll see what else there is. Writing with Ease is still going well. He doesn't love narration, but he gets through it. I don't seem to have too much to say about Milo this week.

Gus: Is reading some detective book about a kid named Bones. It's by the same guy who writes Cam Jansen. There's a roller coaster in it. Gus is funny when he reads books. He can't stop himself from flipping ahead to look at all the pictures and try to guess what's going to happen. We didn't do any Singapore this week, as it required some prep work that I never got around to. Next week!

In history, we read about the Israelites leaving Egypt and then about the Phoenicians. We also read Robert Sabuda's "Tutankhamen's Gift" because I forgot to read it a couple of weeks ago when we read about Tutankhamen.