November 15-19, 2010: Week 16

Apparently that Monday recap totally wore me out last week, as I seem not to have done a weekly review at all. Ah well. This week I'm going to do a combo recap/state of the homeschool post, wherein I note where we are in various subjects going into our Thanksgiving break, so that I can kind of see where we're on track and where we're not as we approach the midpoint of the year. Also--bonus!--perhaps some rambling about future plans. Stick around--it's going to be a very exciting blog post!

Ari:
Math: Ari's finished with Singapore 5A as of last week and just finished chapter 22 in Life of Fred Pre-Algebra w/ Biology. He continues to love and adore LOF as long as he's not doing a bridge. I think from here on out we'll do the bridges together (or he'll do them with Dave). When I look over the bridges he does on his own, he's mostly making careless mistakes rather than not understanding the concepts. We'll keep alternating LOF and Singapore from here, as it seems to be working pretty well. Unless he gets hung up on something, he's on track to finish LOF before the end of the (academic) year. I may have him backtrack a bit and do Decimals and Percents after that, saving the second Pre-Algebra book for next year, as he could definitely use some more practice with decimals (although I'm sure Singapore 5B will have more decimals in it as well).

For the looking ahead part, I'm pretty sure he'll do Singapore 6 next year along with the second installment of LOF Pre-algebra. That would put him ready to start LOF Algebra in 6th grade, but we'll see how next year goes before I jump that far ahead.


Reading: Ari started I, Robot this week. He read the introduction and the first story. We spent some time talking about stuff like frame stories, labor unions, the complicated relationship between when science fiction is written, when it takes place, and when the reader is actually reading it, and, of course, robots. He did a dictation sentence containing the Caesar's English word "profound." At bedtime, he's tearing through A Series of Unfortunate Events (he's on book 8), re-reading the 5th Harry Potter, and throwing in some Andrew Clements here and there.



So far this year for school he's read: Tuck Everlasting, The Boy of the Painted Cave, Summerland, The Egypt Game, and The Golden Goblet. So we're averaging about 3 weeks per book, but that's mostly because we camped out on Summerland for forever.


Next year I'm going to have him read War and Peace. Just kidding. I have no idea what he's going to read next year. For the rest of the this year, we'll continue with our eclectic mix of historical fiction, science-fiction, and random stuff I think he should read.


Michael Clay Thompson: As of today, he's finished Lesson 8 in Paragraph Town, Sentence 23 in Practice Town, Lesson 10 in Caesar's English, and we've read through page 47 in Building Poems. I think this puts us pretty well on track for the year. We have trouble getting around to Building Poems, but it's not that long, so I think it will work out fine. He just finished Lesson 16 in Spelling Workout, so we're doing fine there, too.


This week's lesson in Paragraph Town was on different types of paragraphs. His writing assignment was to pick a topic and write two paragraphs about it, either two descriptive paragraphs or one descriptive and one expository. Ari opted to write one descriptive and one expository about the first thing he happened to see, which was a little metal hourglass we picked up somewhere awhile back. He was super-impressed with his first paragraph (as was I):

My hourglass is beautiful. The copper-like color reminds me of pennies. The white, soft sand is like rain falling from a puffy, white cloud. The mountain formed at the bottom reminds me of a birthday candle that never stops burning. I admire the shining sticker reminding me my beloved hourglass was made in Taiwan. The marks on the bars that support this pretty, sturdy thing were so carefully made, it looks as if a great artist carved them with his own hands.

 The second paragraph, we both agree, needs work. It explains what the hourglass is used for, and it's mostly stuff like, "Also, it can be used for timing people on tests." So we'll work on a rewrite of that after Thanksgiving. Incidentally, there's really nothing that special about the hourglass. Ari is a funny boy. In other writing news, Ari is the only one who's really stuck with Nanowrimo, but he's REALLY stuck with it. He works on it every day, and has long since blown his word count goal out of the water.


Spanish: He's started the second session of his Spanish class at LEO, and it continues to go well. They're finally working on conjugating verbs, and so far it's not giving him any trouble.


Looking ahead: I think we're ready to get a little more intense with Spanish, so I'm planning to go ahead and order Galore Park's Spanish to start after the 1st of the year. My only concern about it is that it teaches Spanish rather than Latin American grammar, and I don't want things to get too confusing. But I started a thread about it on WTM and have been sufficiently reassured that he (and I!) can handle it.


Biology: the new session of Biology, focusing on dissection, started two weeks ago, and he's loving it. He came out after the first class, telling me they'd dissected flowers and announcing gleefully, "I found the ovary!" I don't know how he'll contain his excitement when they get to the sheep's brain.


Looking ahead: I have no idea what Ari will do for science next year. None. There you have it.


I think that's the main stuff for Ari. He works on Evan Moor's Daily Math Practice and Paragraph Editing, but I don't really worry about whether he'll make it all the way through the books this year or not. He'll probably get 3/4 of the way through, at the very least. And we haven't been keeping up with Logic Liftoff very well. We will try to remedy that after our break.

Oh--while I was writing this, Dave came in from taking the kids to a basketball game at his school and asked, "if there's like or as, is that a simile or a metaphor?" "Simile," I said. He paused. "Oh. Ari was right, and I was wrong." Hee hee.



Milo:
Math: Milo's a few pages away from finishing Singapore 1B, so we should definitely be ready to start 2A after Christmas. Which means I really need to order it. He started working with money this week, which he was very excited about until he figured out that it was essentially just more adding. He did well with it, though.


I'm still a little mournful about our "lost year" with Right Start. I wonder if he'd be a lot farther along now with math if we'd stuck with Singapore all along (and I also wonder how things would be going if we'd stuck with Right Start--I mean aside from how I'd be insane from spending an hour and a half doing math with him every day). Ah well--it's done now. I think I'm going to go ahead and have Milo take the ITBS this spring, even though he doesn't have to test until next year, so I can get an idea of how he's doing and what we might need to focus on for next year. I also wonder if I should take him to an eye doctor. His vision was slightly worse than 20/20 at his check-up last year...the ped said she wouldn't worry about it unless he seems to be having trouble seeing. And he doesn't, really, but I do wonder if he's having trouble in ways I'm not noticing. Ari spent who knows how long not being able to hear out of his right ear without any of us having a clue, after all, so I don't necessarily trust my perceptions of these things. And they're all genetically doomed to need glasses at some point. Okay. Randomness over.


Reading: He's been reading Matilda for the past couple of weeks. At bedtime he was reading the first Harry Potter, until he left it at LEO (and all the copies are checked out of the library). Now he's reading the same Andrew Clements' book Ari just finished. I am not going to make a list of all the books he's read for school this year. He's read quite a few. Finding books for him has gotten challenging. I'm finding the stated reading levels on books utterly useless for him. It seems like every one I consider is supposed to be 5th grade, but then some of them are completely appropriate for him, difficulty-wise, and some of them are over his head. Like, using the Scholastic Book Wizard site, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is grade level 5:3, and Matilda is 5:2. And he's reading both of those no problem, so I should reasonably expect him to read anything in that range. But he was absolutely crawling through The Indian in the Cupboard, and it's a 5:9. Perhaps I'm underestimating the difference between 5:3 and 5:9. Perhaps reading level is not all that useful of a tool. Anyway.


Other stuff: We just finished week 5 of WWE 2, and it continues to go well. I'm so relieved that, although he's occasionally frustrated, Milo never throws himself on the floor in tears like his brother did over doing narrations. I think it's going to work well for him. Plans going forward are to keep doing WWE (unless I get brave enough to really try pulling it together on my own again for next year, but I'm not counting on that) and start him on MCT Island level next fall. I STILL haven't ordered the Aesop books from RFWP, but I still plan to, and I think we can get through all of those by the end of the year. He's still working through Explode the Code 5; he's maybe 1/3 of the way through the book. I was thinking this was the last book I'd have him do, but I may go ahead and finish the series with him. It doesn't take long, and it certainly can't hurt anything.

Science (with Gus): We continued the Nebel/Discovery Education Science combo this week. The kids made little books about energy. They had a fabulous time doing it, which was always our experience last time we tried to do the Nebel book, too. Dammit! Why does something so effective and fabulous require so much prep time?! It's not fair! But I have a week break coming up, so I'm hoping to spend some time getting ready for the next few lessons. Ari's homework for this new session of biology has been pretty light so far; if that keeps up, I'd like to have him sit in on the Nebel stuff, too. Next year...who knows? I have the next Nebel book downloaded, so if things go well the rest of this year, I may renew the Discovery subscription and do the same thing next year.

Spanish (with Gus): They both started a Spanish class at LEO 2 weeks ago, and they both LOVE it. Milo couldn't wait to get the homework out and start on it when we got home after the first class. The teacher gave Milo extra homework since he's the oldest in the class. When Gus saw that, he cried, wailed "it's because she doesn't LIKE ME!" and insisted that he have just as much homework as his brother the next week.



Gus: Gus is almost finished with the first half of Singapore Earlybird. We're to that part where I have to get out a bunch of containers and let him spill water all over my floor. I guess I'll go ahead and order the next book for after Christmas. I need to take a look at it online and see if it has "pluses" as Gus is requesting. If it doesn't, I may go ahead and order 1A for him and just start going through it very slowly with lots of extra activities.


He's reading another Bones book to me. His reading is awesome, but he does tend to get distracted and start skipping words or substituting similar words, so I have to keep reminding him about that. He's doing well in ETC 1. We've been pretty slack about doing Handwriting Without Tears regularly. I need to pick up the pace so we can get through the book this year.


Next year I'd like to start him with all the first grade stuff: WWE and Singapore, maybe the RFWP Aesop books.


History: We're actually on track with Story of the World! We did Chapter 19: The Early Greeks, this week. We were having trouble getting around to doing history on Wednesdays (after our LEO classes), so we're trying out fitting it all in to Mondays. We usually listen to the CD in the car on another day, and some of our bedtime reading fits in with history, too, so it's not really all on Mondays. But we did the review questions and  the mapwork and read more of the D'Aulaire's book and did narrations (and a summary for Ari). We're still reading Black Ships Before Troy at bedtime.


And now I feel like I've been writing this forever, so I'm going to stop! I'm planning to buy a new card reader for the computer today, so my after Thanksgiving resolution is: pictures!

What a good (homeschooling) day looks like around here

I.e. a day where I feel like we get enough accomplished, the kids enjoy it, and no one cries (about school). Like today! Also because I've been meaning to describe a semi-typical day for awhile now for posterity (and anyone who cares). I feel like so many details get lost in the weekly review.

We got started at 9:30 this morning, after I had my morning internet (I don't drink coffee, so I use the internet as a substitute). I always mean to start earlier, but really, on Mondays when we have nowhere else to go, it doesn't matter much. I printed out Waker Uppers, and everyone got started on that. Gus is not really old enough for Waker Uppers (I think it's recommended for 2nd through 5th grade), but Gus does not tolerate being left out of things, so he does it with my help. Ari always finishes first and then, while he's waiting on the others, turns his paper over and works on the latest installment of his comic, "Mr. Can" ("He's in a Can; He's a Superman!"). When everyone finished, I read the last poem from Voices of Ancient Egypt, "The Marshman" ("Think of it!/A simple reed that grows in marshes/ means Egypt's story will not be forgotten...."). Then I read a couple of stories from the DK Children's Everyday Bible. It's supposed to be every day, but we actually only do this part where we get together at the table and read about 3 times a week, so I generally do several (very short) stories at a time. I've got my eye on the SOTW-esque Bible curriculum that Peace Hill Press is supposed to be putting out in February, but until then we just read through this book. For the last part of our version of circle time, we did a couple of activities from the workbook for Puertas Abiertas. Gus and Milo are on their second time through watching the DVDs this year, but we didn't do a lot with the workbook the first time, so we're concentrating more on that now.

Then we broke up for math. Ari went into the kitchen to finish the final few pages in Singapore 5A, and I set Milo up working on some subtraction in 1B. Gus draws or plays or looks at books or whatever while I get his brothers going. Sometimes Ari needs help with math; sometimes he doesn't. Today he handled everything except a couple of word problems; I took a look at them and decided we'd let DH help him with those when he gets home. Because I hate Singapore word problems. Today I sat with Milo and wrote down the answers for him, as I often do when the math is something that requires concentration. He still has trouble with reversals with his numbers and just a typical 7 year old boy aversion to lots of writing, so I figure writing the numbers for him gives him less to worry about so that he can focus on the problems. He got through the exercise fairly quickly, and I gave him a page of Explode the Code and a spelling assignment from Spelling Workout to work on while I checked on Ari. Ari was doing fine, so I reminded him to do his Evan Moor Daily Math Practice and Paragraph Editing and then review his spelling words once he finished math. Then I went back in and did a few pages of Singapore Earlybird with Gus. It was all about measuring, so first we measured how many foot lengths long and hand widths long various things in the room were, then moved on to talking about concepts like longer/longest and taller/tallest.

By now Ari and Milo were both finished with their independent work and off to read in the living room. Milo read for 30 minutes from Matilda and Ari read for 45 from The Golden Goblet. I read a library book to Gus, "Monkey Creates Havoc in Heaven: The exciting tale of the fearless Monkey, one of China's best-loved mythical characters." The book was a bit longer and more...episodic than I expected (not to mention full of rather advanced vocabulary like "martial" and "imperial steeds" and "brandishing"), but Gus was pretty into it. At the end, the monkey is imprisoned inside a mountain for 500 years. "They were mean to the monkey," Gus commented. But really the monkey totally deserved it; he was a giant pain in the ass. Gus read a (very) little bit to me from "Dragon Tales" (not the TV dragon tales). He wasn't feeling it today. He finished up his school time with a page from Explode the Code.

Milo finished up his reading and came back in to do Writing With Ease. Today was narration day, on a passage from Dr. Dolittle, and it went pretty smoothly...more smoothly than usual, even, probably because the narration was only supposed to be one sentence today. Like old times! (last year's WWE 1 old times, that is).

By then Ari was finished reading, so I set Milo and Gus up to watch Puertas Abiertas and do their piano practice, and Ari and I went back to the schoolroom for language arts. First we took care of the Caesar's English quiz that we didn't get around to last week. He couldn't remember what lofty meant, and wanted to sit there staring at the paper until he got it, but I finally insisted we move on (I haven't graded it yet, but I think he only missed that and maybe one other word). He did a sentence from Practice Town, and then we started reading the lesson on topic sentences in Paragraph Town. Then we had last week's spelling test. I have to make up a ridiculous story using all the spelling words, because I did it once and obligated myself to continue forever. Today's story was about a woman who was teaching a lesson on ladybugs to her class and wanted her father, who was a police officer in a ladybug village, to help out. But her father was still holding a grudge about an incident that happened when she was young, wherein she accidentally stomped on and wiped out an entire ladybug village. I make them up as I go, a sentence for each spelling word, although I know it sounds like a story that it took me weeks to compose ;-).  Then I left Ari on his own to write a 2 paragraph version of the story of the Minotaur. I came back when he finished, read through it and made some comments so that he can write another draft tomorrow.

Lunchtime! In theory we have an hour break for lunch and playing, but in reality I am more than happy to have this stretch on later if we're not in a rush and everyone's playing nicely. Today was one of those magical days; when the hour was up they were all out playing in the woods, so we probably wound up taking more of a 90 minute break.

When they finally came back in, we all sat down for history. We'd already listened to chapter from Story of the World (on Crete) in the car over the weekend, so we jumped right into the review questions from the activity guide. I mention this only because my kids, particularly Ari, hated history for so long: they LOVE the review questions now and fall all over each other trying to answer them first. We read through the corresponding pages from our Usborne encyclopedia, then started in on D'Aulaire's Greek Myths. They were kind of spellbound. I'm very excited about Greece! We're going to read Black Ships Before Troy as bedtime reading, I think. While all this was going on, I kept having to forcibly stop Milo from reading The Monster in the Maze and assuring him that he could read it later. I sent Ari out to start looking through the Usborne quicklinks on the netbook while Milo and Gus each did a narration. Then I took them to the real computer to look at quicklinks (we mostly looked at pictures from the palace at Knossos). And then we were officially finished, but the kids went into the playroom to work on making mazes, complete with Playmobil Egypt skeletons and a toy cow to represent the Minotaur.

And there it is--a successful day! Except Ari still needs to practice piano, I just remembered.....

November 1-5, 2010: Week 14

I have big plans to someday post some pictures here again. But first I need my refurbished computer to have a working card reader. Or I suppose I could see if I can figure out how to connect the camera to the computer, but I haven't done that in forever, and I have no idea if we even have the right cable and whatnot to do it anymore. So you'll have to make up your own pictures in your head again this week. I could have taken pictures with my iphone, I guess. Hmm. Oh well.

So what did we do this week? Aw, hell, I can't remember. It's been a long week. Thursday night DH and I went to see Mike Birbiglia while my brother played Wii with our kids and put them to bed for us, so that was fun. Oh, but the homeschooling....right. Let me think.

Ari returned to Singapore, the happy math that doesn't make anyone cry (in this house, anyway), and that was awesome. He's doing the final review in 5A now and just has a page or two left. He did cry about having to give titles to the three paragraphs in The Gettysburg Address for Paragraph Town, though. Well, maybe he didn't actually cry, but he didn't like it. He finished lesson 9 in Caesar's English and lesson 13 in Spelling Workout, but we didn't get the tests done today; we'll do them Monday most likely. He's still reading The Golden Goblet. He was reading a bunch of Lemony Snicket at bedtime, but I believe he's now re-reading the last Harry Potter in preparation for the movie. Perhaps I should do that, too.

He finished his first session of Biology and Spanish at LEO. They had a test in Spanish, and he got a 91; he had a bit of trouble with articles, I guess. He and DH spent hours and hours making a lovely poster about the differences and similarities in plant and animal cells for his final project in biology. That would have been a nice thing to put a picture of right here.

Milo also did Singapore, but it did not go quite as swimmingly with him. He's working on mentally adding numbers within 100, like 45 + 27 and such. As usual, he can do it, but it's agonizingly slow and he gets distracted very, very easily.

He's reading Roald Dahl's Matilda, having finished Socks early in the week. It's possible I've abandoned the idea of having him read the books used in WWE. I tried to get him to read Ginger Pye, and he hated it. "I hated that book, too," Ari told him. So maybe he can just read awesome books this year and that will be good enough. He's on a big Roald Dahl kick with bedtime reading, too. He read Esio Trot, The Magic Finger, and The Enormous Crocodile this week. We finally finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at bedtime, so I think his plan is to start reading Sorcerer's Stone to himself after we watch the movie (tomorrow, if netflix comes through for us). Tonight I started Lord of the Rings at bedtime (just for the older two), but I'm not sure if it's going to work or not. Ari wanted me to read The Hobbit again first, but I just it to them last year and don't want to again right now. I suggested he read it to himself, but he didn't think much of that idea.

Gus finally did some more math; it was measurement, which he thinks is really cool. He finished reading his Bones book and picked up where he left off months ago in Dav Pilkey's "Dragon Tales." He also says he's reading Ribsy to himself. I'm not really sure what's going on there.

I finally got around to more science with Gus and Milo. We started the unit on energy at Discovery Education. Then someone on the WTM boards posted about how the new level of Nebel's Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding is out, and the download is only $5. This, in turn, made me feel sad about how we abandoned BFSU after 8 lessons a couple of years ago, so I pulled it out and did the first lesson on energy (and bought the download. Because it's only $5!). It was, of course, terribly successful, and the kids were all into it, and, you know, maybe I should try to do it every week. Sigh. I'm very glad I got the Discovery Education Science, because it's working as intended--an easy way to at least get some science done every week (unless my computer's broken). Now I only have to feel guilty about not adding supplemental stuff in. And next week Ari gets to start cutting up cow eyeballs and stuff in his biology class, so no guilt there!

I signed both Milo and Gus up for a beginning Spanish class at LEO starting next week. I think last week I mentioned the preschool sewing class Gus wanted to take...not enough kids signed up for it, so it's not happening. But I managed to talk him into Spanish. I hope it goes well. Milo took Spanish with Ari (with a different teacher) last year; he was the youngest in the class by far, and there was a lot of writing, and it was kind of a hot mess.

History! Another two chapter week; we did chapters 16 and 17 in SOTW, and learned about Assyria and Babylon. We looked at the Usborne quicklinks and found a choose your own adventure type story about trade in Babylon. We built a siege tower out of legos. We also went ahead and started listening to our Jim Weiss Greek Mythology CD, because we just couldn't wait any longer. Well, something like that. Oh, also. We do a poem of the day most mornings, and for the past few weeks they've been from a book called Voices of Ancient Egypt that we found at the library. Each page has a poem told from the perspective of a different worker--dancer, stone cutter, scribe, et. al. It's really nicely done--lovely illustrations and text.

Oh, last thing: kids are all doing Nanowrimo this month. I think they set their word count goals too low; Ari said 800, but he's already over halfway done with that. Milo and Gus are both dictating to me, so it's kind of slow going. But they're excited, so that's lovely to see.