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!