My weekly review will also, at least this week, be less thorough than in other weeks. This is not everything we did this week; it's what I can remember/motivate myself to write about with the nasty head cold I woke up with this morning.
Milo: still working on Matilda; he should definitely finish it up before Christmas break, maybe with enough time to get in a couple of Usborne readers about Greek mythology that I have waiting for him. He's reading Harry Potter at bedtime, and probably will be for awhile. He has one more review in Singapore 1B, which he'll finish this week. Then I think we'll spend the rest of the time doing a lot of addition and subtraction practice.
Ari: still reading I, Robot; I need to go read it, too, as I'm pretty sure he's ahead of me now. He did a narration from it this week. He was supposed to do a history summary, but that was one of the things that didn't happen. But he did tackle the most ambitious writing assignment thus far in Paragraph Town; he had to pick and research a topic, then write an essay of at least 2 paragraphs about it. He chose....Mario. I turned him loose on Wikipedia. I'm not thrilled about Wikipedia being the source for one of his first research papers, but, at the same time, I'm not sure there's a better source of Mario history out there (and he was so freaked out about doing the assignment at all that I wasn't about to steer him away from a topic he was excited about). There is, in fact, a lot, of information about Mario on Wikipedia, so I talked him through whittling his topic down to something manageable. The final essay is passable, but it veers a bit too close to summary (something the assignment specifically instructed he not do). It's a little tricky for him, since most of his formal writing up until now has actually asked for a summary.
Gus: I think I'm not going to order Earlybird B for him. I pulled out the textbook from 1A this week and went through the first few lessons of that with him, and it went well. I think we're going to stick with that (and the workbook, which I need to order) and just go really slowly through the number bonds, and make sure he has them down before we move on. At least that's what I'm going to try.
And Gus turned 5 on Saturday. Five! I discovered a great new cake-decorating trick, whereby I can make a cake for absolutely any theme imaginable. All I need is a color printer, cardstock, and popsicle sticks!
....and the birthday boy with the cake (with flammable Mario figures removed for safety):
3 comments:
I haven't read the whole post yet but happy birthday Gus! Are the Mario figures printed on both sides or just one? And did you frost the stars before or after you cut them? And did you use a cookie cutter to cut them?
I'm very interested in cake.
Now I have read the whole post. Sorry about your head cold!
How to not summarize when writing "reports" (as they were always called when I was in elementary school) was something that always bothered me and that I never received any instruction on. I still don't know how to explain it... any tips for, you know, 3 years from now when Benjamin gets assigned his first report?
Of course, my All-Summary Reports always got A's so I guess my teachers were less discerning than I was.
Just one side, frosted the stars after I cut them, I couldn't find a star cookie-cutter, so I did it by hand, which meant there were an awful lot of brownie scraps left over.
Yeah, I don't have any tips. Ask me again when I figure out how to get Ari to stop doing it. Really, I think most of the problem was that he only had one source, so it was hard NOT to summarize it. The third paragraph was about Super Mario Galaxy, and he wrote it based on his own knowledge of the game, so that was fine.
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