It's really starting to feel like the year is winding down, and this is making me happy.
Ari is doing an end of the year writing push, which was not his idea. We've had a lot of the "I'm a terrible writer!" "I hate writing!" "I CAN'T do it!" stuff going on again. Meanwhile the book he's writing on his own has just passed 60 pages (and he writes small). The writing he does do for me is adequate, but very cautious; he doesn't like to experiment with sentence structure or vocabulary or, you know, original thought when it comes to school assignments. If there is not a single right answer (that's he's at least 99.9% certain he knows), Ari would really rather throw himself on the floor and sob than give it a try. So. I've always pretty much thought the endless "journaling" that's popular in schools right now is fairly useless. My high minded ideal was all about quality over quantity. And it still is, generally speaking. But it finally occurred to me that some endless journaling might be exactly what we needed around here to get Ari past his perfectionism-induced writing block. So this past week I added in two half page journal entries on top of his usual SOTW summary and MCT assignment.
The first assignment (I just pulled up some prompts online with a quick google search) was to write about what his family does on the Fourth of July. Sounds like a pretty easy assignment for a kid who's writing a 60 page (and counting) novel in his spare time, right? That's not how he saw it. "I can't remember the Fourth of July!" he complained. "WHY do you want to me to do a whole bunch of terrible writing?!" he wailed. I was a wall; I did not waver in my cruelty. Finally, after a good 5 minutes of complaining followed by another 10 or 15 minutes of staring at a blank page, he wrote a perfectly lovely description of year before last's Fourth of July. He set it down in front of me with his usual disclaimer: "it's not any good." The next day the prompt was "I find a secret room in my house." Fun! He complained again and stared at the page again, then wrote a really cool story that was even longer than it was supposed to be! I asked, and he doesn't want me to put it here, so I won't. It involved a secret passageway under his bed that led to a room with a long-forgotten book of stories.
Ari's 4th of July assignment inspired Gus to write a poem about fireworks (specifically about watching the fireworks on Cape Cod, which we did last summer):
Fireworks high in the sky
Decorations
The fireworks are above the beach.
You can see the boats.
Math news:
Art of Problem Solving has a pre-algebra text coming out this summer! I'm thrilled about this, as it might just solve my "what are we going to do next for math!?" woes. Ari is already around a third of the way through Singapore 6A. He's loving it and not having any trouble. He is now officially better at the bar graph problems than I am (not that that's saying too much). AOPS describes the pre-algebra as being for students who enjoy math and have completed a math program through 5th grade. So he'll have finished through 6th grade, but I think that will actually be good, as I want him to be pretty confident going into it (see above for consequences of Ari lacking confidence).
Milo keeps surprising me with math lately. I will not say too much yet, but I'm hoping we're about to get a big leap in math ability like we did last year around this time with reading ability. Especially because he's starting to notice (with Ari's help. sigh) what level he's working at. He's still in 2A, and he told me the other day that he needed to finish all of 2 before he turned 8 (next month). I explained that he'd done two different 1st grade programs (owing to our Right Start diversion) and that the great thing about homeschooling is that we don't have to worry about grade levels; he can work "ahead" in stuff like reading and science, and he can spend more time on math if he needs to. He seemed satisfied with this for now, but I do worry that it might become more of an issue as he gets older if his relative (to his brothers) difficulty with math continues.
Hmm...my post turned out to be kind of filled with tales of my kids' emotional fragility. Despite the lack of anecdotes, Gus is plenty fragile, too. More on that another time, I'm sure!
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