Posts
Will:
The subject we spend the most time teaching Will is the art of Expeditiousness. Otherwise known as S*&t or Get Off the Pot (he needs to work on that, too). It comes and goes. Typically, he spends a lot of time villainizing me and any given assignment, then says, when he finally does it, "Wow, this is actually pretty interesting." Which causes me to make head-shaped depressions in our wall.
When he does work, we're having a lot of fun. Here's the type of thing Miquon asks you in 3rd grade, for those of you who are interested:
(8 x 10) + (8 x 4) = _____ + 32 = _____
4 x ____ + 4 x 5 = 4 x 105
I'm finding that their approach has resulted in lots of mental math, even though we didn't use the rods as much as we were supposed to. Will's also more flexible about breaking things down in more than one way. His approaches to problem solving sometimes surprise me, but he's very good at articulating his thought processes, and they make all kinds of sense. I think Miquon has done what we wanted: given him a flexible, intuitive approach to math. This week, they segued over to fractions and jumped immediately into both adding and multiplying them, in ways that illustrate the concept but don't require him to mess around with denominators quite yet. By the time he does need to, he'll have a firm grasp of why.
His writing is coming right along. He asked to alternate between CW models and making up original stories, so we've been doing that. Here's his original story for last week, which bodes to be the first in an installment (I blame this on WRVO):
One day a knight ran into the throne room and said, "The princess has been captured!" The kind quickly sent for the best knights in the kingdom and told them to find the princess. One went to a fire planet. The other went to a jungle planet, and the last went to an ice planet. None of them ever returned.
Three years later...
One day, a hero whose name was William heard that the princess had gone missing. He set about doing his task. He heard that a UFO had crashed in the marsh. He went to the marsh, got in the UFO and went to save the princess.
During our editing sessions, it has become clear that his spelling errors are frustrating him. so we've started using Spelling Power. So far, we like it. It's quick and easy to do, and reminds him of patterns he sees frequently in his reading but doesn't always recall when he's drafting a piece of writing.
I'm thinking about jettisoning CW next year entirely, and using Classical Rhetoric For the Modern Student to inform the assignments I give Will. I feel like CW provides a level of hand holding I don't actually need, without providing the higher level deconstruction of what we're doing that I want. Perhaps that's b/c we're still on an early level. Readers' thoughts are appreciated.
Will's starting to muck around with imperfect and future tense in Latin. He's settled into his Latin studies. No real news, but we're chugging along. Same with Greek. We're all working on memorizing the dipthongs right now, and reveling in the actual Greek vocabulary that begins at the end of Greek Alphabet Code Cracker. Our Elementary Greek workbooks came yesterday, but we're still waiting for the text and CD.
Both kids are immersed in the Liberty's Kids DVDs right now. They're sort of trippy to watch. Very hokey, typical DiC animation...but with people like Walter Cronkite and Michael Douglas doing the voices...and, notably, Sylvester Stallone playing Paul Revere. Yo, the British are comin'. I keep waiting for the horse to snap in half under him. The kids are enjoying it, though. Will's drawing the Boston Tea Party in his journal right now, in fact. What I'm hoping is that watching hokey cartoons will result in friendly familiarity with historical figures and events, and we'll then use that to dig through the HUGE pile of books downstairs. Every time we do Chinese history, we're supposed to drag out Long Is A Dragon, but when we do the Revolutionary War, wowee. We're the only people east of the Mississippi NOT getting snow this week, but it's snowing books.
I'm working on the first list of assigned silent reading Will has ever had. He's been reading The Great Fire by Monica Dickens aloud to us, and he's almost done. He's racing me through The Lightning Thief; not sure what will happen with that one. He bought a copy with holiday gift cards, but hadn't been reading it until I asked if I could. Then he grabbed it up and started devouring it.
Posy:
Girlfriend is tearing through ETC. She's partway through Book 3. Yesterday, she wrote the this in a small journal she keeps under her bed:
Im mising mi math
der diurey
i fwnd mi math
luv Rosey
She could easily read herself simple picture books at this point, but is insisting on reading things that look like chapter books...like Geronimo Stilton, which my friend Tami's daughter M. got us hooked on. We checked out a stack of them from the library yesterday, because Posy is very insistent that she has finished the one we got from T and M.
Miquon had her messing with long columns of numbers last week. Some carrying was required, but part of the point was to draw her attention to ways she could combine numbers in the column to make the addition easier. So, they'd give her this huge string of numbers, but within them would be a bunch of ways to make ten. I'm seeing progress in her mathematical thinking.
She's very good at translating simple Greek words. I love doing Greek with Posy.
We're...not behind on science, exactly. I'm demotivated. We have more experiments available to us than we could ever get through by next fall, so I'm not terribly stressed out about letting it take a backseat for a few weeks while we catch up on other things.
