You know how some weeks start out really strong and then peter out to nothing much? Yeah, that was this week.
Captain Science has done great with math this week, finishing chapter 29 of Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents completing the bridge to chapter 31 on the second try, and wrapping up the week with chapter 31 today. We’ll call this our high point.
History is our low point. Since I’m covering an area that gets the skimp in History: The Definitive Visual Guide, pre-Roman and Roman-era Britain, I’ve been relying on online resources, especially the wonderful articles on the BBC’s site. Supposedly, Captain Science was to read the article on Roman Britain and then write an essay addressing how life changed for the people of Britain under Roman rule. The actual essay was mostly a summary of how the Romans came to Britain, and a thin essay at that. Currently, Captain Science is trying to flesh it out a bit. We’ll see.
Language arts continues at a modest pace. Captain Science does two sentences from Practice Town daily. He completed the first half of his chapter from Caesar’s English I and will cover the second half today. Chapters alternate between short chapters covering word stems and large chapters covering vocabulary. We do the quiz over the previous chapter on one Monday, the stems the following Wednesday, then the first and second halves of the vocabulary chapter on the subsequent Mon/Wed. Captain Science really seems to be enjoying the Latin-based vocabulary and the format of the book, which is great! After finishing vocabulary, he’ll continue with his Paragraph Town reading and do the next section from Building Poems. If he writes anything interesting, I’ll be sure to share!
The co-op continues at a nice clip. The game class kids seem to be enjoying themselves, everyone loves the brain class, and my writing students are making headway into their stories. We covered “in medias res” this week and talked about making decisions as to where in the plot to start the story. We’ll be doing some experimenting with that in the following weeks.
Physics this week consisted of more Thames and Kosmos labs at Patchfire’s house. For once, Captain Science actually finished assembling something before Eclectic Girl, which is quite unusual. Usually he dawdles quite a bit and EG has to fuss at him to stay on track. Luckily, he seems to enjoy being bossed around by smart females, so he and EG make a good team in that respect. They built some sort of catapult this week and flung wooden balls all over the kitchen. I continue to be unimpressed by the complete lack of instructions in the kit, however. “Assemble as shown” doesn’t help very much when the pictures are small, there are no step-by-step instructions, and many of the small parts look so similar as to be impossible to distinguish between without closeup shots. Hmph.
Piano continues to go well, so we have that to focus on as a major positive. My aunt is having some surgery on March 10th, however, so we’ll have two weeks w/o piano lessons. This means I have to be diligent about making him work on the scales (which were just added) and doing some theory work, so he doesn’t lose his focus. Getting him to play songs is no work at all, though. He loves it!
That was our week. It’s not finished, but I sure feel pretty darn finished right about now.
Sounds like a terrific week! Lydia wasn’t too excited about her essay writing this week either. How do you pick your topics? Seriously. I pull a blank and Lydia isn’t much help most of the time. She’d rather write about nothing but the Cherokee for the rest of her life.
I’m trying to elicit some logic-level thinking, so I try to come up with topics that make him think about social/cultural implications of certain events or inventions. With Rome, I worked on a list of topics ahead of time, but I’m sort of pulling them from my mental pocket randomly for early Britain. One good thing about a background in writing is that I can almost always come up with a topic. If you need ideas for Rome, however, you can take a look at the essay topics we used.
I think I love you! Thanks. I need to find some focus with Rome. With Lydia doing CTC and Ryan doing SOTW, I feel like I’m all over the place in terms of topics. This will narrow the field of vision. Next year is going to be so much easier.
You might like this article…
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Trekking-Hadrians-Wall.html
Even though if feels like less than your best, it reads like a pretty good week. Hope you find the rest and renewal you need over the weekend.
Those Thames and Kosmos kits look great, but I am not too sure about them any more. I have the Chem1000 kit. DD~12 and I didn’t make it too far, but the little bit we did seemed more like activity and less about learning anything substantial about chemistry. I wish there were some “real” science kits that were not just a collection of disjointed activities.
We have too many weeks that start out with great intentions,then life gets in the way, and the week fizzes.
Best wishes on a productive next week.
Iris
Hope you had the weekend to recover from your week. Monday is always a new day!
Which T&K physics kit are you guys co-oping with? I’m starting to look over physics resources for next school year.
We’re using this one. It’s an awesome kit in terms of experiments and education, but lacks any step-by-step instructions for building.