Smrt Lernins

I think we’ve finally found our pace for the year. Watch, I’ll say that and next week will end up completely bunk.

Captain Science finally got started with Grammar Voyage and is making fast work of it. He took the pretest for the book and made 100%. If I had any doubts about Michael Clay Thompson’s ability to teach materials in a way designed for retention, those doubts are put to rest. He read pages 3-45 in Grammar Voyage this week. He also took the pretest for World of Poetry, and got 7 of the 15 correct — not bad, as I’m pretty sure some of those terms weren’t in Building Poems. He also started reading The Black Stallion and watched the 1970s movie version of The Secret Garden for a little comparative media experience.

In history, he read pages 22-57 in Eyewitness: Ancient China and wrote a beautiful piece on the ancient Chinese irrigation device. He wrote a first draft on Tuesday and rewrote it on Wednesday. He’s showing good progress with essay writing, which makes me very hopeful about a good beginning with Essay Voyage in a few weeks. We’re wrapping up China next week and beginning ancient South and Central America.

Captain Science finished lessons 8-11 in Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, including the cities of San Francisco, Gainesville, Palmer, and Racine, and a “Your Turn to Play.” He is doing great with negative numbers and beginning multiplying with variables. At his Math Olympiad meeting, he worked on probability. Captain Science likes to play the odds of situations, so that’s right up his alley.

In PLATO science, Captain S completed the Plate Tectonics packet, the pretests, and the mastery test. He did a second pass of the application of that unit, as well, because he missed a few important questions on his pretest. He did very well on the mastery test and, today, started working on mapping. He finished the main video, but didn’t get through the application, so we might log in and do that in the morning.

Finally, he completed another unit of KidCoder computer programming. He’s running into his first real challenges, however, so he and Officer Daddyman are going to sit down this weekend and go back over the lesson to make sure he’s got all the right foundations to continue.

Tank also had a busy week. He worked on the numbers 6-10, including tracing and writing the numbers, counting objects, and matching items to numbers. He also continued working on his letters, doing a second pass with A a and starting B b. He did workbook pages on circles and rectangles, did some tracing and cutting work, and together, he and Officer Daddyman made a robot using various shapes Tank drew and then cut out. They will be pasting them onto a colored background, so I’ll get a picture then.

Babypie mostly worked on screeching, which she’s mastering, and on slapping the dog, which we’re trying to stop.