Smrt Lernins

With Ninja Houseguest in town and Officer Daddyman being largely unavailable, we cut our losses and ended our school week on Thursday. Since we do school during the first half of Thanksgiving week anyway, we’re making up the day tomorrow and running our week Sunday-Tuesday.

This week, Captain Science took the practice tests and rewatched parts of the unit based on areas where he still had problems. He’ll do the mastery test tomorrow. Our big science fun this week, however, was taking Ninja Houseguest with us to Fernbank for their special exhibit Water. So timely and a lot of fun. The boys really enjoyed the working pump well and I got a kick out of trying to lift a jug of water of the type traditionally carried on one’s head (here’s a hint — didn’t make it to my head). The very favorite activity at Fernbank remains the giant bubble table, however. Tank made some huge ones!

A quick rundown of the rest: Captain Science wrote a nice paragraph for Essay Town about formality vs. informality. His argument was that allowing informal writing gives writers the ability to write more and so do more easily. It was a convincing argument, to be sure, and it also wrapped up the “Formality” chapter. He also did chapter IX in Caesar’s English II. In Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, Captain Science did chapter 37 and a “Your Turn to Play.” He did a chapter of KidCoder on programming sounds. The result was a lot of annoying beeping when he successfully programmed it, but he did such a great job with it this week. I feel like we probably did some other stuff, but eh, I don’t even care that I can’t remember them.

I’m going to try to force next week to be productive, which might make me crazy.

Officer Daddyman’s sensei, whom I affectionately refer to as Ninja Houseguest, is in town from Japan and staying with us for the next week. While he’s here, he’ll be teaching classes around the Atlanta area and somewhere in Alabama, and then teaching a two-day seminar over the weekend.

This is going to be an interesting week for us, schedule wise. We have an additional adult’s schedule to accommodate, plus Daddyman’s schedule will be different, due to traveling around with Ninja Houseguest. Can the McLernins adequately integrate Ninja Schooling into our already busy schedule?

Hopefully, today won’t be the standard. We accomplished exactly science and Essay Town before zipping off to the airport where, in a nearly-British comedy of errors, I circled and circled, he walked in and out of the building, Daddyman called the airport and paged, and we finally ended up meeting inside an hour later with me in tears and him in mild frustration. I was not up for any more school by the time we made it back home at 3:30.

Tomorrow, Ninja Houseguest is being taken to a dojo south of the city by another ninja, so we’ll be able to go most about our normal schedule, up until Tank and Babypie’s 1:30 doctor appointment, where Babypie gets a checkup and we try to ascertain the roots of Tank’s speech difficulties. Hopefully, we’ll be able to squeeze as much work as possible into the morning hours.

Wednesday, I’ve decided the best course of action is to dump everything in favor of a field trip. Fernbank is currently holding an exhibition on water, which also happens to be the subject Captain Science has been studying in his PLATO Science units over the last few weeks. We’ll go down town for a few hours, enjoy Fernbank, maybe even eat a free hot dog, if they’re still doing the “Free Hotdog Wednesday” promotion.

Thursday, Ninja Houseguest and Officer Daddyman will drive out to Alabama in the afternoon, so we’ll have the pleasant distraction of bother of their presences during our school day. I’ll have to bring the kids to Math Olympiad myself or see if I can rope Patchfire’s husband into doing it. Maybe we’ll skip it, depending on how frazzled my nerves are by that point, though Captain Science really does enjoy it and it’s a good social outlet. I’m hoping we can have another meetup w/ the Mitnens, but I guess we’ll just have to see how that goes. *fingers crossed*

Friday, Daddyman has made it his goal to find “something interesting to do” in the area. Ninja Houseguest hasn’t ever had much opportunity to do touristy stuff when he’s here, so Daddyman wants to take him some place fun and interesting. Hopefully, it’ll be something we can tag along with in the name of another field trip! Any suggestions? We have to be back by the late afternoon for a friend’s son’s birthday party.

This weekend, it’ll be just me and the kids the whole time, so I think we’ll rattle around like marbles in a can for a while and maybe bug Nana a bit.

*phew* Ninja schooling sounds exhausting!