Smrt Lernins

Hi there! Been a while, hasn’t it.

It’s been a hell of a summer. Sprained ankles and weddings in the US Virgin Islands and cracked teeth (well, only one a piece of the first two, and two of the third one — one for me and one for Patchfire). We’ve been busy.

Today we start our ‘11-’12 school year. I can’t even wrap my head around how weird that is. I mean, I graduated from high school in 1997 and now my older son is starting 6th grade and my younger son is starting Kindergarten. How did I get old so fast?

I think our schedule this year is going to be pretty decent. Captain Science sat down with it and wrote out some ways he could keep himself on track, as well as (on his own) some things he thought made it a good schedule. High point point is apparently well-timed snack and lunch placement. He wants to set a timer for himself so he’ll have a bell to signal class change.

We’re moving our schedule up an hour this year, starting at 8 instead of 9. We all need to start getting up and at ‘em a little earlier anyway, so this will force my hand. I need to start going to bed earlier and waking up earlier to make the most of my day. Or something. Hell, I don’t know.

Tank is ready to go w/ school work. He won’t start most of his stuff until next week, because Daddyman is teaching the game camp, but he can’t wait to get started.

Pissed off today because I will no longer be teaching at the local homeschool co-op. The woman who runs it decided to wait until today to inform me that there will no longer be internet access, and did I need that for my classes? You know, my classes on blogging and online safety? Could I just use “snapshots” of the internet? Could I provide my own internet? Um, no. She’s had my course descriptions since the spring and only just bothered to talk about this with me, for classes starting in two weeks? Thanks, but no thanks, lady. We out.

This week is a light week. Today was orientation and the start of 10am piano lessons (a vast improvement over the 2pm ones, btw) and game camp homework and reading. The next three days are game design camp. Friday is an overview of the curricula for the year, then academic schtuffs start on Monday.

As an aside, Babypie is no longer Babypie. She is now The Honeybadger, because you know what? Honeybadger don’t care. Honeybadger don’t give a shit. She takes what she wants.

I’m so tired. Can’t I just go back to bed and claim I’m unschooling?

Ok, this isn’t actually a treatise, but it is his explanation (swiped from the comments of the Weekly Reviewins I posted today) of how he uses the abacus with Tank. I’ve had several people ask me how we’re integrating the abacus, but I’m not the one doing it, so I had to rely on Officer Daddyman to betray his secrets. Since not all of you read all of the comments, I thought I’d post it here for your enjoyment:

The abacus I bought for Tank has 2 rows each of 5 different colored beads (blue, green, red, yellow, tan). We started by just using the blue beads to count to 20, as well as writing the numbers on the dry-erase board. About two weeks ago I started writing some simple addition and substraction problems on the dry-erase board, Tank would use the abacus to find the answer, and then he would write the answer on the dry-erase board.

Last week we used the green beads to count by 10’s, and wrote that sequence on the white board. We then did simple addition problems using multiples of ten to illustrate how the tens and units place combine in written form and with the abacus. For example, we would write out 20+2=22 and he would count out 22 on the abacus.

Today we ventured into subtracting from numbers greater than 20. First we practiced substituting 10 blue beads for 1 green bead, and vice versa. Next, I wrote down some subtraction problems on the board with numbers greater than 10, and we practiced starting with a green bead and exchanging it for 10 blue beads to facilitate the arithmetic. The final problem (his Challenge problem) was 30-14. He was a little confused at first, so I re-wrote the problem as 30-10-4. He understand that no problem. We started with 3 green beads and he took away a green bead (10) and then exhanged a green for 10 blue to subtract the 4.

When I told him how well he did with subtraction, and that he even figured out the Challenge problem, he said “I know! That’s what’s making my mind get bigger!”

The abacus is a great tool, and I have the advantage of first learning arithmetic using one. I used poker chips to teach Cpt. Science about odds and ratios. I highly recommend Texas Hold’em for those concepts.

We’ve had a slack past few weeks with homeschooling where Tank is concerned. I’ve been doing progressively less and less with him during the day, academically speaking, and there’s really no good excuse for it other than dealing with all three kids is kind of exhausting. However, I had these three kids, so I need to find ways to make it work.

This morning, Tank and I actually sat down and spent about two hours doing school work together. We tried to do some work with his telling time cards and his foam clock, but the concept of telling time beyond the hour is still a bit over his head. We did move the short hand around the clock and say the times out loud. He also identified the time on a few of the cards that were just hours, no minutes. I might cull the hour-only cards from the rest of the stack and work on those.

We also pulled out the Phonics I flash cards (we have two sets, Phonics I and Phonics II) and went through the letters and their sounds. I was worried that Tank didn’t know all his letters, but it turns out he actually does know them all, with just a slight mix up with Y (he can differentiate it from V side-by-side, but thinks it looks like V otherwise). He could identify all the letters in order and out of order, with the exception of G when shown it out of order, which I think threw him mainly due to the picture of a goat, which he thought was a sheep. He’s also showing some progress with his fricatives! He was able to make a clear S sound for the first time today. Came out of the clear blue! He says he’s been using my iPhone phonics app to practice the sounds the letters make.

We also did a little building w/ the unit blocks. He made a castle with two guns. I made our house, complete with all our porches. After that, we had a snack, and now he’s watching some Mickey Mouse on the Disney website.

Cold oatmeal.

No two words can better sum up the course of my morning than these.

Have you ever had one of those mornings where you’ve realized by 10am that you should have kept on sleeping and just left the children to fend for themselves, because they’d probably learn more and wreck less than they did after you emerged from your bedroom and into the chaos that is your house? No? So it is just me?

You’re a terrible audience, Smrt Readers. I need a little more moral support than that!

Let me tell you about my morning, then, and see if you’ve ever had these experiences. I was up at 8:30, changed and dressed the baby, dressed myself, and folded a load of laundry. Officer Daddyman works a part-time once a week, and this week it fell on Friday, the same day I agreed to do some preschooling with Tank’s good friend, Dimhibbins. This already spells a busy day and I woke up dragging. The goal on these bleary-eyed mornings is simply to fix a pot of coffee and get everyone going on their daily activities as quickly as possible. Of course, no such thing happened today.

Captain Science has two morning chores: make his bed and attend to any dishes (empty the dishwasher if it was run, load if there’s anything in the sink). He had done neither by 8:30. I set him to work on that, took the dog for a walk, and all seemed well-ish. When I came back in, however, all heck broke loose. Dishes were not done, people were still running around half-clothed, and even though Tank typically pours himself a bowl of cereal, only oatmeal would do today. He started whining and yelling about oatmeal, while I discovered that someone had once again tee-teed all over the bathroom. Scrubbing toilets while Tank shrieks “I want OATMEEEEEEEEAL!” Joy.

I put the kettle on to boil, fixed Tank his oatmeal, poured water into my oatmeal bowl, hurried Captain Science along in his dish doing (it’s 9:15 at this point, so 15 minutes past our normal school day starting time), and went up to finish the bathroom. I came down to find my oatmeal stone cold, so I added a little more hot water. Tank then offered to help me feed the dog.

Badge the beagle was just diagnosed with colitis (because we can’t just have a normal dog), so he gets a special diet of steamed chicken and rice right now. Tank was being a big boy, carrying the bowl of rice and chicken, and tripped over the baby gate…spilling white rice and chicken across the entire school room. Badge started dancing around, eating frantically off the carpet, while I tried to get the rice cleaned off the desk. After Badge at what he wanted, I had to vacuum up the rest of the rice. Badge hates the vacuum, so the whole while, he barked, whined, and bit the vacuum. Fun times, noodle salad.

I got everything cleaned up and finished just in time for Dimhibbins to arrive…and for me to eat a quick bowl of (once again) stone cold oatmeal. Captain Science didn’t start school until 10, a full hour after his normal start time. Le sigh.

My morning tastes of defeat, frustration, and ice cold slop.

This has been a great week for working on projects and getting things done.

Our Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra and Home Companion books finally arrived. Captain Science completed lessons 1-3 in Home Companion. He also had his first Math Olympiad team meeting last night. I’m not exactly sure what he worked on or how well he did, but he enjoyed it, and enjoying math is a goal that all parents should want their parents to achieve! We’ll go weekly on Thursday, 6:30-7:30, which makes Thursdays a busy day for us!

Captain Science is still working on his Pantheon Project, writing the blurbs for the cards. We’re waiting on our next MCT curriculum to get here, so this is a good opportunity for him to focus on a little writing. He’s completed the work on the Greek pantheon cards and will go ahead and do the Roman pantheon next. Speaking of Rome, he also finished all the flash cards for Cesar’s English I, which we should have been doing this whole time, I realize now. It really cements the words in his memory. We’ll continue with the flash cards for the remainder of the book and with Cesar’s English II.

Computer programming began this week, too. It was mainly vocabulary and history of computers, but a nice foundation on which to build. We’ll be setting aside a two hour block every Thursday for Captain S to work on it. The final project of this semester is to program a game of Pong!

We’re finished the first unit in our PLATO Earth Science course. Captain Science passed the skill mastery test with 96%. He started the second unit today. We’re working on science four days a week, M/T/W/F.

Captain Science has almost finished reading The Secret Garden. It’s a nice change of pace from Where the Red Fern Grows, what with no dogs dying. He was excited to recognize one of the sentences from the first chapter, which has been used in Cesar’s English I as an example sentence! So far, not a peep of argument about the assigned reading, though. I think we’ll start The Black Stallion next week.

Tank got two new giant workbooks from Nana, who picked them up at Costco. He happily worked on them Monday through Wednesday, then declared yesterday that he was too tired to work on anything but drawing (which he did, quietly, in his room) and flat out refused to do anything but watch Go, Diego, Go with our brand new DOG!!!!! this morning. Last week, Tank and I discussed that if he were going to school at his old preschool, he’d only be going four days a week anyway, so anything he does on Fridays schoolwork-wise is lagniappe, anyway. On Monday, I think we’re going to do some more time-telling work, since he’s enjoying that and has grasped the concept of the small hand telling the hour.

We’ve successfully started our school year on a positive foot! Captain Science rocked his first day of fifth grade (seriously, am I old enough to have a 5th grader? when did this happen?) and Tank thoroughly enjoyed his first day of homeschooling.

Captain S. woke up at 8 and by the time I was downstairs at 8:15, had his morning chore completed, was dressed, had been on his run, and had eaten breakfast. He filled out his daily schedule, deciding he would do history, grammar review, and then math review. He finished his history chapter, a two page spread on Bronze Age China in History: The Definitive Visual Guide, in under a half-hour, then did a few sentences in Practice Town, which necessitated a brief review of the various phrases, and then did a pass on the final bridge of Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents. He’s gung-ho about starting his new materials and his online classes (which he can on Wednesday, when our Internet is hooked up!).

Tank loves, loves, loves his school work. He did about eight pages on colors in a wipe-off work book and then another five or six pages in a book on opposites. I had to actually cut him off and send him to do some other tasks. I insisted that “block time” was an important part of pre-school and that he needed to go down and play with blocks for a while. We also had a little trampschooling for a while, when I put him on the minitramp for exercise time. I’m going to have to come up with a lot more to do, even when we add in the reading stuff.

All in all, great first day. Go us!