Is it Wednesday yet? No, it clearly isn’t, as I’m using the free WiFi at McDonald’s instead of blogging from the comfort of my own home.
Tuesday is apparently crab cake day, because everybody woke up crabby. I had all of two hours of sleep last night, only about 30 minutes of that consecutive, between Babypie’s unexplained restlessness and Tank’s 3am nightmares. I’m not sure what Captain Science’s boggle was, because he also woke up on the sour and evil side of the bed, throwing and banging things around, hollering at Tank, etc., at least until his run, after which he was sweetness and light. Never, ever, ever doubt the power of a runner’s high as a panacea for disgruntled children and foul dispositions.
It’s only Tuesday and we’re already running out of workbooks for Tank. This might be a problem. I’m still waiting on Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading, which my mother-in-law is sending, so we’ve been using various workbooks. We’ve done colors, shapes, comparative lengths, sizes, and locations, patterns, copying letters and numbers, for a total of 20 or so workbook pages over just two days. Tank is proving to be as high-needs of a homeschooler as he was a baby! His thirst for knowledge can only be somewhat quenched by drawing robots to demonstrate his comparing abilities and marking up a dozen wipe-off pages.
Captain Science is still in full-on review mode. It’s amazing how much the lernins trickle out of a child’s head over a month of no school work. Yesterday, he forgot what prepositions were and today, he drew a temporary blank on long division. All Swiss cheesing of memory has been swiftly remedied, but I’ll be glad once we’ve reactivated all his stored knowledge cells so we can start moving forward again.
In the spirit of punishing Captain Science for entering the 5th grade and turning 10 this fall, I have started assigning him some of those great books I remember reading in 5th grade. Why punishing? Well, I started the kid off with Where the Red Fern Grows today. He picked it up, looked at it, and said, “I am guessing this book ends like Old Yeller and the dogs die.” I told him that in books like that, the dog almost always dies, because the dog represents the innocence of child/boyhood. He rolled his eyes at me a little bit, but I like putting that idea in his head as he’s reading. We’re starting to work on symbolism and literary criticism this year, looking deeper into texts. If he knows that dogs represent something and that dogs usually die in books, he might start looking a little more deeply into why they die. Or maybe he’ll just do what I did and bawl when Old Dan and Little Ann bite it.
Apropos of nothing, Babypie has a mosquito bite on her face that makes her look like she’s been on the losing end of a boxing match.
