01.03.07

Late night musing

Posted in The nuts and bolts of it at 2:50 am by Meg

Well, I’m waiting for the laundry to finish up in the dryer so I can finish packing. We are off to New Orleans tomorrow. Hubby has a conference and the kids and I will be sightseeing. This post has been kicking around my head…So, now you get it.

Our academic year is at it’s half-way point, so it seemed like a good point to see how it’s going.

I’ll start with Girl. Here’s her ‘plan’ for the year.

Math - She is flying through algebra 1. Well, generally. Girl is my literal child and is not happy with some definitions. For example: ‘yes, I know that absolute value is only the distance from zero, but WHY can’t it be negative?’ No explanation is satisfactory and she’ll just heave a big sigh, and go ‘I don’t understand it, but I guess this is what you want.’ Frustrating to work with, but a lot of it comes off as a 12 year old to me. OTH, I know she came out of pre-algebra not feeling like she had a clear grasp of the material and I am not seeing any signs that she is struggling this year. I am so happy that we decided to go ahead.

Science - We are nearly done with the life science book, thankfully. This child does not like blood and has no interest in anything connected to biology. This year’s life science was all the plant/animal kingdoms and now the human body and all its systems. By the end of January we’ll be out of it and into physical science.

English - No surprizes here. This child loves to read and spelling and grammar are warm-up exercises. Her outside reading list so far is:

• The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe - She loved it and went and read just about everything else she could get her hands on.
• You Come Too by Robert Frost
• The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm - The Jack Zipes translation - I think she burned out by the end, but another definite enjoyment.
• A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin - Not a strong reaction
• The Little Prince by Atoine De Saint-Exupery - We read bits of it in French and she wanted to see if a translation was just a weird.
• The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain - a definite no, she found the whole point of the story was wasted.
• Hiroshima byJohn Hersey - This one kept her awake some nights (see above notes about blood) but she stuck with it and I think got a lot out of it.
• Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
• The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
• Thank You Ma’am by Langston Hughes

Art - nothing much here, except that this book is taking forever to get to the ‘art history’ part.

French - I wanted to start the year with some in depth review, but the review book I wanted to use didn’t get here until nearly the end of Sept. So, we spent Sept. and most of Oct. going ahead in our regular text and then switched to the review book until break. So, now it’s back to the text. Did the review help? I think so.

Russian - is still coming. I’ve decided that this is a very hard language without a native speaker to work with. But we work away. We do have work sheets that go along with the book and Ribbons needed to do help.

Japanese - is fun. We are both enjoying learning this one and could easily spend way too much time on it. We are even learning the hiragana symbols - though our count is currently at 21. I’m loving the lack of conjugating verbs and straight forward sentence structure - subject, object, verb - (please don’t tell me that it’ll get worst later)

Drama - The fall went well and the kids pulled together some vignettes to perform for their families. They had a lot of fun and now I need to decide if I want to direct something full length.

And Boy - Here’s what we were talking about last summer.

Math - with Hubby. They started off with a discrete and combinatorial text, following the syllabus for a college level course. PoorBoy got behind with the problems while he was sick in September and then between our busy fall and the amount of problems connected with Physics, he only completed about half the work in the time he was suppose to complete the course. That’s now on a back burner. They have moved into the statistics course that Boy was really interested in and are trucking away at it. I don’t believe that they have yet decided what the last third of the year will be.

Science - Another course with a lot of math problems to be worked out. Boy has always worked math problems slowly. We’re not sure why, but he does. So, he’s enjoying physics much more than chemistry (and I think biology), but it is a time consuming course. The labs, OTH, are fun - for everyone. Catmando thought string, paper strips and rolling carts looked like way too much fun. Luckily he didn’t interfere with any measurements. I have a great video of the cats playing with the acceleration paper, but I’m too lazy to set it up to post, you’ll have to take my word on it.

English - No surprizes here. He’s spent a lot of his reading time reading British history for his trip in a couple of weeks. So, his list is rather light (oops, I don’t seem to have it handy.) but he read some good stuff and particularly enjoyed Orwell.
French, Art and Drama match Girl

Driver’s Ed. got pushed off until March.

Geography - We finished Human Geography before break. It was a good book and had some interesting information. We’ll start Economic Geography next week.

Test Prep. - it is Boy’s junior year. So he spent a fair amount of the fall studying for the PSAT. We got the score back a few weeks ago and he got a 212! Now he’ll need to prep for the SAT sometime in the spring and then we’ll hope that it’ll be enough for National Merit Standing. (It varies by state, and last year the cutoff in Indiana was 212.)

And now my laundry is more than finished.

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