Busy week at the Super-Awesome School

Whew! We've had a busy week here at the Super-Awesome School. We finally got around to setting up our calendar for the month!

We finished this fascinating book and we read several others about the Puritans, the Mayflower's voyage, and life in the early colonies.

We practiced our division skills and learned that "Ducks May Swim Backwards."

Played a few rounds of division bingo.

Learned new songs...

...and practiced old favorites.

We read A Very Improbable Story by Edward Einhorn...

...and played this cute Pet Shop Probability game from Really Good Stuff.

We're enjoying The Fallacy Detective; it makes for some very lively discussions!

Add karate, scouts, spelling packets, poetry, creative writing, drama class, winter clothes shopping, a couple playdates, and all that other stuff we call daily life, and you get one busy week!

Hey, Dude, what are the odds that next week will be just as busy?

This Week at the Super Awesome School

We had a fun and busy week here at the Super Awesome School of Super Awesomeness...

The highlight: a trip to the zoo. Yeah, sure, we saw some animal exhibits, but the best part was getting harassed by this Canada goose while we were eating lunch. He really, really wanted our Oreos!



Isn't he a cutie? At one point, I thought he was going to grab my camera.

We read a couple of chapters of Bridge to Terabithia for our mother/daughter book club. I was very surprised when the librarian told us that it's considered a controversial book and when it was first published in 1977, some school libraries refused to stock it. How times have changed! (Can you imagine what the librarians of the 70's would have thought of the Twilight series?)

We finally got around to doing our salt crystal experiment. I'll do another post about it later.



Lots of things happening in math this week, including measuring stuff...



A decimal shopping spree...



And a homemade game of Dragons-and-Decimals...







Hope you had a great week, too!

This Week at the Super Awesome School

In spite of several disruptions this week we did get some schoolwork done. It's never as much as I planned, but that's why I plan everything in pencil. My plans are always based on the assumption that we'll have a routine, uneventful school week, and of course that never happens. This week brought us unexpected visitors, a zillion boring-but-necessary errands, and an opportunity to get H1N1 shots (and you can believe we dropped everything for that!)

Anyway, here are some highlights from the week...

Since we have been on such a candy binge lately, I thought it would be fun to learn about its history. We read Sweet: The Delicious Story of Candy by Ann Love and Jane Drake. We liked the chapters about the earliest known candies, and the cool timeline running along the bottom of each page. After reading about candy around the world, we had to google "Jeddart snails" and "Edinburgh rock." Unless you're from Scotland, now you will have to google them, too!

The kids loved My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, so we read the sequel, Elmer and the Dragon. We hope to read The Dragons of Blueland soon. We also read Cynthia Rylant's wonderful book, The Van Gogh Cafe. (If you haven't read it, go get it RIGHT NOW. Well, read the rest of this post, and then go get it.)

One afternoon, it was warm enough to sit in the hammock and read Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. Every time we got to the end of a chapter, the kids said, "Keep going! Keep going!" We read eleven chapters in one sitting!

We are still working on quick recall of multiplication facts. There are lots of tricks and gimmicky gadgets out there (and I have spent money on many of them) but the truth is, the only way to learn them is to practice them. Unfortunately, there is no way to make that fun. We've tried saying them out loud together, starting at a whisper and then getting REALLY LOUD; we've recited silly poems; we've pulled out the Math-U-See blocks and skip counted together; we've said them in silly voices; and we've made various math fact crafts. We are all royally sick of multiplication, but I have to admit, my own recall has improved with all this practice! (When I was in elementary school, I could never remember 7 x 8 or 7 x 9 for some reason. But ask me now, Mrs. Garrett!)

We also took the Math-U-See blocks outside and did some perimeter and area calculations on the front porch in the sunshine. I threw in a bit of subtraction and division practice, too.

Yesterday, we tried our very first independent day. I made a checklist for each child and prepared some activities for them (a modified version of the workbox system.) There were a few worksheets, but I tried to make it mostly hands-on projects. They made pictures with their magnetic tangrams, used the geoboards to create symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes, designed their own cornucopia and wrote about it, and did some independent reading. It worked pretty well--I was available if they needed help, but I was also able to work on some projects of my own.

Last night Dudeman's friend slept over and the kiddos stayed up way too late, so today was fairly low-key. We had planned to rake leaves, but, you know... I'll pencil it in for tomorrow!

This Week at the Super Awesome School

How is it already Friday again? OK, here goes:

Subtraction, bar graphs, pictographs, map skills, states of matter, A Drop of Water by Walter Wick, definite and indefinite articles, spelling, Stonehenge, the legend of Jack-of-the-Lantern, Andy Warhol, bats, cells, friendly letters, monitor lizards, The Witches by Roald Dahl.

For some reason I was thinking that this week was fairly lightweight; maybe we got more done than I realized. As usual, I only see things in terms of what didn't happen, instead of acknowledging what did happen.

Hush, hush, eye to eye

So, after that lovely fall walk, we made up for lost calories by visiting the local fairly-decent burger shop. One of their gimmicks is that they always play 80's music. (You know you're getting old when the music of your youth becomes ambiance music.) Anyway, I learned a few things on Friday:

1. Journey is still AWESOME.
2. The lyrics to "Too Shy, Shy" are really, really stupid. How did I not notice that when I was 16?
3. I just can't eat onion rings anymore. Urp.

Today's plans: making a cute bat craft and spending more time outside. Kids, there will be time for Wii when it's 18 degrees and the ground is covered in two feet of snow.

P.S. I wanted to post a photo here of my first love, Steve Perry, but I couldn't find any public photos of the guy. If you have never experienced the awesome dreaminess of his tight jeans and 80's hairstyle, you'll have to visit one of his many fan sites, like:

http://steveperryfanclub.homestead.com/

or his Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Perry_(musician)

A beautiful fall day

Since it was such a beautiful fall day, I printed out some leaf coloring sheets for the kids to color. NOT!

This Week at the Super Awesome School

Factor trees, multiplication houses, measuring to the nearest 1/4 inch, Catal Huyuk, mysteries of the Celts, Name That Element, subjective and objective pronouns, adjectives, spelling practice, character comparisons, How to Eat Fried Worms, Smarter Than Squirrels, CinderEdna, Look What Came from France. I'm tired and that's as much as I can remember.

This Week at the Super Awesome School

Lots of progress in the core subjects, except writing. I'm concerned that we're not doing enough there, which would be fine with the kiddos since they both dislike it. Well, too bad! Next week we'll focus more on that.

This week, the kids did excellent presentations on atoms. They practiced in front of us and then did them for their grandparents. It was interesting to compare their styles. Dude wanted to do a straightforward introduction to atoms and their components. Super chose an element (Boron) and wrote from the perspective of that particular atom. Cool! A++ for both!

Our neolithic bread turned out better than everyone expected. Since we don't happen to have a stone grinding bowl, we used a food processor and coffee grinder for our wheat and barley grains. We didn't have any animal fat lying around, either (except for the canine variety lying in front of the fireplace) so we greased the pizza stone with olive oil. The pasty brown dough looked a bit...unappetizing, but it baked into something similar to a Wheatsworth cracker. It was actually pretty good with a little honey drizzled on top.

We made character posters to illustrate the four types of sentence. Mr. Answer speaks in declarative sentences, The Bandit speaks in exclamations, Mr. Mystery asks only questions, and King Command says everything imperatively! The kiddos really enjoyed this project. I got it from a book called Awesome Hands-On Activities for Teaching Grammar. The title says it all!

This will be our first time to try an Intellego unit study, and so far we have enjoyed it. We're doing Globetrotting With Cinderella. So far we have read and discussed the French version of the Cinderella story and learned a bit about France.

We completed our smelly science experiment. The mild acid (vinegar) caused a chemical change by eating away at the calcium (egg shells.) The eggs were really interesting--the brown ones lost a lot of their color, and all of them were soft, sort of like reptile eggs. It was really cool, I'm glad we did it, and I'm glad it's now out of the house.

I feel very confident that the kids are learning a lot, and more importantly, we are all enjoying our family time together. We had a fun week!

This Week at the Super Awesome School

Another fun week at the Super Awesome School! Where do I begin?

In math, we discussed place value to the hundred millions. We pretended we had A LOT of money and wrote checks for some really weird purchases. Did some goofy story problems involving dogs and Stinky Liver Treats. We did a lot of multiplication review, both on paper and out loud (and I do mean LOUD.)

Science was all about atoms! I love the Classic Science curriculum (downloadable from www.eequalsmcq.com.) Since Dudeman requested chemistry, we started with that chapter. We also love Discovery Streaming (available by subscription.) We read a lot of science books (real books, not textbooks) together, and did one really gross but cool experiment, which is documented below. Also made models of atoms, played games on quarked.com and just for fun, looked at a buncha stuff under the microscope.

Language arts was eclectic, as it should be. We practiced spelling words, reviewed parts of speech, worked on handwriting, did some proofreading, and discussed telling sentences, commanding sentences, and questioning sentences. If you're my age, you may remember these as declarative sentences, imperative sentences, and interrogative sentences. Oh, and we read some great books: My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, Bad to the Bone by Lucy Nolan, The First Dog by Jan Brett, and others that I can't think of at the moment!

History was the coolest of all. The agricultural revolution, domestication of animals, and the huge changes in how people lived that brought about the rise of great civilizations. Dad piled a bunch of blankets and pillows on the floor and pulled out a ton of great books (real, not text.) The kids loved working on The Mystery of the Ice Man (a.k.a. Otzi.) The game Dad invented was fun and we all learned a lot They finished the week by choosing their favorite domesticated animal and telling why it was beneficial to humans.

At some point, piano songs were practiced, pictures were drawn, Bendaroos turned into birds and other things, dogs got fed and played with, the Ken Burns series was watched, and life was good here at Big-Mountain-Snow-Not-On-Top-Yet.

Friday

Happy things:

Pug snorts.

Fall light.

Hot vegetable soup with crackers.

An Amazon order in my mailbox!

No plans for the weekend! (See above.)

Don't Stop Believin'

Just a few things that make me happy...

The sound of sprinklers early on a summer morning.

The sound of crickets on a summer evening.

When my mom visits and we can talk all day long, instead of a half-hour conversation on the phone.

Introducing my kids to the music I loved when I was a teenager. (Even if you aren't a child of the '80's, you have to admit the Go-Go's were fun, Aerosmith was rockin' and Steve Perry was the dreamiest...)

Etsy. A double-edged sword.

When Dudeman comes into the kitchen with his eyes still puffy from sleep and serious bed head and wants to sit in my lap (even though he's almost big enough for me to sit in his lap now.)

When Supersim gives me that certain twinkly-eyed smile that reminds me of her sweet wittle baby face.

My new computer!