week one

We did it! We did everything on the list! On day four I was trudging through, circling boxes of stuff already done, when I suddenly noticed there were no more boxes. We had finished for the week. I told the boys, but they only said, "Does that mean we can't do any more?" Storyteller wanted to do math during the weekend. Scientist wanted to keep working on his novel. But here's what we did during the week.


Math

The Scientist is doing very well with ALEKS. He makes a giant lot of progress each time he logs in. This week he discovered he isn't so horrible at operations with fractions. (The initial assessment told us he has a lot of algebra and very little arithmetic.) I'm still not sure where he's going when ALEKS tells us that he has mastered all pre-algebra and K-6 topics, which I expect to happen within six weeks. Art of Problem Solving? < The Storyteller's nose could be spotted behind a Life of Fred book every day, and I noticed that for the first time he is doing the problems, not just reading the narrative. For me, though, he did a bunch of work on liquid measurement and some on multiple-digit addition in columns. He worked on estimation with measurement and rounding in the hundreds a little bit. It's time to move him into Math Mammoth 3-A. I ordered that book for him this week.

For the Hero, this didn't go that well. I need more structure with the Hero, I think. It seems like he is ready for a new challenge, and my casual compilation of cheapo workbooks didn't get done a couple of days because it required me to plan on the fly when I was in the thick of it with other kids. I am seriously considering the possibility that this is my Saxon Math child but I'm afraid to make a $200 mistake.

Composition

We had a blast. The boys invented protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters, writing in depth about them.

The boys both outlined from a text, also.

I corrected a basic spelling deficiency. For some reason Scientist was still incorrectly pluralizing words that end in y.

I noticed that the Scientist chants aloud the letters he is writing as he does. He's always been slow to write. This year he is better than ever before (knock on wood), so I'm not complaining. Just interesting to watch his progress.

The Storyteller also wrote the first chapter for a My Little Pony fanfic. Yes, my sons are bronies. Here's a bit of his writing, heavily excerpted by me with text missing every place you see an eclipsis.

"There was a slight breeze as Scootaloo whizzed past Mr & Mrs Cake. Rainbow Dash was lazily sleeping on a cloud. Apple Blossom was drawing crude blueprints. Sweetie Bell was at Fluttershy's house playing with the birds and singing. . . . Suddenly, Rainbow Dash woke up. 'I'm late for my first flying class!' she exclaimed. She rushed over to the building at a high speed, creating a streak of fading rainbow. . . . Rainbow Dash had signed up for a flying class because she thought she could learn a thing or two there. She looked at the old grey school with a small alleyway of graffiti . . . The teacher began, 'Here at Flight School for Juvenile Pegasi, we hope you will have a wonderful time learning advanced flying, and will not, of course, be late,' she added, glaring at Rainbow Dash."


Humanities

We read the Cliff Notes biography of Herman Melville, listed events that happened during his lifetime, and mapped the journey the author made around the world. We learned all the verses to Blow Ye Winds of Morning (Blow Ye Winds Hi Ho). We visited the 19th century sailing exhibit at the NYS Museum. Oh, and we read Moby Dick. The Scientist spent a surprisingly small amount of time with the dictionary, despite being ordered to look up any word in the text that he was not able to define. We had a conversation about the theme of the text, and we all decided uncreatively that it was obsession.

The boys read What Neopagans Believe. Storyteller told me he is an atheist, but couldn't explain why. Scientist notably did not say that. What we read last year about Neopagans and science probably has kept him from jumping the religion boat entirely. I think I may scrap my plan to discuss history in light of religious ideas, and teach the Storyteller why I believe Paganism is the most accurate representation of reality and the most useful belief system to apply to one's behavior. It's hard to keep kids involved in this religion once they're too big for festivals and holidays to be the main course of study.

The boys read "Story of the World" Chapter One, about Victorian England and about the Sepoy Mutiny. They looked at the pages on those topics in the "Usborne Internet-Linked History Encyclopedia." They made outlines on the reasons the English tried to take over the world, the Great Exhibition, and the events of the Sepoy Mutiny. They read "You Wouldn't Want to Be A Victorian Servant", "You Wouldn't Want to Be a Victorian Mill Worker", "Arts of Crafts of the Victorian Age", and "Life in Victorian England". I read "We Two" about the marriage of Albert & Victoria. The boys filled in blank outline maps to show the Victorian empire and the Sepoy rebellion.

We studied in art: using space appropriately, blocking out chunks of color rather than drawing with lines, using pastels properly. We went over the meanings of hue and intensity again and did a quickie review of the color wheel. We all attempted to copy a Matisse.


Science

The boys put together several simple circuits. We found that Bear was unable to duplicate Verdi's results, so they would have to figure out why. It was fun to watch them eliminate one control after another in an attempt to solve their problem. Science is nitpicky, they discovered.

They read brief biographies of George Simon Ohm, Andre-Marie Ampere, and Alessandro Volta, learned how batteries work and of what they are composed, the omega symbol and how measurements related to electricity are taken, how to set up and use a multimeter, what DC & AC are, how to tell what kind of resistor they have. They lits LEDs, dimmed them and played with a potentiometer. A lot of this was new to Storyteller, but none to Scientist. The value to the Scientist was in finally getting his hands on supplies and physically putting the things together he has so long imagined.


Piano

The Scientist is having a hard time integrating black keys into his playing. Lots of groaning.

The Storyteller is, true to history, quietly doing it without complaint as though to stick it to his whiny brother. He's made some kind of developmental leap that suddenly enables him to follow a beat.

The Hero can't play yet. His fingers are so small and weak. He's into it, though, so I'm not sure what to do. I've been giving him simple five minute drills. Here is where I wish I had professional training.


Miscellany

I brought the boys to a tour of the Radix greenhouse. Radix is a radical urban sustainability training center here in Albany. Scientist especially listened closely to everything Scott Kellogg had to say. On the walk home, the Scientist reported back to me about the state of the oceans after seeing the fish tanks Scott is setting up. Storyteller was suddenly on fire to save the world, wanting to check in on our completely neglected community garden plots. The Hero seemed to get it for the first time, too.

We had a playdate on the day that schools around here officially started up, getting together with the same boys that we met at the D&D/Magic gathering. It was fun to see them, too.

My read-aloud with the Hero was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It has been for a while and I don't know if we'll be done next week.

The Storyteller read two Artemis Fowl books.

The Scientist didn't read anything. Seriously. I'm worried. He spent a bunch of time with several old books he's long loved and poured over a million times: David Macaulay's How Things Work, Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics.

In logic, the Scientist covered the fallacies of camel's nose/slippery slope, lying and argument by scenario.

The Scientist worked diligently on several bicycle problems, having become our household mechanic. He also got to ride a recumbent made just for him by his grandfather.

The boys cooked, too, making muffins one day and brownies the next. I hope to keep them baking all year round.

In response to being told he had to do art lessons because he never uses color, the Storyteller began a lovely series of colored mythical creatures.

You will notice there is no foreign language or memory work in this report. I chose to leave those out to focus on composition. If I reintegrate them, it will be after NaNoWriMo.

I am just as nervous about next week. This week. If we can do it this week, I will feel better about the third week. The first week there's all that excitement behind you, pushing you on. Now we find out if we can sustain this through a week of regular family ups and downs.