Day 28

Up to Galadriel's Mirror in FOTR.

A pretty good day for progress. Kevin and the older boys were gone most of the day. Brendan at community college, Sean at school and Liam with Kevin in Fresno. They took my laptop with them. Hey, maybe that's why I managed to find time to clean and tidy almost the whole upstairs. In between, we worked on the curriculum material.

Paddy only had Math, Phonics and Language Arts to do today. Based on the advice of the teacher, I am letting him take the end-of-unit assessments at the beginning of the unit if I think he knows the material. This was about numbers 12 through 100. .... recognizing, putting in order, filling in the missing, counting by tens, etc. He has been doing this for a couple of years so he passed the assessment without a problem. The next two units are also on place value up to 100 and there are only a few things in those that he doesn't know well. So it will probably only take a week or so to go through those and then he finally gets to something he doesn't know well -- counting money, then measuring time and geometry. Looking forward to that.

For phonics there was a rhyme-finding exercise where you sort the cards depending on if they rhyme or not -- words like bunch, lunch, bench, quench, bent, sent. He has a slight degree of trouble with this -- all my kids could read fluently before they were really able to match rhymes, so this isn't atypical. He also did a page where you circle the correct ending blend to go with the picture. Finally, he did a page where you color the fish differently depending on whether the words have ending digraphs (like sh, ch, th) or blends (like sk, nt, mp). He did it on his own while I was helping Kieron and got them all right to my surprise.

He copied out a sentence "Bob is my friend." and then I had him spell the words in the sentence without looking unless he had to. Then I talked to him about common vs proper nouns. "Bob" vs "friend", Paddy vs "boy", and so on. He was getting a bit restless by this time so we sort of arm-wrestled while we were talking which got rid of some excess energy.

He also did an art project -- art is about shapes in painting (using American Gothic and some Piet Mondrian works as examples) and he was supposed to glue construction paper shapes to make his own picture. I used tissue paper which he liked working with, and he made a picture of a "guy" and then narrated the situation to me "he tried to jump over a pit that was impossible to jump, so he fell in but luckily landed on some land, but the water is rising...."

For history, Kieron learned about immigrants to the USA, did a map study, and answered some study questions. For science he is studying the periodic table of elements and had to answer some questions about that and also do some sort of graph which we're saving for when he's feeling better... he's been running a temperature. For literature, he read a short story called Gumption about African-Americans in the depression, by Langston Hughes. The literature generally has some comprehension type questions which he does fine on, then he's supposed to write answers to "lit ana" type questions in his notebook. But usually we just discuss them together and I change them a bit when I don't like them.

Algebra was reciprocals.

Aidan and I did abacus addition. I am thinking I might actually start simple multiplication with him before subtraction since subtraction seems like it will be confusing to him unless we start VERY concretely. We didn't get to our "reading lesson" today.

Kieron's listening to The Hobbit on audiotape since his eyes were hurting too much to read. Right now he's watching Arsenic and Old Lace.

Paddy and I started reading "Hello Mrs Piggle Wiggle". We also reread the Let's Read and Find Out book about Matter which we read earlier for science. We read some stories from a 2nd grade reader which had his great aunt's name on the front leaf, from 1912. We slowed down on the "Peter Rabbit Book" which is what he calls Thornton Burgess's Book of Animals. We restarted Now We Are Six. I found some books on the shelves which are future possibilities for read-alouds. The Cottage on Bantry Bay; The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe; Little House on the Prairie. He wants to read The Hobbit but I can't find our copy on our shelves.