Wrapping up last week:
ACADEMY: Emma had a great first week of school. She enjoys her teachers and classmates, every day she comes home wreathed in smiles. She's already learning so much—I double, triple approve of her teachers' goals and methods. Her two most time-consuming classes are going to be Global Studies and Geometry. No surprise on the math there, it's always homework-intensive. Her global studies teacher is smart and funny, and he expects a 3- or 5-paragraph essay from them almost every time they meet. He expects them to have a good question, just one, about any topic they're discussing, and to be willing to state their opinion in front of the class. He's like those make-you-think teachers we see in the prep schools in the movies, and I'm all YAY about it.
CHRISTIAN: The birthday boy turned 13 on Saturday. We had one heck of a chocolate cake, went out for pizza, he went to see
Iron Man, and without shoes standing back to back he proved to be taller than his mother. That's my boy. Keep it up, Christian.
FRIENDSHIP: Sofie, a good friend from Canada, was here visiting with her grandson Kyren in tow. In the middle of going back and forth to Emma's school to drop off or retrieve her, of getting my children established in the work of their new grades and trying to recommence school, of just the craziness that is life here, it was lovely to have quiet moments (while making meals, while driving hither or yon—wherever we could grab them!) to chat. Made her read
Twilight, and we talked about writing and plotting and characters and... So fun. And she gave my kids all a wonderful art lesson one day when we spent a few hours in a little campground and drew the quaking aspens and other plants/rocks/bits of wood and listened to the many cows moo over the fence. I hope her bus ride home with her bundle-of-energy goes well!
HOMESCHOOL: Ethan's in first grade, Jackson is in third grade, Libby is in sixth grade, and Christian is in seventh grade. It has changed our dynamic a bit not to have Emma here. In other words, it's a little freaky. But we had a great beginning. I've coordinated our school year schedule with Emma's so when she has her breaks and vacations we also have ours. My
evil plan has already had a great effect—Libby and Christian are hopping through their math books because they know they have only six weeks to get through the first 30 lessons plus tests. No more sitting back and procrastinating! We started off with a bang.
And I've made a change in my methodology this year, regarding writing for my very young students. I've decided that it is totally enough for me that we read history and do a couple of hands-on activities (coloring, looking up a picture and printing it out for their notebook, building a model). I'm no longer going to try to make the young ones narrate history lessons and remember names like Nobuyasu and which part of Japan the feudal system was working in. Exposure is enough at that age, "perfect" comprehension only brings on frustration and makes the lesson overly long. And for Libby and Christian, I'm not forcing history write-ups in outline form anymore. A good paragraph about the page is really sufficient for me. I'm going to work more on building their short essay (like, one paragraph) writing skills than their outline skills. We'll save the narrations for science. I'm so happy about this change I can't believe it. It is appropriate to grade level, it relieves an artificial pressure I'd put on me and my young students, and it builds skills differently, but in a way I want them built. Hooray for me and changing the system. ;)
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Now playing:
Gnarls Barkley - Going Onvia
FoxyTunes
