Weekly Report -- Jan. 16

Math took center stage this week.

AnnaBeth worked in RightStart D on patterns. She also took a break from the regular curriculum to read some Sir Cumference; she was having trouble remembering the word "parallel", so what better way to firmly fix it in her mind than with the Pair of dragons from Lell that show up in Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland.

Thalia worked on binomials, trinomials, etc. When she ran into a snag early in the week, Rick happened to call about something or other just then, and took over the explanation of the equation which he could easily do because engineers used these skills all through college and got to review in constantly, unlike, say, horticulture majors (did anyone explain to you way back then that you'd need to review this on a regular basis because some day your 13 year old was going to ask you? No? Well, me either -- I haven't thought about this stuff in years.). Later in the week, though, I was asked to help her simplify 4w²/(4w²z + 6wz²) minus 9z²/(4w²z + 6wz²) ... after muttering several times, "I know I've done something like this before" (yeah, like in HIGH SCHOOL, which was DECADES ago) I threw myself on the floor with a pile of scrap paper and emerged TRIUMPHANT with (2w-3z)/2wz. Whoa, folks, I might frame the scrap paper I wrote that on. In any event, it gave Thalia a great view of perseverance, and also the sheer excitement of figuring out something that was a wee bit hard.

Latin was rather mundane. AnnaBeth is near the end of Minimus. She has retained almost zero vocabulary, but has gotten a glimpse of how declensions work. This week she learned about direct objects.

Thalia ... did Latin. Ummm. Well. I'm not sure what she did in Latin, though ... but if you like, I could tell you how I helped her in math, 'cause that was pretty cool and shows what an involved parent I am. Oh, wait, I already told that story. Oh well, moving on ....

Language Arts included First Language Lessons 3 for AnnaBeth, who diagrammed direct objects, predicate nominatives and predicate adjectives (we were up to our eyeballs in direct objects this week), did some lessons that mimicked Writing With Ease (which we therefor skipped), and learned about comparative and superlative adjectives. Thalia, in the meantime, did a review section of Analytical Grammar.

Read alouds were A Little History of the World by Gombrich, D'Aulaire's Norse Myths, and The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit.

In History we also revived the Evan-Moor History Pockets started many months ago.

Science for AnnaBeth was supposed to involve some books that are still stuck on the hold shelf at the library while my car is still stuck in the transmission place (the axle spring went wonky, apparently, which is why the car was sitting in a pool of red transmission fluid, looking for all the world like it was bleeding to death in the driveway). Since that unit of science wasn't available, instead, she learned how to figure out what sort of fluid is leaking out of a car -- pour examples of possible fluids (transmission, power steering) on a cloth and see what looks the most like what you just wiped up from the driveway.

Thalia started a new Prentice Hall Science Explorer, The Nature of Science and Technology. It would make more sense to do this one first, before any other Science Explorers, but we're not that organized.

Outside activities have been curtailed by the lack of transportation. Thalia made it to archery, where she shot 246 out of 300 possible points at the 10 yard line; she now moves back to the 20 yard line. The instructor had her go ahead and try the 20 yard line, and she hit a bullseye on the 4th shot -- she was really excited about that, even though she knew it was sort of a fluke.

Overall, a productive week, even though we had to skip certain things we had planned.