A homeschool week without a project is a homeschool week without a mess

09/07/2012 Nichole 3 Comments

math0907 — McRuffy second-grade math in action!

I didn’t take any pictures at all this week! (Until this afternoon, when I finally hauled out my camera.) That’s a good sign that we didn’t really do any fun project stuff. We had a nice & productive week, but it wasn’t a terrifically exciting one.

Reading

Pete is making good progress on his reading. He’s still trying to memorize the Bob Books — he’s working on Book 5 of the series this week — and sometimes he tries to recite it without even pretending to look at the words. To get around that, I’ve made little flash cards of the words. Sometimes I just ask him to tell me what the words on the cards are, and sometimes I read a sentence from the book to him and have him put it together using the flash cars. He doesn’t like being made to slow down and pay attention, though.

Poppy read “Bad Kitty Gets a Bath” by Nick Bruen and “Pirates Past Noon” by Mary Pope Osbourne this week. She’s flying through chapter books lately; it took her all of two days to read both of those. I’d like to have her try some slightly more challenging material, but she’s entirely against that idea. Any suggestions on that front?

History

We reached the end of Volume One of “Story of the World” this week. We didn’t do any of the additional activities, because I didn’t want to cut a hole in a tennis ball to make a scepter. (I know there were other options. I just had kind of a cranky week, OK?) I’m thinking I’d like to set up a timeline once we start Volume Two next week, but I’m not sure where to put it.

In US history, we’ve been reading about the Constitutional Convention. Poppy will be memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution over the next few weeks, and we’re going to start a unit study on elections pretty soon. It seems like a pretty good time for it.

"Fog" — A hand-written copy of “Fog” by Carl Sandburg.

Math

We haven’t been doing anything all that out of the ordinary in math, but I do want to say that the kids and I love McRuffy math. The hands-on aspect of it makes it something the kids look forward to doing every day. Poppy is also doing Teaching Textbooks 3 twice a week. The McRuffy/TT combination is working really well for us this year.

Extra credit

Poppy’s piano lessons are going well, but I need to do a better job of encouraging her to practice at home. Her teacher says she doesn’t need to spend huge amounts of time practicing, but I’m guessing more than Zero time would be good.

Poppy memorized Edward Lear’s “There Was an Old Man with a Beard” this week, and Pete worked on Carl Sandburg’s “Fog.” It was the first non-rhyming poem I’ve asked Pete to memorize, but it’s a short one so it wasn’t too difficult.

Social Media

I can’t stop with the politics

09/06/2012 Nichole 1 Comment

Politics

Andrea’s Who Gets Your Vote? series at Li’l Kid Things asks readers to share some thoughts about politics. It’s been very interesting.

“Superman Comes to the Supermarket” is a super-long read by Norman Mailer about the Democratic National Convention in 1960.

Regardless of your political affiliation, Julian Castro’s DNC keynote address is a beautifully written speech.

And also

Rivers. It’s about parenting, philosophers and high school. It’s not G-rated.

A few regular reads

Meyser at A Cat on the Window Sill said she’d like to take a peek at the blogs I read, so I’m going to start adding a few of them to my weekly link roundup. (Which was going to be every Friday, and then I think it was Saturday once, and today it’s Thursday. We like to keep you guessing here at Butterscotch Sundae.) (No we don’t, really. It’s probably going to be a Thursday thing.) (Probably.)

Kottke.org is not a small, obscure site. It’s been around for nearly 15 years, and it’s popular for good reason. Jason Kottke scours the internet for interesting content, and then he shares the links with a little bit of commentary. He and the occasional guest editor never fail to find great stuff, and I like the site’s simple, clean design, too.

I’ve been reading All & Sundry for a long time. Linda has two adorable little boys, and her family enjoys things like hiking and camping and being generally rugged and outdoorsy. Linda is not afraid to write raw and honest posts about parenting (see: “Mishandled“) and other facets of her life, which makes this one of those blogs that makes me feel like a weirdo stalker if I think too deeply about it.

Heather, on the other hand, doesn’t often get personal at Home Ec 101. The site is “designed to teach real skills as they apply to real lives,” such as how to cook cabbage and how to mop a floor. And if you were to do something like melt a plastic bag on your flat-top stove? Heather would be the person I would turn to for an answer. This is not to say I did that, but … OK fine, I did that. And she knew just what to do.