What we are using

20 November 2009

Week 11 Report -

This week was a great week for Me. I learned a lot this week. CC still thinks Dodge Ball is one of the best games ever invented for school kids, but decided chess isn't so bad either. We spent a good part of this week repeating that it is very easy to have a bad attitude, but good ones have to be worked at somedays.

CC is loving Take Me Back as a history book in addition to just a fun book to read. We read about Egyptian burial rites, Indus valley civilization, and Hindu gods, goddesses and social structure this week. Pilgrims who?


She memorized a very long poem, and then we spent an hour looking up words in a couple of dictionaries and the thesaurus so that she could get a firm definition on some of the words that she wasn't familiar with such as commission, postulate and misassemblage - thanks Bill Watterson for the wonderful poetry.

CC is also almost finished with Through the Looking Glass and just committed to reading Little Women which we have been using for copywork.

She happily took her first Saxon 5/4 test today so that we could find the right place to start the lessons. She started with Test 3 and only missed one problem which was a horizontal subtraction problem with borrowing. She thought it was cheating to write it vertically so we looked up the lesson in which that was taught and saw the solution which is to first write the problem vertically. Saxon got good marks for the first day from a skeptic. She is getting comfortable with the idea that if she doesn't know how to do a type of problem that it is because I have failed to teach her instead of because something is wrong with her.

I am treading very carefully through here. I've been too cavalier in my approach to math. I messed up way back in K math by rushing her ahead because the work was easy then I spent years trying to get her back to liking math and understanding it. The sigh of relief that she gave when she saw that Saxon 5/4 starts the place value name discussions at hundreds really scared me. I had completely missed the fact that she was afraid that she was "behind" and that she was embarrassed because she knew that her friends knew things in math that she didn't - even though she was ahead in other areas. It was bad enough that I had missed something in a math sequence. It is worse that she felt responsible

What else? CC's enrichment school had an Open House - poor teachers. LB has been reading some Sandra Boyton books to me. CC's been reading Mrs. Piggle Wiggle to LB. BB is getting ready for finals.

It was a good week.

1 comment:

Daisy said...

I love your blog. I read your week in review and I just felt like sitting back in my chair with my cup of tea and slowly letting the air out of my body.

I needed the few minutes of peaceful calm I found here. Thanks.