WR 7 2010 Where Am I?

Can you guess what this orangutan is doing?  He's using the stick that's in his mouth to peel away the caulking around the window in his enclosure.  We spent a long time watching him work on his escape.  After a while, he quit, then went into the next room in his enclosure.  Then the female came in, moved the barrel he had been standing over, got a new stick and started doing the same thing.  We were quite fascinated.

This week LB started working on her geography workbook. The first assignment asked her to draw a picture of where she is. After I read her the instructions, she asked if she could go outside. I thought that maybe she was going to draw a picture of the mountains or trees but no. She spent about 15 minutes deciding where she should be, then settled herself on top of the Halloween spider in our front yard.

This week CC and hubby have been timing themselves reading Fox In Socks. She's always loved tongue twisters which I have always thought were terrific for fluency. She started the week reading it in about 7 minutes. She's down below 4 1/2. I'm still unsure of the value of this, but she is awfully proud of her accomplishment. At first I thought she was just having her dad read it to torture him.

Now for the real school update.
CC is reading Black Ships Before Troy, and we're listening to the audio book of the Iliad. She's also working on her Aeneid memorization. For math, she is slow and steady and nearing the end of her book. We've agreed to a two week cooling off period between math books in which she'll do Perplexors and Problemoids instead of "math." She's been writing in her journal everyday. From the number of words she asks me to spell, I think I need to start up spelling. We've had trouble with spelling programs because she is terrific at memorizing things so she'll memorize a list of words for a test but won't know how to spell them. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with this. She still loves her pottery class and wants to continue in the beginning class until she is stronger then move into the intermediate class. Apparently, pottery takes a lot of muscle. In other news, fencing is still great; we she covered inertia and Newton's laws of mothin this week with projects like pulling a tablecloth off the table and making an air-powered water-bottle rocket; she made molasses cookies; she wrote a short mystery story for a competition at school (after first researching famous diamonds and hotels in Las Vegas to make the details in the story more authentic); she's spent the morning researching on the Internet along with working in Pages. She has been avoiding Rosetta Stone so I need to get her on the computer for that later.

LB is getting really good at math, but we've quit doing math so I'm very confused. She can add and subtract most things within twenty and can count into the hundreds. I think the math part of her brain finally clicked. She's been moving along in Reading Pathways doing a lesson most days. She's also almost finished with ETC 1. This has been an artistic week for her with a few paintings or drawings everyday.


I had to do another Very Important Document this week on Wednesday so the kids had the day off from school. They spent it playing together quietly all day. A few times I noticed the house was quiet then found them just quietly playing. I don't know what's gotten into them. Yesterday was beautiful so we spent the afternoon outside with chalk in the cul-de-sac. We now have a very elaborate world drawn there. LB drew the town and roads, and CC drew an arctic resort. They drew an ocean between them and used the skateboard as a boat. Today, when they finish their work, I'm taking off work early to take them to the park.

Today is our 50th day of school.