Week 10, Birthday, Math and Reading glasses

LB is 8

Happy Birthday, LB!  Darling LB turned 8 this week.

One of the good things about homeschooling is taking the day off for your birthday.  LB got breakfast in bed and a trip to the zoo for her birthday.  We spent the zoo trip following her around the zoo at her pace.  She also had a yummy gluten free chocolate cake with a dairy free chocolate ganache frosting.  Seven was fun, but she is happy to be eight.


CC's math project.  By all that is holy, please.  I don't have enough patience to watch a child color-code when she could be graphing.  Really.  She kills me.  I'm a monochromatic kind of person.  She's artistic.  Somebody save me from artistic people.  How on earth did this happen to me?!  Smile and breathe slowly.

She really did a great job.  She spent two weeks working on a graphing project.  She didn't just want to do something simple and easy to answer.  After a lot of effort, she chose to look at the effects of bias on surveys.  It took her a lot of time to design a question set that would demonstrate bias.  Then we spent 5 days collecting data.  The results convincingly showed that bias has an influence and negative bias has a stronger influence than positive.  (51%-49% favored dogs over cats in the unbiased question.  Only 30% chose whichever was the target of the negative bias.  59% chose the target of positive bias.)  She had to graph her data in two different ways which forced her to figure out how to account for the different sample sizes in her data set and still show her findings.  I think it was a terrific project.  She worked hard and learned how important it is to look carefully at the design of a study instead of just looking at the results.

This week her orchestra class had their first concert in morning assembly.  They were terrific.  I still think it is amazingly bold to take a whole class of sixth grade public school students and turn them into a string orchestra.  My brother always notes that the kids are self-selected into the school so they aren't the same as a class at a typical public school, but still.  This is not a group of 65 kids paying private teachers and paying for their own instruments.  It is bold to expect they can achieve this.  At the end of the year, these kids will sounds wonderful.  At the end of the 5 year orchestra program, they will be amazing.

LB's reading glasses arrived Monday.  She was very excited about them, but I think she was disappointed too.  Despite her dad and I both warning her that the glasses should make reading easier by making words bigger but that they wouldn't correct her vision problems, she was disappointed.  She spent a lot of time playing with the way things looked with her glasses during her lessons, but she eventually put them away before finishing her work without them.   I think she had hoped they would making make everything all better.  Later in the week, she brought out again to read a chapter from Mercy Watson and said that they really helped.

Between the new glasses and her birthday, she didn't do a lot of school.  She only completed three days of work this week.  She had a lot of fun, and is making progress in math and has been doing well with her science and poetry also.   Our book highlight for the week was The Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night.  It is a mix of descriptive poetry and natural history with beautiful illustrations.  It was our first poetry book by Sidman, and I think we'll read some more.

It think it is interesting how very different my kids' taste in poetry at this age has been.  In second grade, BB loved nonsense poetry by Shel Silverstein like Where the Sidewalk Ends.  CC loved dramatic poetry like "Charge of the Light Brigade" by Tennyson.  LB loves lyrical poetry like "Daffodils" by Wordsworth.