The Un-Meeting

Cameron is the chair of the Community Service committee for 4-H. Until a couple weeks ago, he was also the sole member of the committee. At our last business meeting, however, several other people volunteered to be on the committee as well. WooHoo! Well, I had been trying to schedule a planning meeting (since his being the Chairboy pretty much automatically made me the Adult Coordinator) for a couple weeks and no one could agree on a time. This is the *exact* same problem I had when trying to organize the Preschool co-op last year - no one could meet at the same time! Maybe I'm just too accommodating? Maybe if I just say, it's at X time, be there or be square? Well, I sort of tried that approach last week and said, how about Wednesday around 11 at the library? One person said, how about 12. One person said, we and another family on your list have a class at that time. Another person had a death in the family and couldn't meet at all. I pretty much gave up on the idea of a meeting.

Fast forward to last night when I get an email from the one family that I hadn't heard a thing from that said See you tomorrow! So I quick sent out a reminder email to everyone else and figured that at least one person was better than nothing. Well, by the next morning I had emails from everyone and no one was able to make it, lol. But we said, what the heck, and went and had the meeting by ourselves. ;) We found a book on 500 Service Projects for kids and went through and picked out some of our favorites. Then we came home and emailed some suggestions out to our committee members and asked for their ideas and said that we could discuss it all next time we see them. I am done with formal meetings. :P

While we were reading the Service Project book, I had Cameron write out our list of potential projects. He totally did NOT want to do that but I told him that I would count the whole process as his Language Arts for the day. Next I read a Max & Ruby book to Cassia. Then I read The Star Wars Visual Dictionary to Cameron - wasn't it just yesterday that I was complaining that they never wanted to read their library books?? Then he did Review 1 in his math book. He did pretty good, but had to use Cuisenaire Rods to do a 38 = ___ + 30, which I thought was pretty bad. But, I suppose the concepts are still pretty liquidy in that little head of his. Next Cassia did three pages in her Explode the Code primer. I am really impressed with how well she is retaining that stuff. She still doesn't know all the letter names, but she sure does know which words begin with which letters! While she was working on that, Cameron pulled out another library book Playing & Composing on the Recorder. He learned how to play a G. Sort of. He definitely learned that playing music takes lots of practice, lol. I wasn't planning on trying to formally teach him how to play right now, but we happened across the book, so there you go. Even better if he's motivated to learn all by himself!

I'm still slowly working on a Master Plan for next year. I've been looking into art & music timelines to see if it will be worthwhile to try to approach things in parallel with history. Another approach would be to go chronologically, because I do see that as having great benefit, but not worry about it coordinating... just start with Raphael (or whomever) and move through to Picasso. A third method that I've seen in several curricula is to spend the first year, when there are artifacts but not artists to study, just doing a general overview of "the masters" to give a conversational edge to overall art knowledge. I was thinking of, rather than that, doing an overview of techniques and styles so that when we enter the Renaissance, he will already know the difference between an oil painting and a fresco. Similarly, we could spend our music appreciation looking at different instruments and types of work (symphony, sonata, etc). I don't know. Maybe we should just be thankful that there are fewer art pieces during the Ancients and take advantage of the slower pace. Can't do it all, right?