Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Another lazy day

Another day of "nothing to do" because the kids are still too sick for me to risk exposing them to the world - or the world to them. I really need to get to the store and we have things on Wednesday and Thursday that we can't get out of, so I hope that there are some miraculous recoveries by tomorrow.

Cameron started the day with Spelling Time but only did the first lesson. I don't blame him since there are thirty words on the review lesson! I'll ask him if he wants to work on it again later tonight and then again tomorrow to see if we can get him on a lesson-a-day pace with it.

Next was Phonics and since there was only three words and two sentences to read, lol, it went extraordinarily smoothly. Grammar was a narration of the fable, The Lion and the Mouse, which you can see by clicking "Narrations" to the right. Math was the final exercise in this section before the first review and before we move on to measurement. I'm definitely going to add in at least one of the extra practice pages. He is rushing through the problems and making lots of careless mistakes in borrowing and carrying... or maybe that means it is time to move on? LOL, I hate that. You get it set in your head what is "right" and then someone else offers another suggestion, which also makes sense, and then you are forever going back and forth trying to decide what to do. Thanks a lot, Cathy. :P OK, final decision: I will have him do the Review section and if he struggles with the carrying and borrowing in that, where it is gradually led up to, I will take that as a sign that the concept needs work and do the Practice pages. If, however, the change of topics and gradual build up eases him into the more complex problems and he does not struggle then I will assume that he knows the concept and is just worn down by the repetition, in which case we will move on. OK, don't let me change my mind again. ;)

Science today was LEGO science. We did the Lever set and he built examples of the three different degrees of levers and then some complex, extending, grabbing pincers. Pretty cool stuff but Cam wasn't really on his game today. He's still recovering from his cold, I think (though he's not really acting sick), because he kept making mistakes and then getting very frustrated by them. Much more so than usual. Anyway, he only did one of the two building cards and we decided to save the other one for Thursday.

I finished off by reading two more Middle Eastern folk tales. They claimed that they didn't want to listen, but again I found them gathered around me hanging on my every word. We read The Queen of the Serpents from Deborah Nourse Lattimore's Arabian Nights and then read Eric A. Kimmel's retelling of The Three Princes. Both were very good. My plan is to read our last two fables tomorrow and then move on to Babylon and Assyria next week.

Now it's cleaning time. Somehow, there are LEGOs all over the floor.

1 comment:

Cathy said...

;Sorry, LOL...I was just genuinely shocked you found that there was any busy work in Singapore at all! ; )

I actually save the review sections, sometimes, for few weeks and have the kids do them as a test to make sure they couldn't just do things because it was fresh from my explanation and that they really "got it".

Consistancy, thou name is not primary child. ; ) Even Lex sometimes totally blanks on how to do something that we did a couple of months ago perfectly. That's what concerns me with Singapore...that you do and don't see it again for a year - from my experience that just doesn't cut it for the average child to make sure it's moved from short to long term memory.

But I'm a math flunky trying to create math junkies ; )