Tuesday, December 04, 2007

A Bipartisan Home

I am in shock. We got a phone call this morning. A phone call from... can I even write it down?? A phone call from...

... the Republican Party. My husband has betrayed me. He, who incidentally never registered to vote before this, his thirty-third, year because he didn't want to be called to jury duty, registered as a Republican. I always knew he leaned that way a bit, but to actually register red?? *sigh* I feel like a woman who has suspected for years that she was being cheated on and has finally found the proof. All he could say in his defense was, "Hail to the Chief." *sigh*

Our home has gone bipartisan today in other, less horrifying, ways too. We went with a half traditional-half technological school day. Cameron set the tone this morning with Spelling Time. He finished up last week's Spelling Lesson but then accidentally closed the browser before he got to play his reward game, lol, so I reset his lesson so that he could retake the test and get his game time. He then wanted to go on to this week's lesson but I wanted him to do the first half of his Spelling Workout lesson first as the introduction to the words. He decided that he wanted to do the entire thing instead. OK! And then he went back to Spelling Time and did the first two sections of the week's lesson. He wanted to keep going but I made him stop, especially since he used the hints to help spell all the words even though he had just written them several times in SWO. If you can't retain them five minutes later, I think a longer exposure time is needed!

Next was Phonics and Grammar. Nothing too exciting in either of those except that Phonics went very easily and Grammar was a little touchy since Cameron refused to even try giving an oral narration to the fable that we read. The book suggests that if the child can't remember the story to go over the review questions. Well, he easily got all of those right but still couldn't "remember" the story to give me a narration of it. So I gave him one instead. I didn't want to stress over it. I just wanted to show him how easy it really was. He still wouldn't try though. Oh well.

Next we did Science and started learning the three states of matter. The book is very leading in its explanations, asking rhetorical questions, and Cameron was tending to guess what it was going to say next quite frequently. I was very glad to see him really thinking about what I was saying. Next we did an experiment to determine the volume of an irregular solid. We found the volume of Han Solo and Yoda and a motorcycle. Can't get that kind of education in public school! ;)

For math I let him play math games on the computer. He played Addition Attack and Cannon Math at the Funschool Arcade and kept playing each of them over and over and over until he was finally able to beat all the levels. I had wanted to find a game where he could practice his multiplication by twos but wasn't able to find one before he started getting impatient to play, lol. But it worked out well because those addition games really helped him to solidify those facts. He still has some problems with things that add to more than 10 (i.e. 8 + 5 or 18 + 15, whereas 12 + 16 is ok) but he was really starting to remember more of them by the end. And I'm not surprised, that was like 45 minutes of drill!

And that was our school day today. I've been doing some thinking about our history cycle but I won't bore you with it here. I will bore you with it here though if you are interested. ;)

Update: I just IM'ed with DH and he now claims that he's *not* a Republican, he's just open-minded. Now what exactly does that mean? Why is he evading my questions of his registered political affiliation? It's all very suspicious...

3 comments:

Meesh said...

ROLF!! Well if it is any consolation to you your DH is in good company with mine. Ben is a die hard republican. I'm registered indy, but if I had to pick a party- well I hope you'd still consider me a friend! LOL!

~Mary~ 4boys4me said...

My dh is Republican, too! But I whole heartedly support him, since I am too!

Maybe your dh just wants to vote in the Repub. primary. Here in WV, lost of Repubs. will register as Democrats just to vote the primaries. There's always a lot more Dems running than Reps.

naturalmom said...

I'm sorry to hear about your husband's affiliation. "Open minded" huh? O.K., sure. (LOL!)

Thanks for the link to funschool. My kids are going to check it out.

Stephanie