Where Am I This Week?

So, am I still part of the Weekly Reporters club if I miss two weeks? What about if I have a really good excuse?

Well, let’s just forge ahead, shall we?

The last couple of weeks have been very busy. I had to make two round trips to Virginia to bring Moonheart home for Thanksgiving and then deposit her back at her dorm. And RobotBoy is deep into Nutcracker rehearsals and preparations. In fact, we are spending much of today getting ourselves ready to be away for a full weekend of performances in another city. At the last minute, I decided that it was pretty crazy to bus back and forth (a three- or four-hour round trip) every day and just booked us a motel room for the weekend. When we return, I should just about have time to catch my breath before I take to the road one more time to bring Moonheart home for her holiday break.

And, of course, right in the midst of it all, we had several days of internet connection trouble.

Nonetheless, we are managing to keep making progress academically. Here’s a quick run-down of what RobotBoy has accomplished in the last couple of weeks:

Math:
He has just about finished the geometry module and continues to do very well. On the oral component of the module exam, he earned 100% of the available points. Now, he is just waiting for a few of the lessons he’s already submitted to be graded in order to be sure there is nothing else he needs to review before taking the online assessment.

History & Literature:
We have finally gotten back to regular reading of Great Expectations. We’re still behind where I had planned to be by now, but will just have to continue reading over the holiday break in order to catch up. RobotBoy finished reading Rifles for Watie just this morning, and has already started on The Red Badge of Courage. Sometime today, he will also read A Day That Changed America: Gettysburg. And, as I type, he is watching the last half hour of an A&E documentary called Abraham Lincoln: Preserving the Union.

One nice side effect of all the Virginia to-ing and from-ing is that we managed a field trip to the Fort Sumter National Monument. It was perfect timing, since RobotBoy has been reading about the Civil War. It was very interesting and well worth the 45-minute detour. RobotBoy’s writing assignment for next week will be to choose a few of the many photos I took and use them as writing prompts.


As a fun extra, we’ve been listening to the Chronicles of Narnia on CD during all of our driving. RobotBoy read the whole series a couple of years ago, but I had planned to have him re-read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this year as a prelude to attending a stage adaptation later this year. I happened to find the full series, unabridged, on CD a few weeks ago, though, which has proven a really fun way to pass time on the road. So, I’m now pondering options to substitute for LWW later this year. Given RobotBoy’s obsession with the Barry/Pearson Peter Pan series, I’m thinking the original novel might be a nice possibility.

English:
We’re continuing to like Galore Park’s English Prep. We took last week off while we were on the road and celebrating Thanksgiving, but got back to work this week with the reading and comprehension exercises.

Science:
We rushed back from Virginia in order to make sure RobotBoy made it to the second session of the Physics class, which he’s enjoying very much. Meanwhile, he continues to read through his human body and marine science books at home.

Latin:
Since I last wrote, he has finished Chapter 4 of Minimus Secundus and did the chapter on Daudalus and Icarus in Learning Latin Through Mythology. In addition to the regular worksheets and exercises, he particularly enjoyed drawing a picture showing how he would escape from an island if he had on-hand only one wheel, a ball of string, some chewing gum and some logs harvested from a nearby forest. He even consented to write a paragraph describing his plan.

Spanish:
Yet more perfect ejercicios. He’s doing so well with this program that I floated the idea of speeding up a bit next year. However, he is pretty vocal about maintaining his current pace and making sure he has time to really learn the material.

Music:
Piano practice is happening on a somewhat more regular basis these days. Of course, between the holiday and our time on the road, he’s missed his lesson the last two weeks . . . Ah well, we’ll get back on track eventually.

Meanwhile, he’s been reviewing his Themes to Remember pieces, and I’m very pleased with how much he remembers.

Well, that’s the whirlwind version of the last couple of weeks. It’s not exciting, but I’m actually fairly pleased with how well we’re chugging along, given everything else that is going on in our lives.

And now, I’m off to finish the packing and preparations.

Almost Caught Up

Okay, I admit I had to stare at the monitor and think for a few minutes to come up with a positive title for this week. Nothing is really “wrong.” I’m just having one of those weeks when my heart isn’t in it, you know? And RobotBoy is already showing signs of coming down with Holiday-it is and looking for every opportunity to slack off and get out of doing anything that looks like real work. It’s not a good combination.

Despite that, however, we did make real progress this week.

Math:
He has finally, officially caught up in his online math class. (Yay!) And, after seeing his grade drop following that one really disastrous module exam, he’s been really good about being more careful and picking up all the points on every daily assignment. It helps, too, that this module is about geometry, which comes very easily to him. He took the mid-module quiz today and earned a 90%. Combined with the good daily work, he’s now back to earning an ‘A’ for the course. (Again, yay!)

History & Literature:
Again, we slacked on Great Expectations this week. I think this mostly has to do with my making the mistake of buying RobotBoy the new Peter Pan prequel, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon. He’s absolutely bonkers about these books, reads and re-reads them, and he just resents any other reading that infringes on his attention. We got through three or four chapters, but we’re still way behind my goals for this week. If we don’t catch up before our holiday break, I guess we’ll just have to continue then.

We did read some more poetry, several short, child-friendly pieces by Christina Rosetti. And we talked about how stressed and unstressed syllables make rhythm and about rhyme schemes. He really eats this stuff with a spoon. So, I pulled an old middle school textbook off the shelf and skimmed through their poetry unit to see what other concepts we might cover this year. He also read “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in preparation for going to see a production at a local theatre this weekend. He’s supposed to be almost 1/3 of the way through Rifles for Watie, too, but as of this afternoon he was only about 70 pages into it. He says it’s picking up and getting more interesting now, so he should be able to catch up this weekend.

And, of course, he’s continuing to read from his assorted history books, and he’s watching a two-hour documentary about the California Gold Rush.

English:
It was a writing week. RobotBoy chose to write a paragraph about his impressions of “The Elephant’s Child.” He stalled the actual writing until Thursday, but blew through it and produced an acceptable paragraph on his first attempt. We also did the grammar exercises about commas in lists.

Science:
In addition to his regular reading from the assorted science books and a couple of marine science worksheets, RobotBoy went to his first meeting of the four-session physics class at the science museum. He seemed to have a good time and is looking forward to the next class.

Latin:
That leftover Secundus vocabulary finally got done over the weekend. (Yet another small yay!) And this week, he had all the vocabulary typed by Friday afternoon. He also translated the picture story and did the Grasp the Grammar page aloud with me.

Spanish:
Perfect scores on all ejercicios this week! I think that deserves a big YAY!

Music:
Piano practice is still a sore point. He goes to the piano without a whole lot of grumbling when I remind him, but it doesn’t sound like enough “practice” is getting done. He spends at least as much time calling out for me to listen and talking about what he’s doing as he devotes to actually doing it. Still, I’m trying to focus on the fact that he is playing almost every day. And he admitted that both he and his teacher could tell how much better he did at this week’s lesson just as a result of the practice he did manage. So, again, progress. (I can’t quite muster a yay for that one, though. Maybe next week.) Meanwhile, he continues to enjoy Themes to Remember. This week, he worked on Mozart’s Concerto No. 21.

Oh, and we did a musical field trip this week. The big Episcopal cathedral downtown offers a series of free lunchtime mini-concerts. I always mean to attend more of them than we do. This week, though, was a recital by the assistant organist on their enormous pipe organ, which RobotBoy just adores. So, we made the effort to get out the door for that one.

Butterfly Update:
Sad news on this front, unfortunately. We were extremely excited to find one of the butterflies hatching this afternoon. After a long struggle, though, he seems unable to free one of his wings from the chrysalis. I went against my better judgment and tried to help him along, but it doesn’t look good. We finally decided to let nature try and resolve the situation, and last time we looked, he was not where we had last seen him. I’m not sure what this means, and we’ve decided to hope for the best. I assume the other one should be ready to emerge in a few more days. We’re keeping our fingers crossed he does better.

And now, we’re off to the weekly 3.5-hour marathon at the dance school. Fortunately, I went to the craft store yesterday and acquired materials for a couple of small projects I can take on the road. So, with my craft bag and the MP3 player, it shouldn’t be too bad an evening. (Maybe just one more tiny yay?)

A Pretty Good Week

We took Wednesday mostly off to celebrate Halloween. RobotBoy even consented to skip his ballet class that evening in favor of staying home and handing out treats. So, we spent the afternoon carving pumpkins and rigging the front hallway with some additional decorations and a couple of fog machines.





RobotBoy donned his samurai garb one more time and insisted on being the one to answer the door and offer our cauldron full of goodies every time the doorbell rang. We got lots of trick-or-treaters, which was cool, and several comments about how spooky our house was. In between, we snacked on freshly roasted pumpkin seeds and the fudge I felt suddenly felt inspired to make that afternoon and watched spooky movies. All in all, a very pleasant day.

And I’m actually quite pleased with how much we managed to accomplish academically given the distraction of the holiday.

Math:
We’re waiting for the instructor to finish grading RobotBoy’s latest exam, but he made great progress this week catching up in his work and bringing his grade back up into A territory. He completed five lessons on area and volume this week, earning near-perfect scores on each one, plus the module exam and the module survey. He is now less than a week’s worth of assignments behind and should be able to make up the remaining lessons next week.

History & Literature:
We didn’t cover a lot of ground in Great Expectations this week, but we had fun reading aloud some poetry. We read an extract from “Song of Hiawatha” and also “Charge of the Light Brigade,” the latter of which seems to have made the bigger impression. RobotBoy commented that the recurring use of the phrase “Rode the six hundred” reminded him of the chorus of a song. We looked up the history of the battle on Wikipedia, too, and he continued reading from his various history sources: Learning Through History: Victorian Era; Time for Learning: Presidents; History of the World: Revolution and Conflict. His independent literature reading for this week is Wisler’s novel about the Civil War, Red Cap. He’s finding it a less than stimulating read, unfortunately. (I have to admit, it was one of the ones I didn’t love when I pre-read over the summer.) On DVD, he watched one episode of a series called 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed the World. He learned about the battle of Antietam. And, just for fun (and because there was a link from his online math course), he watched a BrainPop animation about the history of Halloween.

Netflix is due to deliver Friendly Persuasion in today’s mail, and I’m looking forward to viewing it as a family movie night sometime this weekend.

We had a funny experience this week, by the way. RobotBoy takes his drum lessons with a group that holds its weekly practices at a local, very expensive private school. RobotBoy has been known to walk across the campus sighing about how nice a place it is and how he might like to go to high school there someday. Well, this week we happened to be hanging around in the hallway waiting for other drummers to arrive, and we were looking at the bulletin boards with homework assignments and class schedules posted. I was perusing the Eighth Grade Honors English information and couldn’t help laughing. Their in-class assignments for the week were to: edit the rough draft of their current writing assignment (Monday), read aloud “The Raven” (Tuesday), read aloud “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Wednesday) and watch a documentary about Edgar Allan Poe (Thursday and Friday). In other words, this very-well-thought-of, very expensive private school has their honors-level eighth graders doing exactly the same work as my 9-year-old did at home two weeks ago.

Don’t you love homeschooling?

English:
We started Chapter 3 of English Prep, reading Kipling’s story “The Elephant’s Child” and a letter to the editor about the ethical issues involved in keeping elephants in captivity. As always, RobotBoy breezed through the associated comprehension exercises.

Science:
RobotBoy read about rivers and how erosion shapes land in Earth’s Waters. He read about the major muscles in Time for Learning: Human Body and about coral reefs in Marine Science. He’s happily looking forward to starting the second series of classes at the science center next week. They’ll be doing physics this time around.

Latin:
It’s a Learning Latin Through Mythology week. RobotBoy read the myth of Cephalus and Procris and translated the associated picture story. He did two worksheets on Roman numerals, including making his own dot-to-dot for me to complete. He also finally got around to entering last week’s Secundus vocabulary into his word bank.

Spanish:
Mostly, Spanish went quite well again this week. RobotBoy did stumble and have to work a bit harder on one set of fill-in-the-blank ejercicios. He ended up having to go back and review a bit, but got everything in its correct place before he turned it in for grading.

Music:
His Themes to Remember piece for this week was Bocherini’s “Minuet,” which he liked so much that he voluntarily practiced singing through it every day. Since Netflix finally delivered the Great Composers DVD on Handel, he watched that this week, too. We’re still working together to figure out a good time when he can reliably do his instrument practice. On Friday, we decided to try having him do at least 15 minutes before lunch each day. We’ll just have to see how it goes, I guess.

Butterfly Update:
As expected, the caterpillar who was hanging in the J position last week is now cocooned. I’m always awed by how beautiful the chrysalis is:



We’ve had very windy and rainy weather a few days this week, and I’ve been very concerned about him, but he’s still hanging on. And, just to add to the fun, RobotBoy discovered a second chrysalis on the underside of one of our plastic patio chairs.



So, now we just have to wait and watch.