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.