A Whole Week of Relative Normalcy

So, RobotBoy finished his two-week sojourn at the arts center. It was a wonderful experience for him, personally, and the show seemed to be very successful. Although it was technically open to the public for both presentations, they really promoted the second one. And, on that night, they had so many reservations that they had to add chairs. They got a standing ovation and lots of great audience feedback for both the show and the performers.

Sometime during week two, we got word that they wanted him to come to New York to participate in two more presentations. This possibility had been mentioned before rehearsals began, but became “real” when they bought us the plane tickets. So, next week, we’re off on that adventure. RobotBoy has never been on an airplane and hasn’t been to NYC since he was an infant in a stroller. As you can imagine, this is very big news for him.

Needless to say, I’m not planning on trying to accomplish anything academic next week. Instead, I re-wrote my lesson plans for the month to pull in the left-over assignments from last week and all of February and compacted it into the three weeks we’ll actually have. And I did my mean mommy act and cracked the whip this week to make sure we got things done while we were here.

Math:
Having finished his online math class (with a nice A, thank you very much!), he began this week reading through Painless Algebra. The idea was that it would be a gentle introduction and that he could start a full-fledged algebra class in the fall. However, somewhere around Wednesday of this week, he began telling me Painless Algebra just wasn’t interesting for him, because there was too much reading and not enough equations. So, we sat down together and looked at the University of California College Prep (UCCP) open source Algebra One online class, which I had been keeping in the back of my mind for him to do next year. He really liked the look of it, and we’ve decided to have him go ahead and start that now, moving slowly. With RobotBoy, all math plans are always subject to change, but the plan right now is for him to complete slightly less than one-third of the course this year, then spread the rest over the 2008-2009 academic year. I’ll keep you posted . . .

History & Literature:
We’re still plugging away at Great Expectations. We’re really enjoying it, but are having a tough time finding enough time to read. RobotBoy finished Dragon’s Gate during the second arts center week. He is now reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I had intended for him to finish Alice and then start Tom, but he chose to do them concurrently. He seems to be enjoying them both, especially if I will let him get comfortable in my new patio lounge chair while he reads. He watched a Modern Marvels DVD about the invention of the telephone. For fun, he’s reading Kate DiCamillo’s Tale of Despereaux.

English:
We did some reading comprehension exercises on Monday, and RobotBoy spent the rest of his time this week on that essay he owed me from before the opera. He finally got it done and wrote out his clean copy on Friday. It’s still like pulling teeth to get him to write more than a couple of sentences, but he did manage to produce something that looks a lot like an essay.

Science:
He read this week from Human Body and Earth’s Waters. The thing that seemed to make the biggest impression on him was the section about water treatment. He interrupted my lunch on Friday to show me the diagrams from the book and explicate them in great detail. (Lucky me.) Since the Marine Science books seem to be giving us the least bang for our bucks and contain lessons that are not sequential or dependent on each other, they were one of the few things I jettisoned from our compressed lesson plans to save us a little time. On Wednesday, he went to the first afternoon of the Chemistry series at the science museum. He said it was mostly review for him, since we did chemistry last year, but he had fun.

Latin:
In the name of catching up, he did two lessons in Learning Latin Through Mythology this week. He read the stories of “Diana and Acteon” and “Echo and Narcissus,” translated their accompanying picture stories, and did the worksheets. He even voluntarily did the extra activities, making a flip book of Acteon’s transformation into a stag and looking up pictures of flowers mentioned in myths. He seems to enjoy this book quite a lot.

Spanish:
More of The Learnables: Basic Structures. He hit a snag with Monday’s ejercicios and had to go back and look up a few vocabulary words, but then got back on track and breezed through the rest of the week.

Music:
This is the one thing I can think of that didn’t get done this week. He was supposed to read about and learn the snippet of the “Piano Quintet in A” from Themes to Remember, but I don’t think he got around to it. Maybe it’ll get done this weekend before we leave town?

Other Stuff:
After two weeks of hitting only the occasional outside class, RobotBoy returned to his regular schedule of activities this week. Right after we returned on Saturday, he went with his choir to sing for a wedding in a city about an hour south of us. Then he did piano on Monday afternoon, followed by a two-hour rehearsal/class for Pirates of Penzance Junior that evening. He had his boys’ class at the ballet school on Tuesday and the regular class on Wednesday after science. It’s Parent Observation week at the dance school, and I just have to mention how impressed I am with how much they have learned this year. Thursday brought his regular choir rehearsal and Friday the weekly three-class marathon at dance.

Unfortunately, RobotBoy twisted his ankle a bit in the second class, and his ballet teacher decided it was safest to send him home to rest. After a couple of hours on the couch last night with the ankle propped up and iced, there is no swelling. And he says it feels much better this morning.

More Other Stuff:
Last Sunday afternoon, I bowed out of the way to allow RobotBoy and his dad to have a "guys' only" afternoon at the ballet. They saw a dance adaptation of Pirates of Penzance, which they said was lots of fun. One of the boys from RobotBoy's dance school was having his birthday party in conjunciton with the show, so they spent some time participating in those festivities.

We also had tickets for a show at the Shakespeare Theatre on Thursday evening. It was a new play about a string quartet preparing for a major performance and was very good. (I especially noticed that there is a great part for Moonheart when she gets just a bit older.)

I ended up having to change the dates for a couple of the children’s theatre productions we signed up for at the beginning of the year because RobotBoy has conflicts with the original dates. As it turned out, the only way for us to see the production of Treasure Island was to go this week to one of the school matinees. So, we did that on Friday morning. Normally, we avoid student shows, because, frankly, the kids so often don’t behave very well and don’t have adequate supervision. And I usually demand that RobotBoy read the source material before we see a play or film version, which he hasn’t done yet. Consequently, I wasn’t entirely pleased with the whole idea. However, as it turned out, the audience was fine, and the show didn’t give away the ending of the book. So, now RobotBoy is looking forward to reading the original.

RobotBoy will take some history and literature reading with him next week. And we may take his laptop. However, I don’t really anticipate him getting a whole lot done while New York lies outside waiting to be explored. We are planning at least one museum field trip while we’re there and may do more, depending on how busy he is with rehearsals.

Next week’s report may not be posted “on schedule,” but I do promise to share our experiences in “The Big City” after we return.

And now, I’m off to pack!