Still Holding My Breath

Okay, I admit it: I’m a little stunned that we had another good week. I’m not sure what’s going on, and I have this insane compulsion to knock on wood all the time, but things are going really well. I did mention it to RobotBoy, and he said he just came back from our holiday break feeling like he wanted to do better. And so he is.

Absolutely amazing.

So, here’s how it went.

Math:
RobotBoy is keeping up very well with the faster pace in this course. He’s completing his six lessons a week with good (okay, mostly perfect) grades and nary a whimper of protest. He took the test on the introduction to polynomials and is now breezing through the unit on factoring them. He read some more of Murderous Maths, Fractions and Averages: The Mean and Vulgar Bits and did another page of Maya-themed math from Can You Count in Greek?

History & Literature:
He’s continued to focus on Mesoamerica this week, reading from his world history atlas, Learning Through History: Mesoamerica, The Maya: Life, Myth and Art (Timothy Laughton) and Egyptians, Maya, Minoans (Susanna Matthies). This Friday’s worksheet was a fun wordseach with vocabulary from his reading. Literature-wise, he’s continuing with The Children’s Homer and has read about the first third of The Well of Sacrifice. Both are getting thumbs up reviews.

English:
RobotBoy did his writing project this week, recounting the Chinese folk tale of “Wang the Peddler.” He turned in a pretty good first draft on Tuesday (right on schedule!), which really just needed minor punctuation and spelling corrections. The “final” draft he turned in a day early on Thursday wasn’t completely clean, unfortunately. So, he made the remaining corrections and re-submitted on Friday. I did knock off half a point, but I still consider it a success.
In English Prep, we reviewed prepositions and definite/indefinite articles. Then on Friday we read the excerpt from Silas Marner and talked through the comprehension questions.

RobotBoy did two more lessons of Word Roots. I’m a little sad that he won’t be able to continue the program next year, since he’s finishing the last level that is available for the computer.

Science:
This week in The Story of Science, RobotBoy read about Eratosthenes and his attempts to measure the earth. He then finished Archimedes and the Door of Science, which also earned a thumbs up review.

Spanish:
He’s still working on the “Pronouns” section. I think his favorite thing this week was the exercise about the man being chased out of his tent by the lion. He tracked me down in the kitchen to read that one to me. I have to say, though, that I was actually pretty pleased with his pronunciation. It’s not something that gets worked on formally in The Learnables, but he seems to be picking it up, anyway.

Greek:
He’s nearing the end of the Greek Alphabet Code Cracker. So, he did just two pages of that and six of Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! He continues to enjoy these.

Geography:
This week, he’s started reading about the Pacific Rim. His assignment was to choose one country from that part of the world, about which he had to answer some basic factual questions and then research an imaginary trip. Given his obsession with samurai, it’s probably not a big surprise that he selected Japan to research.

Other Stuff:
It was a very busy week with extras. On Saturday, RobotBoy took the Explore exam at a local school. He said it was not so much difficult as tedious, but he was pretty tired by the time he was done. That afternoon, we had tickets to see the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of Orfeo ed Euridice. That was really lovely, by the way. We all enjoyed it. On Sunday afternoon, we went to see a reading of a new play about John Wilkes Booth at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre’s festival of new plays. Tuesday evening brought the Horns and Pipes concert at St. Luke’s cathedral, which RobotBoy really loved. In honor of Mendelssohn’s 200th anniversary, they played several of his pieces, including the "Wedding March" from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On Thursday evening after choir, RobotBoy and I went to see/hear a workshop of a new opera based on George Bernard Shaw’s play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. RobotBoy enjoyed it and said it brought back memories of his own opera workshop experiences about this time last year.

We have tickets to another reading tonight (Friday) and a couple of more things over the weekend. We love PlayFest time!

My 52-Book Challenge:
I finished re-reading Sense and Sensibility this week but haven’t decided what I’ll count as my official next book. I have Utopia, which I had planned to be next, but I bought a copy of Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads on sale yesterday and started that while I was waiting for RobotBoy to come out of choir. Maybe I’ll do both.

Chugging Along

Things continue to go pretty well here, which continues to pleasantly surprise me. We have reached the end of another week in which all the work got done, without undue stress and strain, and there were no incidents to report. No yelling, no complaining, no going-to-his-room-and-dragging-out-a-single-lesson-for-two-hours issues. Just chugging along.

We even managed to cope with me being under the weather for a couple of days and doing a light day on Tuesday to watch some of the inauguration coverage. And it still all got done.

Wow.

Anyway, here’s the rundown.

Math:
RobotBoy buzzed through the assigned lessons for the week, finishing “Properties of Exponents” and beginning “Monomials.” He took the exponents chapter test on Wednesday morning and earned a perfect score. He also read about prime factoring in the Murderous Maths book Fractions and Averages: The Mean and Vulgar Bits. And he made some connections with the week’s history readings, completing two pages of Maya-themed math from Can You Count in Greek?

History & Literature:
This week, RobotBoy wrapped up ancient China and started reading about Mesoamerican civilizations. He read passages from his world history atlas, Learning Through History: Mesoamerica, The Maya: Life, Myth and Art (Timothy Laughton) and Egyptians, Maya, Minoans (Susanna Matthies). On Friday, he completed the week’s worksheet based on some of his reading. For literature, he finished The Ch’I Lin Purse: A Collection of Ancient Chinese Stories and started working on The Children’s Homer.

English:
On Monday, we read the poem “Christmas” by John Betjeman, did the associated comprehension questions and talked about the role of rhyme in poetry. On Friday, we read the chapter’s non-fiction selection, “Save the Nativity Play,” did the comprehension exercise, and went over the spelling and vocabulary lessons. We also read through our new writing model, a Chinese folk tale, on both Tuesday and Thursday, focusing on grammar and punctuation. On his own, RobotBoy did the next two lessons of Word Roots.

Science:
RobotBoy continued reading with The Story of Science this week, reading the “Archimedes Claw” chapter. He also read a few chapters of Archimedes and the Door of Science. On Wednesday, because he was all caught up with work and had done so well on the math test, we treated ourselves to a slightly-educational field trip to the new T-Rex Café. Lunch left a lot to be desired, but we enjoyed touring the various rooms with all of the animatronic beasties. And RobotBoy talked me into letting him buy both a geode to split in the cool machine and a bag of stuff from which he was able to pan a few tiny fossils in the outdoor sluice thoughtfully provided by the restaurant’s management. Of course, being who he is, RobotBoy spent the last 20 minutes or so at the lunch table brainstorming how he would re-do the whole restaurant to make it so much cooler.

Spanish:
He continued working on pronouns. There were no written exercises this week. Even RobotBoy is beginning to say he wishes there were a little more written work in this book, because it helps him to reinforce and remember what he’s learning. In thinking about next year, we’re considering adding some work from an old copy of Barron’s Learn Spanish the Fast and Fun Way, just to give him some additional practice.

Greek:
He did four pages each of Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! and the Greek Alphabet Code Cracker.

Geography:
RobotBoy continued learning about Latin America, with a lesson on environmental issues and the “Flow of Goods.” He also completed the chapter review.

Other Stuff:
We had a fun theatre outing on Thursday evening, going to see a preview performance of the new play Wittenberg. [Take a look here for video snippets from the show: http://www.orlandoshakes.org/CURRENT_SEASON/Wittenberg.html] It was both funny a thought-provoking, an imagined encounter/friendship between Martin Luther and Dr. Faust, with a little bit of Hamlet thrown in.

The new ballroom class did start this week, which was a lot of fun (both for him to do and for me to watch). This means he now has five dance classes distributed over four days each week, plus choir rehearsals and organ lessons. The thing that I was most pleased about this week was organ. His teacher was apparently trying to get a better feel for where RobotBoy really is with his music reading and so on. So, he was assigned to prepare three or four pieces of his choice to play in a mini-recital for the instructor at this week’s lesson. RobotBoy worked really hard on practicing this week, and the instructor seemed quite pleased. I really hope this means we may be turning a corner with this.

Something that does seem to be helping, with both the academic stuff and the dance and music practice, is going back to making a weekly planner each Monday. RobotBoy and I sit together at my desk, go over the week’s assignments and fill in a table with the specific tasks he will do in each subject each day. We opted not to create more waste paper. So, we fill in the table in a Microsoft Word document, which I then e-mail to him. We each keep a copy open on our computers throughout the day, and he turns the appropriate text red as he finishes each task. This week, we added a section with reminders for him to do music practice and some stretching exercises (since one of his challenges with dance is improving his flexibility). I still have to do a bit more nagging – er, “gentle reminding” – than I’d like. But it does seem to help.

My 52-Book Challenge:
My official book for this week was Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser, which I liked very much. I did find Carrie, herself, kind of frustrating, because she lacked depth. I’m also working on re-reading Sense and Sensibility. And I bought a book called Leaving the Saints off the Barnes & Noble bargain table, which I read cover-to-cover one night when I couldn’t sleep. So, far, I’m ahead of schedule.

Back Again

Well, here we are at the end of the first week of our second semester. It’s going surprisingly well, although we had to make a sacrifice to get here.

Here’s the big confession (which I’ve already shared with my friends over at the WTM boards): We’re dropping Latin for the rest of this year.

I know. I can hear you all gasping with disbelief.

Here’s what happened: RobotBoy really enjoyed Latin as long as we were doing the reading-based curricula. Learning Latin Through Mythology was an especially big hit. We’ve pretty much exhausted the only similar materials I can find, though, that seem like a comfortable fit for him. There are more programs that take a reading approach, but they seem to kick in mostly at the high school level. And we’re just not there yet.

We like the English Prep series from Galore Park, so we thought we’d try their Latin Prep curriculum. It was not going well. RobotBoy just didn’t seem to be retaining or understanding as much as I had hoped. So, at some point, I decided to drop back and aim to finish only the first half of the book this year. Then we got very busy and dropped back into “only the basics” mode for a few weeks before the holidays. And Latin just didn’t get done at all.

Then I had some chat with my student about how things are going for him and what we could do next year to make school more interesting. And he would prefer to kick up the challenge level a bit but streamline the number of subjects. He wants to continue Spanish and Greek, so we agreed to let Latin fall away. At that point, it seemed just plain silly to worry about doing half of a book we’re not likely to finish in the future. So, Latin is off the menu for now.

The good news is that, with Latin off the planner and the FLVS art class finished, we have much more time available to catch up on the stuff that got neglected in the second half of last semester. And we just have more breathing room, which, I suppose, may be why this week has been more pleasant than I anticipated.

Math:
This is another subject in which we fell behind before the holidays. In order to finish the course as scheduled, we now have to complete six lessons each week. It’s a tall order, but RobotBoy is tackling it pretty cheerfully. This week, he did the section on Systems of Linear Inequalities (which involved lots of looking at graphs) and started working on Properties of Exponents. He continues to like the course and earn very good grades. I think this should put him in a great place to do geometry next year.

History & Literature:
This semester kicked off with another very cool field trip, The First Emperor: China’s Terra Cotta Army at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Moonheart came along for the ride, since we were taking her back to campus. She gave the exhibit thumbs up, too. The exhibit was a wonderful way to jump start the semester, since it dovetailed nice with RobotBoy’s current reading. He also watched a DVD from Netflix about the life of China’s first emperor before we went to the museum. He’s working his way through the Nature Company Discoveries book Ancient China and has read several articles from the Learning Through History issue. He also read the pages in the Atlas of World History about the Great Wall, the terracotta army, the Han Dynasty and the silk road. His literature reading for the week included selections from The Ch’I Lin Purse: A Collection of Ancient Chinese Stories and the Oxford book of Tales From China.

We’re just a touch off kilter because of the need to catch up in some areas. So, his Child’s History of the World story for this week was about the Trojan war. He followed that up with a History Scribe page about the Trojan horse. Ah well, it’ll all come together eventually, right?

English:
We are having to pick up a little slack in this subject, too. So, this week we did the pages on demonstrative and relative pronouns and reviewed comma usage. We also read an excerpt from Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree and answered the comprehension questions. Independently, RobotBoy did two lessons of Word Roots.

Science:
RobotBoy read two chapters from The Story of Science this week, which got him caught up. I thought it was cool that the chapter on Hero and Alexandria happened to fall just when we’re finishing listening to the third Bartimaeus book. (RobotBoy read them over the summer and insisted I would love them. We’ve been listening to the audio versions on road trips, and they really are a lot of fun.) He also read a chapter of Archimedes and the Door of Science and did a project from the ancient Greece chapter of Ancient Science.

Latin:
Sigh. (See above.)

Spanish:
He finished the section on plurals and moved on to pronouns this week. He did well on the ejercicios.

Greek:
In Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! RobotBoy is practicing the words he’s learned so far, going back and forth from English to Greek. He’s doing a little catch-up work in Greek Alphabet Code Cracker, reviewing the sounds of the Greek letters. Hey, Andrew! seems to be a good fit for him. We’re planning to continue with the program next year.

Geography:
The current module is about Latin America, and the week’s lessons were about “Society and Family Life” and “Land Use and Change.” RobotBoy continues to enjoy and do well in the course. I’m not sure how much he’s retaining, but it’s a start.

Other Stuff:
All of the extracurriculars have come back into play since the beginning of the month. So, we’re back into the weekly round of tap, ballet, organ, choir, ballet, character. If all goes well, he may be adding a ballroom dance class on Monday afternoons beginning later this month. I’m still frustrated with the amount of organ practice he’s not doing and kind of at my wit’s end to figure out how to fix that problem. But, all in all, things are going well.

My New Challenge:
I’ve decided to join a group of folks from the WTM boards in challenging myself to read 52 books in 52 weeks this year. That is, to be honest, not a huge number of books for me to read, but the rules say that we can’t count things we read for school. We are allowed to count things we’ve read before, as long as it hasn’t been too recent. But my own personal goal is to make the majority of the books I choose for this year classics I’ve somehow missed or things that are in some way more of a challenge for me. In other words, I don’t want to be lazy about this. We are in our third week of the challenge, and so far I’ve read Bel Canto, by Anne Patchett (because Moonheart nagged me into it), In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote (because it was on one of the Modern Library’s “best of” lists and I saw a used copy for $1) and Joy in the Morning, by Betty Smith (because I hadn’t read it since I was a teenager and I needed something more uplifting after the first two).

Of course, this challenge, combined with the B&N buy-two-get-one-free sale on their classics line, has given me an excuse to go on a small buying spree. So, waiting in the wings are Sense and Sensibility (again, a re-read, but one I haven’t done in a few years), Mansfield Park (ditto), Pygmalion and Three Other Plays, Sister Carrie, Barchester Towers and Wings of the Dove.

I haven’t yet participated, but there is a blog to which some of my fellow book-a-weekers are contributing reviews and comments: http://read52booksin52weeks.blogspot.com/ It’s fun to see the diversity of both subject matter and opinion. I’ll keep you posted on how I’m doing.