Wednesday – 2 hour school

• ANOTHER short day!  Well, we will try to cram as much as we can in…
• The reason it’s shorter is because it’s the feast of St. Blaise, and we want to go to Mass at the Cathedral at noon.  That doesn’t mean we absolutely can’t accomplish anything this afternoon, but the chances of getting out of Mass, shrugging and saying “Eh, let’s just call it a day” are pretty high. So..
• Prayer was just a Hail Mary and some intentions – safe travels for a family member, healing of various ailments, comfort and healing for all the sick, especially children.
• (No readings because we would be going to Mass)
• Mixing up the usual order of things, I had him read today’s short story first because I was going to take the copywork/dictation from it and didn’t want to spoil it.  “The Lumber Room” by Saki – a great story. Pair Nicholas with Shirley Jackson’s “Charles” and you’ve got a couple of kids who could easily rule the world. Discussion of the story centered on irony (the punished kid has the Best Day Ever and the rewarded kids have a miserable time) and what the story says about children having to maneuvering to nourish their imaginations in face of the restrictions that adults are constantly putting on them.
• Copywork /dictation:The dramatic part of the incident was that there really was a frog in Nicholas’s basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so he felt entitled to know something about it. 
• Remember what dictation is: He copies the sentence one day, and then the next, I dictate it to him and he writes it correctly. This one has an interesting spelling word (incident) and just a bit punctuation to note: the use of the semi-colon and the commas.
• Come to think of it, let’s go ahead and read “Charles.”  The conversation was on the humor in the story, but also on the way it ends.  Why, I asked, would Jackson not end with an explanatory sentence like, “Now I understand what Laurie had been up to all this time…”  We talked about why an abrupt ending was more powerful and fitting – it condenses the darkish irony of the story into a single sharp sentence uttered by an oblivious observer. I mean, he didn’t say that, but he knew, instinctively, that too much explanation ruins things.
• In the process of digging up stories, I discovered that the Library of America has a fantastic “Story of the Week” site. 
• Cursive. One sentence from the work book.
• Math practice – more word problems from the Evan-Moor book.
• Beast Academy: Practicing order of operations with these pages. 
• Looks hairy, but it’s not. Just keep in mind that problem-solving mindset: break it apart and apply the rules – and it’s fine.
• A bit of paragraph unity work from Reasoning and Reading:  crossing out sentences that don’t fit, and then adding a sentence to an incomplete paragraph. There were three exercises in the latter, and I just had him pick one of them to finish.
• Writing and Rhetoric – just a bit on run-on sentences – which is the bane of my writing-with-kids existence.  I swear. I ultimately resorted to “Long sentences are your enemy.”  Keep them short and they might be boring, but at least they probably won’t be run-ons.
• Back to invertebrates for a bit.  He recited the names of the 6 invertebrate phyla, spelled each correctly, gave an example and major characteristics – using this chart.
• Then we went through the intro to arthropods (since we did worms last week) in the great Animal book and read about that…will go into more detail on insects tomorrow and  try to dissect a grasshopper on Friday, then crayfish next week.
• With just a bit of time left, we looked at the Classics for Kids site – a great music site. We’ve listened to many of the composer broadcasts, but today we looked at musical definitions and instruments and listened to examples.  Talking about how the first violinist tunes the rest of the orchestra led us to talk about Beethoven’s 9th – in which the opening of the first movement echoes that exercise – then to listen to a bit of it, which then, as these things do, led us, for the second day in a row, to Mr. Bean.

 

• Off to Mass!
• Timeframe 9:45-11:50.  2 hours.
• (and for the record – after Mass: lunch; get rat for snake; go home feed snake, discuss snake, clean snake habitat, practice piano during which the idea for a composition evoking battle of snake v. rat was floated and demonstrated – not by me, just to make that clear.)