Daily homeschool report. A distracted day on my part mostly because I kept thinking about how next week, there are going to be about 5 hours available for “school.”
- Prayer: Mass readings, discussion of the meaning of the first – what true fasting is, what God is telling us through Isaiah. Intercessions, Lord’s Prayer.
- No copywork, and no drawing of past copywork either. For writing he did an exercise in Writing and Rhetoric, which asked him to expand a paragraph and make it into a tall tale of sorts – the Legend of Sleepy Hollow was the central story of the unit. They had three different paragraphs to do, and I had him choose one. He mentioned that he would think an invention that would take his voice and turn it into written words would be cool. I said…er…voice recognition software is a thing. We looked it up, and it’s in Windows. The reason he’s interested is because his handwriting can’t keep up with his ideas, and his word processing skills aren’t there yet. Sii
- Then a lot of math. I had said I was going to let this new section wait until next week…but then I realized Monday was a holiday, and that would give us Tuesday as a beginning…and then I realized that big chunks of every day next week would be taken up with Other Stuff. So might as well get this going. And once we started going, it became clear that in order for it to stick, we needed to keep going. The subject was simplifying equations with variables. The first chunk of reading is here.
- Yeah, that took a while. But I will say, I thought the methodology was ingenious. You can catch a bit of it in the linked pages. It begins by giving a “problem” – if you have a number, take away 3 and then divide by 4, what do you have? Well, you figure that out by working backwards and doing inverse operations. Master that concept and then moving on to actual equations, you see that when you isolate the variable by performing the same operation on both sides, you are essentially doing that work backwards thing but in a different way.
- At this point – noonish – it was time think about heading out to run some errands before fetching the brother. We needed to go to the library to get the new Bosch book (they had it and it is a lot shorter than the others he has written – I think he had it half finished by the time we got home), we needed a few groceries, he needed new jeans and I wanted to look for whole frozen squid to dissect.
- So with that in mind, we did one more unit – science. Which was the new OKGo video and attendant educational resources.
- I mean…zero gravity is science, right?
- Then we watched a video about the big gravitational wave discovery. Whatever that is! But he’s studied Einstein in his history of science class, we’ve talked about it, and it’s just valuable for him to see people REALLY EXCITED about scientific discoveries – it matters, it’s interesting, and it’s about the world God made. So yes to gravitational wave frenzy.
- The next video on the Kids Should See this page was a delightful and creative piece of animation – a guy creates animation cels on transparencies and then uses his IPhone to create stop motion films. They’re funny and inspire a kid to think…hmmm….I could do that. Or, if you can’t or don’t want to do exactly that, simply to think of your own creative inklings and think of yourself as part of an endlessly creative group called the human race.
- He mentioned that what he liked was how the animator superimposed his cells on everyday objects and brought them to life. I
began a lecturereflected on how he probably did this by simply looking and contemplating the world around him, which leads to something his one-time art teacher used to tell them “Most of art is not in doing, but in looking and seeing.” “Oh, ” he agreed, “She said that all the time.” And so we continued the conversation about this animator and the kid’s own creative efforts (mostly writing) along those lines. - Book checked out. Non-hormonal milk purchased. (I am indifferent to organic but think hormones in meat and dairy are bad and have probably brought much as-yet undiscovered harm). Squid sought – at Whole Foods, big Hispanic supermarket (I looked there because they carry a lot of Asian foodstuffs as well), Asian grocery. Fail. Many squidish rings and other pieces, but no whole squid.
- It looks like the world’s squid are safe from our dissection skillz. Probably just as well. My older son said the ink sac smells bad when you break it open.
- Next week will be weird and busy. Starting with tomorrow, which is about a basketball game, serving Mass at the convent, then a birthday party. No school on Monday, but I am going to try to set up some science demonstrations and experiments to gestate over the weekend – they actually like that sort of thing as a leisure activity, believe it or not. Who knows.. Maybe cooking will be the only scientific endeavor that happens over the weekend. Tuesday is a music thing in the morning, then boxing, then a new zoo class late afternoon, then basketball practice. Wednesday is an all-day activity out of the house and then basketball. Thursday is a break from Cathedral class, but there’s a school theater performance from a touring troupe from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival that we’re attending, plus piano lesson. Friday is a school music performance of the Alabama Symphony (I think – I haven’t bought tickets yet, but it looks like there are still a lot of empty seats), then Saturday is basketball and a piano competition/performance thing (I’m really not sure what it is).
- #unsocializedhomeschooler
