Friday, May 08, 2015

Friday Data, dentists and dragons love tacos

I had a dentist appointment today. Before we went, I had Esme spell out loud the words on four weeks of a first grade spelling test.  Then, reluctantly, she wrote the sentences I made from the words down on paper. Her sense of humor shines through in that the chicken laid an egg on the date square. 

She played and updated her Dragon City game -  telling me the next steps for success... she needs to build a certain temple, feed dragons up to level 15 and then she can fight in a bigger battle.  I began the little embroidery project for her and got her started.  We got ready for town.  I was given a referral from the dentist (to an oral surgeon, ouch- not looking forward to this), which will happen in a week or so.  She went to the library while I was there with Mark, and checked out a book- Dragons Love Tacos, by Adam Rubin.


8:30-  -spelling and sentence worksheets
9:30 - dragon city
10:30 - break (go to town)
11 - library
12 - store
12:30 - break
1p - math, charting, graphing and analyzing data
2p - reading, embroidery, chores, discussion
3p -break
3:30- Land of the Dinosaurs eating paper tacos
and ---discussion why metal attracts lightning, why does the metal change color if lightning hits it?
we watched several videos about putting a patina on steel with a torch, and making glass out of sand using electricity
4p - done

We stopped by the store on the way home and got some groceries.  At home, while I cooked soup - we talked about her math progress for the entire year-and framed her abilities in words (which she CAN multiply, but hearing the word 'multiply' she forgets what that means) etc... We talked about measuring, and graphing- and she had forgotten what that meant.  I demonstrated- and she said OH, yes, I like that.  So, while I cooked, I had her take a pile of fridge letters and separate them into groups, stressing the words of the process again.  Then, we talked about the 'data set', and she got paper to make a graph or chart of the information.  We went into another room and talked about what we knew of the group by looking at the chart - and then checked to see if that was right.  We discovered that we had missed recording some data because the number of items on the chart didn't match the number of letters in the group.  She found and corrected the mistake.  She has a LOT of natural talent in sorting, analyzing and pattern recognition- but without using the words, she won't understand what tests might be asking of her.

We then used Pie Chart maker NCES.ED to compare the information on this graph with a pie chart containing the same info - which she entered the info from her chart into the program.  We played with the program a little. She read the library book to me, did a little more work on the embroidery, fed chickens and delivered eggs and onions to share with Grandma.

Dragons really do love tacos. We checked!

her graph, which she filled out herself after I explained what the idea was again
we compared bar graphs, line graphs and pie charts.

Article : Deeper, not faster in math...

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