bits

We took Labor Day off..although I had to work.  I've spent a lot of my free time on a new 1,000 piece puzzle (well, fifty cents new, from the thrift store).  Esme and Mark helped me put the last of the pesky sky and tree parts in tonight.  Esme has played more Skyrim the past few days and School of Dragons.  She is waiting on a special egg to hatch tomorrow. 

We finished reading the Grimm sisters book number one the other day - we're on to Stephen Hawking's kids' book "George and the Secret Key to the Universe".  So far, it is very exciting.

We will do school tomorrow, and a store run.  I've ordered a lot of new documentaries from our Netflix for her based on things she has been asking about. There is one about Helen of Troy, one about the Telescope, and a pair about World War I and World War II.  She had started asking some pretty deep questions the other day so I started getting recommendations for the history docs.  And we had a side conversation about Galileo tonight while I was reading the book with her - so the telescope one seemed to be a good match.

Future Thoughts: We still have to plan our field trip to the gemstone museum.  And maybe also one to the astronomy planetarium at Land Between the Lakes.  I really want to do some memorable and fun things with her this year as we are increasingly tailoring to have her writing 'on par' to go back to public school for third grade (or maybe skip once they test her....it all depends, she IS ahead in several things but the writing has been the hardest).  Once she gets more comfortable writing and doing her own research with the computer (spelling, sorting out, using dictionary and encyclopedia type functions) I'll feel she has the key knowledge she needs to learn how to learn whatever she wants.  The way things were going with the first grade classroom and the anxiety from the discipline methods - I felt she was going to be herded towards failure and associate school with anxiety, boredom and adults who yelled at her every day. 

Math games and getting ready for week two

Mark said I should post about these math lessons we've been working on.
We reviewed rounding last week, to tens and hundreds.
I took pieces of paper and marked them randomly 0 through 1000 - about 20 pieces of paper.
I put a 'timeline' like long header of paper and marked it 100,200,300 through 1000.  Then I had her sort which ones, rounded up or down by the rule, would go where.  She did this once as a short exercise with me, and again for review (with more papers).  We will do rounding to decimals in a bit.. she was already doing that in the store, and I will maybe wait for our 'store' project to have a session on it.

The Pirate measuring thing was I had her make a 'treasure chest' of a known number of inches wide and tall.  She had to use her ruler for it -which she wasn't entirely happy about.  Then, she had to guess/figure how big a pirate ship hold would be to contain three layers of chests, four chests wide (12).  She had to measure a piece of paper this big, cut it out, and compare the chest to the space.  Then we cut a 'boat' for the hold to go in, a 'mast' a certain # of inches tall, a triangular sail a certain number of inches wide and tall, and a man who was not too tall to fit within the ship hold.  She got better and better at tracing straight lines and measuring height or width as asked...although it started out very hard.

Ordinal numbers - we have cut out squares with racehorses printed on them, and put two or three digit numbers on them. She has to sort them greatest to least by their value.  We will talk about greater and less than again, like we did last year.

Relative weights of real things and comparison - I found the relative weight of about twelve things, the heaviest being a truck and the lightest an apple.  She will compare which is lighter or heavier, how many of the light things would make up the heavy item, which items would add together to be a little less than or more than another etc. This is leading into my working with her with simple symbolic equations, multiplication and division after we review all of this and adequately borrow and carry again (she has become rusty).

There are 'geometry house', 'make your own store', and 'advertising' lessons I printed out to adapt for her, too.


Also - I scored another big cardboard box, which we will use to make our next cardboard theatre for puppet shows.  We will work on that and 'writing a play' this week.

Painting

 Her hair was swishing around even in a ponytail and getting onto the palette, so I tied it up in a scarf out of my dresser.  She is painting a 'road scene' with a traffic light and (eventually) lots of grass and some cars.

I told her we need to print out her quote from the other day (about her writing journal, but it pertains here, too.  'Practice Makes Greatness!'(I ordered it as a cheap poster at the photo center - we'll get it in about a week and hope it looks good!)

We also received some of our dinosaur and evolution dvds in the mail that will go with our science unit this year. She wants to know if Jurassic Park could have been real, how the 'blood sample' became dinosaurs, if extinct creatures can be made again, and a host of other things related to the topic.  So, we have some background info in video form, a magazine and a few websites earmarked for discussing that topic.  I am wondering a bit if I need to plan out an order of topics....we usually just go 'organically' with what she asks about and hopping around to relevant information as she needs it.

A few other notes:
Definitely do at least a good overview of geology and fossils before we do the museum in Kentucky later this year...

In the Spring we might be able to find a docu on the Rosetta Stone and early writing because she has asked a few questions to that regard.

She asked me to find some Spanish resources for her to look at this year - and I bookmarked them in my browser.  She was also asking a lot of questions about vocal chords and air and food tubes she saw on the organ chart I drew the other day - so that was a discussion before bed.

T-rexes

Esme has been building these in her Minecraft.  She modelled them off a plastic dinosaur toy she has.  This really shows where her natural talent lies.. she can just start and build something with an idea in her head given materials and tools she can use. 

She named this world 'Jurassic Esme'.

It even had small pools of water to the other side of the house that were dinosaur footprint shaped.

 This is in our shared world - Freeway world.. where we are all working together.

I went out to the garden this morning and pulled in ingredients for a soup, which I took for lunch at work.  I have been avoiding the garden some these past few weeks after all the weird weather made half our crops fail to thrive.  But Mark is right- I'll lose what is producing if I keep feeling scorned and neglecting it.  It also doesn't help that I am just so tired lately, Esme wants to play her games SO much (she is exhausting normally, but the undirected energy of no-school schedule in the day seems to exhaust me MORE not less...mostly because she gets prone to repetition and throwing stuff about randomly without something we forge ahead on) When I get up in the morning I am getting ready for work -and when I get home from work I hardly have much time before it is time for bed...I feel like I can't burn the candle at both ends to get anything done, and a bit stressed by the idea of starting things and not being able  to finish them for days.

We did read a bit more in our Little House book.  She isn't into it - but I feel it is important she hears how life was that long ago.  I do see some gears turning here and there - especially during the 'when I/grandpa etc were little' stories.  I've also been scanning here and there for more resources for her science next year - as I feel that will get her excited in other realms.  I am toying with the idea of making her a folder for the main subjects and holding her to finish what is in there (whether I'm here or Daddy is) and then she can decide what to do for the rest of the required time for the day. 

I asked her what she wanted to learn most next year and she said Roller skating tricks...and woodworking (making things with wood).  And she wants to go the zoo again (She said that this morning when she woke up).  When she did her journal entry today she said she was glad her writing was getting  better and staying in a straight line now instead of going up and down all over.  It really is the little things.  I need to work on recognizing that, myself.