LA: Finished up Lesson 3 of OYAN (the one that had her stumped) and selected a new story idea. As a teaser, let me tell you that it involves an American girl, a Japanese boarding school, a revenge plot, a legend, and the disappearance of friends. Interested to know more? Me too! Stay tuned. If all goes well you can read the book at the end of the year! We also worked on root words, essay writing, grammar, and continued our documentary "In Search of Shakespeare" as well as finally getting around to watching the film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (which she finished reading a few weeks ago). There was much laughing and she declared that it was "Great!" (She also informed me that Kenneth Branagh starred in the movie and that during the Olympic opening ceremonies he read a quote from the Tempest. Somebody was paying attention :) )
SS: We did a little more work on our Pilgrims/Plymouth unit, as a video we had on hold came in finally. "Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower" was interesting and helped us to visualize some of the conditions on the boat, etc. that we had not considered previously. This parlayed well into the first episode of American Experience: We Shall Remain, which is a documentary on Native Americans. Very enlightening!
Math: Formulas, equations, cross multiplying, measurement, perimeter, area, scale, organized/unorganized data. Really impressive work this week!!
FA: Continued listening to Tchaikovsky pieces (Piano Concerto No. 1/The Tempest, Symphony No 6 Pathetique), as well as her selected listening piece. Read 3 books on the composer and wrote a brief synopsis of his life.
FL: Level 1 Japanese from Rosetta Stone Home School Edition. Each lesson is broken into multiple parts, including the core lesson, grammar, pronunciation, writing, reading, and review. The software comes with headphone/microphone and voice recognition capability. I asked her what she learned this week and she gave me the following: A girl is drinking water = Onnanoko wa mizu o nonde imasu. Children are reading books = Kodomotachi wa hon o yonde imasu. A woman is swimming = Onna no hito wa oyoideimasu. Juice = juusu. Newspaper = shinbun. She says she is struggling a bit with character recognition (using kanji/hiragana/katakana), but she's getting 80% or better each time, so I think she's not struggling as much as she thinks. It just takes practice :)
LS (Life Skills): As most of you know, in the public school system an IEP was in place. Some of the things covered in this IEP included social skills and living skills. One of the benefits I see to homeschooling is that, with a single student/teacher, we are in a much better position to learn new skills and practice emerging ones. Everything from proper etiquette in various public places (library, grocery store, restaurants, etc) to personal/home maintenance skills, cooking, finance, communication and people skills fall into this category. Some of these lessons she likes more than others, but one day she will be on her own and as much of this does not come as naturally to her as it does to others, it is all necessary. It may seem silly, but for a kiddo with her particular struggles, knowing how to problem solve when you can't reach something on a shelf at the store is something that needs step by step instruction and practice. While many of these things are just an on-going part of our day, you will also see them specifically incorporated into other lessons and as stand-alones.
As she was still riding the high of her success with the Harvest Feast from last week, Friday we went with a similar lesson. She has been asking to make oatmeal-raisin cookies, so we again found and evaluated a recipe (did it have ingredients we can't eat? did it require a bunch of ingredients we didn't have/would that be the best money decision? did it require equipment we didn't have? how long was the prep and cook time/did that fit into our schedule?), made a shopping list, estimated a budget, and set out to procure the items. We practiced silly things, like whether you stop your cart in the middle of an aisle to check your list off or move to the side; and we solved math problems, like determining the unit price of name vs. store brand to know which deal was better. I'm pleased to say she came pretty close to budget with her purchases!
When we got home, she gathered all her supplies and her recipe and set about cooking. I am finding that I am a lot less anal about what's happening when there is a lesson involved. I sat at the bar, but only got involved when she would ask if something met the definition of "creamed" (well, let's look up what creaming means ;) ), or how to measure flour, where to locate certain utensils, etc. If the cookies came out salty, crumbly, uneven, burned...none of that mattered. Because then we could figure out what went wrong and talk about how to fix it next time. She nailed it though! They were delicious and she had to run us all off so we wouldn't eat them all!
"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. " ~John W. Gardner
1 comment:
I am feeling a need for cookies now....
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