A Man, A Plan, A Lesson?
One of the first
palindromes I ever learned - even before I learned what a palindrome was - was
A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama. See a palindrome is spelled the same way backward and forward. The simplest palindromes are
Mom,
Dad and the perennial favorite
wow! Yes, you can say it backward! WOW! But this rambling has nothing to do with palindromes.
I'm struggling again with my lessons. Getting the girls to focus and get things going right - and on some semblance of a schedule. My wife nailed the problem real quickly. She hid my 'lesson plan book'. I never noticed it was missing. Hmph! When I use the 'lesson plan book', lessons (and chores!) go very smoothly. Without it, I'm lost. But, I'm such a lousy organizer that I keep forgetting to use it! She threatened to staple it to my hand so I would not forget about it. Yeah, yeah - I get the hint.
Then I talk to other homeschoolers. They aren't organized. They just fly by the seat of their pants - and have kids that are entering college at age 13. How the heck do they do that? Well, I'm making entries in my 'lesson plan book'. I'm attempting to nail down what needs to be done, at what time, and how long it should take to do it. 15 minutes on time. 15 minutes on money. 30 minutes on math - whether she's done or not. 30 minutes to read whatever she wants. 30 minutes on American History. 20 minutes to read on science.
Well, I'm blogging when I should be planning. So, I'm outtahere. But here's another palindrome for you:
race a toyota e-car!
Updates on Our Homeschooling Adventure!!!
Ok - we're about a week into
Our New Homeschooling Adventure! We've sought different ways to learn stuff, especially writing. Because that's been a weak point with my oldest, I've found a strategy through an excellent book:
Homeschooling Your Child Step-by-Step (click here to see it on Amazon) by Lauramaery Gold and Joan M. Zielinski. I checked it out from my local library and am seriously considering dropping $2 for it used from Amazon. There is an amazing wealth of information in that book, including many different strategies for teaching your kids. I'm still going through the book - rather slowly - and have decided to try a couple of writing-based learning strategies. I like the
Concept Mapping and
Learning through Writing. Right now, I'm using the two strategies together to work on writing.
Concept mapping is simply a brainstorming session. On a paper with no lines, write the central idea in the center of the paper. Now write as many words as you can think of that relate to the central idea around it. Don't worry about grouping, just write the words. Afterward, begin grouping the words by circling the words with different colors. This way you know which words are related. Now, sit down and begin to put them all together.
Learning through Writing - at least the way we're doing it right now - is taking the mapped concepts and putting them in order. I have to keep reminding her that she's writing to someone who has no idea what we're talking about. That's the only hard part.
OK - so we're working on new strategies. That means we're abandoning the traditional 'curriculum-based' education. It simply was not meeting our needs. She breezed through a year's curriculum too quickly. That means it was not challenging enough. Rather than wade through all the available curricula, we've decided to go with one of the other 99 strategies mentioned in the book. Yeah, traditional curriculum-based education was not the only way to go! Woohoo!
Since I'm a science nut, we're studying a lot of science. She's writing about crystals, air pressure (inflating and deflating balloons just by heating the air in a bottle!) and her new pet spider. It was so cool watching that spider eat the first cricket we dropped in its cage! But I think the second cricket is giving us more than we bargained for - I think it was laying eggs in the dirt in the spider's cage... That's all I need - a house full of crickets!
That's my oldest. She's seven and doing nearly all her work at a third-grade level. All her friends are in second-grade. That is a bit of a pressure problem, but we've told her just not to advertise it. She can still go to the same Sunday School classes as all of her friends.
My youngest is a bit harder to entertain. She's got to do everything her way. I'm still searching for the best way to hold her attention. But we're working our way through the alphabet and numbers. She's 3 years old, so I'm not expecting calculus just yet. I just enjoy reading to her.
More to come. My digital camera hasn't gotten any decent pictures of our spider or the battle between the spider and the cricket. I'm still working on how I'll get that done.
New Pet...
Oh, wow! We got us a new pet! A
Wolf Spider! It got in the house, so I figured it wanted to stay. Pictures will be forthcoming...
The cat was chasing something and I thought it was another stinkin' roach. I moved the bag it ran under and -
voila! A wolf spider! Woohoo! Now, for those of you who don't know, wolf spiders can be scary. In fact, when I worked for a pest control company, we got more calls for wolf spiders than any other pest. They look very dangerous, they're big and hairy (not as big as a tarantula), and they have wicked looking mouth parts. The first one that got into our house was about 3" from stem to stern. This one is about half that size.
So, I caught it with the intention of turning it loose outside. Then, I got the idea of looking it up on the web. Hmmm. Wolf spiders can live
several years in captivity. Cool! So we started looking for a cage. We wound up buying one from a local exotic pet store for about 8 bucks. Feed it crickets for about a dime each. Put dirt in the cage, a cotton ball with water, and a rock for it to hide under, we're all set!
We brought the cage home and put the spider in it with a cricket. That cricket didn't stand a chance. It took about 30 minutes before it stopped twitching, though -- nature ain't pretty... But the girls watched it for about 10 minutes, giving me regular (about 15 second) updates as the cricket slowly died.
Now, I'm still researching this. I don't know if wolf spiders actually
eat their prey or if they just suck the juice out of it. I can't seem to find that answer anywhere on the 'net, though I may be asking the wrong question. We also want to know if it's mature, and whether it's a boy or a girl. It's name is Wolfy.
We'll be posting updates. One writing assignment every week involves spider research until we've exhausted it. I'll post some of those writings (without corrections!) here.
I'm going to go watch our new pet! Adios!
