Yesterday was my baby's 10th birthday!

I now have no children in the single digits.  Sob.

She wanted a very quiet day.  She spent the morning watching 2nd Harry Potter movie.  One of her girlfriends called her in the late a.m. and she spent a long time chatting on the phone with her.  She hung out with her brothers the rest of the day, until in the late afternoon she went to her little homeschool basketball game.

I wish I was not such a terrible picture taker!

Anyway, after basketball we had a family supper of fried chicken and Caesar salad (her faves) and then we gave her her presents.  She had mostly picked out stuff from the Hearthsong catalog, having to do with space.  She got one of those light up planetariums and a kind of funky moon nightlight you put up on your wall that mimics the phases of the moon.  She also got a stuffed elephant from Will (the other siblings just wished her happy birthday and were nice to her all day!).  We gave her a set of the 4 Rebecca Caudill series from Bethlehem Books.  She was very happy with all her presents.

Then we went out for ice cream at Baskin and Robbins.  And that was Becky's 10th birthday.

Sean's Curriculum

Well, I did it.  I ordered all the stuff I've been exploring for Sean.  We are going way more schoolish with him next year because:

1.  He got lost and bored this year without more structure
2.  He realized he actually likes doing 'school.'  He enjoyed studying math and Latin as long as it wasn't too much.
3.  Next year, he'll be dragged to Josh and my Latin class twice a week, needing something quiet to do during that time and he'll also be dragged to Becky's all day co-op where he'll need something quiet to do for 6.5 hours.

Ours doesn't actually look like this.  We are using a hand me down 2nd ed.

All indicators seemed to point to being more schooly.  So we were already planning on doing Religion for Confirmation Prep. math and Latin:

Religion - Youcat with Mom plus any other books, movies, etc that we find that furthers his study.

Math - Saxon 8/7.  I also got him the DIVE cd so he can use my laptop with earphones instead of relying on my to read the lessons with him.
Latin - Latin for Children B with DVD

Stuff we've added:

Doing formal science - Rainbow Science looks good.  A friend of mine uses this curriculum and raved about it.  It looks solid and not dumbed down but is written directly to the student.  We are going to do our labs on Friday mornings.  I love that it comes with a kit for all the experiments.  The only thing you have to buy separately is distilled water.  Josh will be taking a Chemistry class next year and Becky will be studying Chemistry in her co-op, so the fact that the first year of this curriculum studies Chemistry and Physics, is a good fit for us.  We all be experiencing the same thing at the same time.  To get myself prepped for this I'm going to read the Tiner book The World of Chemistry.

I love this book!

Doing formal Language Arts - before this, Sean did copy work from either a handwriting book or from Writing with Ease and then occasionally I would assign/strongly encourage  toread a particular book.  But I've decided that he really is a wordsmith in the raw and maybe this is a good time to help him delve deeper with things like vocabulary and grammar.  I got the Michael Clay Thompson language arts program from Royal Fireworks Press.  We received it yesterday.  It looks absolutely phenomenal.  Better than any other program I've ever used/looked at.  I'm thinking we'll start off with Poetry and Humanity for the fall semester and then do Essay Voyage for the winter/spring.  And he can work on Word within the Word (vocabulary and roots) and Magic Lens (grammar) throughout the year.  Very challenging and thought provoking stuff presented so differently from any other program I've seen.  I'm pretty much bowled over by it!

Doing formal Logic - I ordered two texts from Angelicum, Harry Stottlemeier (just the student book; the TM was incredibly expensive!) and I also ordered their Critical Thinking books and lesson plans.  Sean has been interested in that Critical Thinking book for a while.

We may do some formal book studies - I'm planning on Journey to the Center of the Earth, Comedy of Errors and The Screwtape Letters.  I was inspired by the Angelicum list.  We might listen to these on audio together or read aloud or read  independently.  I haven't thought it through.  I think I'll take my cues from

Sean.



History is going to be informal.  We are going to do This Week in History.  I found out about this from the Thomas Jefferson Education site. We are going to watch movies based in history as well as Professor Carol's Exploring America's Musical Heritage during movie night.  Also he'll be around listening in on Becky's history stuff with her co-op.

Sundry Sunday Things

I didn't finish a book this week.  I was too busy watching this!  I finished and thought it was really interesting.  You do have to be a mite wary when watching this around young children.  Every once in a while the professor mentions something to do with sexuality.  It is a college level course and none of it is inappropriate at that level, but it could be confusing for younger kids.  I liked the professor a lot, even though at times I thought he got a little carried away with trying to run out a metaphor as far as he could stretch it.  Sometimes it seemed a bit strained and overblown to me, but on the whole I really enjoyed spending time and learning at the knee (hey in Old and Middle English you'd pronounce that K!) of Dr. Lerer.

http://www.teachingheart.net/minioffice.html

I just stumbled on a new idea (for me, anyway) that I am thinking of using next year with my daughter (and maybe my son, if he wants to).  Here's a link to a blog that describes what she did for her 5th grader.  Since Aquinas Learning involves memory work, I really like the idea of putting a map of the U.S. (she'll be memorizing the states and capitals), diagram of an atom and a simplified periodic table (she'll be studying chemistry), and we can put the Latin and Greek prayers she'll be memorizing along with the Greek alphabet.  I think she'll like making one of these things.  This past year on her own initiative she made a lapbook on St. Elizabeth of Hungary.  She dressed up as St. Elizabeth for our homeschool group's All Saints Day Party.  I had spent October reading the Vision book out loud to her.  I had mentioned lapbooks to her before enthusiastically.  I thought she'd like them because she is so artsy/craftsy, but then I never followed through, because, alas, I am NOT artsy/craftsy.  So she took the bull by the horns and did it herself!  So I think the idea of a mini-office will really appeal to her.

I absolutely love this youtube video.  It has been running through my head all week!  Check out this blog where he writes out the litany for you.

Happy Sunday!

Computer Programming Resources-for Seano

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/newtojava/young-developers-jsp-136992.html

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Programming-Greenfoot-Object-Oriented-Simulations/dp/0136037534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310130160&sr=8-1

http://wiki.yoyogames.com/index.php/Main_Page

http://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Computer-Programming-Beginners/dp/1933988495/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1310058038&sr=8-4

https://www.homeschoolbuyersco-op.org/index.php?option=com_hsbc_epp_order&Itemid=1006&c=1

What I did today

Today seemed like a long, dreary, drifty day.  Don't like those kind of days!   So let me list here what I actually did get accomplished instead of what didn't happen:

1.  Watched two more lectures in my History of English lecture series.  Learned about Noam Chomsky.  Have heard about him for years but never really knew who he was.  Interesting.  Only one more lecture to go and I'm done with the series.

2.  Hired a guy to weed my garden.  My garden had gotten completely out of hand.  My arm has been hurting me lately and I've started seeing a chiropracter.  Every time I'd look at the garden and see all the work that needed to be done I felt defeated and unable to deal with it.  So a guy knocked at my door looking for work and I hired him, even though I have able bodied teens who SHOULD do the work.  But they hate it as much as I do. . . . Anyway, this guy was great.  He's coming back tomorrow to finish the job.  He even trimmed the trees and cleaned out the gutters!

3.  Read more of The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

4. Took Josh shopping.  Got him a suit and new pants, shirts and shoes and ties.  Bought Rick a couple ties also.

5.  Did a lot of thinking and planning about Sean.  Decided that he needed more structure and challenge.  Typed up a potential schedule for him for next fall.  Showed it to him.  He read it all and then said it sounded good!

6.  Got Sean and Josh to put their clothes away.  Been nagging them for days.

7.  Got rid of 64 books yesterday, so what did I do?  Bought more books while at the mall.  Got another Bryson, a book called The Founding Brothers which I overheard two friends of mine raving about and got a book by John McWorter on English.  Also bought a paperback verision of To Kill a Mockingbird.

8.  Cleaned the kitchen and got the trash out.  Getting the trash out was a big deal because 1) we'd missed the 4th of July pick up so our trash bins were completely full.  And 2) I had cleaned out Becky's room and had 4 bags of trash just from there.

9.  Rick finally sent the email to Berklee dealing with our little problem of lack of state documentation.  Hopefully things will be resolved.

10.  We started listening to Story of the World Volume II during dinner.  Listened to Intro and then most of Ch. 1.

11.  Read a chapter of David Copperfield

12. Rafael (or is it Raphael??  Keep forgetting!) went into DC today with Rick and Hannah.  He took in more of the American History Museum and then the Art museums and bought lots of little presents for his family. Came home and played more wii.  He is very happy to spend his time on the wii or watching movies.  He said he dioesn't watch many movies in Austria because where he lives there just aren't any theaters close to him.  So far he's watched Phantom of the Opera, March of the Penguins and A Beautiful Mind.  He's also watching a lot of Monk which apparently is popular in Austria!

Happy 4th!

Becky with her friend

Here comes Becky and the American Heritage Girls!

Moonwalking with Einstein - Book 33

Last year, my then 18 year old son recommended this book to me.  He'd learned about memory techniques when enrolled with CollegePlus! and it had fascinated him.  Somehow he stumbled onto this book and enjoyed it so much, he raved about it.  So I put it in my to read pile and finally got down to it a couple weeks ago.

Moonwalking with Einstein; The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer is a very interesting and entertaining read.  Foer was a young 25 year old journalist, living in his parents' basement trying to forge a career.  He got himself assigned to cover the U.S. Memory Championship up in New York and was thus introduced to the crazy, geeky, and at times, hysterically funny world of competitive memorizing.

Not only does Foer do a wonderful job of explaining what memory has meant to mankind through the ages, he goes into the world of science and how memory is studied and analyzed by neurologists and psychologists.  I found the part at end of the book about 'idiot savants' extremely interesting.   But Foer does more than just report, he actually spends the year training to compete in the U.S. Memory Championship and he volunteers to be a guinea pig for a scientist at the University of Florida who is studying memory.

Foer is a classy, smart, talented guy.  I liked him and thoroughly enjoyed spending the year with him as he trained and explored the idea of memory.  One caution:  in order to memorize things quickly, the memorizer is encouraged to think up memorable images; and what makes images memorable is often lurid or shocking.  Foer usually doesn't go into too much detail but occasionally I really would rather NOT have been let in on some of his images.  But to tell the truth they were often amusing as well as disgusting.  

So two thumbs up for Moonwalking with Einstein!

Go to 52 Books in 52 Weeks  for more reviews.