What a week!

Ending on a high note, so therefore it's been a great week. :)

Electricity has been all I hoped it would be for inspiring fun and intellectual curiosity. Sure, there's plenty of boring vocabulary and reading, but the key for this age is to get the "Wow, this is cool" factor. We had fun yesterday, I went to buy a Kindle at Staples, and Shannon brought her own money to spend for ... wherever we might end up going. She found a remote control helicopter just like Daddy's, and decided that's what she wanted to get (making my afternoon easy, I won't deny it.) But I told her that since that day's discussion in electricity was all about batteries and motors, she absolutely deserved to get that toy demonstrating both ;)

"Ben and Me" has been a great read, too. She finished the book itself today, though we still have a few more days of discussion on the topics it introduced. Then she gets to do some creative writing of her own based on "independent" research.... pick a new event from Ben Franklin's life and write about it in such a way that it could have been included in the book that she read. This one might be a struggle, as I've never really had her do more than a few sentences on stuff before, a full story might be tough. But I acknowledge that's been my failing... I fail to take some of these assignments and adapt them to what I think will work better for us. I've looked at many of the "paragraph" assignments over the last year and thought to myself, "That's really dumb, who'd want to write a paragraph about *that*?" I need to stop pre-judging assignments, because while I'm definitely right about most of the things I think she'll enjoy, I have been wrong on a few things that I've thought would be chores and she turns out to say how easy or fun it is. I'll get better. :)

So it's one short week with Thanksgiving coming up, then another week of chaos before vacation. We go on 2 weeks of vacation in December, so I don't plan to start another full unit until we get back. That last week of November/first week of December will be chaotic enough on its own, but we'll still do math and spelling at the very least. I think I'm going to challenge her to pick one of her books that she's never read before and teach me for that week. :-) See if she's caught on to the types of questions that get asked after her chapters ... she loved the one day that she got to be the teacher for math.... I gave her the parent guide and she had to explain what was going on to a very confused student. Definitely a repeatable approach.