Blog starters?

I know I've used this blog more as a daily diary of things that are going on in our little homeschool world, but that gets boring to write about EVERY day, and of course, not every day is worth writing home to Mom about (to borrow a phrase.) Do any of you full-time bloggers have special tricks for topic spark ideas? I know I can save an unpublished post, but that seems cumbersome when I have ideas of, "someday, write about this topic" without actually *writing* about it yet.

Short week

As we get ready for vacation, I don't want to start a new unit just to suspend it for two weeks. Well, three once you include the Christmas craziness. So, I was stuck for ideas in how to keep Shannon engaged this week and still "do" schoolwork.

Math and spelling? Easy enough to continue. But how about reading? I decided to keep things pretty light this week, and let her pick one of her regular books that she reads for pleasure. But we mixed things up a lot... SHE is the teacher for literature this week. I told her she'd pick a book, decide how much of it I am to read in a day (and advised her I was a fast reader and could probably read more than her in a half hour), and design questions for me to answer based on that day's reading. Then, we'll do crafts or research projects based on the book. I was hoping she'd pick a Magic Treehouse book, keeping options for the extra goodies still learning opportunities, but did not require it.

She did not. A couple of weeks ago she picked a few "Dear Dumb Diary" books to take home, so that's one that I'm reading for now. She told me to read the first 6 chapters/days, and wrote about 5 questions for me. She is having a BLAST.

Whoops, time out. Brag time... she was doing her math worksheet while I was typing, and just checked her answers. 100% on doing problems in her head instead of with an abacus or on paper. She is overjoyed.

Anyway, she loves being the teacher. We're off to make a guitar I think. :)

Spelling

I may have mentioned previously how we've gone to a more traditional "school model" for how we're handling spelling right now. It's definitely not ideal, but until things settle down, it's something that's working for us. So Shannon gets a list of words on Monday to write 1-3 times each, the list comes from suggested words out of MBTP, at least one 'challenge' word, and I've started trying to add vocabulary words out of her literature, science, or social studies unit.

On Tuesday, she writes sentences for each word. Wednesdays she reviews independently and is doing a good job of writing the words she thinks she'll have trouble with. Thursdays we test. Any words missed on test day will be carried over to the following week. Ever since the first week, she has gotten 100% on her tests, and that's great. I think the word lists are a bit unchallenging but we'll ramp it up if we need to. Again, it's the routine I'm working with first until we get comfortable with it.

Tuesdays are her favorite days, as we've found a great way to get Dad involved. She now saves her sentence writing until he gets home, and they sit across the desk from each other. She gives him three random words (or not-so-random, usually objects she can see in the room) while she forms a single sentence out of three of her spelling words. Dad's job, however, is to write a haiku with his words. All of us love this solution. Sean's haikus are usually hilarious (writing for his audience, after all) and his solutions have really stirred Shannon's creative juices to reach for more and more interesting sentences. She often tries to write in haiku herself, and has a pretty good handle on it. Hooray for creativity!

Spark!

Hooray for crunching wintergreen LifeSavers in a dark room in the name of science!

Weird Dreams

(copied and pasted from a Facebook Note I just wrote)

What's the weirdest dream you've ever had? Can you find its roots in your life and see why you might have dreamt that?? Have you ever described a dream without the phrase, "And then for *some* reason...."

I think I've had one of my all-time strangest dreams last night. Here are the ingredients from real life:

1. Study Ben Franklin in both fact and historical (children's) fiction for 2 weeks for daughter's homeschool literature unit

2. Read one of Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" books for 2 hours at bedtime, where the main character is a special agent for crimes against fiction and has the ability to jump in and out of books, usually to fix something that has gone wrong.

3. Stay up until 1:45.

4. Have in your existing back-brain obvious clues pulled from "The DaVinci Code" (book, NOT movie); Hamlet quotation "The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right"; a recent read of fantasy novels centering on a thief posing as a noblewoman; and... not sure where the last ingredient came from, but possibly a reference to the biblical Samson, but it could also be a weird dream alteration of Ben's fur cap.

Mix well and sleep. You'll find yourself a time-traveling agent needing to fix history. It turns out that Ben Franklin is also an agent, but has gone rogue. This is evidenced by the inclusion of the Hamlet quote in Poor Richard's Almanac, long a sore spot for historical scholars, why would he try to take credit for such a famous quote that predates him by so many years? (No, it's not really in there!) Your dream centers on the need to jump into history and retrieve his hair from a famous haircut (???WTF?) before it gets buried and discovered again, altering history. You go to 1780's Philadelphia, and stealthily swipe the hair which turns out to be cut from a wig. Upon returning to the present time, it turns out that Ben is a good guy after all, but it's still important that the hair does *not* make it into the historical record until "discovered" in the 1960's, so you have to go back and re-insert the hair under the barber shop just before it burns down. All the normal sci-fi strictures apply: you can't be in the same time twice, Ben can't go because he's alive in that era, you have to go back after you left from your first trip, you can't overlap those times. You'd already cut it quit close getting the hair out in the first place, and had nearly been discovered.

Well, there was a lot more to the dream, too, but that's the 60-second summary. Definitely one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had, with a "plot" that spanned several weeks of apparent time lapse. Tell me about your weirdest dream!

Advice?

I have a sensitive child. Under most circumstances, other adults see her as a great, confident kid with a mind of her own. But once in a while, her feelings get hurt, and you have no idea ahead of time what might set her off.

This week was a good one for not being terribly upset if she missed a math problem. It's too soon to rejoice, but perhaps we've made it through that block. But I'm still trying to work around it when possible... her issues of sensitivity and crying because of hurt feelings on things that should be able to roll right off her back. The days where it manifests itself I alternate between being so frustrated I want to pull my hair out and so grateful she's actually not in public school where tears make one a target. Then of course I start second-guessing myself and wonder if it's not just a show for Mom, maybe if she were in "real school" she wouldn't be a target after all, but would have learned how to deal with all this crap by now. But of course I go back to remembering what kids are like, and her feelings are so genuine, I know it would be the same thing there, only with a larger audience.

I never spent much time making Shannon do repetitive letter worksheets when she was learning how to write. She didn't have the patience or interest, I didn't have the patience. Plus, my own handwriting ranges from merely embarrassing to completely illegible, it's even hard enough for me to slow down to make "good" letters for her to copy. Or so I justified myself back then. It shows in her writing, though. She's simply not one for big round loops and tall backs, even spacing and proper capitalization. Every unit we do in literature where she has to write in her journal, I've been adding one more "rule" to follow. Every time so far, she has resisted the implementation of the rule, but by the end of the three weeks, she has (completely on her own) compared that week's questions with the ones from the unit before, and remarked how much easier it is to read, and how I was right. ;-)

Today I was planning for next week's tasks, and I thought we'd spend a day working on her handwriting a bit, which is why I bring this all up. Last week at Staples, I picked up a "Third Grade Handwriting" book, with the specific intent to teach cursive. Instead, I wrote out the whole Aa Bb Cc alphabet in good old block printing. Well, I made the mistake of leaving it out on my desk, and as she was getting ready to say goodnight tonight, she spotted it. "What's this?" Mistake #2 of the night, I told her. Apparently an offhand "We're going to spend a day for reading working on your handwriting a bit," wasn't soft enough for her. Mistake #3, I expounded, waxing poetically on my own mother's handwriting, wishing that mine were like it, and maybe with a little work, Shannon's could be; that if I'd practiced more as a kid, I could have, but since I didn't, well, she's seen my writing. Was that enough? Nope, she still took it as a direct criticism of her writing (which, truth be told, is pretty bad for a 9 year old) and went off to get her pajamas on in tears. She came back out for her last hug, and told me I'd made her sad.

So all you education types out there, what specifically am I doing wrong? Is it just because I'm Mom? Or would she be this way for anyone? How can I get her to make a goal to be better at something without her hearing it as she's not good enough?

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.