« Whew! | Main | Weekly Update »
September 21, 2007
Weekly Update
Or, "What the heck did we do this week?"
Er ...
Okay. Well, let's see. Griffin has taken off in math. You see, Right Start wasn't working for him. Yes, Right Start, that math program that I think is better than sliced bread, that I think presents concepts more clearly than any other math program ever, only confused my third son. Doesn't that figure? However, if I sit him down with Singapore he zips off five pages in no time flat. Funny kid.
Connor is still plugging along in Singapore 6B, doing problems that I have to dig out the answer key to check. Here's an example: A tank measures 50cm wide by 80cm long. It contains water to a depth of 15cm. Six 5cm cubes of metal are placed into the tank, raising the water level to the brim. What is the height of the tank?
Um. Yeah. Singapore gives nearly a whole page of white space for the child to work out the answer. And do you know what? All that white space is still there when Connor is finished with the problem. This kills me, folks.
Aidan and I got bored with the geometry part of Right Start D, so I had him take the final exam and pronounced him finished with the book. I pronounced him finished with Singapore 3A, too. So he's starting 3B, and one day I'll order Right Start E.
Latin - only Connor is doing Latin right now. We're waiting for new materials for Aidan, and I haven't started Griffin yet. Connor is still in Lesson 3 of Henle. We are inching along. But inching along and learning is better than ... not.
Classical Writing is a bit of a struggle in that neither Connor not me wants to divide the story into scenes, and make the @#$&* outline. Ugh. But this week I made us sit down and do it together. I think it's a good exercise, I just think it's boring.
Not much reading this week. We read a little more of "By the Shores of Silver Lake," and "Our Island Story" up to the coming of King Arthur. But that was it. Aidan is reading a Horrible History (and more Timothy Zahn novels), and Connor is reading "A Door in the Wall" (and "Red Storm Rising").
We forgot copywork, frequently.
BOTH sets of kids did science this week. Wow! The little boys and I collected earthworms and studied them. Can you believe I did not take pictures of that? The big boys did the chapter on density in Interactive Science, and Aidan nearly melted down again. I am ready to throw in the towel and order him a more age-appropriate program, but I'm going to hold out for the next chapter, which has no math. We'll see. It's not at all a problem if he uses something else instead, or even if he uses nothing for a couple of more years.
We couldn't do the experiments, because I have not yet ordered our scale.
We also had piano lessons, drama class and karate. And three children had Scout meetings. And half the family was sick, including me, so there.
Oh, art! We drew, and I do have pictures of that. I can't deal with them tonight, but will post those later in the weekend. And we picked apples.
And I did a couple of exercises in Henle II, practiced piano, and drew with the boys.
Posted by lynx at September 21, 2007 10:28 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/2530
Comments
OK, here's the trick. You have a three-dimensional tank, 80x50x15, and some three dimensional objects 5x5x5x6 going into it. You want a single-dimensional measurement (the final height of the tank), so to do that you take the volume of the objects going in and divide it by the area of the tank's bottom (80x50).
Now, you can simplify a lot right off the bat, because what you have is that the change in height is (5x5x5x6)/(80x50) - lots of easily-divisible numbers there. Take out the first 5, and you get (5x5x6)/(80x10), take out the next 5, and you have (5x6)/(80x2). The next 5 gets you 6/(16x2), which you can simplify again by dividing both numerator and denominator by 2, to get 3/16, so the height is that plus the original depth of water, or 15 and 3/16 cm.
Because you can do those simplifications very quickly in your head, you don't need the paper to work the problem, assuming you can visualize what is happening in three dimensions.
Posted by: Jeff Medcalf at September 22, 2007 10:25 AM
Sounds like a good week
My son is the same way with the Math.
He writes a few figures down, says "That's the answer."
I say, no no no, first you blah, then you blah blah, which gives you yada-yada, and the cross-reduce and simplify to .. . . oh, yeah,. . .okay, that's fine......Next!..... :-)
It's embarrassing sometimes :-)
He's older now and more patient and just lets me rant and rave while he takes a few minutes off . ..knowing I'll "get what he got" and he can move on in his work.
And people wonder why we do self-learning and self-teaching instead mom-lectures :-)
Your week sounds great -- hope everyone is feeling better soon!
Posted by: LH at September 23, 2007 11:55 AM