fun in threes, sometimes fours
Sunday afternoons have some standard events, and right in the center of those events is afternoon exploring. Today, though, we threw a wheelbarrow into the mix, and spent a bit of time collecting wood.
The wood? For the first bonfire of the year.
The Girl is to write a research-based biographical report about Amelia Earhart. As with all homework, I'm willing (and sometimes insistent) to help her, at least to check her work. But this is a big assignment. We've needed to pace ourselves, so last week, we set up a schedule on Google Calendar to make sure L completed everything in a timely fashion and didn't simply let everything pile up at the end.
She completed the book, she finished the planning, and today, it was time to begin the report.
It's a fine line, though, between helping and doing for the Girl. As a writing teacher, I have experience in guiding students to see the problems with their writing and helping them improve it. But in the back of my mind, I say to myself, "This needs to look like a second-grader wrote it." Should I teach her to transition between ideas within a paragraph? Should I show her how to turn her one-sentence opening, her thesis, into a full paragraph?
I've decided simply to guide her as minimally as possible, then ask her to read the finished product. If she feels it's clumsy, if she comments on the short introductory paragraph, we'll get to work fixing it.
I have a little jar of olive oil mixed with grapefruit seed extract that I keep in a plastic bag in the bottom of a desk draw at school. It was from a long time ago, for an irritating spot of skin on my hand that I didn't want to go see a specialist about. The wise Internet suggested this as a homeopathic remedy.
Today, a young man caught a glimpse of that little bottle when I was pulling something from my desk draw. Or at least I guess he did -- the alternative is that he was rummaging through the drawer when I wasn't looking, something I don't want to imagine he did. At any rate, he went to Ms. W, the eighth-grade administrator and my immediate supervisor, with a concern shortly after that.
"I think Mr. Scott has a little jar of urine in his desk drawer."
Ms. W told me shortly afterwards that it was very hard to keep a straight face with that concerned young man. "I can assure you, Terrence, that that was not what it was, and that there is a logical explanation for what you think you saw."
Oh, but the fun I could have with that misconception tomorrow in class...
Our cat, the youngest, likes to drag her bed here and there.
The Boy is a big train fan. Well, he’s a fan of just about anything that rolls, crawls, lifts, shovels, moves — machines. But trains are special, as they should be.
Every now and then, though, I get a little carried away when designing tracks.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an inventor. Who doesn’t, I guess. I mixed this and that, sometimes with permission, sometimes surreptitiously. At one point, I even determined that I could certainly make my own alcohol, so set some potato peelings to ferment, and not knowing really about the distillation process, created what could only be called later a foul mess.
Today, L was less ambitious. She wanted, appropriately enough for her interests and gifts, to create paint. She mixed various food colorings together, taking careful notes about proportions.
In the end, they all wound up in the sink, I believe. She couldn’t figure out a way to thicken the mixture into a paint that didn’t involve some idea like mixing yogurt into it. We’re more than happy to let her play, let her experiment, let her explore, but everything has a certain limit.