I've taken a break during the last couple of weeks as far as writing goes, but the photos have continued.
Break
the boy
Autumn Sunday
I can't remember a time with so much rain. It seems like it's been raining for six weeks, ever since the hurricane near-miss that swamped the coastal area of South Carolina and drenched us, flooding our basement. Since then, we haven't had a week that I can remember without at least one day of rain, which means any drought we were having has been settled and then some. This has been especially true during the weekends: rain, rain, rain. And that leaves us with few options but sitting inside and fishing.
But eventually, we have to go out. Even if it's only for a few minutes, with umbrellas, we cannot possibly stay in the house the entire weekend.
E on Soup
We tried a new soup tonight for dinner. The Boy wasn’t impressed. A few comments through dinner:
- After the prayer: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” “Daddy, I asked Jesus for a different soup.”
- After the first bite: “Daddy, this soup tastes like, like sea turtles.”
- Later during dinner: “Daddy, some soup is good, and some soup is not so good.”
- Still later during dinner: “Daddy, I need some water to wash the taste.”
- When I told him he’d had his last bite: “Hurrah!”
The Two Extremes
It's third period -- my first academic period this year, as my two planning periods are at the start of the day. (Why? Not so important, but it's a nice schedule: I have plenty of time to get ready for classes, then the classes themselves just fly by. Suddenly I hear the afternoon announcements and think, "Already?!") The first student comes in well before any other student.
"Whew! I missed the hall-pocalypse!"
Clever kid, that boy. Makes me laugh quite often.
Fourth period. Kids are starting The Diary of Anne Frank. I have them exploring the Anne Frank museum's interactive tour of the Secret Annex. Kids who might otherwise be distracted and distracting are silent, looking at the last place Anne Frank was physically free.
Fifth period -- also Anne Frank, but a little ahead of the other class. They're acting out the first scene in preparation for mini-projects that involve staging select scenes from the play. A student who can be disruptive and disrespectful turns out to be a masterful actor.
Sixth and seventh periods -- English I Honors. We're finishing up a unit on poetry, looking at Shakespeare's sonnets in preparation for the upcoming unit on Romeo and Juliet. I have them look at sonnet 130:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
We go over unknown vocabulary.
The school day's over then, but not really -- there's always hall monitoring to get through as the kids head home. Ten minutes after the first students are dismissed, I see her. She stops dead in her stride and half glares at me.
"Why did you write that on my report card?" She pulls it out to show me, but I know what I wrote. She was one of several students for whom I left extensive comments in the grading system, comments that get included on the report card.
The comment was an honest assessment of how this young lady has been doing in my class. I pointed out that she has "demonstrated some very disruptive behavior this quarter" but that recently has shown improvement. I explained that she needs to improve her ability to "reply disrespectfully to teacher redirection" and mentioned her "problems staying focused and refraining from disruptive side-conversations."
"Why'd you write that?"
"Because I need your folks to know what's going on in the classroom. I haven't been able to get in touch with them."
"But now I'm gonna get cussed out!"
And suddenly everything becomes a little clearer.
Autumn Leaves
We always have leaves in the trampoline when we head down to do some jumping. Even in the summer, there’s a smattering of leaves that we have always swept away before we begin jumping. There are always just enough to be a bother. The sweeping process, in fact, has been quite beneficial: it’s motivated L to learn how to be a more efficient sweeper.
Today, when we made it down to the trampoline, it occurred to us that, with so very many leaves on the jumping surface, it might be fun just to leave them.
We were right.
Playing in the Backyard
Autumn Tomatoes
Even though it’s nearly November, we still had tomatoes in the small raised beds we accuse of being a garden. For the last several weeks, though, the ripening process has all but stopped, and so ahead of tonight’s possible freeze, K sent the kids out to pick the remaining tomatoes.
They were to segregate them into red and green, with the plan being to eat some of the green later this week in the form of fried green tomatoes and putting the rest in paper bags to ripen slowly.
Given the color distinctions, everyone felt it was best if E just held the bowl.
Autumn Sunday
It's during this time of year that the early morning sun is so spectacular. It's not that the leaves are kaleidoscopic for they're all still green here in the South. It's the angle of the sun at this time of year.
"It's the best time of the year in South Carolina," K always says. Sunny cool days that invite backyard play.
And it's time to begin decorating -- first Halloween. Pumpkin ghosts to hang on our Crepe Myrtles in the front yard.
Of course, there's always time for the sandbox.
Disaster Lurking
Saturday in the fall means a day in the yard more often than not. We have neglected our yard, however, and so we had quite a bit to get caught up. Rain for several Saturdays didn’t help much either, other than encourage growth of our lawn, which amounted to more work.
With a batch of pumpkins for fall decoration, the kids had a bit of work as well. They each got a small, personal pumpkin but had to share a large one. On his half, E elected for an all black pumpkin, then decided that he might like to have an entirely black pumpkin and began slowly taking over the whole pumpkin. Much to L’s frustration.
While they were painting, I was trimming all the hedges when I discovered the fourth nest of yellow jackets since we moved here. Or rather, they found me, with one giving me a welcome present just below my left eye.
Two catastrophes in one day. If only we could keep all catastrophes at this level.
Daddy Day
"Daddy, there's no working today."
They'd been talking about it all week, the coming Daddy Day as they called it. Friday was an optional work day at school, so I availed myself of the opportunity to be off work and spend the day with the kids. And the kids were ready for it, complete with a plan. First we had to have pizza for lunch. "It's been so long since we've had pizza," L begged. Then we were to go to the Denver Downs, a local farm that turns into an autumnal playground every September. That was the plan. The actual day fell out a little differently.
By Thursday, a little television time was in the morning mix: L has been getting disks of the old 80's show Full House, and the latest DVD arrived Thursday. "Can we watch an episode or two in the morning?" So we did.
It was then that the no working comment came up, for during the second episode -- I try not to let on, but I don't find Full House fully engaging -- I'd gotten the laptop and began fiddling with this site, trying to get rid of a graphical element that has annoyed me for ages. L thought I was grading papers, though. Showing the PHP and HTML that I was wading through to try to find where the element is inserted in the code so I can take it out didn't convince her. "Looks like student work to me!"
Another change: everyone needed a library book refresh. The Girl scored exceptionally well on her fall MAP reading scores, which showed that she's reading four or so grade-levels higher than her actual grade (as opposed to some of my students, but that's a gripe for another post, one I've made several times). It was time to get her out of some of her favorites -- Cam Jansen and the Magic Treehouse series -- and into something a little more challenging. Since she's developing an affinity to mysteries, we ended up walking out with a Nancy Drew book, a Hardy Boys adventure, and a couple of Encyclopedia Browns.
After pizza for lunch at a local establishment that has fantastic pizza but looks like it hasn't had a renovation since its establishment just a few years before the debut of Full House, the Boy took his nap, and L and I played school. I got to be Frankie, the bad student. And having had plenty of experience from the teacher's side of the desk, I knew just what to do. L, having no personal experience with such things other than watching her teacher deal with the one or two behavior issues in her class, struggled a bit. I tried to give her some classroom management tips, but it was hard switching roles, so I just let her struggle and tried to make it amusing for her. For example, when it was time for writing, I wrote my composition about -- oh, let's just change the topic.
The after-nap plan, by this time, had changed as well, after having already changed. Denver Downs got bumped the night before because of a little bit of hoarseness on the Boy's part. "He'll need to have a nap," K explained, which meant no chance of going to Denver Downs. Too far, too tiring, too everything. So we settled on the zoo. But by the time we got to the zoo, there was only a bit of time remaining before they kicked everyone out for Boo in the Zoo, the annual waste of time and money, rather the trick-or-treating in the zoo after hours when all the animals are stashed away for the night and great herds of children rush through the zoo collecting small portions of sugary treats from various stations in the zoo, all for a ridiculously expensive price. I guess it's fundraising for the zoo, but K and I decided long ago it's not worth our time or money.
Instead, we played at the playground across from zoo, hiding, climbing, running, and being just generally silly.
After dinner, a little trampoline time before I packed both the kids off to bed as K was at choir practice.