It's been chilly in the house due to some heating problems -- zoning system again. The kids have been sleeping together as a result.
Commonality
the girl
With the Cat
Late Morning
First Confession
Congratulations to our Girl, the big girl, and for at least fifteen minutes this evening after her first confession in preparation for her first communion, a saint.
Sunday Afternoon
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.
Writing
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.
Balloons
Text
Yesterday, During the Game…
Experiment
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.