The Nile

Both Kyle and Maddie were up again today and despite being exhausted from swimming yesterday, Catherine had had a late night so I shoul have known it wasn't going to be much of a school day. Still, I plunked Catherine down at the table and gave her a bit of copywork to start with. It was only Dd and Bb with sheets I made at this site. She's had some trouble telling the lower case b and d apart so I thought a page of copying the two might help a bit. It did...a bit. We'll continue to work on that.

I pulled out the Singapore text and Catherine started and gave a good try but she was messing up on simple ideas I was sure she knew so again, we called it a day. I'm not going to force the issue when there's no possibility of her retaining or even making sense of the math. We did have a talk about getting enough sleep and agree that she would be getting up tommorrow to do a bit of math.

The afternoon involved a bit of play on the computer with Kyle but after they abandoned that they drew maps, wrote or drew lists of supplies and started playing explorer. It went on forever and the surprising part to me that, by far, the bulk of their play went into the making of the maps. It took quite awhile before they decided to actually pretend to use the maps.

Tonight we're going to watch the first part of a BBC series on the Nile. No, I didn't buy it. Yes, I obtained by means legal in Canada and almost nowhere else. I'm not sure what I'd do without torrents and P2P software. We certainly wouldn't have access to most of the documentaries we wathc now without them. Anyhow, the series looks beautiful and being a BBC production I'm fairly sure it's of decent quality.

And speaking of documentaries and quality, I watched, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," last night. Bits were interesting. Certainly it peaks a person's wonder. Too bad it was such a sloppy mess. Weak inferences were presented as solid evidence in a way that reminded me of past clashes with creationists. If this is what Discovery presents as science, it's really no wonder people in general have such a poor understanding of science. The hypothesis that this was Jesus and his family is really interesting, too bad it was presented in such an awful way.