For Friday

So today we did some multiplication from Math Mammoth. Catherine certainly understood it but again her problem was that she isn't quick enough on the draw with basic addition. She can do it, she's just slow and that seems to make multiplication a little painful. I think I've mentioned this before and I think I've mentioned ways I intended to address it. I think I completely ignored that. So back to Calculadder drills. We did a couple of easy ones today with 2 minute time limits and we'll keep doing it until the answers come to her quickly.

I should make it clear that I'm not forcing the drills on Catherine. She's found the speed she works at pretty frustrating and since quizzes and drills are something we simply haven't done she enjoys the novelty of it.

On to Language Arts where again it was back to basics. I found a couple of capitalization worksheets at Teacher Vision (here and here). This is something we'll work on some more. There's no way in hell I'd give up our time as radical unschoolers but the trade off is that we have to play a little catch in certain areas.

On to history where there is no catch up required although, since Catherine thought we should start SOTW from the beginning, there's some repeating. Again we used a copy of a map of Mesopotamia (from the SOTW activity book) and reviewed the bodies of water and rivers. The SOTW map has the city of Catal Huyuk on it so we plugged that in Google and read a bit about the site. When I read a bit about it being a Neolithic and Chalcolithic site Catherine asked what those terms meant so on we went on to find that out and start a glossary of terms for the back of her history binder.

Science was related to history. We'd done simple machines before but our SOTW activity book has a colouring page of a Shaduf so we went on a search for info on first-class levers. Enchanted Learning has a simple animation that helped us review. When we were finished we stomped outside to find some way to construct something similar to a shaduf. We ended up balancing a garden rake over the top bar of our swingset and hanging a tricycle on one end. Catherine tried moving it around with a rope on the other end. Then we moved the rope over beside the load or tricycle and I acted as the counterweight (couldn't find another tricycle!) while she moved it around again, finding it much easier that time.

Art was related to SOTW. We visited this page on Indian Rock Art and were supposed to try making our own negative handprints and painted handprints like this one...


...but Catherine wrinkled her nose thinking it would be too messy. Sheesh. Ah well, at least we talked a bit about the art and about how prehistory is really not a fixed moment in the timeline but more relative to the attributes of a culture.

There were a couple of other resources I found. One I didn't use yet and one I haven't really tested yet. The first was the Motions and Forces page from LearningScience.org. It has a bunch of links to resources useful if you're covering physics. There's a link to Medieval levers that I know we'll have fun with when we get to that period.

The other resource was a multiplication game called Timez Attack. It's basically just a drill game but the graphics and gameplay look impressive and there's a free version for the times tables from 2-12. Unfortunately it's really dark and in our bright kitchen we couldn't see a thing when we tried it early in the afternoon. there also seems to be no save function. Catherine did seem enthusiastic about it however and she loves a good dungeon crawler game. I'll write more when we're a little more familiar with it.

That's it for our homeschooling today.