Homeschooling

Zoe is really loving her Life of Fred Beginning Algebra book. She is doing really well at it too. We had a few mix-ups with multiplying a negative by a negative. But otherwise her only mistakes are those inevitable errors of carelessness. (I am assuming my child is not the only one to write down the wrong numbers or equation signs)

For Language Arts she was supposed to write an Epic Simile but ended up misunderstanding my instructions and she just wrote a poem made of several similes.

The noise we make is like a siren
blaring out across the horizon,
screaming, shouting all along,
singing out a familiar song,
like an ambulance emitting a blare,
our poor voices we did not spare.

As if we were a cattle stampede,
running about, taking no heed.
And when at last it is time to go,
We shout in unison, "Oh, please no!"
And like a horse around we run,
play on the rings, and have merry fun.

Then, as if traversing placid Rome,
the wild adventurers then go home.

For history we are studying Jamestown and I found this fun online interactive website for it. - On The Trail of Captain John Smith


Yesterday she made this model of a DNA double helix from her esciencelabs kit.


Today we were inspired by a new science book we are supplementing with, How To Be a Genius - your brain and how to train it. The title is misleading. it is not really about being a genius. It is a science book about the brain. We decided to take a detour from our Singapore Science book to read it because Zoe wants to enter into the 2010 NEUROSCIENCE FOR KIDS POETRY WRITING CONTEST.

Today we were inspired to paint a Network of Nerves.


Like how we are tying science to both art and poetry. ;)


For Literature Zoe is reading The Hobbit. As I read this is she is singing the dwarves song about the Misty Mountains.

She also just started Little Women. I can't wait to see how she likes it!! She was extra excited when I told her that Louisa was taught some writing by Emerson and Thoreau.

For Read Aloud time I made up a new game, each time we read poetry from a different letter of the alphabet. We choose a poem where either the first or last name of the poet or the title of the poem begins with the letter of that day. Then we take turns reading the poem we chose aloud. Today the favorite for us both was The Flesh and The Spirit by Anne Bradstreet

Now that we have finished reading Treasure Island we are watching a movie version of it. From my reading I found that a made for television version, with a young Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins and Charleston Heston as Long John Silver, was considered very good. They didn't have it on Netflix but I found what looks like the entire movie, broken up into 10 minute portions, on youtube. It is very good! Zoe doesn't know but I have Muppet Treasure Island on the way from Netflix. It is hardly like the book but who can pass up Kermit as Captain Smollet?? Not I! Or is that Not Aye!

Last week we read The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and then, for fun, we listened to the Iron Maiden version of the song. I am a big Maiden fan and I have got Zoe hooked. She appreciates that they write songs a books and poems and myths and historical events. RotAM is a really long song, 13 minutes! Still that is short compared to the poem. :P

Hmmmm... what else? Well maybe another day I'll write about Japanese, her new piano teacher, gymnastics, choir, math academy, and Hebrew. This post is too long already!

Good News

We found a new piano teacher. In the small world of South Bend some meetings seem serendipitous. This fellow is known to several people that I hold in high regard musically, including a family with a profoundly gifted musical prodigy.

He seems very excited about Zoe. She had a state wide evaluation Saturday. She scored "excellent" on Theory. I don't know exactly what that means but Zoe thinks she got all of the questions on the written portion correct. She was being evaluated at Level 4, which is supposed to be for advanced 12 year old students. We are still waiting to hear how she did on the performance piece.

Her new teacher called the day of to offer her encouragement and then called the next day to see how she did. Then, today, at her lesson he gave her an extra fifteen minutes because he was so excited about what they were working on.

He has an impressive background in music and seems, not only, capable of taking Zoe to the next level in her music but also excited to do so. :)

We are still trying him out for a couple weeks before we make the decision to leave her current teacher. But my mind is pretty made up.

I feel lucky that my musically connected friends helped me find him so quickly.

Zoe pictures (and a cell)

Playing dress up with MC



Watching t.v. before choir





A model of a cell



In her new dress that she got from her Grandmere. Zoe still has her Zombie make-up on her cheeks.



Another beautiful formal dress from Grandmere for the cruise.

Halloween!

We had our third annual Halloween party Friday night. I went with a Zombie theme this year. I handmade the invitations with gray paper and black lace. This was the cover:

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'alls neighborhood

The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom

And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the THRILLER

On the inside I invited people to a Zombie Jamboree

You'll recognize the walking dead
by their pale skin, moaning,
shambling and hunger
for your B R A I N S !!!

Come as you are
or Zombify yourself.

I am happy to say that several of the guests came as Zombies. Zoe was a zombie astronaut, Pere had a spike through his head and I was a Zombie doctor.



We got the front yard ready a week earlier to get the neighborhood excited.



We had out scary graveyard out front.



Each room had a different theme, getting scarier as you went through them. This is the spider hatchery. There were two large spider sacks and about ten big spiders and hundreds of little ones.



In the dining room we had the Zombie Feast. We served deep fried toes, putrid fingers, spicy eyeballs, etc.

I totally forgot to take pictures of the rest but in the basement we had a tunnel of terror which was the favorite for the kids. And we had the mad scientist's laboratory where the Zombie Virus was created, as well as the Zombie Nursery (yes, zombified baby dolls)



My nephew and his friend would have won the costume contest. I LOVED their homemade muppet costumes.



For Halloween proper Zoe went as a "classic" vampire. She felt like she had gone as non-scary characters (Sailor Moon, Robin Hood, Princess, and Hermione) for so long that now she wanted to have a classic costume.



In the afternoon I worked at the neighborhood Halloween party.



I ran the sack races. Zoe must have raced about 30 times!



Some of the boys started a football game.



Zoe went trick or treating with her neighborhood friend. They were vampire sisters.

Halloween was fun! Now I just need to avoid the candy.

I'm unsure

Saturday Zoe had a recital at the home of her piano teacher. Honestly, I felt kind of weird afterward. Zoe's piano piece was SOOO much more advanced than the other performers. This was a recital for all the kids, more than half were older, mostly middle school kids.

Zoe played last and then there was a pizza party. During her piece and after there was a weird tension in the group. We were all sitting in this room in a circle around the piano and harp.So I could see the facial expressions and body language of all the families. And I got a weird vibe. Like there was some hostility. Not directed towards Zoe overtly, just a general depression of satisfaction from the other parents.

Back in Los Angeles, Zoe was a top student with a top teacher in a big city. The piece she played Saturday was not that much harder than the hardest piece she learned when she was five and studying under that Russian teacher in L.A.. When we moved to a small town in the Midwest I figured it was okay for Zoe to not take piano so seriously for awhile. Her teacher in L.A. was always pushing it to be the main thing in Zoe's life, she didn't really understand that Zoe was gifted in lots of areas and that piano wasn't her one big thing.

With her old teacher back in L.A. Zoe was the most talented for her age but there were a couple of students with the same type of talent who were older. These were other PG kids. So recitals weren't so obviously lop-sided.

The lopsidedness of the recital on Saturday actually made me uncomfortable and now I am thinking that maybe Zoe needs a different piano/voice teacher. Is that a strange reaction?

But we both really like this teacher, she is kind and good and has a good relationship with Zoe. So why change?

Well, Pere has been complaining that Zoe seems to be moving so much slower with this teacher. But I always felt like it was more important that Zoe was happy. (She used to get stressed out with her old Russian teacher.)

But now I am worried that teaching Zoe is out of her league. :( I feel like she also doesn't have the contacts and resources to give Zoe the performance opportunities she would like. I feel like there are probably teacher's in our town who have some experience with talent like Zoe has. But I wonder if that is really that important.

What should I do? It is easy enough not to change anything. Zoe likes her teacher and her current song really was complex and difficult. So the teacher does challenge her to a certain extent. But now that it really hit home that Zoe is BY FAR her most advanced student I feel like she is a big fish in a small fish bowl that she might not be able to grow in.

homeschooling stuff

Zoe is finishing her end of year test on her 6th grade math. She is all proud of herself for starting "algebra." *grin* We'll start Life of Fred algebra next week.

She is doing very well in math. I know the time she spends at Math Center helps her to think of herself as a "mathy person." I am also appreciative that there are so many women and girls at Math Center. The program director has a PhD from Boston University. She's brilliant! She spends some one on one time with Zoe every week. This week she sent Zoe home with a DVD of the movie Flatland, based on the book.

Zoe still loves her Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts. Seriously, she asks for extra assignments even. She loves anything to do with writing, creative or even the five paragraph essay. :)

She is doing lots of writing for Lightning Literature too. I am impressed with what she is learning about good writing in that class. And she LOVES participating in the online forums. Getting to communicate and write with other gifted kids is her favorite thing to do these days. She gets up at 7:00 a.m., which is the earliest I let her get up, and runs down stairs, jumps on her laptop and checks her Forums first thing every morning. (except Saturday. Saturday morning cartoons still win out over the Forums.)

She also loves her reading assignments from Lightning Literature. She is reading MY Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell and Treasure Island now.

This week we started the second volume of History of US. I like this series. Our readings yesterday led us to a conversation about how knowledge of life on other planets would change the beliefs of people on Earth.

In science we are studying the cell. She made models of eukaryote and prokaryote cells yesterday, with mitochondria, Golgi, nucleus (not in the prokaryote obviously), cytoplasm, endoplasmic reticulum, etc.

We are also loving a new supplementary science book we got called Open Me Up It is very well written with great illustrations.

We are studying the Human Genome Project and it's ethical implications.

Zoe has a piano recital this weekend and she is getting ready for the AIM competition.

This article is AWESOME!

This article gets into issues that I am currently discussing with Pere and some other gifted girlfriends. This is the stuff that I think about on a daily basis. It is well said and, I think, it is very important that we recognize the ways we still need to change and grown to be responsible to ourselves as gifted women.

Entitled to be Exceptional - by Douglas Eby

"In her book "Smart Girls" Barbara Kerr notes that this pattern may have lessened in the past twenty years, but "the Horner Effect may still live on in girls' and women's tendencies to negotiate and avoid conflict or competition when friendship or intimacy is at stake...

"Since they are astute, gifted girls become sensitive to the conflicts for women in competitive situations much earlier than average girls do... Terman's studies show gifted girls and women have an even stronger need to please others than average women do."