Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Tuesday Homeschooling

Math - solving for X

Language Arts; Caesar's English - Impassive, obsequious, ignominy, acquiescent, and impending.

Here is a sentence she wrote using her vocabulary words.

Time, like an impassive eagle, followed, worrying and impending over us.

History - xtimeline of Jamestown

Science - reading biography of genius polymath Thomas Jefferson. This website, A Day in the Life of Thomas Jefferson, is a really interesting read.

Mommy Time - She read tongue twisters to me while I picked out her clothes for our upcoming trip.

Read Aloud - We each read four poems
I read:
Chicago by Carl Sandberg
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
excerpts from The Black Rider by Stephen Crane

Zoe read
Dirge of Love by Shakespeare
A Land Dirge by John Webster
Morning Song of Senlin by Conrad Aiken
South End by Conrad Aiken

Art - Zoe did three pieces. She scribbled with chalk with her eyes closed, first with her right hand, then her left hand and then both hands at the same time. Then she looked at each piece to find a picture in the scribbles, then she outlined the pictures so we could see them. She named the pieces and described them.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

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!

Monday, November 9, 2009

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.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

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.