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."

Math - finishing integers

Language Arts - Read first part of My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Social Studies - More of the Conquest of America DVD

Science - Read about nerves, neurons, bone cells, autonomic and somatic nervous systems.

Japanese - writing, going over vocabulary

Read Aloud - Treasure Island - In Which Jim Hawkins strikes a deal with Long John Silver

Piano/Voice - Working hard on her performance piece.

Reading - More of My Family and Other Animals

I got to work on my book and Pere is making Focaccia Bread and Challah Bread.

Today

Math - algebra and integers (she was pleased to tell me she already learned all about integers at Math Center)

L.A. - Essay Voyage, parenthetical phrases, fixing punctuation and subject/verb disagreement in essay, and analyzing the Gettysburg address for connecting words, micro-language and personal pronouns. On her own, Zoe wanted to memorize some of the speech.

History - Netflix DVD - The Conquest of America. Ah... some historical info on European and Native American relations just in time for Thanksgiving.


Science - a Ted Talk on the Animation of the Cell

Mommy Time - Went on a Fall Leaf Walk. It was cold!



Arts/Crafts - Made a fall leaf swag for our mantle.



Literature - Online class about internal and external details in an Nathanial Hawthorne story and learned how to make a poster on Glogster.

Update part 2

Zoe is doing really great. She needs her own post. :P

Last night the director of the math center came to tell me that Zoe is doing some really neat things there. She set up a store with the other kids one night, last night they changed it to an arcade. She is also making a binary calculator, working with negative numbers, algebra and fractals.

In gymnastics she moved up a level and I think she is very good. So does her teacher. She has communicated to me a couple times that Zoe learns very quickly and is really motivated to do things with the right technique.

Our Rabbi came to talk to me this week. He said he was visiting her class and the teacher said it was time for a quiz to see how much they remember of what they have been learning. Some of the kids groaned and grumbled. Apparently Zoe stood up by her desk and proclaimed "I love learning!"

When the Rabbi relayed this story to me I told him "We homeschool. So I have been able to brainwash her into thinking that learning is fun." ;)

In piano she has a competition coming up. She is playing a very difficult and beautiful song. I'll try to make a recording of that too and post it here.

In choir she moved up to the next level, Concert Choir. She is very proud of herself. She is in the group that the "big kids" were in last year.

I am really impressed with her Japanese. She is reading, writing, speaking in Japanese. I haven't really tried to keep up but I doubt that I could. Listening and speaking are the hardest parts for her. She is not able to keep up a conversation in real time. But I don't really expect her to at this point.

She is loving all the writing she is doing in her online class, CTS forums and with her Michael Clay Thompson books.

Here is a poem she wrote for an assignment in MCT's poetry book

The undulating sea, it waves before the eyes
of Mother Nature, her surprise
is that the ocean is almost not hers.
In the dead of night a storm stirs.

She is reading a Sci-fi novel called Zoe's Tale and Treasure Island. I am reading her the original Winnie the Pooh books by Milne. They are personal favorites of us both.

Every week she has Daddy Night. They have shot the air rifle, Pere taught her to whittle with a knife, they have done some cooking, assembled the Eiffel Tower lego kit, and other nice Daddy/Daughter things.

Our homeschooling group population is dwindling. I worry about Zoe not having enough kids to play with . Right now there are only two girls her age that come. And her neighborhood friends are always so busy after school during the school year. But Zoe has made new friends this year in gymnastics, choir and math and has playdates planned with a new friend she made at temple. So, I would say that, while not great, the friendship stuff is not too bad.

I work hard to keep her satisfied, challenged, growing, happy, etc. Right now we have hit a good groove.