Randomly Recent

Hello again! The boys are both well as are DH and I. I don't normally talk about Adrian's heath issues but to those in the know, I am glad to report he has lately been doing very well with his homemade diet and is showing fewer signs of allergies and gut sensitivities (fist pump!).

I think I'm just going to update the blog monthly or at most twice a month from now on. Even when I find time, I am just so overcome by mental fog that writing is the last thing I feel inclined to do. I am tempted to blame the February blahs but truth be told, I'm just not able to fix my mind on one task at a time. Plus, the daylight saving time adjustment is not helping at all. I dislike anything interfering with my sleep!

We've been up to some fun with the homeschooling. February and early March were exciting times and filing the PSA for the first time (on Jan 29!) and dropping the charter (Feb 18!) were definitely factors contributing to the excitement.

Thanks to the PSA, I feel less inhibited about dabbling with interest areas. There is little worry now about producing written samples just for the sake of it! Two interests that I am hoping we will go deeper into over the next few months are Jazz history and Broadway musicals, both inspired by the wonderful Bill Messenger. I hope to list other resources once I have them confirmed.

Kiddo worked on a number theory class with Art of Problem Solving from December to March. Despite being challenged beyond his comfort zone, he has expressed interest to take more classes with AoPS and will start another in the next month or so.

This month, he also took the SAT. It was timely (given he has already covered the content in math) and a more meaningful standardized testing experience for him vs. something like the STAR test or new Smarter Balance test.

He prepped for the test using The Official Study Guide (the "blue book"), taking about six practice tests over a period of five weeks (one test per week, then two the week before the exam). The last practice test was taken in "exam" conditions in our local library. The actual test was taken at a local high school. I am glad that we decided to prep for it instead of taking it cold (my initial plan). There were several executive function issues that I was grateful to be made aware of; issues I wouldn't have known about without prepping him.

While I was helping him to prep, I was struck by how different standardized testing is in the US compared to Malaysia. At the age that most students here take the SAT, national exams in 1980s and 1990s Malaysia were spread out over at least three or four days, sometimes more, and we were tested on eight to 10 subjects. Each subject test stretched from about an hour and a half to two hours (I hope I am remembering that correctly). Like SAT Subject Tests, we had MCQs, but were also required to produce well-reasoned written responses in some sections. It was also compulsory for science students to have lab practical exams for all three sciences (Biology, Chemistry and Physics). I can't imagine kiddo being ready to take those exams at 11 years old like he was with the SAT! (BTW, I forgot to mention that while we were researching SAT, we came across the first version of the current test from the 1920s! So interesting. When kiddo takes the SAT again, it will probably be the new version.)

Till next time, happy Spring everyone!

The Lone Wolf

Kiddo wrote a story about Adrian (again, lol) for his charter school writing assignment. The assignment needs some editing but I am posting it anyway. :) Please feel free to give him some constructive criticism if you can! He hopes to expand the story some day and maybe publish it on his blog.

The Lone Wolf

The Lone Wolf stalked the streets of Bellyrub. His silver, six-pointed badge, dirty and tarnished, hung loosely on his gray sheriff’s vest, which was riddled with bullet holes. His taupe Stetson hat was five sizes too large for his head, but he still looked formidable (at least from his point of view). His leather gun holster lay far outside of his arm reach, but that was no problem. He could just lift his hind leg and scratch and the gun would fall right out. Of course, he might get a little carried away with the scratching, but still...

Wonderful Wednesdays

Reading while waiting for math class to start.

"It's such a great day today, Mom!"

At first I thought he was referring to the weather (it IS a lovely day today). But no. He was referring to having his favorite classes on today. Math and music. His two favorite teachers. It's a lovely coincidence that we have scheduled to meet both on Wednesdays, smack in the middle of the week.

Randomly Recent

It's been a while since I've written one of these. Gee, it's been a while since I've written anything here lol! What we've been learning about, playing with, reading, eating, watching, discussing, repeating, trying to remember to, asking, contemplating, etc. in no-particular-order:

KIDDO: Simple calligraphy, Calvin and Hobbes, cells, harder algebra problems, Avatar (with Aang and gang, not the blue people), gravity, Courage the Cowardly Dog, gas laws, area of spheres proofs, The Hobbit (movie), drying and combing hair before breakfast, Feynman and his safe-cracking ways, reviewing gender in German nouns and articles, "is Tolkien supportive of women's rights or not?", 5th grade STAR testing (fun!), tautologies, enzymes, "is it scrumptious, is it juicy?", summarizing an essay, LaTeX, ice cream (lots of it! maybe too much?!), swimming (if you can call it that), Life of Pi (movie, only half though, couldn't summon the courage to watch it all).

Tin Tin, cannon-balling, Downton Abbey theme, Japanese mealtime etiquette, stick swinging and air jabbing (during walks), why do we need literary analysis?, complex numbers, Dexter's Lab, assembling a DIY model tank, disliking the Samsas (poor Gregor!), the science of color, logic puzzles, leaf burning, the courage of hobbits, proteins, Three Men in a Boat, "must I use a writing curriculum?".

ADRIAN: Chewing, looking cute, getting into trouble, wagging, halitosis 401, lack of math skills and what it means in his world, best positions for curling up to sleep without losing sight of Mom and Big Bro, fetching, looking cuter, sighing, being walked without sniffing at weeds every other second.

Eating cherries without Mom's knowledge, finding good spots around the yard to you know what (and knowing what "not in our pond area you don't!" means), shedding, ear-flopping, toe-nipping.

Summer 2012

Some of us read, and read.

One of us traveled a lot and worked crazy hours. Some of us played.
One of us built and crashed stuff. Loudly.
Some of us read some more.
One of us moved up a level in piano lessons.
One of us rearranged the living room furniture (yet again).

Some of us did math (and love our Expo Magnetic Dry Erase Easel Board).

One of us went anagram-crazy.

One of us blogged. One of us didn't as much.

Some of us tried a science experiment or two. And revived our love for all things David Attenborough.

One of us worked out. One of us didn't (ack!).
Some of us kayaked and went paddle boarding too (one of us didn't tag along due to the heat).
One of us complained a lot about the heat and may have glared angrily at the sun several times.

One of us thought some more about math and typed some of it up for a summer class (hurray!).

One of us is loving cheesy vocabulary videos (and happily rushing through the program because another one of us is too cheap to upgrade past the free trial period).

Some of us allowed our yard to become overgrown with grass, weeds and ivy. Some of us are upset about a pesky yard-invading ground squirrel.

Some of us tried hard to resist ice cream and succeeded for about a week.

One of us liberally copied Sheila's blogging style.

Figuratively Speaking: Literary Excerpts

I plan for us to use this workbook to learn new literary terms and review the ones kiddo already knows. We are going at our own pace with this and may use our own sequence instead of the suggested order.

I am bookmarking links to the miscellaneous poems and texts peppered throughout the book, knowing that my curious guy will not be satisfied with reading only the excerpts. We'll probably only choose a few of the original versions to read. Longer works have not been bookmarked -- I will either use the excerpt in the workbook or check out the paperback versions if he wants me to.

1. Denotation and Connotation: Autumn Within by Longfellow, The Rainy Day by Longfellow, Something by Hans Christian Andersen, and Home by Edgar A. Guest
2. Hyperbole: One version of Johnny Appleseed, Pecos Bill Rides a Tornado retold, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain, Birth of Paul Bunyan retold, Flying Fish and other Dave Barry articles
3. Idiom: A Story Without an End by Mark Twain, and an online idioms resource
4. Imagery: The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore, a nature poem (I couldn't resist linking my favorite...The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy), and a painting to describe
5. Metaphor and Simile: Taking Leave of a Friend by Li Po (scroll to bottom of the page), Jazz Fantasia by Carl Sandburg, She Sweeps With Many-Colored Brooms by Emily Dickinson, A Forest Hymn by William Cullen Bryant, Song of the Sky Loom (a Tewa traditional poem), Thirty-Five by Sarah Josepha Hale (I'm not able to find this one!), and Winter Dreams by Fitzgerald
6. Oxymoron and Paradox: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
7. Personification: The Mice in Council by Aesop, Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Grass So Little Has To Do by Emily Dickinson
8. Symbol: Mending Wall by Robert Frost, Beauty and the Beast, and Rose Symbolism (Wikipedia)
9. Alliteration: The Ruin (from a blog post and includes interesting explanation), and because we love this device, purely for fun...Amusing Alliteration, and other examples
10. Assonance and Consonance: The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe, The Hayloft by Robert Louis Stevenson, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing by Walt Whitman, The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Arsenal at Springfield by Longfellow, Concord Hymn by Emerson, Ode on the Confederate Dead by Henry Timrod, Beat! Beat! Drums by Walt Whitman, There is a Solitude of Space by Emily Dickinson, Hampton Beach by Whittier, The First Snowfall by James Russell Lowell, The Marshes of Glynn by Sidney Lanier, The Outcast of Poker Flats by Bret Harte, War is Kind by Stephen Crane, Upon the Burning of Our House by Anne Bradstreet, Preface to God's Determinations by Edward Taylor
    
11. Form: A selection of haiku poems by Matsuo Basho, cinquains explained, a few limericks by Lear, a Skeltonic verse idea, catalog poetry, picture poems, and free verse
12. Onomatopoeia (oh joy!): The Princess by Tennyson, Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton, The Congo by Vachel Lindsay, The Sound of the Sea by Longfellow, and Canto First by Shelley
13. Parallelism: Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
14. Repetition and Refrain: The Open Boat and Do Not Weep Maiden, for War is Kind by Stephen Crane, and Good Night Irene
15. Rhyme: The Duel by Eugene Field, The Blessed Damozel by Dante Rossetti, and An Alphabet of Famous Goops by Gelett Burgess
16. Rhythm: Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant, Sea Fever by John Masefield, Recessional by Rudyard Kipling, There Is No Frigate Like a Book by Emily Dickinson, Preludes by T.S. Eliot, and Song of the Redwood Tree by Walt Whitman
17. Run-on and End-stopped Lines: The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls by Longfellow, and Lift Every Voice and Sing by James Weldon Johnson
18. Stanza: Trees by Joyce Kilmer, Be Strong by Maltbie Davenport Babcock, My Kate by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Ode to the West Wind by Percy Shelley
19. Allusion: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
20. Characters and Characterization: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
21. Conflict: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
22. Dialect: A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns, and On Top of Spaghetti
23. Dialogue: At Last by James Whitcomb Riley, and short story selections at Classic Shorts (specifically for this lesson I suggest A Telephonic Conversation by Mark Twain)
24. Flashback: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
25. Foreshadowing: Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and The Three Bears, The Three Little Pigs, and Cinderella
26. Genre: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
27. Irony: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
28. Local Color: short story selections at Classic Shorts
29. Mood and Tone: The Raven by Poe
    
30. Moral and Theme: The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing by Aesop
31. Narrator/ Point of View: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
32. Plot: The Lady, or the Tiger? by Frank Stockton, and The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell.
33. Poetic License: Mannahatta by Walt Whitman, and an e.e. cummings biography
34. Pun: Hymn to God the Father by John Donne
35. Rhetorical Question: The excerpts in the workbook will be sufficient for our study
36. Satire, Parody, and Farce: L'Art by Ezra Pound, and Jurassic Park by Weird Al
37. Story Within a Story: The Storyteller by Saki, and The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and A Story Without an End by Mark Twain
38. Stream of Consciousness: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
39. Surprise Ending: The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, The Gift of the Magi and Hearts and Hands by
    O. Henry, An Inhabitant of Carcosa by Ambrose Bierce, and for The Third Level and The Face in the Photo by Jack Finney, there's this affordable copy of About Time.
40. Suspense: The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacob and Moxon's Master by Ambrose Bierce

Links are active at the time this post was composed.

A Whole Lotta Writing Going On

I never thought I'd be saying this but the kiddo is enjoying blogging very much these days. Oh I know it's just a passing fancy. Totally not kidding myself there. But I'm so glad it's happening and trying so hard not to look like I think it's a big deal. Why? Well, the quickest way around here to bring a passing fancy to an end is to make a big deal out of it!

I started his blog for him when he was five. We called it The Amazing Adventures of Lightning Dash because he really loved the character Dash from The Incredibles. I would ask him if he wanted to say anything and he'd dictate it to me and I'd type the post for him. We'd choose images together but I'd do all the other stuff, the copying, pasting, publishing etc. For a while, it was a wonderful novelty for him to know that something he'd learned about and dictated to me was on the world wide web for everyone to see. Then, the novelty wore off. Although we updated it now and then, we basically let the blog die for a while.

Last year, I suggested he write reviews for some of the books he reads. I gave him a choice to either hand-write them (which I knew wouldn't be completed) or to dictate them to me and I'd write them for him. After some discussion, we decided to try to resurrect the blog for book reviews. He seemed keen for a bit but it was obviously an effort. He might type a line or two but would often be frustrated by the slow pace. Instead of forcing him to go on, I volunteered again to be his scribe. It did upset me at times that he was struggling to type but I tried to be logical and remind myself that I wasn't typing when I was eight either. Over-focusing on a very frustrating activity has never been productive around here.

This year, we're trying another resurrection, under the name Math and Other Adventures. After the first two entries for the year, kiddo decided he wanted to type his own posts (Wooooohoooo!) and has been doing so every few days now. Of all things, he is motivated by his Google search ranking! When he first googled it, it wasn't even in the top 10. Google Math and Other Adventures now and it's there at 4th place. He wants it to be in first place. And I'd always thought this child will never be competitive. Who knew?

When I was a curriculum junkie, it pained me that we couldn't entice him to try a typing curriculum. That we quickly abandon every writing curriculum we begin. That we can't stick to a grammar program. I overcame the junkie bit but as a mom who likes to write, it did trouble me very much that my son hated writing.

I quickly assumed that this child will never write anything. I've despaired on many a homeschooling forum that my child is a reluctant and resistant writer.

I've wondered which teeth I'd have to pull to help him write his college application essays.

Ha! Today, he told me he really likes writing.

Never Say Never.

Randomly Recent...

Kiddo is reading (and re-reading): Bertrand Brinley's Mad Scientists' Club series.

and I am reading (extremely randomly, when the mood hits me): 

 

Kiddo's glider from the Exploration Education kit is finally ready! We're going at a snail's pace with this kit (this is still only chapter 2 of 36 chapters) but that was the plan anyway. I'm happy to report he played a large part in assembling the glider and only needed my help with the more intricate gluing bits. We plan to test it properly at our neighborhood park (it's been raining here so we haven't had a chance to do so yet). Initial flight tests in our backyard have shown that we need to fine-tune the balance ever so often. 

The beginning: assembling the template and front section (all the parts are included in the kit).
That meter stick with red guardrails is from  another, unrelated experiment.

Halfway point: gluing balsa-wood sections together and reinforcing them.

Blow-drying the shrink-wrap.

The completed glider.

My latest project: Creative Journaling!

I was inspired to do this after stumbling upon some of the books below. I purchased the Artist's Journal Workshop and it's certainly revived my interest in expressing myself visually on paper.

The idea is to create a scrapbooky-journal feel without spending too much money on actual scrapbook supplies (i.e. to hand-illustrate as much as possible instead of cutting, gluing and pasting embellishments). So despite not having updated my paints and marker supply in ages, I decided that if I waited to buy more tools I'd never begin. Using some old markers and watercolor crayons plus kiddo's watercolor pencils, I struck while the inspiration was hot this weekend:

This was inspired by kiddo's profile while he was reading an online article on his laptop.

This was inspired by the quotation (from one of my notepads). The sketch of kiddo in the middle of the page
is based on a photo I'd taken of him when he was four years old. All hand-drawn except for the four captions.

Each page took about three or four hours to complete but it was so worth it. I hope I stay inspired enough to continue doing this for a long time. It's been too many years since I created art just for myself. :)

Year 4 Summer Update

I've been planning this post for a while. Finally found the time! We've been having a productive summer so far. We took a 2-week break for our Colorado visit and decluttering our home a little but are now back on track. Some of our activities this summer:

Movies! Yes, latest and not-so-latest flicks are very much a part of our summer curriculum! We watched Kungfu Panda 2, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Captain America: First Avenger. Kiddo watched The Green Lantern with his dad too. At home, the boys have completed their Stargate journey through Netflix instant streaming and are now watching Star Trek Voyager.

Juicing: This is a newer pursuit so I can't say we've been doing it all summer :). I blogged about our inspiration here. About a week ago, a friend lent me her juice extractor and I'm really loving drinking freshly juiced fruits and vegetables every day. Kiddo likes eating/ drinking the results too.

Physical Education: Kiddo has been taking 30-minute, twice-a-week swim lessons since late April. His swim coaches have had to be extremely patient, believe me. While he could swim enough to save his life, he wasn't doing it efficiently. Lessons have helped him learn to breathe correctly and cut through the water more smoothly.

From taking ages to learn to position his arms and then pivot his head properly for air, the boy has now progressed enough to earn praise from his instructor for his freestyle technique. He finally moved on to the backstroke last week. He's also gaining more stamina on the bicycle now. Every couple of weeks, dad and son cycle to the grocery store and back, and this gives kiddo at least 10 miles of cycling a month. And oh, he has finally learned to climb a tree! (A short one, but still, it's a tree!) :)

Creating: We bought a small Zome kit while in Colorado. He's using it to make cool structures. His dad has been taking advantage of the cheaper model airplane kits in Korea (he flies there for business often) so both the guys have been painting parts and assembling them. Kiddo and I made a number of kaleidocycles from the Escher book pictured on the left and one paper pet (a goat) from the Rob Ives book on the right. The boys tried woodburning last year; experimenting with woodcarving now!

From L to R: painting the parts of a Hawker Seahawk airplane, Scowly the paper pet goat and a Zometool creation.

Homeschooling: I had planned for some summer learning to bridge to what he'll learn in the fall. So he's been spending some dedicated time on Ellen McHenry's Excavating English (to better appreciate his German studies) as well as the following books:

 

Since we have done very little of formal geometry and geography, the two workbooks on the left have been useful to prep him in these subject areas. The Answer Atlas is a good supplement to the Map Reading workbook as it provides more detail than our kitchen table map and Smart Globe.

He's also been playing with more number patterns and has been watching The Great Courses' The Art and Craft of Problem Solving for fun. Here's a snapshot of what he and dad doodled on the whiteboard in early July (we're calling it hexagonal numbers exploration for now). I'll write separate reviews of the homeschooling resources he's been using when I can!