Holiday Monday Babble

It's Family Day today! I think it's also President's Day in the US, but not sure.

In any case, let me begin the babble:

Since it's Family Day, I need to make sure I do something fun with my family today. I know the kids wanted to make cookies; perhaps we could play some games, too.

Other than that, I continued reading in How Children Fail last night and had some inspiration which spilled over to this morning and I got some great ideas for tomorrow. One of the things the book helped me realize is that I'm spending way too much time focusing on remedial work with the 12yo and not doing enough to connect him with 'the world'. So I made a list of all kinds of things he's interested in and that we can use for reading and writing. There was a lot. This made its way to this morning as I was jotting down some notes for tomorrow's plans and realized that I've totally neglected bringing the 12yo's life into his learning: he's heading to Mexico on Wed. and we've not done anything. Mind you, he's been sick and we've been busy and I only found out last Monday. I guess that only really gave Wed. to look at Mexico stuff. But today was the first time I'd thought of it.

So, for tomorrow, I'm going to find some things about Mexico, where he's staying, and possibly draw up a simple report form for him to fill in. He and dd can create a list of useful words and phrases and then write them in French and try to find Spanish translations. So, not only will both be doing French, but the 12yo will get more Spanish exposure (he got some last year in Costa Rica) and they'll see how close a lot of the words are to French. I'm still trying to figure out some ways to tie in math. If he can find a rate for where he's staying, I can have him work out how much it would cost someone to stay x amount of time. Oooh... that just had me think I could introduce him to algebra. Let's say it's $85 a night. He can learn that 85n is how we would write an equation that would allow us to calculate any number of nights. I could also tie division in and give him a final amount and have him work out how many nights the person stayed. There's also the conversion of distance from kilometres to miles (or vice versa)... LOTS! Yay. This should be fun. THIS is the kind of homeschooling I've been wanting to do!!!

He'll still have to do some phonics work, but my primary focus has to be away from the dull and dreary!!

For ds, I've thought of a math game to play with him. We have this large 100 chart. I'll take some Golden Bead bars and units and we can mark off what the number is on the chart. Then I'll do things like take a 10 away or add 20 or grab a different handful and see if we can make 5 in a row or something.

Dd has the activity mentioned above that she could do, plus she's just got a lot on the go and is wanting to start research on penguins.

The oldest must get her math and science units done tomorrow. Then she's free to explore Spanish or whatever she wants.

Well, it's now 9:22. Time to get off this computer and do stuff!