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Monday, October 25, 2010

Another good day

The devotion today talked about the microwave oven. I can’t believe it was invented in 1955. Why did it take so long to come out? I remember it coming out in the 80’s and it was expensive too. Anyway, the devotion talked about our need for speed. The microwave verses the oven…the microwave will win if you’re in a hurry. Or the internet…dial-up or high speed cable? Definitely high speed internet. We want everything now. The devotion transitioned into the saying “Patience is a virtue.” (It’s actually from the bible in Galatians 5:22-23.) God knew we would need to learn to wait for prayers to be answered, help for trouble, relief from pain, and waiting for his kingdom to come. So the next time you’re waiting for you microwave to finish…think patience.

Today’s math lesson was pretty easy. It was dealing with the basics of fractions. Today we re-learned about the numerator and the denominator. We also re-learned about improper fractions, mixed numbers, and fractions on a line. It went so quickly that JD gave a hoot and a hand clap when it ended.

The other day I was searching for videos on the reproductive system when I stumbled onto a website named www.brainpop.com. I signed up for the one week trial period to see if I liked the site. Apparently, JD used this website while in public school. We did like it and used up our free week. So I signed us up for one year plan at $9.00 a month. It is loaded with all kinds of kid friendly yet informative animated videos on: science, social studies, english, math, arts and music, health, and engineering and technology. We ended up using this site today in science. We learned all about atoms and molecules. Then I had him complete a few pages in his science workbook. He labeled the parts of atoms (page 258), wrote the chemical compound of pictured molecules (page 259), and found elements on the periodic chart (page 260). We took a quiz on Brain Pop and scored a 80%.

Today in social studies I had JD take notes on the Post-Columbian explorations to South America and the explorations of the interior continent. There were lots of names that we’ll never remember. I made the main effort of this lesson learning how to take notes. This is a disturbingly difficult process for me to teach. I read a sentence and have him pick out what’s important. This is the slow part for him to think it through and give me his best guess. I taught him how to put the information in his own words verses writing it word for word. So he kind of understood that dates, names, and basic information is what’s important.

I had JD read his book, Behind the Locked Door, for the first thirty minutes of my cleaning job. He took a short break and the moved onto language arts.

I know JD stalls when I ask him to write a story. It tends to be written at a 2nd or 3rd grade level at best. So I was working with him today in language arts to add sense words to sentences. For example what senses come to mind when I say “The first day of Spring.” He had to use his five senses to describe spring. He used smells like flowers, sounds like birds, smells like grass. I had him complete page 95 in his workbook while I cleaned for my part-time job. Then I had him add descriptive words to plain sentences. He could either make a happy story or a scary story about two friends taking a walk in the woods and finding a cave. He chose to make his story happy. Then I had him complete page 97 to finish the story.

1 comment:

  1. Was it a good story? Is he, like his Mother very creative? Glad it was a happy story whatever. Sounds like a good day.

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