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Tuesday, October 5, 2010

A somewhat grouchy day

Our devotion today was called World Smile Day. Our day started out with smiles, but when we finished with the 5 minute devotion JD thought it was time for a break. I had to quickly jump into my teacher/principle mode and call him back. He kicked of his shoes and sulked. This made for a FUN math lesson, I’ll tell you what! As a matter of fact today was kind of a grouchy day. Not for me but for JD.

Next, I had JD read his book for thirty minutes because the internet was acting up and we couldn’t get online right away. So he read in his room while I vacuumed the house. (It’s tough teaching and cleaning. I sneak it in whenever I have a free minute. That way when Jeff comes home it doesn’t look like a tornado went through it.

Math was easy. It gave us algebraic problems like: x+25=50 and asked, “What does is the value of “x”?” We only had to do the opposite to figure out the value of “x” was 25. It is the same for addition, subtraction, and multiplication. When it came to division it got kind of tricky. Sometimes we had to divide and sometimes we had to multiply to find the missing value. In any case these two lessons were so easy I had JD move right to the tests. He scored a 100% on finding the missing value for addition and subtraction, but only scored an 80% on multiplication and division because he didn’t know the tricky part. I’m super proud of him for whizzing through those two lessons. (We’ve been tackling only one lesson a day so far…)

In social studies today we learned all about the people of South America. They are as diverse as North of America. There are mostly indigenous Indians and descendants of the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Africans, as well as the mix of those ethnologies. We learned that during the late 19th century millions of Italians, Germans, and Polish people moved in. Then, the non-Europeans started moving in. They included Syrians, Lebanese, Asians, and Japanese. The largest religious group is Roman Catholic and there are also Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. Each country within South America speaks it‘s own language, but officially Spanish is the language spoken in 9 of the 13 political entities. And there are a handful of Indians languages spoken as well.

We are still in the Human body study and will be for a week or two more. We continued our study of the sensory system, but more specifically the nose. We first looked up online (as we usually do, because I’m not a biology major…or any major for that part) the sensory system. We learned the labels for the eight different parts that make up this system. Then we learned a few interesting facts about the nose like: if your nose is at its best, you can tell the difference between 4000-10,000 smells! And children are more likely to have better senses of smell than their parents or grandparents. Getting older seems like a slow motion train wreck to me. We lose our memories, our smell, our memory, or bladder control, our memory…) Then, we did page 87 from the science workbook.

I wanted the language arts lesson to be quick and easy but it was not. JD and I worked together in a workbook. He provided the answers and I wrote them or I had him circle the correct answer. Today he learned about action verbs and direct objects. We only had four pages to do, but on the last page JD frustrated me by playing “word games” with me when we were trying to finish a story with direct objects to fill in the blanks. I finally had to pull away and take a break. I informed him that the story was asking him to use his imagination. It didn’t matter if it was fictional objects used or non-fiction. Then, I called our school day.

Football practice went well and JD is doing great. He’s still focused and trying. He seems to enjoy being there practicing and talking with his friends. The chill of the season has finally set in. I sit through most all of his practices and have seen him grow athletically and socially. Playing football this year was a good idea.

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