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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

A great and fun day

Today was a great day. JD worked his tail off with all of the lessons. AND we had fun doing all of them. The devotion today was called The Buck Stops Here! That saying was made famous by President Truman. He was actually taking responsibility for his actions. Passing the buck came easy to Adam from the bible (…the woman gave it to me…) Whenever we do something wrong we tend to blame someone else or make excuses. Today’s devotion is clear…when we mess up, on purpose or accidentally, we need to admit our wrong and take responsibility for our actions.

Today we used our reading time to complete the book report for the book called Camp What-a-Nut. He finished this book back on 15 October. I just don’t think he comprehends what “the plot” means. I tried to explain in by saying, “you tell about the book without giving the ending.” Then, I tried saying, “give me a beginning sentence that explains the problem. Then, give me a sentence or two that explain how the problem plays out. Last, give me a sentence or two of how the problem was solved.” This explanation was understood in the steps revealed. We finished the report in about ½ hour because I typed while he talked. The report went a lot smoother than I anticipated and he remembered many of the details.

The next ten or so math lessons will all be dealing with fractions. Today we learned about the Least Common Multiple (LCM). The lesson gave us two ways to get to this conclusion but we preferred the first way. That is to list the multiple of the given numbers and find the LCM. So if it gave us: 2,4, and 6, we would list out the multiples.
2 - 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16
4 - 4, 8, 12, 16
6 - 6, 12, 18
By listing them below each other it’s easy to see the LCM is 12. The second option dealt with the prime factor numbers and multiplying them to get some other number and (blah, blah, blah) That’s why we preferred the listing way better.

The Mad Scientist

Science today was both fun and engaging for both of us. But, I know more about the periodic table elements than I really ever cared to. I can tell you what every number on each element label means. JD and I made a helium model, a beryllium model, a lithium model, and a boron model with Fruit Loops and glue. I will forever be scarred by such numbers as the atomic number, the atomic mass number, and number of electrons in one of the four sub-shells. I feel like running in a hallway somewhere and putting my head between my legs like I did in elementary school in preparation for the Soviet Union attacking the US with an atomic bomb. (Help! I don't have a hallway...) Then I had JD write out the labels for the four models. When he worked independently it was a slow process. When I spelled the names and spoke the numbers we breezed through the assignment.

We spent so much enjoyable time on the science lesson today that we did not do a social studies lesson today. I love that we have that flexibility with our schedule.

I Googled 6th grade writing assignments to see what some teachers are teaching for language arts and found a fun lesson about an the stages of writing an “Autumn” poem. First we learned about the different lines of the rhyming patterns. Then he listed ten words that came to mind when he thought of Autumn. (I did the writing since I knew that would hamper his creative ability.) Then we pulled up a rhyming dictionary on-line. (Yep, they actually have a rhyming dictionary.) We rhymed all those “reminder” words. Then, I wrote the rough draft of JD’s poem. This is the final poem that HE typed out. (I only helped him with writing the last line and prompted him with questions for more descriptive words.)
Autumn leaves
Crisp leaves falling from the trees
can sometimes be seen as hard.
It always makes you sneeze
as it lands in the big brown yard.
A man rakes it up in to a humongous pile.
A young boy happily jumps on top.
The old man watched with a bright smile.
This kind of boyish fun should never have to stop.
Trivia for the day…Do you know the two colors that do not have rhyming words? (Don’t Google the rhyming dictionary either.) Answer: Purple and orange.

1 comment:

  1. Now there is a day I would have like to be in your class! Love the pictures... I gotta keep the poem.

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