Weekly update for week of 11/5/2012

Another week of Rev to Rev has come and gone.  Amazing how fast the year is going by.  I can't believe it is November already.

The big hit this week was again the Exploration Education Science.  He loves this curriculum and I am very impressed with what he is learning and so is his engineer daddy.  This week he did an experiment where he learned about resistors and he found out that lead is a resistor.  He used a piece of lead from a mechanical pencil and found out that if he pushed the lead harder against the copper wire then the light bulb glowed stronger.  He then learned that this is how dimmer switches work.

He continues to enjoy the state study.  Here he is letting some of his goofiness show as I am trying to take a picture.

He started reading about Eli Whitney in Four American Inventors.  He says he likes reading from this book. I like that he is getting such a broad view of so many inventors.  There is lots of history imbedded in the stories of the inventors lives and this helps reinforce what he is learning in history.

The one area I feel like I have failed in this year is Math.  We started out with Chalkdust because I wanted a good video teacher.  It moved way too fast and N. was only frustrated by it.  I then switched to Lial's Prealgebra because I had it here and N. liked the look of it.  Well he is getting frustrated with it also.  In the second chapter they have some very challenging problems that are not usually tackled  until at least half way through Prealgebra. He was getting the concepts, but was overwhelmed with how challenging the problems were.  I think he also needs a more spiral based program similar to CLE.  I have ordered Teaching Textbooks.  I was afraid of it since so many people had said it was behind in scope and sequence.  However after comparing the table of contents of the new 2.0 editions I don't see that as the case any more.  They added many chapters to Prealgebra, Algebra I and Algebra 2.  I figure it is more important that he understand the concepts and that he doesn't feel so overwhelmed.  We will see how it goes.  I just wish it wasn't our 3rd math curriculum for the year.

 One family project we did this year was to fill shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child.  Both kids enjoyed picking out things and packing their boxes.  Here is even a rare picture of S. and even rarer still she has her in it's natural state instead of straightened.