Whip it Good

Well, the next year’s curriculum has been ordered, and my son doesn’t know it yet, but his school day is about to become longer.  Mean ogre teacher-mom is about to start cracking the whip and making his school day a little longer.  No more 90 minute days for him, no sir!  He’s about to go to at least 3 hours! 

Four days a week.

Aren’t I the slave-driver?

And he thinks he has it tough.  HA! 

The princess still has a couple of months to go before she’s ready for the next year’s books, but she’s cruising right along and doing well. 

Me, I just like the ogre part. 

And how was your weekend?

Wednesday Whittles

Well, you know the MiniNess had a great 1st day of school.  :D  She had fun learning about the long A sound, and learning how to make the letter, and all that jazz.  And of course, mama is proud, very proud.  🙂

And the KnytLite forgot to put his game back in the box when he was done playing, so we had to make a 2nd trip to the library in one day.  But he did great in school too, after having a few days off last week.

We finally finished the 2nd season of Dexter.  It’s been a fun show to watch and fortunately, the library gives you and extended viewing time for documentaries and TV series and things of that nature.  I don’t think they have season 3 though.  Was there even a season 3 of Dexter?  I don’t even know!

Just like that, Summer is over and the weather has turned and gotten lovely for a few days.  The weather is never nice for more than a few days around here.  Darc and I were talking how it’s like the earth has turned a corner, weather wise, and then we stopped to think about that, and calculated that the earth moves about 2 MILLION miles per day through space, on its orbit around the sun.  I looked it up – that’s about 66,000 mph.  I don’t know why I never thought of that before but it kind of astounded me.  Plus, it’s spinning at roughly 1,000 mph in it’s daily revolution.  It’s incredible more people don’t suffer from motion sickness.  ;)  66k mph.  Now that’s some speed!

Check out my husband’s latest book, available for download!

A Fine Cast of Characters on Amazon US (Kindle version) A Fine Cast of Characters on Amazon UK (Kindle version) A Fine Cast of Characters on Smashwords (non-Kindle versions)

 

©DarcsFalcon All rights reserved

Tuesday Tootsies

It’s a pretty special day here in the Darc House.  Its the 1st day of home school for MiniNess.  She has been looking forward to this for so long, I probably could have started her some months ago.  Already she tries to sound out words and figure out how to spell them.  She’ll be reading by Christmas, I have no doubt.  🙂

So in honor of our personal “Back-to-School” issue, I thought I’d present some fun shoes with a school theme today.  🙂

 

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Of course, we must have pencils for school.  Lots of them.

 

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And a cute shoe shaped case to carry them in.  🙂

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Can’t forget colored pencils!  Those are so fun!

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Paper clips are essential for keeping our papers neat and organized.

 

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Naturally we can’t forget things like our composition book, our glue, and crayons!

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Must have crayons!

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Lots and lots of crayons.  ;) 

Can you imagine the splash the new kindergarten teacher would make if she wore these to the 1st day of school?  😀

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I hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend.  Be sweet to your feet and do your best in school, even if the school you’re in is the school of life or the school of hard knocks.  ;) 

Check out my husband’s latest book, available for download!

A Fine Cast of Characters on Amazon US (Kindle version) A Fine Cast of Characters on Amazon UK (Kindle version) A Fine Cast of Characters on Smashwords (non-Kindle versions)

©DarcsFalcon All rights reserved

 

 

This Writer’s Son

Today in homeschool, one of my son’s assignments was to fill in the blank.  He had a list of words, and a string of sentences, each missing one of the words from the list.  As he went through them, he came to one and seemed to ponder it for a while.

His list was: hand, at, plant, thank, grass.

The sentence that made him pause was:

We will be ___ home soon.

Finally he spoke.  "I know that ‘at’ is the right word to put in the blank here, but it actually reads best without it, just as it is."

Can you tell he’s his daddy’s boy?  My heart actually swelled with pride, because he was absolutely correct, the sentence didn’t require the addition of ‘at’ to make it complete.  He’s just 7, and he recognized this.  Think maybe he’s developing some writerly habits already?  😀

On another note, it seems my Live Writer has blown up again.  I don’t know what the problem is, but as I write this, it’s too late for me to try to deal with it.  Time enough for that tomorrow.  Damn, I don’t want to go through this again!  Wahhhhhh!

Math 101

more animals

Every parent has had moments like this!  It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure!  I’ve had a crappy day, and while I was sitting here going through some LOLcats, wondering what to blog about, once I saw this one, I knew I’d blog about my crappy day.  Aren’t you glad?  ;) 

You may, or may not, be aware that I homeschool my son.  He’s a bright boy, and I taught him to read when he was 5.  But math has been a real struggle.  For some reason, he just doesn’t seem to get the concept of addition, let alone subtraction.  Every day it seems we make progress, and then the next day it’s like we have to start all over again at the beginning.  Today he basically went into meltdown mode and I’m at a give-up point.  Which breaks my heart because I so believe in home-school.  But, for various reason, public school really isn’t an option right now, and private school – ROFLMAO!  Yeah, right!  So when my husband called while on the train home from work, I told him about it, and he sat down with the Little Prince after he got home and went over some math with him.  But I know it’ll be back to square one tomorrow.  I’ve tried everything I can think of to get my son to understand the concept of numbers and that this many plus this many equals that many.  I’ve tried pennies, pencils, blocks, fingers, toes, even marshmallows because he loves them so much.  I have flash cards, the math books that came with my curriculum, even supplemental math books from other sources.  I’m ready to make him start counting the hairs I yank out of my head in frustration. 

So I’m wondering, what was it that helped math click for you when you were a kid?  What helped you understand the concepts of addition and subtraction?  Was there an “AHA!” moment for you? 

 

©DarcsFalcon