Reading Triumph

M's reading is really improving, but he is not yet a fluent reader and usually doesn't spend more than a few minutes reading any particular book. The only exception is, of all things, _The Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook_ and the related Monster Manual. He often pours over these books in bed before falling to sleep, calling out to A and I to tell him what f-o-r-t-i-t-u-d-e and p-a-l-a-d-i-n and s-h-a-d-o-w-s-t-r-i-k-e spell. The same kid who stumbles over parts of Nate the Great just ran downstairs and read aloud with great dramatic inflection "As you open your mouth with a roar, the deadly power of your draconic kin blasts forth to engulf your foes." Though "reading primer" does not leap to mind when you see these books, I bet he isn't the first kid to learn to read from them.

Math Triumph

The kids are in a nice space lately. A is so enjoying all of her activities these days, and spent the car ride to chess club today thinking up historic events she wanted to memorize the dates of. She said "My favorite subject is history, but I also love writing and math and geography. The only thing I'm not that interested in is science, and even that is pretty interesting sometimes." She loves math!!! 

We've been going really slowly in math lately. It only took us 2-3 months to get through _Life of Fred: Fractions_, but _Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents_ has been quite a bit more challenging. We made it through the first 12 or so chapters when I realized that we had gone too fast. We started over, and again started to bog down, this time around chapter 15 or so. 

The chapters are short, and end with 5-8 problems that go over the concepts covered in that chapter and review one or two concepts from previous chapters or from the fractions book. Then, every fifth chapter there is a "bridge" of 10 problems covering everything that has been introduced so far, and you have to get 9 out of 10 correct before moving on to the next chapter. You get five tries to cross each bridge--i.e., there are 5 different sets of problems--and as soon as you get 9 out of 10 on a set you move on to the next chapter. A had a hard time passing the previous bridge and was really not enjoying math at all. 

Once she finally passed that bridge, we mostly set _Life of Fred_ aside and did a variety of stuff for math. She worked on Singapore's _Challenging Word Problems_,  math puzzles I found on the internet, and the Building Thinking Skills_ Figural workbook. Plus, we did a bit of pool (as in billiards) geometry and a fair amount of "trampoline math," where I threw random math problems at her while she was jumping on the trampoline. I did a mixture in multiplication and division facts; formulae for area and perimeter of a circle, rectangle, and triangle; conversion of decimals to fractions; conversion of decimals to percents; and multiplication and division of decimals by powers of 10. We did these for about 2 months, along with the next 5 chapters of Fred: decimals. Then it was time for another bridge. Which she was dreading. But which she passed! Yesterday we did a very triumphant victory lap, a.k.a. Chapter 26.

Guess What This Is

M found this outside the other day, looked at it through the microscope, and took a couple of pictures of it by putting the camera up to the eyepiece and clicking. It worked!

Can you tell what it actually is?

A hummingbird feather.

Thing One and Thing Two

Check out my new babies! Having only hats and wash cloths under my belt, these were a stretch for me, but completely worth it. It is just mind-boggling that you can do a couple little motions with needles and a piece of yarn, and the next thing you know you've woven this net that really does hold together. Then, some amazing person figured out a way to do these same basic stitches and have the fabric curve around in a perfect little heel shape! Incredible!

The whole time I was knitting Sock #1 I worried that it wouldn't be big enough around, so you can imagine my delight as it slid right over my heel with no trouble at all. Until I ran into the end of the sock at about the point where my toes start. Because they were too small I was going to give them to A, but as I worked away on the second sock and fell more in love with every stitch, I couldn't give them up. After I finished the second one, I undid the toe of Sock #1. It took about 30 seconds to undo it back to the point where I was going to pick it back up, and over 3 hours to get all the stitches back on correctly. That's more than 3 minutes per stitch, if anyone is counting. But, I managed to get them all on more-or-less correctly and re-finished Sock #1 this morning. I figured that if I had been paid my hourly wage for my work on these socks, plus needles and yarn, they would have cost me about $450. 

Now that I've worn these babies all day, the thought of going back to my boring old regular socks is bringing me down. I'm casting on Sock #1 of the next pair tonight.