September 15, 2011

• School and Schooled

  It's all about school lately. Cotton started preschool today, at a little arts center.  It's just two days a week, but it will give Rone and I some time to do things besides answer questions every fifteen seconds.  Seph is still doing the public school 5th grade thing, and so far it's been, well, it's a lot of things. It's early, long, interesting, boring, surprising, hard, stupid, strange, and EARLY.  

  Seph's dealt much more easily with the change of hours than I have--she gets up, eats, gets some basic hygienic matters attended to, packs up a lunch, squares away her backpack, and then comes to get me up to do the driving to school part.  Sometimes I manage to get up to make her breakfast, but she's really taken charge of the whole thing and been really responsible about it.  She is finding school different than she expected, but they are finally settling into a routine and I think that's making things a bit easier.  There are good days and bad, and dull days mixed in, but overall she's learning quite a bit, if less than I'd thought she would academically.  We'd figured she'd have several subjects, with textbooks, and homework and quizzes, with reading assignments and writing.  Between my memories and her reading of fiction we assembled a picture that has been surprisingly wrong (no textbooks come home, ever!), but still useful (sometimes, people aren't nice, and you still need to sit in a room with them!).  Overall, we're kind of constantly evaluating in a way that isn't dissimilar from how I homeschool.

  You keep what's helpful, chuck what isn't working, and hope for the best.

  In Rone news, today he read that a roll of toilet paper is usually 114.7 feet long. He read this in a book of bathroom facts--where the flip did that come from? Did I buy him an entire huge book of poop and potty facts? I need to pay more attention.  So he read that, and then what else could we do? We had to test it. It was more complicated than he'd hoped it would be, but he stuck with it. Turns out? Our doublerolls? MORE THAN DOUBLE! Go math!

  • 10:02 pm
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