More of This Week's Highlights

While I wait for the camera to dump its load, so to speak, into my iPhoto, I can reflect on today, at any rate. Not really our best day: everyone was very scattered, including me, and nobody really wanted to do anything, including me. Nevertheless, we did accomplish a few items of business:

*had morning prayers/morning offering
*read about St. John in Great Moments in Catholic History
*read Mrs. Piggle--Wiggle, which Helier declares to be the best book ever.
*writing practice: Crispina drew Mickey Mouse Princesses (don't ask) on the whiteboard, and Helier dictated a sentence to me, which I had him trace over. Not a very successful venture. He protested vociferously, and I wonder whether to drop it for a bit (I don't do more than about 3 minutes of anything he doesn't take to readily), or persevere in tiny increments.

On the other hand, he and Crispina and I played Boggle, Jr., this evening before dinner. Helier wanted to mix the letters up to invent his own words, which I was then to read aloud to him -- the less pronounceable, the better. This was frustrating in terms of trying to accomplish anything like a game, but I realize, with hindsight, that there was something interesting in his perverse way of approaching the challenge of Boggle. On the one hand, he can read, though I'm not entirely sure how fluently. Sometimes I think he reads more fluently than he lets on, out of wanting me to keep reading aloud to him. Hard to tell, really. But he will often spontaneously read things to me, like the title of my Catholic Prayer Book. Anyway, it occurred to me a little belatedly that what he was doing with the Boggle game was venturing a step beyond the mere copying of words on a card: he was trying to make up his own words, and experimenting with how spelling works. He knows what the letters sound like, and has the idea of putting them together to make a nonsense joke, in which he takes great delight. Willingness to risk experimentation seems to signal some kind of advance . . . I think. Anyway, it's how he does things. Crispina likes making the little letter blocks match up with the words on the card -- that she can do this is a revelation to her. Guess it's been a while since we played Boggle.

Amicus has been diagramming simple sentences with articles this week, and today we also had to deal with an auxiliary verb structure: is caught. We had some discussion about whether you could consider caught to be part of the verb, or a participle (he doesn't know that word, and I don't have a firm grasp on participles and gerunds anymore myself) modifying whatever the subject was. The answer page said, "Verb," however, so that's how we did it. And I'm sure they're right. Amicus was even more sure that I was wrong, and that he was happy to have caught me being wrong.

He's also cracked division with remainders and the basic procedure for long division, which gave Epiphany fits for years. In Introducing the Periodic Kingdom to Its Heirs, he finished reading about and listing the elements in the fourth latitude of the Periodic Table.

Meanwhile, I had a book review to finish, so once we'd worked through our little core of subjects, I turned my attention to that while the kids played and read in the same room. I was reviewing a book I've mentioned here before: Home Schooling: A Family's Journey, by Gregory and Martine Millman. I do a lot of this working at the computer while kids . . . exist? . . . around me, and I hate to admit it, because it betrays me as maybe a little less present to my children than people might have thought, or than I ought to be. Sometimes that concern is legitimate, because I can waste a lot of time just doodling around on the computer, which then makes it harder to tell Helier he can't play the Game Boy. But after rereading a passage in the Millman book, I think that maybe sometimes -- especially when I'm writing something for somebody other than myself and my legion of followers in blogdom -- being with me when I'm working, even if I'm ignoring them completely, is not a bad thing for my kids:

When we have studied a musical instrument, or tai chi, or judo, even cooking, real instruction has come through emulation, through seeing one who is more proficient do it and then trying to imitate the action. Similarly, there are so many little details involved in developing as a learning person that it is almost impossible to capture them in any other way than emulation.

Now, typing on a computer's not as inspiring to watch as someone doing tai chi . . . I guess. I've never personally been that inspired by tai chi, but maybe that's because I haven't been around the right person doing it. Anyway, a person typing on a computer could be writing the next War and Peace, or they could be writing, "K, Thxxxx" to somebody on Facebook who sends them a piece of flair (these, for the uninitiated, are virtual buttons to stick on a virtual bulletin board. My own personal favorite is the one which says, "Procrastinators: Leaders of Tomorrow."), so I don't know that imitating me at my typing would necessarily elevate the children's lives all that much. But it's what I do, and they understand that it's work -- I mean, unless I'm on Facebook arranging my flair. And I hope they get some idea of deadlines (or in this case, of writing something actually BEFORE the editors start sending you emails asking if you ever got the book, and if so, whether you think you might ever, ever, before you die, write something about it).

So that's what we did today. I've been trying to load some photos of our trip to the science museum on Sunday, because that was FUN: among other things, we got to see some people make ice cream with liquid nitrogen. But uploading takes so long, and it's late, and we have things to do tomorrow. So the photos will have to wait for another day.