School & TotSchool Happening Here.

Well sometimes it seems I can do it all :) Today went smoothly and generally fun was had by all. Nat didn't seem so distructive and managed to involve himself a little in our classroom today, so I guess that's TOTSCHOOL worthy :) Check out the photos of him discovering magnetism (by clicking on the little square you'll see nice quality ones)!

2009_01_13 Geomag TotSchool

After that he settled onto Phoebe's knee for a while to watch her on Ed' city and for once didn't mess with the keys or the mouse!
Aside from that we learnt about Ceasar Augustus, discussed the number 5 and the letter V and the fact that V is also the roman numeral for 5. Then we had maths. Jake had an end of topic test for fractions on ConquerMaths  and got 10/15 first attempt, and 100% 2nd attempt. Mostly his mistakes seem to be silly ones (silly miscalculations) or misreading/understanding of the question itself - which stems more from his struggle with comprehension of english than from a struggle with the maths! Overall though, he seems to be working better with just letting him work online. He is more co-operative about it at least, despite saying he really does not like maths. I can see why he doesn't like it though: he is more the creative artistic sort - enjoys art and dance, hates maths and science and anything where he has to try to retain important information. Even so, he is not at all bad at Maths - pretty average I'd say, but at science I think he is always going to struggle with the 'thinking it through logically' aspect of it. Phoebe finished her section on division and is excited to see that she is doing 'time' again next - as she just 'gets' time with little difficulty. It has been really interesting watching her maths developing actually. Maybe because she has a foundation in Miquon, maybe because her mind works differently from some of my others, maybe because I have been so much more hands-off with her and allowed her to work much more at her own pace, but sometimes, when she has her head in the right gear, she makes some suprisingly advanced and logical calculations by methods that I have never taught her. I enjoy seeing her blossom and it is so un-forced. And to boot she has almost completed Yr 1 EdCity English now. I'm hoping I will see a vast improvement in her spelling anytime soon - and I hope it will happen as naturally as some other things seem to have with her. She is about half way through the Ed'City maths. I think maybe at the end of MPH 1B she can take some time out to finish that off - and the rate she is going that won't be long!We did a bit of geography, discussing scale and lines of latitude and longitude. We made a plan to draw our family to scale on Thursday - might be fun! Then we rounded off the day with Spanish and ended up playing a memory game. It was good fun :) I think in the end we had 15 objects in our school bag, ranging from pencils to walls!! "En mi mochila tengo..." The younger girls went out pretty soon, but enjoyed watching myself and the boys getting in a muddle ;) It was good practice of masculine and femine forms too.Homework has generally been done well and mostly today has been happy and content - doesn't mean I'm any less tired, though my stress levels are definatly more tolerable on days like today ;)