Feb. 12, 2009

The newest twist on home-schooling Connor is Austin's reaction! Austin appears to be a little bit jealous!! Several times Austin has mentioned how he is perfect home-school material, since he is self-directed etc. I keep telling him I'm not going to home-school beyond 6th grade. Connor will also attend McQuaid Jesuit eventually. Yesterday, Austin asked me if he could create a test for Connor on one of his subjects. Like a dummy, I told Austin that Connor was due for a math test (since he's on the 4th chapter now) and Austin could design the test. Well, Austin spent almost two hours creating a test, and then he challenged Connor to do it at 8p last night. Next thing I knew, Connor is sobbing, real tears dripping onto his paper. Apparently, Austin feels threatened by Connor's exceptional abilities, and he created a test that was overly difficult. For instance, Connor learned exponents. Austin's questions were things like 8 to the 9th power. With no calculator, Connor was trying to compute the answers. After awhile, he just broke down crying. The bonus question was a geometry problem that Austin' just learned in 7th grade, and Connor was devastated that he didn't know how to solve for the answer. On the one hand, it's good for Connor to realize that there are things he doesn't know yet, but Austin's way of bringing about this realization was not very nice. In the end, Connor scored an 86% on the test and Austin was impressed. Connor was mad he didn't get an A. Now I know not to let Austin create tests for his brother, and I suddenly see how threatened Austin feels by all the attention that Connor is now receiving. This is a learning process for us all.
Now on to the recording what we did on Thurs. for my record keeping.
Connor completed 5 math pages in unit 4 of Everyday Math. For over an hour, he played the vocabulary games online that accompany the unit in the vocab. book. He played the geography games with Sheppard software and is working on Africa now. He wrote a letter to his penpal. He finished another college level packet on identifying major and minor supporting details and creating graphic organizers of expository text. He read Huckleberry Finn for 2 hours! He practiced guitar. Then he took the disastrous math test on units 1-3.