Thurs. Feb. 26, 2009

First thing this morning Connor woke up and ran downstairs to ask if he could skip breakfast in order to research his boat plans. Ok. He did that for 90 minutes and then we left for Mass. I know that Mass doesn't count towards school, separation of church and state and all that, but we sure do learn a lot in Mass. Although Father Schifferle is 90 years old and feeble, he is a fabulous speaker. After Mass,we tried to stay home most of the day because we had the two toddlers that I babysit here. We designated it a "catch-up" day. I had Connor go back to page one of his Math workbook, and go page by page and correct any problems that he got wrong. Boy,did that take awhile. One thing I noticed in school is that after the students worked for 90-120 minutes on the 3 workbook pages, the teacher would then simply solve the problem on the white board for the students to watch. But some students "tuned out," while others just waited for the teacher's lesson and copied down the answers without trying the problem at all. Connor, being so sure he knew the concept already, was one of those students who didn't pay attention to the explanation. I am taking a different approach. I went through the workbook and checked any answers that were wrong. Often Connor rushes through and makes careless mistakes. I want him to see that he isn't always right, even though he understands the concepts and how to do the problems. Also, Connor insists on doing 99.9% of his math in his head. That's all well and good right now, but obviously he needs to learn to calculate on paper. By next year Connor will be doing Algebra, and he must focus on accuracy and writing out the steps. Having check marks to show that his answers were wrong, and no explanation, made him go back and find his mistakes. Often he would insist that he was right, and I had to keep sending him back to find his error. He didn't enjoy the rework to say the least. Connor also played vocabulary games on the computer using the site that accompanies the text book, and he went to a horse-back riding lesson. Guitar practice ended our day on a high note.