Thursday, August 23, 2012

Routine

Vacations are done with for us now and we are starting to settle back into the school year routine.  I love vacations, but I have to say I do love returning to routine also.  There is a rhythm now to our days that allows for peace and productiveness that just aren't always there in the summer.

Michael has been very excited about going back to school.  He has spent many hours in the past few weeks on Khan Academy.  This is a math website (although I believe it has broadened beyond math now) that has instructional videos followed by practice exercises, and you earn badges by how well you work through it all.  Michael has long since left the beginning levels and has been challenging himself with multiplying decimals and learning about conic sections.  He finally got stuck when he couldn't understand the distributive property, which we assured him was like sixth grade material and it was ok for his first grade brain to not get it yet.

I did feel a bit bad for the poor kid in the neighborhood the other day.  Michael was trying to talk to him about all the different math problems and he looked totally uninterested.  So Michael has taken to talking to pretend students around him while he is on the computer.  He narrates through how to click on different things to find the videos or practices problems.  Then he explains how to solve the problem, how to enter the answer, and so on.  (I know what you are all thinking - Like parent like child!  And we love it!)  The other day he talked Jon into joining his class.


Jon is still my child that plays the best by himself.  He loves playing with Michael for a time and Becca for a time, but it is always broken up with some time on his own.  And what does he do?  Car races, car football games, car boxing matches, car soccer games, car whatever.  I use to think that after Michael's one track mind for sports it was so refreshing to have a son who liked to other things, like play with cars.  I'm now realizing that his mind is equally one tracked, just around cars.  Here is blue team vs. red team.


Becca has been getting into puzzles recently.  She won't try it on her own yet, but we sit down and pick out the pieces one by one and she carefully puts them all together.



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