Team Gray!

I mentioned before that I like to draw the children each week in my lesson plan book. The pictures serve both to label which child each individual plan is about and to improve my drawing skills.

I posted last week’s best picture on Facebook, and I got good feedback on it.

This week, I’ve drawn everyone except Chanya, the subject of last week’s best portrait. I am torn between Joy and Esteban’s portraits. Which do you think is better?

Today, Esteban’s math script introduced geoboards. Mind you, as a second grader, this is the third year he’s worked with geoboards, so I skipped over the script.

But we got into some new territory, like the mathematical term for a corner in a shape–an angle.

It went something like this:

“Blah, blah, blah, mathematicians call corners in shapes angles. How many angles are in a triangle?”

“3.”

“Hence the name, triangle.”

The children are giggling.

“Does rectangle mean four angles?”

“I’m not sure about that. I’ll have to look that up. But what about a square? Or a trapezoid, or a rhombus…or a parallelogram? How many sides do all these shapes have?”

“4.”
Esteban stretches a ‘geoband’ (sturdy, colorful rubber band) on his board into the shape of a square.

“How do you know it’s a square?” I ask.

“Because it looks like one.”

“What makes it look like a square?”

Imani and Joy know the answer. They are bursting at the seams.

I make a rectangle on the geoboard. “How are rectangles and squares different?”

“Their sides are longer.”

I change the rectangle so that the sides are narrower but taller.

“What makes a rectangle different from a square?”

Esteban tries to gesture shapes with his fingers. “Use words,” I tell him.

I make a trapezoid. “How is the trapezoid different from the square?”

“The sides are different.”

“How? How do you know a rectangle and a square?”

“Because 2 of the sides of the rectangle are the same, and the square has all 4 sides the same.”

The room let out a collective sigh.

Nothing much to report here. Feeling like a failure homeschool wise, what with the arm wrestling to get folks to attend to their studies today. And I had a question on Imani’s crossword puzzle that she should have known, given how many times she watches the same Cosby episode over and over.

It was, ‘Dr. Huxtable took Rudy and her friends to watch this kind of show.’

She had no idea. I think Imani tried to fit the word, ‘placenta’ into the ‘vaudeville’ slot.

So that time spent watching Cosby was absolutely unredeemable. Good to know. I was like, “you act just like those kids on the Cosby show! When the parents ask them what they learned from this, they were like, ‘what?’” So that was awesome.

But after we got over that hump, I was able to get in there with Imani and talk about word roots and word meanings. She is good at spelling, but lacks understanding of word origins and definitions.

I have figured out how to give Joy and Esteban clues for their spelling crossword puzzles. They are able to solve their puzzles without much help. Focusing on the task at hand? Not so much. So there was that.

And then Xavier and I went to community college to take his entrance exams for summer semester. We were there for an hour, applying to the school, and decided to return later with a calculator to actually take the tests.

And then there was kitchen chores, dinner prep, helping Yanni with her laundry, working out, dinner, etc., all while dragging children through the paces of chores, helping with dinner, working out…
The little kids were more interested in playing today.

Wait, I guess that’s everyday.