The Brick House

A serious slack-arse for the last few weeks! Fighting with Beth to get some work done is so draining that it seems I take any opportunity to fall in a heap. Last week basically proved that if I want to get anything done during the week, I MUST PLAN AHEAD or we basically just vegetate in front of a screen all week…

Beth has taken to playing on Starfall.com again, which, if she is actually reading (and she does seem to be) means she has done something on her own. She also read to Katy a couple of times, although the second time I think she was retelling the story rather than reading it. And she has been doing LISP with E a couple of nights. Oh, and we’ve been reading Puberty Girl and Pride and Prejudice.
So, not entirely free from anything academic, just nothing very structured. I’m going to see how it works if I write up separate entries for every day this week, going back to modify them each evening if necessary. If I don’t have to do all the thinking each night when I’m tired, I might get further!

The Plan:
8:00-9:00 shower, dress, feed the inmates, get them dressed, lay out work
9:00-10:00 Beth: English – reading; comprehension sheet; spelling words; Chicktionary
Katy: drawing/colouring in, pattern blocks
10:00-11:00 Beth: Maths – watch next lesson on my laptop, do workbook page/s + some revision
Katy: rice basket, blocks, puzzles
11:00-1:00 Out?
rest of the afternoon: me: reading aloud indig. stuff
Beth: artsy-crafty stuff; narrating back at least some of the reading (try paragraph by paragraph and only do a little at first!)
Katy: collage, painting, etc

The Plan:
8:00-9:00 shower, dress, feed the inmates, get them dressed, lay out work
9:00-10:00 Beth: English –
Katy: drawing/colouring in, pattern blocks, Playschool (9:30)
10:00-11:00 Beth: Maths – watch next lesson, do workbook page/s + some revision
Katy: rice basket, blocks, puzzles
Me: pack lunch for picnic (including apple muffins and banana cake – yum!)
11:30-2ish (or whenever the BatPup gets too sleepy) HENCAST picnic at Aspen Island, BYO everything
rest of the afternoon: me: reading aloud indig. stuff
Beth: artsy-crafty stuff; narrating back at least some of the reading (try paragraph by paragraph and only do a little at first!)
Katy: collage, painting, etc

The Plan
8:00-9:00 shower, dress, feed the inmates, get them dressed, lay out work; put in load of laundry etc
Beth: played maths boardgame she invented (with dominoes)
Katy: played with magnetic letters and alphabet flashcards; drawing in scrapbook
9:00-10:00 Beth: English – reading; digraphs – vowel worksheets, plus try some of my ideas for practising consonant digraphs through dictation, flashcards etc
Katy: puzzles, feltboard, Playschool (9:30)
10:00-12:30 Beth: pottery + travel time
Me and Katy: Dickson SVDP
12:30-1:30 Lunch and general relaxation
1:30-3:00 (or during Katy’s nap) Beth: Maths (watch DVD, workbook pages); maths games
3:00-whenever Artsy-crafty stuff; reading aloud

Beth went round to Caitlin’s for a playdate after pottery, and I went out to pick her up later than intended because Katy’s nap went longer than expected, and we ended up staying to have tea and a chat with Fiona, so by the time we left it was nearly five, so it really didn’t make sense to go home when we could wait around a bit longer and give E a lift home… so basically we got home at 6pm, having killed the time waiting for E by visiting Little Red Engine. Maths will happen TOMORROW!!!! Since I don’t want to expose all the kiddies at the Preschool Stoytime to Katy’s cold, we will stay home tomorrow morning and do some extra work.

Revision of the basics from last time:

• Gave her a quick revision test: (+ 3 4), (- 7 5), (* 5 2) and so on. No problem, apart from needing clarification that (- 7 5) is the same as 7-5, not 5-7. (Interestingly, has developed a way of expressing negative numbers: 5-7=0-2. Where did she learn that?)
• Extended to multiple operands: (+ 3 1 2), (* 2 2 3) and so on. She had a brainfart with some of it, but worked it out with hints.
• Trick questions: (* 4 7 13 64 12 7 18 0). She lost confidence and wouldn’t even try, until I took her through each step encouraging her not to worry about the answer. To get better at maths in general, she needs to know to look for shortcuts wherever possible.
• Fired up the CLISP program and she typed in the same expressions, getting the hang of the fiddly details involved: spaces, parentheses, the enter key and so on. Quickly took to entering huge expressions just to see it print really big numbers, which LISP can do because it doesn’t suffer from the same numeric limits as most languages.
• Had to be dragged away after about twenty minutes so we could watch Heroes together.

The Plan:
8:00 -9:00 shower, dress, feed the inmates, get them dressed, lay out work; put in load of laundry etc
9:00 -10:00 pootled; listened to a Classics for Kids web radio show on the William Tell Overture
10:00-12:00 Beth: reading, composition/copywork – writing a book for Katy, digraphs workbook page (did half), “ch” memory game, Chicktionary
Katy: drawing in scrapbook and colouring in tracings of her hands, Playschool (watched 2 recordings), treasure bottle, feltboards, sorting beads and buttons
12:00 -1:00 Lunch and general relaxation; do some more laundry!
1:00 – 2:00 Kippax Go-Lo for food storage containers and any craft supplies, esp. construction paper. See if I can leave munchkins behind…
2:00-3:00 Beth: Maths – watch Lesson 3, play with manipulatives, complete workbook pages – Beth did not do any Maths today so we will do it over the weekend
Katy – play with Daddy or nap
3:00 – whenever History – reading aloud books on indigenous history/culture; encourage Beth to narrate back; brainstorm ideas and write a short composition on one aspect which interests her; artsy-crafty stuff
Katy: collage and/or painting; puzzles; Playschool (3:30); reading aloud; ABC/shapes online games; independent play
6:30-8:30 Scouts

Evening: reading aloud Pride and Prejudice

Introduced B to the basics of the programming language LISP (or Lisp, as the young whipper-snappers call it). LISP has two main advantages over other programming languages: its syntax is much simpler, and it doesn’t have any expressive limits. B. is most chuffed at the idea that she’s learning the most powerful programming language ever invented. And we did it entirely on paper, without needing to touch the computer.

Plan of attack was this:

• Started with a simple mathematical expression: 3 + 4 = ___. She answered that quite happily: 7.
• Digressed (already!) to talk about algebra. She’s managed to pick up (gods know where) the idea of variables, such as x and y, and their use as a place holder like the ___ in the expression above.
• Asked her to find what x was in x = 3 + 4. No problem.
• Asked her to find what x was in 7 = 3 x 4. (Note: that’s an x, not a ×. On reflection I should have used a less confusing variable for this step.) With a little hinting she hit upon the idea that variables didn’t have to be things (ie operands, like 3 and 4): they could also be actions (ie operators, like + or – or ×). The light went on!
• Introduced her to LISP syntax: the equivalent of the above expression would be (+ 3 4) – note the parentheses and the operator-first order.
• Asked her without explanation to evaluate (+ 1 2 3). She answered correctly (6). Explain that the syntax allows more than two operands.
• Talked about the difference between evaluating an expression like (+ 7 2) to get an answer (9) and seeing it as a list of three items (a plus sign, a seven and a two).
• Explained that everything in LISP works like that: a list whose first item tells you what to do with the rest of the items. So, for example, (format t “Hello”) will, when evaluated, print the word “Hello” on the screen. (Digression: she guessed that the t stands for “text”, which is pretty clever but, sadly, wrong; it actually means “true” and is the convention in the format command for outputting the result to the screen instead of a file, but I didn’t go into detail.
• Asked her to evaluate (+ 3 (- 4 1)). Explained that on the face of it, it was silly: how do you add a number to a list? Pointed out that she can evaluate each item in the “plus list”, including the “minus list”. Showed her how to cross out the (- 4 1) and replace it with 3; from there she worked out the rest and gave the answer: 6.
• Gave her a very complicated expression, introducing * as the multiplication operator: (+ (- (* 7 1) (- 4 2)) (* 5 2)). Concentration was flagging a little, and the asterisk threw her at first, but she evaluate the (- 4 2) as 2 and the (* 7 1) as 7, meaning that the first operand was 5 (that’s 7 minus 2) and the second was 10 (that’s 5 times 2) so the result was 15 (that’s 5 plus 10). Was justifiably pleased with herself.
• Gave her a teaser for next time: the defun operator for defining functions. Was very pleased with the idea of defining functions and using what she already knows of algebra.

So: the basics are: the duality of code and data (ie an expression can “mean” its contents or its value, depending on what you decide to do with it); the concept of evaluating a list to get a result, and the very minimal LISP syntax (given a list, use the first item to decide what to do with the rest) and a bit of a view of types (I showed her symbols, like +, – and defun, as well as numbers and text). And all without using a computer!

Next time I’ll show her how to write her own functions, and maybe touch on the list operators car, cdr, cons and list as a teaser for lesson 3…

The Plan:
8:00-9:00 shower, dress, feed the inmates, get them dressed, lay out work etc
9:00-10:15 Beth – English: reading (finish book), comprehension sheet, -ch, -th, -sh word find etc [Beth dashed off the comprehension sheet far more quickly and easily than I had assumed – and without any complaint whatsoever! – so she had plenty of time to play Chicktionary as well]
Katy – scrapbook; puzzles; Playschool (9:30)
10:30-11:30 Preschool Story Time, Library (Beth – read books, do colouring etc)
11:30-12:30 Lunch and general relaxation
12:30-1:30 Beth – Maths – watch second lesson, play with manipulatives
Katy – blocks/Duplo; puzzles/threading beads
1:30 – overnight Beth to the farm with Nannie

Send out to the farm:

• maths workbook and manipulatives
• reader (Bear in Town – reread for fluency)
• -ch memory game and digraphs boardgame

The Plan: [what we did in blue]
7:45- 8:45 shower, dress, feed the inmates, get them dressed, lay out work etc
8:45-9:45 Beth – English: reading [1/2 of Bear in Town], composition/copywork [wrote a thank you note to MG then copied it out neatly], digraphs workbook [1 page], etc
Katy – out with Nannie
9:45-10:15 Beth – digraphs boardgame with Nannie
10:00-12:00 Katy – ABA Playgroup with me
10:30-12:00 Beth – pottery lesson with Nannie – went to pottery but it wasn’t on this week!
12:00- 1:00 Lunch and general relaxation
1:00- 2:00 [put back til 2-3] Beth – English: reading, digraphs workbook, copywork or composition, Chicktionary
2:00-3:00 Beth – Maths: watch second lesson, play with manipulatives, look at workbook
Katy – nap (hopefully!)
3:00 til whenever: me – reading aloud (indigenous culture and technology)
Beth – tapestry; collage, painting, etc
Katy – collage, painting etc; Playschool (3:30); rice basket

Evening: reading aloud Pride and Prejudice

The Plan: [substantially edited because while we did most of the things on the list, we didn’t do them in the order given]

• shower, dress, feed the inmates, get them dressed, lay out work etc
• Beth – English: reading, pillow fighting, handwriting workbook or copywork, on-line games, etc. Explore the possibility of her learning poetry off by heart. Also see if she wants to keep working through the Spirit book we were looking at before she went away.
• Katy – Playschool (9:30), puzzles, magnets, colouring in page/s
• errands: library; op shop
• Beth – Maths: 1st workbook page/s, play with manipulatives; Katy – nap
  
• me – reading aloud (indigenous history and stories)

So, we did all the work-type stuff on the list, anyway. Most of the rest of the time they were playing with blocks, with rather more success than yesterday or I would have thrown the whole basket in the green shed!

Beth does not like her handwriting book, so we decided that she would do copywork or write letters to people to get the practice instead. She said that she’d rather do something like that because workbooks are so pointless. We experimented with various online phonics games, and she was contemptuous of all of them except Chicktionary, a Boggle-style game where you have to find all the words you can make with seven letters, against the timer. Beth hated the timer, since she could only find two or three words before it went off, but we had to download the game to make it work without one. She spent an hour using the demo version and we filled up all the spaces given between us, plus found some more words which didn’t fit on the gameboard but which got us extra points anyway *g* I think it is definitely worth looking for similar games which won’t cost US$20 to install the full version, but if we can’t find anything else with the same level of functionality, it might be worth paying for. The number of ways in which it will help her practice spelling and word building skills is definitely worth it, plus it comes with a built-in spell-checker function so she can experiment with combinations to see what works and what doesn’t. Much better than spending the money on pointless spelling workbooks which she will hate and refuse to use *g*

We worked in the Math-u-see workbook for the first time, and she ended up quite happily working her way through the first lesson, and even insisted on doing the review exercise when I said she didn’t have to. I think she doesn’t quite want to admit that she likes it, given how much she has complained! After that, she went back to her pastime of building a city out of blocks, and I finished reading the chapters on pre-European history in Shipwreck, Sailors and 60,000 Years. I decided to stop reading it there for the time being, and pulled out the rest of the enormous pile of library books on indigenous history and culture. I read a couple of Dreamtime stories and a story about an ancient family which is just at Beth’s reading level, so I might get her to start reading that next week. We finished Willie the Whale, after a bit of grumbling from Beth about how I was making her read such terribly long stories *g* Next week, I’m going to start requiring her to read more than she has been, as it is quite ridiculous to take a whole week to read one reader! I also want her to start doing some more writing. We will see how it all goes.

Scouts started again for the year, and Beth was terribly excited to find out that they will be doing abseiling at the upcoming camp! After we got home, she watched a few of her shows, then I offered to read more Pride and Prejudice and she leapt at the chance. Funny little thing that she is *g*