Skool Daze

In just a few weeks school will be over for this year.

Faith's class had their first science fair, in some ways it was better than the high school 

production. They had simple scientific principles explained.

Faith chose to do a study on the usefulness of thumbs.

She had her subjects do common tasks using their whole hand and then with their thumb taped to their palm. Her hypothesis was correct, it takes longer to do a task if you can't use your thumb.

This whole project was a bit ironic for this family though...wonder how well people can tie their shoes with only one hand?  How about with only 3 fingers?

Our one handed typist can pound out as many WPM as most two-handed typists.

We will have to think outside the box when it is time to teach Shekinah to type, haven't found any online programs for that.

I liked this experiment. The plant on the right was fed water, #1 was fed Gatorade    #2 was fed Mountain Dew    #3 was fed peroxide...there was a #4 that was fed chlorox, but that plant was just dried up leaves.

This fine lady was found at my kitchen table doing her homework.

Later she was seen walking on the drive in her white high heeled shoes.

First Grade has been an interesting ride this year. She started off by having issues with her math facts.When you've lived life with only 4 fingers you can't just visualize 4+1. I learned those facts way before I went to school simply because I added on my fingers many times. She didn't have that opportunity.  So we taught her to use the mental image of dots on a dice, a number line or simply counting backward for some of the simple subtraction problems. She is doing quite well with them.

She is also very literal, she and Zeke get along very well. The other day I pulled out some papers from her backpack and noticed that this one paper had four errors so I started reading.  "Ray will tear a white shirt."  Well of course that makes sense.

The next one should have caught her attention, but  "the thorn where on my dress."  sorta makes sense.   "Over where is my house"  is a sentence we've surely used.   "There is my book?"  I told her that one is a question.  She said "yeah, there is my booook?"  with a pronounced question in her voice.

I explained that English is a crazy language with three "wears" in it and I wrote them and explained it.  Her response? "Well that just isn't fair!"

Because I'm a mean mom or ....not, I also ordered the ACE English for 1st grade and 6th grade math for Faith intending to use them over the summer because Hope intends to go to school over the summer. Well they arrived on Saturday and those books just HAD to be opened. So I relented. I explained that the beginning of the books was going to be easy but that was OK, I didn't expect her to be finished quite so quickly though.  She followed the directions to the letter!

One night I got this note when I came home from teaching a class. "I wrote it myself"

Those crazy shoes!

We took Parker on an ambulance tour the other night.