Catching Up October 27th

Once again I have fallen behind on my updates! Between work and a round of the stomach flu things have been a bit crazy. I've also been doing a LOT with the homeschool group to help get their websites/blogs organized which makes me reluctant to do much work on here. However, I have to take the bull by the horns next week and really work on my own web presence for work... but I digress -

TJ's homeschooling was spotty last week but this week finds us back on the path of knowledge! TJ's been going to open swim/gym every Thursday and went on a trip on the Ghost Train in Lake Linden on Saturday with a homeschooling friend. It was cute - the grim reaper (a LARGE mechanical creature with a speaker) pointed to TJ and said, "I see you TJ, in the first car." It totally freaked him out! He's still talking about it! TJ also attended his first gymnastics class (of the year) on Monday. He's doing a LOT better than when he was younger and there's actually quite a few boys in the class - so he's got some friends there and it's great exercise!

For academics, we've been taking advantage of our Netflix membership to order educational videos from Nova, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel on the Mayan, Incan and Aztec cultures - as well as on plants. TJ's also been exploring some online science games at http://classroom.jc-schools.net/basic/sciplants.html
These activities coincide with the chapters he's working on in Social Studies and Science. TJ's working on learning how to take notes, make an outline and what the difference is between a primary and secondary source. We've also been working on Poetry in language arts and he is continuing to read Roald Dahl books and do worksheets and activities associated with the books - due to the extra stuff I'm throwing in he's still working on finishing Matilda but I think it's worth it for the extra information (one of the worksheets is what made us take a closer look at poetry - for instance) and for thoroughly assessing his reading comprehension (which is a LOT better than I feared! LOL!). In geography we're moving on to Alaska and doing a bit with Google Earth - a program that lets you view the globe interactively. In Math, TJ's struggling with word problems but that seems to be normal at this age. He'd like to take the lazy way out and just have the problem put before him! But he's finally starting to get it. We continue to work on simple math drills too to keep up multiplication, addition, division and subtraction skills. Japanese has not been going very well but yesterday I finally got in touch with a student at Tech that may be willing to tutor him. Now all I have to do is come up with the money! LOL!

Guess that's about it for now! I'll try to get back to post pictures of Jessica's B-day from last Sunday and to give more updates...