My Card Shark Daughter

FIRST PHOTO: Wednesday night
SECOND PHOTO: Thursday night

Wednesday night we played four hands of Hearts together after dinner. Sarah SHOT THE MOON! That is difficult to do! We saw it coming as she collected the Queen of Spades and all the hearts. Happy for her but dejected for our scores, the rest of us accepted our 26 points...

THEN

on Friday we played another three hands to finish the game. SHE DID IT AGAIN! We weren't expecting it because WHO SHOOTS THE MOON TWICE IN 7 HANDS OF HEARTS!?! On the very last hand, she led off with the Queen of Spades! Such drama! Smarty pants! Black Kitty tends to distract her while playing, so she perched him on the iPod player to watch.

My daughter is a card shark. In September, she Shot The Moon during Hearts AND when we played 5 hands of poker (5 Card Draw)...she got TWO FLUSHES (and a 3 of a kind!) and won most of the chips! She was DELIGHTED at her good fortune!

Dan Wins Die Siedler von Catan

Daniel LOVES board games (just like his dad!) and this is him winning at Die Siedler von Catan after dinner. FUN game. I was always short on sheep, baa. There's an english version called "Settlers of Catan".

Literature For Lunch-New Lunch Read Aloud-Germ Hunter-A Story About Louis Pasteur by Elaine Marie Alphin

Germ Hunter-A Story About Louis Pasteur by Elaine Marie Alphin was fantastic! We read the entire book in one afternoon and Daniel was RIVETED. He said, "let's read about some more scientists"! AND in the same way we read FINE PRINT on Gutenberg's death day Feb 3rd, there was something significant about Feb 15th in this book!

Dan's Valentine Lego Design

 

This is a scene from Daniel's most recent design on Lego Digital Designer for Valentine's Day...Daddy is giving Mommy pans! Cute!

Yum?

Sarah's food experiments...LOTS of hot chili sauce...it smells really bad and clears the sinuses! Thankfully, she moved on to sewing before COOKING it!

Sarah's Kitty Pillows

Sarah enjoyed using my sewing machine to make the turquoise & pink cat pillow but stitched the beach kitties on her machine. She loves stuffing them when the sewing is completed!

Learning Math With ALEKS

I keep this blog for me as a reminder of our days and weeks and months and years. It is such a delight to look back over the photos of my precious children and reminisce about their unique, creative learning processes.

I went to college to become a math teacher hoping to change the world for good by helping students ENJOY math and see it in all its' practicality. My husband has a BS in Math so you can see that we LIKE math in our house. I find that I'm attracted to crafts that involve lots of math...formulating recipes for soy candles and lip balm, crochet, sewing and quilting. It is a good day in my mind, if I have to use algebra to solve for an unknown in my measurements!

Basic life skills include communication and computation. At the core, communication requires reading and writing and computation involves basic mathematical functions. In the grand scheme of life, a person needs these tools to move their education forward. The how and when are debated feverishly throughout humanity. 

We started our homeschool journey under the heavy load of a lot of curriculum which included a math curriculum. Recently, I realized the repetitive worksheets were really just busy work and set them aside for a time.

Shortly thereafter, a friend mentioned ALEKS. I'd heard about it when some friends used ALEKS to pass required college level classes so I thought it was only for advanced math. I was so wrong! I just wanted to post about ALEKS because though I limit screen-based activities, this is really worthwhile in my opinion.

I signed up for the 60 day free trial. I told Daniel the only requirement for the 60 days was to visit ALEKS everyday and do a minimum of one problem. He has done that-and MORE. In a few short weeks, he's spent over six self-motivated hours of interactive, self-assessing math with a high level in enjoyment.

Here's what I like about ALEKS:
-FREE 60 day trial (thank you!)
-student decides what to work on
-knowledge base divided into "pies" (student selects topics to explore)
-no boring explanations or lessons (if the student misses a question, they click the HELP button to find out how to get the right answer, "reverse engineering" is a great way to learn!)
-no lifeless, repetitive drills

I expect to sign up for the paid subscription when the trial is over. ALEKS offers a way for homeschoolers to master math concepts in a student-directed way that I appreciate.