Are you cold? Is Uranus Blue?

“The gas from Uranus turned its face blue! Poohey,” he said as he waved his hand in front of his nose. Yes, we finally managed to tackle the planets of our solar system and Uranus was his favourite. At least he’s going to remember it.

Science: Working through Teaching Treasures ,Planet worksheet, Boy made up a little book, each page containing cut and pasted information about one of the nine corresponding planets.

Using a fun site called COSMOS4KIDS we together read interplanetary biographies and played a couple of groovy quizzes. Rather than write facts about each planet, I agreed that Boy could cut and paste from COSMOS4KIDS. I just don’t see the sense of needlessly stressing him by making him write beyond his tolerance level.

Writing: The first task on the above worksheet was to place the planets in order of distance from the sun. Boy drew the sun and then a descending vertical line of nine circles. After working through the distance hints provided by Teaching Treasures, Boy wrote the names of each planet beside the correct circle. He did well, got them all right and even attempted to sound the planet names out without asking me to spell them for him.

Once he had completed, I shared with him a memory aid that I learnt when I was in Grade 3: My Very Elderly Mother Just Sat Up Near Pluto. I have never forgotten it and I still mentally recite the statement when I am trying to locate planet order. Boy didn’t appear overly keen on it. Rather, he wanted to repeat “Uranus” in a record number of times per minute.

Technology: Rather than use Word to cut and paste into, today I showed Boy what he has in accessories. He used Notepad and we both decided we didn’t like it. Hence, Word will be used from now on.

Need I say anything about World of Warcraft!!!! He’s still on a bender to level.

Spelling: Fifty percent today so we’re on the rise.

Cooking: Boy has been wanting to include some home economics into his home school hours. Whereas I’m happy with the general meal preparation that he often helps me with, he wanted to do something structured for school work. At 9AM this morning, we made a double load of jelly (jello in the U.S). While this alone is no great feat, I did have the opportunity to talk to Boy about my experiences of food preparation difference between a cold and a hot climate. In the tropics the cook does not put the stated amount of water with the jelly crystals because it just won’t set and hold. We also had a fun discussion about when I lived in Alaska and was always in trouble for putting the butter in the fridge. Here our butter is straight back into the fridge as soon as it is spread on bread. Left on the table or bench, we end up with a yellow pool of something that looks quite disgusting. Putting the butter in the cupboard sounds so funny to us and we had a good joke about our bugs, ants or cockroaches dieing from cholesterol rather than a squirt of Mortein.

Math: Valentine's Day saw the culmination of a fund raiser we were helping the Abused Child Trust with. Boy helped me to count how much money we raised ($158.15). As we sat together and counted our respective piles, Boy counted aloud and I had to restart about 15,000,000 times.

The picture is Boy’s collective schoolwork for the day. He’s done well for someone with a very short attention span for anything but World of Warcraft.