Circus Goes Back to School

First day back at school after the two week term break. Oh joy!!! Boy was a pleasure - he did exactly as expected: tried every excuse under the sun to get out of doing any school work!!! He was a monkey in a circus confused because no-one was clapping at his tricks!

We had a great holiday. Camping, camp fires, sleep ins, lots of kids to play with and best of all, we caught up with another home school family who live in our region. We LOVED them. We spoke their language and understood their strive toward quality of life for their children. Although our children are different ages and genders, I fully intend to link with this family and share home school treats.

But today - it was a circus. Boy morphed between sloth and lion in record breaking time. Lucky for me, one of his friends was online and it was that which dragged Boy's holiday craving body from his bed. After allowing Boy a short time of online talk, I rang the school bell.

The circus really is in town. Boy went last year and I didn't see the sense of going again this year when the money is needed for more pressing pursuits. Boy did however, begin to show some interest in alternative Circus discourse - the argumentative and demonstrative type (which in reality is animal libertarians simply pleading their case).

"Why do some people hate circuses?"

My in - thank goodness for teachable moments!

I feigned ignorance and suggested that we look it up. "People must have a reason to demonstrate. They wouldn't do it just because they're bored, would they!"

Nope - didn't work. It was school holidays and he was not going to be drawn into anything remotely educational.

So, I looked it up (lesson plans specifically) and was ready to go this morning with a nice little lesson on a circus assessment task. The completed assessment task is expected to demonstrate the following qualities:

• capacity to argue a point of view relevant to a given role


• use of persuasive language and techniques appropriate to audience and context


• control of both verbal and non-verbal language.

Using a feature article on a local council saying no to a Circus setting up in a local park, I had Boy highlight several concept words and read me what their definitions were. I read the article and Boy followed. He had his pre prepared list of words and definitions beside him and kept saying, "slow down Mum, I can't keep up". This was evidence that Boy was at least attempting to understand and not miss any words.

Tomorrow we will build on the activity and we will take turns in debating the two sides as portrayed in the feature article. We will also keep the list of concept words as spelling words for next week (this weeks words are chosen from a 6th grade list: ache, assignment, address, again, although, Pacific, February, fourth, fuel, hemisphere) and I want to make a match the definition to the word card game.

Boy managed an english and math unit from Kinetic Education and it is official - Boy is MUCH BETTER at Math than I am. Whereas Boy got 70%, I scored a high 40%. Ummm....I may need to get accountant husband to explain the rules of change to me again!

It is incredibly cold here in tropical North Queensland. So much so that Boy has shown interest in following the rise and fall of the temperature gauge and understanding the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius (we measure using Celsius). I found a neat website sticker (below) and I am about to show Boy how to load it to the front page of his site. Part of Boy's technology study this term is to create a very simple web site - uploading the html code for the temperature gauge is going to be the first step toward his web development career.

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