Thursday, August 12, 2010

Summer studying, Day 3

Continuing on with my plan to rob my children of precious summer hours by making them do homework for me.

My daughter did another PEMDAS worksheet, getting closer and closer to at least a passing percentage of correct answers. (By the way, if you're ever working on order of operations with your kids, this calculator rocks -- you can enter the whole long thing and get the answer without having to work it through yourself. Purely for parent use, mind you.) Mostly, now, it's carelessness. You really do have to go boringly step by slow step, not rushing things by combining stuff in and out of paragraphs or doing the figuring too hastily in your head. Good that she's doing all this practicing now, though, so maybe she'll have it together by class time. We read another chapter of The Color of Water, which she has pronounced to be a weird book. That won't get her off the hook.

My son's geometry homework involved looking at pictures of the flags of various countries and matching them to descriptions that use the names of many different shapes, triangles and polygons and dodecagons and trapezoids and what-all. I helped probably a little too much, but seriously, the descriptions were awfully convoluted. In Spanish, we moved on from a chapter about family members to one about rooms of the house. Not sure how much of this he's going to retain, but he's game to try it. We read another chapter in Bridge to Terabithia, and yes, the glasses made a difference.

No comments: