Monday, August 30, 2010

It Happened One Night

My choice for the lunchtime classic movie festival. I wanted to chose a comedy.

I first saw this movie at a college movie festival, long before you could buy a movie and watch it whenever you wanted to. Everytime this was shown on television in Nashville, the newspaper would note that one of its editors had a brief role greeting Clark Gable in the newspaper locker room.

So far we've seen the "walls of Jericho" and the hitchhiking scene is soon. PRM

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Week 1

We finished our first full week. We had "preschool" the week before. During that, we began Rosetta Stone Hebrew and Math. We are doing, I hope quickly, a pass through pre-algebra topics and then will move into Algebra 1 in the winter/spring. Dolciani's PreAlgebra book was my text choice.

So our first full week

1. Continuing K12 Literature. We only have time for one more unit so we are doing Unit 11. This finishes with a literary analysis essay.

2. Oak Meadow Civics for 8th grade is our social studies topic this year. He will be completing three Eagle-required merit badges that coordinate well with this. He completed Week 1.

3. CPO Life Science, jazzed up with extra reports, labs and reading will be science for this year.

4. Modern Hebrew. We started Rosetta Stone. I'm not convinced yet that he is learning much. With the homeschool edition of RS there are supposed to be worksheets and other teaching helps. Not so in Hebrew. I am looking for supplemental materials to have him writing in Hebrew, too. This is difficult since I don't read or speak Hebrew myself.

5. Kitchen studies, some techniques, some kitchen chemistry. We won't start this until next week.

6. Math, Dolciani PreAlgebra, finished the first chapter. Chapter test on Monday.

7. Megawords to improve his spelling. We are doing 2 pages/day. I want to get through 2 or 3 books this year.

8. Handwriting. Someday he will have to write an essay for the ACT or the SAT and someone will have to read it. Right now they could not. I want to work on this for a few weeks and then just re-enforce as we go along.

9. PE. He lost about 15 pounds at camp this summer and it has given him the incentive to lose some more. I can't say he is interested in sports but he is willing to be more active this year. Right now he wants to run each morning. If that doesn't last, then I will have to enroll him in martial arts or swimming. PRM

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Classic Movie Study

Fancy name for watching classic movies by streaming Netflix during lunch. Noach chose The Odessa File for our first movie. I am going to try to keep a running list of what we are watching in the sidebar to make sure we are mixing it up a bit.

And "study" is a bit misleading since basically we are watching them during lunch and talking about them informally. I do plan to have a formal movie study at some point in his education but not yet. This is for fun.

The hard part will be choosing. PRM

Friday, August 20, 2010

Moving day

Today Yakov moved into the dorm. His school is about 1 1/2 hours away. Shoshie, Noach and I helped him pack all his stuff into the car. Jasper says "Good bye". Or "I want to go to college". It's so hard to tell which.

Pictures of his new digs await someone's help with getting them off my phone and into email. I haven't quite mastered that consistently.

It was sad to leave him but not nearly as sad as it was last year to watch him walk through airport security and think we would not see him for 9 months. In 9 days we can watch Shoshie do that. PRM

Thursday, August 19, 2010

"THEY CAME FIRST for ...

Well, my small voice is speaking out. Now they are complaining about the Muslims and their community center. Someday it could be the JCC or a synagogue. Who knows?

Sometimes people just want to be angry about something. But it is so tiresome. We really need to discuss some important issues, our economic situation, our national debt. But no, let's waste our time and energy on BS. And intolerance.

For people who claim to revere the Constitution, they sure like to ignore it when it suits them. PRM