Winding down, though LONG winded

Things are starting to wind down for the year here. Yesterday, we finished the unit on matter and movement culminating in a wordless skit the kids put on showing different forces and balance. They had to come up with 3 different ways to pantomime push, pull, gravity, balance and friction. Two of my favorite parts were Zoë as the human balance with boxes on her hand, and watching Aiden keep track of Zoë eating a balanced diet of pretend food. I just love that given free reign to formulate the skit, Aiden came up with a balanced diet to represent the idea of balance. The kids practiced the skit a couple of times, then preformed it last night for Tom and me.

We're also starting the final project for the unit on change. We've taken the curriculum's idea of a time capsule and expanded on it. Today we spent some time discussing what important parts of our culture we should include in the time capsule. This is going to be a lot of fun, and all four of us are going to put some things in it. My hope is that when the kids are grown, and (hopefully) have their own children, we'll dig it up and look through it. I guess the key will be burying it in a spot we can find in 20+ years!

Today in math we made lists of the steps for multiplying multiple digits (for Zoë) and long division (for Aiden). It dawned on me that these concepts would be easier if we spent some time listing out each step. It did seem to work. Zoë did a great job with her problems overall, she just needs to remember to add anything carried over. Aiden continued to befuddle me by being able to do story problems in his head, but struggling with the mathematically written version. If he's not a visual-spacial learner, then no one is! Either way it was a vast improvement over yesterday's math lesson, and we got donuts for a morning snack to celebrate their hard work.

I've received the samples from Saxon for their middle grades math curriculum. Meh... My initial thoughts are that it is entirely too repetitive for Aiden still, but maybe Zoë would like it. Part of me (the lazy part) wants to just order it and say tough. It would be so much easier to just hand them their book and say "do today's lesson." I just don't think that will work well with children who grasp the big concepts so quickly. I think part of me is scared they might miss something if I don't use a curriculum. Of course the reality is that we are using grade based math workbooks, so I really don't think they'll miss anything. Maybe it's more that I can't wrap my head around the idea that some people don't need to work as hard to learn basic math concepts. Perhaps I've forgotten what I felt like at their age.