Math Week

Aiden is in charge of the lessons this week. He has decided that they haven't been doing much math lately, so that is the theme for the week. They've both spent a while on Khan Academy doing the practice and earning points/badges. We've played around with this before, but I had forgotten how great it is. Although you have to do a set number of problems correctly to become proficient, you can skip around on the flow chart and it will back fill proficiency as needed. Best of all it's FREE!

He also wrote 10 story problems for Zoë to do based on Halloween. They're cute problems like "You get 12 Reece's peanut butter cups, but Dad gets a 25% toll. How many peanut butter cups do you have left?" We've also been playing math games like Equate and Set. Basically he said he wanted to find a way to do math things that Zoë would enjoy.

We are also as a family learning Sign Language. That has been a lot of fun. The kids are excited that they can now "talk with their mouths full." We checked out books from the library and have a friend that knows ASL so we can practice with her. Most of our dinner conversation last night was spent sharing signs and trying to talk in sign.

My big issue right now is coming up with a way to evaluate success in their learning by the end of the year. I've started to piece together some vague ideas and in the end I'm hoping to have a questionnaire we can each use to see how we think things are going. It needs to be life skills/job performance based instead of a standardized test. In this information age it isn't important that they can recall mundane facts, but rather can they work on a team, can they communicate (in many forms) their ideas to others, can they solve problems creatively...that kind of thing. I'm constantly evaluating and thinking about these kinds of things, but it would be nice to have it in writing with specific examples. In the end it will probably help if I need to create high school transcripts for them too.