Digraphs are going to be Hannah’s Achilles’s heel. After much work I have gotten her to see and hear the regular sounds of the alphabet (mirror mirror on the table!) Now, we have to make sure that she is saying digraphs correctly, and that is going to take some work. I’m glad that I can work this out though, in a classroom with 20 other kids she’d probably get overlooked for saying words incorrectly until it got so ingrained in her that it would take therapy to undo the wrong way and insert the right. Practice, practice.
Bethany is delving into the Middle ages and was reading and learning about Monks today. This site has information about religion, homes, clothing, health, art and so on of the Middle ages. She learned about the Order of St. Benedict here. (And she was thinking, I wonder if that’s where Mr. Cumberbatch’s parents got the name from?) We looked at the Abbey of Monte Cassino here.
Grace is sailing through negative numbers. I think it’s because every time I draw a number line to play on outside, I include negative numbers. It could also be that we live in Colorado and sometimes it is negative outside. A fun game to play to practice adding and subtracting negative and positive numbers is called ‘zero’. It’s like blackjack, but the aim is to get 0 instead of 21. Black cards are positive, red cards are negative (no face cards), put one card face down (only the player can see it) and one card face up. Now the player adds or subtracts in their head and asks for a hit trying to get to zero. She had to turn in her essay today, it had to be on a specific topic, so it wasn’t one that made her jump for joy…but it turned out okay. Thank goodness she could type it instead of writing it long-hand. (And for the record, she’s been working on this all month.)
Sir Alexander Fleming once said, “It started as something of an accident. After that it was a question of patience and work—good, satisfying work.” Sir Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur were two people who had patience and did work that helped others. They didn’t always get to see what their hard work ended up creating, but working toward a goal made them determined.
Sir Alexander was a bacteriaologist who studied long and hard. While he studied about influenza he saw a mold that was stopping the growth of the bacteria. He found out the mold was pennecillin and by testing it he discovered that this mold would stop the germ influenza. Though he didn’t make the drug, his work allowed others to create a vaccine. So, he worked hard and others helped to create something important by studying his work.
Louis Pasteur was a research chemist. By studying microorganisms in spoiled milk and beer he found that small things floating in the air were causing the milk and beer to go bad. Even though the medical society laughed at him he continued to work on the problem before him. This led to him proving that tiny things called germs made diseases. This helped the health of people because new vaccines were created to stop certain diseases.
I admire Sir Fleming and Louis Pasteur for their hard work and for their ability to keep going when others put them down. For instance, Pasteur was mocked by his friends but he continued to study and work on problems. We can use his example today by working hard on things that interest us or that we have questions about. We might not see how our work will turn out in the end, but sometimes work itself can be very satisfying. Asking questions and studying can be like solving a mystery, we have to work hard and be patient and in the end we will find the answer to the problem.
I was rather distracted during school watching the snowflakes float and flick by in the basement well window. I love the way they get drawn up and then pushed back down in the wind drafts…it’s rather mesmerizing. After school we ran by the docs office to pick up the note from her that says Bethany can use the equipment at the gym, not that it does her any good right now, but when she’s better we have to have the note on file at the rec center. Then we dropped off some more kids hats at the hospital, we knitted a few more baby hats and a few kid sized ones for anyone up on floor 7 at Littleton Adventist. Whenever Grace is there she likes the surprises that she gets – books, a new hat, coloring books, dolls, so we thought a nice knitted hat might make someone sick a bit happier. We ran by the library and OMG, sometimes I wonder about the books at my local socialist bookstore. Grace saw this book, ‘Little Monkey’s Big Peeing Circus’ there and I was like…no way.
So, we opened it and there was little monkey pointing to his ‘pee-pee’ (oh yeah, it was drawn there) and then he was peeing everywhere. Mimi then showed her ‘pee-pee’ to little monkey and he said she had no ‘pee-pee’, then she proceeded to pee in a most unladylike manner. I’m not quite sure what the book was supposed to do…encourage kids to show their ‘pee-pees’ off to each other? Teach kids that boys have things called ‘pee-pees’ instead of a penis and that girls have no visible ‘pee-pee’ but somehow manage to pee? I made the girls crack up by reading the book correctly on some pages – Little Monkey has a penis and he can pee out of a small tube in it called a urethra! Mimi has no penis, but manages to pee using her urinary output device also called a urethra! Girls really can not pee like boys and shouldn’t even try – it’s messy. Ahh, the library, what fun we can have there.
I have a stack of books awaiting me….a murder mystery….
A book about America’s newspaper columns….
And two math books….
So, I better get going on that before we have to go pick up James from DIA.
