You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2011.
I’m not knitting. It should be a very passive experience – not doing something – but it isn’t. I am very actively not knitting. I am not knitting on the couch. I am not knitting while talking. I am even not knitting while watching Champions League soccer. I am not knitting. I’m resting my finger. erg.
But in the meantime I might as well remember the good ol’ days, back 8 days ago, when I could knit and make plans and have something to do with myself.
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Pair 5 of 12 for this year.
Kroy Socks FX: Clay Colors – A nice, thick sock. Sturdy and warm. And the marled effect? Soooo wool socks. When I think of Wool Socks, I think of gorgeously outdoorsy socks like these.
Simple sock with a mock cable ribbing.
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mapping
Rainer’s been running in this city for years, and it’s a small city. He was getting bored. Now, thanks to a map of the city and a blue highlighter, he’s seeing the city in new ways and discovering little parts of it we didn’t know were there.
Right now, all that’s left are a few bits at the extreme edges. (The picture is from a few weeks ago.)
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dictation
Dictation has really been working for Sandra. Because her reading was delayed and she needed vision therapy, her experience with words isn’t the same as other kids her age. She just hasn’t had the same volume of experience with the patterns of written language. We did copywork for years. She liked it and it was satisfying for her but her spelling has remained rather…exotic.
In the last year, I’ve almost entirely switched to dictation.
Here’s how we do it:
I find a passage that looks like it mostly contains words she ought to be familiar with. I read a sentence aloud, then reread it a phrase at a time, finally repeating it entirely one last time. I repeat this til she’s got about half a page, double-spaced.
Then she goes through the passage, highlighting the errors and writing them at the bottom. I get her to spell them aloud before she then copies each one 3 times.
While she doesn’t like correcting her own work and confronting her errors in any subject, it’s really an important part of the process. Each word she checks and gets right is reinforced while she’s brought face-to-face with her mistakes. I think the main book we use is important, too. Bloodhound is from her favourite series, the Beka Cooper books, and I think she feels a little like she’s letting someone special down when she makes errors.
One day, frustrated by her mistakes, she counted the total words she’d written. It turned out that while she’d made 12 errors, she’d gotten the other 77 right. Since then she’s made a practice of doing this – seeing what she’s done right. It’s a wise choice.
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shovelling
If you went outside last week odds were you’d hear the heavy, wet sound of at least one of our neighbours moving snow to sunnier spots. Sandra and Rainer have taken the lead for our yard.
Go, spring, go!
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baking
Easy French Bread, pg 63 More With Less Cookbook, slightly modified. The recipe my mom made for us as we grew up.
Sandra is on a baking kick. Muffins. Cookies. Bread.
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strength training
All winter, I’ve been adding two 30 minute sessions of strength training to my week. I really like these Fitness Ball Workouts. I’ve got a couple of these 10 Minute Solutions DVDs, and I like the way I can play any number of the 5 workouts in any order I choose. Like Choose Your Own Adventure for sweating.
I love this fitness ball workout. I do the upper body, core, and lower body routines. Simple, straight forward, effective.
With all the running I do year-round, and the cycling I did last summer, I had thought I’d pretty much achieved equilibrium with my legs. They were as fit as they were going to get, especially as pertained to their appearance. I was wrong, it turns out. Happily so.
My weight is now at a number that was my ‘Whoa! You’ve lost focus. Get it back!” number. Except that I can’t really get it much lower, no matter what I try. Naturally, I was freaking out a little. I like to keep a pretty tight rein on my weight, because I just never, ever, ever want to weigh 50 pounds extra again. Then I remembered that adding muscle might just be adding weight. D’oh. Sometimes we can be so dumb, eh?
Feeling stronger, tauter, more capable is just awesome. This is definitely working.
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spring!
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cursive
Matthias, who hates handwriting with a boundless passion, almost enjoys this simple workbook.
Handwriting Without Tears: Cursive. We’ve used none of the other products and I didn’t even buy the Teachers’ Manual. He just picks it up and does it. At less than $10, I figured it wasn’t going to be much waste of money. Turns out, it’s working.
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readiness
Tias is reading and enjoying this graphic novel/novel combo. Like Sandra, he’s needed vision therapy. I’ve been waiting for the magical moment* to happen – that collision of confidence and interest and readiness and ability. He’s 11 now, and parenting him has been a series of lessons in You Can’t Rush Readiness. Acceptance. It’s been very Zen, being his mother. I just have to pay attention to each moment. No planning. No expectations. Just…now.
About 8 months ago the magical moments started…when I’d come into a room and see him reading Calvin and Hobbes. Then the Geronimo Stilton books caught his eye. It’s a perfect series for him: each page has lots of white space and, with all those words in playful fonts, the pages don’t look at all intimidating. That’s important. Unintimidating. If he doesn’t believe he can, he can’t.
Travels with Thelonious Book One: The Fog Mound is a novel and a graphic novel at once. It’s set in a future world full of animals and devoid of humans. Our hero is a chipmunk with an odd notion. Imagine: Thelonious is daft enough to believe that humans once actually existed! Swept away in a flood, he begins an incredible adventure.
* Although we all know that it isn’t a moment, right? We remember that there are very few times in life when progress is flicking a switch, right?
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broadening
I want Sandra to experience a wider range of ideas and personalities, and I’ve been happy with what we’ve added to our routine.
Each week, I ask that she:
- watch a TED talk
- read a biography from Great Scientists and mind map it
- listen to a podcast (Age of Pursuasion, Quirks and Quarks, and Stuff you Missed in History Class are her favourites)
- read a National Geographic article
