Saturday, November 14, 2009

I'm up in the middle of the night, on accounta spending the last few days in bed, recovering from a non-flu virus (it was interesting to discover that my doctors are still testing for the flu, even though most articles I've seen say doctors have mostly stopped testing and just started treating anything flu-like as if it is H1N1). I'm still a little under the weather, but much better than I was on Wednesday or Thursday -- and apparently I've slept my full, for the moment, because despite feeling like I'd been hit with a sandbag as of 11 last night, I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed at 2 this morning!

Sarah and I've had an extremely quiet week, for the most part. Tuesday at co-op we read about scroll books and made our own, played some Munchkin Booty, and then did alien-of-the-week club, in which we were each assigned a type of planet at random and charged with coming up with what types of aliens would live on that planet, what their homes and clothes would look like, what their culture and religions would be, etc. I got a gas giant, and had a lot of fun with it. Sarah also had a lot of fun with her lava planet.

Other than that, we've mostly done lots of math play, this week. Joe and Sarah's math adventures have continued -- Joe is now leading them through a dungeon crawl in which Sarah charges her magic wand by doing arithmetic. They're both loving that. Sarah and I've been playing with her calculator, talking about place value and a little multiplication, and doing lots of Sudoku together.

She's also making progress on our readathon month -- she's got three books up on our readathon line on the wall, and is working on her fourth. She's making better progress than I am -- I've barely been able to make my eyes focus, the last few days -- but I'm hoping to catch up over the weekend!

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Sarah and I decided to do a month-long readathon, although our focus will still be our Great Big Giant Readathon Day on Friday. She already finished her first book -- Calvin and Hobbes It's A Magical World, and I finish mine today -- Ex Libris, again. :)

Today we started our co-op. We started out by deciding on a schedule for our Tuesdays:

* morning circle (show and tell and planning the day)
* Everything Coffee Play Club (arts and crafts)
* class 1
* No Free Lunch (anyone can sign up to talk about anything -- but it's usually me, talking about history or science or world cultures or current events)
* class 2
* class 3

The classes are what we decide during morning circle -- we agreed that I'll be prepared to provide science class, math class, spy class, writing class, and fairy scouts (as well as ECPC and NFL), and we've got a friend who's offered to teach Ireland class, but each week which classes we do will depend on what the girls are in the mood for and whether they want to offer any classes of their own. It seems like it'll be a happy medium between structure/commitment and spontaneity/whim.

Today we decorated our folders, did morning circle, did a more formal meeting, and did fairy scouts, planning our badge requirements and making some badges with Joe's button-making machine.

Holy hell I'm exhausted. I had a wonderful time, and it seems like the girls had a wonderful time, but those were some *packed* hours!