Parenthood - 2020-07-10 Summer school jul 5-10 Cousin Week

July 10, 2020

We scaled back schoolwork a bit this week but still managed to do some music, cooking, french, math and our summer journals. Amelia formally started Math-U-See sheets and was quite taken by the idea of word problems. She especially likes silly ones about elephants and cats. Matthew is working on tally marks and is steadily getting closer to the end of Beta (addition and subtraction). Elizabeth is still wading through fractions.

Elizabeth made cheesy macaroni with steamed vegetables and a salad for her meal this week.

Matthew participated in some online french "summer camp" programs put on by Eureka! We had hoped they would provide an opportunity to practice speaking in french but although they required you to sign up it turned out that this wasn't actually necessary and several hundred students participated in each one.

Matthew did one about gravity and another about different kinds of animals. The gravity guy had a lot of trouble getting started and used a technology called kahoot to solicit answers to quiz questions. This was cool in theory but in practice the kahoot would come up with four different symbols and you had to pick the right one but while it would show us the question on the presentation in a different screen, by the time the answer key with the various options and what their symbols were showed up the kahoot had expired. So you could either take a one in four chance or just wait for it to time out. Matthew was quite disgusted. The experiments were pretty fun though. He made moon craters with flour and an eraser, dropped weights into water and did an experiment with surface tension that involved turning a glass full of water upside down.

The teacher for the animal presentation introduced Matthew to a new technology too called padlet. All the kids were supposed to make a padlet with their favourite animal and insert a picture. We did manage to do this but there were so many responses it was quite challenging. I could see this working much better with a regular sized class. There were three unusual animals presented and then they had to pick their favourite. Matthew enjoyed this so much that he got the rest of the family to watch the videos and pick their favourites as well. Daddy liked the water-shooting fish best. Matthew liked the kea and the girls thought the Dik-Dik was SO CUTE!