Thursday, May 29, 2008

Queen of Good Intentions

You all know I'm the queen of good intentions. What I lack is follow through. Nough said.

Perfect 10....My Sweetling turned 10. She is my Perfect Ten.

Not to be outdone, Little Guy is 5.

I could write for a long time about my children and their parties. But, then I'm back to being BEHIND in my blog. And then I'm discouraged. And then I don't get started cause there is way too much to write and I'll never get caught up. So, I'll just move on to my next Good Intention.

We sat around the kitchen table this morning and took turns making a list of summer activities. Here is our list:

--swimming pool
--nature hike
--creation museum
--make signs
--Parky's Ark
--zoo
--sculpture park
--kite flying
--Gorge Trail
--acorn hunt
--children's museum
--buffalo in KY
--pick apples
--go to playground
--park programs
--piggies
--bike ride
--scrapbooking

Now, my perfect summer day, cause i'm the queen of good intentions, would look like this....

First, all the miscellaneous stuff on the fridge would all be cleared off. The front of the fridge would be decorated with space shuttles, planet pictures, etc (with matching magnets of course) to turn the fridge into "Mission Control". One of the things on the fridge would be "Morning Flight Routines" for each of the three of us. We'd get up, have breakfast and devotions, and then race through our morning flight routines. We'd have some neat sticker chart or something for our flight plans.

Second, each week we'd have a schedule "This Week in Space Camp" or "Shuttle Destinations for this Week", or some such snazzy title. We'd have park programs, library trips, playdates with friends, weekly cleaning tasks, activities from our list, and scrapbooking/journaling all organized into our Weekly Flight Plan.

Third, once a week one morning or afternoon would be "Launch Pad Repair" or "Launch Pad Maintenance" and we'd work together on Repair and Maintenance of our Launch Pad. (shhh...cleaning our house)

Fourth, when we'd get home or finish our Daily Mission, we'd zip through our "Landing Procedure" (put away lunch boxes, water bottles, clean up any messes we'd made during the day). Part of our "Landing Procedure would be a page in cursive, a math skills update, lowercase letter matching, or some other needed school review.

Last, once a week, we'd schedule a Missions Log, for scrapbooking and journaling about our summer.

Isn't that such an awesome idea??

Sweetling is, by the way, at her 90% completion marker in all of her core subjects (except language skills). We're continuing on in a few subjects anyway, because I want to finish the last History unit (the world post WWII) and the last pre-algrebra unit (Statistics and Probability).

Speaking of which, I have to share an email I sent to the Jedi:

Check out one of the “pre-algebra” problems Sweetling worked today:

In a class of 24 boys and 16 girls, the class mean was 75 and the mean of the girls’ scores was 72. What was the mean of the boys’ scores?

Yesterday, one of her problems was:

Find the value of x such that the mean of the given list is the specified number.
8, 14, 16, 12, x; mean = 15

Sweetling said, “I just solved that like I would solve for any variable.”