Tuesday, September 4, 2007

I Love Math. . .

Today didn't go exactly as I'd planned but better than I'd hoped. Gloria's books haven't arrived yet, so I pulled a bunch of workbooks out of my extensive collection of homeschooling stuff in each subject so she could start school yesterday. One of the books was on multiplication and utilized cute cartoon characters to teach the concepts. I knew Gloria would enjoy this because math is one of the (few) subjects she hasn't balked at and she totally got into it!! When we were through, she set up a grid and found some counters and continued to explore this new world of fascinating number pairs on her own. All the while she kept repeating, "I love multiplication! I love school"!
She continued to teach herself the multiplication tables off and on all day. When Rob got home from work the first thing she said was, "Hey dad, I'm a math person like mom." This thrilled me on so many levels! I have always loved math. I remember when I learned long division and I would spend hours dividing bigger and bigger numbers into each other. I am not ashamed to say that in Jr. High I was in math club. It was a big deal and we competed against other schools. We were good! I especially enjoyed teaching Zach Algebra last year. I get so excited at the prospect of finding out what x is. The more numbers and letters involved, the better. And plotting x and y on a graph?? Don't even get me started! Zach is good at math, but he scoffs at my excitement. Algebra 2 will be more of a challenge for us both this year, but I think I'm up to the task.


I went to the shop as planned at 3-ish and accomplished quite a bit while I was there. The place has been an absolute disaster all summer so I spent some time organizing and cleaning and then helped Rob over at the other shop. The cases he's working on now have been the bane of our existence over the last year and a half. We took on an order for 200 of these small cases for a local flight company and they have been much more time consuming than we ever imagined. They take them in lots of 10-20 at a time and we need to get them delivered pretty quickly when they call.
They needed 20 last week so we're trying to get them together as quickly as possible. Although my "plan" says I need to leave the shop every night by 9:00, we were there until almost 11:00. :( But we finished 10 of them.
Zach will have a ton of required reading to do this year so he'll be doing a lot of it in the evenings. Luckily, he doesn't mind reading. The books he's reading this week are Peace Child, by Don Richardson (a book about head hunting canibals in New Guinea) and A Thousand Trails, by Hugh Steven (The personal journal of William Cameron Townsend, Founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators). I'm hoping to read along with him this year, but I'm not sure when I'll fit it in. . .

(Those Captain Underpants books next to him in the chair are NOT required reading. I don't even want to know why they're there.)

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