Tuesday: ladder, ELA, moats

Let's start with ELA (English Language Arts) and get the bad part of the day out of the way.  I don't know what Isaac's problem is, but he pretends to be incapable of doing the worksheets.  Today he had to read a story and write five questions that he could also answer.  It took him ten minutes to write one.  We even talked about it before hand.  Then I came in there for something else and was like, "you can write a what question about any sentence!" and even that took another five minutes before he got one he liked.  Now, I know I'm not an English major or a teacher.  I know we're in some weird times and that in school he probably would have gotten more advice before doing the assignment.  But he isn't that poor of a student that he can't write five questions! 

Anyway, I emailed his teacher.  She said that this is pretty normal for him (which scared me a little bit), but she's also never made a huge deal about it.  We discussed a few options.  Isaac and I will be talking about some options tomorrow.  While I don't feel as though we need to do every single worksheet, I do feel as though he should be able to do some of them when asked to do so.  Stay tuned.  (This was only the second day of distance learning and our school has been very relaxed!  I'm starting to understand what some of the parents are talking about now.)

Moving on.  I graded "most" of the day.  And by "most" I mean I kept sitting down, grading a few parts of an assignment, and then getting up to do something else.  Grading isn't fun to begin with, and progress was so slow.  Luckily, one of my graders is willing to help me with the final exams so that is a relief.

Moving on again, to the fun parts of the day.  The cats enjoyed the ladder.  Joshua played with it a bit and Isaac just a little bit, so it'll be coming down tomorrow.

Today's lego challenge was a river with dams, like you see at science museums.  It kept Joshua occupied pretty well.  I let Isaac do it for his science part of the day, since in involved testing and fixing and retesting.  Much better than a worksheet.

Joshua also made a crazy complicated card/maze/game for Pat.  I made a video of the solution since there's no way she'll be able to figure it out herself.  It involves portals and keys and a puzzle and a good dose of five year old logic.