Back to the books

We're easing back into the books. Jetlag is doing both of us a number, but more so for me. Come noon I feel like I've been poleaxed and need to sleep for several hours. Mia doesn't need to nap, but she's been very irregular in her sleeping schedule.

While we were gone, the only math I had Mia do was figuring out money. I figured that converting dollars to dongs, dollars to bahts, and dongs to bahts was enough math for anyone. She had an allowance to spend, figured in dollars and then converted, and she was always helping me figure out how much things cost. I had a cheat sheet that was absolutely necessary for me, but Mia could often figure things out without it.

Yesterday I had her review her Latin flashcards and do some long division. Today I had her take a math test to see how much math she had forgotten.

She knows how to do long division, our current lessons. She has forgotten how to do long multiplication, which is required to check her long division. She had 18 problems to do and it took over an hour. She has some catching up to do, for sure. Tomorrow we'll review long multiplication. I don't think it will take long for her to get back up to speed.

We need to do some writing, too. I've never really taught writing before and I feel like I've been floundering a bit. Yes, I can require her to write, get her to do a cohesive paragraph about some topic, and help her edit her work. I don't really feel like that's enough, though. This trip has been eye opening in that area. The two boys that were on the tour with us had to write journal logs, too. One was a year older and one was a year younger and both of them were vastly superior in their writing abilities. I listened to their parents working with them. They required quite a bit more from them--more volume of work, more variety of writing styles, better vocabulary usage, etc. I pumped up my expectations for Mia in response to that and got nowhere really fast. She mutinied. We ended up eliminating the journal entries in favor of daily emails to her father. That was vastly more popular, but not as easy as it sounds. Computers were not always available and we had not a few computer problems on the way.

Needless to say, we need to get back to writing. I had bought a writing curriculum way back when we first started homeschooling, but had abandoned it when we stopped the classical method in favor of freeschooling. During our musing for our mission statement, writing came back as an essential skill that needs to be a part of our curriculum. The Daddy required Mia to read two newspaper articles a week and do a summary of them. I required Mia to do journal entries on the other days. The articles and summaries are still good skills. I want to continue that. I think the journal writing isn't enough, though. I'm sticking Mia back into that writing curriculum today to see how that works.

But we'll skip Latin today. We're just easing back into the swing of things.

SE Asia

We're leaving for a monthlong trip to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand tomorrow. It will be Mi'ita, my mother, and I, taking a GAP tour, then visiting my uncle in Thailand who will be showing us around. He married a Thai woman and has lived there off and on for probably 20 years. Mi'ita and I have been trying to learn some Vietnamese for the trip. I must say, I was better at Swahili. (We originally planned on going to Tanzania on Safari, but canceled that trip due to dangerous political conditions.)

My goals for this trip:

1. I hope we all have some fun. I hope my mother enjoys it, especially, and I hope Mi'ita and I don't drive her batty (or vice versa.)

2. Mi'ita and I have already learned a bit about the linguistics of Asian languages--tonal rather than syllabic, lack of articles, formal address for different types of people, etc. I hope we will learn some more.

3. My mother was a young woman during the Vietnam War. She never went, but knew many people who did, and the war was huge for that generation of Americans. I hope that she puts some of her own demons to rest, and I hope that Mi'ita and I learn some about that period of American (and Vietnamese) history.

4. Money! Oh my Lord, it is hard for me to convert dollars to dongs, bahts, euros, or pesos. It will be good math, and I hope Mi'ita is better at it than I am.

5. How to travel. Whether she enjoys traveling or not is of no consequence to me. I hope she learns how to do it well, though. Packing for it, navigating airports, getting along with fellow travelers, figuring out maps and train schedules, learning enough of the local language to get along, bartering at markets, enduring a bit of discomfort, how to be safe from diseases and accidents and "bad guys."

6. Politics. Husband was doing military intelligence during the Cold War, and has definite negative views about communism. I am hoping that she will learn how communism works from the ground (and be less negative herself. After all, capitalism has it's own list of problems.) Also, Thailand is much like England in which they have a mostly figurehead monarchy and a ruling parliament. Unlike England, you can be jailed for even saying something disparaging of the royal family. They are also expected to have a coup attempt while we are there, which my uncle assures us will not be violent. He's lived through 4 or 5 himself. If that's not a crash course on political systems, I don't know what is!

7. I won't be making Mi'ita do any actual academic work while we're there. It's going to be a tremendous education in itself. I will be making her keep a daily journal.