Thank God for fall!

Fall is my favorite time of year! I am so glad it's here again!

We've had a busy few weeks with school work and baseball. Plus E is still taking guitar lessons, which keeps him busy with practice about 45 minutes every day.

Math really has me scratching my head lately. That's kind of bad, I know, when 5th grade math is throwing you for a loop, but we're learning something my husband and I were never taught. Casting out 9's to check arithmetic, multiplication, and division.

I looked at this method and studied it in the curriculum and had my husband look it over and explain it to me. Ha ha. Both my husband and I were a little perplexed by the whole thing. We had never heard of this method and were struggling with the reasoning behind it and the usefulness of it. My husband (Mr. Cool, Calm, and Collected) said to just teach the method to my son and get on with life. We could do as much or as little of it as I was wanted.

Wouldn't you know that I introduced the concept to E and he LOVES using casting out 9's as a way to check his work?!? It is easier than doing the work again or (in the case of division) multiplying the divisor and quotient to come up with the dividend. And, after some research, it does seem to be a pretty popular method. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Did I just call myself an old dog?

Anyway, we conquered that challenge. Today we did some extensive study about fall and the seasons in general. I got some help with that from EnchantedLearning.com. I have been a member of that site before, but let my subscription run out. You don't have to have a subscription to the site, but paying the fee does gain you access to items you can't use without the membership. I might have to budget in an extra $20 to join again.

I'm doing much better with lesson plans this year. Although I use ABeka curriculum for Math, Language Arts, Spelling, and Penmanship, when dealing with Social Studies and Science, we tend to go with our interests or seasonal studies. The lesson planning has really helped keep me on track so far this year. It takes some extra prep work on my part, but I use some time on Sunday evenings to plan out two weeks at a time.

I also keep a few sheets stapled to the inside of my lesson plan folder with ideas for things I want to do in the future. For instance, in late October I plan to spend some time discussing the upcoming presidential election. We are also going to do a unit study on Ben Franklin (my son's research paper might also focus on Mr. Franklin). I have been looking up websites for research and books that are available at our library. My son has been watching Liberty's Kids, so we're looking forward to delving into more about that time period and Ben Franklin, specifically.

I'm also hoping to read A Christmas Carol this year. We watch many renditions of that movie every year at Christmas and I would really like to read it as a family for once. We'll see how that goes for my husband and son, who are more visually inclined!

So the beginning of another fall! I'm looking forward to all the good things coming up!