LIFETIME: We love to play board games for fun and education, and today, we broke out a classic we hadn't yet played together - the game of Life.
I spent countless hours playing this as a kid, and I told CJ and Annabelle the thing I remembered most about it was that it took a long time to play. That has not changed. In fact, it has gotten worse with the new and more complicated version that we played.
I chose a college route (as opposed to delving straight into the workforce). Unfortunately, unlike Annabelle, who also went the college route and drew a lawyer card at 100k a year, I got a computer designer job, and could only afford to live in a mobile home, thanks to my pay level and my horrible spins.
While CJ, Annabelle and Christian racked up pay days and accomplishments, and a car full of children, I slogged along miserably behind. At one point my mobile home even flooded, if you can believe that.
Life's not fair.
That said, the game was good for prompting discussion about life choices, luck, and some good ol' math.
KEEP, CHANGE, FLIP: Today we did something we haven't done in waaaay toooo loooong. We cracked open the math workbooks.
Don't get me wrong, we do and talk about math every day, but it's primarily 'real world' or 'organic' math - things that come up in the course of the day that need to be computed. That's all well and good, but I want to make sure the kids are on track to meet state benchmarks come annual testing time, so the books need to be part of our lives, too.
The exercise the kids had to tackle today was dividing fractions. Instead of me just explaining it to them, I thought it might be fund to see if there was a music video on the topic. There is! We watched an animation from the "Flocabulary" series called "Dividing Fractions - Keep, Change, Flip."
Was it the Best Video Ever? No. But was it mildly entertaining and did the kids understand the concept that when dividing fractions, you just keep one of the fractions and multiply it by the reciprocal of the other fraction? Yes, they did.
KEEP, CHANGE, FLIP: Today we did something we haven't done in waaaay toooo loooong. We cracked open the math workbooks.
Don't get me wrong, we do and talk about math every day, but it's primarily 'real world' or 'organic' math - things that come up in the course of the day that need to be computed. That's all well and good, but I want to make sure the kids are on track to meet state benchmarks come annual testing time, so the books need to be part of our lives, too.
The exercise the kids had to tackle today was dividing fractions. Instead of me just explaining it to them, I thought it might be fund to see if there was a music video on the topic. There is! We watched an animation from the "Flocabulary" series called "Dividing Fractions - Keep, Change, Flip."
Was it the Best Video Ever? No. But was it mildly entertaining and did the kids understand the concept that when dividing fractions, you just keep one of the fractions and multiply it by the reciprocal of the other fraction? Yes, they did.
MEANWHILE, ON MARS: The year Annabelle was born, NASA rover Opportunity landed on the Red Planet. There, it has been toiling away ever since.
Today, we checked out photos and video of what Opportunity has been up to as of late.
Photo: NASA/JPL
The photo shows Opportunity looking back at its own tracks made from nearly half-a-mile (more than 700 meters) of southbound driving along the west rim of Endeavour Crater.
We also watched a short video of the rover's drivign route of more than 25 miles (40 kilometers) since its 2004 landing.
http://youtu.be/Ka08deWohpQ
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