Long Ball

EXTRA INNINGS: Kind of on a whim, we decided to go to the Mariners' game last night. It's the last week of their season and, of course, there won't be a post season, because, well, Mariners. Sigh.

Anyway, we got great seats right behind home plate for super cheap. It even included a parking pass in the Safeco Field garage, right across the street from the stadium. (About the only good thing regarding having your team not in the thick of things is that tickets are cheap.)

It was a beautiful night at the ballpark. And a looooooooooong night at the ballpark.

The first two innings seemed to take two hours. So many hits. So many runs. 

In the improbable end, the Mariners won it 8 - 10, via a walk off home run by a back up back up catcher in the bottom of the 11th. In all there were THIRTY hits in the game. That might be the most in any Major League Baseball game I've been ever seen.

GREAT PUMPKINS: It will be October before we know it, and so we're already going on a few craft projects for the tenth month of the year. Naturally, they involve pumpkins.

We're making a Great Pumpkin-themed birthday board for a local learning center. CJ and Annabelle helped trace Linus and Sally, as well as a shadow-y Snoopy. We made pumpkins, which will have the birthday kids' names on them in a Peanuts-like font, and cut out dozens of leaves for the pumpkin patch.

In the midst of all of this, I used one orange IKEA napkin, a roll of toilet paper, a cinnamon stick and one of our construction paper leaves to assemble this.

It took all of ten seconds - so easy!

MAD DASH: This morning we plugged away on algebra for nearly an hour. This afternoon, we dabbled in some language arts, using a video on BrainPOP all about hyphens and dashes. It was really interesting - I learned things I've never known my entire life (like the dash in this sentence should have been longer).

I'll have CJ tell you a bit more about dashes and hyphens and what we learned.

Today, I learned about the different kinds of hyphens and dashes. They are, in order from narrowest to most narrow:

1. Hyphens (‐), primary use is to form compound words (example: fifty-year-old), also used to separate syllables in a dictionary (example: syl-la-ble.)

1. Figure dashes(‒), primarily used in phone numbers (example: 123‒456‒7891.)

1. En dashes (–), primary use is to bridge times together (example: 9 A.M – 5 P.M.)

1. Em dashes (—), primary use is to separate parts of a sentence (example: John repeatedly stained my shirt — the same one I had bought the day prior.)

So interesting, don't you think?!

For our science schooling, we watched a video about conditioning - as in Pavlov's dog, not what you do after shampooing. ;)

Annabelle can tell you a bit more about that. 

Conditioning, made famous by Ivan Pavlov, describes how one can teach animals or humans to respond to certain stimuli in a new way. The experiment most are familiar with, known as “Pavlov’s Dog”, is an example of classic conditioning. It involves ringing a bell right before giving the dog food, which if repeated enough, will eventually cause the dog to associate the bell with food, and salivate at the sound of it.

On the other hand, there is another type of conditioning referred to as “Operative Conditioning”. This is when instead of prompting the subject with something, the subject learns that a certain action equals a certain response. An example would be a small child learning not to draw on walls, because when they do that they are scolded. This can go both ways, both positive and negative.