A Tuesday...

A relatively busy day for us. I guess that translates into...I actually left the house during the week! We went to our Chinese lessons today. This week - countries/nationalities and animals. It is getting harder! We don't seem to be having trouble speaking or remembering the words - but the characters are getting tougher.

Literature today was as exciting as meeting the President. (Maybe not - but the sentence works for the subject matter.) Caity was learning about similes and had to come up with her own sentence. Remember similes - those things with "like" or "as?" I loved the sentence she came up with - "My friend Carah is as fast as the rain falling from the sky." GREAT sentence! Now keep in mind - that a few weeks ago we would have had "My friend Carah is as fast as a cheetah." The creativity is starting to spark! (Carah and Caity playing dress-up)

And we looked as something completely new to both of us today. Math Journaling. Math journaling? Yep....math journaling. Caity is to do two of these a week. She may select any problem from her work this week and then show her computations and answer and then write in her own words what she did. Interesting concept...cross-brain activity perhaps? Getting that left brain to know what the right brain is doing. This might have worked for me during my mathly challenged days! She did a great job. This is what she wrote:

(The problem asked her to do a front-end estimation and then solve.)
475-304=171 or 400-300=100
First, I had to front-end estimate. I ended up with 100 as my answer. I looked at 475 and turned it into 400. Then I looked at 304 and turned it into 300. Next I could subtract 300 from 400 and I got my estimate. Time to solve my problem. First I subtracted 4 from 5 and got 1 for the ones column. Next I subtracted 0 from 7 and I got 7 for my answer for the tens column. Then I subtracted 3 from 4 and got 1 for the hundreds column. My answer is 171 which is close to my estimate - 100.

What a concept. Never even heard of front-end estimates....unless I was talking to the insurance adjuster about my car.