Sunday, September 23, 2007

My Week in Review

This past week wasn't as busy as last week, but full of fun stuff.

The boys started their National Junior Honor Society meetings (I found out the morning of the meeting that it would be after school) and have to complete 12 hours of community service each semester. I was under the impression from the teacher sponsor last year (she moved) that the sponsor would organize some group stuff, but no, it's up to me to figure out. Twelve hours doesn't sound like much, but with everything else we have going on, it might be hard to squeeze in. Some of the other moms had some ideas for a couple of group things and I'm still brainstorming. I'll call the church tomorrow for some ideas - if any of you can think of something that is age appropriate, please let me know.

Progress reports came out last week and the boys did very well - many 100's for each of them, all A's for Ryan and one B for Justin (Geometry). Of course I e-mailed the teacher to see if he needed to go to her tutorial sessions or if he was still talking too much and she called me the next day. After re-averaging the grades he actually has an A and both boys are doing better than during the first couple of weeks. I'm not sure that I agree with the new group-work grading system, but we will see as the year progresses. As long as they are paying attention and learning something!
Ryan did a poster project for his Spanish class - pictured above. They started it at school, didn't finish it so he brought it home and we basically started over (many of the pictures had been pulled off and the poster was bent up). You can probably see my influence, but I just can't help myself!! The boys also turned in a PowerPoint presentation for Language Arts that they did completely on their own (I just proof read for spelling and punctuation) and they think they got an A - they'll get their grade tomorrow. Lots of animation and pictures - very good job. They now have a project for Science that we spent some time today shopping for supplies. They have to make a 3 dimensional model of the Bohr Atomic Model of different elements of the Periodic Table. Ryan was assigned Manganese and Justin has Iron. It involves bunches of protons & neutrons surrounded by rings of electrons. I was thinking about Styrofoam balls and skewers, but they want to make it with actual rings - hard to explain. Anyway, we ended up getting wooden beads (that we will paint) and heavy gauge wire for the rings. Again - anybody knows more about this and has a better idea, please clue me in!! I think we have another week to finish.

I took the boys and Lindy to dinner at Pei Wei yesterday and a movie afterward. We saw The Invasion - a kind of remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It wasn't my first choice but all 3 teenagers thought it was great! All you need to know is that it involved lots of vomit - some from one character's mouth to the other!!! I'm getting queasy just remembering... Lindy insisted on paying for half of the evening as she had cleaned her entire house last weekend to earn money for the outing! Very sweet, responsible girl. She had played in Bailey's volleyball tournament that morning where the 8th grade girls came in 2nd place among 8 different schools. Go Bailey!! She had some medals and was very excited! We didn't fair as well in Friday's Cross Country race, but they all ran very hard and have improved a great deal from last year.

That's it for now ... need to get the boys off to bed and everything in place for tomorrow.

1 comment:

Holder Happenings said...

So have you come up with some community service projects for the boys? Ryan did a good job on his poster. How did the science project work out?