What to do??

       We've reached a sort of impasse today.  Sophie is in a tough place math-wise.  She hates it, it kind of hate her back lol.  She can do the basics (addition, subtraction, and easy multiplication/division), but anything more is just beyond her.  She struggles when math is presented to her in anything but the most everyday way... for example, if you handed her 17 cookies and said to split them evenly between her and the boys, she could, and know that she will have 2 left over.  But if you asked her, "What's 17 divided by 3?" or even, "Sophie if you have 17 cookies and have to split them evenly between 3 people, what would each person have?" she is stumped.  She needs to see it in front of her, working.  The abstract, in your head, IDEA of math is just too much.  I don't know what to do to fix this, or if it even really NEEDS fixed.  We have calculators, they are accessible to us at all times these days, what with smart phones.  Why does she need to have it memorized that 17 divided by 3 is 5 with a remainder of 2?  I think I'm going to just let her be for now.  She plays math games all the time online, at multiplication.com and coolmath-games.com.  She uses various skills on these games, including basic math, strategy, geometry, etc.  I'm comfortable knowing she can use her knowledge to achieve what she wants.  And honestly, she has the skills she needs to do what she wants in life at this point (bakery owner/chef).  Next year, I'm buying the full set of Spectrum curriculum workbooks, which I will give her to use at her own discretion.  I don't want to PUSH her in any direction, but I want them to be there if she chooses to use them.  I'm hoping she will at least be interested in the math book.

        We finished our "Road to Revolution" project yesterday.  We found the project idea online, that a fourth grade class did in groups.  Obviously we don't have "groups", but we worked together on it.  She researched 10 events that led up to the United States becoming a country, found the year it happened and wrote up 2 sentences summarizing the event.  We purchased a medium sized poster board and I drew a "road" with ten segments for her to write her sentences in and Sophie decorated the "road sides" with trees and a period style house.  She worked quite hard on it, and we are both proud with the results.  I'm not going to lie and say she did this completely alone.  I helped her research the events, using the textbook the school lent us and Wikipedia, and helped her to summarize the events into a more kid friendly couple sentences.  All in all, though, she did the bulk of the work, and I think learned something along the way.  She didn't much like the writing part of it, as she struggles with putting her thoughts onto paper, but she did like the research and looking up ideas for the illustrations.  She does enjoy history when it isn't all about dates and textbooks.  Once again, she needs to be able to see it and have it in front of her, visually teaching her.  Words and pictures in a book are just not enough.

            We have been watching a lot of "Octonauts" on Disney Junior.  All 3 of the kids are interested in marine biology right now, following our trip to the beach, and this show is a fun way of learning snippets of it.  We watched an episode yesterday that was about a baby dolphin getting lost because he ended up being in the wrong slip stream.  This was something new to ALL of us, because even I didn't know about slip streams or that each dolphin has its own whistle that identifies them.  In the same episode was a species of fish we had never heard of called "spookfish", which are a subspecies of barrelfish who have transparent heads.  "Octonauts" may not be the most scientific of ways of learning, but it appeals to all three of the kids at once, which I like.  No one is over their head, everyone is having fun, and they are learning without even realizing it :)

         We are also into what I guess would be called cryptozoology right now.  There are several tv programs on discovery and destination America (channels) that are about animals/creatures that may or may not exist.  Sophie and Lil Man are very into this right now and have been on the fence about the actual existence of the creatures.  Sophie is more believing I think, which I found surprising considering she is the older one.  She is very fanciful though, and imaginative, thinking up stories and ideas that are less realistic in nature.  I like when the shows take a more scientific route than just a retelling of people's stories, personally, because they see how "scientists" or researchers find evidence either way and theorize from there.  They both like ghost hunter type shows, too, and often have their own expeditions.  Sophie uses her ipod to record them trying to find the ghosts or creatures, or acts like they have caught evidence of either thing.  We have discussed how scientists theorize that ghosts are a type of energy and therefore show up using several devices that measure different types of energy, like the people of TAPS use.  I think we will do more research on that and maybe conduct our own "ghost hunt".