Christian, Kelly, and I went to the Borders bookstore on Saturday morning while Lorena, shopped at CostCo. My plan was to find an introductory trigonometry book and a book on the writing part of the ACT test. I did pretty good on the trig book. The kids will cover trigonometry comprehensively in their when they study pre-calculus, so the idea is to give them a good coverage of the basics of trig between now and when they take the test on February 7. I think we found a book that will be quite good for that. I am not so sure about the writing part of the ACT. We found a book that covers the entire ACT with a good big section on writing. Who knows whether it is adequate for our needs. We view this pass of the test just as practice anyway. We decided to read the instructional part of the writing preparation aloud together to try to get the most out of the material possible. Only Kelly will take the optional writing part of the exam this year, but it will be good for Christian to have this more formal writing practice, too.
We planned to grill some steaks this weekend. We changed our mind on Saturday morning and bought salmon to grill instead. Then, when it came time to grill, we were not that hungry, so we decided to hold off until tonight or tomorrow night. When we got home from shopping, the kids worked on some craft projects. Kelly has taken to sewing plush toys from knit gloves. She got the idea from a Martha Stewart magazine. They are very cool. I hope she puts a picture of here work up here. I think Christian started to sew one, too. Christian decided he wanted to paint one of the walls of his bedroom a denim color, so Lorena ran down to the Home Depot to get him the paint he needed. It sounds like a very fun project. It looked cool in the pictures we saw. The guy at Home Depot explained the whole thing and even had a brochure on how to do it. I am looking forward to seeing how the wall turns out.
I plan to talk to my boss about the Christmas holiday today. We are in the middle of field trials with our biggest customer–it always seem to work out so that the important stuff happens around a holiday–but I want to try to get a block of time off so we can plan something very cool and interesting!
November 8, 2004 – Tim to meeting
November 9, 2004 – Kelly’s statewide assessment results
Ken,
All you really need to do is look online for the many tutorials and free help with writing this type of essay. There are examples of essays and how they are graded….showing the topic
and examples of graded essays. Highest is a 6, lowest a 1 and they will show you the
essays written on those topics and why they got the score they did. The kids should
be able to do a rough outline of their thoughts in a few minutes and then state their
“topic” or position clearly and concisely and then have one or 2 fully developed points relating to their position or point.
I believe that the more practice they get on this the better. Write more of this type
of essay. Learn how to write impromptu and off the cuff.
My 2 cents,
Ruthie
Thanks Ruthie. I have been struggling with this. I think it is a handicap to be an engineer (for most of us anyway) when it comes to writing. This is excellent advise. I think what I might do is write up what you said above (and post it here), check around the web like you suggested for some ideas on topics, then start having them do this a couple of times per week. These might even be interesting blog posts. I very much appreciate your input on this–your two cents are always welcome here!