I spent a lot of time last night catching up on math correction with both Kelly and Christian. They kept moving along while I fooled around with blogs, reading, radio construction and the like. Through no fault of their own, they are now both stuck with a bunch of correction to do in addition to their regular homework. The plan was to go over some of the non-obvious elements of the trig they work on to prepare for the ACT, but we did not even get to that. Still, even though we made good progress, we did not complete everything, so we will have another fairly arduous set of tasks to complete tonight.
One thing I have found that helps a lot with big projects like building a radio or reading a book is to try to accomplish something every night even if it is only something little. We only read about a third of a chapter in our intelligent design book last night, but it was a very interesting passage on the fossil record. We only assembled one part onto the radio, it was a very cool looking toroid. We hand wrapped it, burned the insulation from the leads with a match, sanded the leads to get rid of any residual insulation, and soldered the toroid onto the board in a vertical orientation. It looked so cool we took a picture of it. It is the vertical, doughnut-shaped thing in the middle of the image with green wire wrapped around it.
The homeschool kids from the family that moved into the house next door came over for awhile yesterday. I felt kind of bad because we pretty much ran them off after only about an hour because we had so much work to accomplish. They seem to be very good kids. They are very polite and seem to be excited about life. They have never homeschooled before, but will start tomorrow. We are excited to hear how it goes for them. I am sure we will see a lot of them.
We have backed off a little bit on Christian’s programming instruction. After writing the second paragraph above, I was inspired to call Christian and tell him to start back to work on his C++ programming. The reality is that it requires a lot of effort to learn how to program well. It is like learning math or a new language. The only way to do it is by investing a good amount of effort every day for quite a long time. The book he uses is C++ Primer Plus. It is possible to work through the examples in the book with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), but it is better to do it with just a text editor for writing the code and a terminal window for compiling, linking, and testing the programs. An IDE tends to obscure the workings of the compiler and linker. Christian has a pretty good handle on object orient programming after having studied some C# and C++, but now is the time to jump into it in a lot more depth.