Lorena got Kelly some new clothes with her birthday money and a new shirt for Christian. When they got dressed for meeting on Sunday, they looked so nice, we thought it would be good to take a few pictures. I put some of the pictures here, but thought one might look nice in my blog post, too.
This weekend was a little bit of a catch-up weekend although we did not really even get to much of that. Both of the kids are a little behind on a few things, but not too bad. Mostly, I want them to get caught up on a great little book titled Calico Bush they are reading aloud together. Other than that, they only need to do an experiment from RealScience-4-Kids and they are good to go. I had it in my head that we would stop with our math after finishing their current books in the Singapore Math series, but both of the kids want to press on ahead. The kids were a little bit starved for math having gotten such little good instruction in the local government schools. When they both finish their current books in the next week or two, they will have done the equivalent of a year and a half of work. We will still have about six weeks left, so that should take us through about half of one more book. They are really getting a solid grounding in the fundamentals and moving consistently ahead with lots of review, too. It will give them a good jump on their program going into the next year. Kelly will be in sixth grade next year and should be well into eighth grade math by the end of next year. Christian will be in fourth grade next year and should be well into sixth grade math by the end of next year.
On Friday, I downloaded the Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog 5.04 Linux distribution and decided to install it on our home school computer. I had a little bit of struggle getting the screen resolution to be anything greater than 640×480, but after I got it going, it was AWESOME. It is not perfect, but it is very, very good. I got the screen thing worked out so that I could get it to the 1280×1024 that I wanted, but I am sure my mother would have gotten discouraged very quickly and given up. There were a few hiccups with some games the kids want and with RealPlayer, but other than that, it is truly amazing.
At this rate, Linux will be dead even with Microsoft within a year. They are more than dead even now with people like me, but when the take the one more step to brain-dead installation of all the major components, they will be extremely difficult to beat. One of my biggest irritations with my previous installs was the lack of good support for my SanDisk Cruzer mini 256MB USB memory stick. That was completely solved in this installation. The other thing that was not that easy was networking to our Dell computer running Windows XP. I could do it, but it was a hassle. That and accessing the HP 7760 printer connected to the Windows computer was completely automatic with Hoary Hedgehog. Incredible. I had previously been running Fedora Core 3 and had to use the KDE program KPPP to use my dial-up connection to the internet. The Hedgehog fixed that, too.
What I am really waiting for is Fedora Core 4. There are test releases available for that now, but I am at a point in my life where I do not have time to experiment too much. As soon as the kids are a little older, I might be able to get back to that, but right now I need something that works, so I try to stick to release versions. The reason I am waiting for the next Fedora is because, they have been super releases in the past, right on the bleeding edge of usability and functionality. I have a lot of hope that all the very, very small problems I am having with this release of Ubuntu will be more ironed out in Core 4. The other, equally important reason, is that OpenOffice.org 2.0 might be available at that time, too. I have heard that it is really amazing. While my current OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 works great, all reports are that 2.0 will be faster, better, and prettier.