Five on Friday

1.  This is how we celebrated TableTop Day last Saturday!  The electricity was out for most of the morning, but you don't need power for board games!  We did manage to squeeze in TransAmerica and RoboChamp (a lego game) as well as this fab round of Settlers!

2.  Here's our white board for Wednesday.  Ginny kept distracting me during her math lesson and I kept going off on tangents.  Then I thought I should draw a tangent for her on the board and explain the phrase and the mathematical concept.  And then she thought I should keep track of all my tangents on my diagram!  So you can see that I tangentialized (not a word huh?) about people who don't know math, your math toolbox, tangents themselves, weird 80's music, and beating Jack.

So let me explain about the beating Jack part first, to put you at ease.  Jack decided to wear a stool over his head while we were doing his math lesson.  I asked him what the stool was doing there and he didn't really know.  So I said, "Is it to protect your brain in case I decide to whack you over the head with this empty pringle can?"  Which I then proceeded to do.  So Jack thought I should add "beating Jack" as a tangent.

The weird 80's music came up when I decided to show the kids a video of Spin Doctor's song "What time it it?"  Only because Jack kept asking what time it was, and I kept answering 4:30, so I figured they should know where that comes from!  Jack believes that all music that I know is from the 80's, and that explains the "80's music" part, even though this song is from the 90's.

We've been discussing quite a lot lately about people who don't know math or think they can't figure it out.  It's a sad state of affairs when people have math-phobia.  My husband and I both have degrees in math, so we rather like it!  But we know many people who don't.  In any case, I want my kids to feel at ease with math, so when they say math is hard, I try to remind them that they are really quite smart and probably know more math right now than many adults.  I was also reminding Ginny that she has quite a lot of tools in her math toolbox already.  Facts that will help her in her future math endeavors.  Things like "The angles of a triangle all add to 180 degrees" and "A line that touches a circle at only one point is called a tangent!"

Ain't homeschool great?!

3.  The bushes in our front yard have started to bloom!

4.  Just something fun from Pinterest this week

5.  And finally a really nifty video from Numberphile which demonstrates concepts like AND and XOR using dominoes!  

And really, truly finally, I'm trying this linkup with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.  Click through to read what other homeschoolers were up to this week!