And We Have Homework

Today Quinn had homework for the first time ever. He's got a couple words he has to learn to spell. Evidently they go through a pack of 50 words, and if he spells it wrong, it goes onto the list for homework. They stop once he has somewhere between 5 and 10 words on his homework list He gets a week to learn them, then next week he'll have a new list, or the same list if he doesn't actually learn them. Today he ended up with 7 words to learn:

• whim
• when
• whisk
• whack
• whip
• whis
• wham

Now you may be thinking "Look at that, he screwed up on the next to last word", but that's the way the word was written (by the teacher and him) in his notebook. Ginger and I were looking it over tonight and we both looked at each other with a puzzled look on our face where we were obviously thinking "What is that?" I made the joke that they're obviously teaching him the word "whiz", as in going to the bathroom to take a... And then much to my surprise Ginger said "That's what Quinn said it was earlier too." My next thought was should I be concerned that the teachers at this school can't spell words that a first grader should be learning?

The other neat thing to do was to try and make heads or tails of Quinn's journal. He evidently writes down what he does each day. But since his spelling still leaves a bit to be desired it can be a challenge sometimes trying to work out what exactly he worked on. Sometimes it's pretty easy to figure out, like the following:

• volano - Obviously he helped with the volcano the class is making
• fractions - Score, he got that one completely right
• sufix - Worked on suffixes
• geamts - Starting to get a bit tougher, but probably geometrics
• chan - This one is chain

Then there were some that took a good while to figure out:

• maf - Ginger had to tell me this one was math
• mlafbat - Another one that made no sense whatsoever until I started sounding it out. Suspect this one is the movable alphabet
• coc - I won't mention what I thought of when I first 'read' this, but suffice to say I didn't think that subject would be covered until sex ed in high school. Turns out after looking at the work he did for the week, that's probably clock

Then there were some that we still don't know:

• hanait - (Ginger thinks this may be handwriting, but we really don't know
• ainmat
• shmoel befam
• lag bedfaam

For dinner tonight we got invited to Red Robin by Rob and his clan. Of course they have the TVs on there full time. What I discovered is that both kids are absolutely fascinated with the old American Gladiator show. I think they were rerunning some of the shows from the early 90s. I suspect they're trying to build up interest since I've heard the show will be returning to the airwaves in 2008.

And I've become entranced with Blogger Play. The mention it on the blogger dashboard, so if you blog using blogger, you've probably already seen the link. But you get to watch real time as pictures are uploaded and posted to blogger. As I've been typing this in I've had it running over on the side and I can't stop watching. It's like looking at 60 blogs a minute and only seeing the pictures. To really enhance the effect, have Mad World by Gary Jules playing the background. I've noticed some of the pictures are really good. But I guess it's all based on who's doing what at the time you're watching, so your experience may vary (which is part of what makes it so addicting).