Cool Down

We've had steamy days this past week until we got a thundershower yesterday which brought in a "cold" front.  Today was much cooler; it felt like Fall this morning.  The humidity was waaay down.  The best part is that the whole weekend is going to be like that.  The bad part is that next week is going to be steamy again.  I guess that means I need to make the most of this weekend, doesn't it?

I don't have much to say to catch up on the week.  It has been a pretty typical late summer week at our house.  There are a few schools in Louisville that are "year round" schools, and they actually started their new school year on Wednesday of this week.  Andrew goes back to school August 9, so Eler Beth and I will probably start her sixth grade year about the same time.  I did actually spend a little time this week working on her curriculum.

One of the things I want her to do this year is learn the proper way to write letters -- friendly and business, but mostly friendly.  Good letter-writing is going out of style, so I thought that would be a fun thing to do, and I can incorporate other lessons into the letter-writing.  I'd like to find her a few people in other parts of the country (or world) for her to correspond with the old fashioned way.  Of course, I have family in Kentucky and in Florida, with whom she can trade letters, but I'm playing with an idea for a letter swap with some students her age in other states, where she can also do a little questionaire to learn about their school, city, and state.  (I may be emailing you, Bea, for some assistance with this!)

I also have an idea for a math lesson, incorporating fractions, percents, ratios, and pie charts!  I had to take Thomas to work and pick him up one day this week while he was having some work done on his truck, and I noticed as I was waiting for him, that the stop sign in front of where he works was not being very effective in stopping traffic.  Out of a dozen vehicles that I counted only one driver "sort of" came to a stop.  Most of the drivers just slowed a bit and then rolled on through.  Some didn't even really pretend to slow a bit.

So I got the idea to sit there one day with a camcorder and video tape the vehicles for a set period of time (say 15 minutes), and then we can do all sorts of things with the data we get, including making pie charts or graphs.   We could even do it at different times of the day for comparson, or on different days of the week. 

Well, anyway, I thought I'd pop in to say hello.  I have found this week that I have so many journals on alerts (or feeds) that I need to do some re-ordering of them again.  I can't read them all each and every day; I'm going to have to assign some to certain days of the week.  Yeah, I REALLY need to do that.

I hope everyone has a great weekend!