Saturday, June 7, 2008

Summer Work

School is over for the year in a manner of speaking. It's the end of daily schedules and intense study (not that there was much of that). The next two weeks is totally school free, I'm interested in seeing what D will choose to do. Will he work on his physics again, all his experimenting? Yesterday he was happy to do algebra, he did more than was required; wonder if this will continue. It's helping me a great deal to see what he understands immediately and what he has trouble with. He likes the idea of working problems on the same concept and procedure until it becomes second nature to him. I got to watch him realize that he had more trouble working with reducing the regular numbers than working with the variables. He laughed about it, I gave him a tip that he could use factoring to do it more quickly, he realized finding the GCF (greatest common factor) would help in this situation. It was great because he told me a couple of weeks ago that he didn't remember anything about doing GCF and we worked on it for a couple of days until he could basically do it at a glance. He liked being able to make such immediate use of it.