Good Questions

X-man has a science fair coming up at school. Tonight, I sat down with him and Papa at dinner and we talked about science questions he had that he didn't know the answer to. (The idea being to learn something new and not just repeat what he already knows.)

And (drum roll) the final three project questions are:

1. How does lava get into a volcano?

2. How does a queen ant become a queen ant?

3. Which comes first the seed or the plant?

At the last one, my Dad looked at me and smirked. How profound for a first grader. My Dad's answer -- 42 (Thanks to Douglas Adams).

I called MacTroll, who plans on working on the project with X-man. He votes for Lava. :-) He's all excited about making some kind of earth diorama. He already knows how lava gets OUT of the volcano (good old baking soda and vinegar). But we'll have to see what kind of experiment they do about how lava gets into the volcano.

Meanwhile, my son came home from Mathman today all excited. Don has started to introduce him to multiplication and fractions. X-man was ever so proud of the work he did there today. And I love that he loves going and finds math so much fun.

We've been working on spelling words this week. X-man loves to read, but he's a visual kid, so even though he knows the sounds, he sometimes has to write down the letter that corresponds with them because if he says /bah/ meaning b, he doesn't say b. But he'll write it. So we've been practicing spelling words by writing them on lined paper. He is 100 percent better at writing on lined paper than paper without lines. Legibility increases by 80 percent. So, I'll have to talk about that with his teachers at parent/teacher conference, because I had a hard time making out his writing on the test on a white sheet of paper. But when he wrote the words on lined paper I could read them all for sure.

He missed two words on his pre-test on monday (littel and ceb for little and cob). I've also been having him practice his handwriting because he is still behind in his fine motor skills. I asked him if he wanted to work on the challenge words, but he said he wasn't allowed to. I told him he could learn to spell any words he wanted to, but apparently, that was too much work. :-)

It's like on the math homework today. One of the questions was to list an even number under 50 and then make tally marks next to it. X-man picked the number 2. Answers the question with the least amount of effort having to be put into it. And this, in a nutshell, is my kid. It is also, in a nutshell, my husband. Go figure.