Blog Backlog, Chunk #1: The Nerd Herd

So, yes, I know I left the disturbing post up for a little too long (and yes, I also realize that both my hair in the photo and the shirtless hand dancer qualified as disturbing). Lots has been going on at our house and I haven't seemed to find the time to update ye olde blog. So I'm going to break things up into chunks over the next few days.

Chunk 1: The Nerd Herd/Battle of the Books (Jonas)
Chunk 2: Forrest's trips to both Germany and Mexico. Sheesh, that was a long time for me to do the single mom thing. But as least Forrest took some good pictures. And brought home chocolate.
Chunk 3: Elise's musical (first performance tonight--break a leg honey!)
Chunk 4: Miscellania, paraphernalia, juveinila

The Nerd Herd!

So Jonas has been on a "Battle of the Books" team for the past few months. They've read all twelve of the Maud Hart Lovelace nominated novels for 2010 and met every other Wednesday to discuss them, and last night they competed.

Walking into the cafeteria, ready to do battle

Jonas's team competed against 8 other 4th grade teams. They were asked 50 questions related to the twelve books, ranging from "What was the name of so-and-so's uncle" to "why didn't so-and-so want to go to school in the morning?", then they had thirty seconds to whisper possible answers amongst themselves and have the scribe write the answer on a white board.

You'll notice the nice woman sitting holding the green(ish) card in her lap. She's the coach of another team. Coaches went to sit with other teams to serve as a judge. If they got the answer right, the judge would hold up a green card. Wrong? Red. Not sure (e.g. if the wording the boys wrote down didn't exactly match the wording in the official answer)? Yellow. Our judge held up a lot of yellow cards, which necessitated a head judge coming to the table and making the final call. Nine times out of ten the head judge called it in our favor. So while our table judge was a bit of a stickler, it did make things more exciting.

The Nerd Herd was leading up until question 30. In fact, at one point we were up by four and seemed untouchable! But then we had a few missed questions and a couple of close calls (the boys knew the answer but didn't write it down completely) and suddenly, an all girl team to our right surged and before we knew it, the lead had slipped out of our hands!

We ended the night two questions behind the eventual winners, who get to have a pizza party at school (luckies!). But the boys were good sports and had a lot of fun and are going to have their OWN pizza party.

All the kids who read each of the 12 books (not a requirement) got a special ribbon.

I think the best part of this whole thing for Jonas was meeting a group of really nice kids. Two of them live quite close to our house, so hopefully once it warms up they'll be going outside to play sometime soon. (Hooray for going outside to play!).

On other good Jonas news, we just had parent teacher conferences last week, and not only did his teacher say, "Jonas is the type of kid that I would love to get to know as a grown up. He's such a nice person, and he just gets it!", but his grades are excellent and his test scores have improved quite markedly since the beginning of the year. He went from the 86-88th percentile in reading and math on his standardized tests (they tested him when we first moved for placement purposes) to 96-98th percentile when he took the tests last month with the rest of his class. I think the accelerated curriculum (to which we did NOT have access in the ALPs-dominated Jordan School district, much to my dismay) has done him a lot of good. I really like his elementary school and his teacher in particular.

Good job, my super-reader Jonas. Right now he's reading The Little House books. Oh, my mother heart smiled at that! Elise didn't really like them so I didn't think any of my kids would, but after reading a ton of fantasy--which he still claims is his favorite genre--he's decided to read some historical fiction. He read a few WWII books (Number the Stars and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) and then thought he'd give Little House a whirl.

Anyway, thanks for being such a great kid, Joe. Love you.