{"id":6913,"date":"2020-08-18T23:27:25","date_gmt":"2020-08-19T04:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=6913"},"modified":"2020-08-22T23:48:49","modified_gmt":"2020-08-23T04:48:49","slug":"school-starts-and-a-math-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=6913","title":{"rendered":"School Starts and a Math Game"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s back-to-school time &#8212; at least for Anya! The local district put off starting school until mid-September in what I assume is an attempt to let <em>other districts <\/em>see how bad SARS-CoV-2 spreads &#8230; but we decided to try Connections Academy instead. It&#8217;s a dedicated online school, rather than a few local teachers using a third-party online platform (and going <em>into<\/em> school was right out). She&#8217;s bummed about &#8220;missing out&#8221; on a month of summer vacation &#8230; but August classes in our air conditioned house are a lot more pleasant than classes in the massive concrete block 60&#8217;s building with windows that open.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?attachment_id=6914\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6914\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6914\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/IMG_20200813_112325.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"644\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/IMG_20200813_112325.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/IMG_20200813_112325-300x189.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/IMG_20200813_112325-768x483.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/IMG_20200813_112325-750x472.jpg 750w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The school sent out info to use <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prodigygame.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/www.prodigygame.com<\/a> &#8212; a wizard adventure game that Anya absolutely loves (even if casting spells requires solving math problems).<\/p>\n<p>So far, I think Connections Academy are a little unorganized. They&#8217;ve got a calendar, but few of the meetings get populated into it. They&#8217;re using the first week or two of school for everyone to get themselves sorted &#8212; log in, learn the platform, make sure they&#8217;ve got their materials. The actual education platform is starting out the same place 1st grade did &#8212; using manipulatives to add. The teacher said Anya would take a placement assessment in early September and the education modules would be jumped to whatever is reasonable for the kid based on their assessment. Hopefully!<\/p>\n<p>She&#8217;s been going through the educational modules quickly, so I&#8217;ve come up with a few experiments. I also signed her up for a Scratch class on Outschool &#8212; and I&#8217;m thinking about teaching more advanced Scratch classes since none seem to exist &#8230; essentially teaching programing concepts like variables &#8212; what they are, what scope is, data typing and loosely typed languages, and debugging by watching variable values. She&#8217;s really enjoyed the class, and she&#8217;s certainly learned to write her own game. We&#8217;ve also talked about the scientific method &#8212; using spontaneous generation as an example and designing an experiment to prove that mice magically pop out of rotting straw. Which points out something I&#8217;ve always liked about science. We&#8217;re medieval scientists who want to prove this generally known fact, we design a really good experiment, we meticulously carry out our experiment &#8230; and no mice. Even though our experiment failed to prove our hypothesis &#8230; we&#8217;ve still made an amazing discovery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s back-to-school time &#8212; at least for Anya! The local district put off starting school until mid-September in what I assume is an attempt to let other districts see how bad SARS-CoV-2 spreads &#8230; but we decided to try Connections Academy instead. It&#8217;s a dedicated online school, rather than a few local teachers using a &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[507],"tags":[1094,1095,1093],"class_list":["post-6913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parenting","tag-back-to-school","tag-connections-academy","tag-online-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6913"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6915,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6913\/revisions\/6915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}