Saturday, Part 2

[chochiyo_sama]

Friday was my snow day--first, I slept in till about 9:30, which gave me great joy and happiness.

When I went downstairs, I made a huge pot of chili--I have set half of it aside for Jim, DeAnn, and Swayze.

I did a couple of loads of laundry, including bedding.

But I spent the bulk of the day working on curriculum for the new class I am developing--"Research Skills"

I had a  hard time trying to decide where I would start them off--I made the class so that kids would have some exposure to the research process before senior seminar.  The CORRECT research process, that is...where one includes citations and bibliographies.  Finally, I decided the best place to start them off was reviewing the essay process.  I don't intend to make them write enormous papers--at least not during first quarter.  I am going to start them off with five paragraph themes--first themes that require no research at all (drawing from their own personal experiences) and then moving on to some short research projects.  I may even require them to design and conduct some surveys or bring in someone for them to interview so that they can learn about using primary sources. 

It would be cool if I could get three tattoo artists in--then their theme would naturally fall into three sections--one for each artist.  And that is a topic all my kids are fascinated by.

Anyhow--I typed many pages of examples and exercises yesterday.  And to be sure they are not lost, I emailed them to myself.  I've been having issues with my school computer just LOSING massive amounts of information that I have worked on for hours.  That pisses me off.

I know I did some other stuff Friday also, but I cannot remember what it was.

Today I have gotten a lot done.  I have all but one load of laundry washed (I had six this week because of all the bedding I washed).  I will have to make three more trips up and down the horrible steep, narrow basement stairs, risking my life in the process.  I hate that my laundry is in the basement.

Sigh.

I refilled my pill caddies and did the "mouse-milking" task of popping a lot of my loratadine tablets from their blister-pack confines.  I have a little plastic bottle that I was able to buy loratadine in once, but now I can only find it in 30-day supplies in boxes of blister packs.  I had several boxes on hand as I hate to run out of my allergy med.  I punched out all but four cards and put the pills in the plastic bottle.  My fingers are still sore. 

I get caught up in the small tasks that are time eaters.  I don't know why.  It's like when I was working on my craft room.  I bought one of those nuts-n-bolts organizers which are perfect for small craft items like beads and wiggly eyes and stuff like that.  I was just obsessed with sorting all the beads into size and color and texture groups.  It was insane and took at least three days of sporadic sorting to get it done.  There were much more important tasks that would have made a greater difference in the appearance of my craft room, but I couldn't proceed until I had taken care of those stupid beads.  Sigh.

I have folded and put away all my clean laundry except for the basket with two blankets in it.  I am goingt to put at least one of them on the bed when I remake it.  The sheets are already upstairs.  The comforter is in the last basket. 

I used my new vacuum cleaner for the very first time--and it sucked!  REALLY REALLY GOOD!!!!

It is awesome sauce with awesome drizzle on top.   It is a bagless vacuum, so I have to detach and dump the part that holds the gunk that gets vacuumed up.  There was so much powdery dust in it that my asthma started to make me wheeze.  The recepticle was over the full line just from the living room alone.  It was mostly cat hair and green carpet dust.  I will be doing the dining room too, before I go to bed, but I needed to take a break from vacuuming so I could work on  the laundry some more.  And before I did that, I had  to pop on here and report that my new Bissel vacuum cleaner that I got super cheap at Walmart works GREAT!

Who knew I could get almost orgasmic over a damned vacuum cleaner!  But it is so good to see my living room CLEAN for a change.  Sigh.

I am signing off again now, but I may be back for a Saturday Part 3 if I achieve a few more accomplishments.

Comments

The research process?

[the_godiva]

Now you're talking.

Check out The Big 6. http://www.big6.com/. It's an excellent framework for teaching the research process and they have tons of resources for lessons.

If your local public library has a website they might have databases. Ours does. And you can use them if you have a library card. You just go to the library and they give you a PIN number and that's it. You can use all of their databases. And many of the databases already have the citations done for you. There are also plenty of citation generators online where you put in your info and the create the correct citation format for you. Just make sure it's MLA 7. That's the most recent.