Delia's first indoor soccer game (they used to call it 'futsul,' but they gave up on that this year because it confused people) was on Saturday. It was at the same middle school where all of her basketball games took place, so we had no trouble finding the place. The main complication was that Scott and I had to go in to his work that morning for a fasting blood draw (and weighing and blood pressure). That was at 8:20, and the game didn't start until 9:40, so we didn't have any trouble getting there in time. We just didn't have time to stop for something to eat on the way.
As in outdoor soccer, they don't keep score in indoor soccer. They did use the scoreboard to track the quarters and count down the time in each quarter. They used the whole gym (basketball uses half the gym, so there are always two games taking place at once). The game before ours ended less than five minutes before ours began, so the girls didn't have any time to warm up. There are about twelve girls on Delia's team, so the coach was switching people in and out a lot throughout the game. The other team only had five players, so all of those girls played the whole game. (When the game started, the other team only had four girls. I thought the ref would cancel the game because there are supposed to be five on the field, including the goalie, but he didn't.)
I think the game ended up tied. Delia's team wasn't playing very well at first, and they let several goals in. None of the girls are clearly better than the others which is a bit unusual. In my experience, there are usually two or three who obviously know what they're doing. That's not the case this time.
After the game, we went to Bob Evans for an early lunch. Delia objected to Bob Evans, almost as a reflex. She objects to most any place we suggest taking her unless it's Applebee's or Olga's. She usually settles down and eats once we're there. After lunch, we stopped for bubble tea. It's a tradition that, when we have games on that side of town, we stop for bubble tea. That probably won't always happen this season-- Several of the games end too early for bubble tea. Bubble Island doesn't open until eleven, and the weather's too nasty for me to suggest strolling around for twenty minutes until it's open.
Yesterday, we had the first Estimania practice. One of the kids couldn't come, so I only had three kids, two boys and Delia. We did a little bit with length, figuring out how long a foot was, measured against their arms and how long an inch was, measured against their thumbs. We didn't get into centimeters, meters or yards. After that, we played around with the small scale Scott bought last year for demonstrating specific gravity. We mostly worked with grams, but we ventured a little into ounces and pounds (the scale's not set up to measure kilograms. It goes up to 5000 grams, but can't render that in kilograms), but mostly stayed with grams. Getting the kids to have a feel for the measurements is going to be challenging.
I need to go over unit conversions and things like how to calculate area and volume. I need to go to the state's website to look at the year by year educational standards. The event coordinator said he would expect each grade to meet the end of the year standards for math and fourth and fifth graders to know basic science information. I need to see what that encompasses. I'm not sure the second graders can be asked to do multiplication or division, and I think the third graders can only be asked to multiply/divide up to the ten times tables. Some of the example questions are mathematically challenging-- The fourth graders can be asked to find the surface area of a pyramid, and I don't remember my geometry well enough to figure out the area of a triangle that doesn't have a right angle. Oh, well. Google is my friend. The information is out there.
I still have to cover measures of time and temperature. I suspect that the practical side of the test won't include them-- temperature because it would change during the twenty minute test time and time because it wouldn't be fair to ask the kids to spend a set amount of time on one problem, just for the set up of it-- but I'm sure the paper and pencil part of the test will include them.
Scott's Babylon 5 game is on hiatus for another couple of weeks. We haven't played since early December (people weren't around during the holidays, and then Scott was sick), and Delia's soccer practices throw a monkey wrench into the timing. I think Scott's settled on alternating Fridays for the temporary date during the soccer season, but we can't start that this week because some of the players have plans.
I've been reading books on my Sony e-reader. I like it. It's lighter than a book and relatively easy to use. The main barrier I'm running into is that I simply don't want to buy books. The library has a very limited selection of e-books and has long waitlists for most everything. There's also apparently no way to 'return' an e-book early. I have to wait the full two weeks for it to expire even if I finish it or decide I don't like it, and I can only have, between holds and books checked out, ten titles at a time. Project Gutenberg has yielded a few books, but I'm mostly finding what I'm locating there not to my taste (recommendations are welcome!).
I'm still reading mostly books on paper. My library wishlist is nearly two hundred titles long, and almost none of them are available from the library as e-books. I could buy them as e-books, but I expect that most of them are things I'll start and not finish. I don't want to put money into them without having a better idea as to whether or not they're worth my time. (I sometimes make a list of everything Amazon is recommending to me and search to see which of those items the library has. Amazon recommendations are sufficiently bad (Amazon won't stop recommending urban fantasy, werewolves, vampires, etc. for me) that those books aren't even remotely worth buying, but I'm willing to sample them from the library to see if any of them hit the mark.)
I now have a very pretty purple zippered bag to hold my e-reader. I got it from Etsy, following a recommendation from
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rilina. When I first got it, I thought it was too small, but a little bit of practice has proven that it's just the right size. I just have to be sure to put the reader into the bag the right way round.
My next step is to get a screen protector. I've been putting that off because I can't find reviews of the various options. I'm hoping that, given a couple more weeks, there'll be some product reviews at Amazon. It's rather bewildering to page through the options and know nothing about how they differ except the price.
