Saturday, December 8, 2007

Journal in a Box

Pamela started exploring calendars in 2002. All on her own, she figured out how to look up calendars in Wikipedia and Google and learned about the fourteen kinds of calendars: seven leap years and seven common years. One of many things she does in her free time is to write different ways to analyze calendars. Not only that, she remembers the exact date of events that have occurred since she developed this skill. In fact, if you tell her your date of birth, she can tell you the day of the week on which you were born. This is a great way to break the ice with acquaintances! She knows what years go with what calendar type. Then, in her mind, she visually looks up the date just like we would look up the same information visually by going to a website.Years Cheat Sheet

As part of a writing co-op class, Pamela kept a journal for two years from September 2003 to July 2005. Back in September of 2007, she wrote her auto-biography in a spiral notebook but ended it on December 31, 2006. I wondered if she would ever write up 2007, and she has launched her account of this year in a very unique way: a journal in a box! She found some untouched, little tablets in my desk and started filling them out page by page. Methodically, she ripped off each completed page and placed them neatly in a plastic, food container.

So far, she has recorded daily entries for the first two months of 2007. Some entries look very similar, and it is amazing how accurately she remembers events by date, such as a trip we took to Wilmington, NC around Valentine's Day. She wrote that we saw a movie on Monday, February 26, 2007. (If you double click, the picture you can read that entry.) The movie was Amazing Grace, which was released on February 23, 2007. I remember seeing it on a Monday because Steve was hoping to take the afternoon off and meet us at the movie theater. She even writes down what days we homeschooled and did not homeschool. I wish I were as accurate in remembering dates at the end of the school year when I write up my homeschooling reports! In fact, I think I better just use her journal as a guide come August of next year . . .

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