International Space Station fly-by

Last night, we were treated to a fly-by of the International Space Station, along with the space shuttle Endeavour docked to it (although we couldn’t really distinguish the two). I had read in the paper that it could be seen around 6:10 p.m. So right after dinner, I took Carlos out on the deck behind our house and told him that we should be able to see the space station go overhead. Sure enough, off to the southwest, we saw the fairly bright object making its way at approximately 17,200 mph through the sky toward the northeast. To add to the coolness factor, it appeared right between Jupiter and Venus. And I just found out today that yesterday was the ISS’s 10^th birthday. Had I known that, perhaps we could have sung Happy Birthday to it. Of course, Carlos was all full of questions. What is the space station? How did it get up there? How big is it? Who drives it (that one was my favorite)? So we spent a little while watching youtube videos of a space shuttle launch and finding pictures of the space station. It was pretty cool and Carlos seemed really interested in learning more.

Here’s a few fascinating facts about the ISS:

-The ISS is the largest man-made object ever to orbit the Earth

-It has completed 57,309 orbits of the Earth or a distance of 1,432,725,000 miles (that's billion - it gets good gas mileage). As a comparison, that's roughly twice the distance from the Earth to Saturn.

-The space shuttle Endeavour, currently docked to the ISS, was the delivery vehicle of the first US component of the station.

The “I’s” Have It

One of our birthday “gifts” to Carlos was that he could now stay up an extra 15 minutes later than Jeremiah’s bedtime. Judging by his reaction, you would have thought we had given him the best present ever in the history of birthdays! Every day since then, he has “Do I get to stay up late tonight?”

The main reason for this change is so that I could have some time to work with him in his schoolwork. And let me tell you, you never know how much patience you have (or DON’T have) until you try to teach a 6-year old how to read! It’s a wonder the entire world isn’t illiterate by now. Each lesson begins by having prayer, both for his understanding and for my teaching ability. To his credit, he has learned the letter recognition very quickly (with much thanks and help from his LeapPad thingy.) He knows most, if not all of his uppercase letters, and now we are working on recognizing both upper- and lower-case. The fun and challenging part is learning the sound AND recognizing that sound in a word. He does very well hearing the very first sound of a word, but has been having some difficulty hearing other sounds. For instance, a lesson might go like this:

Me: “What does the letter ‘I’ say?
Carlos: “I says ‘ĭ’
Me: “Good. Let’s see if we can hear the ‘ĭ’ sound in this word: zzz-‘ĭ’-pper” (said slowly and distinctly)
Carlos: “zzzz-ipper (z drawn out, the rest said really fast) No, it’s not there.”
Me: “Say it slowly like this: zzz-‘ĭ’-pper” (said slowly and distinctly)
Carlos: “zzzz-ipper (z drawn out, the rest said really fast) No, it’s not there.”

Repeat 5 times. Bang head on desk.

He gets frustrated easily with himself, but I told him that it takes practice and he shouldn’t get frustrated but to keep trying. I think that’s a lesson I need to remember too!

On a side note, check out some really cute pictures on Sarah's blog (link over there ---->)