I know it's only the first week, but the curriculum seems to have exactly the right mix of rigour and fun that I was looking for to grab my fourth grade daughter. I hate to buy (expensive) curriculum online without having an opportunity to preview it. But I went ahead and got it based on the catalog description and now, I'm glad I did.
Now if Aimee ever finds herself in a position like Master Tom Tulliver from the Mill on the Floss did, she will know that it's better to decline the Latin word for roast beef than to decline the roast beef itself at the dinner table. At least she won't have to leave the dinner table hungry.
Here's one of my favorite excerpts from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot:
Not that Mr Stelling was a harsh-tempered or unkind man - quite the contrary: he was jocose with Tom at table, and corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in the most playful manner: but poor Tom was only the more cowed and confused by this double novelty, for he had never been used to jokes at all like Mr Stelling's, and for the first time in his life he had a painful sense that he was all wrong somehow. When Mr Stelling said, as the roast beef was being uncovered, `Now, Tulliver! which would you rather decline, roast beef or the Latin for it?' - Tom, to whom in his coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut, was thrown into a state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him except the feeling that he would rather not have anything to do with Latin: of course he answered, `Roast beef,' - whereupon there followed much laughter and some practical joking with the plates, from which Tom gathered that he had in some mysterious way refused beef, and, in fact, made himself appear `a silly.'
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