Cheaper by the Dozen Part 1

Cheaper by the Dozen~Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
I read from page 1 to page 22

In the beginning, they described the family and how it ran.  They described that the dad would try and figure out how they could get things done with less motions.  For example, he buttons his shirt bottom up because it saves him four seconds from if he went from the top to the bottom.  He also did that for businesses.  He would try to figure out how he would be able to make their production rate go much faster.  They explained how he would call the family assembly call to give out gifts, or introduce them to someone, or make an announcement, or he would use it if there was an emergency like a fire or something because the children could evacuate the house VERY quickly.  They explained how he showed them their new house.  He told them that it wasn't the best, and then he drove to a neighborhood with a rundown house.  They all got out thinking that this was their house and they didn't know how to respond. Then their dad looked at the address and said that he had gotten it wrong.  When they got to their actual house, they didn't know if he was joking or not.  It ended up that he wasn't joking.  They explained how everybody had a job in the car. They certainly got a lot of attention when they were driving down a street and the dad would just talk right along with the people.  They told about a joke that one of the kids played on the dad.  If you want to find out more detail, you should go pick up the book and read it for yourself.

Question:  I wonder how their family ever gets along.  Think about the TV.  Who would get the remote?

Prediction:  I predict that in the next chapter, I will figure out who Mrs. Murphy is because her name is in the title of the chapter.

Connection:  I am going to connect this week to the movie Home Alone.  In that movie, a little boy gets in trouble and is told to go up the attic or something like that.  The family has cousins, aunts, and uncles over because they are leaving for Paris (I think.)  Well, the next morning they take a head count, but a neighbor boy gets counted and they think that they have enough kids.  It wasn't until they were on the airplane that they realized that they had left him home alone and forgotten about him.  That is sort of like what I am telling you about in my Key Question.  When one of the kids gets left at a restaurant and they don't notice until they are almost home.

Key Question:  For our Key Question this week, we had a choice whether we wanted to write a paragraph comparing two of our characters from our book, a paragraph on a problem that occurred and they had many different solutions for it, or if there was something that happened to the characters that had a lot of effects on them.  The last one that we were allowed to do was persuasion.  We have to do one that we haven't done yet.  The only one that I haven't done yet is problem and solution.
             There are problems that occur in this family considering problems occur when there are only five people in a family, imagine the problems with a 14 person family.  A problem that occurred in this family is people would get left behind in places and really, you wouldn't get noticed because there were so many other kids.  To solve this, they always take a role call before they leave. They had it once where they left someone at a restaurant and they didn't notice until the trip was about done that they were missing him.  So, now they always take role call before they leave for somewhere or from somewhere. That is how they solved that problem.