What DID we do this week?

Our two biggest events this week were group oriented. On Friday, of course, there was the play and talent show at our HAA gathering, and on Monday we met with another homeschooling group for the first time. It's a more local group—smaller, and two of the families we already know from HAA. It's a very informal, relaxed gathering. The kids played games and designed and created paper airplanes while the moms chatted and watched. We are looking forward to romping through local parks with them throughout the summer, as well as gathering in more distant parks with our friends at HAA. What a fun summer we will have!

Calvin finished reading The Water Horse and Mitt the Michigan Mouse and started The Marvelous Land of Oz. On the subject of books, Thursday we went to see a stage production of something he read last month: The Cricket in Times Square. He wrote a journal entry about the event.

There was Lego play in ancient Egypt, complete with Lego pyramid Egyptian god figures. Calvin read, and reread and reread, Senefer: A Young Genius in Old Egypt (out of print, but we got it from the library), and tried a few fun links suggested by Intellego: Images from inside Tut's Tomb (by Discovery News); a video about tombs, and lots of info on King Tut (from National Geographic); and a great interactive site on the pyramids at Giza (from the British Museum). He also played this silly tomb adventure game (from National Museums Scotland), this silly mummy game (from Schools Liaison), and revisited this great interactive mummy making site (from the Children's University of Manchester). Both The British Museum and the Children's University of Manchester sites have great overall presentations on ancient Egypt.

That Anubis, he's such a trickster...

He was reading about Senefer as an elephant walked by...

He did two Math-U-See lesson sets from Gamma, introducing products of 5 and 10, and we also discussed products of 9. We played Totally Tut a few times, some modified versions of Shut the Box, and quizzed each other on odd-ball multiplication problems (the bigger the number, the better—what is 6 million x 9????) while playing in the yard, while walking the dogs, while eating lunch, while driving...I think you get the idea.

I'm bringing back BFSU (Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding). We'd been wandering through it last fall but got away from it over the winter, so this week we reviewed some of the topics we'd covered and I was delighted to find that the understanding is still there. The BFSU book is just a guide for us, a way for me to jump start conversations about science, but really we've been talking about these things all along.

There was piano practice, and line practice, what with the talent show and the play on Friday, both of which went very well. There was dog walking, grocery shopping, swimming lessons, and library volunteering.

As a family we started watching episodes from The Pyramid Code on Netflix. It's a little conspiracy theorist in flavor, but many of the ideas put forward are entirely plausible, or at least imaginable, and the show certainly makes one think.

This week we'll be cleaning up from the book sale, which happened yesterday, and heading over to Holland, Michigan for the Tulip Time festival, at which there are likely to be no tulips this year since the season started a month early. No problem, we don't really go for the tulips so much as for the big lake, the beach, and the quiet, relax time we sneak in while there.