Here it is Friday, it feels like Tuesday, and I last posted on Sunday. So what happened to our week? I will probably get back into the routine of posting regularly around the time that we leave for our week long camping trip at the end of the month, and then I'll have start all over again. I think routines are healthy habit. I love routines, really, but apparently I only stick with them just so long. In our family it's a good thing that Jon is more of a true adherent to routine. He is the reason we have fresh, hot coffee every morning, and that the garbage gets out in a timely fashion on Friday mornings. Which brings me back to today, which happens to suddenly be Friday, which means it's time to look back at the week.
The birthday weekend provided lots of new diversions for the week. I spent many a moment with an adorable Boris dragon, we played many games of Oz Fluxx (fun!) and Dragonology (both beautiful and fun), and we assembled a pretty awesome model hand.
Book wise Calvin has been a reading machine all week. He received several new books as gifts and he seemed to want to read all of them at once. He read all of the first Dragonology book, The Dragon's Eye, and is well into the second book in the series, The Dragon's Apprentice. There is some violence in the series, but mainly they are focused on the dragons, and we have been seeing and recording sightings of dragons everywhere we have gone all week. Calvin also read Chasing the Gnome, the first in a new series of books that is authored by a father in our homeschool group. He gave the book to Calvin at last week's gathering and asked him for feedback, which Calvin readily supplied at today's meeting, easy to do since he really enjoyed the book.
We've been practicing multiples of four all week. We mostly practice while playing ball or doing some other physical activity, or while playing Totally Tut. Following the Math-U-See lesson order, so far we have zero, one, two, ten, five, nine, three, six, and now four. Calvin has definitely mastered the concept of multiplication, but memorization will come with time, and lots and lots of games.
We mostly left off history this week in favor of birthday games and books, but we did watch the first section of The Story of India, and today we just started reading a beautiful, illustrated, youth version of the Mahabharata.
Science was our milk and cookies this week. I think summer, with the beckoning of the outdoors and the liveliness of nature around us, was made for life sciences. This week we reviewed BFSU lesson C1: energy, then we took things outside to the park for lesson C3: kinetic/potential energy (as in rolling balls down slides, etc.), and B3: distinguishing plants and animals). Sitting in the park, having a picnic lunch after biking/running a couple of miles, we had a nice chat about all the life around us, about its need for energy to survive, and its place in the world for absorbing and passing on energy. It was just a start, but a fun one at that.
This weekend we will be setting up our tent to prepare it for the summer. A biking or hiking trip is also in the works, and Sunday is Father's Day, when we'll be enjoying some fantastic ribs with family. I hope our little dragon will come along.
