What have we been up to?

It's been a while since I really posted about homeschooling. Between illness and travel I've had a hard time keeping up here. First Tulip Time, then two weeks of a nasty cold, then one week before we left for Chicago, and now this weekend we're off again, headed north to visit family. Actually the whole summer promises to be as scattered (and joyous).

Of course, this doesn't mean that we haven't been reading, and researching, and trying, and doing, and learning everywhere and all the time. Some of it has been researching and playing in the library, in life, or even on the computer, and some of it has been more curriculum oriented, with a worksheet here and there.

This week we are finishing up our initial tour of the ancient Indus Valley with a few fun links, in particular this site from the BBC. Using the Story of the World as a guide we'll be back in the area in a couple of weeks, but as with our first stop in ancient Egypt I am supplementing with a more thorough sally into the area with a little help from Intellego and my friend the library. We read a couple of books, most notably Savitri: A Tale of Ancient India, and in reading it Calvin learned that the tale was from The Mahabharata and asked to read the whole thing, so we have a copy of that on order, too.

Speaking of reading, with all the driving we've been doing Calvin has been gobbling up books. He's on book seven of the Oz series, The Patchwork Girl, has reread some of the Magic Tree House books, and has started in on a new series as well, the Paleo Joe Detective Series.

He's more than half way through the multiplication tables, using Math-U-See lessons, but mostly via dice games.

In keeping with the classical education, or at least partially so, he memorized a poem and we did some picture narration, writing a story about a Mary Cassatt painting, Children Playing on the Beach. Calvin remembered, after this suggested activity, that he'd read about the artist before, and he was right—we have  a copy of her biography from the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series, so he read that as well.

And we baked: shortcakes to go with strawberries and cream on Tuesday, and banana bread today.

He devoured science this week, even more so than history, which is his usual favorite. We did lessons C-1 and D-1, energy and gravity, in BFSU, and he checked about five different books out from the library on the subjects before making his own.

We also spent a lot of time touring the gardens, walking the dogs, and playing at the park.

Lots of energy

A little science sounded good today. Lately all Calvin has wanted to do is read. Which is great. He finishes one book and moves on to the next one. He has it in his mind that he wants to read all of the Magic Tree House books in order of the series. I've been picking them up for .25 a piece when they come into the sale room at the library, and since there are 45 books in the series, he's had plenty to do as of late. Between books he grabs his backpack and notebook and tears through the house on some mission, pretending to be Jack and Annie. It's fun.

But today a little science sounded good. It's been a while since we visited the BSFU chapters and when we last left off we were talking about energy, so that's where we picked up, talking about the different forms of energy (a simplified version) and how we use them in everyday life. We had checked out a few books from the library that were nice to have, but not stellar, and mostly we had a good time chatting about how to conserve energy. Even better...coincidentally Calvin received a set of Snap Circuits from my aunt and uncle for St. Nicholas Day, and he and Jon have been going to town with it since then, so we spent quite a bit of time with that, too. It's a great set and we're really loving it.