Bleh

Meant to post before, just got distracted. Alex is volunteering with St Bernards starting next week. The interview went great. Yay!

Our apartment flooded, in the closet.

And I bought some more books. I'm really going to stop doing that. Someday. I promise. (fingers crossed behind back)

Fourth grade reading level and up...

set of 6 books, Fish, Birds, Whales & Dolphins, Mammals, Reptiles & Amphibians, Insects

set of 4 books, Muscles & Bones, Ears, Brain, Eyes

Complete Handbook of Science Fair Projects

Every Day's A Holiday, "Value Based Theme Units for Individual Calendar Days"

Pocket Rhyming Dictionary & Lucky Pocket Spelling Dictionary

Too tired for detail.

Japanese

We get access to Rosetta Stone software for free, at home, with a Phx library card. w00t! Alex wants to learn Japanese. Perhaps I will learn as well. :D

Kitchen Science

A discussion of why divers can't fill their tanks with limitless air evolved into how when water freezes it gets a little bigger. Alex remembers when I left a soda in the freezer and it exploded, but he wanted to do another experiment anyway. So we filled up a bottle of water and added some food coloring. That migrated into multiplying the drops of color to get the recipes we wanted to create the right colors. When the color was perfect we added a line on the bottle to show where the water was, and put it in the freezer. We shall see what we shall see.

Fun. :D

Now he's playing with his Spongebob playdough set. He was patently unimpressed with the multiplication workbook I gave him. Shocker, eh? Well, it's there if he gets interested.

Amazon is going to put me in the poorhouse

But I'm all excited. I got for me:

"What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fourth-Grade Education (Core Knowledge)"
E.D. Jr Hirsch

"Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter"
Steven Johnson



And for Alex and I to do together:

"Science Experiments You Can Eat: Revised Edition"
Vicki Cobb

"Entertaining Science Experiments with Everyday Objects"
Martin Gardner



And for Alex:

"Stormbreaker (Alex Rider Adventure)"
Anthony Horowitz

"Hatchet"
Gary Paulsen

"Haunted Mad Libs"
Roger Price

"SpongeBob SquarePants Mad Libs"
Roger Price

"Cool Mad Libs"
Roger Price

"250 Piece Tub with 150 Bonus Parts"
K'NEX

"Klutz Kwiz 4th Grade Math: Cards and Math Deck"


...

We've got a globe, maps, art supplies, legos, playdough, tons of books. I think with this last batch of stuff I will have most of the things I forsee needing within the next few months. The only thing I didn't get was magnetic poetry. Next time I splurge I will get some. I think Alex would love it.

I'm going to go get some food and work now. :)

Whee

We hit the library. Got some fiction and a book on cobras. We also went to the bank to take care of my accounts and Alex asked about getting him an account. At some point we may do that. Need to see how responsible he can be first, and right now it doesn't look good, heh.

Today we cleaned up, did dishes, etc. Now Alex is watching Toys Story 2 and I am ostensibly working. ;)

Crazy Busy

It's been a long time since I've posted, oops. We've had a busy few weeks, and I haven't been keeping up. This is supposed to be a kind of record of what Alex is doing and learning, so I will try to keep up a little better.

I've totally abandoned the 23 things thing, sorry. :/ Life and stuff got in the way.

Anyway, we went to the science center yesterday. We did so much cool stuff! We saw a 3D Imax movie about coral and fish and stuff and that was awesome. Alex and I built this cool plumbing thing and I got a terrible cel phone photo of it. Alex was so proud. :) We spent a ton of time in the home building room, Alex did almost all the activities. We went through the human body area, and the insect area. There was one room with all kinds of interactive stuff, and Alex learned about pulleys and levers and stuff. I made lots of paper airplanes, most of which were colossal failures but it was fun anyway. We spent a TON of time with the air pressure exhibit. Alex LOVED it. Then on our way out we did the outdoor water play thingy and he got himself soaked and generally had a fantastic time. It was a great day. :D

We have an appointment scheduled for next week to meet with the Saint Bernard rescue so Alex can volunteer there. He is still in gymnastics and we've had some strange issues come up with that but overall it's been a very positive experience. I'm not sure he's going to want to do it again. I do want him in something big and physical, so if he quits gymnastics hopefully I can get him interested in some other activity.

We're signed up for an animal care class with some animal welfare group and also a dissection class at the science center.

My first round of emails to homeschool groups did not get much of a return but the latest one went very well. I have like 5 groups to read up on and maybe we will visit them all.

I really like having him home. :)

Bleh.

It was a very busy couple of weeks. So, to catch up, I know I've noticed lots of learning moments but I don't remember them. Alex is awesome. I am enjoying the hizzity heck out of having him home. :D

I finally let him quit drawing. I hoped that he would relax into it, or it would grow on him, but he gave it a good shot and just didn't like it. He would like to do gymnastics forever, though, I think, so that's going very well.

The fracking state didn't send the paperwork and I have about a million bits of paperwork to deal with. They need to send it!

Oops.

I thought I had a partial post saved. Apparently not. *glare blogger*

Anyway. Alex is doing incredibly well in gymnastics. I am so thrilled to see him so successful.

His buddy was over here the other day and they were playing with the real globe and the inflatable globe, calling out names of places and finding them together. Or, fighting over who found it first. Or getting mad because the other kid called out a "hard one and it's not fair". But it was very cute and educational.

Today I was playing Katamari and Alex was trying to understand how big my Katamari was. It's labeled in metric, so we talked a little bit about how inches and feet compare to centimeters and meters. It was very brief but a few minutes later I was rolling around and Alex goes, "Your Katamari is about 6 feet." I checked and it was at 2 meters. He also directed me to spots to pick up good good stuff and in general helped compensate for my terrible sense of direction in 3D environments.

Now he will surely go out into the community with a Katamari and just roll everything up because of course kids are powerless to resist TEH VIDEO GAMES! It couldn't be that he learned something and we enjoyed our time together, cooperating and playing and having fun. Not from a a video game. No way, no how. :P

He watched a video for the second time through on allosaurus. He has another one on ancient crocodiles and omg they were so HUGE. It was pretty awesome.

...

Saw this article on Yahoo news. A third of boys are left behind

Basically, it says there is a significant gender gap in high school graduation rates. The gap shows up significantly in 3rd grade achievement, and grows in the 8th grade.Am I the only one with a little boy who is entirely unsurprised? Has anyone looked into an elementary school classroom lately? It's full of color and light and story centers and art materials. I don't see trucks, or monsters, or ninjas. I don't see kids at recess nearly so often. I don't see gross movement integrated into lessons. I don't see teachers reading Captain Underpants or Stink., I see frowny faces on drawings with guns or tanks. I see constant trouble for little boys who are doing nothing but being little boys. Fierce in their enthusiasm for everything BIG and FUN and SCARY around them, they move and call out and shout, and play fight. And it is simply who they are. To suggest that they may not be successful in an environment so clearly built for the still and quiet is to suggest that perhaps the sun may rise today. It's a miracle that so many of them have the successes they DO have.

Gymnastics

We had our first gymnastics class tonight. It was AWESOME.There is another little boy in Alex's class, and 5 girls. They range from maybe, 6ish to 12ish. Their abilities are all over the place and Alex was intensely nervous but he really tried and did really, really well. I was so proud of him.

He did all the basic stretching and stuff. And then he did forward rolls, and backward rolls, and those forward rolls with your legs out wide, and handstands, and cartwheels, and he walked on the balance beam and even did a roll on the balance beam. So. Freaking. Cute.

He likes it much better than drawing. Drawing is much shorter, so that works. :D

I hated this stuff in school. It's so cool now.

Alex, reading his book: Mad as a hornet. Bzzzzzzzzzzz!
Me: Hmmm?
A: He is mad as a hornet. It's an igh-dough-um.
Me: Um. Igh-dough-um? Oh! An IDIOM?
A: Yeah. (looking very exasperated with me)
Me: You are awesome. But I think it's a simile.

So we looked it up and I am pretty sure it is, in fact, a simile. And now we are attempting to figure out metaphors, similes, analogies, and idioms.

He's learning so much

It's hard to remember all the little things we talk about and he learns throughout a day. I want to try to keep track, mostly so if his dad or the in laws start grousing about no "visible work" I will have a log of the things he is doing and learning.

In the past few days we've talked about calories, and how they provide your body with energy, but that not all calories are the same, and more processed foods aren't as healthy as less processed foods. We had a discussion about conjoined twins which broke off into genetics, treating people who are different with respect, learning to get along in the world when overcoming personal obstacles, and animal conjoined twins. The animal discussion was pretty abruptly ended as he just couldn't stand seeing the sad images of the animals. We came across the book "High Score", a history of video games, and he's had a lot of fun reading through that. There have been other topics but they escape me right now.

Sort of tangentially,last night he had drawing class at the community center. Last week he seemed to really not like it but the work he did was good and I really think he would like it if he wasn't such a harsh judge of his own abilities and work. I talked to him about how great I think he is doing and told him I'd like him to complete the class and see if it improved for him. We walked down to the car about 10 minutes before class and the key wouldn't turn.

So, I said, "No class this week, buddy, I'm sorry." And he was disappointed! Which, you know, I was happy about, because it meant he was actually looking forward to the class. So I dragged my out of shape behind out of the car and we walked it. He finished the class frustrated again, but in a much milder way. I suspect that it's almost a cover, so that if anyone else doesn't like what he produces he's safe - he's already indicated he doesn't think much of it. As he progresses I suspect he will loosen up and really enjoy it.

Alex has another class tonight, his first in gymnastics. The car is still in the shop, but I am confident it will be done in time or we will be able to wrangle a ride out of a good friend.

He's pretty much home for the summer.

Alex spent the last week at his grandparents' house and space camp (daytime only). He had a fantastic time and seems to have learned a great deal. He doesn't want to do another space camp week, but he is signed up for drawing class once a week and gymnastics twice a week for most of the summer. Once we see how that schedule works out, we might try some form of martial arts as well. I've heard that a lot of kids who have a high need for movement and sensory stimulation really enjoy martial arts.

I've requested the paperwork from the state to officially register him for homeschooling next year. The next thing I need to take care of is getting us involved with a compatible homeschool group. We need a secular group that is open to unschooling and positive discipline. Basically I am hoping for a group that gets together a couple times a week for a park/pool day and some kind of field trip. This will be especially important in the fall when his summer activities run out and his neighbor buddies are all back in school.

We hit the Phoenix library branch closest to home yesterday, and came home with an interesting assortment of books for Alex. Four short fiction novels, two large Star Wars pictorial encyclopedias, two books about cats, a giant Guinness Book of World Records, a book on saving endangered mammals, two books on the constitution and the amendments, a book on poisonous bugs, and a book on carnivorous plants. He choose all of them except the constitutional ones. I grabbed those because he asked me questions about it last week and I didn't have very good answers. I'll read them and do some, "Hey Alex did you know X?" type stuff to see if I can get him interested enough to read them.

Last night I had him in bed by around 8, and told him he could read as late as he wanted. At 10 I checked on him and he was zonked on top of piles of open books. I started to shift him around to put the books away but he woke up and insisted he was NOT SLEEPING and he wanted to read more. :D

The breadth of his interests and his uncanny ability to retain and apply information leaves me pretty confident about unschooling. I see no need to control his daily information intake. My job is to take advantage of real-life teachable moments and to create a rich environment. So far it seems to be going very, very well.