Students: 10yo (Grade 5-ish), 8yo (Grade 3-ish), 6yo (Grade 1-ish).
The first thing you'll likely notice is that our definition of 'school' is pretty vague and flexible. Take heart; you're probably doing more than you realize. All three of my students are fairly independent, and our house is a constant hive of activity so I'm going to attempt to tell what was happening during the day but keep in mind it was all swirled together and didn't happen in as linear a fashion as it appears.
The 10yo and I started the week 4 unit of Chemistry for the Logic Stage. We're loving this program and it dovetails perfectly with the boy's interests. Today was experiment day, so we gathered a variety of materials and tested to see if they held any of the four attributes of a metal - conductivity, malleability, magnetism and lustre. After we'd hooked up our materials to a circuit, pounded them with a hammer, held a horseshoe magnet to them and looked at them against a lightbulb, he wrote our his experiment notes and read about metals, poor metals, semi-metals and non-metals in the Smithsonian Science Visual Encyclopedia. I can't recommend it highly enough for little science lovers. In the meantime the 6yo read a few Frog and Toad stories aloud to grandma, and the 8yo read chapter 6 of Anne of Green Gables, narrated the chapter to me, and then answered her two questions in her literature study guide. I gave her the Oxford Can. Dictionary and she looked up her vocabulary words and copied them out.
I am taking an intensive university-level grammar course right now, so I spent time throughout this printing off work. The 6yo finished her reading aloud and brought out art supplies and started crafting. As the girls finished their work they helped Grandma fold and put away laundry and and then sat with her to watch tv.
The 8yo asked me a question about dinosaurs which led to me reading this article from BBC Earth to her and the 10yo. The 10yo suggested that an efficient way to estimate dinosaur weight from footprints would be to measure the depth of the print. The 8yo wondered if the length of the neck influenced the pitch of a vocalisation. Everyone disappeared to watch the show Oh, Baby (all about baby animals) and we had to interrupt it to Google pictures of baby squid.
Which turned into watching youtube videos about metals. Here's one on crushing tungsten steel, which we discovered today is the hardest metal. And here is one on making a ball out of tinfoil. And another ball out of tinfoil.
I had to go to the store with my mother in law so my husband sat with the children while they read. This is what the 10yo read...
When I got back we did history. We wanted to learn about Samuel de Champlain, which was fascinating. I read from several books about him, and we ended up taking down the globe to talk about latitude and longitude, astrolabes, astronomy, the Latin word 'astro', native peoples, etc. We looked up astrolabes from the Canadian Museum of History to see what they looked like.
It was 3pm by this point, so the 6yo helped Grandma cut up butternut squash and the 8yo set the timer and did her free reading. She's working through Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat. The 10yo took apart and rebuilt a gear box from a solar powered robot that hadn't been working properly but stopped in order to get the lasagna in the oven and then went back to whatever he was doing with that gear. When the 8yo finished I logged her into Prodigy math and she got to play while I went to my chiropractor appointment.
I got home and made some tea and played a few rounds of an addition/subtraction dice game with the two youngest.
And by then it was about 5pm and any 'formal' school, such as it is, was done.
No comments:
Post a Comment