The other night I was tucking Alex in and he marked the day off on his calendar. I noticed he was actually crossing off the next day’s date. When I mentioned this to him he looked at me like I was silly and said “I know—I’m ahead of schedule.”
This week pretty much zoomed by. Monday we spent a lot of time on schoolish work. Introduced addition with carrying with Jordan and Alex, but since Sunday night Alex got out of bed, came downstairs and announced that he had figured out multiplication (and proceeded to tell me all about it as if it were a great mathematic discovery!), we worked a bit on that with some manipulatives.
We wrapped up our Ancient Mesopotamia work in SOTW and History Pockets. They made cunieform tablets with their names on air dry clay (a new discovery for me–how did I not know this stuff existed?) and wrote their postcards for the folder. Next week, on to Ancient Egypt and to get them interested in that I got a book from Alex’s favorite book series “You Wouldn’t Want to be a Mummy”.
Aubrey has been balancing equations in Algebra—she is pretty independent but has needed some help this week–uh-oh, I better work on my Algebra so I can answer questions!
On Tuesday we went to programs at a nature Discover Center–first time we’d done one of their free classes and noone liked them as well as the other nature center that has homeschool programs. Plus, Jordan told me that she was talking and one of the other moms yelled at her and almost made her cry. Now, I realize she shouldn’t have been talking, but I’m really unhappy that someone was yelling at my kids.
Friday I had lots of things planned, but our motivation dwindled away by lunch time. We did play a new math game that was a hit. Jordan and Alex each had a dry erase board with a blank in the ones, tens and hundreds space. They took turns rolling the dice and picking which place to put the number they rolled in. After they both had completed their number the one with the highest value got a point. It didn’t take them long before they figured out not to put the low numbers in the hundreds spot. Plus, a good lesson on probability—what are the chances that I’ll roll something bigger than this six? Should I put the 6 in the hundreds or hope for something bigger? It did get a little competitive, but for the most part was pretty fun.
Alex nixed the idea of a friday afternoon art project. He said we’d done too many arts and crafts type projects lately, so I asked him what kind of project he wanted to do. The answer? Build a dam or a canal. Okey, dokey, guess I need to work on that one.
Aubrey has been working on an Astronomy lap book project from Hands of the Child http://www.handsofachild.com/2/ and I’m surprised with how much she is really enjoying this format. She also started up Writing Strands, and is not enjoying that quite so much. Her other main subject besides Algebra right now is the Rosetta Stone Spanish.
Jordan and Alex also memorized a new poem (actually, part of one) this week. This is the one thing I would have never thought of doing, but they really enjoy mastering and performing the stuff they memorize and I can really see how the process of memorizing something is working their little brains out. We got a book about space shuttles that is in poem format and they memorized the first page–about 8 fairly short lines.
We found this little guy yesterday and went to work researching what he might be.
After researching for a bit we decided that he looked just like the luna moth caterpillar 
except he was the wrong color. That is when we stumbled upon this great website– What’s That Bug? http://www.whatsthatbug.com/ We were able to scroll through the pictures of caterpillars and find that it WAS a luna moth and that they turn pinkish orange when they are ready to pupate. http://www.whatsthatbug.com/caterpillar_6.html Then we had fun just looking at all the great, crazy pictures that people had sent in. We even submitted a mystery bug of our own. We found this little guy last year and eventually figured out that it was a moth that had just emerged and those giant ear type things were his wings trying to unfurl, but we never figured out what he was. Aubrey sent the picture to this website, though after googling some more we think he is the Rosy Maple Moth based on the bug guide website (another great find!) http://bugguide.net/index.php?q=search&keys=rosy+maple+moth This morning our caterpillar is wrapped in a sticky strands. We think he is going to overwinter as a cacoon, so we will have a while to see him as a giant luna moth./p>