Tuesday's Homeschooling

Today Aaron seemed anxious to get started with homeschool. What a change! Maybe he likes learning! We did the spelling list first. While he translated words into his secret code I made spelling worksheets for the rest of the week.

He picked up the Disaster Science book and looked through that for a while. It is a fun children's book, if you can call disasters fun. Well, at least it is fascinating. It has lots of before/after pictures and scientific information. Aaron gave me running commentary of everything he knows about disasters... including an earthquake demonstration using our cardtable as the victim. There's a picture of a Walmart store in the book that never ceases to amaze me... a tornado went right through it. What a mess!

We started reading a book about New York State, and learned about the French and Indian War among other things. Somehow I'd never realized before that the war lasted 74 years. That's amazing... and sad. We made more date cards for the time-line.

This was one of those days when we didn't cover every subject, but what we did, we did well.

Aaron asked for more simple logic problems. Also he wanted to spend time doing one of his favorite things... just us asking each other questions about whatever we can think up to test each other on. It is kinda fun once in a while.

He wanted to look up 4-Wheeler ATV's on a website (like I could really afford to buy him one of those, right...) and then together we did a long division problem to illustrate that I could probably only afford 1/4 of what one of those sells for... well, maybe less than that, depending on the model. The website was pretty interesting, though...


Monday's Homeschooling

We started the day out with a simple logic problem... the one about a man who needs to cross a river on a rowboat. He has with him a fox, a chicken and a bag of corn. He can't leave the chicken and the corn together because the chicken will eat the corn. Likewise he can't leave the chicken and fox together because the fox will eat the chicken. How does he get everything across when he can take only one thing at a time?

This problem stumped Aaron for a long time, but he finally got it all on his own.

We're settling into a comfortable routine. Aaron is getting used to it and looks forward to his time alone with me, working one-on-one to learn new things together. On Monday he did the fractions worksheet over again, and this time did it all right. No errors. :)

I introduced his Dolch spelling word list for the week. This will be his first year with regular spelling lists, now that he's more comfortable with reading... it will work out well. Today he unscrambled words. I was happy to see this was no problem for him.

A wonderful thing happened... Aaron took up a project on his own - of creating an alphabet code. He made a secret symbol for each letter and started by writing his name in the new code. I'm so thrilled about this project! It will help him to learn to spell. It will help him be interested in words! Finally! He's planning to share this secret code project with his friend Shane, who is also a slow reader (though he's in public school). Together, they may learn something valuable from this!

We finished reading the New Jersey book today, and another wonderful thing happened... Aaron was able to point to New Jersey on the map with no problem! I'm so happy. We really enjoyed the book: New Jersey in Words and Pictures by Dennis B. Fradin.

P.E. was him on his bike racing his friend on a 4-wheeler ATV. Aaron did well... he's very fast.

For Alternative Archetecture we studied plans for adobe homes - we found the article in Mother Earth News. Aaron also did a pattered drawing for art.

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