Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Day 73 -- Catching Up

A few things going on -- I realize that the heart of learning seems to be the connections between one thing and another, so that's what I am emphasizing here. I know there are things I missed here, but this is a partial list. I'm not sure what "day" we are on but am going to pick it up as Day 73 because I'm figuring we've done 18 weeks of about 4 days each.

Aidan's been very busy these days -- two of his favorite activities here. The physics of spinning, and typing numbers in large font and then cutting them out.



Bleak House (movie) -- older kids and me -- Brendan read a bit of Bleak House to me and Clare and we compared Mr Guppy's marriage proposal in the book to the version in the movie.

The Worm Ouroboros -- Clare is reading this. Originally I requested it from the library for Liam because CS LEwis had mentioned it approvingly. But then I went ahead and bought it for Liam for a late Christmas present. She has been reading bits aloud to me and Brendan.

HMS Mauritius by Patrick O'Brian. Clare has been reading bits of this aloud to me too -- the sloth, and Jack Aubrey's twin babies.

Superhero video games -- Kieron researched which one to get with his Christmas and birthday money, and decided to get Spiderman Friend or Foe. He also read a lot in Wikipedia about the Spiderman cycle. The game arrived today and Kieron and Paddy have been playing (I can hear Paddy getting a bit cranky).

Aidan -- solar system. He found the booklet that went with his felts and pored over it spelling the planet names. Then he asked for the felts themselves and has been playing with those.

Paddy -- his rabbit trail on Magic School Bus continues (mixed idiom there!). We have covered: Bee Hives, The Weather, Dinosaurs and Water Works in this manner over the past couple of weeks. Today as we were reading about the dinosaurs, Kieron came over and expanded on his own past research on dinosaurs.... filling out what the book said, etc. I mentioned how impressed I was by the immensities of time, say between Triassic and Jurassic, or even early and late Cretaceous. Millions of years! This led to a discussion about the Bible creation story and about how scientistis know what they know.

Aidan -- still typing out, cutting out, and reordering numbers up to 100. I think that this has taught him how to identify higher numbers and how to count in sequence past twenty. These were skills listed on his IEP but he has found his own entry point into them, and the work has been his.

A calendar of the dumbest things said in 2008. Sean got this for his Christmas present at the extended-family game of "dirty bingo" (it's a form of White Elephant). He and the whole family have loved it and I realize that humor is really a thing that requires quite a lot of cultural sophistication. You have to know why the things that are said are dumb, which means a broad general knowledge of correct syntax, etc. He read the ones he liked best to me, then went and read them to Clare and then I heard them making up their own spin-offs.

The squirrels.... a bit of impromptu nature study.

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