The latest.

Things have been moving along as smoothly as they can when one has a Gus in the house. Today I made brownies and Gus dumped a glass of ice water all over them. But that is not really homeschool-related, I suppose (except that Gus does seem to think of life as a sort of grand experiment. I am not sure how to nurture his curiosity while preventing him from destroying everything we own. Perhaps he's trying to teach me some sort of anti-capitalist lesson. "Property is theft!" insists young August. But, still, I digress.)

Current chapter book for Ari and me is The Castle in the Attic. On his own, he's tearing through the Magic Tree House books. He's almost finished with one about the Vikings, and then he'll have to take a break while we wait for the next one to arrive via paperbackswap.com. Everything that happens to us these days seems to relate back to something Jack and Annie experienced. He also has a "bookstore" set up in the schoolroom, which trades primarily in Magic Tree House books. Milo is by far its best customer. Things go like this: Ari convinces Milo he needs a particular book. Usually it costs $1, which Milo does not have, so Milo comes running in to me to ask for a dollar. Sometimes I give it to him and sometimes I don't, but Ari always seems to turn the book over to him anyway. So now Milo keeps wanting me to read Mummies in the Morning to him, and I kind of hate doing it. I keep cringing over the incomplete sentences. I just don't understand it. Why not use a comma where a comma belongs. Instead of a period? I kind of freak out about Ari reading them, too, since it is firmly cemented in my brain that one learns to write well by reading good writing.

And, speaking of writing, I worry about it. Sometimes. The abysmal writing produced by my freshman comp kids at Brandeis is a lot of what made me start thinking about homeschooling in the first place, so I really want to get it right. And I think that it's a craft, a skill--something you can't learn overnight, which is why the kids at Brandeis sucked at it so much. They were smart kids with great ideas and no clue how to wrestle the ideas into coherent sentences, much less paragraphs and whole essays. They couldn't learn it in one semester, and they shouldn't have needed to try. So I am intrigued by Bravewriter, but also a little wary of paying $90 for a book, however full of amazing ideas it might be. Really, Ari writes well and enjoys writing and reads a lot, which is all I think he needs to be doing at the moment anyway. But still sometimes I worry.

But anyway...some stuff we've been doing:

We read about various stuff that happened a long time ago on the Arabian peninsula and then made an oasis out of candy and brown sugar. As you might imagine, this was a very popular project with the youngsters. I'm a little worried that they now know of the existence of the giant wall of jellybeans at Target. Also, we only got one camel in our box of animal crackers, and it broke, so that's an elephant or something hanging out at the oasis. Tomorrow we move on to China.












We're just finishing up weather in science (though we haven't finished up Weather Detectives. We may or may not keep reading that, depending on time and interest and whatnot). I found "Blizzard in a Bottle" kits at a yard sale last spring, so we whipped those out the week we learned about snow. They entertained the kids for at least 45 minutes, but they didn't really teach them about snow so much as about the technology behind disposable diapers (the kit is basically a baggy full of powder, apparently very similar to the stuff found in Pampers, et. al., that fluffs up into a snow-like substance when water is added to it). It's very messy. It is only appropriate for Gus' naptime.

I forgot to take a picture of the actual thing we made, but here is Ari's drawing of the "tornado tower" we made out of 2 liter bottles. Our two bottles are held together by a film canister (the last one in the house, I think) with the bottom cut off, but my friend Di Linh has a similar contraption at her house and told me they actually sell a little piece of plastic specifically for holding bottles together to make tornado towers. How would you even know to look for one? Anyway, tornado tower was loved by all, and now Ari regularly recites safety rules for what to do in case of a tornado to anyone who'll listen.




And, finally, here is Milo's drawing of The Weather Detectives. I'm not sure how well you can see it--the Weather Detectives themselves are down on the bottom ("oh! I forgot to draw their hats!"), and then there's a tornado on the top left, and then he drew a circle around the whole thing so they'd be in glass. Because they're in a museum. Because they're not real. I don't quite follow the logic, but whatever makes him happy. He is pretty new to the world of representational drawing (until a month ago or so, he mostly just drew big, spirally things and called them all machines), and I'm enjoy his new, spooky-eyed little people. He insists that I write "Milo's drawing" on all of them.