Co-op begins! and more!

Homeschool co-op started up again this week. There is a very ambitious schedule (that I had nothing to do with picking; I would not have been nearly so ambitious) covering explorers, scientists, and inventions all through history (following the Trisms History Makers schedule), and then also doing art and Spanish. Everyone takes turns teaching the history/science part, with the kids divided into three age groups. Milo's in the 4-5 year old group, and Ari's in the 6-8 year old group. I'm teaching a total of 11 weeks out of thirty. And then the person who was supposed to be mostly doing the Spanish is abruptly moving to DC, so I'm doing that, too, because I'm the only person left who knows any Spanish and can therefore at least pronounce things sort of correctly. The Spanish is La Clase Divertida (the value of which I question), so it's mostly just putting on DVDs. Anyway, I taught the middle kids this week. The idea is they all prepare some kind of little report at home and then at co-op they present those, we put stuff on a timeline, we talk about one of the topics for the week (they cover the rest at home, only my kids really won't so much because we already had other stuff planned when I found out about all the ambition), and then there's an activity having to do with the topic. So we talked about pyramids, and made a little book about pyramid building, and then I had them build a pyramid out of (square brick) legos. I just kind of tossed the legos at them and had them go at it, and then made some suggestions eventually so that they'd come up with something that would actually stand up. There are supposed to be 5 kids in the group, but Ari refused to participate at all and Gabriella got pissed off after a few minutes and stormed off. But 3 out of 5 isn't bad. Here's the finished product and the proud architects:




In Art, they all made a mural with hieroglyphs on it:













We also started Spanish class here--my friend Di linh and I hired a tutor to come once a week for an hour and do a class just for our three older kids (Milo and Ari plus her son Gavin). It started the day after I sprained my ankle, so Dave was home and I was in the other room not really seeing anything that was going on. Dave came in and I asked, "did you tell her Ari's not going to talk at all?" Turns out he WAS talking--repeating everything he was supposed to and offering up unsolicited tidbits like, "some of our crayons have the colors in English AND Spanish." So I think it's going to be a really good thing for everyone.

Everything else is going along pretty well. Dave is teaching Ari piano, which Ari alternately finds really cool and really frustrating. We learned about rocks for science the other day. First I sent Ari and Milo out to look for rocks. I stuck my head out to check on them a few minutes later. "How's it going?" I asked. "Good!" they both answered. " I haven't found any rocks, though," Milo added cheerfully. So I came out to help. Then we took the rocks inside and did a scratch test on them with fingernails and a penny and a drinking glass (and maybe one other thing. I can't remember). Then we took them outside and smashed them with a hammer.