Two weeks, few pictures

I've been lazy about doing photogenic project-type stuff the past couple of weeks, and I'm not feeling motivated enough to scan in the written work we've done, so I'll be wordy instead. Mostly. And brief, I suspect. Maybe.

Ari has finally left money behind in Singapore, and is zooming through both fractions and time. He loves both things, and they're easy for him, so for the past two weeks I'll tell him to do 2 pages and come back to find he's done 6--that sort of thing. I have the Intensive Practice book, too; we've only used it sporadically, but I think I'll break it out for more fractions and clocks next week (Intensive Practice has more, generally more challenging, problems on the same topics covered in the regular Singapore book). Milo's started in on the last book of Earlybird--more adding so far. He's very much got the concept down, and can do sums up to 5 or 6 in his head, usually.

Ari did the first of the "oral usage" lessons in the back of First Language Lessons 3; it's interesting to see to what extent he correctly conjugates verbs without having actually been taught them formally before. One lesson was on...umm, past progressive is it? I have eaten, etc? He knew most of them already, but not all.

In history we learned about various west African kingdoms last week and then explorers (Columbus, Magellan, et. al.) this week. Africa yielded the only project we got around to--a sad attempt to make salt blocks. In Africa, they made houses out of salt blocks. Our salt blocks were still all mushy and collapsed when we tried to take them out of the ice cube trays after sitting around in the sun for a week, however, and we decided that our humid climate is not at all suited to constructing things out of salt blocks.

I was surprised at how difficult it is to find kid's books on Columbus from anything other than a "what a terrific guy!" perspective. Story of the World does at least point out that Columbus wasn't really the first European to stumble across America, so that's something I guess. We read the Value Tale about Columbus--the Value of Curiosity--in which Native Americans are said to have returned to Spain with Columbus because "they were curious, too!" Sure they were. Anyway, so we talked about other perspectives on it and how history depends on who's telling it and all that, and that will have to do unless someone has a picture book suggestion to offer, because I don't think they're old enough yet for the Columbus chapter from Lies My Teacher Told Me.

Ari's reading a book about the first moon landing to himself, and we're reading A Cricket in Times Square at bedtime. I tried to start Matilda with Milo, but I don't think he's quite there yet. If we could get past the first few chapters, things get a bit more fast-paced, as I recall. But I think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach would be a better Roald Dahl introduction for a not yet 5 year old.

I want to try to do the Green Hour Challenge, so this week we went for a walk and found two things we want to learn more about--umm, I think it was our dogwood tree and our creek. Now we have to do the part where we find out more about them. But that brings us to the real reason, or at least the real excuse, why we haven't been very organized the past couple of weeks: it's spring! So we've been doing stuff like this instead:


I forsee a lot of laundry and stain remover in our summer.