The last few weeks we haven't been wildly successful in terms of sticking to plan and covering every subject. The week before their birthday party we had too many errands and the week before that was MY birthday and a stat holiday which messed things up. I had planned to get back to routine after their birthday party of course. We have new topics in Language Lessons, History, and Science, but even I am not such a slave driver as to force my kids to stay inside working when we get a rare west coast snowfall. And this week, well this week is just one thing after another. Daddy has been out of town all week for work, Theo's birthday was Monday, and Georgie has a visit to Children's Hospital for some tests on Thursday morning. It's pretty hard to start a lot of new units when we have this much disruption.However, we did double the amount of Math last week and are well on our way to finishing grade two in that subject. Should be on to grade three in about 6 weeks or so depending on what happens with Lent--also a disruption. I want to keep plowing away at Math, not because Theo is wildly enamoured of it exactly, (he sure dislikes drill work), but because he has yet to encounter a concept that he can't master after one try. He's well into multiplication now and will soon be doing double digits on that--well before he has finished memorizing the entire times table probably, unless I start showing him that-- might be a good project now that I think of it. And the multiplication he hasn't memorized yet he is able to work out on his own. For example, he knows the 5 times table, but he may not be able to recall 6x7 off the top of his head. What he will do then to figure it out is think "5x7 is 35, so 6x7 must be 7 more" and then he will count up to 42.
He has also been doing a lot of reading. He is now halfway through the 3rd How to Train Your Dragon novel and devouring them at an impressive pace. We had to go the library to make sure we had the 4th book on hand in case he finished number three before the weekend. I'm starting to feel a little like I ought to actually read them. They seem ideal for 7 year olds-- lots of talk about farting and pooping and belching and they are full of hilarious cartoons and diagrams. Today he was killing himself laughing because he got to a part in the book which has a dragon vocabulary guide written, apparently, by the hero of the tales, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock. He informed me that "Hoody dranken de bath juice?" is Dragonese for "Who drank all the bath water?" No prizes for guessing what "buttock thunder" means...We have also had a few practical life life type lessons. The other day we talked about the fact that a vegetarian is not the same as a herbivore. Herbivores are creatures that can only eat plants, whereas "vegetarian" describes a person who, although they CAN eat meat because humans are omnivorous, they choose not to. We also went on to talk about what it means to be vegan as mummy is doing her best to have a go at it for Lent--at least for the first little bit.
A birthday card arrived from Great-grandma with a check for his birthday so we talked about what checks are and why people send them for gifts in the mail instead of cash or parcels. Cash is gone forever if it gets lost, and parcels cost a lot of money to mail, but checks are like a letter to the bank saying how much you are giving someone. This then led to a discussion about not blowing one's money on the first thing one finds, but taking one's time and looking around and waiting before deciding. Surprisingly, Lego was not the favoured choice, but rather...wait for it...ANOTHER book about dinosaurs. I don't think I can take it.
But the BIG project we have been working on this week is a stop action movie made with my iPhone and featuring the new monkey and toucan Lego creatures he got for his birthday. So far we learned how to write a story: we need an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion. We learned how to brainstorm to come up with ideas-- and what research is and how it can help you come up with ideas for making up stories. We then took our brainstorming ideas, turned them into a plot diagram (sort of), and then turned the diagram into a series of storyboards drawn by Theo with written narration below, also by Theo. Today we managed to "film" the first scene and build sets for the following scenes. I haven't transferred them to the computer yet or figured out how they will look on iMovie once we start stringing them together. I have my doubts. Our Lego figures are poseable. Meaning everything on Monkey MOVES, even eyebrows. So its not going to look awesome and I can't even contemplate how to make his mouth move properly to make words. I tried to convince Theo that we ought to make the movie silent film-style, and we looked up some Charlie Chaplin so he could see what I meant. I think he was put off by the prospect of having to construct text signs to fill in for dialogue. (Although he thought Charlie Chaplin was brilliant of course). I am hoping he might change his mind, but we will see.So while our usual routine has been on hold for nearly 3 weeks now we are still moving along and doing plenty of terrific learning.
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