Homeschool Update

Science:

Our homeschool group is taking science classes with Mad Science again this semester. The topic this time around is a combination of life science and earth science. This week's class was about geology, volcanoes and earthquakes.



Afterwards, we read some books on those themes at the library. And Queens Library lets kids read down their library fines, so we made progress on that front, too.





Math: More workbook stuff, and he has started just randomly asking us questions about math. Like out of the blue, he'll ask about money and making change, or adding two digit numbers, as in, "Um, mom, does 43 plus 28 equal 71?" Place value is starting to be more automatic. And he's really enjoying logic puzzles. He's getting some practice skip counting by 5s when we return our bottle recycling and get back the deposits (which pays for my morning coffee.)



English/Language Arts:

We've done capitalization rules, rhyming, poetry forms, writing acrostic poems, syllables, spelling games, unscramble word games, how many words can you make out of the letters in a long word (like "emergency" or "instructions"), etc.



History:

We have watched 10 of the 12 episodes of the Silk Road miniseries on DVD. Mikro is reading Kids Discover: Ancient China.



We saw the Silk Road exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History a while back. I wish it was still there. Now it would have context for Mikro... Today he asked me to come up with another ancient China art project for us to do.

We've been outside as much as possible, and that always means watching birds and collecting bugs. We are keeping up our measuring and collecting data on our pet Bearded Dragon, who is now a whopping 9 inches long, almost double her size when we brought her home. And, there's always time for a little silliness...