He's reading a series on early man featuring titles like A Day With Homo Habilis. We're also talking about more modern historical eras as they are implicated in the series Who Do You Think You Are?, which we are watching on Amazon Instant Video and enjoying immensely. It's lead to discussions of slavery, the Holocaust, prohibition, the Civil War, the California Gold Rush, and I'm sure others I'm just not recalling at the moment. Very cool, and it makes me wish I could get past Charlie from the late 1700s on my paternal grandfather's side in my own genealogical research, but the trail ends with him.
Mikro is also reading a book on California history and geography. Next we move on to Florida and Texas. We're working our way through the 50 states in the order that the Highlights Magazine Which Way USA issues arrive at our door. I still have a bunch of resources on Africa to get through before moving on to the ancient Middle East, though we have dipped a toe in that pool already at this point. After that, it will be precolumbian civilizations of the Americas, and then Australia. I'm hoping by September we are ready to move along to the Dark Ages and early medieval period. We also just did a bunch of health/hygiene videos. And I just signed him up for the season pass at Silver Lake, and for swim lessons.
We are really getting a lot done lately, though I am feeling very uninspired about math. Usually we have fun with it, but I think I'm just a little burned out on it at the moment. I'm having him do computer math and some fun type workbooks, Hidden Picture Math and Quilt Math, where you do problems and the answer determines what color you make the space, and if you get it all right, you reveal the picture or pattern. Beast Academy math books arrived, and I'll turn him loose on them next week or so. He's not the math apathetic one, I am. Hopefully this is a short lived phase brought on by the headaches doing the taxes gave me.
Pottery is winding down for the semester. Still a few more weeks of glazing, but I'm not planning on building anything new. Fingers crossed it all gets in the kiln. Mikro is a dragon drawing dervish. He's really doing some nice sketches. I'm hoping he'll branch out and try some new subjects as well.
Next week, we are probably going to try to see the Enterprise fly by NYC on its way to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Kev may be able to see it from the windows at work. Wednesday, we have reservations for the educator's night preview of the new Terracota Warriors exhibit at Times Square Discovery Exposition Center. And Friday is science class at SMLI.
We messed up this week and somehow managed to get on the wrong train, so we missed science class, but instead headed to the Earth Day Fair at Grand Central Terminal. Mikro really enjoyed the Bio Bus, where he saw lots of microbes living in compost, including nematodes that had jellyfish bioluminescent cells grafted into them, so that different parts of their anatomy glowed under different color filtered light sources. Red was muscle cells, which showed up mainly around the exterior, and green was neural tissue. Mikro informs me that nematodes are roundworms, and they have nerve rings. He was quite the little professor on the Bio Bus.
1 comment:
Have you tried Life of Fred for math? Fred is a funny little five year old college professor. It's a cute story with a few problems at the end of each one.
Kathi
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