Frozen February Frolics: Homeschool Update

Besides the math carnival and the BAM Film Festival, which I posted about previously, we've done a few fun things this February. But if I had to sum up the month, it would probably look like this:



Besides doing battle with the weather, here are some of the other things we did in February:

• Mikro's Comparative Religions class had a field trip to a mosque.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• We've been doing some art projects, like Sketch Tuesday, and keeping gluebooks. A gluebook is just a sketchbook for collages... We are having fun with them.
  
  
  
  
• Mikro wrote a book review of his favorite book, The Number Devil by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. He has read it about 15 times now.
  
  
  
  
• The Nanowrimo novel continues, when I can convince him to work on it. He has waaaaay too many ideas for stories, so it is hard to get him to stick to one thing and see it through to the end, since he is always wanting to dive into the newest idea immediately. He read me a paragaph he had written one day, and I was absolutely blown away. Yeah, his punctuation still needs some work, but he can tell a story that no one would guess was written by a not quite 11 year old. He says he may want to be a writer, as well as a scientist.
  
  
• He drew up a graphic novel based on the Aztec creation myth.
  
  
• He's doing math on Khan Academy these days, and watching Vi Hart videos. He's also read some math poetry, having been inspired at the NYCHEA math carnival. He is talking about starting a math journal, but managed to lose the sketchbook I gave him for that... Hopefully he'll get started on that soon.
  
  
• TED Talks are an obsession around here, especially the science and art ones. Microbiology illustration is a brand new interest. He's reading about marine biology and ecology, mostly. He also enjoys doing science on BrainPOP, and watching Discovery Streaming Education videos and The Happy Scientist. I'm hoping to get some more experiments done in the near future. He's making noises about robotics again, so it's time to break out the LEGO Mindstorms...
  
  
• He's learning photography. We got him his own camera, but most of the time he borrows my backup camera. So far, he's learning the mechanics of using the cameras, and a little bit about composition. Eventually, I'll teach him to shoot manually. But for now, he's in program mode with autofocus. We use the parked car as a bird blind and take pictures of the visitors to our feeders. He actually managed to take a photo of me that I don't hate (as I do most photos of me..)
  
  
  
  
• We finally got to go see my parents. Christmas was in February, because Gramma had pneumonia and was sick since before Christmas. I'm happy to report that she and my dad are both pretty healthy now.