Swim Lessons

Mikro is taking Level 3 swim lessons, and learning new strokes. He's got a strong but messy front crawl, a ridiculously fast, powerful, but slightly sloppy back stroke, the beginnings of a breast stroke, and he can do the scissor as well as anyone I've ever seen (which is funny, because it figures prominently in my dad's tales of his navy shenanigans...)

Today's lesson was rained out (thunderstorms, actually), but here is a look at our lovely swimming hole on the Croton River:



























Mikro is serious about improving his strokes, but verbal instructions take a while to be translated into physical movements where he's concerned. So he is extremely willing, but not at the level of precision he wants to be yet. And he aims high. He has his eyes set on that lifeguard's chair, and watching the Olympics has sparked an interest in maybe swimming in competition some day...

Homeschool Update

I haven't done enough of these posts lately... Mikro has learned so much in July and these first few days of August.

He finished the library's Summer Reading Game weeks early, and our wonderful librarians let him keep going and reporting on books and getting little prizes from the library treasure chest. He really enjoyed it. Next week is the end of game party, which he always has fun at. I can't believe summer is flying by so fast. I'm already wishing it wouldn't end, because that means we lose our beloved swimming hole till next summer... Mikro made amazing progress with his swimming. Usually he is a bit of a clown and hangs back with the littler kids. This time he stepped up and really gave it his all. More on that later. This is supposed to be the mostly academic homeschool update post..

So far this summer, we have focused primarily on Math and American History, and worked on finishing up our study of Japan. We've mostly taken a bit of a break from science (the reading, anyway), but not entirely. There is a lot of robot design, kit building, nature study, bird watching and science video watching going on, but not the usual tons of science books... We're doing multiplication now, and Mikro has the 2s, 5s, 10s, 3s and 11s down, and knows how to do the 9s using finger math... He really loves math and science songs, and music has been a big help with the times tables especially. We read lots of good math books, including a bunch on multiplication. And we've read a lot of Jean Fritz's American history books and watched some videos. He's still singing songs from the musical "1776".

He's also found lots of time to read for fun. His current favorite book series is a toss-up between Chris Mould's Something Wickedly Weird books and the Time Warp Trio books, over which he cackles like mad... He's anxiously waiting for Steven Hawking's latest kid's tale (George and the Big Bang) to come out. I ordered it from Amazon.uk, but it hasn't arrived yet...

Math:















Japan:











American History:















Science:



General Reading:













Now I just need to finish and submit Mikro's Individual Home Instruction Plan to the school district. I guess it helps that we have done so much work for the new school year already...