Saturday gameday

Photo bombed by the jumbo-tron

The wave

Reading in the third quarter? In his defense, it wasn't really a stellar game.

Oh no! The tomatoes!

There is an exuberant energy that comes with learning something new. Upon grasping a grand new concept or coming to the end of a good book sometimes I just want to get up and run around the house to burn off the sudden vibrations running through my whole body. I see this in Calvin, too, but often when he's that excited all it does is make me feel tired. I must be getting old.

The sudden dances of joy today were frequent and bright. For starters, any science activity that involves water and dye is pretty massively exciting. And there was an Amazon delivery today. That's like Christmas come early! A science non-curriculum book for me, Prehistoric coloring books for Calvin, and a new game for us all. We try to pick up new games every so often and the new addition today was Shut the Box, something that we're addicted to already. Who said math had to be boring.

Math-U-See is going well for us still, although I'm frustrated that they provide no extra practice sheets. I've been searching out some pretty good free sites for printing practice pages, mostly clocks from this site, and dinosaur addition color by number pages from Enchanted Learning. If only I could find the Burgess Shale color by addition page I'd be all set.

And a walk outside later in the day. Actually we've been tied up in the house quite a bit the past two days with the sniffles. We even missed this afternoon's homeschool gathering at the park in order to get some extra rest. We have tickets to tomorrow's game and I want us all to be well enough to go and enjoy it. But with so few outside days remaining we had to get out for at least a little of this one, which foiled this little bugger's plan of eating our tomato plants right down to the ground. He was sleeping so we snipped off the branch he was on and dropped him in a box to observe for a few hours before taking him over to the field and dropping him off. I just couldn't kill him, but I really hope he doesn't find his way back.

Prehistory on a time line

The furnace installers were here all day today, so now we have a working furnace with a new thermostat that will take weeks to learn how to use (so far we have learned how to change the font of the display).

But with workers in the house from 8:30 until 5:30 Calvin and I found ourselves home bound. That's not always a bad thing. I have piles of laundry to catch up on, surfaces to dust, and plants to water, and today was the perfect day to do all those things. It was also the perfect day to move all the dining room furniture and drag out the felt to make a massive interactive timeline of evolution. We got all the epochs and periods and massive extinctions marked, and the Cambrian creatures are made. Maybe I'll get to the laundry tomorrow.

Since Calvin's sudden fascination with prehistoric evolution I've been drooling over the Charlie's Playhouse site. This is a great find for any family interested in teaching the subject, especially if they have extra money floating around. We have a new furnace instead, so no matter how much I wanted to order that really awesome 18 foot fold out book play mat thing, it wasn't going to happen. Instead, it became the inspiration for our own 12 foot (because that's the length of our longest uninterrupted wall) interactive felt version of the Charlie's Playhouse timeline. Ours has removable prehistoric creatures and a lot of our own time, energy, study, and thought put into it. We've only filled in the first period so far, but there's plenty of time (ha ha).

We also read Bang! The Universe Verse and It's Alive, both by James Lu Dunbar, both entertaining if nothing else. And we played Mammoth Hunt, practiced the piano, ran through the yard (which needs rain again), and Calvin filled in a dinosaur color by addition sheet. But all of that is moot comparatively.

Linking up to

This busy life

A day of pleasantly warm sunshine to break up days of chilly fall rain. Although I've always thought of September as being the month to usher in fall, this is the first in a long line of years that I remember it being quite so chilly and actually fall-like. This isn't really a bad thing, although since the new furnace doesn't go in until tomorrow there were a few rather chilly nights in the house last week when temperatures outside dipped below forty degrees. Brrr.

Today I was faced with the bare fact that a discussion of evolution must bring with it a discussion of mating. Years of conventional thinking causes a spark of indecency when this lesson comes to mind, and yet I see nothing unnatural in the progression towards that topic. For now, though, I am going with the time tested tradition of providing information on an as needed basis. Steve Jenkins, in his book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution, says simply that "Many living things reproduce sexually. This means that there is a father and a mother and that each baby has a mixture of the qualities of the parents." For now this has answered our needs and sparked no further questions.

We re-watched BBC's Walking with Monsters, penciled in a timeline of life on earth, and read a few books on the subject, most notably the above noted. We also went to lunch with family, shopped for winter clothes, groceries, and craft items, went on a nature walk, practiced the piano, tried out some map scaling worksheets, took notice of the warm sunshine, and straightened the house for the sake of the people who are coming tomorrow to put in the new furnace. October is a lot closer than I keep thinking.

Evolution

Antarctica has now cleanly melded into a vigorous inquiry on the beginning of time.

I had intended to introduce the concept of American history this fall by beginning with the Land Bridge, since that would be the beginning of human American history, but it's funny how when you try to begin in one place it can seem as though you need just a little more first. Land bridge? What about the humans who used it? So okay, early humans it is first. But that's kind of an open beginning, and after watching the History Channel's Ape to Man he had questions about evolution, and the step before that is the introduction of life, yadda yadda. If we were an actual unit studies family one might have to call this the American History Unit Study: From the Big Bang to the American Revolution and Onward. Ha ha.

Calvin is now all kinds of interested in the dawn of time. We followed up Ape to Man with BBC's Walking with Monsters, a rather enjoyable series of three videos on the Paleozoic Era. This afternoon found us scouring the library for books on evolution, Charles Darwin, and the very beginnings of life. There's a surprising amount of good material out there and we have a tall stack of books to go through this week, or as we see fit, plus some related play dough and painting projects, a science look at what it means to be alive, color by number (addition) pictures of Paleozoic life, and possibly some new felt to design, make, and play with. I'm sure we'll also watch the videos again, and there will be other activities that suggest themselves as we go. We'll spend as much time as we like traipsing through seriously historic history, and eventually we'll get around to America and U.S. history. Eventually.