Unschooling Moments of the Week - 2/4/11

I think I'll do this report by student:

Butterfly Knife

Josh, 15 year old - my most un-unschooled child at this point.  Things he prefers to do on his own - read web comics and play videogames.  This week he also started reading the second book in the Discworld series on his Kindle (Rick gave him one for Christmas).  He also loves to play with his butterfly knife.  He got a stunt one, also for Christmas.  The stunt one isn't actually sharp, so he can practice all his cool knife tricks without cutting off his hand or anything.  For his schoolish stuff - the stuff he says he wants to do because one day he does think he wants to go to college (but frankly, doesn't seem all that motivated in the moment):

• Took a home Biology test for his Bio class, and handed it in on Tuesday.  He also read and did vocabulary cards for Biology.  Attended Biology SAT study group.
• He did Geometry at Kahn Academy. (which is fast becoming one of our favorite places on the web).  I'm not sure how far he's gotten though.  Probably should ask him that!
• He did some more on line Driver's Education.
• He read but didn't quite finish chapter 6 of The History of the Church.  
• He read Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot
• We did a practice National Latin Exam and attended Latin class.
• He attended his CLC group Wednesday night.  Something he really looks forward to each week.
• Hopefully he'll attend gym class today.

 A really good book!

Sean, 12 year old.  Had a really good week.  He loved working with his older brother Will.  They got really into the whole fairy tale thing.  Sean, who has complained about reading for any sustained period of time except if it was comic books spent an hour reading Gwinna and Grimm's Fairy Tales each day.  He also enjoyed doing math with Kahn Academy.  They have dumped Saxon in favor of this (at least for this week), they started at the beginning with Arithmetic to make sure Sean gets all the concepts thoroughly.  Sean's also worked on Latin (completed Chapter 28 of Latin for Children A) and did some cursive as well as some dictation from WWE3.  For fun he went sledding with Becky and played Bananagrams with me.  But mostly for fun he obsessed on the new DS3 that is coming out in March and also he played a lot of videogames.  He drew his self-imposed number of comics and posted them on his Deviantart account.  He also really enjoyed the brain teasers at Kahn academy this week.

Becky, 9 years old.  Becky was really resistant to anything formal this week.  She didn't go to art because she said she had a scratchy throat but that turned out to be nothing.  It seems like she just got a bad start to the week and never quite got traction after that.  She did like doing her cursive penmanship.  She's gotten very good at it.  We did a wee bit of Latin but she just wasn't into it.  She seemed especially interested in spelling this week, insisting that I put up new spelling rules on our cabinet wall of learning.

She had fun playing with fraction manipulatives for a bit.  I had gotten the manipulatives out but had to go do something in another room for a while.  When I came back Sean was explaining all about fractions to her, so I didn't have to do that for her!  She already knew some stuff anyway.  She watched a lot of PBS kids this week, more than usual.  She did a lot of sledding at the beginning of the week.  She liked curling up with me and playing Scrabble with me on the ipad.  She loves all the read alouds we are doing currently and begs for more.  

At one point she tried to devise her own maze.  She wanted to make it really difficult but found that it was difficult to make a difficult maze!

Will, 18 year old, had a great week.  He got up and went to daily mass a couple of times.  He set up his next CLEP test on Western Civ. I for 2/22.  He did lots of music practice and lots of reading on music and made it to both music lessons this week.  He's studying the book of Samuel on his own.  He even made it to the gym once or twice. Plus he's been doing a great job teaching Sean math and literature.

Hannah, 20 year old, continues to be in Rome, Italy where she is not putting enough entries on her blog to satisfy her family!  I hear she's reading things like the Phaedo and Oedipus Rex and the like and doing neat things like scavenger hunts around Rome and attending wine tasting parties.  Ah, the life!

Books this week:  Read Bible History - we are up to Daniel in the Lion's Den.  For The Story of the Romans we've read about Cincinnatus and Camillus.  In Mathematicians are People, Too, we read about Sir Isaac Newton.  Rick is still reading The Begger Queen by Lloyd Alexander.  I'm still reading David Copperfield out loud to everyone (it's gonna take forever!).  We're up to the part when David meets up with Steerforth again in London and goes home to meet his mother.  We've just been introduced to Miss Dartle.  The family is trying to decide if they like Steerforth or not.  They mostly do, whereas I just want to shout at David, "No, no!  Don't introduce him to Em'ly!"  I'm still reading Hitty to Becky.  She's made it back to New England again, only to be lost in a hayloft.  And Will is reading Wayside School to both Becky and Sean and doing it in a very dramatic and funny way.  He seems to do this late at night when I am already in bed.  I hear lots of shouts of laughter coming from Becky's bedroom.  This gets Becky and Sean very wired at night, so they don't go to sleep until very late.  Sigh.  But I don't have the heart to stop it, because William will be gone away to school next year and our hearts will be broken.  Sob.

Butterfly knife image http://www.darrelralph.com/ddr_knives_balisongs_balisong1.htm