Last week

If you think I'm only having trouble keeping up with the blog, you should probably see the unchecked list of chores and the piles of books, papers, and other items collecting on tables, steps, the floor, and even chairs. It's a shameful confession, but true. I haven't written in our daily homeschool log in two weeks, and Calvin's budget sheet has been equally neglected. At least the library books are not overdue, the gardens are watered, and we do have clean underwear. Priorities.

So what happened last week? Last week was hot. We had our air on for two more days that reached into the triple digits, and nights that barely dropped into the seventies. We kept our cool by working at the library, reading a lot inside, and playing in the water. It has been over two weeks since we have had any rain worth mentioning. Our average rainfall for July is 3.67 inches, and to date we have had a total of .77 inches, the large majority of which fell in the first week. I'm battling to keep the gardens alive, and the rain barrels aren't exactly helping much.

Calvin had daily "jump start" swim lessons all week as a supplement to his weekly lesson. He takes weekly lessons at a local swim school with a comfortably warm indoor pool and enthusiastic, joyful young teachers. The lessons are limited to four students per teacher, and they are never-ending, so kids just move up to the next level whenever they are ready and keep going from there. I do admit to feeling a little guilty, though, or maybe just nostalgic, in taking him to indoor summer swim lessons when I remember so fondly the weeks of rising early to take lessons in the chilly outdoor public pool when I was little. I had to walk uphill both ways to school, too.

It was Art Fair week. The Ann Arbor Art Fairs are quite a production, and most locals try to get out of dodge for the week, but I have always enjoyed the crowd and the festive spirit. Jon's family has a tradition of spending the opening day walking the fairs and we have always joined them, so while this was unfortunately the first year that Jon could not take the time away from work, Calvin and I had a great time seeing everyone and perusing the art. Calvin was particularly drawn to a booth of nude photography, a booth of plaster and stone reliefs, and a booth of metal sculptures. He spoke well with a number of artists, and enjoyed a fair favorite—fresh squeezed lemonade. Jon and I went back on Saturday so he at least got a chance to go and look around. But even the Art Fairs didn't bring any rain worth mentioning.

Probably the highlight of the week is Calvin's new, very own Magic Tree House, built for him by Jon's dad, as imagined by his mom, in a tree at their house. A real, honest-to-goodness, awesome as all get-out tree house. I'm a little jealous. Calvin, of course, loves it, and had a marvelous time spending all afternoon in it. He especially loved the sweeping and upkeep, so why, I ask you, is our own house so messy?

And lastly, we spent yesterday morning cooling off at the lake, where Calvin practiced his swimming and played at splashing his father for a good couple of hours. This year especially I'm feeling lucky to live so close to a small public lake and beach.

Which brings us to this week. We have just three more weeks before we'll be on our final summer vacation, which I figure is just about enough time to catch up on everything and get back into a routine so that I can lose a whole bunch of ground again by leaving. But at least it's been fun.

Where the week went.

Better late than never. Here are some favorite moments from last week.

The past few days, or maybe the past week, we have been gearing up for a camping trip. It will be our second, but only sort of, since the first was for a single night and only a half hour from home. This time we are headed north to Wilderness State Park to rediscover the beauties of our home state. This trip will be a three-nighter, so still just a warm-up, really. We'll spend one day on Mackinac Island and another hiking or on the beach, hopefully, and we're pretty excited. Preparations have included research (mainly looking up lists of camping needs and wants), list making (of our own lists), and shopping (i.e. garage saling). It has been a fun exercise in "what-ifs" and "best vs. worst case scenarios", and Calvin is certainly developing a knack for contingency planning.

We finished the multiplication talbes this week and broke out Totally Tut to celebrate.

We learned about water animal life at Nature Thursdays and Calvin practiced his swimming in Independence Lake. It's fun to see how far he has come, and I'm looking forward to watching him play like a fish while we are up north.

Of course our one butterfly eclosed and went on his merry way.

We watched a spider weaves his web in the window of Calvin's playhouse, and then we watched him spin it again the next evening, and then the next.

We ate our first strawberry, and made kale salad from our first garden harvest, but we're still waiting on the rest of the plants.

And we went garage saling! We found so many fabulous games for around $1 each that we are still trying them all out. We also brought home a pretty descent Etch A Sketch.

See you in a few days on the other side of the camping trip, assuming we're not eaten by bears (this is one contigency for which I do not have a plan).

What happened to our week

Here it is Friday, it feels like Tuesday, and I last posted on Sunday. So what happened to our week? I will probably get back into the routine of posting regularly around the time that we leave for our week long camping trip at the end of the month, and then I'll have start all over again. I think routines are healthy habit. I love routines, really, but apparently I only stick with them just so long. In our family it's a good thing that Jon is more of a true adherent to routine. He is the reason we have fresh, hot coffee every morning, and that the garbage gets out in a timely fashion on Friday mornings. Which brings me back to today, which happens to suddenly be Friday, which means it's time to look back at the week.

The birthday weekend provided lots of new diversions for the week. I spent many a moment with an adorable Boris dragon, we played many games of Oz Fluxx (fun!) and Dragonology (both beautiful and fun), and we assembled a pretty awesome model hand.

Book wise Calvin has been a reading machine all week. He received several new books as gifts and he seemed to want to read all of them at once. He read all of the first Dragonology book, The Dragon's Eye, and is well into the second book in the series, The Dragon's Apprentice. There is some violence in the series, but mainly they are focused on the dragons, and we have been seeing and recording sightings of dragons everywhere we have gone all week. Calvin also read Chasing the Gnome, the first in a new series of books that is authored by a father in our homeschool group. He gave the book to Calvin at last week's gathering and asked him for feedback, which Calvin readily supplied at today's meeting, easy to do since he really enjoyed the book.

We've been practicing multiples of four all week. We mostly practice while playing ball or doing some other physical activity, or while playing Totally Tut. Following the Math-U-See lesson order, so far we have zero, one, two, ten, five, nine, three, six, and now four. Calvin has definitely mastered the concept of multiplication, but memorization will come with time, and lots and lots of games.

We mostly left off history this week in favor of birthday games and books, but we did watch the first section of The Story of India, and today we just started reading a beautiful, illustrated, youth version of the Mahabharata.

Science was our milk and cookies this week. I think summer, with the beckoning of the outdoors and the liveliness of nature around us, was made for life sciences. This week we reviewed BFSU lesson C1: energy, then we took things outside to the park for lesson C3: kinetic/potential energy (as in rolling balls down slides, etc.), and B3: distinguishing plants and animals). Sitting in the park, having a picnic lunch after biking/running a couple of miles, we had a nice chat about all the life around us, about its need for energy to survive, and its place in the world for absorbing and passing on energy. It was just a start, but a fun one at that.

This weekend we will be setting up our tent to prepare it for the summer. A biking or hiking trip is also in the works, and Sunday is Father's Day, when we'll be enjoying some fantastic ribs with family. I hope our little dragon will come along.

What have we been up to?

It's been a while since I really posted about homeschooling. Between illness and travel I've had a hard time keeping up here. First Tulip Time, then two weeks of a nasty cold, then one week before we left for Chicago, and now this weekend we're off again, headed north to visit family. Actually the whole summer promises to be as scattered (and joyous).

Of course, this doesn't mean that we haven't been reading, and researching, and trying, and doing, and learning everywhere and all the time. Some of it has been researching and playing in the library, in life, or even on the computer, and some of it has been more curriculum oriented, with a worksheet here and there.

This week we are finishing up our initial tour of the ancient Indus Valley with a few fun links, in particular this site from the BBC. Using the Story of the World as a guide we'll be back in the area in a couple of weeks, but as with our first stop in ancient Egypt I am supplementing with a more thorough sally into the area with a little help from Intellego and my friend the library. We read a couple of books, most notably Savitri: A Tale of Ancient India, and in reading it Calvin learned that the tale was from The Mahabharata and asked to read the whole thing, so we have a copy of that on order, too.

Speaking of reading, with all the driving we've been doing Calvin has been gobbling up books. He's on book seven of the Oz series, The Patchwork Girl, has reread some of the Magic Tree House books, and has started in on a new series as well, the Paleo Joe Detective Series.

He's more than half way through the multiplication tables, using Math-U-See lessons, but mostly via dice games.

In keeping with the classical education, or at least partially so, he memorized a poem and we did some picture narration, writing a story about a Mary Cassatt painting, Children Playing on the Beach. Calvin remembered, after this suggested activity, that he'd read about the artist before, and he was right—we have  a copy of her biography from the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series, so he read that as well.

And we baked: shortcakes to go with strawberries and cream on Tuesday, and banana bread today.

He devoured science this week, even more so than history, which is his usual favorite. We did lessons C-1 and D-1, energy and gravity, in BFSU, and he checked about five different books out from the library on the subjects before making his own.

We also spent a lot of time touring the gardens, walking the dogs, and playing at the park.

What DID we do this week?

Our two biggest events this week were group oriented. On Friday, of course, there was the play and talent show at our HAA gathering, and on Monday we met with another homeschooling group for the first time. It's a more local group—smaller, and two of the families we already know from HAA. It's a very informal, relaxed gathering. The kids played games and designed and created paper airplanes while the moms chatted and watched. We are looking forward to romping through local parks with them throughout the summer, as well as gathering in more distant parks with our friends at HAA. What a fun summer we will have!

Calvin finished reading The Water Horse and Mitt the Michigan Mouse and started The Marvelous Land of Oz. On the subject of books, Thursday we went to see a stage production of something he read last month: The Cricket in Times Square. He wrote a journal entry about the event.

There was Lego play in ancient Egypt, complete with Lego pyramid Egyptian god figures. Calvin read, and reread and reread, Senefer: A Young Genius in Old Egypt (out of print, but we got it from the library), and tried a few fun links suggested by Intellego: Images from inside Tut's Tomb (by Discovery News); a video about tombs, and lots of info on King Tut (from National Geographic); and a great interactive site on the pyramids at Giza (from the British Museum). He also played this silly tomb adventure game (from National Museums Scotland), this silly mummy game (from Schools Liaison), and revisited this great interactive mummy making site (from the Children's University of Manchester). Both The British Museum and the Children's University of Manchester sites have great overall presentations on ancient Egypt.

That Anubis, he's such a trickster...

He was reading about Senefer as an elephant walked by...

He did two Math-U-See lesson sets from Gamma, introducing products of 5 and 10, and we also discussed products of 9. We played Totally Tut a few times, some modified versions of Shut the Box, and quizzed each other on odd-ball multiplication problems (the bigger the number, the better—what is 6 million x 9????) while playing in the yard, while walking the dogs, while eating lunch, while driving...I think you get the idea.

I'm bringing back BFSU (Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding). We'd been wandering through it last fall but got away from it over the winter, so this week we reviewed some of the topics we'd covered and I was delighted to find that the understanding is still there. The BFSU book is just a guide for us, a way for me to jump start conversations about science, but really we've been talking about these things all along.

There was piano practice, and line practice, what with the talent show and the play on Friday, both of which went very well. There was dog walking, grocery shopping, swimming lessons, and library volunteering.

As a family we started watching episodes from The Pyramid Code on Netflix. It's a little conspiracy theorist in flavor, but many of the ideas put forward are entirely plausible, or at least imaginable, and the show certainly makes one think.

This week we'll be cleaning up from the book sale, which happened yesterday, and heading over to Holland, Michigan for the Tulip Time festival, at which there are likely to be no tulips this year since the season started a month early. No problem, we don't really go for the tulips so much as for the big lake, the beach, and the quiet, relax time we sneak in while there.