Well, like his dear old mom, A.J. is suffering from a cold today and does not have much energy. We have taken advantage of this by sitting down and reading together (when he hasn't been sleeping) from Your Big Backyard, where we read about box turtles, hummingbirds, and elephants painting (e.g., http://www.elephantart.com).

Curious as to how small hummingbirds really were (I thought 2-3 ounces), we looked them up in our handy-dandy Encyclopedia of Animals. What we learned amazed even me. The smallest hummingbird, the bee hummingbird (pictured above), only weighs 2.5 grams or 1/10 of an ounce! Wow. And they can beat their wings up to 78 times per second. The giant hummingbird weighs in at a grand total of 2/3 of an ounce! Amazing little creatures!

A.J., being A.J., soon began to make up new types of birds, like the ling bird, which could weigh anywhere from 1/27 of an ounce to 2 pounds and could flap its wings at 123-788 beats per second! :)

• "Are there real pirates now?" (game: TradeWinds 2)
• "Do blue whales have teeth?" (game: Feeding Frenzy 2)
  
• "Do some whales have teeth?" (game: Feeding Frenzy 2)
• "What do oysters eat?" (game: Feeding Frenzy 2)
• "Do oysters really make pearls? How?" (game: Feeding Frenzy 2)
• "What's 30 x 30?" (game: Qbeez 2)
  

• A cake (with 33 on it, my age, since there were no Mother's Day candles)
• Two notebooks (both purple, my favorite color)
• A new set of one of my favorite kinds of pens (yes, with a purple one)
• A pack of Post-It Notes (with purple again!)
• A toy matchbox car
• A book called Marley and Me.  He got the book because of the picture of the puppy on the cover, and sure enough, it turned out to be a really good book (it's a true story about a man, his family, and "the world's worst [behaved] dog"). It made me cry at the end, though. I should have stopped when the dog started getting old! I knew I should have!
• A very sweet card, in which A.J. wrote, "I love you so much! I'll never stop!"

Well, I haven't written an update for a little while because A.J. is totally still into playing cards. He plays cards on the computer (Parker Brothers Classic Card Games, which includes Rook, Free Parking, Cribbage, Spades, and then some), and he plays with decks of regular playing cards. He takes them in the car and into restaurants! He plays them by himself or with anyone who is interested. He is learning card games from books and making up his own games, complete with rules. He says he likes having fun and winning when playing cards.

Rachel, a friend of ours, was over the other day and played Rook with him on the computer. She was amazed because he doesn't just know the rules, but he knows the strategy and plans his plays in advance. For you family out there, I think he's ready for Iowa! Oh, and watch out, because I told him all about bidding other players up so that they would go set! He loves that!

Last night before bed, we tried a game from a library book (Card Games for Kids by Adam Ward) called "Cheat." Alan read the rules and said it sounded a lot like a game he knew called Bull****. I'd heard of that one before, too. You deal out all the cards, and each player lays a card or cards face down in the middle and says "five" or "three fours" or whatever. You have to either play the same card, one up, or one down. Or at least, you have to say that's what they are...it's all about bluffing. So, it took a few minutes for A.J. to get this concept.

First, Alan kept saying, "Don't let us see your cards, man!" Then, A.J. says, "I don't have any 2s, 3s, or 4s." We told him he was supposed to pretend that he did. So, next time it went around, he said as he put his card down, "That's a 2, 3, or 4!" LOL. "Just pick one cutie!" He did start to get it near the end, but you could hear the hesitation in his voice when he bluffed. A.J. won and Alan and I lost b/c we kept catching each other in cheats and had a ton of cards! :)

ÊËÌÍ

We are also reading a book called The Story of Writing and Printing (by Anita Ganeri and published by my former employer, Oxford University Press). I think it's really fascinating, and A.J. likes getting to see "some stuff that I didn't know before. Whenever it brings up Greek or Roman stuff, I get to call Alan in—"Is this right?" or "Did you know this?"

For example, did you know that the Greeks first wrote right to left? Then, they tried to write plow-wise, which means switching direction at the end of each line. Can you imagine trying to read that? I guess it wouldn't be that hard if you were used to it, but it kind of blows me away. Maybe that would be a good way to write in code:

A.J. played cards today.

.teahC dna kooR deyalp eH

What fun!

The Greeks eventually settled on writing left to right. Well, today is PE, so we're off to Harrisonburg to have class and run errands. We might even find time for a snack and a game or two of cards!

For those of you that don't already know, A.J. is taking a homeschool PE class every Wednesday in Harrisonburg with friends from NLSV (Natural Learners of the Shenandoah Valley).

At first, I thought going to Harrisonburg every week would be a pain, but I decided to make that my grocery shopping day, too, since the Harrisonburg Wal-mart has more stuff than ours. We fit it all together and have a good time.

In the first class, I wondered how A.J. would do. He was totally off in his own world, but he did have pink cheeks and was breathing more rapidly by the time the 45-minute class (30 minutes of directed play followed by 15 minutes of free play) was over.  However, by the second class, he was actually following directions (most of the time) and still  having fun.

Lauren, the teacher, is really great with both the younger kids (A.J.'s group) and the older kids. A.J. is also getting some good social interaction with the other kids. So now we have groups of friends in Harrisonburg, Luray, and Woodbridge. Very cool.

With the PE class plus his constant bouncing (he's taken over an old chair in the basement for "trampoline" practice), he definitely gets a lot of exercise. He was also interested again for a while in his Yoga Kids video.

On another note, I took a cue from the unschoolers this week when we stopped at the library before PE and asked A.J. if he wanted to get some books about card games from the kids section since he's been so interested in that. He did, and we also had to stop and play a quick game of blackjack before heading to PE.

We read one of the books last night before bed and spent a little time playing P'yanitsa, a Russian card game that I'm sure he'll be asking me to play when he wakes up this morning. It's a lot like War, only the reverse--you're trying to get rid of all your cards. Anyhow, the book also included a little bit of the history of card games. It was neat to learn that cards used to be very expensive (and were even used as wedding presents!), and it was the invention of the printing press (like with books) that finally made cards inexpensive and, thus, more universal.

A.J.'s also making up his own card games with specific rules, and they're not too bad. Sometimes his rules conflict with one another, but most of the time, the games end up being fun for both of us :)

We also started a book this week about Mali, which A.J. picked out from the library. I led him to the geography section, since he likes geography so much, and he picked it out. It is part of a Visual Geography series. What surprised me is that as we read, he actually seemed interested (I thought it might be a bit past him, but he's always proving me wrong!).

Of course, being a number kid, toward the end of our reading, he got really focused on how deep the Niger River was when the book showed a boat full of people crossing said river. I told him it was probably not too deep because the boatmen were pushing the boat with poles, but the river had to be deep enough to support all those people (20 or so) in that little narrow boat (suddenly we were in a discussion of buoyancy!). I said 6-10 feet. It's hard to know for sure, though, since I don't even know where in Mali the picture was taken or if it was the rainy or dry season!

We try so hard!

Yesterday started out pretty typically, with A.J. getting right on the computer after he woke up to play card games (Rook, Free Parking, Rummy, etc.) while I did other things like email and laundry.

In the morning, we played a game of Sleeping Queens (he keeps beating me!), and then made our own king and queen cards by coming up with names (I made the Lily King, and he made the Silly Queen) and then drawing the "cards" on a big piece of art paper. Then, we reduced the drawings on my handy-dandy all-in-one scanner/printer/copier/fax machine. We also copied the SQ card backs. We then used a glue stick to stick the new card drawings and backs to card stock and wha-lah! Two new cards :) Of course, A.J. made his queen worth 65 points, which means if you get that card, you basically win the game because none of the other queens are worth near that much (the Heart Queen is worth the most at 20).

This afternoon, I invited him over to my computer to investigate a math site I learned of through my daily Clickschooling email.

We visited www.321know.com. First, we practiced double-digit vertical addition. I reviewed the first problem with him because it had been awhile since we'd worked on carrying. I thought he might have trouble with it, but he did 20 more problems with no trouble. I liked the way he added (I don't think I taught him this, but Alan might have). If he has a problem like 28 plus 32, he first adds 28 plus 30 (which is an easy 58) and then adds the other 2 to make 60. I thought that was clever (but I'm not biased or anything!)

We also did a little with work on place values to the hundreds. We've done that before, and he remembered it pretty quickly (and got bored with it quickly, too).

Next, I wanted to introduce a little more geometry, so we started looking at and talking about polygons. That got his attention for awhile. We talked about sides and angles, including what degrees were and what acute, obtuse, and right angles were. We also talked about what each polygon was called, depending on how many angles and sides it had. We also talked about the roots of the names (e.g., how "oct" means 8, just like in octogon and octopus). He got so interested in polygons with up to 10 sides (a decagon!) that we found and printed a list of the names up to 20 sides (an icosagon!). He made up his own names for past 20 (did you know that a 21-sided polygon is a podjeral? )

Then, yesterday evening, I headed out to a mom's night to talk with some other area moms about unschooling (basically, child-led learning). It was interesting. That is definitely the way A.J. learns best now. We do introduce some things and see how interested he is, and he comes up with some things on his own. Alan and I agreed to stick with what works for now and then change the plan if it no longer works for us in the future.

Hi, all!

I am creating this homeschooling blog so that family and friends who want to know can see what A.J. is up to in his homeschooling journey. Alan and I have, of course, been teaching him at home since the day he was born. However, this year, the technicalities of homeschooling are starting to be more prominent because he is becoming "school age."

For the next school year, we will either have to opt him out of kindergarten or go ahead and send in our NOI (notice of intent to homeschool).

We also joined VaHomeschoolers, which is a statewide organization that provides support and information to Virginia homeschooling families.

Right now, we are still pretty much unschooling (which means letting A.J. do the leading), although we are considering adding more structure to his schedule. I imagine we will end up somewhere in the middle between  unschooling and classical learning with some other styles thrown in. I am meeting with some other unschooling moms (with kids A.J.'s age and older) on Monday just to see how unschooling has worked for them and their families.

We also ordered the first volume of English from the Roots Up, as Alan would eventually like to teach A.J. Latin and Greek, and this book was recommended to us for teaching Latin and Greek roots. If A.J. shows a lot of interest in that, it may be time to start teaching him more intensively.

A.J. has been really into card games lately, which do a lot to reinforce math skills and teach probability and other things (including good sportsmanship, one of the hardest things to teach!). He likes traditional games, such as blackjack, poker, and Rook. We have also bought a couple of kid's card games, including Rat-a-Tat Cat, which is fun and in which players aim to get the lowest score. We just bought the card game Sleeping Queens yesterday. It includes math (matching and simple addition) and strategy as well. A.J. was so happy that he could counter my knight (which would steal one of his queens) with a dragon!

We've also been reading more educational books at night since he's been caught up in games during the day. Last week, we read Children's Atlas of the World over the course of four or five days. It is an Usborne book, and after teaching about a certain environment (say lakes and rivers), it has several illustrations at the bottom of the page that you try to find on the continent maps included in the book. He really liked that part, and we were able to introduce some thinking skills there by saying things like "well, we're talking about deserts, so which places have deserts?"

Last night, we read in A.J.'s geography book about the phases of the moon, since he was showing interest in the way the moon changes from day to day. A couple of days ago, we turned off all the lights and got out a flashlight and a basketball to illustrate how the sun and earth interact to make light and dark/day and night.

Homeschooling is fun and definitely an adventure!