Our Homeschool Day: day 2

Here we are at day two of the homeschool blog. I woke up early.

That isn't a great picture showing how nice the sunrise was through the window. I got a good night sleep and it just looked calm and beautiful. But if for some reason, like a baby, I hadn't slept well the colors would look completely different. Here is a poem which expresses that idea very well:

Desasosiego

Distraída y comoquienolvidaunparaguasmente

Me enamoré de la chica con trenzas

Y cuando me dí cuenta ya era tarde.

¿Porqué aulla el crepúsculo estos colores?

¿Quien le pisó la cola?

En todos los perfiles el cielo se entretiene

Recorta los aleros sin olvidar las tejas

Y yo no veré nunca el verdadero

Y completo perfil de mi cabeza.

Mi alma es una garrapata insoportable

Que me rechupa todo y deja exhausto

Y acabará acabando por matarme!

Unrest

Distracted and likewhenyouforgetyourumbrellaly

I fell in love with a girl with braids

And when I realized it was too late.

Why does the twilight howls in these colors?

Who stepped on his tail?

The sky, with all profiles, entertains

And trims the eaves without forgetting the tiles

And I will never see the true

And full profile of my head.

My soul is a foul tick that resucks it all

And leaves me exhausted

And upended, it ends up ending and killing me.

That poem was written in 1926 by Jacobo Sureda. I like the part about stepping on the tail of the colors howling -- but that is the way you feel after a long difficult night.

Made sure this was going:

Leo goes to Hawthorne Valley kindergarten two days a week for 3 hours a day, so we walked down in the cold and off he went on the bus.

The house was messy from good play the day before (card houses in one room, papers out, kitchen, etc):

So I said to clean up before I went to the barn. Aenne has to go to work. Everyone has to help. So, off to barn:

And when I got back, everything was actually straightened up. Huge surprise. I hate to start a day of "school" with any mess.

In fact, I came in and Ollie had checked his goal books (we write down goals for the week every week) and had decided to go back into his story on the Kanas -- a fictional land first created for this book/class called Islands of the Imagination -- and add in vocabulary words. He got the vocabulary words from his writing class at the Consortium, where he goes on Tuesdays.

I found this picture that Leo had done yesterday:

I was about to start doing some work with Lotta but Ollie wanted to show me how high the computer could square by 2 before hitting an error message:

Here is a screen shot of the calculator right before it erred:

MISSING PICTURE OF HIGH NUMBER

Ollie is supposed to read the preface to this great book: Bury the Chains and write a poem about it. I said to Ollie, "You know, the names of the villains of history roll off our tongues like common words, but the real heroes, we can't remember their names."

So, 12 people met in a printing shop in the 18th century in London. The first time in human history that anyone ever tried to abolish slavery because it was morally wrong. And, these not-powerful people did it, without violence. Truly a great and inspiring story and an excellent book.

He read the preface but didn't get to the poem. His other assignment is to read chapter 10 of Though a Window on war among chimpanzees and write his thought about how that might apply to human warfare today and in the evolutionary state. That will come too.

So time for school with Lotta. More multiplication with Lotta. To me, it seems like doing a few problems every day -- no more than she can really get into and enjoy -- is better than drilling. It's not about facts, it's about understanding the idea: place value, variables (function machines), patterns, multiplication, how to use an abacus, dice, a bit of probability... a bit of everything but it's all about concepts.