Turbo-Schooling

Check out this cool spider web that we found on our playset today!


What a great school day we had!!
Last spring, we started holding school at the library occasionally. We all love it there, and now we're hoping to be library regulars. So this morning we packed up our books and took over the library reading room, which is truly a wonderful spot.

We accomplished a ton: Everyone did grammar, writing, math, and some logic or other puzzles. As part of WWD's writing lesson, we did a read-aloud of the first chapter of Famous Men of the Middle Ages, which was about the Gods of the Teutons. After reading about Valhalla and Thor and the Valkyries (Teutonic angels, it turns out), we came back home for lunch and listened to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries at a very high volume, which we all loved. Then we discussed the fact that composers often get ideas from literature and from religion: "Do we think any famous composers got ideas from Christianity? Maybe? Well it turns out that most of the famous music throughout western civilization was composed with Christian themes in mind"...etc.

Today WWD worked with his supplemental math book called Football Math which is awesome. I can't say enough good things about it. We're using it as a workbook; it's full of trivia and math problems based on football history and statistics and hypothetical solutions. It's targeted towards grades 4-8, so it is perfect. Today we calculated averages by figuring out various real players' yardage per game, etc. This got us into long division with quotients and divisors into the thousands, which is ahead of his regular text, and we hardly even noticed! Perfect, perfect, perfect for him! When he gets a bit older, and gets into Fantasy Football, we will have created a HUGE monster. I can't even imagine how obsessed he will be.

We also completed building our weather instruments today. The rest of our weather science unit will include tracking and graphing weather for the next several weeks, along with discussing how seasons work. Here's a picture of our rain gauge, anenometer, and weather vane:

We also have a barometer from William's last-year work with the Jason project, and a mini store-bought weather station, both of which joined the group after this picture was taken. So now we have a real, live weather station in our back yard!