Great quote! (warning: political)

From blog.indecision2008.com comments:

Only a Maverick can suspend his campaign to work on a bill, not
actually suspend his campaign, not work on the bill, declare that he
will not debate, actually debate, and never formally declaring his
campaign back on. I challenge anyone else to do that trickery and not
look like a doddering old fool.

Fun days with the homeschool co-op

Check out our latest adventures at the beach:

9/11
http://www.inclusivelearners.com/?p=12

9/25
http://www.inclusivelearners.com/?p=13

Sunflowers, books, football, Boy Scouts, Spore….

I did not take very good notes last week on what we were doing, but I'll attempt an overview anyway.

Please visit Unbridled Learning to read about it

8/25 - 8/30 Unbridled Learning Journal

I'm not even going to pretend to myself that I'm going to keep this up, but as the first week of the new school year has come to a close (and we have a three-day weekend woot!), I thought I would post a log of what we have been learning so far.

On the Math front, besides general review we have been exploring the various dimensions, including the 4th. It started with Kevan's interest in Escher, and his downloading a bunch of Escher artwork which somehow led him to want to download the movie Flatland which I had coincidentally just downloaded the day before. I think I read about the movie on the TAGMAX list, and since Ben had been building tesseracts and supercubes and trying to figure out the fourth dimension a few days before I had downloaded it. What a happy coincidence that Kevan was following the same interest!

So, we watched that movie which was quite fascinating although it didn't illuminate us much about the 4th dimension other than the fact that I don't think it is possible for us to understand it! When we went to the (new! and beautiful!) library, Kevan checked out Spaceland, by Rudy Rucker (which he's already finished) and Flatland the book, which he has started.

At the HSC conference, Kevan purchased a math puzzle game called Pythangos after spending a long bit of time at the table playing with it. So... picture the Pythagorean theorem, with a square on each leg the length of the leg and a square on the hypotenuse the length of the hypotenuse. There are foam pieces the size of both leg squares cut up into various shapes. The puzzle is to piece them together to fill both squares, and then to take those same pieces and fill the hypotenuse square with them. There are several puzzles, with different colored foam pieces, that get progressively harder. Too hard for me after about the second level, lol. Ben spent a *lot* of time on those this week and solved red, orange, yellow, green and blue! All he has left is purple. Blue was a doozy, let me tell you!
Here is a picture of it complete:

One other sidenote... I went to Big Lots and bought some stuff that Carmen had alerted me was on sale (I had been complaining about not being able to find hot tub test strips at Walmart; they were on clearance at Big Lots so I bought them out at 75 cents a bottle!!) I bought a big inflatable 4 person boat. I came home. Kevan came to inspect my loot as usual (I also got a book and some cds at Goodwill). He saw the boat and I told him it was only $7.50 bucks since it was on sale for 75% off (this was not a setup, seriously!) Like 2 seconds later he said, so let's see that means it was about $30? Weirdo! lol

Ok, now for science... we are waiting for a large shipment of chemistry supplies that we need for Ben's newest teddy bear - Home Chemistry Experiments. In the meantime, I found a great site with kitchen chemistry; right now we are looking at different leavening agents. We started with air... yes, air. Demonstrated by putting a balloon in the freezer overnight, measuring its circumference, then measuring again at room temperature, and then once more after placing it in a 110 degree oven for 10 minutes. It grew... and so did the popovers, with nothing but air to grow them!  Ya, they were a little overdone, hehe.

Yum! Then we made cream puffs (no pictures, though... but they were good!)

We also started reading George's Secret Key to the Universe, by Stephen Hawking and his granddaughter. This involves the fourth dimension as well! We watched the show Evolve! on the evolution of sex. Now that was interesting.

And, we watched Bill Nye's new show "Stuff Happens" which was quite fascinating - he talks about and shows you the impact of various choices (in this case, breakfast choices) on the environment.

Oh yeah, we also painted a bunch of styrofoam balls for molecule models. Ben put together a few already - H2O, H2O2, and propane, but we'll do more and take some pictures.

In the area of History, we watched a movie on the Battle of Megiddo (ancient Egypt), as part of a review of ancient history before we go into the Middle Ages through modern that they want to learn this year.  The movie (from the library) wasn't too exciting so we didn't watch the whole thing.

Kevan and I are reading Uncle Tom's Cabin together, which is obviously a great history lesson! I read it years ago, and he has started it a couple times but it is difficult to understand so we are reading it together. We also watch the Daily Show and Colbert Report together which provides great fodder for current events conversation! Not to mention the punditkitchen.com website which we both keep up with and talk about. It's amazing the stuff he knows. He totally got this one:

This is not very historical, but Ben and I are reading Bridge to Terabithia together.

In the "other" category, we have plenty going on as well. We spent two afternoons with our local homeschool group this week planning a weekly co-op that the kids will help plan and coordinate. There was much trampoline-jumping, ball-throwing and game playing. We also planned a kid swap with Ben and his friend Parker so one day a week Ben will go to their house for the day and the following week Parker will come to our house for a day. Parker's mom also works from home so this gives us each a day of relative quiet now and then.

Ben has had two football scrimmages now, and his first real game is next Saturday. He is a defensive lineman. Here he is before picture day (on the right):

Will has lots of pictures of football but I don't have them on my computer yet.

Kevan and I are still in tae kwon do. Ben has been learning and mastering magic tricks again lately, and showing them to everyone who will watch. He learns them on Youtube mostly. He is very good!

One day while we were gone Will set up a scavenger hunt for Ben with clues leading to a $50 bill, which he owed him. They had a blast running through the house finding the clues, so that night Ben set up a scavenger hunt for his dad leading to a $1 bill with 0s taped to it to make the 1s into 100s. Ben is also doing stop motion films (well, so far he is taking lots of pictures, but hasn't put them all together yet) with legos and little wooden art mannequins.

Kevan has spent a lot of time playing his guitar. One of these days I will sneak and record him hehe. He loves to play but is not quite a performer... yet!!  He and I went and saw The Rocker yesterday at the movies. It was hilarious. We both love silly comedy, and also love The Office... The Rocker starred Dwight from The Office. Will, William and Ben stayed and played football and then watched football. Nerds.

Wow, I cannot believe that was all 1 week. No wonder I was so freaking tired.