Muppets and Museums

Well, Dagfari is pretty much over the fascination with workbooks and to-do lists. I figured it wouldn't last long, and frankly, I'm a bit relieved. I mean, if he wanted to math problems and analogies and books reports all day, there was no reason for us to overhaul our lives in order to homeschool him.

For the past week and a half, D's time has been devoted to watching Season 2 of The Muppet Show (got the DVD set cheap at Costco), and turning the upstairs into an art museum. He's back into drawing, and even painting, which he hasn't done much of for a while. And he even unearthed the bin of plastic dinosaurs, which haven't seen the light of day in about five years (the dino era came to an abrupt end when we started reading Harry Potter, the week after D's 5th birthday!). He's spent a good bit of this week watching his old favorite video, Walking With Dinosaurs, and setting up dino exhibits. I figure this counts as science.

We also survived two visits to the dentist, the first a checkup, the second a cavity filling. D wasn't thrilled, but he was 100% more tolerant than last time we attempted the dentist (which, was, ahem, nearly four years ago). Nitrous oxide was a bad idea, though. It seemed to have the same effect on D that it does on me-- increases anxiety, rather than the reverse.

In critter news... we have acquired two more guinea pigs, Fred and George. These came from a person on the local homeschool list, who needed a home for her two female guinea pigs. Thinking that Robin and Percy might like to have girlfriends, and maybe eventually father a few baby pigs, I volunteered to give these pigs a home. D tentatively named them Petunia and Lily... until a look at their back ends necessitated a name change. Robin and Percy were not at all happy with the idea of two much bigger roommates, so Fred and George now have their own cage, and half of our kitchen is now a pig farm. D finds this all very amusing and thinks we should now get four female pigs. I'm not sure I'm ready for quite that much of a biology lesson.

And here I worried that science was going to be the weak point for our homeschooling!

Pictures of Summer

Summer 2007: Dagfari discovers that the diving board is fun!

More photos on the flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7332078@N02/

It's Official

We received our little orange card from the NC Dept. of Non-Public Education last week, which means that Stratford School is officially open for business.

I was assuming that we'd just continue on with unstructured summer vacation until after Labor Day. But Dagfari was eager to start "doing homeschool" last week, since all his summer camps are done. So we devised a daily list of stuff for him to do-- a bunch of reading, a page from a couple of math/logic and analogy workbooks that I'd picked up, some Minimus Latin, etc. Our "unschooling" is looking pretty schooly at the moment, but this is entirely at D's insistence. I guess this is what happens when two geeky academic types reproduce-- you get a kid who learns Latin for fun.

D is also heavily involved in a project of filming Shakespeare plays using his many stuffed animals as actors. You haven't lived until you've seen Marc Antony played by a stuffed sheep! I think we'll soon need some video editing software, which I know nothing about. Any suggestions are welcome.

ProfDad and I are gearing up for the start of the fall semester and trying to stay cool in the east-coast heat wave. We're hoping D's enthusiasm for the homeschooling project continues next week, when college classes start and the new schedule is put to the test.

Back to School

Dagfari attended the last of his weeklong summer camps last week. Fifteen kids and one incredibly patient teacher came up with a screenplay of sorts and filmed a movie on school grounds. The result was entertaining, as one might expect, and D had a great time.

(The photo above is D at the Borders Harry Potter party. He's dressed as Nearly Headless Nick.)

Now summer camp is over, August is here, and ProfessorDad and I are headed into the always-busy beginning of another academic year. It's going to be strange not having D headed back to school too. But our homeschool curriculum is starting to take shape.

ProfDad ordered a laptop for D to use, so that we won't have to fight for computer time at home. I've ordered Singapore Math materials. This will probably be our only "canned" curriculum, and I chose it because it seemed to have the least bells and whistles of any ones I've seen recommended. D's school used Chicago Math, and he hated all the games and group activities. This is typical of D-- hates the things teachers do to make school "fun" (I was the same way as a kid). Must be darned annoying for the teachers.

We're also going to get some keyboarding software (again, he doesn't want any games!), so that he can learn to do his own typing.

I guess D and I will probably come up with a reading list of some sort. He's been very interested in myths, folktales, and fairy tales, and he wants to do a research paper on the Grimm brothers. I found a nice bio of them by Donald Hettinga, who was a very young English professor when I was an undergrad at Calvin. ProfDad might do a history study of Napoleonic Europe to complement this.

We also learned about some homeschool drama classes starting up in September, so we'll sign D up for a couple of those, and maybe an art class too. When it gets less hot outside, I'm hoping to take another stab at getting D on the dreaded bicycle. This should count as P.E.!

This should keep us quite busy, I think. The next thing we have to address is recruiting college students to look after D while I'm at work and ProfDad is teaching. Homeschooling with two working parents is apparently a very unusual concept. When I tell people we're homeschooling next year, most of them immediately ask if I'm quitting my job! But I think it will work out, and will even be beneficial to D, if he gets to spend time with some interesting people.