Countdown to holiday fun

It is getting harder and harder to get these written, but maybe that is a sign of a good thing...we are too busy!  In this last week we have had play rehearsal, been to the Nutcracker which thoroughly enchanted and thrilled him this year, not the least of which were our surprising up close seats.   Conor attended a play with his best friend on Saturday called "Red Ranger Came Calling", which they both adored, especially when the lead came and sat between their seats.  Conor has been writing every day, letters to his pen pals, in the lesson book we are creating, and a secret book for me he worked on for over an hour yesterday am. He was so into it that he wanted to show me right away but I convinced him to wrap it and save for the big day.  We have also been frantically baking and icing cookies for the play tomorrow, Conor doing all the measuring himself-including some recipes that I had him double and do by himself-a sweet kind of math class!

Let Conor tell you what we have been doing:

This is the second time I have gone to the Nutcracker and this time we were 4 seats from the far right!  This time was much more fun because it made it like 3D, we could see some of the orchestra, we could see back stage, and I understood what was going on better.  One time one of the male dancers was goofing off on the side before he came on, that was funny to see.  The Red Ranger story was very good to watch and now I want to go see the bicycle growing up a tree on Vashon.  In piano lessons I am learning to play the blues and "Jolly Olde Saint Nicolas".  I enjoy piano and find it is getting easier and easier to read music.  I am reallly excited about our play tonight that I am in, "A Big Day for Little Bear".  I play Galen, a wizard, and I get to be on top of a high mountain which is actually stairs up to a platform.  We go on in just a few hours for opening night, two performances! 

We are dropping behind on communicating, being a week of night shifts for me, along with our usual aikido, drama practice and sports classes.  In aikido, Conor successfully passed through his green belt test!  He has been working some months toward this and when he knew he was ready, he was very confident and prepared.  Already he is taking on the new role and the new skills with ease.  He also had a monthly Wilderness Awareness class-a lovely non-rainy day where he learned about many properties of Cedar and many other trees, collected sap, hiked a lot, roasted his lunch apple over the fire and had a great time.   

Conor says, "The best thing I learned this week is about lattice multiplication.  It is a trick I learned (on Khan Academy) to multiply any large number.  First you write out the numbers putting a space between each of the numbers.  Then you draw columns under them.  You draw the number you are multiplying on the side and draw lines out for those.  Then you split each column in diagonal, coming up through the boxes from left to right.  Then you start multiplying from the ones column on the top right, then the tens, hundreds and so on.  If the result is greater than ten, you carry over the ten number to the upper box.  After you have filled up all your diagonal boxes with your multiply results, you start adding the diagonal lines, carry over any tens to the next diagonal up.  Using this tool is very cool, you can multiply any number of any size, even millions!"

Today we are happy and festive from a trip to the Pacific Northwest Ballet's Nutcracker where we somehow scored, via homeschool friends, fourth row seats.  Conor was just the right age this year, also having seen the story a few times, to really appreciate and enjoy it this year-he says it was "awesome"!

Winter has arrived!

Conor's summary of our last week or two

In drama this week is the last practice week before my play! And  I am also learning about the days of creation  and am doing pictures about each of the seven days along with the words in my best handwriting.  We have been playing "Apples to Apples" which has been great for my vocabulary.  For math I have been doing multiplication and division, lots of mental tricks to do them, practicing my times tables with bean bags.  And today at the new park we went to we found a sundial and I was able to tell the time!  This is also the last 2 weeks of sports class.  The end.

So we have started onto a module of "Old Testament" stories as a historical, language arts, and fine arts experience, starting with the days of creation.  Which is very cool on the heels of the Native American stories of creation, an interesting comparison.  We are making a book of wet on wet paintings of these Thestories so every day we cover a new day painting the scene and then using the best handwriting for the text.  I was entirely amused to see my son correcting the 1600 era English of the text version we were reading, and his handwriting has improved immensely.

In our math, he has become quite scary at mental math, using shortcuts that are faster than ours in multiplication and division.  We still play our bean bag games to get faster at times tables.  We were at the park today and discovered a sundial at this new park-he correctly told me the time and totally confused another dad and I with his explanation of how he got the answer but he was right-even calculating for daylight savings time.  I am pretty sure soon I will be eclipsed by this boy, if not already.