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"!