Weekly Wrap-up: American Revolution, Part 2

We are just about done with the American Revolution.  A highlight of our studies was our trip to Valley Forge, PA. They had a special Homeschool Day program where they lined up the kids for military drilling, complete with fake wooden muskets,  and had various stations for the kids to learn about what they wore, how they built their huts, how they cooked, rules they had to follow, etc. It really brought to life what we were learning about. We toured the house where George Washington stayed during the winter at Valley Forge, as well as checked out the memorial dedicated to the soldiers of the war.

George Washington's Headquarters

We also stopped by Washington Crossing in PA, since that was close enough by. To be honest, it wasn't that thrilling, but there was a museum with artifacts and information from that time period. But still, it's pretty cool to stand where they embarked on the crossing and see the replica boats.

So during our 2nd half of our American Revolution unit, we covered from Valley Forge, through Saratoga, and on to Yorktown.  We read comic book biographies on Thomas Jefferson and Benedict Arnold from the Graphic library, and read "Why Not, Lafayette?" by Jean Fritz...All of them I would highly recommend. Lafayette, especially, was a fascinating person and had quite a notable life! I honestly knew NOTHING about him, other than that he came from France to help the Americans. I really loved learning about him alongside my kids.

This week, we are planning to wrap up the American Revolution with an emphasis on George Washington's life, using the following books:

George Washington's Breakfast

George Washington True Patriot

If you Grew Up with George Washington

This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschooler's Weekly Wrapup.

Weekly Wrap-up: American Revolution, First half

Over the past month, been interspersing a week of 50 states geography, with a week of the American Revolution. This week was our 2nd week on the American Revolution.

The first week, we covered the events leading up to the war and the events of 1775:

• Stamp Act, Sugar Act, other Intolerable Acts
• Boston Massacre
• Paul Revere
• Lexington and Concord
• Bunker Hill
• Fort Ticonderoga
• Henry Knox

We've read short books about each of the topics above, none of which are that noteworthy-just books we pulled off the shelf from the library, but these are few highlights among the books we've read:

• George vs. George: The American Revolution as Seen From Both Sides - This is a great overview that covers the major factors leading to war, key players, and notable events. We are using this throughout our American Revolution unit.
• Can't You Make Them Behave, King George? - This is a fun biography of King George III, written by Jean Fritz.

• Mr. Revere and I - Historical Fiction, from the point of view of Paul Revere's horse. This was a fun overview of all the major events leading up to and including Lexington and Concord.
• And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?  - This was a good biography written by Jean Fritz. She does a great job of adding humor to the biographies.
• Guns for General Washington - This covers a not-too-well-known event in the war-a trip lead by Colonel Henry Knox from Boston to Fort Ticonderoga, and back again, in order to get weapons to General Washington's troops, across mountainous terrain in harsh winter conditions.

We have also been watching Liberty's Kids videos also and we are loving them! The kids always want to watch more episodes, but I don't want them getting too far ahead of our timeline! It does a great job of portraying the differing points of views of the colonists and the loyalists, and touches on other important issues of the day, like slavery and the treatment of Jews

This week was our second week of the American Revolution and we covered up through 1777:

• Thomas Paine's "Common Sense"
• The Declaration of Independence
• The Liberty Bell
• Nathan Hale
• Washington's crossing of the Delaware
• Saratoga
• Valley Forge

The kids each read a book about civilians serving as spies for the Continental Army:

Bunny read Daughter of Liberty by Robert Quackenbush about a woman who retrieved some important papers for General Washington in New York after the British took over his headquarters.

Monkey read The Spy and General Washington by William Wise about a man who posed as a Tory in Griggstown, NJ and served as a double agent, pretending to by a spy helping the British, but actually reporting to Washington, giving information that helped launch the attack on the Hessians in Trenton.

Both books claim to be factual, but I guess after so many years, some people question whether these stories are authentic or folklore. Regardless, they sure were exciting stories and a glimpse into life during the war.

We also read biographies about Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock by Jean Fritz.  We are really enjoying these biographies by this author! It's very kid-friendly, while still being really informational.  We've also enjoyed some of a series of comic books ("Graphic Library") of some of the various topics, like Valley Forge, as well as some Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type books in the "Interactive History Adventures" series.

Bunny especially has been getting interested in the colonial period. She bought a shirt at Colonial Williamsburg when we visited this summer, and this week, we made a mob cap and apron for her. She also sewed part of another 'gown' for an alternative colonial outfit. 

Both kids also wrote up their own 'pamphlet' to convince colonists to join the cause of freedom (like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense"...but on a much more basic level!) this week as their writing practice, and did copywork from the Declaration of Independence. 

We also worked on our wall timeline:

For review, we played charades with the names of various key players during the Revolution! The kids had a blast with that.

I asked the kids whether they wanted to do the 50 states next week or continue with history, and Bunny said "History!". Coming from the girl who HATED history a few months ago, who would groan and throw a fit whenever history was mentioned, this was a HUGE milestone! I looked at her questioningly, and asked "History?!??!" in disbelief and she replied, "I'm kinda interested in it now!"

***This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers' Weekly Wrap-up. ***

Weekly Wrap-up: Weather Unit

It's been a lighter load this summer, just due to family visits, outside camps, and playdates, but we are still doing a little bit so schooling. We spent about 3 weeks on Weather, learning about temperature, cold fronts/warm fronts, air pressure, precipitation/water cycle/dew point, relative humidity, extreme weather (tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, etc.), and forecasting.  What took me by surprise was that my kids had never watched a weather report on TV! Admittedly, we don't watch much TV, so that's probably why, but also, with iPads and smartphones, we've always used weather apps to get our forecasts!

We used a variety of books to do some hands-on demos and read about various weather-related topics:

  

The National Weather Service also has Learning Lessons with printouts to use for making weather maps, so we practiced making isobars and isotherms using their maps.

Here's a couple of our projects:

Homemade Thermometer

Assembled Weather Station Kit

We incorporated other subjects into this unit with the following:

• Writing: Use weather in a story
• Math: convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and vice versa
• Computer Skills: Excel graph of temperature change
• Greek root words: meteor, bar, meter, therm, hydro. 
• Chinese words: rain, snow, hot, cold, temperature, degrees, clear, cloudy, clouds

It was a fun and practical unit!

This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschooler's Weekly Wrapup.

Weekly Wrap-up: Trip to Utah, Native Americans, Colonial Period, and Deserts

Well, this will be more of a monthly wrap-up, rather than a weekly wrap-up, as it's been some time since I've posted. In that time, we covered Native Americans, desert animals, the Jamestown settlement, the arrival of the Pilgrims, and the starts of the Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maryland colonies, as well as taking a trip to Utah to explore some of the National Parks in the area.

We had planned the trip months ago as purely a vacation to hike and see the beautiful landscapes there, before we had even planned to homeschool Bunny and did not have a plan for science or history for the upcoming months. But turns out, our new history and science curricula had us studying Native Americans and desert animals RIGHT before our trip!

So while we were at Arches National Park, we saw a dessert cottontail rabbit, plenty of lizards, and flowering cacti.

Dessert cottontail rabbit

We also saw some Native American petryglyphs carved into the cliffs at Capitol Reef National Park. The tribes mentioned were familiar to the kids, because we had studied some of the different Southwest Native American cultures.

And of course, we learned about the formation of arches, spires and fins through erosion, and we learned about geological rock layers and forces that produced suck amazing views.

Before our trip, we did some fun Native American projects(we focused on the pre-colonial period): 

Pictographs

Various art projects

Pizza map of Native American cultural regions

Sampling of Native American food (various regions)

Attempting to build a home out of sticks

After we got back, we started learning about the colonial period and the first European settlers. No great activities or projects though, just some standard mapwork and timelines and lots of reading from our America the Beautiful textbook, Story of the World, the Light and the Glory for Children (tells the early history of America from a Christian perspective), and a few books from the library. We watched Disney's Pocahontas and picked apart the historical inaccuracies and read a few chapter books to get to know the era better:

• A Lion to Guard Us 
• Blood on the River: Jamestown 1607
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond
• Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims

However, we hope to visit Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown, VA this summer! 

This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschooler's Weekly Wrapup.

Weekly Wrap-up: European Explorers

We're back on to history now, after taking last week for science. We had started with Leif Eriksson a few weeks back, and now we've come to Columbus and other European explorers. We are using Notgrass's America the Beautiful  and I really like it so far. It's got a short Bible passage for each day, lots of pictures, biographies and American landmarks included in the history lessons, and short enough lessons that it's not too drawn out.

But it does focus on only American history, so I've also supplemented with Story of the World Vol. 3. I love how SOTW reads like a storybook, and the kids definitely enjoy it. We read about various kings and queens and in Europe during the 1600s...Charles, Phillip, Ferdinand, James, Mary, Elizabeth...It was fascinating to hear about the treachery and drama that went on with the various people taking over thrones and plotting overthrows!  We also got to hear a bit about the struggle between Protestants and Catholics during this time period, which the kids really knew very little about. The kids were captivated by all this! I have to admit, I know very little about European history, so I found it fascinating myself!  It also put a lot more relevance to where the names King James Bible and Jamestown came from!

So we read a lot about various explorers, and I remember learning and memorizing a bunch of facts about each explorer in 4th grade. I don't know that it really helped me in my life to memorize those facts, so I tried to just make sure the kids have heard of the explorers and the areas they explored, and we made the connection of where they came from and where they explored, to the influence that they had on the current languages spoken and culture of these areas today. We also talked about their motivation for exploration(gold, and looking for trade routes), their treatment of the Natives, and the spread of the gospel in to the New World.

We also found an iPad game called European Explorers: The Age of Discovery, which has them exploring "new" land and outfitting a fleet, and in the process, reading brief bios of various Captains that explored long ago.


This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschooler's Weekly Wrapup.

Weekly Wrap-up: African Grasslands Minecraft Project

We did our second week of African Grasslands this week, and I asked the kids to make a project that incorporates all the animals we've talked about and their habitat.  I gave them ideas to choose from: build a Minecraft project, a Powerpoint presentation, a short story, a diorama, a painting/drawing, a report...their choice. So, no big surprise, they both picked a Minecraft project.

Bunny built a 'zoo', with signs or a book of facts, alongside each animal section. They have a Minecraft mod called "Mo' Creatures", which gives them alot more animals in the game than the regular game (but they don't have giraffes), so she penned them into sections like a zoo.

Monkey built statues of the animals, that you could climb through, and inside, there were facts posted on signs.

They both really enjoyed the project and were proud of their work. I think I will try to incorporate a project for future units, they seem to like to do that, but I'll have to have some guidelines or every one of them will be a Minecraft project. Not that Minecraft is a bad choice, just that I'd like to give them the chance to learn how to use Powerpoint or do some artwork or do more creative writing.

This post is linked up with Weird, Socialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap-up.

Weekly Wrap-up: New Beginnings - Zoology and Early American History

This week was our first official week of homeschooling Bunny.  I tried a schedule that was much more defined, in order to try to keep some semblance of organization through the day:

• Bible
• Math
• Language Arts
• Science or  History (sometimes both)
• Chinese during lunch
• Free time in the afternoon to explore their own interests

I'm doing most of it together, except for Math and Language Arts, except for this brief moment when they both worked on LA together:

So not only was it a new beginning in terms of Bunny being homeschooled, we also started new units for Science and Social Studies

Science

We began using Sassafras Science Adventures: Zoology with Animal Classification and African Grasslands .  We've just been doing science based on Monkey's interests for the past year, but with both kids, I wanted to try to do something they would both be interested in- Animals! I found some online games that covered animal classification:

• Backyard animal classification game 
• African river animal classification game
• North American animal classification 
• Brain Pop Quiz 
• PBS Nova Classifying Life Game

We read the book "Do Cats Have Family Trees?" to explore the different classification categories of animals and watched a Brain Pop video.

We learned about Lions and Cheetahs in the second chapter of the Sassafras Science Adventures. This curriculum is a different approach to science-using a story to impart the facts, and it's alot less dry than reading a textbook with animal facts. The story is 2 kids who are staying with their eccentric Uncle for the summer, and this uncle has a cool invention that allows them to go on an invisible zipline to locations around the world, where they will encounter and learn about all kinds of animals. We will supplement with short books about the animals from the library and DK's Encyclopedia of Animals to learn more facts about each animal.

History

I had started with Ancient History a few months ago with Monkey, but it wasn't quite 'exciting' and didn't seem to capture the kids' interest (I was including Bunny after school when we did History), just felt very forced and unnatural. Maybe it was just too distant to feel relevant? I was also concerned about ancient practices being a little too intense for Bunny (sacrifices, mummies, etc.) so I decided to just do a different period of history now that Bunny is home-Explorers/American History. I love the idea of using living books so I got the, TruthQuest History Early American History for Young Students I, which is a very open-ended guide of History, with no planned schedule, just a list of great living books, and a commentary, and we are free to explore those periods of history. I will supplement with videos and a timeline. (In the meantime, I've also discovered Notgrass's America the Beautiful, which I think I will add to this, even though this is a textbook and I prefer to use living books.  Notgrass's textbook looks great and covers daily life, biographies, American landmarks, and a biblical worldview when looking at history, but also as a literature component corresponding to the periods in history).

So we started with the Vikings and Leif Ericsson(or Erikson, Ericson, Eriksson) as the first to 'discover' America, reading:

• D'Aulaire's Norse Myths
• Viking Explorers
• Magic Tree House - Viking Ships at Sunrise
• Leif Eriksson - (I wanted to get Leif the Lucky  but the library's copy was lost. There's lots of kid's biographies about Leif Eriksson, so I jus randomly picked one).

We also watched the Crash Course video on Vikings. The kids love the Crash Course videos, but most of it goes over their heads. They might catch a brief overview and general idea of a topic, but they talk so fast and cover so much, and make jokes that are beyond the kids, so I don't think they learn that much from them, but they love to watch them.

But, after this first week with both kids and also doing a planned science and history unit, we've decided to just focus on one at a time. We'll do Science only (zoology) next week (and incidental history, if we come across it in our reading or everyday life), and at some point we'll switch to History (explorers) again (and do incidental science based on interest)

This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Weekly Wrap-up: 2 Kids Home Now

Bunny's last day of public school was last Friday. She was so excited when she came home from her last day of school, cheering "I'm homeschooled now!!" and "I can't believe it!"  This week would have been her Spring Break, so I thought we should give ourselves a week to adjust, and she could still have her week off from "school" that she would have had if she stayed in school.

I've been both nervous and excited about Bunny being homeschooled. I've thought about how to schedule time to teach individually vs. together, what subject areas to cover that would interest them both, how to incorporate my work hours, how to keep them from bickering, etc. I'm glad we had this week to transition to just being together for so many more hours of the day. I wish I could say it all went smoothly, but she ended up having tantrums 4 out of the 5 weekdays this week.

So what did the kids do this week? 

We started each day with a Bible devotional on Jesus' crucifixion from "Old Story New" 10-Minute Family Devotional book.

On the Skrafty Minecraft  server, we found they were offering a free Holy Week course. We've never tried a Skrafty Minecraft course, but since it was free, the kids thought it would be fun to try it. There were Lessons for Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, good Friday, and Resurrection Day. Each lesson had a Minecraft building project, and they had a great time (albeit, argument-prone) building the Palm Sunday scene and the Upper Room, and the 3 crosses. With them both sharing one account, the arguments were many! They enjoyed it though, so we may look into paid lessons in the future.

We also had our first day of co-op! It's nice to connect with a homeschool group finally! I hadn't pursued joining a co-op the first year because Monkey is happy being at home and doesn't really seek new friendships, but with Bunny home now, I knew she (being an extrovert) would need friends and regular contact with other kids her age. The co-op meets twice a month, which works out nicely because then I don't have to take as much time off work. I was thankful to meet some other local homeschooling moms and they were all very welcoming and friendly. The co-op has different subjects per trimester, and this trimester is music, plus they always have an hour of gym. I think it will be a nice addition to our routine.

We've also started doing a rotation of having each child taking turns to help me with the dinner prep. Surprisingly, it's working out pretty well! This week, it involved mostly chopping vegetables and mixing batter, but as they get more familiar with the kitchen duties, I hope we'll be able to add some cooking.

One of the nice things about having Bunny out of school now, is more time for family video time! Our kids don't watch much of anything usually(no TV, rarely any movies), and when there is something we want to watch, we always wanted both kids to be able to watch together, and with Bunny in school, plus homework time and activity time, we didn't have much time for movies. But this week we watched "Mary Poppins" and a "Brain Games" episode on Attention/Multitasking. They loved both!

Besides all that, Bunny read a LOT:

• "Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep" (Gail Carson Levine)
• "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" (Grace Lin)
• An "Encyclopedia Brown" book (Donald Sobol)-don't remember which one she read
• "Mary Poppins" (P.L. Travers)

Monkey read 2 comic books of a Japanese cartoon character called "Hamtaro" and has been listening to Fellowship of the Ring read aloud by Dad. He's not much of a reader and definitely prefers being read to. I also began reading "The Jungle Book" to them out loud, as a precursor to our Zoology science unit that we will start next week. 

Overall, a pretty good week, and I think maybe we will try to incorporate an unschooling week every month or so. Every other week (my original idea from a few weeks ago) seems a bit too much, but I do love that they actually do end up learning things(we did a bit of math when I had a %-off coupon, we addressed some envelopes for letters going out, we planted some flower and vegetable seeds), while I get a break from planning.

This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Hip, Homeschool Moms

Weekly Wrap-up: Ireland Unit Study

Since my kids are half-Irish, and St. Patrick's Day was last week, it seemed a great time to learn a bit about their Irish heritage.  To be honest, we have done a lot more on the Chinese side than the Irish side, in terms of teaching our kids about the cultures of their ancestry.

So, our plan was to do our planned Ireland Unit Study in one week, but we didn't get to it all, so we finished up this week. We all enjoyed learning about some Irish culture and history!

The  Great Hunger (1845-1850) - a.k.a .Irish Potato Famine

• http://www.irishpotatofamine.org/flash.html - This kid-friendly, interactive website was great for learning about the causes of the famine and the conditions the people endured. 
• Read Feed the Children First. We skipped over some of the more disturbing recollections of awful conditions and deaths, but they did get enough to learn about the how terrible it was.

Irish cooking

We tried out some Irish cuisine, which included potatoes for 4 out of 5 meals during the week. This is what we tried, in order of how much we liked it:

• Potato & Leek Soup 
• Corned Beef and Cabbage - Which is not actually Irish. It's roots are Irish-American.
• Irish Soda Bread  - I used this recipe as a base, but added 1/2 cup sugar and raisins
• Beef & Mushroom Pie
• Colcannon 
• Boxty (Potato Pancakes)

Folk Tales and Legends

We Read a variety of folk tales and traditional stories from these books:

St. Patrick & St. Brigid

We learned about St. Patrick (book pictured above) and also St. Brigid.  

Lapbook

We covered mapwork, flag, time difference, and copywork in our lapbooks (Both Monkey and Bunny made one, even though Bunny wasn't officially homeschooled yet. I wanted to try things out with her and see what she thought about lapbooks) :

Fiction Reading

Magic Tree House - Leprechauns in Late Winter - Jack and Annie go visit Ireland in the 19th century to help Lady Gregory be inspired to bring back Irish legends and culture. (Monkey read this one)

Lara and the Gray Mare - Story of the 9-year-old daughter of the clan leader in 14th century Ireland who gets captured by a rival clan. (Bunny read this one)

Weekly Wrap-up: Fungi and Volunteering

This week we went back to a normal schedule for school and followed up on the yeast topic we stumbled upon last week during our unschooling, and I pulled together some resources for learning about Fungi.

• Planet Wild Fungi video
• Assorted books from the library (none that are noteworthy so I won't note them here. I just pulled whatever I could find off the shelf)
• Experiment with yeast in warm water (and one with cold), with added sugar, salt, or flour. 

The sugar and warm water worked best, and even the sugar and cold water worked fine, just took a lot longer to produce as much carbon dioxide. The sugar and salt and warm water produced some, but not as much, and the flour and warm water produced a little bit, but not much.  The one with no sugar at all, didn't do anything, as expected.

• Experiment with growing mold on bread (swiped in sink, swiped in sink and put in fridge, and not-swiped in sink):

 The kids were surprised that the mold didn't grow on the bread in the refrigerator. At first,we were going to monitor this for 10 days, but it got so gross, we decided to cut it short and end after Day 4.                                                                                                      

The other thing that filled up our time this week was starting up some routes for picking up  leftover food from local restaurants and delivering as part of some volunteer work for Rescuing Leftover Cuisine. I recently began volunteering with them to start up some new routes here, so it's been a busy week of coordinating pickup/drop-off times, communicating with potential volunteers, meeting volunteers, and actually driving around.  It was eye-opening for Monkey to see the amount of food that would have been thrown away as we packed it into our car and delivered it to the food pantry. 

I've always wanted to find a way for my kids to volunteer and serve the community, but it's often hard to find something that will allow kids to help (usually for safety reasons) and that fits our personalities.  We tried volunteering at a nursing home last year, but all of us being introverted, quiet types, it really didn't work out as an on-going activity, as we just couldn't converse naturally.  We've done a few one-day volunteer events in the past, but I'm hoping that this work with RLC will be a great way for the kids to see that we really can make a difference and to give them a heart for serving others. 

Weekly Wrap-up: Trial Unschooling Week

The concept of unschooling was something that was on the edge of my radar. It's not something I really set out to do or even research, but through various internet groups, I've heard quite a few people who embrace this philosophy of learning. The book I'm reading about right-brained learners, The Right Side of Normal also mentions unschooling as a great option for right-brained learners. I don't think I have the right personality or courage to really embrace full-time unschooling, but I loved the idea that they can spend time on what interests them and learn from those pursuits, and not be bogged down with 'formal learning' lessons that often take up most of our day (because of Monkey's distractability) and don't capture their interest. There's a lot that can be learned in just every day wondering and exploring!

The other week, through the Weekly Wrap-up, I ran across a post by Angelic Scalliwags where she told about her idea of incorporating unschooling alternating with her formal schooling weeks. I loved how she asked her children to "stop thinking about the unschool week as a holiday week but to think of the two weeks together as a two-week schedule which would be repeated. The first week I would schedule and the second week they would schedule."So it's kind of like "partial unschooling", which to true unschoolers probably doesn't really exist. Anyway, I don't know what this would be called officially, but I really loved this idea! I really have a hard time 'letting go' to just let Monkey's learning be completely up to him, so this hybrid method really appealed to me. 

So we tried our first week of unschooling this week, and Monkey spent most of his time programming video games on Scratch - as in, ALL DAY Monday and Tuesday, except for short breaks for eating.  Yes, it's educational, but there's alot of playing around on the other games on the site too! But I tried to not interfere and let him explore and create.  This is his Scratch profile with some of the games he has worked on:http://scratch.mit.edu/users/timwm/ . A lot of his work is unpublished, as he worked on various games and ideas and didn't complete them, but I hope one or two will be finished products. One of the things I need to embrace is that it's not all about a finished product. He is learning through the process of experimenting with different games and animations.

When he wasn't using Scratch, his time was spent on these pursuits:

• We baked some bread from scratch and learned about yeast, fungi, and fermentation.
• He played chess with a variety of opponents.
• He and Bunny dug out a couple snow forts during this past snow storm.
• We watched an episode of Brain Games (on Netflix) and learned about how our brain uses past experiences to make assumptions about what we see, and how we end up seeing optical illusions because of that.
• We read aloud from The Fellowship of the Ring and The Fields of Home (Ralph Moody).
• He built and played with Magneatos and the smaller version with thin rods and marbles.
• He read some books about dinosaurs, Mars, and robots that he borrowed from the library
• We watched Robot Adventures-Introduction to Robotics

I have to admit, the first day was rough. My control-freak, planning-loving, check-list personality couldn't bear the eight hours of Scratch. I kept thinking 'What if this is ALL he does the whole week? What if he doesn't learn anything? What about language arts?' I was so antsy, but I kept myself in check and allowed him to finish the day out without interference.

The second day, I told him, well, you STILL have to practice guitar and do daily Chinese work, because those are skills you will lose if you don't work on it regularly. He wanted to make bread, so we did that, and in the process, talked about yeast and carbon dioxide. He still spent the remainder of his time on Scratch,

The third and fourth days, he finally took a break from Scratch as he went to the sitter while I went to work, and we had a big snowstorm that provided some great snow for snow forts and he branched out to a few of the other pursuits mentioned above. 

The last day (today), he had a variety of activity, including some Scratch, but also watched the Robot Adventures movie (with prompting by me), among other things. 

So as I evaluate this at the end of the week, I know Monkey loved it.  I do think if we did this again in a couple weeks, I would maybe give a little more direction, but not require anything...but suggesting the Robot movie turned out to be good move, as he really enjoyed it. It was very difficult for ME though, to just sit and not direct his time. But at the same time, it was really nice to not be nagging him to start something or complete something. 

Next week, we will go back to our formal learning, with Fungi as our science unit. Ideally, when I first started homeschooling, I thought we'd do 'formal' work in the morning, and child-interest-led activity in the afternoon, but the reality was that he rarely had time for that free exploration time in the afternoon, he would be so drained from working on the assigned work that he didn't have any mind for exploration at that point. I hope that alternating weeks of formal and unschooling will allow him the time to explore and learn, while still giving him structure to learn the things that I feel are 'must-dos' (math, writing, science/history, Bible) at a deeper level than he would get by just letting him lead (because honestly, I don't think he'd ever really dig into writing or history).