We had a pretty good homeschool morning, my son and I. We did some math questions from Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents (although I did the lesson on the side; I have NEVER seen anybody go about teaching how to multiply decimals the way he does!!) and then I had him read part of a passage in Matthew. For the math, I actually added some extensions to it all. We'd already looked in the past about how a decimal number reflects a fraction, so I tied that in and then (re?)introduced scientific notation since one of the answers was 0.00000009. Made sense to do so.
And then, wait for it: We finally did SCIENCE! Woot! I pulled out the Deluxe Science Kit we've had for, oh, perhaps 2+ years and have never really done? It's been open and we set some of it up but haven't done the experiments.
I decided to just start with Experiment 1 (they're not so much experiments as activities, but anyhow) and we worked our way through to Experiment 9, I think. He quite enjoyed the water play, which is funny because it brought back memories of him and his cousin, 11 years ago as 2-year olds, playing at the kitchen sink! lol. I have a picture, but I'm not at home and it's only in emails and I can't figure out how to get Blogger to put it in while I'm on a public computer! I'll share it in a separate post. Along with an after-picture of his having put away the dishes...
In any case, he went on to explore a bit more. The last experiment we did, he had a beaker full of water upside down in the sink full of water and put some tubing into the beaker, then he blew air into it. That led to his having lots of fun (no, 13's apparently still not too young to enjoy making bubbles! lol) with that and then seeing what would happen if he put a beaker full of air upside down in the water and sucked the air out. I'm not sure all he did as I ended up walking away when I saw he was just exploring.
After that, I read to him from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the Kindle version is currently FREE!). We've been working on this book for over a year for sure. He had started it on his own, but found it difficult to understand, so I started reading it too him and I stop every now and then for him to tell me in his own words what they mean by something or to just outright explain because some of the vocabulary is like a foreign language. We are just about done but it's been an interesting story for him and I'm glad we're doing it together. I grabbed the Socratic Logic book I have by Peter Kreeft
Peter Kreeft has a great sense of humour, or at least in the early pages. It was kind of funny as my son asked, "Why are we doing this?" and I said it was to help him write well, so that he could write papers and such where he could defend an opinion. "Oh, okay." (Always that practical, teenaged-mindedness!) And I opened it to what I thought was the first page and it was something like "Reasons to Study Logic". Ha! Then I realized there was a preface. I turned to that and it started off talking about Middle Earth (my son has seen all the Lord of the Rings movies, the two most recent Hobbit movies and we've been slowly reading through The Hobbit (oh! I was just trying to find a link in Amazon for the book and discovered an illustrated version!), so it definitely caught his attention. I only read the preface and a part of the first page of the reasons and he ended up playing his guitar for a little bit. This all took us the morning, was relaxed and enjoyable. It was superb. :)
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