Second Day of Khan Academy

My son and I watched another chemistry video yesterday. He balked at first. "21 minutes?!" (Apparently, that's a long time?) I said that if he were in school, class would be 40-50 minutes. He retorted, "But it's not a video." lol. I'm not sure I totally understood, but that's okay.

We watched the Introduction to the Atom. It covered some of the same information from the first video and went in a little deeper. The thing that hit my son the most was the end, when the instructor said that what we see as solid is really mostly empty space. It is mind-blowing, isn't it? Which means that if our eyes could see that "clearly", we would not see things as solid but see the empty space. Crazy.

When we finished, there was a thing about having earned so many points and signing up and this and that. Do any of you "do" the points? I looked it up. All it seems to be good for is earning badges, which, I guess, are supposed to make the kids feel proud of themselves or something? My son having grown up without rewards for the most part really has no interest in earning points and badges. Sees it as totally useless. lol. (Perhaps if there were some actual physical product gain... lol)

So, so far, so good with Khan Academy. If only my son found Canada: A People's History as interesting (or perhaps if Canada: A People's History were in only 20-minute snippets and not hours upon hours long...).

It can be hard to change!

I had been feeling for a bit, and my husband and I talked and he felt the same way, that we need more structure, more routine around here during the day and part of that routine needs to include the kids doing more around the house.

We started off the week great for that--and 3 days in... By today, it wasn't any different than last week.

Have you ever made a kind of big change to your daily routine in your homeschooling household? How did that change go? If you succeeded, what sort of tips do you have for those of us who seem to very quickly fall back to the old ways?

I finally used Khan Academy!

I feel like I'm so behind the times, what with so many familis using Khan Academy regularly--even my own husband has used some of the math videos for years in his junior high math classroom--and other than my briefly looking at one of the videos, I've never used them as part of our homeschooling.

Until yesterday.

And let me tell you, I think if I could have an entire video curriculum for my son, it could be just the ticket for him. The possibility of pausing, rewinding, having the visuals...

We looked specifically at the first video in the chemistry section. I took notes on the side in a notebook my son will eventually be using to take his own notes. I also added in additional notes/information and his questions. He actually had a really good question at the end of the video yesterday:

"What would happen if you could make the electrons and neutrons change places?"

I explained about electrons having no mass compared to the neutrons and what that would do. He came up with the idea of an apocalyptic movie where such a thing would happen--"It would be a two-minute long movie." (I'm not even sure it would last that long. lol)

If you haven't checked out Khan Academy yet, do so! Now if only they had Canadian or world history instead of just American and art history...