Rocket Boy has officially gotten over the "I love homeschooling" phase. This has been building over the last few weeks. He's gone from the enthusiastic learner to the kid who whines when he has to do actual schoolwork. Today he finally voiced it. "I don't want to go to regular school and I don't want to do school here. I just want to stay home with you and Daddy." It's a lovely sentiment and I know that when he's a ten years older I'll be dreaming of the day he said that he just wanted to be with us. But for now I turned a hard heard to it and cracked the whip. Not so hard since the kind words were accompanied with much whining.
Since I am highly unsympathetic to that kind of whine, we went ahead with some phonics and social studies, with a 10 minute nap break for me in between. We went back to the atlas and looked at North America. He's definitely more interested in what the internet links are. We may have to abandon the atlas if that keeps getting in the way. It was still enjoyable and deciphering all the map symbols was good, but I got impatient at parrying all the questions about the links.
Since he was so down on school today, for our reading I decided not to push him too much. Instead I read to him for quite a while, which is fun because I can read a much more complex story from start to finish. When I make him do all the reading, I have a really hard time not getting bored by the latest easy reader. There are so few really good ones.
After a late lunch, I let him watch his chosen TV shows for the day, chatted with my father, who called to find out how to use Facebook (!), and started reading a new book. That's part of my resolution to read in front of Rocket Boy more often. I want to encourage a whole culture of reading in our family, but if the only time I read every day is before bed after he's long asleep, Rocket Boy is just never going to get it that reading is something grown-ups do.
After his TV break, we went back to schoolwork. I have a cooler full of leftover ice from the broken-fridge debacle. There has to be some science we can do with ice, right? We pulled out the experiment books and they all pointed to making ice cream. We talked about heat/cold transfer and we talked about how salt affects temperature. And we made some awesome ice cream using two different methods. #1 involved nesting a cup of our ice cream base (milk, cream, sugar, cocoa powder) within a big bowl if salt and ice with occasional mixing over about an hour. While we waited for ice cream method #1 to work, we did another experiment involving dissolving salt into hot water and into cold water. Then we started ice cream method #2, which was far more fun and quickly effective. We filled a small baggie with our ice cream base (milk, cream, sugar, cocoa powder), ice, salt, milk, and chocolate. We put that baggie into a large baggie filled with ice and salt, put on our mittens, and played catch. 5 minutes later we had real ice cream! Is was especially fun because I could tell he was getting antsy and really wanted to move his body.
It was a long school day with lots of breaks, but it felt really good (to me at least) since I got to intersperse housework with school, instead of saving it till after Rocket Boy is in bed and I'm tired. In the end, even he really enjoyed it, despite his whiny start. Ice cream makes everything better.
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