A lot of this past week in Ethan’s unschooling journey was spent outdoors, as we tried to take advantage of the beautiful, sunny fall weather we’re having in Vancouver. Here’s what happened…
October 14
Ethan started the morning learning about the digestive system with a lesson from Gizmos.
He then learned about how velocity affects the way objects travel when thrown. He learned that once an object travels at 7.5 km/s, the object will orbit the earth. If an object travels faster, it will escape Earth’s orbit and be launched into space. Too slow and the object crashes to the ground.
Practiced the song he learned the day before at his orchestra class.
We then went out for a walk and ended up at Whole Foods for lunch.
Once back home, Ethan watched a lesson about why the Berlin Wall was constructed. The lesson was about how to destroy things and explained how the Berlin Wall and other large concrete objects can be demolished by a wrecking ball. There was a project to build your own wrecking ball so Ethan gave it a try.
But first, he went for a bike ride with Kal and his brother and dad.
We promised a friend that we’d walk her Golden Retriever so Ethan was excited to come back and do that.
Kal joined us and we took the dog out for a good hour. He loves the water and really wanted to jump in but we had instructions to keep him dry.
Back home again and time to finish the wrecking ball project. Ethan used a marble inside the ball to give it weight.
Dong Eun has been encouraging Ethan to practice some shoulder stands and plow pose (halasana) because of how much time he sometimes spends in front of his laptop.
We then read “The Secret Garden” before Ethan went to bed.
Not so fast. He still wanted to stay up for a bit and read one of his Magic School Bus books. He hasn’t read these in a while but said that he still liked them.
October 15
Ethan made a Do Not Disturb sign for his door so he could work in peace, according to him.
We got Ethan a new backpack and rain pants and they arrived today. The backpack is mainly for nature school because his old backpack had thin straps and wasn’t very waterproof. (hi, Ethan here. I. love. this. backpack!!!!!!!!!!)
We got a rain cover to keep his things dry and him visible.
After the unpacking, Ethan worked on changing the subject of a formula and moving terms in algebraic formulas.
He then learned about how to use the quadratic formula from Khan Academy.
More about changing the subject of a formula.
A lesson from Mystery Science about whether you could knock down a building with dominoes.( ethan: yes, you can!!!!!)
Ethan worked on another experiment. This time, it was a chain reaction experiment to build a ramp and a lever to make a marble go down the ramp.
Violin practice before having class later in the day.
Learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
After learning about the garbage patch, he created a poster about how plastic bags get into our environment.
He read about ancient Egypt and what it was like to live back then.
Continuing with what he learned about plastics polluting the environment, he read an article about the upcoming plastic straw ban.
He printed this out because he said it goes well with our family rules.
Here’s where he got the above list from, a lesson on Buddhism from his world history book.
Heading out to play!
Back to play Prodigy, the online math game. We let Ethan have access to the parents’ site so that he can adjust/add questions and topics.
Going over the day’s work with me. I usually check the writing and reading comprehension.
Making labels for the fig jam Dong Eun made.
Some violin practice.
Re-reading the Wizard of Oz. He said it was a fun story so he wanted to speed read through it before heading to bed.
October 16
Ethan is working on one topic over several days and so he continued on the garbage patch topic today. Here, he’s writing what he knows about the garbage patch. We noticed that he wasn’t adding a lot of detail, just providing basic information. We’d like him to go a little deeper into his topics to demonstrate what he knows and how he thinks.
We were wondering if he really understands what he reads, based on how he was writing, so we had him take a practice exam. He aced it. We’ll see how it goes with periodic tests because, otherwise, we’re not totally sure he understands everything.
Time to play outside!
Ethan had taekwondo class tonight. He missed the first month of classes so he’s been catching up with learning his blue belt pattern. He usually gives a good effort in class, as the instructors are very good and he likes learning.
We headed to the library for a bit afterwards to find some books on writing reports. After Ethan’s writing about the garbage patch, we realized that he needs some help in communicating more clearly through his writing. He knows what he knows, but needs some practice articulating his knowledge.
These were the books we got. Some are pretty good. I also got him one about avoiding plagiarism because it’s important to learn what to do when using others’ work.
One area that Ethan has greatly improved is writing in complete sentences and in demonstrating comprehension.
Same here. Although he does sometimes forget to use complete sentences, we’re happy with his progress.
There has been a lot of recent news related to the garbage patch and plastic straw ban, so that’s helped with rounding out Ethan’s knowledge about the problem of plastic garbage.
This lesson from Mystery Science taught Ethan about using smaller structures to build larger ones, even if the material is paper.
We spent some time going through the report writing books.
Ethan also had to water some plants and pick up Jane’s mail.
We finished the day by reading “The Secret Garden” and Ethan made a fan/rabbit origami design.
October 17
Getting ready for nature school with the new backpack.
He was very excited about his backpack. 26L is pretty big!
The weather has been amazing and this week, Ethan and his group made swords that they carved from wood provided by his teacher, Scott.
Back home, Ethan worked on a project to learn how boulders can roll down hills and destroy cities/towns and how to prevent the boulders from causing damage.
He then practiced violin.
He tried another comprehension test for “The Secret Garden.” This time, he got 7/10 because he didn’t understand one of the questions and he also didn’t pick up on the clues in the passage about the time of year.
Toonie skating! Ethan lost his bike helmet and had to wear his ski helmet. Ethan loves skating and is really improving his balance and ability to move around on the ice. Stopping is next!
Back home after skating to learn about volume using blocks.
A visit to Jane’s to water her plants and pick some more tomatoes before calling it a day.
October 18
Ethan read an article in Classroom Ready Science News about how the idea of 10,000 steps a day came about.
He then read an article about wind turbines.
Next, he learned about parabolas on Khan Academy.
At the community for the home learners gymnastics class. Looked like playing with the fallen leaves was also a lot of fun, although he’s really enjoying the gymnastics class, too.
Found some huge leaves that he brought home simply because they were so big.
At home, he learned about how roller coasters work and how they go so fast.
He learned about lava types and their effect on how volcanoes erupt.
He learned about Dark Knight, a planet that is completely dark, even though it is very close to its sun. The reason is that this planet has a lot of light absorbing material.
He then read some of his Captain Underpants comics. Still loves these.
We read “The Secret Garden.”
While I was reading, Ethan played with his gravity well.
He was kind of hungry so he had a snack while reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator before finally heading to bed.
October 19
Friday morning family jog!
Ethan likes putting on violin music from the Suzuki Violin Books. He’s currently working his way through the first book so he likes to hear the songs he’s learned and what he will eventually learn.
We listened to some of the first songs he learned and he tried to play them, too.
He put the leaves he collected on the wall to display them.
And put another in his room.
Ethan said that the violin lesson videos he likes are taught by a Korean man because his video descriptions have Korean in them. I explained that he is using Korean as a way to improve his video search results and that Ethan could do the same thing.
He said that he couldn’t type in Korean on his laptop because his keyboard doesn’t have Korean characters. So I showed him how to open up the on-screen Korean keyboard on his laptop. Hopefully, he’ll write in Korean to try this out because it could help him get more views and subscribers, which are goals he has for himself this year.
Back to working on a Classroom Ready Science News article. This one was about the ISS.
He spent some time reading about Indian history and in particular, about India’s caste system.
He also watched a crash course video about India.
This is the violinst that plays songs from the Suzuki books.
Ethan learned about rain and the water cycle.
He did an experiment about condensation and the water cycle.
He learned about Canada’s boreal forest from a Canadian Reader article.
He then practiced independent and dependent events in IXL.
Doing some Grade 9 math exercises.
We registered Ethan for a class about pill bugs and wood bugs at the library. It was a Pro D Day for the public schools so Ethan’s friends Nico and Paulo also joined him for the class.
The three boys played together outside afterwards.
That night, we all watched some Discovery Education shows together. This was about monster black holes.
October 20
Saturday morning means orchestra practice for Ethan. The West Vancouver Youth Band is the organizer of the orchestra.
We went to Costco to do some grocery shopping after Ethan’s orchestra practice. Ethan had a hot dog and was very happy about that. Surprisingly, he finished the whole thing.
After we got home, Ethan watched another lesson in Gizmos.
It was voting day so I took Ethan over to help me vote. We talked about why we need to vote about a week ago while observing all the signs from candidates that have been put up everywhere. Ethan was able to see how the voting process works, from signing in, to casting votes and to placing the ballot in the voting machine.
When we got back, we went up to see Jane, who returned from her trip. She gave us some gifts and even gave Ethan some money for helping out with checking the mail and watering her plants. She visited a salt mine in the Czech Republic or Slovakia and brought back some salt and pepper for us. There was also some Italian chocolate and marzapan.
It was a beautiful day out so we decided to visit the Capilano Salmon Hatchery, as we’ve never been and the Coho are returning now.
We could see a lot of fish in the water, as well as some dead ones.
People were fishing along the riverbank. We got to see two massive salmon that were caught.
The hatchery itself has lots of information about how and why the salmon hatchery works to protect salmon stocks.
There’s a final area where the fish jump through the different gates to reach their final destination inside the hatchery. We could watch as the fish jumped.
As we were leaving the hatchery, there was a massive spider hanging out near the parking lot. It was hard to focus on it but anyway…
Ethan lost his scooter and bike helmet the week before so we headed to MEC to pick up a new helmet.
Then we went to A&W, which we had promised Ethan the day before. Dong Eun had the Beyond Meat burger and was quite impressed at how good it was. So that’s a hot dog and two hamburgers for Ethan today, food that he normally wouldn’t get to eat so this was quite the treat.
He also got to have root beer, which was an even bigger treat because he’s normally not allowed to drink pop. I have to admit that it was pretty darn good!
Back home, we played some tennis to work off the burger and fries!
But then we found out that Fin needed a walk so we all headed out to meet with him and his owner, Maryam.
It was a beautiful night to go for walk and it turned out to be a long one.
Fin needs about 4 1/2 hours of walks every day. We ended up walking him for 2 hours! And he still didn’t want to go home.
So on our way home, we got ourselves a snack. When we were done, we took Fin home but he wasn’t happy about it. That dog never gets tired it seems.
Finally settled in for the night. Ethan watched Discovery Education and we learned about how our Milky Way galaxy has a massive black hole in the middle and that there are even bigger black holes the further out in space you go. There are even likely black holes inside black holes. What was mind-blowing was that the Big Bang was likely due to the reactions at the centre of a giant black hole.
With black holes done for tonight, we read “The Secret Garden” before bedtime.
Before we started, Ethan wrote something is his daily Q&A journal, which he hasn’t done since he’s been back from Korea so it’s good to start again.
But before bed, he watched a video about solving the Fisher Cube and decided to make a video about it, too. Unfortunately, the phone stopped recording just as he was about to finish the video because it ran out of memory!
So that was the past week in Ethan’s unschooling life. He had a full schedule but he seems to be enjoying how he spends his time, as well as constantly learning and improving his skills and knowledge.
Let’s see what next week brings.
Learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Continuing with what he learned about plastics polluting the environment, he read an article about the upcoming plastic straw ban.
It gives me hope that children like Erhan are educating themselves about how to reduce plastics in our environment. I still feel such a deep sadness for the damage that is being inflicted by plastics. I remember the first time I heard about the Great Pacific Garbage patch, just a few years ago really, maybe 2011. It blew my mind then and now it is common knowledge, things are really developing and changing so quickly on the planet. I am proud of cities like San Francisco and Vancouver for taking steps to reduce single use plastics especially!
I found this incredible article about how buses are allowing people to pay their fare by recycling plastic bottles.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/bus-plastic-bottles-1.4874662
Indonesians can pay bus fare with plastic waste instead of money
2-hour bus ticket costs 10 plastic cups or up to 5 plastic bottles
Thomson Reuters · Posted: Oct 23, 2018 1:20 PM ET | Last Updated: October 23
Residents bring plastic bottles to exchange for Suroboyo bus tickets at Purbaya station in Surabaya, Indonesia, October 21, 2018. (Sigit Pamungkas/Reuters)
Indonesia’s second-largest city has come up with a novel way to encourage its residents to recycle waste: giving free bus rides in exchange for used plastic bottles.
Under the scheme launched by Surabaya in April, commuters can ride red city buses by dropping off plastic bottles at terminals or directly ‘paying’ a fare with bottles.
A two-hour bus ticket costs 10 plastic cups or up to five plastic bottles, depending on their size, which the city hopes will help it meet an ambitious target of becoming free of plastic waste by 2020.
Surabaya is the first city in Indonesia to implement this scheme.
Ethan is working on one topic over several days and so he continued on the garbage patch topic today. Here, he’s writing what he knows about the garbage patch. We noticed that he wasn’t adding a lot of detail, just providing basic information. We’d like him to go a little deeper into his topics to demonstrate what he knows and how he thinks.
Do you think a visuals like this might help him go beyond the facts and showing he understands them to applying and thinking creatively about information
We were wondering if he really understands what he reads, based on how he was writing, so we had him take a practice exam. He aced it. We’ll see how it goes with periodic tests because, otherwise, we’re not totally sure he understands everything.
We headed to the library for a bit afterwards to find some books on writing reports. After Ethan’s writing about the garbage patch, we realized that he needs some help in communicating more clearly through his writing. He knows what he knows, but needs some practice articulating his knowledge.
ne area that Ethan has greatly improved is writing in complete sentences and in demonstrating comprehension.
Good for him! Just keep practicing. The best way to improve writing is to read good writing and keep practicing. Try different techniques such as compare and contrast, persuasive writing, descriptive, creative….How about you two prepare for and do a debate on a topic he enjoys? Or write a newspaper article about plastics, or an opinion editorial? Just try different styles with him. He will find his writing voice more and more I am sure.
There has been a lot of recent news related to the garbage patch and plastic straw ban, so that’s helped with rounding out Ethan’s knowledge about the problem of plastic garbage.
I remember a vivid conversation I had with my then 87 year old grandfather (he was born in 1910) when I was 19….
I asked him, “Grandpa you have lived through world war II, the Depression, Vietnam, the cold war.Is it just me or does the world seem like such an intense place, with so many problems, conflicts and environmental devastation? Maybe I am too young to have a good perspective?”
He simply answered, “Natasha I saw the invention of plastics, I could have never imagined the world we live in today.”
I was reassured, yet devastated in a new way. This conversation from 1995 rings in my ears today and when I read about learning like Ethan is doing about plastic.
Ethan started the morning learning about the digestive system with a lesson from Gizmos.
He then learned about how velocity affects the way objects travel when thrown. He learned that once an object travels at 7.5 km/s, the object will orbit the earth. If an object travels faster, it will escape Earth’s orbit and be launched into space. Too slow and the object crashes to the ground.
I am always learning so many things from Ethan’s learning. Here is yet another one. It makes sense. I say that since i have never wondered how objects orbit the earth and stay in orbit, I never searched out the answer. Do you find that Ethan wonders about things first and then does research to find answers or does he often gain new information from various sources and then delves into it deeper if it interests him? I guess a bit of a chicken or the egg question, but I am curious as to what you see as the driving factors in Ethan especially since he is designing his own learning so much of the day?
Violin: Practiced the song he learned the day before at his orchestra class.
Once back home, Ethan watched a lesson about why the Berlin Wall was constructed. The lesson was about how to destroy things and explained how the Berlin Wall and other large concrete objects can be demolished by a wrecking ball. There was a project to build your own wrecking ball so Ethan gave it a try. Cool project. As I began reading this I thought the lesson was going to be on the Berlin wall and the political and historical reasons as to why it was built and came down, but instead it was more of a physics lesson about wrecking balls. So interesting how our minds work. I wonder are wrecking balls still used much? I feel like I have not seem one in a long time, but I guess I notice all of the new construction in cities these days and now how they demo old projects…
I guess I was right demolition balls are rarer and rarer…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rise-and-fall-wrecking-ball-180957752/
When most buildings reach the end of their usefulness, they are taken apart and their parts are reclaimed. Or they might be imploded. Yet when people think demolition, most still imagine the ubiquitous wrecking ball, despite the fact that this tools is becoming increasingly rare, writes Eric Grundhauser for Atlas Obscura. Their remaining popularity in song and cultural consciousness might just be due to people’s fascination with destruction. But it also might be thanks to the wrecking ball’s history.
Demolition has always made a great spectacle. In the early 1900s, the New Yorker profiled Jacob Volk, a prominent wrecker in the city, stating that he had “pulled down the best places, and was proud of it,” and that “[h]e never passed a tall building without an appraising glance and a sigh,” reports Jeff Byles in a 2006 New York Times article. Demolition at the time was a skilled trade, Byles, who wrote a book on the subject, adds:
Demolition was construction in reverse: fixtures and appliances were sold; wood studs and flooring pried up, studiously denailed, and tied in bundles for reuse; and bricks cleaned by fiendish characters who could knock the mortar off 5,000 bricks a day. Laborious, yes. Wasteful, no. It was an elegant way to wreck.
While the wrecking really began with sledgehammers that smashed through fixtures and windowpanes in the 1930s, wrecking balls, heavy steel spheres suspended from cranes, came soon after.
Grundhauser writes that wrecking balls reached “peak ubiquity” in the 1950s and ’60s, primarily because they were so cost-effective. “You no longer had to pay a crew of barmen to spend all this time taking apart a structure piece by piece,” Byles tells Grundhauser. “That combination of factors, saving on labor costs, and the advent of technology really transformed the industry.”
But the work was also messy. Growing recognition that some building materials, such as asbestos, were toxic to the workers handling them helped push the industry toward less dramatic, more contained methods of destruction. New equipment, Grundhauser reports, also made for more precise work. Wrecking balls fell out of favor as experts started using attachments and machines that could “nibble away” at buildings. When a building needs to come down quickly, explosives have now become the best option for taking down modern skyscrapers.
Though wrecking balls on the job site are now rare, their power in metaphor remains strong. For Atlas Obscura, Byles cites the wrecking ball as a symbol of progress and optimism because of their use in an era that prided itself on an “out with the old and in with the new” mentality. But their allure might also just be that they are such a simple shape, which can still cause plenty of destruction.
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