I mentioned how as a home learner the learning never takes a day off. This was evident during our road trip and it’s the same at home because kids can learn all day long. The most interesting part of Ethan’s unschooling experience has been his desire to learn and try new things from the moment he wakes up to the time he grudgingly goes to bed. It’s pretty cool.
For example, this morning he got up and did some reading but once he saw his math book, he was right back into math. No prompting or encouragement needed from us. He just goes right to the thing that he’s most interested in. This morning, he did some more practice measuring the area of a circle.
Ever since he got the coding games book, he’s been wanting to make every game in it, which is cool. Today, he made a version of Flappy Bird called, what else, Flappy Fish.
He tried making a snake game a couple days ago but the game wouldn’t work properly. He wanted to give up but we encouraged him to keep trying because there’s probably a reason why it wasn’t working. He finally figured out that the reason why the instructions say to make the snake’s head larger is that that’s the key to making the game work properly. He also shortened the tongue so the snake could move closer to its body and the edge.
Ethan needs to take more time to troubleshoot and try different things to find a solution. He also has to remember to follow the instructions exactly the first time and then experiment when things are working. It’s great to try doing things in a different way as long as you understand the basics of how something works.
Next, he made a cat and mouse game where you have to move the mouse up and down to dodge the cats.
With coding done, it was time to help Dong Eun make peanut butter cookies.
In the afternoon, we went to the library for the free French story time. It was good but geared towards pre-schoolers and kindergartners so Ethan wasn’t all that interested.
After the library, we picked up a geometry set for Ethan because he’s been interested in measuring circles, so a compass would be handy to draw his own circles.
And we got a pad of graph paper so he could accurately create shapes.
Ethan has been interested in typing before so we thought it would be good to try some online typing lessons.
With typing practice done, it was back to using the compass and finding new ways to create shapes and patterns with it. He also worked on drawing cubes and showing their area.
We also got Ethan a set of coloured index cards because we wanted to make story/writing prompts, just like Storymatic. Originally, I wanted to purchase Storymatic but we decided to have Ethan make his own set of cards, instead.
Then we played by taking turns choosing a card and adding what the card said to a story. Each story began with “Once upon a time…” and there was an “End Story” card to prompt us to conclude the story. It was great fun and a neat way to get Ethan to write.
At some point, Ethan wanted to know how tall he was so we measured and he recorded his height onto his height chart.
The workspace.
Ethan started to really get into the different shapes and patterns he could make with a compass, such as a spiral.
This video was about how to make an impossible triangle, which Ethan was able to do.
One thing he learned is that drawing geometric shapes requires accuracy in measuring and drawing. But for a first attempt, this was pretty darn good.
He then found an impossible heart and made one for Dong Eun.
And that was a full day of learning and experiencing new things. Ethan discovered a way to make writing fun and a way to create geometric patterns with a compass. That’s why I say that it’s hard not to learn anything because there’s always something.
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