We’ve been homeschooling and following a sort of unschooling method for Ethan. He loves learning at home, which has been great. However, we feel like we haven’t hit our stride or found our groove when it comes to helping Ethan learn in an engaging way that brings out the best in him. So we’ll keep our eyes and minds open to different possibilities.
In the meantime, Ethan’s been his usual busy self. There is never a shortage of things he wants to do, to create or to discover.
It’s all in books
To help spark Ethan’s imagination and to reinforce the things he’s learned about, we went to the library. We feel that the library is an amazing resource and that we’ve barely scratched the surface of how it can help us.
We came home with a nice haul of books and Ethan immediately dove into the morse code and phonetic alphabet book. Since Ethan was reading about vikings and Rune alphabet, we found a book with viking stories to help him dive a little deeper into the topic. Not sure what he’ll get out of it, so let’s see.
While going through the math projects book, Ethan came across the Möbius Strip, which is a one-sided loop. He demonstrated it to me after learning about it, and it’s these moments where he’s excited and engaged that we want to experience more of.
Helping out
Ethan has been doing more to help out with cleaning and keeping our place organized, which is a huge help to Dong Eun. Today, he helped with the dishes and did a great job getting them all clean.
Learning during the Renaissance
In the language arts workbook today, Ethan read about education during the Renaissance. The story was interesting but Ethan had some difficulty with the inferring exercises that followed. He managed to get them done, anyway, which was awesome.
The rest of the afternoon was spent doing whatever activities Ethan wanted to pursue. During one of those pursuits, he noticed that one of the cookies he made was in a, what else, heart shape.
Learning more about good manners has been a priority for us, and this book by children’s author Mo Willems was a fun way to learn about saying please.
Afterwards, Ethan watched Mary Poppins again and quite enjoyed it.
And in the evening, Ethan built a track with a loop-the-loop for his Hot Wheels cars. The cars weren’t making it down the full length of the track so Ethan had to figure out why. He eventually discovered his track was too steep and long and found a design that let the cars go through the loop and go all the way to the end of the track.
He grew!
Of course, all kids grow but we hadn’t checked Ethan’s height since before leaving on the road trip. We were quite surprised that Ethan had grown about an inch-and-a-half. No wonder he seems so much bigger these days.
We’re going to continue looking for a way of teaching that resonates with us because we know there’s something that’ll make everyone happy and help Ethan learn. The journey continues.
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