Trying to post daily again. It’s actually way better and it’s nice to have a record of what Ethan’s unschooling day looks like. Today was also full of things that Ethan did. It’s almost unbelievable how much he can fit into his day as a homeschooler.
Ethan woke up and had his Kindle in hand, reading Harry Potter books 6 and 7. Reading is a normal way for him to start the day and it might be a good idea to find some other books on Kindle Unlimited for him to read.
Once he was done the reading, he went to the bathroom and noticed the way the light was reflecting. It’s cool how he notices little things in his environment like this. Always learning.
Before breakfast, Dong Eun and Ethan went for a walk down to the beach. They watched two pigeons cleaning each other, people catching crabs and fishing at the pier.
Then they found cool pebbles, an interesting piece of wood and a “soap dish” from an empty clam shell.
He also found this awesome branch to play with.
And here’s our new soap dish!
And here are the interesting rocks he collected from the beach.
Once breakfast was done, Ethan did some research on deer fern, as it was an assignment for nature school. He found out that it’s called deer fern because after deer lose their antlers, they rub their heads on this particular fern. Cool!
Ethan then worked on Scratch, making some new games. This time, he used what he has learned and created his own game where you have to dodge and shoot asteroids while trying to land on earth.
He made the game and refined it when he discovered that a function he wanted didn’t work. He kept adding and refining until he got the game to do what he wanted.
We were quite impressed because we’ve been concerned that the coding was merely copying what he saw in the book. But making his own game from what he learned is pretty cool.
But we still want to limit his time in front of a screen, so after making his game, he read a book about Charles Darwin that we’ve had for a while.
He also read a Korean book called The Gobsmacking Galaxy by Kjartan Poskitt; obviously, it was translated into Korean 🙂
The Gobsmacking Galaxy is all about space and this lead to Ethan doing some online research about meteorites. He found an article about the top10 biggest meteorites to hit earth.
He saw that one of the meteorites hit earth with a force equal to 22,000 megatons of TNT. He didn’t know what that number really meant, so he wanted to do some research and figure out what 22,000 megatons of TNT was equal to in order to better understand what he was reading.
Ethan found a conversion of megatons to tons of TNT and found this answer: 2.2e+10.
Since he didn’t know what the “e” was, he did some more digging around to learn what the “e” on a calculator meant.
The explanation for “e” triggered his memory of how standard form is a way of writing very large numbers, something he learned in the Help Your Kids with Math book. He was finally able to comprehend how powerful 22,000 megatons was.
After math, he made a new design with his compass.
By this time, it was the afternoon and time for taekwondo class followed by mindfulness class.
In the mindfulness class, he made a mandala with random objects provided by the teacher.
After his class, they picked up a book from the library about circle patterns called Let’s Investigate Circles. Once home, he was excited to use his compass to make patterns from the book, some of which are mandalas.
Ethan actually went with me to the owner’s meeting for our building after arriving home. He was curious what the meeting was about but left after about five minutes.
Dinner time!
After dinner, Ethan practiced his taekwondo pattern.
Then he wanted to share with me what he learned about meteorites, so he read the top 10 biggest meteorites to hit earth article with me.
And from that, he found an article called “Amazing facts about Asteroids” that he read and talked about with us.
He then read “Here’s what would happen if a giant asteroid actually hit earth, and it’s terrifying.”
Reading this article about asteroids led to questions about the speed of sound, as well as what supersonic and hypersonic speeds were.
As well as some more ways we could be wiped off the face of the earth by an asteroid and what scientists are trying to do about it.
Ethan kept looking for related articles and found one about a massive meteor that hit the moon last September.
Finally, he wanted to practice his taekwondo pattern again and some kicking. I tried to follow along but was a bit off.
Ethan was following a video to practice the pattern and in the video, they added some martial arts movie sound effects when the teacher does a move. It’s that whoosh sound if you know what I mean.
Anyway, I stopped trying to do the pattern and switched to doing the sound effects while Ethan practiced. This was a lot of fun, especially when I threw in a couple of fart sounds.
So that was Ethan’s day of homeschooling, the never-ending learning that starts from the time he gets up until he has to go to bed.
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