May 6

Tennis in the morning.

A bike ride to the local farmers market.

A hitchhiker we found on Ethan’s t-shirt.

Found out it was a green garden looper.

Ethan looked up how to take care of it, but everything he found was about how to kill them! Yikes!

Typing lessons.

Mexican lunch at a friend’s house.

May 7

Tennis in the morning. Again.

Found some leaves outside our building.

Learned more about scientific notation.

Played with dominoes while listening to astronomy podcast.

Read a story and answered questions about eating crickets in Canadian Reader. Practiced scientific notation.

Read books about space, math and study skills. These are his current favourites.

Made a pyramid from dominoes.

Wrote “garden” with rocks at the school playground and planted the plants you see in the picture by clearing away the wood chips and transplanting the grass, flowers and ferns.

Worked on making a hexaflexagon.

May 8

Morning tennis. Again.

Picked flowers for Dong Eun on his jog.

Worked on making a hexaflexagon.

Made marble tracks online.

May 9

At nature school, Ethan smashed some plants with rocks to make art.

He also dyed a fabric pouch with beet water.

Worked on decimals divided by 1-digit whole numbers.

When Ethan isn’t sure how to solve a math problem, he usually goes online to Khan Academy or references one of the math books he has.

The hexahexaflexagon has been a big challenge to make but he’s worked on it almost every day.

Ethan drew some fun pictures onto a sheet of paper that folds to reveal each picture.

Practiced violin.

This was a failed attempt at the hexahexaflexagon.

And all the remnants from other attempts.

Here’s one that worked. The corners are snipped for easier folding and transforming.

Another one of the folding pictures.

And another.

Working together on whole numbers divided by decimals.

Canadian Reader article.

Worked on Classroom Ready Science News article.

Tennis in the afternoon.

May 10

During our jog, Ethan picked flowers for Dong Eun.

Worked on a Canadian Reader article. He works on one article from each issue of Canadian Reader until he has completed all the articles. Then he moves on to the next article.

Typing practice.

Multiplying fractions and mixed numbers.

Converted percents to decimals.

Did some reading.

We then went to SFU for a talk on a large millimeter telescope in Mexico. The speaker was a Canadian who lives in Mexico with his family.

He gave a great talk on how sensitive a millimeter telescope is and the challenges in building one.

He demonstrated the amount of energy that the telescope has to detect by using a drop of water and other objects.

May 11

Math practice in the morning. Not tennis!

Made another hexaflexagon.

Playing with dominoes, creating different structures.

Made some more marble tracks online.

Here’s how a hexaflexagon works.

The hexaflexagon collection.

May 12

Morning jog.

Cleaned up his desk with his mini vacuum.

We then went to SFU again to check out Astronomy Day and SFU’s Science Rendezvous. The first thing Ethan checked out was the school of criminology’s maggot art exhibit. They wanted to show how maggots seek dry areas, so after dipping them in vegetable-based paint, the maggots would wriggle around and create “art.” 🙂

A machine that tracks the movement of the metal ball and keeps it balanced on the board. The machine’s parts were created using a 3D printer.

Trying to see how electricity can pass through different materials.

Checking out a cow’s eyeball. They offered Ethan the chance to handle the eye but he declined.

There was a magic show demonstrating chemistry and physics.

The show was cut short not long after this next photo when one of the performances triggered the fire alarm and we all had to evacuate the theatre. Even the fire department came!

On the way to lunch, we checked out the solar telescope. The solar telescope lets people look directly at the sun, which was very cool, even though it was literally just a white sphere.

Interestingly, Ethan wasn’t as interested in the space exhibits as he was the other science exhibits.

A demonstration on probabilities.

The highlight of the day might have been the free ice cream that was created using liquid nitrogen.

These boxes were for making s’mores using the sun.

That evening, we had Kal’s family over for their first ever Korean meal. Kal’s family is Bulgarian so it was a good experience to share Korean food with them.

Kal’s mom had never used chopsticks before but did quite well.

That was the week!

The post Unschooling Journal May 6-12, 2018 – More Tennis, More Learning appeared first on How to Do Stuff With Ethan.