It was certainly an interesting last half of the week, since it was Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year… two events where the colour red are themes! Ethan’s unschooling during that time involved coding, a workshop on energy and time with family.
February 14th
Valentine’s Day started with Ethan re-reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Ethan was still recovering from being sick so he we thought he would spend the day relaxing.
But Ethan usually has something he wants to make or do, such as building this speaker system for my iPhone from some instructions he found online.
Distance of planets in our solar system
Ethan has been watching programs about space and reading some books about our solar system. He had already made models of each planet, but now he wanted to lay them out to see how far they would be from the sun.
So he first did some research to learn about the specific distances he would need to calculate.
He then had to work out what unit of measure he would use.
And now, it was time to place the planets on the floor as accurately as possible
Ethan used the LED light as the sun and went about setting up the planets in their proper order and equivalent distance from the sun.
The distances from the sun for each planet.
Violin
Ethan restarted his violin lessons this week and wanted to practice the new song, Allegro.
Some YouTube videos helped Ethan learn the song, too.
Scratch time
Ethan is still into coding and was practicing making a new game.
Brain Pop
Ethan enjoys the Brain Pop videos and it’s easy to understand why. Brain Pop explains things in an easy to understand and engaging way.
Here, Ethan was learning about mean, median, mode and range.
February 15th
The day started with Ethan completely recovered from his cold and the first thing he did was experiment with blowing up a balloon using a straw.
This was part of a project to make an air powered car, which he didn’t quite get to on this day.
Is proyel a word?
Ethan asked what proyel meant, a word he just kind of made up. I honestly wasn’t 100% sure so we looked it up. It’s not a word, in case you’re wondering.
DIY Sudoku
Ethan likes Sudoku and found instructions for how to make a Sudoku game that uses numbers on cards, instead of pre-written on a game board.
Ethan turned the game into a competition, whereby you receive one point when you complete a row, column or section. If no move is possible, then the game ends.
We ended up playing a few rounds of Sudoku and had a great time, as the game was quite challenging.
Classes
Ethan had swimming lessons today and was very excited to go. He was worried that he wouldn’t be able to make it because he was still recovering from his cold, but he was fine. They swam with flippers today, so he was looking forward to that.
Later in the day, he had taekwondo class and it was easy to see that practicing at home has helped because his skills have shown a definite improvement.
Attending our Annual General Meeting
Ethan came with me to our annual general meeting (AGM) and ended up staying for the entire meeting.
He kept himself entertained by bringing his sketch pad and drawing. The woman in the grey sweater was intrigued by his drawings, as she’s an artist, so that was cool.
New game in Scratch
After the meeting, Ethan quickly put together a new game in Scratch. The user controls the orange fish with the laptop’s trackpad and tries to keep the fish away from the shark.
February 16th
This morning, Ethan began the day by trying some coding projects in Python, starting with a password generator.
Ethan found this challenging but stuck with it. One thing he learned was that everything needs to be entered without spelling mistakes. He tried to run the code but received errors because his spelling was off.
Once he corrected the mistakes, the code ran perfectly.
Science World Home Learner Workshop
Science World has some home learner workshops and Ethan attended this one. The topic was energy, but Ethan found it a little boring because he has learned about energy on his own and in other classes.
However, it was still good to be there with other home learners and explore Science World.
[UPDATE FEBRUARY 23, 2018] In the workshop, the participants did an experiment with elastics. They stretched the elastics to one of three predetermined lengths (5cm, 10cm and 15cm), then let the elastics fly. The distance the elastics flew was measured and recorded.
The participants were supposed to create a graph using the distances as data, but there was no time, so the graphing was assigned as homework for next week’s session.
After Science World closed, Ethan enjoyed a hot cocoa before heading home. Nice!
Year of the Dog party prep
To prepare for the following night’s family dinner party, Ethan found some instructions on YouTube and made a dog puppet out of paper.
February 17th
This was our first time hosting our annual Chinese New Year dinner for my family. There were 21 people in total so we had it up at the penthouse of our building.
Dong Eun prepared some amazing Korean food that everyone loved and my uncles brought way too much Chinese food.
Throughout the night, Ethan was awesome. He interacted with people by showing them his coding and he also got some of his uncles and aunties to play Monopoly Deal.
It was nice to see how much he’s grown as a person when in these social settings.
February 14th to the 17th was chock full of things Ethan did. Unschooling has been the right way for Ethan to learn and grown as a person. Looking forward to this next week.
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