Then about two days ago, Jeff came in and told Griffin to show me his new teeth. Sure enough, there they were growing right in behind the two baby teeth. The two baby teeth are still firmly planted.

I’m curious to see what the dentist has to say on Monday.

I still need to get some window treatments but I just haven’t found what I want yet. We don’t need them for privacy since our house is in the middle of our 5 acres and nobody can see into them, but I think they would soften the room up a bit.

We do most of our work at the table by the big window. He sits in the adjustable chair with the stool for his feet to rest on. The table on the left is the art table. Supplies are left out at all times for him to create art or for writing if the urge hits him. There are more supplies in the red boxes to the right of the art table.

Here we have bookcase and storage above it. There’s a lot of room in the storage area. It contains art supplies, school supplies, new curricula that we are waiting to use and in some cases, old curricula that we have finished.

You can see our latest PR lesson on the whiteboard and our ongoing habitat posters and desert diorama which are part of Elemental Science biology.

This wall will be changed this summer. I’m going to move the art project clip line up higher, get rid of the All About Spelling whiteboard and tiles since we no longer use AAS and use the space for a world map.

This is where most of the current curricula can be found. The three black bins on the right of the lower bookcase hold our current books. The binders in the taller bookcase hold most of our completed work separated by subject. At the end of the year, I will pull everything from the binders and pick the best items to bind with a comb binder as a keepsake for the year.

The bins and shelves hold art supplies, readers and many many math manipulatives. Inside the bookcase are shelves of learning games. Next to the binder you can also see our squeezebox boom which streams music from my computer into the school room. This is how we play music for our classical music studies as well as song school latin, internet radio and audio books without having to bother with cds all over the place. It can also be moved all around the house to listen to whatever we want wherever we want. It even has batteries so it can be used outside. This way we have our entire music/audio collection at our fingertips all around and even outside our house!

In another room of our house we have an office with a continuous desk covering two walls with full windows on both walls. All three of us have our own computer space (3 computers). This way, we each have our own computer, but he can be supervised at all times on his computer.

Here he is checking out headventureland.com.

For reading, we either snuggle on the couch or get in our bed. He will do his own reading on his bed or on the couch or anywhere really!

For art, we are combining several different resources. First we are working our way through Drawing With Children. While it’s a great book, it’s a little difficult to break down into nice neat little lessons. This lesson plan link for Drawing with Children helps with that. For lesson 7, “Drawing From Graphics”, I decided to use the Draw Write Now books instead of the graphics depicted in the Drawing with Children book. The graphics in DWC are very small and really aren’t all that helpful I’m sorry to say. Draw Write Now is the same concept, but BETTER. We began by going over the 5 elements of shape which are circles, lines, curved lines, dots and angled lines. I was impressed that he remembered all of them! We then talked about everything can be drawn just by using these 5 elements!! I let him choose whichever book from the Draw Write Now set that he wanted and he decided to draw the Statue of Liberty. I thought it turned out GREAT!! Below it is a drawing that he did only a couple of days earlier with his usual drawing style. It’s amazing how much confidence he gained just by realizing that everything is made up of the 5 elements and seeing that he can draw something so impressive. These books are consistently pulled from the shelf almost daily to draw on science narrations, journal writing, art projects, Phonics Road illustrations, and just for fun!

Drawing with Draw Write Now:

Drawing on his own:

We began by adding the 5 great circles to our memory work. The five great circles are The Arctic Circle, The Tropic of Cancer, The Equator, the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Circle. We also throw in the Prime Meridian for good measure.

The premise is to start by folding a regular sized piece of paper longways to create the line for the equator. He then lines up his paper with a map outline to draw each of the 5 great circles on his paper. He then folds it again in the other direction and uses the crease from that fold to create the Prime Meridian.

We got the map from the following link:

www.worksheetworks.com

I added blue for the oceans and made the 5 circles text larger. I then colored each of the continents to roughly match the colors found in Draw Write Now Volume 7. I then outlined each continent with a sharpie marker and then laminated it. Eventually, I will probably go back and outline the rest of North America as well. I’m not sure why I left that off other than it was late and I pictured him drawing the main areas to begin with and didn’t want to confuse him.  Also I was using the Draw Write Now drawing maps as a guide and they do not include those areas.

Here is a scan of our map:

You may download it below. I think it turns out best if you print it on white card stock. Then color in the continents; outline with sharpie marker and then laminate.

World Map with 5 Great Circles colored oceans

Once we have the 5 great circles in their correct positions, we will move on to drawing and coloring our blobs. The point of this exercise is to get them about the right size in about the right position. The photo below is from Draw Write Now Volume 7. I highly recommend this entire series of drawing books.  It only shows the equator and the prime meridian but we will obviously include all 5 of the great circles as mentioned above.  Later in this volume, it moves on to show how to draw each continent with detail (not just blobs). VERY COOL!!

Tomorrow I’ll follow up with some photos of him drawing the 5 great circles!

In science we have been studying about camels. Today we did an experiment from this book to illustrate how/why camels can walk through the sand while carrying heavy loads without sinking.

First we put a dime sized cardboard circle (representing a human’s foot) into the sugar sand and we tried to push it down into the sand. It easily sank.

Next, we put a larger cardboard circle (representing a camel’s foot) into the sand and tried to push it down and it would not sink!

Of course I knew this was bound to happen as well!

Because of that, today he was a statue AND a hugging machine. Then he got behind me with his head over mine and said, “I’m pretending like you have two heads. You have two heads mom!” Then he brought his head to my shoulder and wrapped both arms around me to the front and said, “Now you have two heads AND four arms, Mom!” The hugging machine might have been my favorite. He did a pretty good impersonation of a robot giving a hug and he would hug and let go, hug and let go, hug and let go…he was a hugging machine! “Ok mom! when the doctor comes in, we’ll both act like statues ok? I’ll put my hand up and say Go! when it’s time to start acting like a statue, ok?” Indeed he was a statue when the doctor entered. He held character for just long enough for it to be funny or cute. It was very similar to how he always wants to hide and make people find him whenever they come to our house. He couldn’t hide so he became a statue. A very cute, happy, giggly statue.

The doctor checked his ears and throat and nose and said he looks fine. The pediatric eye doctor told us to come back in 6 months and that will be our next stop to be sure his glasses don’t need an adjustment, because of course that could cause head pain.

These are my favorite days. Waking up to bridge tunnel; doing lessons in the morning sun with cute jammies and bed head; wearing “Sumerian robes” while learning about The Ziggurat; snuggling on the couch to read book after book; and tucking him into bed with lots of butterfly kisses and pig noises (his request!).

We started Song School Latin today and he really seemed to enjoy it. He loved the coloring page and sang along to the songs and seemed to be learning the words.

We moved on to art and did a lesson from Drawing With Children. I forgot to remind him how to blot his brush before using it on the aquacrayons which caused him to be frustrated by how his turned out. He’s so resistant to art. I think we should do more to move him out of that resistance! He just wants everything to be perfect, and life just isn’t that way!

We also learned about camels today! After we read all about camels, he narrated a couple of things that he learned. I then wrote them down and he wrote them out as copywork. We didn’t include a drawing today since we already had an art lesson planned.

For the past week and a half or so, he has been complaining about a pain on/in his head. The first time I heard him complain about it was at Zoo Lights and I thought maybe he had a hunger headache since he did not eat his dinner before we went. Then I heard it again when we were at the movie Tangled during a very intense part of the movie when he was crying. Over the past few days he will just suddenly yell, “ow! ow! owwwww!!!” and touch his head in the same place each time. He says it’s a pain that is pulling his hair. I looked at the spot he points to with a flash light and I did see a bit of dry skin in the area, but so slight. When asked if it’s on top of his head or IN his head he says it’s both. When he yells out in pain (or a couple of times fell on the floor and rolled around because of it), he says that it feels like it’s pulling his hair really hard. Anyway, we have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow at noon. I can’t imagine what she’s going to say or do about it. We’ll see.

I think he had such a rough day today because he just wanted to get back to this: