Week 1: Brand New School Year!

 Welcome to 2021/2022 school year!!

This is a continuation of the summary of the Dillman Brother's combined interest based life schooling evidence for attendance purposes as part of Teach NW charter school. We had a fabulous summer, running a vegetable CSA and market garden, growing out 120 chickens for meat purposes, maintaining our 70 ish laying hens, growing out our cows for butcher, and raising a third batch of Lagotto Romagnolo puppies for our breeder. The boys did a lot of exploring local nature parks with our co-op, growing veggies in their own gardens, learning how to cut down trees for firewood, work on and ride a small motorcycle, learning to kayak, and reading, oh so much reading! 

To kick off the school year we begun with a tea party and Story of the World Volume 4. The boys have loved all three other volumes and were very excited to get started. The version of activity guide we have has test pages with fill in the blank answers as well as multiple choice. The older two have been filling out the pages as we read, Michael especially likes to do them instead of other writing practice. 

We have been playing  a lot of board games recently and plan to use board games this year to help round out our schooling and help reinforce lessons. The boys respond really well to them and Avery has started doing simple multiplication because of games. We played Citadels this week, a fun game where each round you are secretly someone else in a metropolis type setting. Each character has special traits that help you build your city, and whomever has seven districts in their city first ends the game. The winner is decided based on a points system. It is a lot of planning, strategy, math, and fun!!

Avery and Emmet grew small gardens this year. The have pumpkins, celery, cucumbers, flowers, green beans, tomatoes, salad, blueberries, peas, potatoes, and more!! They wouldn't believe me when I said their cucumbers were ready weeks and weeks ago, and decided this week they were finally ready. Avery said it tasted okay, but ended up giving it to the chickens in the end!

Emmet's pumpkins are quite impressive!

Emmet is always paper crafting, he made homemade books while we read our history. One he gave to me to use as a record book for this year.

Michael does a lot of research on Minecraft projects. He usually builds some sort of challenge or activity in Minecraft for his brothers to complete once a week when they play Switch together.

Avery drew while we read history, adding characters to a sheet on the great wall of China. Not really the topic we are in, since our history is just about to get to the Revolutionary War, but he said it looked like  a fun page to do. 

Ticket to Ride London is one of our favorite games!! I really like all the Ticket To Ride games, but this one is Avery's favorite as the board is much smaller and easier to find your routes on. In this game you get a secret train route that you must complete. To make a route with your little plastic trains, you must collect cards with the right color ticket. Once you have enough of that color you put your trains down, then repeat until you complete a route. When you run out of the trains the game is over and everyone counts points based on how many routes they completed. Strategy, math, geography, and critical thinking are the skills we practice here!

Our read aloud books for the week. We learned about Dicken's, and the older two are reading some Dicken's adaptations made into comic books. We also read the Secret Garden, have a Secret Garden cookbook from the library right now, and I have plans to listen to the actual Secret Garden book on audio once we get our turn with it from the library. Our history lesson was on India and the British influence in their country. We were also supposed to host a puppy day with our co-op, where we would learn about dog life cycle and socialize the puppies. However, our family fell ill, then several other co-op families got sick as well. They have positive COVID tests, and I am waiting on mine, but more than likely that is what we had. So, lots of reading, school, playing with the puppies ourselves, and staying home this week!

For Science this week we watched the documentary Seaspiracy. Quite an eye opening movie, which I thought would be about plastic in the ocean, but was more about the cruelty and massive over fishing happening in our world. Some very graphic and sad imagery of poaching and just plain murdering of whales, dolphins, and sharks for profit and control, as well as the tragic truth that slavery is also involved. It was a hard thing to watch, but important to be aware of. We don't eat a lot of fish already, as I am allergic, however the boys take fish oil capsules, our cat food has fish in it, and we talked about other ways we may be using fish and supporting a false and dangerous industry. 

Here is my attendance booklet that Emmet made me. Keeping track of our math, writing, reading, history, science, and art every week as well as writing down the board games we play and the books the older two read.

Have a great week!

The Dillman's