Week 6 October 11-15th: Unschooling At Work!

 Whew. Two more weeks of our vegetable CSA, and then we take a month off from major garden work! It has been a whirlwind of a summer. Michael has learned how to wash veggies, and spent quite a few days with us working on packing peoples orders and organizing inventory. All three boys have helped plant, harvest, wash, weed, and maintain garden beds. Emmet grew four beautiful carving pumpkins in his garden as well as tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, and flowers. Avery's little bed has rotated quite a few crops! He had melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, green beans, lettuce, potatoes, celery, sunflowers, blueberry bushes, and more!! Both their beds are in need of clearing out summer plants and planting for winter. Avery has already planted quite a lot of extra celery we had from our garden and they will slowly grow until spring. Michael would like to build a bed as well, and we are hoping when things slow down in November for me, we will have time.

Because it is end of the CSA, and we are trying to get as many beds turned over and planted for winter, I have been extra busy. This week we did zero focused school together except one day we read a pile of Halloween books from the library. Because we ebb and flow so much we usually school over Christmas break to help make up for it, however the boys also get really creative when they have a lot of open space for it, and boy howdy did they unschool themselves well this week!

One morning Avery opened a new to us Steve Spangler Science book and found an awesome project called Jumping Soda Can! He gathered the supplies and called me over to read the instructions. By the time I was outside working and our Super Nanny was here, they were all deeply involved in making the can jump out and seeing how it landed. Because they were so involved Super Nanny turned the whole thing into a super fun science AND math project, creating graphs and charting what ways the can jumped out of the cup. We also discussed how this was Bernoulli's principle on fluid force gravity, which suggests that slow moving fluids have greater pressure than fast moving fluids. So when you blow across the can in the cup it causes the air (the "fluid" for this project) to disperse around the can, lowering the downward pressure, which causes air to flow under the can and push it up and out. 

Michael enjoys Choose Your Own Adventure books quite a lot. He has expressed before how a Minecraft one would be really cool, however one does not exist. This week he brought me this book and surprised me with his very own Choose Your Own Adventure Minecraft book!! He made all of what he has so far in one day. This is as much unprompted and spelled independently writing in one day in one place than he probably did ALL of last year. I really love when passion strikes and they blow me away with how far they have come. I highly praised all of it, and he asked for some spelling pointers, but oh man, it makes me so happy we have reached the next step where he feels confident enough to even try to sound out words by himself. This child led learning process requires a lot of faith and patient waiting (which is never actually patient but I have to keep it to myself, ha!). 

Co-op's first day this week was at a park making illustrations for the book that co-op is writing together. One mom organized asking each child to add a paragraph to a story, and then printed each child's paragraph onto individual papers and had them illustrate their page. Another time each child will get to use a coil binder and put their books together. I have read the story but haven't seen any of the illustrations yet, and am so excited to see it finished!

Our second co-op day we visited Topaz Farm on Sauvie Island! Since we already have many of our own pumpkins we did the 7.5 acre corn maze, visited the animals, and played in their activity areas. 

Michael has been thoroughly enjoying his Urban Sketching class he is taking through Teach NW. They have been learning some really awesome drawing skills that really teach to his type of brain. To make cityscapes and buildings they do something called point perspective. One, Two, and Three point perspective starts with one, two, or three points that you make every line off of in your drawing, creating even lines and different view perspectives. I have been really impressed!

Kiwi crates came this week!! The older two built coin sorting machines and Avery made a manual pump Lava lamp! We paid for the book to come each month with Avery's and we received a really cool science project book this month which will no doubt inspire many projects!

This weekend we hosted our very own pumpkin patch for our CSA members! Everyone had a really good time coming to see the farm and take home their Halloween pumpkins. After everyone had gone Michael brought out his croquet set he got for his birthday and we played in the field. We also played the following board games this week: 5 Minute Dungeon, and we started to learn how to play the Civil War board game Michael also got for his birthday. It is a quite complicated two player "hold the line" game with many scenarios. It will take us a bit to get the hang of it, I think!

Our Super Nanny also snapped photos for me of boys doing their workbooks. We got three writing lessons and four math lessons in this week! Avery did no reading, as we have to do that together and I just didn't get to it this week! He did however do some drawing and labeling his work in the car one day and worked on spelling out words with me.

Hope you are enjoying your October, I sure do love this month!

The Dillman's