Unschooling Journal December 23-29, 2018 - Christmas!

Yes, still posting even just after Christmas! With Ethan and unschooling, the learning never takes a day off, even over Christmas. So here we go with the Holiday 2019 version of Ethan’s unschooling…

December 23

We went to my Uncle Don and Auntie Lynn’s house for a big family lunch buffet. Uncles, aunts, cousins and babies were all there, about 20 people in total. This is a photo of my Auntie Lynn and her grandson Ezra. Ethan had a great time being around family, dogs and getting a bunch of Christmas presents, of course.
After we got home, Ethan went onto Mystery Science and he was checking out the lesson on energy and chain reaction machines, which he’s learned about before. The great thing about Mystery Science is how much Ethan enjoys revisiting lessons he’s tried in the past.
Here’s the first part of Ethan’s chain reaction machine.
And here’s the finished machine.
There was also a lesson about sound frequencies and what people are able to hear. Ethan found a website that played a constant tone that automatically increased the tone’s frequency. We hit stop when we stopped hearing the tone to see who’s hearing was the most sensitive. Ethan learned that as you get older, the more difficult it should be to hear higher frequency tones. Predictably, Ethan could hear the highest frequency.

Ethan also made a video about square roots with variables.

December 24

Christmas Eve Day! Ethan was getting very excited. We received a gift from a neighbour so we had Ethan make her a card.
We then realized the gift was from a different neighbour so we had Ethan make a second card.
Gift and card delivered to one neighbour.
And second gift and card delivered to the other neighbour.
We then worked on Christmas decorations while listening to Christmas songs. We were having a Christmas dinner later that day with my family so we wanted to prepare our home for our guests.
We originally wanted to buy Christmas poppers but decided against them because of the cheap plastic toys and other things that weren’t really nice. Instead, Dong Eun came up with the idea of making paper necklaces.
Ethan and Dong Eun also made some paper snowflakes.
And we also made some Christmas trees.
Turkey all done and ready to be set aside until later.
Dinner served. Ethan helped with getting the table ready and was excited about Christmas dinner, especially since his cousins were over.
Everyone’s here, except my cousin’s wife, who was in Hong Kong.
After dinner, Ethan and the girls worked on a graham cracker house. The girls brought all the ingredients, including icing sugar to make the “glue” to stick the house together.
It was a team effort to decide how the house would be built.
Cheryl loves to bake and brought us this amazing Oreo cake for dessert.
They decided to hold up the walls of the house using smaller graham crackers for support.
The roof went up, but it wasn’t holding too well so they had to improvise a solution.
They decided to turn it into a flat roof house, instead and call it a night.
My mom was really happy with the card Ethan made her, especially since he wrote in Chinese.
With everyone gone, Ethan had one last thing to do before heading off to bed… A note to Santa.
Along with some of Dong Eun’s homemade cookies.

December 25

Ethan awoke to a new scooter from Santa. Santa even left a note saying how he knew Ethan had lost his old scooter. Cool. Needless to say, Ethan was super-happy today. He was especially happy because he also got to open up his birthday presents from September. Long story.
New binoculars from Dong Eun’s sister, his Auntie Da Young.
He really loved this gravity thing filled with sand and water. We were concerned about it because it was leaking water but Ethan ended up figuring out what was wrong and stopped the leak.
He also really loved this model of the solar system, even though he said the planets and the sun weren’t too scale.
We had to tie a string to the planets in order to hang them up but the knots we were using weren’t holding. So we went online to learn some new knots that would hopefully help.
Once we got the knots sorted, Ethan hung the planets under his bed and placed the glow in the dark stars on his walls.
He then spent the rest of the night reading Secrets of Mental Math, a fun book that teaches you how to do things like multiply any number by 11 or calculate the square of a number all in your head. He loves this book.

December 26

Ethan woke up on Boxing Day and started reading Secrets of Mental Math again. This time, he wanted to try some of the things he learned.
Here, he was asking us to test him on squaring numbers. He was almost 100% right the first try and when he was wrong, he was able to correct himself immediately.
He started with smaller numbers multiplied by 11 but then started figuring out how to calculate larger numbers like in this photo. He was able to answer these pretty quickly. He sometimes used a piece of paper to do the calculation but it was still faster than the traditional method of multiplication.
He ended the day’s learning by watching some lessons about plants and pollination on Mystery Science.

December 27

Ethan spent some time with a toy he originally got for his birthday, this kind of 3D maze puzzle. We all liked playing it, as it’s quite challenging.
Next, it was time for Ethan to dive into some math on Khan Academy and learn about counting permutations and tree diagrams for calculating probability.
This lesson about frying an egg on a hot sidewalk he’s done before but again, the Mystery Science lessons are so good that Ethan is happy to repeat them.
Ethan did some practice with prepositions on Khan Academy.
Time to head over to his friend’s place to play.
After he got home, he learned some more about prepositions.
He then explained what prepositions are by writing about them. Although he borrowed from the videos he watched, this is a good way for him to learn how to explain things, since the Khan Academy videos are so good.
Later, he read more from Secrets of Mental Math and dazzled us further with his new math skills.
Ethan and I reviewed some other work he did, like this comprehension exercise about big cats from Classroom Ready Science News.

December 28

We’re all fascinated by how the gravity toy works. Lucky that Ethan fixed the leak.
Ethan did some practice on contractions. He got most of them correct but a few he wasn’t sure about.
He was excited about this new discovery by astronomers at NASA and how they found evidence of a moon(mabye)outside our solar system. The NASA site is a favourite of Ethan’s.
He then wrote about what he read about the possible moon discovery.
He also did an astronomy lesson about the sun.
Then it was back to practicing his new math skills and having us call out numbers for him to multiply by 11 or to square. And this time, he was 100% accurate with his answers.
The book also teaches you how to calculate the day of the week for almost any date in history.

December 29

This book as been a huge hit. There are hardly any illustrations. It’s text-heavy but Ethan loves it because of what he’s learning.
He also wanted to work on some algebra problems from The Humongous Book of Basic Math and Pre-Algebra Problems.
This book is written in a fun, quirky way with lots of humour so Ethan really likes it.
We spent the middle part of the day shopping and Ethan kept himself entertained by solving a couple of his cubes… the 4×4 and 6×6.
He watched a lesson on explosives and how we can try safe experiments using baking soda and vinegar.
Ethan found a lesson about how the eye works. There was a cool project to build an eye but we didn’t have one of the main parts so Ethan couldn’t build this one.
Ethan learned about strange ratios and wrote about what they are. The writing was good, but we asked Ethan to try and write with the reader in mind, someone who may not know what strange ratios are or why they should be interested.
Ethan learned about the history behind italic typefaces.
He also learned about ellipses.
This was part of the lesson on the eyes. There was a woman who wore special glasses that made everything appear upside down. She did this for a while and was able to do most daily activities like normal after some time.
Ethan also learned about groups of creatures that live together, such as ants.
Ethan did some coding in Scratch by remixing a game.
He then spent some time playing with his new Snap Circuits set.
And we ended the night with some time spent playing Monopoly Deal. Ethan was on a hot streak. He won 5 ouf of 6 games, which isn’t easy to do because Monopoly Deal is a game of strategy.