Will has four lessons left in Explode the Code, and he's working on one of those as I write this. He'll be finished by the week's end. We won't be finished with the plant science book until the end of next week, b/c we missed several days. Anyway, I'm doing it with him every day now, and we may double some of the lessons in order to finish soon. We're still in Isaiah in the bible, going along slowly, because the prophecy stuff doesn't keep his attention well (understandably), and I have to explain it as we go. We still are reading Proverbs, of course. Will started on subtraction for math last week. I'll have him continue addition and subtraction until we're finished with the science next week. Then, we'll take a break from that, and during our "break" from the books, I'm hoping to teach him more about money and time. When we get back to the books in mid-September, we'll go back to more addition, subtraction, place value, etc. I just ordered two dvds off of Ebay; they're part of a series called Drive Thru History. The ones I bought will cover from Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims to George Washington and other forefathers fighting for freedom. It will pretty much cover everything we went over in Our Christian Heritage. The boys love dvds, so this will be a treat...and they learn. ;-)
Sunday, Will and Nathan went to the very front, near the road, and built a stick house together (a "log home") and dug a pond. I picked several white clover flowers from the yard and made him little flower beds around the bank of the pond. I took several pictures. One of them is included here. Then, Nathan set the house on fire to demonstrate to Will how a house can burn. This was a great follow-up on the fire safety video Will and Trust have recently watched. Of the things we got Will for his sixth birthday, a set of safety videos were included. The series is called Danger Rangers. They teach fire safety, water safety, wheel safety (bikes, etc.), and miscellaneous safety things. One of the pictures I took of the burning house is included here.
The other three pictures show what Will did in science yesterday. After we read the science lesson on leaf patterns, Will went out in the yard to study several trees, bushes, and other plants to see which of four leaf arrangements each had: opposite, alternate, whorled, or rosette. This refers to the way leaves come off of the nodes on plant stems. I included three of the four pictures I took here. One is of him with a redbud tree, another with a walnut tree, and the remaining one is of him with an unknown weed he found by the creek bed.
Will is also studying caterpillars. This is something he's doing on his own. He is collecting caterpillars in a black plant bucket (Nathan duct-taped around the bottom to cover the holes), with leaves and a little water. Every time we see a caterpillar, we attempt to identify it with our moths and butterflies field guide, and then he puts it in the bucket.
He's continuing to take his swimming lessons. He'll be finished with level 1 at the end of the week, and I'm not sure where we will go from there.
Trusten seems to be learning his colors. I talk to him about colors in every day life--our clothes, the grass and trees, the boys' trucks, foods, etc. He also says things that surprise me. He's just very observant. His attention span doesn't do well for long with books, but he's always observing everything--visually, audiby, etc. He's dangerous, though. We do well to keep him safe.
Nathan and I had learned about bot flies several months ago. I can't remember why they came up, but we watched short videos on Youtube of persons removing them from other persons. Well, I didn't know we had such a thing around here, but apparently that's the same thing that invades rabbits, and Nathan had told me about some "worms" that tunnel through rabbits. Well, the most awful thing happened. All of our cats (well, we're not sure what happened to one of the four cats) got these things. Maybe it was b/c they hunt rabbits. The mother cat has killed at least one rabbit since we've lived here and have been teaching the kittens to kill things. Anyway, Nathan and I tried helping the cats. He removed a larvae ("wolf worm") each from two of the kittens, but our most beloved kitten Sylvester--Will's cat and also my favorite--we couldn't successfully help. We were going to take them all to the vet the following morning, but they are outside cats, and all of them were gone again yesterday morning, and we haven't seen them since. They'd been gone a whole day or more before the day we helped them, with one of them being gone closer to two full days. The mother has been missing for close to a week now. I'm really, really sad. :-( I so wish we would have done something to keep them inside that night so that they wouldn't leave. As more time passes, the hope fades. I'm not dealing very well with what has happened to Sylvester, b/c I prayed for that cat all the time, b/c Will is so attached and loves that cat, and I'm sad of continually seeing him lose animals (and he's lost a brother). Another lesson learned here for me is that if want to have a pet cat survive out here very well w/o being a partial indoor cat.
I've been doing more study on the plant family Solanaceae. This is the "nightshade" family of plants, which includes several genera and a few thousand species. Some of the most familiar are tobacco, tomato, potato, eggplant, and pepper (excluding black pepper). I am planning to cut out all sources of Solocaceae from my diet. I will talk yet more about why later. This post is long enough.
One more thing. I took the boys to this traveling reptile exhibit last week. They had a Nile crocodile and a large American alligator. They had all sorts of snakes and a couple lizards. Will had been asking to go.
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