Schoolless

Garden variety

I was going to post these pictures as these flowers were blooming. A long time ago. Last month... last week...
After this long winter, that dragged in one monotonous, snow-sodden day after another, you would think we deserve the have the pleasures of spring linger on. But she is a tease, and here are some of her cohorts.

This lilac is called Beauty of Moscow. She's also the beauty of my back yard. Can you just smell her? Gorgeous! Stays that way for about a week, then all this profusion turns brown and limp, and it is done for another 51 weeks. A nondescript, rather leggy bush in the corner of the yard.

The peony buds, big as golf balls, and seemingly as firm, burst open into their vulgar, gaudy display.

The magenta ones are the most obnoxious, but the white ones are not far behind.

They're even worse than the lilac. Once opened, the petals last only a couple of days (during which there invariably come violent thunderstorms which beat them mercilessly to the ground), and the they droop all over the surrounding foliage, as if a large bird had taken a rest there to commune with nature.

The shortest bloom award, however, has to go to the poppies.

Spectacular! But even in the best of circumstances, their blossoms don't last more than a day or two, but since they bloom at the same time as the peonies, they also fall victim to the storms.

I love these extravagant flowers, but I have to admit that I find them a little stressful: the anticipation while the buds take their sweet time to open, the high drama of the peak bloom combined with the constant fear of impending storms, and the keen disappointment after the flowers fade...

Although I vastly prefer this ever-changing display to the monotony of a lawn and its constant and unvaried maintenance, I breathe a sigh of relief when these drama queens are finished, and summer brings in the somewhat plainer, but more dependable summer cast.

Playing catch-up

It's been that kind of week. Not enough time for anything, yet I can't quite account for what we have done. You have such weeks, don't you? I think they usually happen when outside duties, appointments and obligations intrude on the things that you want to do. And you have to scramble to fit your life around them.
A camera is a great thing to have when you want to chronicle your comings and goings without having to write anything down. So, in reviewing last week's snapshots, I realized that we actually got some things done.

Nadia made necklaces following mathematical patterns.

Peter drew a scale plan of our kitchen, and Nadia helped him decorate it with pictures of our cats, hypothetical mice, not hypothetical ants, and even an anteater.

We made a stab at our family tree using stamps cut out of an eraser. As the above kitchen plan, the family tree included pets, both living and deceased. (Note that we are straight line descendants of Adam and Eve.)

We spent a day at the beach.

We made bone models out of drinking straws, and tested them for strength.

Drinking straw bone models are fun to look through.

Oh, let's see, what else? We also stained our teeth and tongues pink with disclosing tablets while studying teeth and plaque, we dropped out of math class, but we did do a lot of work with fractions while studiously avoiding worksheets, and helped an imaginary but very dull-witted farmer add up the feet and tails of his livestock. The kids also discovered the Klutz window art kit, so we now have beautiful stained glass throughout the house.

The bunny is little grumpy

OK, he's a little grumpy, because he saw this today:

He is disgruntled, because, as his bike-store-owning family reminds him, last year at this time people were wearing shorts, and actually riding their bicycles.

Bunny is also a little upset, because he spent a whole day being cooped up in a minivan on the way to Smoky  Mountains. Bunny is not looking forward to this vacation, because he overheard the family discussing the presence of mountain lions at the park. Mountain lions are large carnivores that make bunny nervous.

However, bunny realizes that this is a holiday season, when people like to enjoy spending time with their families and sharing good food.

So bunny does wish you a happy Easter. And so does his friend Brutus. Really.

If you didn't get a card from us this Christmas...

...Sorry!
It was all I could do to get wishes out to our closest kin. But you didn't really miss anything. Our card this year was just another reflection of our laziness, questionable parental authority and poor grooming habits, and probably will not raise our profile in our dear relatives' estimation.
You can see it here, and make up your own mind as to whether you ever want to associate with the likes of us:

Happy Holidays, y'all. Don't lose your mind.

This n'that

OK, the pictures are a little out of season, but this is what some of our days look like:
Art with water-color pencils
Classical music for people who hate classical music (we don't).
Dancing.
Discussion of applications of classical music in Loony Tunes and computer games (lots of talk about Wagner, looked up Valkyries).
Exploring family tree with old photos.
Physical activity through monkeying around (illustrated below).

Discussion of homeschooling goals, responsibilities and personal discipline & freedom.
Exploring computer arts with Photo Booth on our iMac.
Exploring the neighborhood. Continued our on-going discussion about large & small houses. Discussion of communities, economics, architecture, aesthetics and social climbing.
Digital photography with mom's camera.

Legomath

This was back in May, when I thought we really should get back into math.
We used Legos to figure out which numbers were prime numbers. Nadia took groups of like-colored legos and tried to group them into even groups. The numbers that were prime could only be grouped into one large group, or groups of singles (divisible by itself and by 1). The numbers that could be evenly divided into smaller groups were not prime.

While Nadia threw herself wholeheartedly into this project, Peter got fed up pretty fast. "I HATE math," he chanted like a mantra. Then he added unexpectedly: "but I like doing math the fun way." I wasn't quite sure what he meant. He had never previously put the words "math" and "fun" in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence. As he spoke, he was putting together a lego pyramid with a square base. Chris commissioned him to build a pyramid for a king, the base of which would be a square with a side of ten bricks (measured in little square lego's with four dots). As the royal engineer, his job was to figure out how many bricks would be needed to construct such a pyramid (solid, not hollow). First, he established how many bricks were needed for each level. This provided a thorough review of the perfect square numbers up to 100. Then, he determined that you would have to add the total of bricks on each level to figure out the total number of bricks needed.

Since he understood how to do the calculation, I decided to introduce him to the magic of spreadsheets to do the actual math. Peter learned how to enter values into cells, how to use autofill, and how to enter a simple formula into a cell. He concluded that we would need 385 bricks. Once he knew how to do that, he figured out how many bricks would be needed to build a pyramid with a square base whose side was 200 bricks. For that, we would need 2,686,700 bricks.

Since we were on the subject of pyramids, we spent a little time talking about equilateral and isosceles triangles. Here is what we covered, according to Peter: the sum of angles in any triangle equals 180; an equilateral triangle has at least two sides of the same length, at least two angles have to be the same, the third angle equals 180 minus the sum of the other two angles; an isosceles triangle must have three sides of equal length, and three equal angles. He reminded himself that each of its angles is 60, because 180 degrees divided by three is 60.
OK it took longer than I planned, but we were not bored. And, I was reassured to see that some of the math actually stuck.