Star Wars Playdate

It's been super-hot here every day this week and we've been trying to stay indoors as much as possible. But Monday wasn't too bad which was great 'cause that was our official Star Wars Playdate day with our homeschooling group.

Let me just say, the mom who came up with the idea did an amazing job organizing the whole thing. They even had time to bake Star Wars cookies!

We all got together at a local park. Everyone was encouraged to bring their Star Wars toys and dress up. M finally had his dream realized - all his friends brought their light sabers and were allowed to have as many battles as they wanted. Aside from almost non-stop light saber battles, there was some hard-core jedi training. It included Nerf gun practice, insignia making, light saber crafting, learning to navigate dangerous fog-filled jungles of Dagobah.

The capstone of the event was an epic battle - all the little kids against 2 teenagers who volunteered to be the bad guys (in exchange for a chance to handle dry ice).

It was super awesome! It also helped that a day before the playdate I scored this paper mask of Darth Vader for $0.25 at a Kids Exchange Sale. M was so thrilled. He put the mask on right away and walked around the house, breathing noisily and humming the Imperial March which is, of course, Darth Vader's theme.

He wore the mask as the playdate as much as possible, but insisted on being on the side of good. You see, his Vader is a rehabilitated one who's nice and even "helps Mama wash dishes".

Summer is So Crazy

I thought that once summer is here we were going to be sort of bored, looking for things to do and friends to hang out with. After all, many home schoolers we know follow the traditional school year. For example, our preschool co-op is over and done with 'til September and so it the Math Trek. Rrrrright......

Over the last couple of weeks we've been very-very-very busy with the capital "B", dashing from one thing to the next and being late just about everywhere we'd go. Plus we're not exactly taking a whole summer off either. We study a bit each day, mostly through reading books and talking about stuff. But also I've been teaching M to read. He knows most letters and reads very short words. Anything longer than 4 letters puts him off. But I think it's just a matter of practice.

So we practice, although not as much as I'd like. This is us playing the "5 marshmallows" reading game. It's simple - I write 5 syllables on paper cups, turn the cups upside down and hide a mini-marshmallow under one of the cups. When M opens his eyes, I tell him "The marshmallow is under... "му" (for example). Now he has to find the right cup by reading all the syllables. No guessing! If he gets it wrong, I get the marshmallow.

For this game he likes assembling all his little toys and "sharing" the hard-won marshmallows with them, giving each one a bite to eat. So it takes us a while to get through all five marshmallows. But it's fun and it works.

He's still heavily into putting together various contraptions. The new twist is he might want to sketch it out first. So he takes a sheet of paper and a red marker (gotta be the red one!) and carefully draws two vertical lines for the body, a jumble of wires in between (some squiggly lines), a few gears (small circles), and caps it all off with a head - an egg-shape with no facial features.

This is M assembling a refueling station for his new Star Wars toy (thanks, Grandpa!). The droid starfighter took forever to fuel up 'cause it needed "three million and fourteen gallons" of fuel. No matter since Darth Vader and the minions were patiently waiting.

Finally, this is M in the Contraption Room at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. It's an awesome room that is full of spare parts to build the basic simple machines and put them together into Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. I'm in love with this room! In fact, I want to scale it down just a little bit and re-create here, at home. Maybe next school year.

M didn't like it at first 'cause it wasn't a robot-making room. But after some sulking and whining, he said, resignedly, "ok, so then let's build some machine" and we started. He was particularly fascinated with pulleys. In fact, that's all he wanted to do for almost 40 minutes - explore pulleys. So we put a little contraption together. Then I started adding to it - a ramp here, a lever there for the plastic ball to negotiate. I thought it'd be interesting to M, but he was way too absorbed with the pulleys and hardly paid attention to my creations.

We've also been going to pools. Yes, the real ones! M finally got into a big pool and now it's a challenge to get him out of it when it's time to go home. Plus I got him a floating vest and we usually borrow inflatable arm bands from a new friend, Yura. Wearing all that M proudly negotiates water all by himself. Now he's actually asking me for swimming lessons! Yay!!!! No pictures of this part 'cause I'm in the water with M and Chris hasn't had a chance to come with us yet.

Making Things

In case you're wondering, this above is our DIY Darth Vader. He's made out of towel roll tube, a paper cup, some black felt, stickers and little plastic pieces all painted black and hot-glued together.

Did I tell you that M is off his wanting to be an astronaut thing? So much so that he doesn't even care to go to NASA. Plus he actually suggested to tear down his big cardboard rocket! He gave us three reasons as to why the change of heart:

1. The International Space Station is too small, no place for running around;

2. Astronauts have to be there for long stretches of time;

3. Astronauts have to train in a huge pool and train under water.

This is a clone trooper wind-up toy we found at the flea market for $1. He's in a secret rebel hide-out. There's also a capsule waiting for lift-off.

For a period of about 2 days he wanted to be Mickey Mouse and that got me worried. Knowing how he really get into these things and stays with his "themes" for a while, I was afraid of having to sing "Hot dog, hot dog, hot diggidy dog..." and speak in a very high-pitched voice for months.

This plane has nothing to do with Star Wars. We went to a Trader Joe's store and M noticed all the planes made from recycled things and pieces of cardboard. So M immediately wanted to have a plane made out of junk. We didn't have anything for a fuselage, so we had to promptly drink a can of V8. We also used a paper cup, some cardboard from old boxes, 2 wooden spools, some wire and, of course, loads of ducttape.

Fortunately, he moved on. He's into Star Wars now, big time. Which is kind of a mixed blessing. Turns out, Star Wars has a ton of toys and every single one of these toys is very expensive. And the old ones are called "collectibles" and cost even more than the new ones. How inconvenient!

This is a Jedi Starfighter made out of some tubes we got at Scrap Exchange, another paper cup and some Popsicle sticks. Actually, M figured out how to arrange the pieces by himself and then Chris glued them together with hot glue.

But never fear! Fortunately at this point M doesn't care if a toy is store-bought or home-made. Actually, I take that back. He prefers home-made toys, the junkier the better. So lately there's been a lot of toy making at our house. We're actually starting to run out of spare parts. Hence the recent trip to Scrap Exchange. Our hot glue expenditures went up dramatically as well, but still we are ok compared to having to buy all these toys.

This strange contraption is a Probe Droid of the kind that Darth Vader sends out to find Luke Skywalker. This one is made out of some plastic containers from Whole Foods, a toilet paper tube, shoe laces, more spools, some beads and various odds and ends. M's contribution (other than helping figure out which part to use where) was creating the probe's tentacles.

Of course, now all the toys are Star Wars themed - Darth Vader, various spaceships and escape capsules, droids, etc.

This is Scrap Exchange, our new most favorite place to go explore when in Durham.

Math Games Week 3 - Taking a Break

This week there are no new games posted, so we've been taking it easy and replaying a few games from the previous weeks. We played another chimera grid game, this one is 100% Star Wars related. M loved it!

I splurged on a huge Star Wars sticker book - so worth it. The stickers are

reusable so they'll last us a while. Plus a friend suggested an idea of turning a few of the stickers into magnets for even more fun. Hooray!

In the mean time, we created this comic story grid and filled it with stickers and words. I still had to draw a couple of things since strangely the sticker book did not have a single sticker of Princess Leia in her golden bikini. Nor did it have pictures of Jabba the Hut. Weird...

Oh, and we also made this Darth Vader 'cause I didn't care to spend any more money on Star Wars stuff (telling ya, M's entire space program, including the lunar module, must've cost less than a 2-inch R2D2 action figure). So I put my foot down and said "no" to all the requests for a Darth Vader toy. Instead, I said that we would just make one. So here he is - a toilet paper roll, a paper cup, left-over felt and some stickers.

These last couple of pix are from a couple of weeks back, I think. I had some tomato cages laying around waiting for me to use them. M got to them first and decided that they were just perfect as weaving looms. So he spent quite some time in the yard weaving twigs, branches, flowers and ribbons through them, then pulling it all down and starting again until he got tired of the game.