I woke him up at 8:10. Took him a few minutes of stretching to get going. Downstairs we watched most of the Formula E race. We discussed a good amount of strategy and the technical stuff. He surprised himself by reading ‘Massa’ and a few other names. He asked where Hamilton was, remembering him from Formula 1.
Eventually we moved on to Minecraft. At one point he asked, “Would you be kind enough to get me some raw cod?” He asked for some banana bread but he didn’t really eat it. After Minecraft I hung up envelopes for our calendar and he played with the graphing calculator. We did a good amount of discussing math. Eventually we moved to Khan Academy. We had one activity and he finished kindergarten math. He was then doing the latter part of first grade. He got bar graphs down easy peasy, as the problems themselves were the sort of story problems he’s done with Carly a lot. Telling time (just half hours) was easy too, and that’s where we stopped.
On his piano he discovered a flamenco scale, then had some oatmeal. He spent some alone time taping up a structure in the kitchen. We played Minecraft, and grief was a word of the day. August found a new way to have fun and be funny, turning me and then the monsters and villagers invisible with potions.
Back on the piano he played the c minor scale, then e minor scale. He asked, “What’s ambitious?” A word of the day. I explained, then he said, “I am ambitious.” We finally got ready to go, but he was concerned about the rain. I convinced him to head to town. We left at 1:15. August played more with the graphing calculator, and when we ordered pizza at VIPizza he showed the calculator to the owner. We talked a lot about the graphing and infinity as we ate, and lines going, seemingly, to infinity. I looked up and taught him the word asymptote. He said, “It’s like a whirlpool that gets closer and closer but it’s infinite.”
We finished our pizza (he had two slices) and then we went next door and did some grocery shopping. Back at the meat counter he saw a huge chunk of meat with ribs coming out of it. The guy spoke English and asked if we had any questions. I told him August did and we asked what it was. Unfortunately, his answer was very professional, talking about the origin of the beef and its quality. But I learned the term tomahawk steak, which is another term for rib eye. The guy had been born in San Francisco and recently traveled the whole east coast.
August had fun moving his eyes around as we finished shopping. On the way home he developed a ice cream story with the pirate captain, exchanging his gold for melting ice cream.
At home I made little signs to teach August how to make major, minor, and diminished chords—something August had actually asked about a day or two ago. He did a lot more graphing calculator, then we learned about chords together and he was starting to get it. He’s still kind of stuck on the white and black keys, but starting to understand how you use the chromatic scale to determine these things. We also figured out that a chord progression that he developed a couple weeks ago and has been playing is A diminished, D diminished, E diminished, F major.
We moved over to the rug and I was the teacher and he was a student in class, teaching the chord structures. He was getting it down, but doing even better telling me what kind of chord I was playing by ear.
Carly got home. He showed her that and the graphing calculator. For alone time he did some tracing, tracing parts of a Minecraft picture onto paper. We then played Minecraft. He stopped okay at first, and read to me from Rivet, but then wanted an educational video and wouldn’t wait until after we ate dinner. Bit of a meltdown.
We had dinner (sweet potato dish, and Carly made a rice dish with artichoke). He was spinning a coin on the table and we discussed coin flipping. I told Carly I shouldn’t teach him all my tricks or I won’t have anything to teach him by the time he’s 6.
He requested a video again, and again got upset.Carly took over and they were going to paint. I went up to work. During that time he apparently asked what sine meant, and she taught him about right triangles and circles.
She took him up for his bath. He was then having a fake argument with her, and asked me to take a video. We said good night and read a few questions in What If? Sterilize was another new word. We ended up reading more about moles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant?wprov=sfti1
We started a series of children’s meditations on Insight Timer. As we were going to sleep he told me something about compressing air into a solid. It rained really hard for a minute. He asked, “What would happen if the earth weighed three times as much as the sun?” We listened to the Bach Sinfonias again, and he was asleep around 10:30.
Demonstrating one of his cool graphs:
A funny looking graph:
A song of the day in c minor:
Wait, what?:
My argument was chaka chika:
