He was up at 7:20. “Time to go down stairs, right?” Downstairs I read a few chapters of The Last Kids on Earth, then we played Minecraft and listened to podcasts, learning about dust in particular. We had breakfast, then he was doing graphing. Irrational number was a word of the day. He found that absolute value and square root of a square are the same and we talked about why. He then asked about sine and WHY it makes a wave, so we learned all about how that works. I initially got a couple of images and threw them in Paper, then explained and wrote on them. I also taught him how to do exponents and division in typing out equations (^ for exponent and / for division). And he discovered that ‘pc’ is the abbreviation of ‘parsecs’ in Siri.
We watched a video on sine waves and learned how it applies to a generator and AC power:https://youtu.be/LrZ46TIZ1-M
We then got going to Shani’s: He ran in, hyper and grabbed the swing thing and was running in circles and chanting things like: “3.1414 bla bla bla…pi is how much bigger the circumference of a circle is greater than its diameter!” When she said something about pi having a lot of digits he responded, “Not a LOT of digits, infinite…irregular number…or Eregular number. Get it, cuz e is also in mathematics.”
They started at the table and she had him sit on a ball as a chair as he did stickers. That worked pretty well, I thought, although I noticed she switched it out for a regular chair at some point. He ‘stole’ a couple minutes on the swing, then climbing the ladder. When he wouldn’t agree to go by the plan (writing first) she then switched them and they did swinging time before writing, which is the usual order of things. He swung around on his stomach for a while, then agreed to do the fishing thing. He initially got out of the swing to do the fishing, but then decided that was too easy.
They moved back to the table for writing. E: “Every single one is gooder than the one before that.” “I did that? Crazy.” He then practiced A before doing some_ Fs_. They then went to G. He asked, “Can we skip to Qs? Z’s? Those are my favorite numbers. I mean letters! Variables! Whatever.” But then was fine doing them in order and doing G. She was doing a good job of getting him to calm down, using words like, “I want to see your body calming down.” “Next week we’ll work on slowing down.”
From there we drove down to Netanya and to Winter Lake Park. There was indeed a big pile of snow in the park. On their Facebook page the city had posted that snow was waiting for people. Well, it was waiting, but it was fenced off. A review of a post a couple days ago said it didn’t open until 1. So kind of odd that the snow was sitting out, just able to have its photo taken, but we made the best of it and walked 7 minutes due north to a pizza place. He asked, “Why don’t people like the taste of Christmas stamps?” Which is from a Joseph’s Machines video. We found the pizza place, then he needed the bathroom. We walked up the big round stair case to where there are some government offices or the such. August was hesitant to go in one, but I went in and asked and we were able to go in and use a bathroom.
Back at the pizza place we got a piece of ‘regular’ (cheese) pizza and a Nestea. It was a big slice, but August kept eating and eating. He had a game where Brother was doing tons of knitting to be rewarded with his favorite treat, which he said is cinnamon rolls. This is also based on a Joseph’s Machines video. Eventually, Brother found out he was in a simulation, and there was a big debate about whether that was a good or bad thing, and whether he should leave the simulation. He did, and it turned out that the only difference was that there were no bananas in real life. And artichokes were different, I think. Brother had been worried that there would be no Minecraft, but there was.
It wasn’t enough food, so I also got one of the things with potatoes and olives and eggs in it. August kept eating, and ate more than half of that as well, even eating the green olives.
On the drive to Netanya August had talked about wanting to learn a language that only he and I could talk. We talked about learning something like Latin or one of the rare/fictional languages in Duolingo, and then I had started to teach him Pig Latin. Now, on our walk back we discussed programming languages and hexadecimal and density of language systems, as we were talking about why hexadecimal is easier to read than binary, even though it is more dense, and then were discussing how many symbols are in written language.
We got back to the snow area. Still not open (a few minutes before 1) so we sat on a bench and started the Python programming course on Brilliant. He liked that, then a few minutes after 1 we wandered over to the snow. Still not officially open. But there was no on around. A school group showed up, but then were just standing around as well. Finally, a dad came by with a smaller girl, and they slipped through the fence and started playing. After a couple minutes August agreed to go in as well. A minute after that the school group came in. A little chaotic at first, with middle school age students throwing snowballs, but not too bad.
August put one of his old pairs of gloves on, but they only lasted about 15 minutes before they were soaked. I had brought gloves and coats, but hadn’t thought of bringing boots, or a change of shoes. Also, in the future I should bring beach toys. August thought it was more like ice than snow, and called it a glacier, and liked that it was rather transparent. We played for about 45 minutes. While he was playing he came up with a couple good lines: “Splashing ice is easier than learning python. Obviously.” And: “The chance of finding a binary star with your eye is the same as making a snowball in an oven.”
When he was done and wanted to warm back up we went back to the bench. He was figuring out different units in the search calculator on my phone. Kelvin, Celsius, Parsecs, etc. About 2 we headed to the car, but he stopped at the spinning chairs and other little toys area for a few minutes first.
We were listening to Story Pirates on the way. At home I let him do Minecraft first, before his alone time, as he argued I should let him try that once ever two weeks. While we played we watched some of the first Robotics competition on Twitch. We saw the AIS team once. They looked like they were off to a rough start.
In graphing we discussed and explored order of operations a bit. I made a list of all the things we’ve talked about doing, as he keeps jumping from thing to thing, and we’d also discussed so many things he wanted to do today. He agreed to start with the 15 minutes of alone time he owed me. He did that, then started our list with wanting to know how to change some of the settings on my camera, so we did that first and he took photos for a few minutes. We then started, well continued since we’d started on the bench at the park, the Brilliant course on coding in python. He was hungry, so had a bowl of soup and then we did more more coding.
Carly got home just as we were moving into the next chapter/quiz on Brilliant and August excitedly read out every little program to her, parentheses and all, excited that he could understand it and she couldn’t. She was home early and went upstairs to rest or work. We did more programming, then he did more graphing. I did the dishes, then he was ready to move on, first by doing alone time. He spent the whole time at the piano. He excitedly told me he could figure out how to do “Ode to Joy” in every key, and showed me it was based on knowing how many steps and half-steps were between each note. That way he could start from any key and know the intervals.
We did Minecraft, then Joseph’s Machines videos: the ketchup and mustard one and the big alarm clock. Carly came down. I got him peanut butter and crackers, then I went for a run. They read a little of the Sid the Science Kid book. I had suggested he do some reading, and she asked him to read half of the words. He obliged by reading the first half of each word. They didn’t get very far. I think she read something else, then they watched a documentary on Curiosity Stream about the Large Hadron Collider. After I got back and took a shower we played piano together. We played the blues minor and pentatonic scales and reviewed minor scales. August was actually copying and playing along to a line I was playing in the blues minor scale and it sounded really cool.
He voluntarily headed upstairs to Carly when we were done. She gave him a bath, then we said good night. I had to run downstairs to fill up his water bottle, and he had the Seuss app read him a couple of stories. He then read a few pages of Hop on Pop to me. I then read the lava most chapter of How To. He was doing yoga poses, and pulled his feet up to his mouth and was kissing them, and said, “My footsies!” We listened to the new Circle Round story “The Mountain Spring”. On Bedtime Explorers we listened to “Snake” and he fell asleep before I put on any music, about 10:20.
Using the ball as a chair:
Fishing from the swing:
Snow in Netanya 1:
Snow in Netanya 2:
Song of the day:
Song of the day 2:
Playing jazz together:
More jazz together:
Playing with his feet:
