He was up about 7:55. He asked if it was time to get up yet and I told him to let his body decide. We lay down and after about ten minutes he was ready to head down. He went downstairs and saw the screen of a video she was watching. It involved China and had people wearing masks, so could guess what it was about. He then curled on the couch for a while more. Carly and I were talking about the free things artists had been doing, and I had us watch the first Seattle Symphony Orchestra morning videos, of the concertmaster violinist playing. August really liked that. I then read I Want My Hat Back, which was a cheap book on Apple Books.
We played Minecraft, exploring the International Space Station and being marine biologists in two of the free downloadable worlds they released. He surprised me with his reading of the signs telling us the habitats of the marine animals. I then showed him a Doc77 video of the new mob in Minecraft, the ones that spawn on and walk on lava.
He watched his beloved Mars Base video from Kurzgesagt as I got oatmeal ready and he ate. We then played piano, and we looked at some of the Supersonic Piano pieces we had printed, and I discussed some of the techniques that they teach, like “Lava Keys” and watched the videos. Sadly, that was the last techniques video, as they don’t have them starting with book 2. Those would be helpful for learning from home. He then had a story of Brother being jealous of piano playing girl in the park: “She’s not actually magical, just figuratively natural.” We did more piano playing. He asked what Hands on approach and nutshell mean. I’m not sure where he picked those up. Words of the day.
He elected to do math next and wanted to go up to the bedroom to do Ms. Safe math. We went up. I didn’t really have a plan, but offhandedly mentioned we should do math related to Minecraft Math. So Minecraft Math was born. I used a diagonal lined page in Paper and drew a cube and colored the blocks we could see, then had August trying to visualize how many blocks we could not see. We worked through it using both visualization to figure it out, then checking our answer with arithmetic. I then had him open Minecraft and build the exact same cube to verify it visually. This was all tough for him, and really good exercise. He snuck a little extra iPad time while I drew more shapes for tomorrow.
He wanted to go outside so we got some crackers with peanut butter and honey and ate those outside. We read Paddington in the Garden (finally). Stake was a word of the day. He randomly asked what indivisible means. And we read more of How To where linger was a new word. How To mentioned Terry Pratchett, and we tried The Wee Free Men, but he wanted to go back to How To.
We ended on the chapter about sending a file. This really got August thinking, and he went on and on about storing data in DNA and how he does it. After several minutes of that he went to the bathroom, then we watched Grian’s latest video. Retrofit was a word of the day. He listened to Circle Round’s “Armadillo’s Song” for alone time, then we played in the Washington D.C. world in Minecraft. We saw and talked about things like the MLK Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Library of Congress, and the Jefferson Memorial.
We started to get outside for a walk. But he saw a “Crane fly! Panic room! Panic room!” And ran back inside. He asked why I was laughing as I know crane flies freak him out. I told him it was the use of “panic room”, which he had learned from Grian.
As we got walking he told me about harvesting ice from Mars to bring to Earth. He said it was “stupid but genius”, like Grian has described his plan to kill himself to get points in the Head Hunt game. He also asked “What’s a hands-on approach?” A few more times during the day.
We walked by the corn flowers and up to the park, then back down and sat on the rarely used bench by the corn flowers and he had his chocolate bar. He had the idea of doing a time lapse of him eating it. So I did. He soon wanted to head home to wash his hands, so I kept it going all the way home and through him washing his hands with the hose.
Inside we played piano and I wrote out a couple new chord progressions from the Pianote video and we played around with them. We went outside at his request, but that only lasted a minute as this time a huge black bumblebee came flying by.
This time we read a couple chapters of The Wee Free Men. He looked at songs on Supersonics Piano. Apropos of nothing he asked “What’s navy mean?”
He asked for a Circle Round and listened to “Fiona and the Fairies”. We then watched a complex video together: “What you will find in higher dimensions”. He wanted to watch the whole thing and a few things stuck as he said “I calculated the kissing number of dimension pi…” He then told Carly that tan(2) equals sine(2) divided by cosine(2).
They then started a Zoom call with Vivian and Colin to do math. Carly was having difficulty coming up with problems for them. I finished dinner. August shared the hundred gears problem, then Vivian had one that involved a man with 7 wives with 7 cats with 7 kittens. It turned out to be more of a riddle, but I didn’t hear why. They then moved to Minecraft. There was a lot of feedback coming from Vivian and Colin being so close together. August said, “You know, I’m not affected by high noises like that. I just go on with my day.”
I escaped upstairs to work. August ate three bowls of the rice/peas/tofu meal. Carly then read Junior B. Jones to them. They hung up and I came down when the Tiv Taam order arrived. Carly cleaned stuff off outside as it started to rain and I carried it all in. It was an interesting experience, and some of the substitutions were odd: the bag of lettuce was larger than any bag of lettuce we’ve ever seen in the store.
August and I did piano together while Carly worked on putting the groceries away. He was teaching me his new song and I got him applying a chord progression to it. We then watched the latest GoodtimeswithScar video. IOU was a word of the day. When he was talking to Carly a bit later wiggle room was another word of the day. He was still hungry, so I got him some crackers and peanut butter and honey. He randomly recited “An affiliate of the university of Washington” Carly asked “where did you learn that?” To which he further recited, “KEXP. Where the music matters.”
We got him upstairs and Carly gave him a bath. I started Skyping with my parents while they were in there so I could chat about the virus. August then came in and talked to them. He did air quotes, which he had apparently learned from Carly. He wanted to show them his piano playing so we went downstairs for that. Paul came up to watch, and August had fun hiding from him when we were back upstairs.
We said goodbye, then Carly was trying to get him to brush his teeth, or simply allow her to do so. He’s gotten really frustrating with this lately, so when she said she was giving up, he started to get it, and with me he agreed to do it himself. He did it partly on his own. We think he’ll enjoy it more doing it himself, as then we aren’t jamming something in his mouth, but he still said it is about the same to him.
In the big bedroom he noted how the clock was ahead an hour. He had helped Carly do it after his bath. He saw it click to 11:00. We said good night and went in to bed. We listened to “The Rusty Cowbell” in Circle Round and then discussed the emotions chart and his old “losing your top” chart (as he called it). I don’t think I have any more paper copies of it though. We then listened to Peace Out’s “Solid, Liquid, Gas”. It mentioned 5 states of matter, but then only discussed the three. He knew plasma, but wanted to know the fourth. So we looked it up and learned about Bose-Einstein Condensates. Another word of the day.
His brain was really going, and he just kept talking: “Black hole that collapses out…infinitely collapsing…only if there’s more mass outside the black hole than inside it…that’s only possible in a 7.5 dimensional universe…” We listened to the new Brian Eno and Roger Eno album and discussed Brian Eno a bit. He kept talking about how sleepy he was “I think I’m a 2 on the scale…” (referring to his old scale). He finally fell asleep around 11/midnight.
Minecraft Math learning:
Improv time:
Chocolate bar time lapse:
A new song:
A new song 2:
A new song 3 – I’m bored:
Air quotes:
