Yesterday was our first day of homeschooling. Our trail attempt to see how it goes.

I hadn’t told the school yet, thinking we could just try it first, and Lex said he didn’t want people at school to know, so the plan was to just keep him home. All went well until his teacher responded to my “Lex won’t be in school today” email with “I’m curious as to why. Yesterday he told [his para] that he was going to be out and that you were going to home school him for Tuesdays. Is there something that happens on Tuesdays he is avoiding?” BUSTED! So I sent her a whole reply about what we are thinking of doing. I said I wanted to chat with her in person, but we were going to try one day and see how it went. I got no reply. Now I don’t know who she has told (other teachers? principal?) or what anyone is thinking. So much for keeping it on the DL!

We started the day as usual, then when Eve left for school, Lex and I headed down to the basement. I thought it would be good to have some separation and I was concerned if we did schooling upstairs we would feel like we spent the entire day at the dining room table. Downstairs we began school with a discussion of how the day would go and a plan for what he wanted to learn.

Our plan for the day. (I really should crop and edit these pictures before posting. I’m getting blog-lazy!)

His first question was “How does a prism split apart light?” Using a prism, the info that came with it, plus two different science books, we did some experiments!

Setting up the classic “light through water” experiment.

Looking for rainbows

We found some! It was hard to take good pictures though.

Lex learned that each color moves at a different wavelength and when it hits a medium such as water or glass the waves refract (bend) at different angles, thereby causing the light colors to separate. Refraction was a new word for him.

Quick break!

We did some other exploring with the prism and the water as well.

This sheet came with the prism. It’s pretty cool to see what patterns emerge when the light is refracted through the prism.

This experiment brought up the concept of focal point. As you look through the water and move the paper backwards, the arrow appears to flip, pointing left instead of right. We talked about why that happens and how it would be affected with different size containers.

We had a snack break in the morning too, with some reading, of course! After lunch we had some outside time (shoveling the driveway!) and then went back downstairs to look at his second question. “Why are the 7 colors of light what they are? (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)” This question took us to the Internet for some research. We learned that Isaac Newton first discovered that you can use a prism to split white light into a spectrum. He grouped the visible spectrum into seven colors because he thought there was a significance to the number seven and linked it to seven octaves, seven days of the week, and seven bodies in the sky. He thought they must all have some significance and relation. He also named them the names we use today.

That led us to wonder if all colors we can see (pink, teal, tan, beige, etc) appear somewhere in that spectrum or not. Turns out that they do not. The colors in the visible spectrum are colors made with just one wavelength. Shades and variations of colors require multiple wavelengths. We had a long discussion about that. On Wikipedia we found a drawing that Newton did mapping the colors to musical notes. Lex said, “Hey, I can play the rainbow.” So he did.

Playing the rainbow.

I don’t know why the audio has the static noise.

Lex wrote up his notes from the morning and afternoon sessions.

It’s good to have a key for your notes.

Morning session – light refraction

Afternoon session – visible spectrum

While we were doing experiments in the small office he noticed that his voice reverberated off the bass drum every time he spoke. That got him curious about sound vibrations and he suggested we add that to the list for future study. While he was reading about Newton he paused and asked, “I wonder why they call it octaves, when there are just seven notes? Oct usually means eight.” We added that to the list too. In bed last night he remembered that he had been learning Python (a programming language) with Alan, so we thought it would be fun to have Alan take a day off and they could learn about Python all day. Alan doesn’t know about that yet, so we’ll see. :)

The list is growing. Eve would very much like to be homeschooled too, so she started her own list.

Overall I think it was a successful day. He struggled a bit in the evening because one teacher sent work home for him with Eve, plus he was trying to get his Weekly Write done early, plus he remembered (at 7pm!) that he was supposed to read three chapters, answer some questions, write a summary, AND lead the discussion in his reading group today. He went to bed feeling very overwhelmed. We talked about the fact that he will also have to keep up with his regular school work, but we can allow some time during a homeschool day to work on that as well. At bedtime I asked if he thought homeschooling was still a good idea. He said, “YES!”