Preface: Yesterday my son D was sent home from school because the learning support teachers said they couldn’t manage his behaviour. He was shafted from one person to the next and finally they sat him in the office until I was able to collect him. So today, D and L didn’t go to school (L said he had a headache). This is what we did instead…
This morning D and A got out the mat with the car track, and raced their cars around it to see who was the fastest, pretending they were race car drivers. Then A decided to do some colouring-in while L played “Line Writer” on the computer and D practiced on the Mario Kart Wii game. Then we found a cool science experiment on the internet looking at what happens to an ice cube when you drop it into a jar of cooking oil. In the instructions it said to float the ice cube on the oil but our ice cube didn’t float…. It just sank to the bottom. We watched as the ice melted and released little bubbles of oxygen into the air. The ice cube looked silvery, kinda like mercury. Eventually all the water settled at the bottom. From this we figured out that water has a higher density than oil and that oxygen likes to find a way out, even if trapped.
Then we went to the school for a visit with the special education teacher to discuss D’s “behavioural problems” and the fact that they were having trouble getting D to do anything for them. As we were discussing this, D and A were playing beautifully in the corner with a dolls house and their cars and then they were playing make-believe with the plastic dinosaurs. L was lying on the couch reading his Andy Griffiths and Paul Jennings “Just Annoying” book. After we finished, I asked D to pick up the toys and put them back in the box so we could go to the shops. He did so with little prompting.
At the shops, the boys got a little over-excited and over stimulated, so I focused their attention on finding items on my grocery list. It became a game. It fizzled a bit when they didn’t know what the words were so next time I’ll make sure I have pictures. While at the grocery store L figured out that 1kg of icing sugar was cheaper than buying two packs of 500g by three cents.
When we got home a storm rolled over and the boys went downstairs and placed Lego pieces in the new drainage pipe Wayne had placed in the ground and waited at the other end for the Lego to spew out of the drain pipe. They experimented with putting the Lego in at different points to see if it got stuck. Then L and A played “Trampoline Poison Ball” which involved jumping around and over a variety of objects on the trampoline. Then L decided to write up a set of instructions for each variation of the game “Poison Ball” he came up with, while D stayed downstairs to play and draw pictures in the mud. When I went downstairs there was mud splattered everywhere!
Today we covered science, ecology, engineering, drama, social science, maths, art, physical education, writing, and reading. Of course, while doing all these things, they didn’t learn a thing, did they?
