Mom Who Needs Chocolate: Tour 1 Week 16

Given my forgetfulness in writing about Week 15, I decided I should write about Week 16 as soon as possible.

While it's all still fresh in my mind and all.

Okay, I still had to look back at my pictures to ~~cheat~~ remember how the week went.

After an appropriate amount of time spent mourning the loss of the snow, the younger boys embraced the sunshine and warmer temperatures with more time playing outside. Having a walk to the park to look forward to also helped motivate them to finish their schoolwork in a timely fashion.

This week our history timeline moved into the beginning of the 20th century. We learned about Henry Ford and the Model T/Assembly Line, Silent Movies, World War I, Prohibition and Women's Suffrage.

Yes he was that interested in Trench Warfare

We added some features of the Plains States to our Geography Notebooks: Missouri River, Mount Rushmore, Black Hills, The Badlands, Red River and Flint Hills. We spent a little extra time reading about Mount Rushmore, since it's one of the more well-known features of that part of the U.S.

We'll be continuing to study the music of John Philip Sousa, but began learning about Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini this week. Our art studies included Impressionism and the work of American artist Mary Cassatt. For our project, we did a Value Study based on her painting The Boating Party. Using only one color, we applied lighter and darker shading to our copy of The Boating Party, while discussing the effects on the final piece.

The teen boys usually appear in the background of my other photos, but I realize I don't usually write much about them.

Probably because they don't do anything interesting.

Unless you count eating everything that isn't tied down.

Obviously they do interesting things. Oldest Boy stays busy with his Purdue classes. He's finding this semester to be especially challenging yet interesting. He has to collaborate with a group for one of his classes, which gives him the opportunity to interact with fellow students who are outside of the Computer Science department on a weekly basis.

College Work is Exhausting

The other teens set their own schedules - with guidance from me of course. We tend to all be in "school mode" during the middle of the day which makes it easy to keep tabs on the teens working in the adjacent room.

They each know what they're supposed to work on and I check in with them, help them, and grade their work as necessary. Once they complete their assigned work for the day, they usually spend time exploring their individual areas of interest - things like video game creating/coding, graphic design, and leisure reading. The fourteen year-old usually has a number of creative pursuits in progress - he makes mosaics, watercolor paintings, rosaries, drawings, among other things. He's my creative soul.

He asked to make Arduino ("an open-source electronic prototyping platform, enabling users to create interactive electronic objects") his science class this year and has been working on the designing and building of a remote control boat. He had his first prototype almost completed but realized he needed different motors and has started from scratch. Needless to say, he's learned a lot along the way and I have no doubt he'll eventually succeed with his idea.