Sluggy

This morning Kirk was a blue spanish dancer (a nudibranch) oozing up onto the dining table and swirling around in circles. This week we made all sorts of sea creatures with our fellow homeschoolers; killer whales (rubber matting), sharks (cardboard), leafy seadragons (vinyl and material), fish (cardboard & sparkles), octopi (yarn doll), star fish (paper & sparkles), seaweed (finger knitting) and jellyfish (1/2 CD and straw beads).  I'm trying to encourage him to do a lot more craft to improve his very ordinary small motor skills. Photos next week.

Virtual Aquarium

Nanny was given an aquarium for Christmas and naturally Kirk wants one too. I have refused for the moment but to compensate we painted the laundry wall BLUE and next week will create an underwater collage.

In conversation

It's great to have a conversation with Kirk when he is making sense. Today we started discussing seahorses which we were modelling from plasticine. Kirk's seahorse naturally morphed into a submarine and then he asked whether cleaner wrasse would clean a submarine or boat hull. "Yes, if it stayed still for long enough but it's better if people clean the boats because too much grows on them". We then went into why boats and submarines had to be cleaned (to reduce drag) which ended up in a demonstration on friction. PLEASE let the weather fine up so we can use his snorkle set!

Planet earth

It was long drive home last night so we watched the marine sections of David Attenborough's Planet Earth and, not surprisingly, great whites and seals are his favourite animals so we'll focus on them next week.

Heeere fishy fishy fishy

Last week Kirk and I concentrated on alphabet and number recognition and made origami fish to improve his small motor and spatial skills (these were in fact Transformers who lead secret lives as jets*).

As a part of his studies about the sea we read a lot of books (Wet Paper readers) and this weekend Sean took Kirk to Underwater World.  Sean tells me Kirk had to see the seal show 3 times and laughed his arse off throughout.  Then he explored the underwater shark tunnel 6 times before he was satisfied. Looks like Underwater World was $50 well spent.

* Note: I can't wait for him to be ready to study mechanics - he will LOVE it.

Welcome...

I'd like Kirk to share his homeschooling with you.
Yesterday we baked biscuits and a big chocolate fishcake. Today we built & sailed boats...and an echidna (no it did not float).
Left to right: Catamaran, laser, houseboat, origami boats...and the echidna...which morphed into a spider and a sea urchin and then a triffid and then a spikey spaceship which of course fired spikes. He's pretty creative with plasticine and a heap of skewers.