This week was another one of those weeks where nothing really seemed to go to the conceptual plan and the best I could do was roll with the reality of that and make the most of the things that went better than expected. I suppose that all started with E’s pumpkin carving on Halloween night (Sunday) which fit his Steve Jobs’ costume perfectly. He also carved a standard “Stumpkin” face like we have every year since reading that beautiful book together. But, the rest of Halloween was a total bust. Due to the lack of a covid vaccine, we chose to not trick-or-treat and E’s desire to see the Northern Lights and stars with a telescope were thwarted by lack of location with a clear view of the horizon. E made several comments about being disappointed with Halloween which is always hard to hear. I am excited for the world to begin to reopen for him in a few weeks after his vaccine.

As has become the pattern, Monday needed to be spent outside and after a disappointing Halloween evening and waking up to find that Dad had escaped for a getaway to the NC Mountains, I was determined to make the most of a day outside with E! The weather was gorgeous - a warm fall day with clear skies and the colorful leaves surrounding us. E and I cherished every moment in nature that we had to spare! Oh! Definitely have to share that E has decided in the last two weeks that he is now dressing and grooming himself!! Monday he woke me up completely dressed on his own just after waking up himself!! I love the way he is fixing his hair and taking pride in selecting his own clothes each morning.

By Tuesday, we were ready to engage with school work again. Since Dad had just been to the North Carolina mountains around Asheville, I thought it timely to go on a virtual field trip to learn about the South Eastern states. E chose to dig into North Carolina a bit further for his journal entry and drew a beautiful image of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the bottom of his paper and a sandy beach above. E’s hands still get tired quickly when shading (and he is using full arm movement instead of wrist) so the picture was not completed but he did write a beautiful sentence to recall the drawing’s intent. We are continuing to work on fine motor strength as the year progresses with a goal of writing a paragraph by the end of the year. We also began a new unit in math, introducing multiplicative form. I chose to take this outside to make it active and in his element. He ran between 5 stations to write various forms of money he had in his hand from Standard, Column, Word, Expanded, and the new Multiplicative Form. He enjoyed the active session… but still needed some basketball afterwards. I can not believe how he can dribble.

For spelling this week, we completed both the ‘short i’ and the ‘short o’ words. He nailed these before we even began to study the words and even was able to mix the words with capitalization tricks thrown in. Again, a journal entry to get some fine motor work in - both drawing and writing. Finally, we began vocabulary this week by leveraging Wordly Wise. E has always enjoyed “big words.” Wordly Wise was exceptionally repetitive and boring so I do not think we will continue on this approach but I do like their word lists and he mastered the assessment at the end. I am enjoying that he is now better able to approach online learning platforms than in the past. The only word he struggled with was “modesty.”

With the multiple forms of numbers well established, we moved on in Math for the later part of the week to comfort with addition and subtraction, mentally. We did this through a game called “Richer or Poorer” where dice are rolled which determine if money is added to or taken away from the player’s wallet. E had a ton of fun coming up with scenarios that aligned with the dice rolls and asked to play the game every day for the remainder of the week. He is mastering mental math - swapping a 10 for an 8 with a return of 2 ones in an effort to “conserve ones.”

E surprised me this week with a music video creation he made in his free time. I am so amazed by his ability to put together so many complex topics to produce something as impactful as this. He featured it as his intro sequence to his monthly business announcements event.

By Friday, the weather had turned wintery cold - freezing in fact. Dad had his COVID Booster on Wednesday and had been in bed since. So, I asked E what he would like to focus on between robotics, coding, and experiments. He chose a day FULL of experiments. We studied Fluorescence and Luminescence with several hands on demonstrations. He seemed to enjoy completing each of the activities and added some new pages to his science journal.

Sceince experiments were a nice way to end a very trying week.