Smithsonian can be a great place to visit online with H.o.p., so Friday after a difficult time with math we went to Campfire Stores with George Catlin. H.o.p. liked Peter Matthiesson’s introduction and wanted to listen to it several times, and at his request we listened several times to Peter Nabakov talking about Sacred Geography and we talked about the concept of land ownership and how different cultures can view land–all great with H.o.p., he loves that kind of thing. There’s a good deal available at the site and will take many returns with him to view it all, so today we just looked at three paintings and discussed them (only a portion of Catlin’s catalogue of paintings is up though which means foraging elsewhere for other paintings). That’s all great with H.o.p., talking about the paintings and sacred geography and reading the brief bios and bits of info that go with the paintings. Pull up the art and he talks about what the people are wearing, how they’re decorated, asks to see several times the image of a Blackfoot man in his grizzly bear robe, its head hiding his face, and asks a multitude of questions on that, why have they decorated the bear’s eyes with red, why are the leggings blue, wants to know about the rattle and spear he is holding, wants to know exactly what it means, what is happening.
We didn’t use the book for science. Instead he went to Brain Pop to do their Flash bit from the techology section on television, then the Flash bit on Natural Selection–his choices, he loves loves loves these flash animations and the dollops of information he gets there. Very visual.
He watches the Brainpop flash on extinction and starts conversing on how we need to get rid of certain things to save animals and plants.
He asked to listen to Peter Nabakov again.
Put on Xi-Lin Wang’s2 Pieces for Lu Xun’s Sword Casting, Op. 28, 1993 and there’s immediate focus (which is what we did for music today). He sits. He leans forward and intently listens. He’s recently discovered Chinese music and loves it.
He’s learning to wrestle. When I fiinally said let’s quit the math and come back to it later, H.o.p., already irritated, diverted the anger in another direction and said to me, “No, you’re not going to quit! You’re not going to give up!” He continued to fuss a little but got through the problems.
And he seems to finally be starting to accept what I’ve told him for years, that there are no wrong answers when you’re learning. He’s said it to me several times the past few days. I plan to take big advantage of it.
After some other things, finished the school day going to the BBC companion website for “Walking with Cavemen”, reading there, looking up maps of Olduvai Gorge. H.o.p. memorized some of the skull shapes at the BBC website and went to his desk and drew the below:
He’s very disappointed that we’re going to be sending “Walking with Cavemen” back to Netflix, he likes it so much, but that disappointment was eased somewhat by “The Magic School Bus, Space Adventures” arriving today.
So did Altman’s “California Split”, which I’ve not seen before and am looking forward to viewing.
Dreamhost is having problems again and the blog is slow and now I can’t ftp. They’re shutting down everything for 45 minutes Monday night.
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