Week 3 Wrap-Up

Looks like winter is over and done with and so is Week 3 at the Treetops. We wrapped up our cozy math circle on Wednesday with a few more challenges and, finally, a long-anticipated search for treasure. We also wrapped up our yoga sessions. Next block will start in mid-March. Monkey played with Silk and created this mandala for his yoga instructor, Mrs. T.

Homeschool was a bit bumpy this week. Lots of "do I really have to do this?!" and complaining about school in general. But we also had some terrific moments. Like when Monkey decided to start his own comics production and publishing company. He immediately set to work and created 2 issues - The Lost Treasure Map, followed shortly by The Lost Math.

Or when I picked up a copy of the Indiana Jones: Indy's Adventures Step 1 reader at a used books store and Monkey read almost all of it by himself and asked for more. And, as if reading my mind, he started his own exploration of homeomorphism with rubber bands and Legos. He built a mini-geoboard out of Legos and showed me how he could turn a rubber band circle into different shapes. The three handcuffed minifigs led to a little algebra investigation - how many pairs of handcuffs would Monkey need if he wanted to cuff every minifig in his collection (we estimated that to be around 40) if he used 1 pair for 2 minifigs.

Then later in the week he worked very-very hard on one of the Mathmania's puzzles, tried lots of different approaches until he finally figured it out. The problem was to place numbers 1-8 on the grid in such a way that no two consecutive numbers touch vertically, horizontally or diagonally.

When we played Catan Jr, Monkey came up with a pretty sophisticated strategy that allowed him to catch up to me first and then turn the game around so that every time it was my turn, only he would get the resources, trade or build. His previous strategy was built around getting Coco cards and no paying much attention to anything else in the game.

So all in all, it was a good week. On to the next one!