NBC Studios & Apple Store

Another great trip yesterday with the homeschool group.  This time it was to the Apple Store on the Upper West Side for a class on Digital Photography.  We had almost a dozen kids - all 5th grade & up.  Each child got a yellow Apple t-shirt and their own iPad to use.  The instructor was young, cool, and funny and really kept the kids interested in what was going on.  The kids took a bunch of pictures of themselves using all the crazy filters.  Then they opened up iMovie to piece a bunch of them together along with music, sound effects, and their own voices.  The class was 90 minutes long and afterwards the kids hung around the Apple store for another 1/2 hour playing on iPads.  W and I went with a couple of others to Ollie's Noodle House for a nice lunch.  I love the Upper West Side.  Lincoln Center is right there and of course LaGuardia High for the Performing Arts, too!

Making a movie out of pictures

Another awesome field trip was the NBC Studios tour last week.  I didn't go, but W did.  They visited the studio sets of a few TV shows and did a mock newscast on the Today Show set - W was the weatherman.  I had done this trip years ago as a teenager.  I remember seeing some celebrities, like Soupy Sales, Victor Borge, and Connie Chung walking around the hallways.  We only had like 6 channels of TV in the 70s so I knew more about who was on the major networks.  W hardly watches NBC at all - or much TV at all, really.  I'm not sure W would recognize anyone.  He had a good time, though.  We had gone to the West Village pool hall the day before and W went home with a friend for a sleepover - they brought him to the NBC Studio tour the next day.

I was once again overwhelmed with emotion and gratitude yesterday thinking about how lucky we are to get to homeschool.  I literally get teary-eyed thinking about how W has such a wonderful balance of academics, friends, trips and classes, and most importantly - plenty of time to follow his interests and enjoy childhood.  The older he gets, the more there is out there for him.   I'm glad J got to have that experience as well - and as brief as K's homeschooling journey was, she definitely got a lot out of it.  

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Recent Academics include:

English/Lang. Arts: Types of sentences (declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, imperative), run-on sentences, fragmented sentences, outlining a research paper, dissecting paragraphs, homonyms, correct usage of verbs, pronouns, & superlatives, 

Math: Pyramids & prisms, graphing coordinates (x & y axis), similar and congruent shapes, equivalent fractions, metric conversions (milli-, deca- hept- kilo-), approximate measurements, estimating area of irregular shapes

History: The 13 colonies, life in colonial times, The start of the American Revolution