Thirteen

Lu just turned 13!

Here he is with all his presents, minus a goat.

Yup, a goat.

About a month and a half ago,

Lu decided he wants to get into the goat farming business.

Since then, he's been getting up at 5am, 

three times a week, to go apprentice on a friend's goat farm.

Cha and I take turns dropping him off.

We run with the dogs, Lu takes his bike.

5am is not my favorite time of the day,

especially not for actually being awake.

But I can't complain about my early morning walks

with views like these:

He's already put in over 50 hours, so,

as promised, we're getting him a goat!

 

The goat house, companion goat, and goat accessories

will have to be paid back in milk, cheese, and meat.

But the first goat is a gift.

Lu's already done some successful cheese-making

with cow milk. Can't wait for that goat cheese!

AND he helped slaughter and butcher a sheep!

Here's Lu moving rocks on the land

where the goat house is now almost up:

And taking a break by getting some jocote fruits
down from the tree:

Jocote season is definitely a favorite time of year.

On the academic front,

Lu's been busy writing essays.

We took a class with a professional writer

who taught us basic structure and gave us

lots of useful tips.

Here are some paragraphs from his

instructional, compare/contrast,

and character development essays.

He's editing and typing his favorite two

for our homeschool archive.

 This year's math was mostly algebra and geometry.

To keep up with Lu, I covered all the new stuff with him during

the first half of the year, and then got a tutor for reinforcement,

the second half of the year (for my sanity).

Here's his last math homework assignment:

And making shapes with M.C. Escher:

With the rains finally over

(rainy season is about half the year here)

it's time for swimming!

And swimming with friends:

For one of his 13th birthday presents, I gave Lu permission to join facebook. This was something I decided on just over the last few months. I used to think we'd wait until he was at least 16, but I found myself often thinking "this article would be great for Lu" or "I wish Lu was on here to share this with him". And indeed, it is very handy for homeschool, as well as for keeping in touch with long-distance friends (one of the downsides of living in a town that is a tourist attraction, is that friends are usually temporary or seasonal). But having a facebook account comes with many rules, like not blocking me from anything, showing me his news feed whenever I ask, and only friending new people with my consent.

Lu has grown up so much this past year. 

He's done two major apprenticeships 

(restaurant and goat farm),  

and showed serious commitment and responsibility in both. 

I'm so proud of my official teen-ager.

Old Books, Big Cities, Free Flow, and a Rock Star

 Our school year runs from Jan-Nov,

so these are the last few months of 6th grade for us.

After finishing the first two books of the "Chronicles of Ancient Darkness" series, and not having the third, Lu pulled "Black Beauty" off of my childhood bookshelf and is reading it mostly from a lack of a better book, aka We Need More Books. 

Morning reading time is VERY important around here 

(specifically for mami's quiet coffee time).

Creative writing has always been a struggle for Lu, so we let it go for a while, but recently we bust out a notebook and started 

"Free Flow Writing/Doodling Time" and it's been a HUGE success!!!

 

The first half of our year was very science-heavy with lots of documentaries, including the complete "Through the Wormhole" series with Morgan Freeman (the only man I'd leave my husband for, I luuuuuv Morgan). Now Lu is just chilling with some reading on deep space from another book from my childhood, this Nat Geo "Our Universe" book that my great-grandfather gave me when I turned five, 35 years ago:

For history we're reading about the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Guatemala. It's a very old book written by a Spanish soldier. We take turns reading aloud in a Spanish that is old and difficult to read. We're slowly working through the over 800 pages, but it's worth it because the story is truly fascinating.

As a final 6th grade research project, Lu is putting together a slideshow presentation of ten major cities of the world. He's having a great time with it. He'll come running to ask "Did you know there's no toilet paper in Tokyo, because the toilets wipe your butt for you?!" or "Did you know that pinball machines have been illegal in New York since the year...?!" Some of his findings are questionable, but it's so much fun to see what he gets excited about. lol

 We recently participated in an artistic photo shoot 

for a make-up artist friend.

 Lu had a blast getting made up and posing.

Here's one of my favorites: The Rock Star

Ancient African Civilizations

We recently completed our studies on Ancient African Civilizations. 

We read about Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush, 

the Axums, the Nok People, the Bantu People, 

and the Kingdoms of Ghana and Mali.

We also watched documentaries from the BBC series

Kingdoms of Africa.

Lu is loving the African folklore.

I even found some in Spanish.

(that's history and bilingual language arts wrapped up in one, score!)

After reading, Lu retells the story to me, 

which is a highlight of my day :)

Here, he is retelling a story from Zambia:

After telling me the story,

 we come up with a synopsis together.

In this story, the synopsis was: 

"A boy saves his sister from being eaten

by her man-lion husband." 

Putting a whole story into one sentence 

is not as easy as it might seem. 

*   *   *   *   *   *

And here's Lu's final timeline for Ancient Africa.

Ancient Rome

Having spent two months on Ancient Rome, we are moving on to Ancient African Civilizations. But, as I have done with our other big history projects, I want to share an outline of what we covered. So, here's a summary of our journey through the fascinating history that took us from seven villages on some hills to the birth of the Republic, then through the emperors and on to the collapse of the great Roman Empire.

One of our main resources was this book on Ancient Rome from our collection of Dorling Kindersley's Eyewitness Books.

I got a bunch of these books on different civilizations, and so far Lu's read the ones on Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and now Rome. The bite-sized chunks of information don't go into great depth, but Lu enjoys reading them. They're packed with beautiful pictures, and definitely help us imagine what life was like then.

This Site: Kids'Past.com is our central history resource.

It has many grammatical errors, and some dates were off, but on the whole, it's a very easy-to-read, straightforward world history paper. So, I edited the whole thing - from prehistoric humans to the Industrial Revolution (yes, I'm slightly OCD) - and turned it into a document formatted to our liking (picture size, font size, etc.) so that we wouldn't be dependent on internet signal (which is unreliable here), and to avoid having to look at the ads on the website.

We usually read 4 or 5 picture-full pages, discuss, and write. We're doing so much writing in history that I've decided to skip grammar as a separate class, and just include it in our history sessions. 

The writing consists of formulating questions and answers to what we just read. After coming up with a question, we focus on composing the answer. 

So, we'll usually read a couple paragraphs, discuss, write, continue reading, discuss, write some more, and so forth... 

 We use Wikipedia and other websites, like this one, 

to read more and to cross-reference.

We also do a timeline at the end of almost every lesson.

Here, Lu's making a comparative timeline
between Greece and Rome.

Documentaries, as always, played a huge part in our learning:

History Channel's Engineering an Empire, 

the Rome and Carthage episodes

Nat Geo's Julius Caesar, The Roman Empire

BBC's The Rise and Fall of Hannibal 

and

Nat Geo's Jesus, The Man  

(which was accompanied by our studies on Christianity)

Lu created a Word document as his final project.

 Apart from a few minor suggestions,

Lu did this all by himself!

The Writing Flow

There's a lot of writing going on around here lately. 

It seems that Lu is finding his writing flow. 

And writing is becoming second nature.

 

Questions like:

Does it have to be that long? 

How do I start it?

Can you give me some ideas?

have become a thing of the past.

(knocking on wood so that it lasts)

He recently finished the first two books of the Narnia series,

so he wrote a few paragraphs summarizing, comparing,

and critiquing them.

Lu originally wanted to read straight through the whole series, but then decided he needed a bit of a break after Prince Caspian. So he read a very fun book in Spanish about a bowl of story-telling noodles, and wrote a short summary about it. 

I asked him to limit himself to two paragraphs. He said it was impossible to fit it into so few words, and tried to get me to up it. So we talked about how it can be very useful to know how to get your point across in as few words as possible.

Anyway, I'm thrilled that he's asking to write more 

rather than less.

As we are bilingual, I try to make time every week 

for written work in both languages.

Much writing also happens in

history and science.

 Lu does most of the writing, but sometimes I give him a hand

by writing what he dictates.

I try to vary writing assignments as much as possible - reports, reviews, creative writing, dialogues, descriptive paragraphs, summaries, note-taking....

I used to make the mistake of correcting

spelling and grammar in the first read.

Now, instead of handing in his work to me, when Lu is done he reads aloud what he wrote. Then, he edits his own work. 

Reading it to me helps him find his mistakes. 

Then we put it away. I won't check spelling or grammar until a few days have passed, and only comment on content and wording. I give as much praise as I can, to compensate for having been overly critical in the past. And his writer's confidence has definitely improved.