I’ve spent the last few weeks debating whether or not to put Baloo in public kindergarten.  I honestly never imagined myself in this position and the task of figuring out what is right for our family has been overwhelming.

I should start out by saying that our goal in educating our boys is to make learning fun, interesting, and completely tailored to each of our kids.  We are willing to utilize whatever form of schooling to make this happen – homeschooling, public school, private school, charter school – whatever.  Given Baloo’s personality and learning style we’ve started to realize that he could really benefit from a year or two in a public setting, especially kindergarten.  I’m not committing myself (or Baloo) to any set period of time and we will play this by ear, but for now we are planning on kindergarten being at the local public school.  We move next November so chances are he will not attend 1st grade here as we don’t want to move him mid-year.

He starts school 2 weeks from Tuesday so we’re going to just have fun the next 2 weeks.  Which means a LOT of playing outside, a lot of games, a lot of reading, and whatever else we want to know!!  It also means not much school work.

We will continue to work on reading, writing, and some other stuff at home!  There is no way I can just let him have all the fun at school!

Well our first weekend of kindergarten went pretty well!!  Baloo was excited for most of it and did really well!  Royal was a bit neglected as we worked out the week but we’ll get better at it!

Baloo loves writing so we did a lot of writing this week.  We worked through a lot of our writing prompts.

We also starting working through his Explode the Code books and he’s doing really well!  I’ve been letting him do as many/as few pages as he wants per day and that seems to be working out.  Some days he does 2 problems, some days he does 3 pages.

The best part of the week though, was Science.  We talked about scientists, science tools, what kind of scientist Baloo would be (dog scientist) and then we did an experiment.
 

First I had Baloo pour the milk into a bowl. 

Then I told him to drop 3 drops each of red, blue, yellow, and green food coloring.  After that he took a Q-Tip with some dawn dish soap on it and stuck it in the middle of the colors.  The colors all swirled around!  It wasn’t quite a rainbow, but it was pretty cool.  (I believe this happens because the soap breaks down the fat in the milk causing it to move which causes the colors to swirl).  I took a video of the swirling so Baloo and I could watch it over and over again, so no picture!

After, Baloo decided to keep swirling and the milk all turned green.  He really liked that.

Then I had him record his observations.  He was stuck on the word rainbow so he just drew a rainbow.

That was all the excitement from last week!