After our amazing Indian feast on Friday, yesterday we laid low while we mourned the presumed loss of our kitty of 10 years 🙁 He left on Saturday night and now as I write this, he’s been gone 3 nights, 4 days.

We’re hoping against all logical reason that he’ll come back, but at this point, we’ve taken the last few days to lay low and try to not let the stress cripple us too badly.

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Brain Chase

That said, after a difficult few days, we rallied a bit today. I woke up and decided that we would start to catch up on our Brain Chase experience! I was so excited to get the kids involved in this, and after a couple weeks of waiting, it’s finally here!

Day/week 1 is Warm-Up week, which means getting introduced to the topics that the kids chose to work on (Engineering, Photography and Fitness – other options were math, reading, cooking, typing, art, yoga, gardening, etc.). That said, the warm-up week projects were mainly watching the intro videos, doing a couple minutes of pushups and taking some photos of whatever the kids would like.

One of the neatest things about Brain Chase is that, throughout the 6-week program, the ultimate goal is to find a real treasure (for this session, it’s a gold nugget worth $1,000). The kids and their families compete in an Amazing-Race-esque challenge to find the treasure using the clues that are scattered throughout the program 🙂 Honestly, it’s a super cool concept and I’m loving the weekly prompts with post-exercise rewards of new video clues!

Chalk & Bikes

After the longest 2 minutes of push ups ever, and after I sent the kids outside to take pictures for the Brain Chase Photography lesson, they ended up occupying themselves with hoses, chalk, bikes, scooters, flower-picking, swings, etc.

E discovered the awesomeness of chalk + water, so the kids had a fun time making chalk paint, covering their hands and bodies and the driveway in it, and reveling in the puffy texture that the chalk took on when it became waterlogged.

It was a beautiful day and I even got to lay in the grass and read about half a page of my book in between being Mom (if you’re into epic fantasy like the Wheel of Time or GoT, then pick up Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb – it’s a 12 book series and it’s SO good!). I also weeded about 1% of the edging of the houses, so I got that going for us.

Chess

T found a stray chess piece around the house, which led to a treasure hunt to find the rest of the Story Time Chess pieces. They actually did a great job, finding all but one pawn, and we’re rewarded with some games together and then against me. T actually checked me multiple times, catching me completely off guard 😳

He’s been mastering the art of reading the board multiple moves in advance, which is amazing, seeing as he’s only 6, and also that he’s only played for maybe a week or so in total (Story Time Chess is awesome and I highly recommend it!)

After everyone else was tired of playing, we downloaded Real Chess 3D on his phone for him, which he played in bed before sleep time 🙂

Human Anatomy

To end the day, B took a nap from 5-7, which meant he was wide awake for bedtime (7:15), so he and I snuggled up on the couch and he chose the Smithsonian Human Body! book to read together.

I asked him what he wanted to read about – eyes, ears, hands, etc – and he said he wanted to read the whole thing, haha, so we started with the cells and made our way through 25 pages of DNA, aging, the epidermis, hair, and the skeleton before we decided to try again for bedtime.

Every new page we turned, I expected his eyes to glaze over or for him to get hyper and attracted by something else shiny, but he was incredibly calm and attentive the whole time, even offering his own insight once I finished reading a passage and answering my questions after a part that he seemed most interested in here and there. It was amazing, especially knowing how much of a hands-on, hyperactive and easily distracted learner he is ❤️

By the time that we (I) were ready to call it quits for the night, Kelly (Dad) came over and B told him (through many prompts, of course) that the epidermis (skin) on his phalanges (fingers) is glabrous (hairless like your palms), which was all very tongue-twisty and fun to say 🙂

Homeschooling Checklist

And for those who are counting, I’d say we worked on:

• Physical Fitness
• Arts & Crafts
• Photography
• Logic & Deductive Reasoning
• Biology
• Human Anatomy

Tomorrow, we’ll likely continue our Brain Chase activities, maybe read some more of the Human Body book together and hopefully have some more outdoor time, weather and (Mom’s) energy levels permitting!

I hope everyone had as lovely a day as we did!

Kyrsten

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