We finally had just enough sun today to get the measurements for the Noon Day Project we are participating in. Yippee! I get the feeling that much of what we are doing is beyond his understanding. However, today when we were taking the measurements he had an “oh wow!” moment when he found he could literally watch the shadow of our meter stick move. It was neat to see how much it moved in our 10 minute increments. We were supposed to measure every 2 minutes, oh well. The 10 minute measurements were much more impressive. 
So we calculated our sun angle. I am sure I didn’t explain that part well enough. I’m having to overcome areas where I know “what” but not “why.” 
It is challenging! Next week we will try to do our calculations using data from a class in Iran along with our own.
For one reason or another, it has been a light week lesson-wise. I swear every time we have a situation like this I have to really crack down on him to do his work. He gets really whiney and lazy. Makes me worry about our summer session. I don’t want to stop everything completely for that reason and others. We’ll still have morning routines, daily exercising, household chores and pet care but I think we will continue with the hour of free reading time, typing lessons, drawing time and weekly (or bi-weekly) library trips. At our last visit to the library I discovered they had a great selection of DVDs! We have one now about the “backyard microcosm.” There is very little narration but the shots of insects going about their lives is way cool. The music is pretty good too.
I haven’t gotten much further with lesson planning. Hopefully, now that I have the pillow issue solved, I can get cracking on it! I’ve been trying to use Homeschool Tracker Basic to set it all up. Unfortunately, it doesn’t let you do recurring assignments (like free reading time) You need the paid version for that. So I have to do them one at a time. I may just do one month in it and have my usual lists of assignments by subject done. Then I can enter month by month from my lists to print out the weekly assignment sheets. If I still think it is useful in 6 months, I may buy it. The biggest bonus I can see with this program is facilitation of transcript creation. You can also plan at the course level with the paid verison rather than just assignment by assignment.
Tomorrow morning we are off to join Dad at Tan-Tar-A. The laptop is effectively dead so I won’t be online until we get back sometime on Friday.
