Designer Dragons

Alison assigned the kids a new project for school this week. They've been listening to the Wings of Fire novels as audiobooks and playing dragons, so for biology, they are each supposed to design a real-life dragon. They have to explain their dragon's skeletal, muscular, nervous, and digestive system, and how it would be classified scientifically. Rea also has to talk about how her dragon develops from an egg and how the cells differentiate to make those different systems. It has been fairly popular; the kids are enjoying looking at books of how bodies are put together and thinking about what their dragons are like. Rea wants to make a swimming octopus dragon, Timmy an ice dragon that's eaten by polar bears and is adapted to protect itself, and Sara a crocodile dragon.

Alison is working hard on getting better at helping the kids learn to design their own projects for learning; the dragon one is a fun start, and she hopes it will help them learn how to create their own projects later. Rea is pretty good at coming up with projects already; she's currently writing a book and working on learning to type and spell so that she can publish it, and she's practicing her knitting to make Christmas presents. Sara is working on making the baking she wants to do into an engineering project by deciding on a goal (biscuits) and keeping track of her iterations of recipe variations until she creates one she likes. Timmy is still trying to figure this whole thing out; Alison helped him make a backyard obstacle course with monsters he could shoot with a Nerf gun along the way last week. But he hasn't really learned to stick with a topic and make a project out of it yet.

We went to Grandma Julie's house this Wednesday. We went up to their local park and the kids had so much fun that it was hard to tear them away!

We saw Logan and Dustin almost every day this week. The kids had a lot of fun together. On Saturday, Papa Mike and Grandma Sheila invited them to rake leaves, so they were there for almost three hours. As soon as they got home, Sara informed us that they had not had nearly enough time with their cousins and could they meet at the park? They did and then came back and played in our yard until dinnertime.

Boo got a fever on Thursday and threw up Thursday night. She got better in the morning, slept in the afternoon, and was feverish in the evening for the rest of the week. She's still awake as we're writing this (4pm Sunday), so maybe she's better today.

Friday was Gideon's birthday. Since Boo was sick, we didn't do any of our normal Friday things (nature group and park day) and we had more time to celebrate. We made fruit pizza for dinner and got Little Ceasar's for his "cake" (because that's what he wanted more than anything. Grandma Sheila and Papa Mike gave him Paw Patrol roller skates and a king-sized Bakugan. We gave him construction trucks, Pokemon cards, and a stuffed toy car that Rea made. He says it was very fun and very good and he loved it.