Star Wars

Evan has been going through a Star Wars craze after watching the movies.  He's been reading the Star Wars books, dualing Logan with "light-savers" (that's how Evan calls them), and collecting Lego star wars sets.  I thought his last creation of a Millennium Falcon out of K'nex was qutie cool:

Kidtown

Evan has been enjoying 1st grade so far and enjoying the longer school day.  His first PBL (project based learning) is "Kidtown", where kids create their own pretend businesses. Evan's team decided on opening an icecream shop.  They made icecream treats in maker space, created a menu/poster, and the day of the open house, sold their products!  Evan's favorite part was counting how much money he got :)

Ticket to Ride

Evan has always been into kids boardgames ("Fish sticks", "Hoot owl hoot", "Stone soup" to name a few).  Recently we introduced him to a "grown up" game - "Ticket to Ride", and with his obsession with trains it's no surprise that it was a big hit!

We play with a few modified rules that make it more kid friendly:

• Face up all cards 
• Can always build 2 routes if the map shows it (even in <= 3 player game)

It's interesting to see that just after a couple of games Evan started developing his own strategy: choose the long destination cards (21+ points) and build using long segments (6+ lengths).

Another awesome side benefit: 2 digit addition is now piece of cake :) 

  

Doctor Evan

At end of Kindergarten open house, one of the pieces on display were what the children want to be when they grow up (in Chinese).  I was surprised to find that Evan wanted to be a doctor.  When I asked him why he said he would like to help people... that's awesome Evan!

Exploring at the Exploratorium

It's very interesting watching Evan at the Exploratorium.  He can often spend 30+ minutes at a single exhibit.  On our most recent visit, he was particularly drawn to the station for testing the resonant frequency of metal.  Even though Evan doesn't quite understand frequencies yet, he was determined to make the same pattern that was shown in the example.

After much experimenting and trial and error, we succeeded!

The trick that we learned is less sand is better than more sand.  And the magic frequency is... (spoiler alert):

Knowing Evan he probably has that number memorized :)

Chess Club!

Evan has been extremely interested in playing Chess in the last couple of months.  Knowing nothing about chess myself I decided to take him to a Chess club where he can learn from the experts.

We made it happen last Friday and I foresee this becoming our new Friday routine.  We learned some basic rules such as "castling" and "forking".  Both Evan and I knew the basic concepts but didn't know the proper terminology until now. 

For Evan, scrimmaging was the most fun by far!

Rock climbing

Evan tried rock climbing for the first time and turns out he's a natural!  Climbing up was very easy but letting go and propelling down took some practice.  Once Evan got the hang of kicking the wall to come down he was a lot more confident and made it all the way to the top!

Reconnecting with Magnatiles

I always thought of Magnatiles as a toddler toy.  Both Nathan and Evan played with them at Orchard when they were little and Logan has them in his classroom now.  But we actually never had any at home until recently from a visit to the Exploratorium.  Evan was stuck at the Magnatiles table for a good half a hour.  Since then he has made some very cool structures at home and Nathan often joins in tool.  He likes them so much we even brought them with us to Tahoe when we went skiing back in January.  A very versatile toy and one of the few that all 3 boys can play together on!

Variants of "No"

Evan is going through a phase where he likes to spell out certain words in his replies, e.g., instead of replying "no", he'd said "N, O".  I'd like to think it's due to his love of spelling but it's probably his more rebellious side showing.

Today it occurred to me he used to go through a perioud where everything was either "definitely yes" or "definitely no".  I miss that phase :)

100 days of school, 100 days smarter!

First homework

Evan got given his first official homework assignment over Thanksgiving break.  Since we were on our road trip at the time we did most of it in a hotel lobby.  It was actually quite a fun project.  Involved collecting fall leaves and making a picture out of them.  

In general, Evan has been very excited to *finally* get his own homework after hearing us constantly bugging Nathan to do his.  He is very detailed oriented and enjoys the 1-on-1 time when we sit down to help him.  Nathan has been helping a lot too and is often more interested in Evan's homework than his own :)

Kindergarten FLG

At Bullis the children get to set a Focused Learning Goal (a.k.a. personal goal) for themselves.  It gives the children a chance to pursue their interests and goal setting.  Interestingly Evan decided to learn to climb trees.  I'm not sure where he got the idea, but sure had fun climbing the tree in our front yard and even helped take down some of the holiday lights. 

Since then he's considering this goal as "accomplished", and decided a new goal of babysitting Logan, which works great for me :)

What is "sarcastic"?

James often likes to use sarcasm with the boys.  Use to drive Nathan crazy but he's slowly gotten used to it.  Now Evan is curious what "sarcastic" means and we've explained to him it's when you say the opposite of what you mean.  He managed to use it in a sentence quickly after that.

"I don't like Logan, and I'm not being sarcastic".

I can't remember exactly what Logan did to upset Evan, but it was quite amusing despite the dispute.