LR Week 5 Grade 3 - Chickens, reading and Skype - Oh my!

Weekly Reflection

Two of our chickens recently started laying eggs - you can see one of them way in the doorway of the coop in the back there, if you squint your eyes just right. This is a photo Kiernen took of his favourite chicken of ours: Cuteness. She looks kind of crazy here, but she has an adorable fluffy face and is quite brave for a chicken - she is always the first to go explore new situations and things, and she is forever chasing our cat, Frenzie, when we let them out to free-range. 

Kiernen helps collect eggs and wrangle the chickens when they need putting in - he is the best at catching them and getting into the small spaces they like to hide under to get away when it’s time to go back into the pen. SInce they started laying, they need more calcium, which we provide both in the food and in the form of oyster shells...but sometimes if we don’t get the eggs fast enough, Kirby will eat Peckish’s eggs (but not her own). So we have been getting about one egg a day usually. 


Kiernen and I have been using (sometimes) the book, “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons”. There are worksheets and words to practice reading and letters to practice. To be honest, it bores Kiernen to no end, and persuading him to work on it is something of an exercise in patience, but when we do sit down and do it, he does the work and I can see that it is helping him in his quest to read. He can sound out the letters now and he is clicking about the sounds, and at least is able to find many words by knowing the first sound of the word. SO….it is slow going just because I think it is made for much younger kids and even though we skip through a lot of the parts that are redundant (he gets it the first time), he kind of loses his motivation to do the book. 

But he is also picking up reading from typing and the games he plays and the books we read, which are all worlds more interesting to him. 

Kiernen got his very own laptop! It was time. We thought the tablet was all he might need for awhile, but as he ages and grows it turns out he needs something portable that he can type on, that he can Skype on, that will play games like Minecraft, Terraria, Animal Jam, etc. 

This summer he got REALLY into Skyping and playing with his friends - he has a friend who lives in Seattle and they met right before Life is Good last year, via Skype, then played all weekend at LIG, then kept right on Skyping. His friend has an older brother who also has a bunch of Skype friends, and they introduced us to an application/website called Steam, which seems to be a portal through which young gamers can connect and play all sorts of online multiplayer games - and in a safe space. Through Steam and K’s friend, we learned about a game called Terraria - apparently it’s the newest game all the Minecraft kids are into. That’s K playing Terraria in the photo above, on his new snazzy (yet reasonably priced) laptop (yay for sales at huge electronics stores!). 

K will spend the whole day on Skype at times, and only a half hour at others, and everywhere in between. As he is more into it, he is Skyping with (gradually) more kids, and they each do something a little different together. They will play plush, or the online games together, or LEGO, or even video games (one plays while the other watches). As a parent who grew up with none of this amazing ever-changing technology, I am amazed at both how fast Kiernen adapts to each new thing, how quickly he picks it all up, and the amazing amount of information and possibilities that are out there. I mean Skype! Playdates without anyone leaving their own homes! Which for a parent whose health has taken a toll, and a kid with high social needs, it’s brilliant.