On Friday, Stephanie announced that she is beginning her 1-month novel project with her writing group. She has several parts, one of them being a character from the Italian renaissance. So she is now (voluntarily, and totally self directed and self motivated) studying and researching this era and associated historical and geographical issues.

She started with our home library, but we have limited books on the subject. She did read the chapter in my Western Civilization college textbook. Her next request was to go to library, but google is faster and cheaper and has more resources!

I will take her to RFK library at University of Guam and get her a friends of the library card, which last time I checked costs $60. This gives you access to the entire library, including computers and internet.

I am excited to see her studying diligently, knowing she will retain close to 100% of what she reads and learns.

She has been working on this for 4 days now. Last night she stayed in the (house) library and read and wrote until 5am. Then she got up with me at 7am to go to office and open up for our customers and to disburse paychecks for the wedding company. She works at an adult job/business in between her child/student activities.

Eric drew cartoons all day Sat and Sunday. Sunday evening he read a magazine for bird enthusiasts. He got bored pretty quickly, though, so he went back to creating and recording sound effects for his animated cartoons that he makes on his DSi.

Cassie made a few animated cartoons as well. Hers are incomprehensible as they are so artsy that they make no sense to me, but the artwork is astounding. Her drawing style is very anime, but not entirely borrowed. Much of it is hers alone. Her pics are very dramatic with emotion and action vividly portrayed. I guess we need to post some here. This blog can be our family portfolio as well as a record of their academic pursuits.

And on another note, we got some feedback on the questions I asked about the grass fire and the subsequent science lesson. One person said she would indeed go look, because that's the kind of thing that family would do, but they would not call it "school". I appreciate the response; it was not supposed to be a rhetorical question. So I don't want to sound defensive or aggressive, but the whole point is that we also do not call it school; it is what we do instead of school. In cases of schooled children, they could associate the adventure and observations with what they learned in class at school. Or they could learn it later in school and then realize it is just like what dad showed us. Either way, it is reinforced if you do an actual book study of the concepts we discussed. Or you could just do book only or just field trip only. Either way is legit as long as they learn something about the world.

In fact the word academic means having no practical value, so I am happy if most of their education is hands-on instead of academic.