If last month had a theme, it would Arnold Schwarzenegger. Which is cool, because his birthday was in July. Sarah wants to do a celebrity birthday post about him, but we didn’t quite there before his birthday, so it’ll come… eventually.
But we also did some other cool stuff, like heading to a local wildlife preserve, finishing a huge jigsaw puzzle, getting ready for the 4-H fair and more.
We took one of our tiny owls, Meego, to Isaac’s for dinner. And made him a set of skis from some straws and toothpicks. And then, at right, we went to Lake Tobias and fed real-life goats.
(If this is your first time catching our month-in-review posts, welcome! Check out our archive of previous wrapups here for some more info on why we take this approach to documenting some of our unschooling learning adventures.)
We went to the King of Prussia Mall, a huge mall about two hours away. In it, we found this McLaren. You know, a car that costs a mortgage? Sarah wanted it.
Books
In addition to teaching Scoops the Giant Penguin some geometry, we’re teaching her to drive. This is why we can’t have a McLaren.
Disclosure: This post has some affiliate links. I only link to things we legitimately use and recommend, so if you see such a link, it’s because we really do believe in the book or item!
- Batman Vol. 1: The Court of Owls
- Batman Vol. 2: The City of Owls
- Batman Vol. 3: Death of the Family
- Life of Fred: Geometry
A fun note about that last item: We’re actually teaching our gigantic stuffed penguin, Scoops, geometry.
You might have noticed in previous posts that we are all about our stuffed friends.
Each friend has a specialty; some are chefs, some are web developers, some are huggers, and for whatever reason, Sarah decided Scoops was a Geometry Penguin.
So we’re reading the penguin a geometry book at night in which she and her fellow stuffed friends act out concepts like point, line, plane, collinearity and more.
Don’t you wish your family had a two-foot-tall Geometry Penguin? You know you do.
Of note this month: It’s gearing up for county fair and 4-H fair time, so lots of alpaca practice. This is Sarah with Coal, this year’s project animal, working on showmanship with Teresa, one of the club’s awesome leaders.
Movies and TV
- Terminator
- T2
- Terminator: Genisys
- Inside Out (We saw these last two as a double feature at a drive-in movie theater near us; yes, drive-ins still exist!)
- Terminator 3
- … and yes, Terminator 4
- Searching for Bobby Fischer
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine
- Minions
- Twins (I told you, we had a Schwarzenegger-a-thon!)
- Total Recall
- Kindergarten Cop
- Last Action Hero
- The Big Green
- American Dreamz
- Eureka
- Numb3rs (THIS has been awesome. I always loved this show, and got Sarah into it on Netflix after she ran out of Every Star Trek Series Ever to watch with her breakfast each day. Super fun conversations out of both this and Eureka!)
- The Monuments Men (Honestly, a little bit disappointed by this. It seemed like something we’d all like, but it was kind of a flop.)
Sarah and I got red hair. Hers redder than mine.
Video, board and card games
- Star Fluxx
- A chess app that Sarah found for her iPod Touch; this may have been sparked by watching Searching for Bobby Fischer, as I noted above!
- A homemade game called Terminator Attack (made from combining dominoes, Lego Heroica and Minotaurus, and poker chips); making our own games is kind of a hobby of ours and this was a fun one!
- MLB 15: The Show
- FIFA 2015
Also at Lake Tobias, on the safari tour: Sarah and Dan got a visit from an elk.
Places, projects and odds and ends
Sadness from Inside Out found the perfect job: Lamenting my puzzle piece Situation.
- One of our biggest accomplishments in July was planning for 10th grade; we’ll see what comes of that plan as the year progresses!
- Sarah and I both got red hair.
- Sarah, Dan and I spent a Sunday at Lake Tobias, a wildlife park about an hour and a half from home that offers safari tours, a great reptile show and more.
- We attended three of the four sessions of the LCBC At the Movies series held at a regional church. Got to see big chunks of three movies – Unbroken; McFarland, USA; and The Princess Bride – and actually didn’t have a terrible church experience, which had kept us out of traditional churches for a while. We’re hoping to occasionally go back to LCBC this year!
- Sarah also took part in a Lego robotics camp where she used Robot C to program a Lego NXT robot to do cool stuff. This camp was HARD – but she stuck with it, which made us super-proud.
- We finished a 1,000-piece paint can jigsaw puzzle (which ended up having two of one piece and none of another piece, grr!) and a 2,000-piece America jigsaw puzzle.
So what’s new with your family this month? Drop me a comment! I love hearing from all my “blog friends!”
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