Texas Thomas': Aaron’s update

Evidently I can’t claim that the reason I haven’t blogged is because I was homeschooling like I said in my last entry in June. Summer time ended up being really busy too! School started today and I want to get back in the blogging habit!

Let’s start by discussing each kid separately!

1st day of 4th grade

Aaron is 9 years old and is awesome! He started the 4th grade at Stephens Elementary today and I’m hopeful he has great teachers that can really challenge him and meet all his educational and social needs.

Christmas in Utah

Last year I homeschooled him and had a great time! In addition to the typical English, spelling, history, writing, math and science stuff I taught, one day a week we focused on other topics, somewhat of his own choice. We ended up doing a lot of lapbooks to focus our attention. One of the units we studied was cars. We read books about the history of cars, watched documentaries about how cars were made and a friend of ours took an hour to show Aaron everything under the hood and explain how cars work. We even took a field trip to San Antonio to the Toyota Truck Manufacturing plant.

It was fun getting to learn about other things we were interested in such as “The Little House in the Big Woods”, The 12 days of Christmas, The Zoo, How chocolate is made, and more. Here are a few pics of Aaron at the zoo.

He has a great ear for music and has been taking piano lessons this year from Debbie Siebert. She has been awesome and Aaron has learned a lot. He enjoys his lessons and even enjoys practicing (almost) every day. I look forward to him continuing this talent and seeing how he progresses.

St. Louis Arch

Aaron is a Bear in the Cub Scout program and has a lot of fun working on advancement and awards with his dad. He won first place at the Pinewood derby in January and then went on to the district derby. Paul was recently made the Cub Master and is very invested in making our Cub pack excel. The whole family gets involved in the cub scout activities and helping Aaron earn pins, belt loops, arrow points etc.

In April and May, Aaron entered two 1 mile races and ran the entire time (The Blue Bell one with free ice cream was his favorite!) I was surprised at how fast he is. He loves being outside (when it’s not too hot) and rides his bike and runs often. I see a future track star in the family!

Aaron got to have a birthday party this year when he turned 9. He invited 9 friends and they played 9 games. They were all “minute to win it” style games that each took about one minute to play. We made tic tac toe shirts and the kids got an X on a square for each challenge they completed. It was a lot of fun!

He had a great summer playing games, reading books, watching TV, playing video games, playing on the computer and hanging out with his family. Now on to greater learning in 4th grade!