27 September 2020

The kids finished their third week of school and Becky finished her first week of school.  The kids' school schedules are ridiculously complicated.  We made a poster with everyone's schedule to put on the fridge so we know who is supposed to be in a zoom class at any given time.  The schedule changed a bit the first two weeks of school, but we think it's settled now. 

Gibson gets his own separate schedule on the fridge since his schedule doesn't summarize neatly in a weekly chart. The middle school schedule is extraordinarily complex, with A days and B days and alternating weeks.  Gibson is also taking a math class at the high school which has a completely different structure for classes and adds extra convolutions.  Depending on the day, Gib spends between 100-150 minutes a day in class.  Before Covid, he spent 300 minutes a day in class.  In summary, online school is a mess.

Here's a bright spot in the mess.  Our school district heard about our microschool shop class and asked if we would be willing to be a test case for a partnership between students and Craterworks, our local maker space.  Carterworks wants to offer their space for small groups of students to use during the quarantine. They're using our group to work out the details of how social distancing will work and how much support the students will need.  This week we went for a tour.  We loved the interactive way the boys were introduced to the shop.  Ross, in the yellow shirt, is the shop manager.  Nathan, in the red shirt, is a teacher whose purpose is to tie activities to learning benchmarks and standards.  Ross gave the boys a block of wood and asked them to design a car.

Then for the shop tour, the boys made their cars.  First stop was the drill press.  Ross showed the boys how the drill press worked and then they each drilled holes for their car axles.

Next they learned about the band saw and used it to cut out the body of their cars.  All of the tools at Craterworks are very high quality.  The large space is well ventilated and brightly lit.

The next stop on the tour was the belt sander which they used to shape and smooth their cars.

Finally they used a laser cutter to cut wooden wheels from a sheet of plywood.

Here are Jason, Gibson and Eddy with their completed cars.  Next week the boys will get to choose their own projects to work on.  We think this is a fabulous opportunity for the boys to get personalized attention and use top notch equipment. 

Brandan took Gibson shopping for materials for his Eagle project this week.  He showed Gibson how to select straight 2x4s.

The material is now sorted and stacked in our garage, waiting for construction.