Chinese Instruction

Grafton has been occasionally teaching his parents the Chinese symbols that he's learning at school. Today he introduced some news one to me that are particularly hard to pronounce. In response to my attempts, he gave up on me said, "Dad, we'll work on it."

Hardball

Grafton and Dad played catch with a real baseball today. Dad was a little nervous at first, worrying it would end up with a bruised face (not saying on who...). But no such thing happened. And Grafton's arm packs some heat! And he's catching a good bit too in his undersized glove.

Old Books Must Be the Best

Mom: "Why do always choose the old, beat up books from the library at school?"
Grafton: "Mom! That means a lot of people got them and [so] they are the best books!"

Another coder?

I introduced Grafton to the "Lightbot One Hour Coding" app, which is an educational app that teaches the basics of programming in a visual way. He picked up the programming environment quickly and with little help proceeded through Level 1. He was usually able to figure out where a bug in a given program existed and to remove and redo the undesired commands. Level 2 required use of procedures--a set of repeated commands that can be packaged into a single, reusable higher-level command. Grafton immediately recognized how to make use of this programming abstraction, and how it helped simplify and shorten the main program, which gave me great pleasure to witness. He knew exactly when it was appropriate to call the procedure from his main program. I think what made me happiest of all is that he kept at it for almost an hour and repeatedly declared "I love programming!" If this is the start of his programming education, he'll have had a two year jump on his Dad--so I look forward to seeing where this takes him.

Sight Words

Grafton can now read about 20 "sight words".

House Cleaning

Grafton decided the house needed to be made tidier. So he cleaned the house today. The whole house. All the rooms. Putting away anything that was sitting out, organizing, vacuuming. Floors, counters, under tables, closets. For at least two hours. He was a boy possessed. He even directed his parents to clean up their messes, "All this stuff on the counter has got to be cleared away!" The house is now spotless.