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.

Quirkle Master

Grafton beats Mom at Quirkle!

And he's off...

Grafton vs Grafton

PopPop introduced Grafton to chess many weeks ago, after giving him a children's book on how the game is played. Thanks (in part) to the adventurous illustrations of Kings and Knights (etc.) throughout the book, Grafton continued to be interested in it. And he was even motivated to continue learning to play the game! We ended up playing a number of games, while I continued to teach him the rules. I was surprised at how well he learned all the chess piece moves within a few games (although the Knight still gives him occasional trouble when he's tired).

As is usually the case with Grafton, once he gains interest in a topic, it becomes a requirement that we learn more about it on the Internet. Partly because he loves to see images on the things he's interested in, but he also loves for us to read to him historical accounts of nearly anything related to the topic. At one point  I had mentioned the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer", and how it was about a boy chess prodigy. So Grafton was soon asking "Who is Bobby Fischer, Dad?" Wikipedia provided a truly in-depth account of this enigmatic man's life. We both found it interesting to read that as a young boy, Bobby didn't have many available opponents to play against and so continued to teach himself chess by playing against himself! We both found this quite interesting and talked about how difficult it must be to switch sides each move, and knowing how your opponent would think and plan his moves against "you". 

Well, one day while Dad was at work, he received this Google Hangout chat from Mom:

G's playing himself at chess!

That's fantastic. 
Is he winning?! 

Yes and losing.

Grafton says the white side has the most pieces left, but he can't predict who will win because the winner will be decided by who protects the king the best.
Check mate! White side won, black lost.

After the match, Mom told Dad that after the game was over, Grafton demonstrated a high-level of sportsmanship by shaking his own hand!