Discussed gyroscopic attitude indicators and reviewed how gyroscopes work. Joe made the connection to open up the "World War II Air War" chapter on "Buzz Bomb Blasts Britain" where there was a story about how British Spitfire pilots destroyed the Nazi "buzz bombs" with "wingovers" - tipping them would upset their primitive gyroscopes and the buzz bombs would then crash. Great connection for him to remember!

Pleasure Reading: Four Days.

Purchased scanning radio receiver to practice listening to and understanding aviation communications (partially covered in 1/23 lecture).

Barometric Pressure and Altimeters Lesson: Set barometer, reviewed surface analysis (weather map) from internet with approaching low and watched barometer fall all day. Compared millibar and inches Hg barometric pressure units on barometer (both), weather map (mb), altimeters (Hg). Had Joe fly the flight simulator, closely monitoring the altimeter and rate of climb indicator in aerobatic flight maneuvers.

Reading: Strider (Beverly Cleary)

Composition: drafted two emails to Isaac, using appropriate typing technique.

Aircraft Radio Communications: monitored scanner, and logged ID of call originator. Trying to pick up call cadence and format. Learned airport map and followed snowplow and aircraft radio reports of taxiway use (alpha, bravo, charlie, and delta). Monitored radio traffic for several inbound IFR approaches (one might have been Harry in a King Air). Joe is very sharp on map reading. He noticed that runways 8 and 26 are rounded from the actual headings, which appear on the map in fine print with decimal degrees! Good grasp of spatial orientiation on the map too.

Aviation Training Videos: AOPA "Joy of Flying" (introduction). Also, 25 min. of Chapter 2 Jeppesen GFD video on engine systems and flight theory.

Parent coordination: reserved flight time for Friday, discussed curriculum with Juneau Flight School, and bought Juneau sectional chart for future mapping exercises.

Art class at DZ, 8:30 - 10:00 (NW Coast design elements-"u", ovoids)

Visited Technology classroom at DZ..brief orientation.

Barometric pressure lesson - reset barometer and compared to current surface analysis map, and discussed how to reset aircraft altimeters accordingly. Practiced reading altimeters in Microsoft flight simulator again.

Reading: "Strider", Beverly Cleary.

Recess, Ethics class (with Sam Skaggs) and Art class (with Diane Anderson) at Charter School.

Jeppesen Guided Flight Discovery video (30 min) on aircraft instruments (lecture prep).

Paper Route

Evening: 3 hour lecture by Marti Show in Ground School on powerplants and aircraft instruments. Introduced vectors, venturi effect, prime meridian, and cancelling units in numerator and denominator, which will need to cover again with Joe.

Morning Math and Science: Introduced vectors (concept from class last night). Discussed prime meridian and the story of longitude (another class concept). Joe had noticed the "zulu" clock at class last night and wondered what it was. He's very adept at time zones, just hadn't encountered the standard before.
Barometric pressure review - barometer. Reviewed the current surface pressure map, as well as the 24 and 36 hour forecast pressure maps to see how the lows would move around his flight tomorrow. Looks like he could luck out and be flying in a "window" between frontal systems.

Writing: drafted email to Isaac, practicing typing.

Art: Watched "Eagle of the Dawn", a library video about a Haida carver working in his studio. Joe especially liked that he was playing "Boil them Cabbage Down" in his studio, a song that he knows on the violin and relates too. Reinforced the "u" and "ovoid" concepts that he was exposed to in art class on Wed.

Reading: 30 min, "Four Days", to page 47.

Music: 15 min. violin practice, then 45 min violin class at JCCS.

Paper Route: 4-5

PE: Soccer practice 7-8pm. Developing good goalie skills and confidence. Scored one goal in scrimmage.

Played with Neal (afternoon), and did lunch recess at Capitol Playground. Held court with his flight training stories at lunch at school (he flies tomorrow).

Art: Art class at DZ, 8:30 - 10:00 (NW Coast design elements-"u", ovoids)

Meteorology: Weather briefing for his afternoon flight. Reviewed the current surface pressure map, as well as the 24 and 36 hour forecast pressure maps. Joe noted slightly rising barometric pressure. Understands mb to inches Hg conversions for barometric pressure.

Aviation technology: Jeppesen Maneuvers Video to prep for today's flight. Basic Maneuvers: straight and level flight, turns, climbs descents. Landings and takeoffs. Airport patterns. Flight Simulator. Just got Disk 1 (free) in mail today of Sporty's Private Pilot training DVD and watched the instrument section. Looks like better job of production than Jeppesen. Joe has altimeters and altimeter math down pat. Also had image of altimeter with simultaneous setting of barometric pressure in inches Hg and mb, which was great.
Unfortunately todays flight was cancelled at 1 pm because of airport winds. Everybody disappointed. Rescheduled for Monday at 2pm.

Life Skills (animal husbandry): Dog grooming (15 min.)

Paper Route 4-5

Play: Built snow forts and tunnels in yard with Bingo.

Math: "pi" exercise. Measured and logged circumference and diameter of found objects around the house, and computed pi on calculator. Joe knew what it was supposed to be, so was initially disturbed that so many of our calculations were "off" of the pi theoretical value. We'll turn this into an exercise in statistics and measurement error too!

Music: practiced violin (15 min.)

Reading: Four Days (to p. 61)

Science: (evening) attended free public "Science for Alaska" lecture on the aurora borealis, by Physics professor Roger Smith, Director of the Univ. of Alaska Geophysical Institute. Fascinating slides and animations of solar ejection events deflecting the earth's magnetic field!

Aviation Technology: Reviewed Jeppesen "Maneuvers" video on basic maneuvers to prepare for flight. 2pm flight was scrubbed because of weather. Practiced on flight simulator. Airfield observation: found great observation point up on Mountainside Estates, overlooking the airfield and parked there with our aviation band scanning radio, practicing listening to radio calls and listening to radio traffic as two Alaska Airlines jets departed and several small planes landed. Excellent spot to visualize all Joe has learned, and particularly to visualize the airport, runway, and taxiway map and designations and approach geography.

Reading: Strider. Library in evening.

Math: prime numbers and prime factorizations. Joe is further along with this than I thought. Did not recognize the term "prime factorizations" at first, but he knew what it was and how to do it. Did exercise with him where we took turns naming the next prime number. He was very, very fast (they weren't memorized). We stopped at 50 but he could have gone quite a bit higher I think.

Writing: started "dog" personality email dialog with Grammy.

Music: Practiced violin 10 min. Violin class with Xia at JCCS. Sat in on music club at DZ after school.

PE: Lunch Recess and PE at JCCS.

Science: Legends for barometric pressure maps, examining current maps to decode symbols.

Math: Good long discussion of pi, covering history of pi 2000 BC to present, National Pi Day (3/14, also Einstein's birthday!), and calculating pi to two billion digits. Also transcendental numbers (briefly). In the history of the development of pi, two mathematicians, most recently Brahmagupta (~640) believed pi to be the square root of 10. Long digression to square roots on the calculator and Joe's discovery of square root series converging to 1. Also, he explained his denominator conversion problem from yesterday more fully. He was stuck on a part of converting fractions to decimals, especially if there were repeating digits. Kind of a link to pi there (which does not repeat).
Presented factorials on walk to meadow. Joe thought the concept interesting, and was impressed by how quickly factorials got huge. He seemed to grasp it right away.

Reading: Strider; Honolulu Star Bulletin newspaper of Dec. 7, 1941 (from BlueStocking Press) - about Pearl Harbor attack.

Writing: Mavis Beacon - keyboarding skills

Aviation Technology: Preflight section of Sporty's DVD on pilot training.
And, FIRST FLIGHT!!!!
Evening: Three hour lecture in Aviation Technology 100 (Jan Gordon, Jackie Segal) - aerodynamics

Reading: Strider. Library pm

Math: Factorials (writing this time).
Propeller Pi and Other Math Adventures

Music: violin practice and class

Art: Art class at JCCS with Diane Anderson

PE: Soccer practice; lunch recess.

Aviation Technology: reviewed yesterday's flight, logbooks.

Math: Propeller Pie exercise continued: From circumference to rotation speed, with units conversions. Use of simple calculator cont'd.

Reading: Pearl Harbor. Completed in one day.

Writing: Dog personality email (Bingo to Bizzie).

Geography: field trip to Glacier for map reading exercise. Compared Juneau sectional (aeronautical chart) to the 3-D relief map of the Juneau area in the visitors center at the Mendenhall Glacier.

PE: Sledding at Glacier with Michael Pollard.

Math: Drilled on squares to 12 and cubes to 5 (opportunistic) Introduced scientific calculator (now that he has gotten thoroughly familiar with pi and typed it into the old calculator lots) with pi key etc. He was curious about all the other keys, so we did some exploring of the exponent keys.

Science: Big storm Saturday. Tracked and logged barometric pressure thru weekend. Nice bullseye storm to look at on the surface map.

PE: Soccer game Saturday. Tennis Sunday.

Math: More scientific calculator exploration. Discovered Joe, all by himself in experimenting with the calculator had discovered the "parenthesis" keys, and was entering algebraic expressions with the parentheses controlling the order. Correctly!!!! Guess that is one lesson I don't have to teach!

Propeller pi. Worked through another example of calculating propeller tip speeds using pi and units conversions, this time with a rubber band wind-up balsa glider. To get RPMs we came up with the idea to count the number of times it was wound, then time the unwinding. I drew a graph of how speed might decrease over time (several hypotheses of shape) which Joe had good grasp of and had his own opinion, favoring the linear one. We opted to use an average, based on a linear model. Joe measured and I recorded in his notebook, to set an example for how to neatly record lab information so you could go back and check it, using headings and sketches and graphs interspersed.

Percents and shifting decimal points for powers of 10. Joe has this nailed... did a little drill.

Writing: started to draft email from Bingo to Bizzie but did not complete.

Reading: Completed Strider.

Aviation Technology: Field Trip - A Visit to the Hangar, to measure the propeller diameter of a C-130 Hercules, with a bonus tour of a high-tech, all-glass cockpit! Also (AM) watched Jeppesen video of Flight Maneuvers 16-20 (stalls).

Science: (evening) attended free public "Science for Alaska" lecture diving physiology and foraging ecology of seals.

Math/Science: Propeller Pi on the C-130 data we collected yesterday. Joe was so eager to do this, he got right at it before breakfast! Computed tip speeds right at the speed of sound, about 602 MPH. Discussed speed of sound in liquids (Joe was well aware of this) and solids.

More time on the Scientific calculator. Joe is fascinated by watching series (progressive square roots etc.) and inventing new ones. This was a favorite activity today, so I just let him go with his interest. It will tie in nicely to sequences and series here in a little bit.

Music: Violin, practice 20 min. AM. One hour lesson at JCCS, afternoon.

Art: Art Club at DZ, 3:00

PE: Lunch Recess at JCCS

Joe's Mom's birthday today, so things were a little lower key.

Art: Art Class at DZ, 8:30-10:00. NW Coast designs. Hand drawing. Art Club at DZ 3-4:30pm

Aviation Technology: Jeppesen GFD video: Forces of Flight, Stability. Review FAA test questions on principles of aerodynamics. Evening lecture: Field Trip to the Juneau Tower.

Math: Equation of circle ( how can you calculate a perfect circle?). Scientific calculator exploration: scientific notation. Negative powers of ten. Exponents add when you multiply in Sci. notation.

Social Studies: Air Force One (Nat. Geo.). Office of the president, history and presidents review, 1940-present.

Reading: Time Warp Trio: Not so Jolly Roger (30 min - finished)

Math: Intro to Spreadsheets (Excel). Joe entered barometric pressure log he has been keeping. Had him entered formula to convert inches Hg to millibars and compare result to what he had logged. Demonstrated "copy down" process, and lesson that what computers are good at is repeating things. Showed him how to make a graph in Excel of his barometric pressure data. Very gratifying that the storm event of Feb. 9 was so obvious in his data as a big pressure drop! Here's a page about Joe's Barometric Pressure exercise.

Reviewed each unit of Everyday Math with Joe, to see what they covered in school, and what they didn't, and what his comprehension was. Marked up the unit and topic list, and flagged topics that needed more work. He is well along with 5th grade level, and with our recent work, partly into 6th.

Music: practiced violin 15 min. (morning). Then 1 hour lesson at JCCS in afternoon.

PE: Soccer practice at Harborview gym (1 hour). Slight leg injury, may have strained something in right thigh.

Writing: drafted email from Bingo to Bizzie.

Art: Art club at DZ (3:00)

Science: made barometer from state surplus 1000 ml graduated cylinder, inverted and standing in a pan of water. Will correlate observations with Joe's regular barometer readings and put in his spreadsheet. Also, introduction to Electronics. Pulled out the multimeter to try to investigate how the potentiometers in our computer joystick worked, in preparation for building our own rudder pedals for our flight simulator. Placed a tub of old, mostly discharged, drycell batteries in front of Joe and let him experiment with the multimeter. Came back in a few minutes and he had about 10 batteries lined up in series, using a 9v transistor battery to "turn" the corner, and was measuring voltage in series!! What a great discovery on his own! He definitely had discovered that voltage is additive when batteries are added in series, all on his own. I was going to cover that, but this was WAY better!

Social Studies/History. While querying Joe to inventory his knowledge of Alaska History, we made the link that the Alaska purchase timescale overlapped the westward expansion timescale he was studying at school. Also, a personal connection of his (great-grandfather) overlaps this timescale also, and he sounded interested in some biographical research about it. That led to a discussion of how countries "acquire" land, and he asked if they do that anymore or if it was disputed. We discussed the Kurile Islands (Russia-Japan), Antarctic treaty and the moon as contemporary examples. Also led to a discussion of NATOs mutual defense agreement - he asked what would happen if a member nation *intentionally* caused a retaliatory strike to happen. Not knowing the answer, we turned to the computer and were able to immediately read the actual text of Article 5 in the NATO treaty. Great use of computers to just fit into a discussion like that! We did not find an answer to the intentional strike question there though.

Math: continued introduction to spreadsheets. Joe updated his barometric pressure spreadsheet with new data and then experimented with many of the formatting controls on the graph. He's catching on to this quickly!

Reading: Hardy Boys, "Secret of the old Mill". Joe very wrapped up in this book, read for 2 hours and did not want to put it down!

(Monday was holiday). School is out today (teacher inservice), but we did a few things anyway. Reconstructed barometer to fill to lower height - thought perhaps the tall height of the water column was damping the variations.

Electronics. Got started on the rudder pedal electronics project for the flight simulator. Joe disassembled a discarded joystick, part of a collection that we obtained from Phil Witt. He located the potentiometers, and together we hooked up the multimeter so we could verify which circuits in the DB15 plug had resistance controlled by the potentiometer. It worked! Left him some time to just play with the multimeter, and the various possibilities for wiring the potentiometers. Joe also hooked up himself two of the old joysticks to his computer, calibrated them (in control panel) and used them. A first for him, and a confidence builder for dealing with computer innards.

Reading: Hardy Boys, "Secret of the old Mill". Finished over the weekend. Started "Case of the missing chums".

Music: Violin class at JCCS, 10-11.

Aviation Technology: read textbook chapter 3C to prepare for tonight's lecture. Did "dynamics of flight" chapter on the Sporty's DVD. Also watched the King's "Learn to fly" section on Flight Simulator 2002 through basic maneuvers, and the simulator sessions with the electronic instructor. Great learning tool. 3 hour lecture in class tonight, with Mike Lawson (ATC, CFI), on airport procedures. Great class!

PE: Outdoor snow activities with Zac Pease (afternoon).

Reading: Hardy Boys, "The Missing Chums"

JCCS Winter Camp (overnight) at Methodist camp. Seadogs visit. Interestingly, before leaving, Joe chose to "overfly" Methodist Camp in Microsoft Flight Simulator!

JCCS Winter Camp at Methodist Camp (cont'd). Morning nature hike with Discovery Southeast naturalist Walt Chapman. Joe's class makes lunch for the whole group.

Math: Adding Fractions: Common Denominator review and drill. Least common denominator (new concept).
Updated barometric pressure data on spreadsheet, including the new observations from Joe's homemade barometer. Joe invents a new unit for his measurement scale (which he calls the "prebar"). He observed prebars had an inverted pattern and correctly inferred that was because our scale (the graduated cylinder) was upside down. We made the conversion by inverting the axis, plotting on same graph with different y-axis. I think he got it OK. Then we added the hourly real data from the airport and superimposed this on his graph. He was tracking this very closely, and correctly observed that the phase shift was because the airport data were measured in zulu time! The topic of measurement error arises again....

Reading: "Fighters of World War II" - (fighter pilot diaries)

music: violin practice

Aviation Technology: physics of helicopter flight (puzzled about forward angles when flying helicopter in flight simulator, and tendency to descend). Went through some parts of Rod Machado's ground school lessons that came with flight simulator 2002. We both agreed that these lessons were too basic and did not have enough real content for our level.

Life Skills/biology: Bingo goes to the vet to donate blood for ailing (likely terminal) Zephyr. Discussion of role of hemoglobin and oxygen binding with graphic example from the lethargic Zephyr, with a very low red blood cell count.

Math: Discussed the label "inverse" and inverse operations. Joe knew and listed the obvious ones, but had not heard the label before. Asked him to think of more inverse operations and he came up with square and square root (after glancing at the calculator keys). He also asked about the log keys, somehow suspecting there was an inverse there, so with a little guidance was pleased to discover 10^x and log(10).

Joe has been asking for pan-balance equation exercises, so today we used a neat little javascript interactive program to do pan-balances: Pan Balance Equations

We played a game where I would enter an expression on one side, and he would enter another to balance (varied our rules so that it had to have say two or three operators). Then we went back to Pan-balance with symbols, another neat java applet. He spent quite a bit of time experimenting...the applet will keep giving you new problems too. The beauty of this is the self-teaching of removing identical quantities from each side of the equation. Very slick, and eye-catching enough to capture the imagination thoroughly!

Music: violin practice (am), violin lesson (1 hour) at JCCS (pm)

Aviation Technology: Reviewed FAA knowledge test questions on Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. Joe needed more review on Chapter two (venturi and some other engine functions), so we reviewed the book and I had him watch the corresponding Jeppesen tape on those chapters.

Math: Factor trees for deriving prime factorizations. Played game for drill where we each made up numbers (50 to 500), wrote them on slips of paper and put in basket. Then took turns drawing a number and writing out a factor tree to get the prime factorization. I had in mind making this a competition (with a handicap for me, although Joe was nearly as fast as me), but it was working just taking turns so we left it at that. Very good drill for this.

Reviewed Joe's Main Lesson Books, and writing and spelling/grammar journals from school

Geometry/Art: Tesselations. First reviewed some geometry concepts (rhombus, parallelogram, trapezoid), then discussed replicating these shapes as tesselations. Reviewed M.C. Escher tesselations (from Douglas Hofstadter's 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid) Then had Joe spend some time browsing artistic tesselations, including an animation which "morphs" simple geometric shapes into some of Escher's figures.

Aviation Technology: Tested on Chapter 2 (Airplane Systems) again, then reviewed concepts in the book and the video on pressure engine instruments. Class lecture tonight (2 hrs) was a field trip to the FAA flight service station at the Juneau airport, where we learned about filing flight plans, weather briefings, and the radio communications functions that occur here.

Music: practiced violin with Neal Callahan (learned Star Wars theme!). Then attended Neal's 1/2 hour private lesson with Greg Bowen, a possible new music teaching situation for Joe.

Music: 1 hour lesson at JCCS with Xia

Reading: Hardy Boys, "The Missing Chums", 1 hr.

PE: 1 hour league indoor soccer practice (Harborview gym); Lunch recess at JCCS

Science/Technology: installed new dual-head graphics card in computer. This will be used for the multiple-monitor "wraparound" view flight simulator we are building. Discussed PCI vs AGP slots, dedicated graphics processors (this one has a cooling fan, so is particularly recognizable and "cool", quite literally, on the board.

Life Skills: Zephyr, Golden Retriever we dogsit, dying of cancer. Visited last night, sutures leaking fluids... discussed function and origin of fluids in abdomen in this situation. Our dog, Bingo, has given Zephyr a blood transfusion, to raise her red blood cell count for this exploratory surgery operation, which confirmed the cancer.