This edition of our “unschooling roundup” has a theme: Animals. Also nerdiness. Oh, wait. That’s all our unschooling. Never mind!

We went to Pittsburgh, and Ashar geeked out over the stadiums along the river.

(If this is your first time catching our month-in-review posts, welcome! Check out last month’s for a little bit of background on why we’re taking this approach to documenting some of our learning adventures.)

One of our August highlights: Ashar got blue, light blue and emerald green hair with white-blonde spikes in the back!

Books

• Batman Detective Comics Vol. 3: Emperor Penguin
• Batman Detective Comics Vol. 4: The Wrath
• Painless Algebra (Ashar found this browsing at our local bookstore, sat on the floor with it for a half-hour and got excited when I said, “Uh, do you want to buy that?” This kid hates math. Supposedly.)
• Dracula

The actual reason we Pittsburgh’ed: to meet Levar Burton and get his autograph.

Movies and TV

• Guardians of the Galaxy (YES YES YES YES YES. We are Groot. Also, we bought the Awesome Mix soundtrack.)
• The X-Files: Fight the Future
• Skyfall
• WWE Summer Slam
• A couple episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
• Two Robin Williams movies on the day of his death: License to Wed, and Cadillac Man. Not the most kid-friendly, but I’d forgotten that. That’s OK. Lots of good conversations came out of this rather epic #parentingFail.
• Knight and Day

At Steel City Con in Pittsburgh, we met these cool people cosplaying as Scully and Mulder from the X-Files, which was awesome since we’d just seen the X-Files : Fight the Future movie.

Video games

• The Last of Us (Ashar and Kaitlyn played this start to finish, and I watched most of it. Surprisingly good, and lots of cool stuff to talk about!)
• World of Warcraft (and Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, at the encouragement of her friends)
• Club Penguin (Ashar has loved this for years, and randomly picked it up again this month. She still loves it!)
• MLB 11: The Show

Videos

What, you don’t randomly quote your two dozen favorite Monty Python sketches and make your friends watch them? Sure you do. Also, goats. And the new World of Warcraft expansion, which Ashar is anxiously awaiting.

Places and projects

• Feathered Sanctuary Exotic Bird Rescue – This was a fun day trip!
• Ashar has a Rubik’s Cube that we’ve been TRYING to follow the instructions to get “finished.” Hasn’t happened yet. It’s an undertaking.
• York County 4-H Fair
• Steel City Con, where Ashar got Levar Burton’s autograph, and after which we hung out at Point State Park in Pittsburgh, where we took our not-back-to-school pictures
• Mini golfing at Lost Treasure in Lancaster and bowling
• 4-H alpaca club show
• Dirt-track racing and demolition derby at Susquehanna Speedway Park
• YorkFest (where I did a reading as a literary award winner, and Ashar’s abstract painting won first place for 14- to 18-year-old art!)

Ashar won first place for art by 14- to 18-year-olds at Yorkfest, our annual regional art show. That’s her painting at left!

Odds and ends of stuff we’ve talked about/read/geeked out over

• What the “Eco-Boost” does in my Honda Civic, and what gas mileage is.
• Gelatinous sea creatures called hydroid polyps that washed up in San Francisco.
• How the designated hitter works in interleague play in baseball, and how they choose what stadium the Super Bowl is played at.
• Meatball the 35-pound cat. (He weighs “two stone,” so a fun chance to talk about British weights and measures, too!)
• Chris and Ashar had a long conversation about the Holocaust, mostly focusing on the people who got the Jews to safety and people like Anne Frank who lived in hiding for long periods. (Anne Frank wrote her last diary entry on Aug. 1, 1944.)
• Baby hedgehogs. And baby panda triplets.
• A woodchuck/groundhog/pick-your-rodent-name is rescued from a sewer grate. It’s adorable.
• A local forensics mystery involving a foot. (Spoiler: It wasn’t human.)
• How momentum works, and how larger items are harder to slow down and stop.
• Whether we should visit this parkour gym in Baltimore.
• Who the next James Bond villain might be.
• How exterminators do their jobs, and whether they have to know about every individual bug or different types of bugs.
• The messages of greeting sent to space on the Voyager record from a bunch of different countries, in a bunch of languages.

So what’s new with your family this month? Drop me a comment! I love hearing from all my “blog friends!”