Grassroots Homeschool

First UU of Rochester 's Amazing Viral Video

2011-09-12T18:56:00.000-07:00

Check out this amazing video, posted just in time for Fall Ingathering. What a great idea from a dynamic congregation!

Curriculum 2011-2012

2011-09-06T07:32:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the long dry spell. I'm writing more than ever...just not on the blog.

I thought I'd post our curriculum this year, though, for those who are interested in such things. Our Michael Clay Thompson resources are finished on the half-year, so when I list two levels, that means we're halfway done with one right now, and will be halfway done with the other by the end of June. We're doing Latin M/W/F, using Drew Campbell's I Speak Latin on Friday, and we do Greek on T/Th.

G/Kindergarten

Explode the Code
Miquon Orange and Red
Mindbenders: Warm Up
Mnemosyne

Posy/Third Grade

Explode the Code
Singapore 3A and 3B
Orbiting With Logic
Mnemosyne
Spelling Workout C
MCTLA Island/Town Levels
Greek for Children
Big Book of Lively Latin One
Shanleya's Quest
Various Life Science Resources/Projects
Story of the World 1

Will/Fifth Grade

Singapore 5A and 5B
Building Thinking Skills 1
The Snake and the Fox
Mnemosyne
Spelling Workout E
MCTLA Town/Voyage Levels
Greek for Children
Big Book of Lively Latin Two
Ellen McHenry's Botany
Botany in a Day
The Way Life Works
The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way
World in Ancient Times
Kingfisher Encyclopedia of World History

Both of the older kids have book baskets. Will's fall basket includes:

Blubber, by Judy Blume
The Coming of the Bear, by Lensey Namioka
India Authentic, One and Two
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
Gilgamesh the Hero, by Geraldine McCaughrean
Pyramid, by David Macaulay

He also reads two stories a week from Famous Men of Greece.

We're all doing a UU Bible literacy curriculum called Timeless Themes once a week.

You can see that Will's schedule in particular is heavy on the reading this year, so I didn't put many books in the basket. Also, we shortened our quarters so that we can take July/August off next summer. It was getting too hairy with sleep-away camp, local day camp classes, and swim lessons.

I'm also throwing in "math lab days" a few times a month, in which we ditch other seatwork to mess around with Hands-On Equations and Calculus for Kids.

On "Parents, Don't Dress Your Girls Like Tramps"

2011-04-29T06:01:00.000-07:00

I was re-reading an article by LZ Granderson this morning entitled, "Parents, don't dress your girls like tramps". As I read it, I realized that it put a pretty fine point on a lesser-known reason to homeschool. It's in our top five:

We strongly oppose the commercialization and commodification of our kids' childhood.

So, when Melissa McEwan at Shakesville decries the article, arguing that "How girls dress would be moot if we didn't live in a culture that sexually objectified female people," I see her point. I really do. But I disagree that this nullifies Granderson's argument.

There is no shiny, post-sexualized reality in which little girls can wear underpants that say "Who needs credit cards?" without comparing their vaginas to ATMs. "Don't dress your daughters in a way that will make people look at them in a way no one should be looking at them in the first place," is all well and good, but there is a difference between sexualizing underpants that happen to be on a child, and sexualizing a child by emblazoning underpants with overtly sexual messages.

Then there are her other points, which I am admittedly paraphrasing:

1. Don't pretend to be criticizing "parents". You mean "mothers".

OK. Why does that invalidate his argument? Because Granderson's not a woman? Marketing companies will tell you that whoever does the grocery shopping in the relationship at the age of 30 is the person who chooses the brands for that household. If we're going to shut down the discussion so women don't feel singled out, we're not going to get very far. And I don't need a pass. Thanks.

2. If you only have a Wal-Mart, you have to buy sexualized girls' clothes.

Nope. Not true. I have never yet seen a Wal-Mart that didn't have plain old jeans and khakis, solid, floral and striped tee shirts, plain underpants and socks, reasonable bathing suits, and dresses with patterns rather than logos.

3. Stop blaming poor people for accepting the sexualized crap they are given.

This argument reeks of false sympathy. As someone who dresses her children in 99% thrifted, garage-saled, hand-me-down clothing, I can say with assurance that the most disadvantaged parent has no need to dress his or her child in objectionable clothing. If there is a pervasive culture of doing so in one's extended family, one might rely solely on thrifting and avoid the hand-me-downs, but it's certainly still possible to avoid messages like, "Juicy" or "If you take me shopping, I'll be your girlfriend."

Even if we couldn't easily find non-sexual clothing for our young girls, as Eric Schlosser has said of the fast food industry:

They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.

Is Melissa McEwan arguing that poor people aren't capable of agitating for change or voting with the dollars they spend? That's a shitty argument. Wal-Mart knows who their customer base is. Substantial criticism would give rise to change.

And that, I think, brings us around to the real issue.

There are a myriad of corporations vying for our children's attention. They are shameless about their agenda, which is to inculcate cradle-to-grave loyalty to their brands. Over the course of her lifetime, your child is estimated to be worth approximately $100,000 dollars to each individual brand.

Just think about that for a minute.

Companies are perfectly happy to win your child over at the expense of that child's relationship with others and with self. They promote the illusion of substance, discussing brand perception and religion in the same sentence. And the most commercialized child in any given group carries corporate messages like a virus to children whose parents have set more reasonable limits.

It's a never-ending cycle. What brands are you wearing? Do you own the latest fashion in that brand's line? What are you playing with? Do you own enough of what you should be playing with? What's in your lunch? What gaming systems do you own? What rating of game are you allowed to play? Do you have the latest game as soon as it comes out? What have you seen on TV? What music do you listen to? What movies are you allowed to watch?

Of course, all of these commodities are far more expensive than the identical product sans label. You pay for cachet. You also pay for things nobody needs, and as we are beginning to realize, even recycling is not as green as it seems given our exorbitant rate of consumption.

Homeschooling has been an enormous boon for our family. There's not much of a push to conform among homeschoolers. We're generally one-income families, which requires us to economize. We run in mixed age and income groups, so that familiar figure of the-kid-with-everything who pushes new trends just doesn't exist. Shared interests tend to be viral; they transcend age groups and gender. As a group, our homeschooling friends watch little TV, and are more likely to watch as a family. We don't buy school clothes, so fashion tends to take a backseat to what lasts and what's comfortable. This makes it easy to protect our children from opportunistic marketers so they can develop their own interests. Most importantly of all, they can learn to discern the difference between an interest and a commodity.

Having seen what's possible, I am frustrated by these circular arguments in which people whine that parents must accept egregious marketing trends simply because they're filling store shelves. It's fallacious and lazy.

If you think I'm overstating the case, take a few minutes to read an ANA Magazine article from 2003, "Tween Marketing: It's No Longer Child's Play!" It's not even the tip of the iceberg.

Happy Birthday, Graeme!

2011-04-27T15:00:00.000-07:00

Today, Graeme is five, the same age Will was when we moved to upstate New York. It seemed so old to me then; it seems so young to me now.

Five years ago, PB and I rushed to an emergency ultrasound in Columbus to find out if something had been missed that would explain the four liters of extra fluid my body was holding, which were preventing full labor. We ended up driving back down to our smaller local hospital a few hours later for a c-section. We were at risk for both cord prolapse and placental abruption. After two uncomplicated, unmedicated births, it was a scary conclusion to our childbearing. Thankfully, a beautiful, healthy baby was born, and he has been our comic relief, our larger than life hero, our Robin Goodfellow, ever since.

Graeme worked through a detailed itinerary today: he picked the ice cream to go with his cake at our local dairy (and told the dairyman it was his birthday), spent time at the park (and told the kids it was his birthday), picked up new playdough at Target (and told Dennis at the checkout it was his birthday), bought fondant at the craft store (and told the clerk it was his birthday)...you get the idea. He had pancakes for lunch and Chinese food for dinner. He made fondant squids and dolphins for the top of his cake while Will and Ro made fondant sushi and turnips (not kidding). Unfortunately, his original idea, a gigantic fondant statue of Abraham Lincoln rescuing a pirate from a T-Rex, proved overcomplicated. We rented Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and played Nickleback's "Hero" one jillion times (because it is a "Birthday-ish" song).

By the end of gift-opening, he was decked out in full pirate regalia, smeared with chocolate, and whooping aloud as he ran around the house, brandishing a moose.

That's my boy. Happy Birthday.

Those Suspicious Homeschoolers

2011-03-03T05:43:00.000-08:00

Last year, about halfway through my first lap of the MidWest Homeschool Convention's trade show, my debit card stopped working. Several phone calls later, it became clear that the bank had flagged my account for suspicious activity. I theorize that this was not because of how much I was using the card, but rather how little I use it the rest of the time. I was eventually able to convince them that it really was OK for me to purchase art supplies and science kits in Ohio instead of New York, and all was well.

But I should have realized it wasn't an isolated incident.

Yesterday, I spent a long time moving things from my homeschooling list on amazon (see right sidebar) to my cart. I'd done a very careful job sorting out which books were cheaper used, despite the flat $3.99 s&h added to each one. I'd carefully totaled up everything. Then I hit submit on what appeared, on amazon's end, to be handled as one purchase.

Then they pinged my bank with one transaction for each individual used book, as well as an individual transaction for each of the amazon processing centers my new books were being split between. It must have sounded like Atlantic City in the bank's fraud detection department.

So now, some of the transactions have shipped. Some have not processed. I may or may not have to input those a second time. And the bank branch does not open for ten more minutes, bless their little sleepy heads. Neither fraud detection nor the corporate headquarters can unlock my account, which they find mildly surprising, since "clearly you have sufficient funds". Uh-huh.

I'm fairly amused by the idea of some sort of homeschool co-op cum crime syndicate. Watch out for the nefarious homeschooling underworld, my friends. We'll steal your credit card numbers and spend all your money on amazon! Muwahahaha.

Requests and Offerings

2011-02-02T07:36:00.000-08:00

First, the request. If anyone knows of some treasure house of Iroquoian folklore (but particularly Mohawk-specific), could you send the title/link my way? Many thanks.

Second, I wanted to share some resources that have gotten my kids interested in Chemistry, for those who might be doing Chem next year. These are all things we've used successfully at the grammar stage.

(This first is a no-brainer.)

Here Comes Science, by They Might Be Giants, first got my kids interested in the Periodic Table of Elements.

The CD comes with a DVD of videos. If you like TMBG anyway, you'll be glad to have music that doesn't make you want to drill holes in your eyeballs to let the commercial demons out. If you think, "OK, charming, slightly quirky, but no big deal," let me just disabuse you...TMBG songs are catchy. They may not get you the first time, but you'll be singing about elephants made of elements while you do the dishes.

That led to various people taking this book to bed. It's cute...more of an introduction than anything, since some of the more obscure elements are not included. But the little illustrated pictures personalize things, and it's engagingly written.

We ended up using Delta's Science in a Nutshell kits as our Chemistry program last year, and they were fantastic. There's way more there than anyone could do in a year of science lessons; I'm beginning to find that it's better to pick some you'd like to do together, and turn the kids loose on the rest of them. I've also linked you to the page that lists the smaller (less expensive) kits included in this larger one, which is called a cluster. Delta does a pretty good job of meaning it when they say that only household items aren't included. They include things as basic as drinking straws. You might have to adjust your grocery list every once in a while, but it's no big deal. Highly recommended.

Lastly, my kids love this book, which I picked up after Christmas on a big sale. If your kid has gotten a toe wet and now wants lots of detail, this book is highly visual. There's also an iPhone app if you don't want one more hardcover book at your house, but it's square and not terribly large.

The kids have had a blast with all of these...we're doing physics this year, and when I declared a "have at the science kits" Friday last week, they immediately asked for the chemistry nutshells. When we watched NOVA's "Making Stuff" series, there was a general outcry when the host started talking about the elements and flashed the periodic table on the screen. The periodic table is both familiar and a friend. I think that's good news.

Citizen Science

2011-01-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

I knew, when I shut down the computer at midnight, that I was forgetting something.

This year, I'm registering as early as possible for the "citizen science" projects that catch our fancy. I'm also going to sock away funds for the necessary supplies. For example, in the past we've wanted to host a variety of bird feeders throughout the winter. However, feeder season has run into Christmas and homeschool purchasing for the following year. In an environment as cold as ours, we're particularly mindful of the warning not to quit filling feeders in the middle of winter. So we've erred on the side of caution by not having feeders in the first place, though we have several bird houses. In 2011-2012, we plan to:

•Tag Monarchs
•Create and certify a Monarch waystation
•Participate in Project Feederwatch

There are other things I'd like to do. The "Purple Project" raises beetles that eat purple loosestrife, an invasive species that clogs our native marshes. There are pheasant raise-and-release programs, if the funding cuts haven't gotten them. We might try YardMap. And, last but not least, we're planning to compile a field guide for our homestead. I'm really looking forward to that one.

Next Year's Plans

2011-01-26T17:46:00.000-08:00

Here I sit, surrounded by a welter of library books. At last count, there were fifty-one.

This is the fun part.

Of course, that's only half true. The other half of me is thinking, "Help! I need to cut back my purchasing list!" And these stacks of books are supposed to help me do that. Any book that could reasonably be read and digested during one checkout and three renewals can safely be removed from my amazon list. The rest of them probably have to stay on. Some of them are in the book carrel you see rotating above this post. Others are in the widget in the right-hand sidebar. Most of them are history books.

The most tempting titles are the Peter Connolly books. Put out by Oxford University Press, they include gorgeous reproductions of all those little details...armor, household artifacts...you know what I mean. Fortunately, our library has quite a few, and they overlap with our history spine, which is also put out by OUP. The World In Ancient Times series is pricey, but it's gaining traction due to its excellent writing and the primary sources woven throughout the texts. (And you can get it a lot cheaper than the price listed on amazon if you keep your ear to the ground.)

Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt? Meh. I'm not even sure we need to check it out from the library, truth be told. But I think Augustus Caesar's World by Genevieve Foster is a keeper. And I would love to hear from someone who went to the trouble of acquiring Caesar's Gallic War by Olivia Coolidge. I'm wondering if we might be better off reading excerpts from the original.

Handily enough, as I typed this I saw a commercial for a movie adaptation of The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff. That's a classical homeschooling bellwether; how nice of them to make a movie just now, when Will is headed into his Logic-stage Ancients year.

I'm not completely settled on our science resources yet, but I'm leaning toward using The Way Life Works, by Mahlon Hoagland, as our spine, with a side dish of Botany in a Day for Will, and Shanleya's Quest for Posy. I've got my eye on a dissection set, though Will has expressed some trepidation...which I can understand. There are virtual dissections aplenty online, so we can cross that bridge when we come to it. I'm planning to pick up some slides for our microscope, and I think I noted a good guide for preparing one's own slides on my purchasing list, but it's stuck on my malfunctioning laptop at the moment, and I can't access it.

Math, Latin, Greek and Language Arts are easy...Miquon and Singapore, Lively Latin, Greek for Children, and Michael Clay Thompson. We'll switch back to Trail Guide to World Geography, and I think I'll have Posy do the Elementary level with Graeme as her able assistant. Will will do the Intermediate Level.

When the two older kids finish Logic Liftoff (they're almost done), I'm moving them into Building Thinking Skills 2 and Orbiting Logic. I'm hoping to have both of those done by the fall, though not perhaps by the exact day we begin the new homeschooling year. After that, I'll put Will in The Snake and the Fox, but I don't think Posy will be ready yet. They've been doing logic as a team this year, and I'm fairly sure she's going to need some review to build confidence. Likely it will be a mix of analogy resources, the Logic Safari series, and Critical Thinking Co. materials. Although it would be lovely if their reps at MidWest tried to act a little less like they smelled poo this year.

Art and music are up in the air. We've liked Artistic Pursuits, but we rarely stick to the curriculum, mostly because the kids are already so busy with art projects. Which begs an obvious question. I'm considering enrolling Will in Music At Our House, and I think they are just getting their first class rolling now, so if anyone develops any opinions, I'd love to hear them.

Graeme needs his own paragraph. He'll continue with Explode the Code and Miquon next year. We'll most likely start Song School Latin. He'll start using a beginning handwriting book. He'll keep up with his Mnemosyne binder. He can listen to SOTW with Posy if that floats his boat, and I imagine he'll be neck-deep in our nature studies. He has recently started toting our First Act guitar around the house and insisting that he is a rock star. He also wants to raise tortoises. I'm looking forward to it.

Greek for Children Errata

2011-01-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

We found our first Greek for Children typo today. It was bound to have some. I've yet to find any curriculum put out by a small press that doesn't. Still, because it is a new program, and because the homeschoolers I know tend to complain about CAP's errata, I thought I'd keep a list as we work through it. I'll add to this post whenever we find anything.

The book states that there are seven dipthongs, but the included chart has eight:

αι
ει
οι
αυ
ευ
ηυ
ου
υι

Elementary Greek's chart omits ηυ, and does indeed list seven. This leads me to believe that the similar pronunciations of ευ and ηυ led EG to omit the latter, and/or GfC to count them as one but fail to explain that to the young reader.

Catch-Up Part One: The Day-to-Day

2011-01-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

I have about six disorderly posts floating around in my brain right now, so expect this particular one to be an eclectic (read: not comprehensive) update.

The five or six weeks on, one week off schedule we're trying this year seems to be working. The weeks we said we'd be on, we were on. The weeks we said we'd be off, we were off. Learning continues apace.

Weekly reviews, although I haven't been posting them, have also continued. I've been experimenting with Homeschool Skedtrack, instead. On one hand, I'm wondering if this could be a way out of the longish narratives I submit as quarterly reports. On the other, it increases my tendency to overplan, in a format that takes time to undo when we don't adhere to the exact assignments I've typed in. It also pushes me toward letter grades, which I've avoided thus far.

There are a couple of changes on the curriculum front. We've officially ditched Elementary Greek in favor of Greek for Children. I went to the trouble of scheduling it all out, but I admit that with a bit of trepidation. GfC requires more practice, and therefore, more written work of the student than EG. I may have scheduled optimistically.

We also received and are beginning Michael Clay Thompson Grammar's Town Level. I'm quite pleased with the jump in tone and concept. Caesar's English is fascinating to read, and I actually think Will is going to get a lot of the Melville references in Paragraph Town. I'd forgotten that he's seen the TV miniseries of Moby Dick starring Patrick Stewart. We also watched Into the Deep recently. It was amazing, though there's a nasty bit in the middle that needs to be skipped if you've got impressionable young viewers (think waaaay too long in a lifeboat with no food). At any rate, I think he'll get a kick out of Fishmeal and the crew. So far, I'm very pleased with the program. My reluctant writer is thinking about language and edging toward risk-taking. He has, at the age of nine, a solid understanding of concepts I regularly have to explain to college bound high-schoolers. MCT consistently and overtly supports our favored family subjects of literature, classical history, Latin and Greek. And I'll be frank: we just plain like the guy.

There's an extremely long grammar thread still in progress on the WTM forums; it focuses on whether there are holes in MCT's grammar instruction that demand supplementation. So far, I'd say this: plan on supplemental mechanics practice, and if you are using standardized tests, look at review materials to ensure there aren't differences in terminology.

We recently experimented with some K12 placement tests, and found that I had to briefly explain that "adjectival phrases" and "adverbial phrases" were just prepositional phrases being described in terms of what they modified. I've never heard those terms before, and I'm one of those rare thirty-somethings who had grammar instruction all the way through high school. I'm not, however, going to flip out and try to run two or three grammar programs at once. MCT provides excellent grammar, vocabulary, writing and poetry instruction. It's playful, insightful, and artfully designed.

In book news, Will is reading The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper. Before that, it was I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov. That was our first unfinished title of the year. He was interested in the dilemmas surrounding the laws of robotics, but was understandably bored by the fact that those dilemmas played out in the adult workplace. It's a perfectly do-able read-aloud, but we're also reading Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld, and The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien, when PB is home and I can find the book. So, he read about two-thirds of it, but we've shelved it for the moment.

Lastly, someone had asked me (I can't think who) to let them know how The Odyssey graphic novel by Gareth Hinds was. I haven't gotten to sit down with it myself, but the short answer is that Will loves it, and Posy detests it. "Not nearly enough Circe," was her verdict, "And no Athena." She's still pretty tied to images, so it might simply be an issue of "Athena took mercy on them," narrative and no pics, but it's still likely to be an issue for your average kick-butt girl.

NaNoWriMo Victory Dance!!!

2010-11-29T20:08:00.000-08:00

ETA: Posy is officially done! She finished about half an hour ago, and I verified just now.

Will and I hit our word goals within an hour of each other. Posy is still working on it, but I have no doubt she'll finish by the end of tomorrow (she got a real shot in the arm when PB counted her words for her and she realized she had been underestimating her total). I cannot begin to tell you how much fun it is to do this as a family. I have to give a shout out to my area NaNo'ers, too. The write-ins have been a blast, and very motivating. Look for me at the TGIO party on Wednesday, which, alas, will again overlap with Craft Night. Thankfully, they are held at the same location-- one which will supply me with enough caffeine to switch hit. Good thing, too. Time to start the holiday presents! I wish Grandma was still around to send me fruitcake. I could use the "cheer". You know what I mean. And Robin, Maude love her, is way too smart to serve "cheer", although the food is outstanding.

Congratulations to all my homeschool, mama, local area and long-time friends who NaNo'ed. Oh, and just in case you were wondering if any of these people ever get published, my best friend from high school, Allison Pang, has a debut novel hitting the shelves in January entitled A Brush of Darkness. Not for the kiddies, but if you like urban fantasy with a healthy side of bawd (which seems to nutshell Allison herself, if that's actually possible), then I'm positive you'll love it.

The Elusive Chutney

2010-11-23T09:46:00.000-08:00

This recipe needs to be widely disseminated, largely because everyone I know who has ever had a copy has lost it at least once...in several cases, more than once. When my sister emailed to ask me for it this year, I had to laugh. So, I am putting it up on the blogosphere, in the hopes that it goes viral and we never have to lose it again. It's yummy, it's easy, and you can make it ahead. Enjoy!

Cranberry Chutney
(double if you have a lot of people)

1 orange, peeled and chopped
1/4 c. orange juice
1 12 oz. package cranberries
1 3/4 c. sugar
1 large apple, peeled, cored, chopped
1/2 c. golden raisins
1/4 c. chopped pecans or walnuts
1 T. apple cider vinegar (white works fine)
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/2 t. ground cinnamon

Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, stirring occasionally, for 5 to 8 minutes, or until cranberries are bursting. Chill until serving time; freeze surplus (riiiiight) in small containers.

GoodReads for Homeschooling?

2010-11-18T09:12:00.000-08:00

Is anyone else still (or newly) using GoodReads with their homeschooler? The homeschoolers we spend time with right now are reading at disparate levels, so a book group a la Deconstructing Penguins does not make much sense. GoodReads struck me as a flexible way for kids to participate in a larger conversation about the books they read. However, when last we tried it, Will wasn't really ready yet, so we haven't touched his account in a long while.

I'm taking a second look at it now. He has read a laundry list of chapter books so far this school year, including:

Battle of the Labyrinth
The Last Olympian
Sarah, Plain and Tall
The Iron Giant
Frindle
The Indian in the Cupboard

If there are other GoodReading homeschoolers out there (or avid non-homeschooling readers, if you're interested in spending the additional time outside of the school day), we'd be interested in buddying up.

Review: Greek For Children

2010-11-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

Some readers will remember that I got sort of crabby pants while choosing our Greek curriculum. At the time, my choices for an elementary-suitable Greek program were:

Hey Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! (koine)
Elementary Greek (koine)
Waiting an unspecified length of time for Greek for Children (koine) to come out.
Waiting an even longer unspecified length of time for Greek Prep (attic) to come out. (This is sort of like looking for unicorns in North Jersey, and is much, much worse now that I've gotten my hands on Latin Prep, which I love).

Elementary Greek eventually won the field, mostly by default. Hey Andrew seemed to introduce very little vocabulary in the first few books, and though I waited as long as I could for Greek for Children to be released, we were more than ready. It was time to commit.

Naturally, when Greek for Children did come out, I wanted to see it. So I requested a review copy. Here's my reaction. YMMV.

The book has a nice, open layout, with enough white space to prevent claustrophobia. The little critters made out of Greek letters are cute in a superfluous kind of way. I had wondered if there'd be some sort of story theme related to the critters, but they didn't really go there.

The book is divided into seven units, each containing two to four chapters, and a review. Each chapter begins with a memory verse, a chant and vocabulary. The memory verses are accompanied by phonetic pronunciation guides, which I love. (Elementary Greek doesn't have this.) There are a few pages of instructional text, followed by exercises. Sounds exciting, right?

Well, actually, it is.

There are several things I really like about this program.

•They introduce the various breathing marks early on.
•There are actual derivative activities. I am big on derivative activities.
•They push the chants more than EG does. I consider early introduction of ending and form chants to be a major strength of the Lively Latin program, so I'm glad to see them here.
•The grammar instruction is less dry than EG's. It's conversational in tone, and there are illustrative graphics. There's a lot less "this is how it is" and a lot more "this is why it is".
•I like the vocabulary better. Classical Academic Press has always seemed to grasp that kids want to know the words for common objects, greetings, and everyday events. In contrast, Book 1 of EG is a little more cerebral in its vocabulary choice. As an example, when EG introduces first declension, eta pattern nouns, it offers these vocabulary words:

writing
parable
peace
commandment
life

Greek for Children offers these:

love
justice
*peace
head
voice, sound
soul
*life
*writing
sister
slave
servant
friend
beginning

•Greek for Children trusts the kids with more grammar, faster. I suppose this could be a pro or a con, depending on what grammar instruction you are giving. We're most of the way through Michael Clay Thompson's Island Level, which covers all the basic parts of speech and their uses. Explaining what the different cases are used for is more interesting than just endlessly drilling them.

Things I'd like to see:

•I wish they would re-do the mp3 files of the vocabulary, and for goodness' sake, SLOW DOWN. My kids need space left to repeat after the speaker. They can't just listen to a whole laundry list of words and retain it long enough to remember how to pronounce each one. To be fair, EG and Greek for Children both drive me crazy in this way. Lively Latin is my perfect model for audio support.
•Pre-made flashcards would be lovely.
•So would a Greek history reader like the one that accompanies their Latin program.

The only major con is the fact that this is a one year program. We might take a bit longer than that, as we only do Greek twice a week. Still, where do we go from there? Will Posy be ready for Athanaze, the go-to Attic program, by fourth grade?

On the other hand, there is no getting around the fact that Elementary Greek moves much more slowly. There are few things covered in the three books of Elementary Greek that are not covered in Greek for Children. Examples include deponent verbs, the third declension, contract verbs and passive voice. If you were brave enough to teach deponent verbs on your own, you could segue into EG 3 with a minimum of fuss, I think.

Greek for Children is also pretty economical. The complete three year package of Elementary Greek Materials will cost you $150, plus $45 in workbooks for each added child. Greek for Children is $25 a child, and $15 for the answer key. The audio files are a free download on the site. Though you're stuck making your own flashcards at this point, there is a review game available on CAP's Headventure Land site.

At this point, if your goal is to learn Attic Greek with your children eventually, but you'd like to start Greek while they're under ten, I recommend the following progression, begun once your child is solidly reading:

Greek Code Cracker
Greek For Children
Elementary Greek 3 depending on age/maturity
Athenaze

We're going to switch over. Doggone it.

Good Finds: Between the Folds

2010-11-13T15:31:00.000-08:00

We're watching Between the Folds, a documentary about origami. The level of sculpture involved is just amazing. It's streaming on Netflix, but here's the trailer:

Na-Na-Na-Na NaNo

2010-11-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

Oh, the page is staring me in the face tonight. You know it's bad when you feel the sudden urge to type things like:

"The main character suddenly wondered what on earth she was doing there. Clearly, her visit didn't further the plot of the novel in the slightest. This little side jaunt was a complete waste of time. She decided to cut this scene later."

When you start writing things like that, it's time for the dare thread.

The kids love NaNo dares. On the YWP site, there's a "Dare Machine" that automatically generates silly things for you to work into your novel. On the grownup site, dares are a little more free-form; we generate them for others, in the forums. Take one, leave another. Here's my favorite tonight:

"Your omniscient narrator suddenly decides that he hates. Every. Single. Character."

This sounds like lots of fun to me. It's a great prompt for someone who's having writer's block. I might just use it. It's either that, or call in the plot ninjas. Or maybe I'll procrastinate, and go see what Posy is writing. She took her NaNo notebook up to bed with her. She's got about 30% of her word count, which whips my butt. I'm blaming it on the flu. Will, I believe, missed a few days and is now psyching himself out. I understand the demons with which he struggles, but NaNo is supposed to be fun, and I refuse to have one more reluctant writer battle with oldest son. I am hoping we will lure him back in at some point.

I'm On Fire! (Wait, That's the Fever Talking...)

2010-11-11T20:04:00.000-08:00

Lessee...fun things that have happened since my last post:

A very, very busy weekend, in which:

•We managed to coordinate my work schedule with Will's three-hour alternative energy class, PB's all day church board retreat, and the childcare issues endemic to all of the above.
•I led a youth lock-in at our church, which was fantastic. Except for a one a.m. visit, *post* time change, after all the kids were finally asleep, by the young dude who picks up our trash. Who would absolutely not be dissuaded from doing this even when I offered to take the trash home with me. Who insisted on replacing every single bag, with a great deal of rustling (it's a very small church). Who got downright pissy with me because I brought him the wrong receptacle from the darkened sanctuary in an effort to prevent him from fueling adolescent nightmares. In the end, he carried away approximately two kitchen bags full of trash and recycling. But, this was very much compensated for by our glorious parent chaperone, who uttered those wonderful words, "Let's order a really weird pizza just for us". In case you were wondering, broccoli and pineapple is a bangin' combination. Vaguely asian. Watch for it on Top Chef.

Then, the week.

Flu.

Heater malfunctions.

Laptop cord utterly shredded by the metal supports of the recliner.

Terribly, horrible NaNoWriMo word count disasters and sleep deprivation brought on by all of the above.

What? The homeschooling? Oh, that got done. I was delirious for some of it, but other than that, it went quite well. Thanks for asking.

Why Do NaNoWriMo?

2010-11-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

Will, Posy and I are all spending our mornings feverishly writing away on our NaNoWriMo novels. Will's book is science-fiction, Posy's is a comedy, and mine is, as ordered, a fantasy adventure story with a "girl main character".

So far, we're having a blast. Posy in particular is eating her word count alive. Her goal is 600 words, and she's up to 165.

I think we're in good company. They've been having a horrible time with the site...since about noon yesterday, it's been down more than it's been up, and I've gotten the error message "too many users" more than once.

A bunch of homeschoolers on the WTM boards have jumped on the wagon in the last 24 hours. One of them asked, "But what do you GET? A certificate? Is that all?" So I'm going to answer that question now.

What do you get?

You get an event. You get a one-month period during which hundreds of thousands of people are banging keyboards right along with you.

You get community. You and your buddies sign up together, read each others' synopses, watch each others' status bars as your word counts climb, and cheer each other on. You get forums, even if a lot of people do have photoshopped banners at the bottom of their posts indicating that they are contributing one more teen vampire novel to the void. Who knows? Robin McKinley's vampire novel sure came out of left field, and I liked that one. One scene made me blush, but I liked it. There are write-offs, where someone designates an arbitrary fifteen or thirty minutes of the day and you all type like crazy people to see how many words you can add to your novel. There are dares to motivate you when you hit a wall. (Involve a zombie. Lock all your characters in a smelly public bathroom for one chapter. Work in a road trip to Tallahassee, right now.) There are write-INS, gatherings of NaNo-ers at your local caffeine supply station, and I am told that the clacking of other people's keyboards is a huge motivator. They're having them twice a week this year at the Tramontane, and I'm going to be a regular attendee.

You get a chance to do some really fun bonding with your kids, a chance to hide everybody's "inner editors" and pull every messy thing you know about good stories out of your mental closet and spread it around. It's as much fun as a Christmas cookie baking marathon and craft day combined. And the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program has really fantastic materials, tips, and forums of its own.

You get a novel. Fifty thousand words (less if you're a kid) of your own creation that prove, once and for all, that writing is not just something you keep "meaning to do". And one month is about as close to instant gratification as you could get, as novel-writing goes. Sure, it might sit on your dresser, after. You might never edit it at all, let alone try to get it published. But if you ran a 5K, you wouldn't spend the rest of your life complaining that you didn't come in first, would you? You'd say, "Hell yeah, I RAN A 5K!"

There's still time to sign up. A couple of 5K days, and you'll be trouncing the rest of us just as our first wind wears off. So hell yeah, WRITE A NOVEL!

"Neutrality": Are Teachers Talking Back?

2010-10-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

This morning I am really curious. Part of my angry reaction to yesterday's news story stems from my self-identification as a public school teacher as well as a homeschooling mother. Somewhere, surely there are current full-time teachers who had a similar reaction. If you find any links, would you send them my way?

It's Not Neutrality; It's Negligence.

2010-10-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

I heard this story on the radio on the way home from a homeschool park day, and I am furious.

Essentially, the point of the story is that some kids who are raised to believe that homosexuality is biblically wrong...get this...they bully gay kids. They also bully hetero kids by identifying them as gay and targeting them as they would a gay kid.

Now, I don't think this is really a surprise. While I know that many Christians would be horrified by this behavior, I think we're basically sensible of the impulses behind religiously motivated anti-gay bullying, and the ethical danger facing someone who's comfortably in the majority and hasn't had to walk a mile in his or her neighbor's shoes.

What absolutely sent me over the edge was this:

Aaberg says teachers felt they couldn't get involved — even when her son was bullied — because of the school district's "neutrality policy," which prohibits employees from taking sides on matters regarding sexual orientation. The district says the policy is meant to apply to the curriculum. But teachers say it's so broadly written that they're loath to intervene even when they hear anti-gay slurs.

I do not know how to fully express to you my loathing for this excuse. And make no mistake, it is an excuse. Bullying (as the leader of an evangelical group is quoted as saying in the same article) is bullying, regardless of the purported reason for it. I just plain don't believe that mature adults aren't capable of making the distinction between enforcing the student code of conduct and endorsing homosexuality...or anything else. I'll tell you why teachers don't stop bullying when they see it:

•The bullies are kids they think of as "good kids", or have important parents.
•They think all this anti-bullying training is a bunch of P.C. crap.
•They dislike the victim themselves and see the bullying as justified.
•They are themselves uncomfortable with/actively against homosexuality, and turning a blind eye to anti-gay bullying allows them to act on that belief.
•They are lazy assholes.
•Their principal is described by one of the above, and they're scared of their principal.

Anybody, and I mean anybody, who said one word to me about disciplinary action being taken because I protected a child would be talking to my union rep and the union lawyer before they could say boo. If that didn't work, the press would be involved PDQ.

If standing up for the physical and emotional safety of a child meant getting fired, then I WOULD GET FIRED. The idea of a mother finding her child hanging from a noose in his bedroom because I was too cowardly to protect him, or even to tell her about it anonymously so she could handle it herself, makes me feel physically ill.

All the teacher-glorification we do as a culture is meaningless if we turn a blind eye to our students in this way. Our schools' curricula are proven worthless if our students can contrast them with such utter indifference for their welfare. This is the most fundamental thing we must get right. Some things are worth getting fired over.

Weekly Review: Weeks Six and Seven

2010-10-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

It probably looks like we decided to run off and never return from our "break week", but this is not the case. We did get right back to it, although, as predicted, not without substantial fireworks from my oldest son. As a result, we came down heavily on recreational media/computer use and backed up "lights out" time, and things seem to be smoothing out, but that was one reason I didn't get around to blogging. Another was that we seemed to head right from break into a routine of one or both of us having a meeting to attend every single night. That didn't help, either.

Reading is going really well. Will finished The Indian in the Cupboard, read Sarah, Plain and Tall, and is several chapters into Frindle. He's still found time to read about a third of The Last Olympian on his own time, and to do some assigned Physics reading. He enjoyed Sarah, Plain and Tall, but we didn't discuss it much. Some books just need to settle...to be absorbed. He keeps reading me bits out of Frindle, though. He's getting a kick out of it. I am thinking of assigning a writing prompt: "Agree, or Disagree: Mrs. Granger is Nick's enemy." Enemy is, at least to me, different in degree than opponent. I'm curious to see whether he will argue that she is a villain.

Miss Posy threw me a curve ball by demanding her own assigned reading, and also demanding high fantasy with strong female *lead* (not supporting) characters. However, she's still reading easy readers, picture books, Magic Tree House, Ivy and Bean and the like. I didn't perfectly conform to her demands, but I think I did pretty well. I settled on:

Swamp Angel, by Anne Isaacs
Eleanor, by Barbara Cooney
My Name is Celia, by Monica Brown
Hilary and the Lions, by Frank Desaix
Tatterhood and Other Tales, by Ethel Johnston Phelps
Moss Gown, by William H. Hooks
Lavender, by Karen Hesse
Meet Josefina, by Valerie Tripp
Emily, by Michael Bedard
Gwinna, by Barbara Helen Berger
The Story of Holly and Ivy, by Rumer Godden
The Ordinary Princess, by M.M. Kaye
The Hundred Dresses, by Eleanor Estes
The Van Gogh Cafe, by Cynthia Rylant
The Light Princess, by George MacDonald

We're wandering through the mid-Atlantic states in geography. In history, we spent more time than was really necessary on Stanley and Livingstone, mostly b/c we tracked down an audiobook on the subject, and have been listening to it in the car. We've also talked a great deal about Lowell and textile mill town life, and read Lyddie. We listened to the second Fablehaven book. We've stalled on Larklight (entirely my fault), continued with On the Banks of Plum Creek, and begun The Two Towers. We've picked a lot of apples. It has snowed, and today it is in the seventies.

We're on Chapter 11 of Elementary Greek, and I am perusing Greek for Children and feeling annoyed because I like it. Lively Latin continues apace. We're doing a better job of practicing our flashcards regularly.

In math, Posy's through exercise 12 in Singapore 2B. Will's going to be done with the times tables by the end of this week if I have to tattoo them on his arms.

The complaints that Thames and Kosmos's directions are lacking are merited. However, at our house this hasn't been a problem...it might even be an bonus. My lego-crazy kids have no problem building most models from the little 2x4 pictures in the book. We continue to do 1-2 experiments a week. The only thing that has confused me so far was why they had us build a force meter and then didn't give us any experiments to do with it. On our last two Fridays, we've built a fall speed indicator, and a ship's lantern, which we're using to explore gimbals.

In art, we've painted frescoes and done some general work with watercolors. I keep forgetting to buy the instant papier-mache Artistic Pursuits wants us to use, so we'll need to backtrack a bit when I do get it.

We slowed a bit on MCT. Like I said, when there's drama, writing brings it right out. Will would read grammar with me all day long, but when I ask him to write a four-line poem, all is woe. He's doing an amazing job on his practice sentences, which don't seem to provoke the same level of ire. I also broke down and bought a fourth grade spelling book for extra practice. I started bumping the Explode the Code lessons up myself instead of waiting for my kids to hit their very exacting time targets, and I'm much more satisfied with the pace of their progress.

It is a rainy, crabtastical day here. We are watching Ken Burns' Civil War documentary and tidying a bit.

Why Did They Change the SAT?

2010-10-04T05:09:00.000-07:00

Do you remember taking the verbal portion of the SAT?

Remember the mind-numbing pages of analogies? The finely honed semantic connections you had to make to answer the questions?

They're gone. There's not a single analogy on the SAT any more.

Before you cheer, ask yourself why.

Analogies require that we determine a relationship between two words, then order a second pair to reflect that relationship. This is a higher-order thinking skill, a skill we frequently bemoan the lack of in our students today.

But the SAT isn't testing for it. They've replaced analogies with sentence completions.

They've also added a section that tests student grammar. Here are the primary categories covered:

Subject/verb agreement
Correct use of pronouns
Correct verb tense

There are also questions that test for:

Diction (affect/effect and similar)
Number and case
Parallel comparisons (Tongue-in-cheek sample question: "My Guitar Hero score was higher than my roommate." Answer: Unless you are truly lampooning your roommate, you should be comparing his/her *score* to your *score*. Change roommate to roommate's.)

There are a few idiom questions, questions about using consistent verb forms in lists of actions, etc., but you get the idea.

Would you define this as a challenging grammar test?

Lastly, College Board has added a five paragraph argumentative essay. Here are some sample prompts.

Many colleges already require admissions essays. Why is the SAT testing for basic writing ability?

Why didn't they test for it before?

Weekly Review: Week Five

2010-10-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

This was a good week. People seem to be hitting their stride with independent work...with the exception of one long morning of procrastination and arguing when Will got to the UU Principles in his copywork book. They're broken down over two pages, but the first page was still longer than his last assignment, so...foot dragging. When he finished, he was thrilled. Will danced a truly (not being sarcastic) wonderful dance of joy at work well done, pointed out how much better his writing had gotten between the top of the page and the bottom, commented on how it hadn't taken that long once he'd finally worked steadily, and so on. Of course, after a long day of trying to calmly steer him toward these conclusions to no avail, his "Eureka!" moment leaves me wanting to gently bang my head against my desk, but I am truly happy for him. I think that's the hardest part of being his mom...watching him get to every conclusion the hard way. I also think it's karma I'm working off.

I'm finding that we move through the times tables more slowly as Will gets more and more of them under his belt. He has to review consistently, so that he doesn't backslide. Also, the upper tables are arguably harder, if only because young children are much more likely to count by ones, twos, fives and tens than by sixes and eights. So, this week we worked on sixes and twelves, but I wouldn't say we're done with them yet. And Will's going to have to practice during break week, although I assured him that it won't always be this way. Posy is finished with Unit 1 of Miquon 2A. I'm using a correspondence chart to align Miquon and Singapore, but the Miquon pages that are listed for "numbers to 1000" are mostly arrow games that didn't seem necessary. Posy understands what she's doing, and I didn't want to give her busywork. Once I started needing curriculum for all three kids I started buying their Miquon books one at a time, forgetting that the two-books-per-grade-level model means that I don't have access to everything I need to supplement Singapore for Posy. Oops. It's not a big deal yet, but I need to rectify that soon. Graeme's buzzing along, but his math skills outstrip his fine motor skills (which is not really surprising), so at some point I'm going to have to decide whether it matters if he's doing written work orally.

Will's not *quite* finished with The Indian in the Cupboard, but he'll finish it this weekend. "It's not the best book I've ever read," he told me, "but I *do* like it after all." He's planning on starting The Castle of Llyr next. We read some of his Cartoon Guide to Physics assignments, and discussed them, which was a big help today when we were calculating velocity. We also read his assignment for OWL, which comprised pretty much all the gnarly parts of It's So Amazing. I was surprised at how cool he was about it, although he did start a pillow fight when I asked if he had questions...which seemed age-appropriate to me.

Will is doing a great job working through Practice Island sentences. He remembers what he's learned, and quickly identifies what is new or unusual. We reviewed a lot of poetry concepts this week, and he tried writing poems in several different meters (see below). I'm trying not to rush through the materials, because I want him to be rock solid on the concepts and taking more risks with writing before we move on to Town Level, which has some review but is a definite jump.

Both "big" kids are still using Explode the Code online. I like it, but am starting to feel a bit tetchy about their speed requirements. On the one hand, I know they help to develop automaticity. On the other hand, it takes *forever* to progress through the concepts. I could use workbooks alongside the online service, but it would double the time we spend on phonics. I'm offering mad incentives within our chore program to encourage the kids to do some Explode the Code during break week, but who knows if they'll take me up on it.

History is chugging along. Not much to say there. Ditto with Artistic Pursuits. We made a very cool battery powered car with treads for physics, and measured its velocity. Currently, I am tearing my eyeballs out with my fingernails while I wait for Will to willingly write half of what his second-grade sister wrote two hours ago. The boy is going to be the death of me. Will has moved on to Ch. 14 of Lively Latin, Ro moved on to Ch. 4, and they both spent some time playing the Roman Gods card game from Ch. 3. Chapter 11 of Elementary Greek is going slowly, but it's going.

My goal is that next week will provide some "breathing out" time, as well as unfettered time to pursue individual interests. The real test will be how easy it is to get back in the flow afterward.

Will's MCT Poems

2010-09-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

Since I spent some of my morning searching for other kids' Michael Clay Thompson writing samples, I thought I'd post Will's latest products here. He loves MCT, but we are working on getting ideas past his inner editor and onto the paper. He tends to shoot himself down long before his pencil moves. What eventually worked was to have him simply write down his thoughts so that we could edit them into poems. I was expecting lots of iambs, since they we use them constantly when conversing. However, we ended up with trochees and dactyls. The bimeter is evidence of his foot dragging, but I'll take what I can get. Many thanks to Smrt Mama's oldest son, Captain Science, for sharing his poems about Rome and lasers online. It was really helpful to Will to see that he truly could write about whatever interested him.

Trochaic Bimeter:

Tyson hit the
Hydra so hard
it broke its brain
and fell down a
drain.

Will really wanted that last line there. Said it was the sound of the Hydra hitting bottom.

Dactylic Bimeter

Hercules punched ugly
empousai and they blew
up a bat factory
full of bats, wearing hats.

Classical *and* seasonal!

Why Do Newark Schools Need Money?

2010-09-24T06:05:00.000-07:00

I find this unbelievable. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of facebook, is donating $100 million to Newark Public Schools. Now, that in and of itself is big news. But what really caught my attention was this:

This school district of 40,000 students already has an operating budget of $940 million. Let's look at those zeros, shall we? $940,000,000. That's $23,500 PER STUDENT. Which, in this house, would allot this family $70,500. Go ahead and tell me how expensive it is to keep up and heat all those buildings. Tell me about computer labs. Tell me about teacher salary. I'm not buying it. I recognize that homeschoolers have fewer infrastructure costs, but we also sacrifice one adult salary in order to do this. Our family could pay me $50,000 a year out of the above amount, and we'd still have $20,500 to account for daytime utility costs, "school" lunches, and curriculum. And there is no school in Newark with a 1:3 teacher to student ratio. Hey Mr. Zuckerberg, how about funding a grant program for small educational start-ups with little or no budget, enterprises that reflect facebook's beginnings? We're probably a safer bet than Newark, which recently lost a $400 million educational grant due to a clerical error.

Someone please tell me that this money will directly and immediately benefit student academics in a tangible way.

Teachers in the Family?

2010-09-23T04:41:00.001-07:00

I wonder how many homeschoolers come from teaching stock. I mean, obviously not all of us do. There are between 1.5 and 2 million of us in the U.S. right now. But if I had a nickel for every time a homeschooler has mentioned teachers in the family to me, I'd be able to pay for next year's curriculum.

In my case, the fact that I am a certified teacher caused a sort of professional guilt when I first began homeschooling. As a society, we tout schools as the cradle of democracy and deify teachers. And teachers buy the hype. You can see why we would. Work can be a grind, and being confident that we are doing something important goes a long way toward getting us over the hump. On the other hand, what teachers want teaching to be is not necessarily related to what public schools currently are. As a result, the lows are much lower than they might be if you work in an office. Being bummed that you didn't close a sale is nothing compared to feeling that you are failing children. This all serves to develop a culture among teachers of "profession as quasi-devotional practice". So leaving teaching, in some ways, is like abandoning the family religion. Even if you believe that what you are doing is right for you and yours, it's hard to shake the sense that you are somehow diminishing the validity of the institution by being a good teacher who is leaving voluntarily. And I was a good teacher.

By the time I left, no one in my family was teaching full time any more. And, fortunately, I distinctly heard my kindergarten teacher grandma click her tongue over how much kindergarten has changed. My recollections of visiting her classroom had fueled my own concerns about the state of early childhood education in this country; to hear her echo my thoughts was enormously reassuring. Unlike many other people we know, we didn't face any serious opposition from anyone in our extended family, although there were at least three teachers besides me among them.

I'd be really interested to hear from others on this topic. Do you have teachers in your family? How has that affected or influenced your homeschooling journey?

Weekly Review: Weeks Three and Four

2010-09-22T09:29:00.001-07:00

Sorry to mash them together like this, but oh my, the home improvement fever. And SAT Prep. And RE starting back up at church. Also, it is harvest season. Posts upcoming on those topics, with pics of our haul and the amazing, amazing bookshelves PB has built.

It's a good thing we painted the glassed-in porch this spring, elevating it from a Weasley-esque sinkhole of muddy shoes and garden trays to a livable room with a large table and lots of chairs. That's where we've homeschooled and eaten every meal since our little building project started. The rest of the downstairs is piled with books, but we've been carrying on, despite all the sawing and hammering. Then there's my favorite part about these projects: the way the kids get in on it. There was measuring, use of plumb lines (right after we used a pendulum to determine center of gravity, too!), help with the saw, sanding, and so on. I love these practical applications of things we're learning anyway. We did, however, have a couple of days of derailed seatwork, mostly due to PB getting called into work despite being on vacation. I did a lot of sanding and staining so he could get right back to work when he came home, and I did all of the varnishing, I think. At any rate, it's a good time to squeeze two weeks worth of review together.

Will is solid on the following times tables: 0,1,2,3,4,5,10,11. Threes were a bit stickier than some of the tables he'd done so far. They melted him a bit, but he eventually pulled it together. Tomorrow we start sixes, and I'm hoping he'll notice right away that they build on what he just learned. I am chafing at the time we're spending doing this even though I know how essential it is, and I'm afraid that all this oral practice is going to cause drama when we're back to written work. Posy is just burning through Singapore. She seems to really like it, and will do a four-page workbook exercise in a day with no complaints. She's finishing Lesson 3 this week, and we'll likely start the review. She's also worked through four of the strategies in ExpressMaths so far this year.

Will is finished with Chapter 13 of Lively Latin, and Posy is wrapping up Chapter 2. All she has left is the mythology card game. They finished Chapter 10 of Elementary Greek.

We're chugging along with MCT. I'll talk more about that next week, but progress is being made.

I'm really happy with Prufrock Press's logic resources. Will and Posy are working through Logic Liftoff. Right now, they're doing a page of analogies each day, and they're doing a very solid job of defining the relationship between the words in each pair, which is wonderful to see. We've started doing Geography at the same time as Logic, after I realized that it had snuck right under our radar a day or two.

We had a lot of fun with the Victorians, but we moved on to the re-opening of Japan and the Crimean War. Will gave me a stellar oral narration, and was pleased to make the connection with "The Charge of the Light Brigade", which is in his memory work. Posy hesitates, but when Will is narrating she is quick to supply details. So, that's a work in progress, but I can see the road. Will's got some reading to do about Commodore Perry, and about what it was like to be a Japanese sailor who could not re-enter Japan.

We skipped our Physics lesson last week to help PB measure the bookshelves and compensate for our old farmhouse's sloping floor, ceiling and walls. This week, we'll do two lessons, one in which we make a sail car, and another in which we make a powered vehicle with treads and time its speed.

Graeme finished Get Ready For the Code, and has done ten pages in Get Set For the Code. He's got "The Cupboard" and "Ducks' Ditty" almost memorized. Now we're working to get over those little humps in which a person consistently misspeaks a word or two in one line, and can't stop doing it. Miquon is mostly counting practice right now, including filling in a hundred chart. I'm having to help him write by holding his hand, but he's doing a nice job on the counting.

Will's on Chapter 10 of The Indian in the Cupboard. He keeps accidentally "reading extra" now that he's immersed in the story. This is one of our brief chat books. As an example of how this works, yesterday he came to me to show me how much he'd read. Glancing at the page (I've read this book multiple times), I said, "Oh, so this is where Patrick gets more involved, right?"

"Yeah," Will answered. "But he just seems so obsessed with war. It's like he doesn't get it."
"Doesn't get what?"
"That they're people. He acts like they're just an army and you can get new ones, but it's not like that."
"But Omri gets it?"
"Yeah."
"Well, Little Bear already got hurt by this part, right? Didn't they have to use the medic?"
"Yeah, he got kicked by his horse. It was really bad."
"Maybe that made it more real for Omri."
"Yeah. He knows Little Bear is real. Bossy, but real."
I laugh. "Little Bear is bossy?"
"Yeah, especially since he got made the chief."

Short and sweet, but that conversation told me what I wanted to know. This book is a lot of fun to read, but it also brings up complex themes such as the real vs. the imaginary, the rights of the individual, the possession of and misuse of power...on a child's level, it comes quite close to addressing the role of God in the lives of humans- disinterested observer, or actively involved? And Will was able to tell me, in that brief conversation, that he is circling those ideas. I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in a larger conversation in this way, without interrogating him or beating him over the head with these ideas. I am grateful that the book can be a shared experience, instead of a lesson I teach. Thank goodness he let his guard down and let the book in.

Weekly Review: Week Two

2010-09-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

This week came together very nicely. We stuck to our plan to start at eight instead of nine, and discovered that what we get done in one, concentrated morning block takes all afternoon to complete when we stretch our seatwork past lunch. Finishing by lunch leaves all the time I wanted for supplemental reading, documentary viewing, and crafting in the afternoon, too. We are sold.

Will was much more amenable to writing this week, although he was heard to plead, "Can't you just write it down FOR me?" Nope. Sorry, bud. He wrote the story I posted earlier in the week. He did one of those silly stories MCT wrote for Building Language in which all the prefixes behave...well, like themselves. He wrote a paragraph in which both his subjects and his predicates had the same number of words. He did a quick summary of sights to see in Massachusetts, although I think he sort of lowballed me on that one. And he completed a pretty reasonable description of this week's physics experiment. None of these are long or terribly complex. My goal is to spend the year inculcating in my son the habit of communicating in print. I am hoping that his interest in Dance Mat Typing means he has already internalized this to some degree.

He's confident in his 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, and 10 times tables. 3 and 6 are next.

Not much to say about Greek and Latin. I finally scored some red flashcards, so Will updated the Latin ones. We use green for Greek, and I updated those through Chapter 13. Both kids did grammar work in Latin this week. Will did some history reading and map work in Chapter 13 of Lively Latin, Posy started the Roman mythology pages (she loves them) and he and Posy both finished up some translation and vocabulary review work in Elementary Greek. I'm having a couple of thoughts about the Greek. One is that the kids need to be reviewing the alphabet, b/c we're having conversations that go like this:

"How do you spell λογος?"
"L-o-g-o-s."
"Dude," (This is me talking. Yes, I say 'dude' to my children. If I'm really frustrated, the phonetic spelling changes to 'dood!') "You need to be saying, 'Lambda, omicron, gamma, omicron, sigma."

Or alternatively,

"Mom, how do you spell βαλλω?"
"Beta-"
"Wait, what's that one look like again?"
"B!"
"Oh." (And they write it in Greek. Aargh.)

Also, Posy is doing that "drawing her letters" thing. That bugs me when she does it in English, but it *really* bugs me when she does it with those beautiful, streamlined Greek letters.

Still, this is my fault. Totally. I meant to put Greek alphabet copywork in their books this year, and got busy and didn't do it. So now I will print them out, and we will review. And review. Because this is annoying.

I'm also contemplating making Catherine Drown-style mp3 files for Elementary Greek. The CD they've produced just goes too quickly, with too little repetition. I may dredge up some supplementary vocabulary, too. I know it's a Koine program, but is knowing how to say "demon" in Greek really a first year priority? ( τό δαιμόνιον )

Will and I had a pretty frank conversation this week about the pace at which he was reading The Indian in the Cupboard. He sat by, sighing gustily, while I calculated how many pages he needed to read each school day to finish the book by the end of the month. Then we calculated how many pages he *would* have needed to read each day had he not been reading two pages and switching to Percy Jackson. I brought up, my fellow Hivers, the concept of twaddle and its effect on the reading of quality literature. He blanched and buckled down. As his mother, I am compelled to admit that he is being cussed (cuss-ehd). I know he likes the book. He just doesn't like that reading it wasn't his idea.

We read Chapter One of SOTW4, and Will did the related outlining. I bought the book of tests this year, and plan to use them for selected chapters, including this one. He and I are still reading through our supplemental literature on the subject.

In Physics, we built a scaffold with an attached pendulum, and the kids learned a method for finding an object's center of gravity. I think their favorite part was demonstrating how easy it is to balance something on your finger when you know exactly where its center of gravity is. My favorite part was when we were talking about stability on two legs vs. four, and Graeme wondered aloud if he'd have as much stability standing on his head as on his feet. So we all tried it. Love that boy.

Posy finished Lesson One and completed Lesson Two of Singapore 2A, which is practice with greater than and less than. There's also a fair bit of practice with mentally adding and subtracting tens or units from a number. We did an additional lesson in Math Express Book 1. She read aloud to me each day, mostly Kevin Henkes titles. Lilly's Big Day figured prominently.

The G-man is learning about number lines, being read to, and blowing through the end of Get Ready for the Code. He has about half of his first Mnemosyne poem memorized.

MCT Writing Sample

2010-09-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

Well, shut my mouth! Granted, I transcribed this for him while he brainstormed, but no sooner do I complain about Will completing the creative act than he comes up with this story, in which Mr. Mix misaligns his subjects and predicates:

Mr. Mix met a crab. The crab asked Mr. Mix where he was from.
"I is in the Pacific Ocean. It am from Hawaii," said Mr. Mix.
"Will you buy me some slippers?" asked the crab.
"I can not wear slippers. You will buy them when pigs fly," replied Mr. Mix.
"You're not making any sense," the crab said.
"I are really mean. You want to go away. I am," said Mr. Mix.
"Why aren't you gone, then?" demanded the crab.
"You am not going away. I should go away," replied Mr. Mix.
"You just said that!"
"I is so stupid! This am going home," shouted Mr. Mix.
"Good-bye," the crab said, and crawled away.
Mr. Mix fell over in the sand, and went to sleep.

Weekly Review: Week One

2010-09-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try this again this year, and see if I keep up with it this time. As we've moved to using more curricular resources, the mere fact of having so many dated work samples has made me complacent about doing weekly reviews on the blog. Still, I'm quick to read everyone else's. And it would make my narrative quarterly reports a bit quicker to pull together. So, here goes.

Will worked on his times tables a good bit last year, and something just wasn't clicking. He practiced, he played related games, we listened to ridiculous songs, etc., but the retention just wasn't there. We laid off of them for a while, but the tail end of third grade Miquon is multiplication with carrying, and long division. It was fortunately as clear to him as it was to me that it was time to give it another go. So, we downloaded a multiplication unit from Math Mammoth, and we're going to work our way through that before we do anything else. Math Mammoth works through the tables in its own order, which this week meant reviewing 2s and getting good and solid on the 4s. We're supplementing with hundred problem drill sheets and math wrap-ups.

Posy's most of the way through Lesson One in Singapore 2A. She has another page or two to finish in the second workbook exercise. I'm still figuring out how I'm going to marry Singapore with Miquon for her.

Have I mentioned that Graeme is making a very big deal out of being "Pre-K"? He is demanding equal time. We're working through the orange book of Miquon, which mostly involved dot-to-dots this week. He's most of the way through Get Ready For the Code, and I'm going to add him to ETC Online when the subscription we're currently on lapses. I have a fairly good stock of cool alphabet books, so we're reading those and various other Pre-K fare each day. And I covered myself with glory by making him his own Mnemosyne binder, complete with a scrapbook paper cover that says "Kindergarten Kid". He has been known to cheer aloud and fist pump about academics. I love that boy.

In ~~foreign~~ mother language news, we had one of those cool confluences, in which Lively Latin started discussing prepositional phrases, and Will already knew what they were, thanks to Michael Clay Thompson. Then they introduced common Latin prepositions, some of which Will knew from MCT's Building Language. I need to send that man some cognac, or something. Will's finishing Chapter 13 of Big Book One, and is practicing using the Ablative case. We'll go on to Big Book 2 after that. Elementary Greek has Will and Posy beginning to translate English sentences into Greek, including conjugating verbs. Posy gets a bit frustrated with Greek sometimes, but digs Latin (she's in Chapter 3 of the Big Book). Will seems very relaxed about languages this year. I think he's realizing that the early Greek exercises (the kids are on Lesson 9 in a 30 lesson book) are in large part a review of concepts he encountered already in Latin. And he genuinely likes Latin.

Last spring, I made comprehensive master flashcard rings for Song School Latin, Minimus, Lively Latin, and Elementary Greek, and those are all required independent work assignments. I'd like to extend a boo-hiss to Staples for discontinuing their red flashcards, by the way. Punks. I used SophoKeys to type up all of the kids' Greek memory work (included in Elementary Greek), and added it to their Mnemosyne binders, along with Greek and Latin proverbs culled from Drew Campbell's Living Memory. Will also has the opening paragraphs of the Aeneid and the Iliad in his binder. I typed each in its original language and in English on the same page. The kids are listening to Mary Pope Osborne's Odyssey series on tape right now, so our classical studies are all interweaving quite nicely.

We're doing Trail Guide to U.S. Geography this year, since SWB recommends U.S. geography during the Modern History year. Week One covers Maine and Massachusetts. I pulled a d'oh and forgot that we'd need a *U.S.* atlas, which we didn't yet have. That came in Thursday night. Fortunately, the state books I'd been requesting from the library started to arrive, so we were able to use those. I assigned a bunch of reading on Massachusetts, since there was a nice little four page selection on Unitarians and other Bostonian freethinkers.

We still haven't read our first SOTW chapter, but that doesn't mean we've been idle. We've been perusing The Secret Garden Cookbook as we decide what to cook, Will's working through some reading assignments in a book called Victorian England, and we're all watching 1900s House with fascination. I'm not sure reading Larklight really counts, since it's an AU novel, but there's a good bit of Victorian flavor in between the space pirates and the giant spiders. Hurrah for steampunk! We also went to the inaugural year of a local endeavor called the Victorian Leisure Fair a few weeks ago, so the kids have some familiarity with people like Queen Victoria, John Brown, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Will chose The Indian in the Cupboard for his first read-aloud, and is about two chapters in. I think he likes it, although he's unlikely to admit it while he's grappling with the injustice of assigned reading. Posy, on the other hand, is annoyed that I didn't make a list for her, but am allowing her to self-select what she reads to me. Sometimes, you can't win any of 'em.

Writing continues to be a major struggle with Will. He's got a great vocabulary, reads voraciously, and has quickly taken to the grammar introduced in MCT, but if I ask him to write something down, he reacts like I've come at him with a kitchen cleaver. His spelling has improved quite a bit, both through reading and through use of Explode the Code...I really think it's more of a mental block than anything. The drama of the oldest child of two oldest children, who wants to do everything perfectly the first time, or not at all. Just the idea of an editing process makes his eyes roll back in his head. We also really love the reading portions of MCT, so much so that we sometimes forget to do the writing exercises that go with what we're reading, so this week we worked backwards a bit and did some of the poetry exercises. I think he likes the logic of poetic meter; it's the act of creation that makes him nervous.

We did the potato drop experiment from Physics Workshop this week. All three kids loved it. Getting Will to do his notebook entry (What did we use? What did we do? What happened?) was fraught, but Posy wrote (with some spelling assistance from me) just as detailed and complete a narration, and had great fun illustrating it. I'm glad I scheduled time to discuss/assist Will with his independent reading, b/c I gave him a few pages in The Cartoon Guide to Physics, and he clearly needs some brushing up on "telling back" what he's read. We'll go through it together on Monday, or on Tuesday, if I decide we're taking Labor Day off.

Front loaded in Will's Mnemosyne binder right now are:

• A mythology page with the twelve Olympians, the nine Muses, and the twelve labors of Heracles (I'm trying to talk him into taking the National Mythology Exam)
• A list of U.S. Presidents
• A geography page with the states in each of the six regions of the U.S., Major U.S. rivers, and major U.S. mountain ranges
• The aforementioned Greek and Latin proverbs

In Posy's:

• "The morns are meeker than they were"
• "There is no frigate like a book"

both by Emily Dickinson

and in GRAEME'S!!! :

• "The Cupboard", by Walter de la Mare

(let me just tell you how this mama's heart melts when he lisps about being "good as good can be" and how there are "Banbury cakes and lollypops for me, me, me!")

Our Loop Schedule

2010-09-02T18:43:00.000-07:00

Loop scheduling is a trendy little idea making its way around the WTM boards right now. Essentially, you schedule your subjects in a loop instead of a linear schedule. While not everyone does it this way, I like the model in which you rotate students. So, first I work with one child on Latin, then I work with the other, and so on, (although we still do Logic and Geography together). The child I am not with works on independent assignments, like copywork, memory work, and online phonics. I like this approach because it gives me greater opportunity to work one-on-one with each child uninterrupted.

I did find the need to tighten up the "independent work" expectations as this week (our first after a two week break) unfolded. So, there's a checklist floating around that has "daily", "weekly" and "when daily and weekly are done" categories, with room for the kids to initial what they've completed so I know what to check (our online phonics has parent tracking).

Some homeschoolers find that this approach reduces the pressure to get everything done each day. Because they use a loop, if they don't get to, say, math, they haven't "failed" to do math that day. They just begin with math the next day and follow the loop from there. I'm a wee bit paranoid about that approach. It feels like a slippery slope to me, mostly b/c we have been alternating Latin and Greek Mondays through Thursdays. If we don't get all the way around the loop most days, we could get seriously off the rails. On the other hand, Will and I got great stuff done today, but we didn't make it to Michael Clay Thompson. I looked at the clock and decided I didn't want to rush through a lesson just so I could say we'd done it. MCT really demands attention and appreciation for the subject matter. So, we'll start with it on Monday. Tomorrow we'll do Science and History in extended blocks, although I'm working things around so that we can do History two or three times a week and NOT do it on Fridays.

So far, I like it. The only real wrinkle is that the child I'm working with tends to feel like a spectacle if the other kids are in the room, but out-of-sight kids sometimes have trouble being accountable for independent work. I think it will smooth out after a period of adjustment, but I'm going to need a bag of tricks for Graeme, who does not like going upstairs alone because it's "creepy", but who now finds himself confronted with people trying to work quietly in multiple downstairs rooms.

On the other hand, he is getting dedicated alone time with me every single day. Someone (I can't think who...Gretchen?) posted the fantabulous idea of having 30 or so minutes of quiet reading time for the olders at the beginning of the morning while you work with your youngest. This neatly solved the problem of getting Will to dedicate time to his new reading list while also ameliorating the temper of a four-year-old demanding "me too school".

Digging My Way Out

2010-08-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

My children went out of town for a week. A week! That is longer than I've ever been away from any of them in their lives. It has been pretty strange. But, they are all back now, and we're just finishing up the first week of the 2010-2011 homeschooling year.

I spent my week "off" doing some much needed catch-up. I made the kids' Modern History copybooks, for example. For folks who weren't reading last year, these are hybrid handwriting/copywork books filled with primary source quotes from the period the kids are studying. I'm still not completely satisfied with this year's finished product. Gathering the quotes is usually a slower, more contemplative process. This year, it was a whirlwind. Still, all in all, not bad. And there are fabulous resources on WWII, Civil Rights, folk music and the Sixties, for example. So, I can compensate elsewhere for the few things I wish I'd managed to include.

I also stripped the wallpaper from and painted the boys' bedroom, held a garage sale, deep cleaned as much of the house as I could do, and butchered seven ducks (with the help of my kick-ass friend, J and her family). And did lots of other homeschooling prep, as well, though not as much as I'd have liked.

We moved to a loop schedule this year. Getting through the loop in a reasonable amount of time is something of a challenge, but the one-on-one instructional time is worth it. I realize that some loop schedulers don't consider getting through the whole loop in one day to be a priority, but with our staggered foreign language schedule, I'd really like to. We figured out that we have basically two options. Start at nine, break for lunch, and be done at two or three, or start at eight and be done at noon. The loop covers everything but science, history, and supplemental read-alouds presented by me. Science gets done in a dedicated block on Fridays, but those other two topics up there will get sidelined a lot if we drag seatwork past lunch, so the kids are winding back their alarms.

I want to rave about the symbiotic relationship developing between Greek, Latin and MCT, but I think that's another post.

Getting Closer...

2010-08-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

If you're wondering why there are only three comments, it's b/c the bulk of the discussion is taking place on the WTM boards. It's fun to see how the same books can inspire eternal fandom or intense loathing. Still, those extremes can be really helpful in making decisions. And people had good, sound points about two of the books on my "You Probably Won't Talk Me Out Of These" list. I did, in fact, remove them both.

For those who think my son will hate the Alcott titles, I am hoping you're wrong. Even if you aren't, though, as a UU I feel sort of honor-bound to leave them on there. Certainly Will will have a fair amount of background on the Alcott family before we start to read. Did you know there's an entire issue of Cobblestone just on the Alcotts? And another on the Transcendentalists? Lucy Whipple has a story connected to it, and I also tend to be pretty loyal to authors I've met and liked. I still really want a Karen Hesse title on that list...maybe Just Juice. But if anyone has read Witness and wants to weigh in, I'd appreciate it. The reviews are all over the map on age level.

Frindle
The Half-A-Moon Inn
The Ballad of Lucy Whipple
The Castle of Llyr
Sarah, Plain and Tall
*Just So Stories
*The Jungle Book (possibly on audio)
The Dark Is Rising
The Animal Family
Little House on the Prairie
King of the Wind
Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories
Riding Freedom
*The Iron Giant
Hey Kidz, Buy This Book!
*Little Women and/or Little Men
*Wolves of Willoughby Chase
In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson
The Indian in the Cupboard
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The Watsons Go to Birmingham
The House of Sixty Fathers
Bud, Not Buddy
The Master Puppeteer

Now, here's my next question. Who is doing literature a la Michael Clay Thompson? He would have many of these be private read-to-self kinds of books, with only a brief book chat at the end. Others would be books into which we delved deeply as teacher and student. I've got some opinions about that, but I'd like to hear yours. If one-two books each quarter were going to be deep, suck the marrow out of them kinds of books, which ones would you pick?

(Oh, and for those of you who are thinking, "That list looks impossible," at least seven of those books are fairly quick reads.)

Reading List Decisions

2010-08-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

So, I was all excited when Will soldiered on and finished The Lightning Thief, and even more excited when he started tearing through seven and eight Magic Tree House books at a time (I know, I know, they're fluff, they'll rot his brain). But now, he's doing that thing I remember doing at his age and juggling three or four titles at a time. At the moment, he just finished Sea of Monsters (took him about a week), he's several chapters into Ender's Game, he's still reading Magic Tree House, and he's also reading How To Train Your Dragon.

All of this seems pretty ideal to me, since this is the first year I'm planning to give him independent reading assignments for history and science, as well as literature. A kid who enjoys topic jumping ought to handle that pretty well. I've been mucking around with a loosely 1850-present history-linked bucket list for fourth-graders. Stars indicate books we don't own, but let me tell you, all those years of garage sales, Half-Price Books browsing, and annual ginormous book sales at the Montgomery County fairgrounds are coming in handy right about now.

You Probably Won't Talk Me Out of These:

Frindle
The Half-A-Moon Inn
The Ballad of Lucy Whipple
The Castle of Llyr
Sarah, Plain and Tall
*Just So Stories
*The Jungle Book (possibly on audio)
The Dark Is Rising
The Animal Family
Little House on the Prairie
King of the Wind
Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories
Riding Freedom
*The Iron Giant
Hey Kidz, Buy This Book!
*Little Women and/or Little Men

Then there are those...other books. The ones that feel like they should be on the list, but not like they should ALL be in the list. Here are the also-rans I now have to weed through. I'm thinking I'll add maybe five more from this second list, and make some read-alouds if I feel Will has too much independent reading to do this year:

*Wolves of Willoughby Chase
*Stone Fox (I always found this book super-boring, and am biased b/c I eventually developed a deep dislike for the way it is automatically included on every public school reading list.)
*In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson (starred, but I just *know* there's a copy around here somewhere)
*Calico Bush
*Fairy Tales, by e.e. cummings
The Indian in the Cupboard
Peter Pan (funny, but fraught)
Bridge to Terabithia (this one I have eight million copies of, if you need one)
Maniac Magee (I think this HAS to be a read-aloud. And it's absolutely on my lifetime bucket list. I'm interested in thoughts on the appropriate age at which to read it, though.)
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The Watsons Go To Birmingham
The House of Sixty Fathers
The Music of Dolphins

All this book browsing is causing some weird temporal loops. I was positive I owned Just So Stories, then realized I was confusing my mass market copy of Aesop's Fables with my fourth grade teacher's mass market copy of Just So Stories. Very weird. I have been looking for Miss Bishop from Darnaby Elementary for years, by the way, so if you know where she is, have her drop me a line. In the meantime, feel free to rip my fourth-grade bucket list apart, and to argue vociferously as to which five books I should add.

Field Trip!

2010-08-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

(Now with additional PB action!)

We've been trying to schedule this around PB's work schedule all summer. A bank robbery and manhunt slowed us down on Thursday, but we still managed to leave town on Friday morning! Yay us! Also, my friend J was kind enough to brave our protective herding dog's lair to take her out while we were traveling.

We headed upstate to the WILD Museum, and had a great time. Our only real problem was Graeme's state of mind all weekend. You're looking at it. This was actually his response when we sat him down to give him "the talk", and PB was so impressed by his sheer cussedness that he couldn't resist snapping a shot while G. wasn't looking.

We had a great time otter-watching. We also got to see live programs with a kestrel and a red screech owl. We saw a cool movie about how tracking dogs are being used to help with moose counting (they're tracking the scat, not the moose themselves).

One thing about the WILD Museum that fascinated me last time was all the green technology. Their office building has a living roof on one side, and two hundred solar panels on the other. Their water cycling system is pretty sophisticated (there are tanks everywhere showcasing local wildlife, particularly dwindling fish species like trout). PB examined the converters pretty closely. A solar/wind tandem system is a dream of ours.

The drive up to the Tupper Lake area on Rt. 30 is gorgeous. You pass (and cross) lake after lake after lake as you wind through the Adirondack Mountains. This was the view near our campsite.

This was our first camping trip in a while, largely because we outgrew our tent a while ago. This is the new (to us) model, which worked out well. We chose a pretty popular commercial campground this time. It was good for a trial run (store, close to town, etc.), but we agreed that we'll go with a quieter site in one of the state parks next time. And there will be a next time. None of us slept very well this time, but we had fun! Actually, I was amazed at how awake the kids were. The only time anyone fell asleep in the car was once we were firmly pointed towards home. That's very unusual for this bunch. We were reading Farmer Boy in the car most of the way up, and they stayed awake for *six chapters* of it at the campground. I finally had to call it quits to save my voice.

On Saturday, we headed north again, and went almost all the way up to the Canada border, to Almanzo Wilder House. While the barns have been restored, the house is original. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but we saw some of Mother's original textiles. We were lucky enough to go when they were holding their annual festival, so there were adults demonstrating rag rug making, spinning, and the use of Mother's loom. We saw the pantry, and the parlor (no gold wallpaper anymore, but the rug and the portraits on the wall were all there, as was the horsehair sofa.)

Will took a cool panorama of the enclosed barnyard described in the book, which faces away from the house...we had been picturing it wrong! I'll post Will's pic as soon as I get PB to save it in a file type I can use. This is the side that faces the house.

We saw Star and Bright's stall, and the pump Almanzo used to water the stock. There was a Morgan Horse demonstration, too! We got to pet the horses afterwards. We ate homemade doughnuts, but they had those newfangled holes in them...not like Mother's twisted ones that flipped themselves.

We took one Flat Stanley up with us. I'll send the little girl her pics later today. I hope she's a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan!

Flat Stanley

2010-07-23T16:16:00.000-07:00

We are doing a Flat Stanley exchange with a bunch of homeschoolers this summer. I think we've got 39 states and somebody in the military, though I can't remember where they're stationed. I really like the homeschool Flat Stanley method, because as opposed to the "send Stanley to a variety of unsuspecting relatives" method, we are all both giving and receiving all the time. So far, we've had three Stanleys visiting our house. We also divided the total mailing list into thirds and sent out three sets of Stanleys to different families, so we'll get more results in a shorter amount of time. Each of our packets contained our Stanleys, a copy of the mailing list, a letter from the kids, and brochures about our area's historic places and points of interest. Observe the first batch...for these we found templates online, cut out and colored them. Posy liked the "Flat Stacie" the Girl Scouts use.

Once we started getting "Stanleys" that were actual photographs of other kids, though, we switched to those ourselves. It's much more fun to actually see the kids we're exchanging with! The organizer had the foresight to have us email the photos to each other instead of snail mailing them, and one enterprising participant even entered our spreadsheet into Google Docs so that it can be edited, and so that people without Word would have an easier time printing it. I love homeschool parents!

I'm planning to post our Stanleys' travels here as possible (I figure some folks won't want their kids' pictures up on my blog, if they're in the shots). We've got a big U.S. map up on the wall so we can mark all the places our Stanleys go. And we're planning to compile all the photos and swag into an album. It's a nice antidote for "staycationing". And I think we'll roll our NYS history studies in with this process, as well. While we're driving around looking for Flat Stanley photo ops, we might as well kill two birds with one stone.

Handyman

2010-07-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

Will has been going around fixing several annoyingly loose nails and screws this morning...one in the entryway to the playroom, one on the wooden porch. He just came striding into the family room and launched into the following:

"Mom, you're going to hear some banging, because I'm going to be working on a couple of repairs this morning. Pretty much as many as I can find. I added some tools to my toolbox. Not much, just a few screwdrivers, a few wrenches, and a tape measure. Dad says the reason you can never find a tape measure is because you use it, and then three weeks later you don't remember where you used it last."

Now he is, completely unbidden, fixing the loose weather stripping that has to be held out of the way if I want to deadbolt the front door, and which caused me to slam my fingers in the door this week.

He has read five Magic Tree House books since Thursday.

I really need to borrow some of his focus. The words "loop scheduling" actually caused some sort of loop in my brain, and if I were a Mac, there'd be a very small cherry bomb on my screen right now. Also, I'd love to hear suggestions of how you scheduled independent reading assignments for history and science with your fourth grader.

Woes of the Head Librarian

2010-07-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen

Oh, how I need them. Not the amalgam of four-foot wonders with non-adjustable shelves we currently own, but nice, tall, floor-to-ceiling shelves.

This is the third time this year I've had to request a book we own from the public library, simply because I can't find the correct box in the attic. The hell of it is, I pulled every single box into the house, labeled them, and cataloged their contents. But they've all been moved so often, I have no hope of finding the right one in our semi-lit, spidery attic in the heat of July.

Sigh. We have room for shelves. Just no shelves. Dear MidYork: Please send me I, Robot. My son wants to read it.

Birding Help!

2010-07-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

This will mean nothing to most of you, but just in case there's a closet birder out there, I will post it anyway. I emailed Lang Elliott's studios tonight to ask for help audible-ing a bird. I am that desperate. If you knew me in Lancaster, you probably remember that Will was obsessed with a birding CD, and we had to play it at bedtime or he wouldn't sleep. This is that guy. He's brilliant. It's sort of like accosting Michael Clay Thompson to ask for a book recommendation. Which I have also done.

Hi there,

I have listened to Lang's recordings for years, and found them so helpful. We've tried to get down to the RTP Festival, but with three young kids have not managed it.

I have extremely tall evergreen tree screen on three sides of my house, and something up there, something small and very aware that I'm looking for it, is singing a complex song I can't identify for the life of me. I've been on Cornell's site until my eyes crossed, and I've listened to call after call. The closest I can come is a Smith's Longspur, but it's just not right.

The call is musical and clear. If I express it with a musical scale, I hear: "ABA DDBA BBAF# E B-trill" The notation would be eighth-eighth-eighth, quarter-quarter-eighth-quarter, quarter-quarter-eighth-quarter, quarter, trill. I hear no variation. It's clear, beautiful, and just like this each time.

This bird sings all day in various parts of my yard, but is very sensitive to observation. I could probably sit out there all day trying to get a look at it, and as a busy mama I'm sure you can guess how much time I've found to do that. But this is my third evening this week wandering my property with field glasses in one hand and iBird in the other, and I'm slowly losing my mind. Please help!

Thanks,
Sarah xxxxx.
xxxxx, NY

Anyway, if anyone is thinking, "Oh, I know that bird!" or "It sounds familiar," or even "I bet my Aunt Ethelfreda would know," hook me up. I will totally call your Aunt Ethelfreda. This is ten times worse than having a song stuck in my head, and I will do anything.

**ETA: Holy Moly. Lang Elliott just emailed me back.

Not An Unschooler

2010-07-02T04:32:00.000-07:00

My sister asked me recently if we're unschoolers. Um, no. My unschooling friends would find that pretty hilarious. I know some great ones, and I think it *can* be a successful method. But that "can" comes with a lot of caveats. In case you're wondering, if you're a **radical unschooler, all learning has to be the kid's idea, and at the kid's request. That's not how it works around here. My non-coercive parenting career was over when I put frozen peas on my nine-months-pregnant belly so Will would turn his breech ass around. He did. I stick with what works.

One thing that gets a lot of homeschoolers' panties in a twist is the occasional sensationalized news story on unschoolers. The news has mostly stopped sensationalizing homeschoolers in general, unless a child abuse case involves homeschoolers. Even national geography or spelling bee winning homeschoolers are old news. But unschoolers, and in particular radical unschoolers, are the soup du jour for reporters who like to look shocked on television. George Stephanopoulis comes to mind. First time I've ever wanted to slap an O.U. grad. Much. One reason homeschoolers tend to hate these "news" pieces is because they seem to beg concerned citizens to demand more stringent regs, and frankly, we've got enough to do without someone putting up four more hoops for us to jump through. So please, George, tap your chin back up and let someone do a hard-hitting news piece with extended interviews and details...no more of these sensationalized, quotes-out-of-context fluff pieces where you all make Macaulay Culkin shock faces at the camera. Not helpful.

Now, this is all very interesting, but there's one line that always seems to come up in these interviews that just drives me crazy. "What about spelling?" the interviewer inevitably asks. "That's what spell checkers are for," the parent glibly replies. I am not a weekly spelling test kind of girl, but neither am I unconcerned about spelling. I'm a big etymology fan, and we do a fair amount of phonics at our house, too. If the spelling isn't where I want it when I want it there, you'd better believe we'll be drilling my kids' commonly misspelled words. And everyone here will know how to apostrophize. Kitten killers we are not.

Here's a poem that exemplifies my reaction to the spell checker comment, and which can also be found at the Spelling Society.

Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques for my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it to say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
Eye am shore your pleased two no
It's letter perfect awl the weigh
My checker tolled me sew.

--Margo Roark

Once upon a time, the computers at Bob Evans all failed. One manager and me. That's how many people were comfortable cashing people out on an old manual register that doesn't tell you how much change to give. I'm very suspicious of knowledge that fails when the power goes out, or which depends on the premise that the computer is always right. Just sayin'.

**There's a differentiation to be made between radical unschoolers and unschoolers. Google it...I'm not gonna link directly here, for a couple of reasons.

We're Having Too Much Fun

2010-06-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

I asked for it. I don't say I didn't. I'm the one who just stood there thinking how cute they were while the woman plunked two more ducklings into my cardboard box. But they're outgrowing the brooder box rapidly. And I noticed how fast the feed was disappearing, and thought maybe we should get them outside to forage. So, on Saturday my friend ran out to his barn while it was raining cats, dogs and small sheep, and got me a tangled roll of electro-net fencing. I ran it twice around the area I was containing this morning, hoping that overlapping it might serve to keep the ducklings in more effectively. They seemed pleased to get outside. They were quiet in the tote I used to move them. When I let them out on the grass, they seemed pleased and befuddled in a cute sort of duckling way. Then someone gave some sort of signal, and they formed ranks and poured through the electro-net like water.

Right about then, Graeme came around the corner of the house in his rainbow mud boots, against my express instructions, to proclaim, "Cake Boss will not play for me!" He then offered to help me catch the ducks. When I, rather panic-stricken, said "NO!" and sent him to get the feeder instead, he dumped feed all over the barn...adorably predictable. Soulemama would have made it into a moment and photographed it. I just groaned and chased ducklings, getting increasingly drenched by the rain-wet grass and undergrowth. The best thing about all of this was that the ducklings, although I don't see how they could have imprinted on the chickens, seemed to feel like adult birds ought to know what to do, so they started following the chickens in a tight little group...which freaked the chickens right out. They squawked; they jumped; they fled the small hopeful ducklings. You can tell nobody around here ever hatched out a nest. Hopefully, the ducks will show them how when they grow up. If I don't expose them to predation with my hare-brained ideas.

By the time Graeme and I came in, I was soaking wet and cranky. I'd just spent an additional five minutes dragging a fat, greedy hen out from under the brooder, where she'd gotten stuck while sneaking the spilled duckling feed. I'd already missed my couch to 5K run due to another day in the endless two week rainy period we've been having. It rained on me again while I weeded carrots. And again as I went to get the mail and contemplated possibly taking everyone to our local Monday night outdoor music scene.

On the up side, Graeme is over the moon to have his very own Miquon to do, and I spent Friday morning printing out the first ten lessons of MEP math for each respective child. Graeme and I worked on both today, and I declared it a reading day for the olders, who are immersed in ancient Egypt courtesy of Rick Riordan. The gloom and rain is making me want to bake, so I'm thinking it's pancakes for dinner. Although I have a yen for oatmeal cookies...or Soulemama's Coffee Crisps. Mmmmmm, coffee.

RIP Mike

2010-06-08T05:10:00.000-07:00

One of our big roos has been taking runs at the kids. Yesterday was the second time he's come after me, and even "foot therapy" was insufficient to stop him. I ended up popping him on the butt with a shovel and acting insane, then I shut the girls into the barn and left him outside it for a while. At night, he hopped through the window into the other half of the barn, where our two barn cats live. The cats and the chickens don't bother each other, and we've never had a predator problem, so PB, who was feeding them, decided to just leave him there. Big mistake. This morning, there was a trail of feathers across the yard, leading to our fence. And no Mike.

I feel bad enough about it already, but here are some additional wrinkles:

•The barn cat girls have been in the garage several times lately. Maybe they quit sleeping in the barn? Maybe they had a good reason?
•The roos have been crowing at night some. After three years of false alarms in the wee hours, I've been thinking, "Oh, shut up, boys," and rolling over. Besides, the heat lamp has been on for the ducklings, so they've had the option of being awake and full of beans at 3 a.m..

Was Mike running at me because he'd reached the magical age of kamikaze roosters, which at our house seems to be about 18 months? Or was he feisty because he'd been on red alert lately? I feel really, really guilty, like I staked him out as a welcome hors d'oeuvre for Hannibal Lecter. I swear, Mike, I didn't know.

Scores

2010-06-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

Me: 1
House: 0

Kidding.

Several of our friends are moving or have moved recently, and there's a fair chance we could move as well, at least within the next couple of years. I'm using this as the shoehorn that gets me to drag out things I'm saving for no good reason, strew them across the driveway, and invite total strangers to pay me money for them. Today I cleaned out our one decent closet in this old farmhouse. You might remember PB built some amazingly useful shelves in there a while back. First I filled them; then the floor began to slowly grow a thick mat of reuseable grocery bags full of leftover materials from scout projects, traveling crafts, and other things I didn't have time to put away properly.

I can now see the floor.

So far, I've found:

•All those pencils the kids can never find
•Ditto on the colored pencils and crayons
•The Pizza Hut Book-It forms I've been looking for since November
•The letter from the school district which says they have Will and Posy's IHIPs on file, and which I need to finally upgrade to Barnes & Noble's plastic educator discount card, so I can stop overpaying for all our books
•My best pair of sewing scissors
•My library card (which isn't a big deal, since I request everything online, but still: what if I'd erased all my cookies by accident?)

I made a bag of trash and a bag of garage sale items. The trash bag was bigger.

Anybody else get a leg up on the universe today?

Duck!

2010-06-02T11:45:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, we went up the road to Remsen and came home with ten Muscovy ducklings. Cute, right? They're good ducks for small homesteaders. They're low maintenance grazers and foragers. They love flies, which would endear them to upstate New Yorkers all by itself. They're broody, and at maturity will hatch up to three clutches a year.

"Duck eggs, huh?" those who've known me for, oh, say nineteen years or so are asking. Nope. Roast duck.

Now you're all really scratching your heads, right? Why would a vegetarian want roast duck? Yeah, that's a good question. The short answer is that, while we haven't been talking about it much, we've spent the last two months moving to moderate intake of pastured or grass-fed, preferably organic meat, at least some of which we'll raise and butcher ourselves. Some of our reasons:

•We can increase our self-sufficiency by taking responsibility for additional protein sources
•Buying organic, pastured and grass-fed from our neighbors supports diversified small farming over industrialized, high-chemical farming and CAFO operations
•While tossing around the idea of milk goats, we acknowledged and discussed the fact that consumption of dairy involves us in meat production
•Pastured and grass-fed meat, dairy and eggs have, in various cases, less or healthier fats than corn-fed, factory penned animals. They have more Omega-3s, more Vitamin D, A and E, more beta carotene, more myelin, less cholesterol...etc..
•Giving away aggressive roosters or egg-eating hens to meat-eating friends tends to change your thinking somewhat. Particularly once you've helped butcher said animals.
•In some quarters, a whole pastured Muscovy duck could go for $56. I paid $4 a duckling.

So, yes, the ducks are very cute. But in 84 days, give or take, they're going in the freezer. We'll keep two or three of them, so they can mature and hatch out nests of ducklings next year, making this a closed cycle which requires little or no financial input from us. Our wonderful neighbor, Jordan Winters of Winters Grass Farm, trained with Joel Salatin and provides us with pastured chickens (and hopefully, this fall, a turkey). Valley View Farm provides us with grass-fed milk, butter, cheese and ice cream. And we provide various friends with free-range, organic eggs.

The Grass-Fed Revolution (TIME Magazine)

Early Phonics

2010-05-24T07:05:00.000-07:00

I bought Graeme Get Ready For the Code at MidWest, hoping to use it with him this fall. Instead, he laid hold of it the minute he saw it, and demanded to begin. So, we have. And he's absolutely right: he's ready. But we still hit the occasional road bump. Like this morning.

Posy: "Graeme, what does unicorn start with?"
Graeme, proudly: "U!"
Posy: "And what does turtle start with?"
Graeme: "TURD!"

I cannot imagine why our seatwork is taking so long this morning. It can't possibly be the giggling, or the insistence of all parties that they hear pencil scratching even when they aren't writing, and it must be our house brownie doing *his* seatwork. Although it is really cute when they all three have their heads glued to the table, listening intently. Not productive, but super, super cute.

Oh, and can I just mention this in passing? I figured out why the district is finally calling me and asking questions this year. They put a different person in the homeschool co-ordinator position. And you want to hear something really interesting? Both of her sisters homeschooled their kids. That's the third hs co-ord. switch-up I've heard of in this county this year. I wonder what the deal is.

When Grammarphiles Get Silly

2010-05-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

So, someone on a homeschooling board I frequent asked for "Christian Dinosaur Book" recommendations. And I know what she means (although that's a whole 'nother issue), but I cannot stop giggling like an exhausted, punch-drunk moron (which is basically what I am...we got back from our weekend travels at 3:30 a.m. and put in a fairly full day of work). I wonder how many Christian dinosaurs actually existed? I am composing a new version of the Beatitudes while I think of ridiculous book titles. Stuff like: "Blessed are the meat-eaters, for they control the herbivore population."

Our book suggestions so far (PB is 'helping' in between bouts of razzing me for being unable to pick a movie to watch while I sew badges on the kids' scout sashes):

Velocirapture
Left Behind: The La Brea Tar Pit Story
The Book of Partheno Genesis: Cautionary Tales From Jurassic Park

Will came downstairs to use the bathroom, and he suggests that Mosasaurs are probably Christian.

I recognize, people, that her modifier was not misplaced, just open to interpretation, but it hit me right in my funny bone.

Anybody else know of any Christian dinosaurs?

Sunday Reading

2010-05-09T05:59:00.000-07:00

(This is my traditional Mother's Day post.)

Mother's Day didn't begin as a "Hallmark holiday". Although she had previously penned the famous "Battle Hymn of the Republic", Unitarian Julia Ward Howe's original Mother's Day Proclamation was a pacifist protest against the carnage of the Civil War. Both she and her husband tended the war wounded as part of the Sanitary Commission, which was, at the time, the equivalent of the Red Cross. This is a traditional Mother's Day reading on my blog.

Mother's Day Proclamation, 1870

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

--Julia Ward Howe

Mwahaha...A Real Curriculum Sale!

2010-05-07T14:05:00.000-07:00

My friend Terry, bless her heart, messaged me today to see if I was going to the "tailgating curriculum sale" the local Christian homeschooling group was putting on. Um, nope, I'm not in that loop. Fortunately, everybody else knew or could find out the wheres and whens. There was an absolute sea of Abeka and Christian Liberty Press, but there were some pearls in there, too.

This is what a *good* day at a resale event looks like for me:

•The Way Things Work CD-ROM (Mac)
•Liberty's Kids CD-ROM (Win/Mac)
•FAN-Math: Math Express, Levels 2 and 3
•Key to Decimals, Books 1-4 and Answers and Notes
•BTS Book 2 and Teacher's Manual (for $15!!!)
•Multiplication Wrap-Ups
•Mousetrap game
•Ginormous Puzz 3D puzzle with no missing pieces

I spent a total of $38, and made about ten selling off stuff I didn't need. I'm pretty happy about the math and logic stuff in particular, because I'm waffling about Singapore big time now that I've got it in my hands. I want to pitch it all out and run Mathematics Enrichment Programme with Hands-On Equations, Dan Zaccaro and I don't know what all else on the side. If anyone has any opinions about any of those programs (or Math Mammoth), bring it on.

Blasted Miquon. You have ruined us for other math programs! Ruined!

Teacher Appreciation Day

2010-05-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

If you aren't reading Smrt Lernins, you're missing out. Honest, incisive and witty, Smrt Mama is a must-read for me. Here's a great post she wrote about Teacher Appreciation Day. As I don't get those nice annual performance reviews anymore, I needed it.

Homeschooling Economics

2010-04-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

If you homeschool, a lot of people assume you are a person of means. As in: if you homeschool it means you don't need a second income. In my experience, this isn't generally the case.

Remember all those books on the babycare shelves at the bookstore about how it's cheaper to stay home than to work? I think there are probably times when that's true. For example, when PB and I were both working, there was a lot more convenience and restaurant food around; anyone who's ever compared the cost of homemade pizza to the cost of pizza from a restaurant (or even the freezer case) knows the size of the discrepancy. We spent more money because we had less time.

Nowadays our motto is, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without". That doesn't apply to curriculum so much. Some things are consumable, others too specific or obscure. Also, sometimes the timing is off. There's a book set I want desperately, but we don't need it until fall of 2011. I know someone who's selling it for about 3/5 of what I'm eventually going to get stuck paying for it, but I can't prioritize the expense right at this moment.

On the other hand, we cook from scratch (mostly). We grow our own ingredients where possible. We've got a porch full of seed starts, and garlic, onions, last winter's leeks and this spring's carrots in the ground. I finally got the generations-old rhubarb that came with the place moved out of the woods and into my herb garden. The perennial herbs are all coming back. So is the grapevine. The fruit trees have actual flower buds on them this year, so that's a four-year investment that may finally pay off. And we have wild black raspberries and semi-wild blackberries. We have chickens...well, to be honest, organic chickens aren't terribly economical. They pay for their own feed all summer, but in the winter, not so much. But we love them, we never waste table scraps, and our eggs are absolutely unparalleled. (There are some learning objectives about food systems and personal responsibility being met there, so we're letting it go.) It's messy and inconvenient and hard and grotty and rewarding and grounding and freeing and wonderful. A lot like life.

So no, we didn't add a room onto our house to be the "schoolroom". We scaled back our expectations. We bought an inexpensive house. We buy things used. We barter and trade. On vacation, we visit family. We rarely eat out. We drive used cars. My last one was something like fourteen years old when we traded it in. We have used or hand-me-down furniture. That's how it goes. We're not leisure class; we're just relieved that homeschooling is cheaper than private school tuition.

So I must say, when the garage sale that was pointedly marketed on our local homeschool group as offering "homeschooling materials" yielded a couple of old Houghton-Mifflin math texts and books like, "The Internet for Christians", I was annoyed that I'd dragged the kids out of the house early for no reason. But when I found the lady two streets over who was unloading a bunch of expensive boys' clothing she bought retail, victory was sweet. Almost as sweet as the hundred pheasants Danny, the Champion of the World, was successfully poaching on the audiobook in our van.

Math D'oh!

2010-04-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

Remember long ago, on the Simpsons, when Lisa said, "As usual, the playground has the facts straight, but has missed the point completely."? Well, today Posy had the facts wrong, but she was rock solid on the point.

1/3 of 9 = _____

Me: "So, if you were splitting nine pieces of candy between you, Will and Graeme, how many would Graeme get?"
Posy: "Um, seven?"
Me: "Ooooo-kay...leaving how many for you?"
Posy: "One!?"
Me: "And how many for Will?"
Posy: "One!"
Me: "Would Will be happy?"
Posy: "No!"
Me: "Would you be happy?"
Posy: (laughing) "No!"
Me: "Would Graeme be happy?"
Posy: "YES!" (pause) "But he wouldn't be content until he had my piece!"

MidWest Conference

2010-04-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

I have to say, MidWest was pretty cool. We've all got our klatches of homeschooling friends and community, but to see 13,000 homeschoolers take over a convention center is something awesome.

I flew solo with all three kids one day (exhausting), and went alone the next (extremely productive). I'd recommend it to anyone, although I think a push for more secular offerings is a must, if that's the way you lean. They picked up Michael Clay Thompson last minute due to demand, so it's certainly possible. I'm planning to shill for Tin Man Press and Prufrock Press next year. There are loads of Christian offerings, if that's what lights your fuse, and the children's program, unfortunately, had a tone of proselytization, so we skipped that, but there was plenty there for me.

MCT is amazing, by the way. I'm thoroughly sold on MCTLA. So many people boil grammar and poetics down to their most pedantic interpretation...I know you know what I mean. Structure and order have an innate beauty and harmony to them, which rarely comes through in grammar texts. MCT, OTOH, is the sort of person who grieves that we are depriving our kids of great literature. He's a gifted teacher who designed a language arts program specifically to show us that rigorous instruction doesn't have to be complicated, fussy or boring, and he did it so that we could get to the good literature and poetry right away. My kids (at the end of a loooong day) attended his grammar lecture. It was most definitely addressed to me, not to them, but Posy got up at the end and asked if she could go tell him that his presentation was cool. I didn't think they were paying any attention...I was just relieved they were quiet! Maybe the Tolkien sentences he parsed won them over...but I tend to think it was his demeanor. He has a quiet, quirky sense of humor and a passion for his subject.

I'd also highly recommend his book, Classics in the Classroom. He's provided some very incisive examples of how reading the classics gives rise to broad and deep semantic understandings. Even for a classics convert, there's plenty of meat there about Socratic dialogue and assessment. He's also very approachable. Like a good teacher, he admitted to staying in the background on the yahoo group so that others will talk and not defer to him as the "authority". But he said, and I quote, "If you want me to talk, just address me directly. Say, "Hey, Mike!"" And he offers some online enrichment classes for 3-5 and 6-8 graders through Northwestern, if anyone is interested.

I saw a new math program I'm interested in, both as a potential replacement for Singapore Early Bird with Graeme, and as a supplement for Will. I got my hands all over all kinds of curricula. The kids picked up some "I'm a homeschooler"-type swag (and I'm having trouble getting Will out of his new tee). Susan Wise Bauer's lecture on self-education was fantastic, as was Julie Bogart's presentation on "The Bravewriter Lifestyle". Jim Weiss was amazing. We had to leave one of his seminars early, but he'd already managed to draw parallels between Cincinnatus and George Washington by the time we left. He was actually manning his own booth, sans name tag, when we were at the trade show. Graeme recognized his voice and asked him his name. He asked Graeme's, and then told him what a beautiful name it was. Sigh. All in all, I think this will be a regular event for us.

DIY Curriculum, Part Two

2010-03-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I discussed the use of primary source materials in our history and copywork studies. This time, I'll talk about our "reading program".

First of all, I'm going to cop to being an intuitive when it comes to reading instruction. I know folks who seem to be this way with math, but I'm not one of them. (That's part of why I use Miquon...to compensate for an occasional lack of flexible math thinking on my part). I love to read. There are pictures of me as a child reading on my swingset. We have almost two thousand books. So, immersion is a big part of our reading curriculum. I've used embedded phonics instruction, onset-rime wordplay, and formal phonics programs. Success with each method varies from kid to kid. We play lots of word games in the car, read aloud to the kids, listen to audiobooks constantly, etc.. Stuff lots of people do. We hated Bob books, loved Now I'm Reading, and I've got an eight-year-old chapter book reader and a six-year-old emerging reader to show for it. I'm content that reading is a beloved activity and trusted anchor in each kid's life. Those were my primary goals.

One thing has really shifted for me since I taught in public schools, though. I've come to view children's literature as a somewhat secondary consideration when choosing reading material.

It feels very weird to type that. I'm going to my first homeschooling conference this weekend (MidWest...it's huge!), but for years I attended the Children's Literature Convention in Columbus, Ohio...one of the two biggest kiddie lit conventions in the country. I've met Karen Hesse, Kevin Henkes, Karen Cushman, Katherine Paterson, Steven Kellogg, Eloise Greenfield...just an enormous number of extremely talented authors. But most of the authors I met wrote fiction...which I adored and would have read anyway. On the other hand, I read precious little non-fiction as a child. And non-fiction trade books, particularly those relating to history, are a cornerstone of our homeschooling curriculum.

History spills over into every other subject we study. Homeschoolers are lucky enough to have history-centered materials available even for math. (Take a look at Living Math. It's an amazing program, and caused a fundamental shift in our understanding of the concept of the "Dark Ages". If you've got a history or lit kid who doesn't much like math, or a math kid who has trouble contextualizing or playing with math concepts, it's well worth the money.

WTM-ers move from the Grammar Stage, which is all about whetting the child's appetite for the story of history, to the Logic Stage, which is about getting history from the horse's mouth and internalizing much more detail, to the Rhetoric Stage, in which the high school student reads great books, sometimes in their original languages, and is able to not only know history, but engage in higher level discussions about the whys and wherefores of historical events. This progression means that children's trade books are going to be central to our studies all along the way. We're much less likely to use textbooks, as modern public schools don't cover world history at the elementary level anyway. Most WTM-ers end up with a narrative history or world history encyclopedia (arranged chronologically). This is their spine for history studies. But the bulk, the meat of our studies comes from mass market children's books.

There are a wealth of chronologically arranged "history for kids" booklists out there. A Book In Time is a good place to start. The Activity Guides that accompany Susan Wise Bauer's Story of the World books have bibliographies to accompany each chapter. Those two sources alone will provide any family with more books than they could possibly read in a year. So far, my best solution to that has been The Horn Book.

The Horn Book is the best source of children's book reviews I have ever found. If The Horn Book likes it, it's almost always excellent. I watch for their reviews on amazon when I'm reviewing materials, and if they pan a book, I'm not likely to bother with it. The other dead useful strategy I've used is to pick a quiet week during the summer and pay for a one-week subscription to the Horn Book Guide Online. It's archived back to 1989, and searchable. This helps me cull the available books down to a "must-read" list. The invention of tabbed browsers is essential to the process, which works like this:

Tab 1: Amazon
Tab 2: our local library system's online catalog
Tab 3: Horn Book Guide Online

I keep hard copies of the lists I mentioned above in front of me, star the titles that look like winners, and add any new ones I find. Also-rans that cover unusual topics are kept, as well. Then I run them through the library computer. If our system has them, they stay on. If not, unless they're so fantastic that I'm willing to shell out for them, they're dropped. It's not a perfect system, mostly because I can't be sure an online hold will actually come in by the time I need it. Mostly, it works.

In the interest of time/length, I'm going to split this post and do a short second one later about library book management...if anyone would like to see some of our past booklists (and they've been Herculean efforts, though I'm learning to hone more now) let me know.

DIY Curriculum, Part One

2010-03-05T05:21:00.001-08:00

I was reading over at patchfire's and it occurred to me that I posted a huge list of curriculum for next year, but didn't talk at all about the process of creating and compiling my own resources, which takes up a good part of my spring and summer each year. It's a process I actually enjoy, not least because, while conservative Christians have many homeschooling resources with religious content available to them, our family does not.

We didn't set out to homeschool for religious reasons, but we do have a flourishing religious life. At some point, I looked around and realized how wasteful it would be to have all this time together as a family and fail to overtly integrate our beliefs into our curriculum.

This became particularly clear when our history studies began to include topics such as the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity. If you're interested in religious history, you know that major decisions about the tenets of the Catholic faith were determined in the first few centuries after its inception. UUs tend to relate to the dissenters, like Arian, who disagreed with the doctrine of the trinity, or Origen, who believed in universal salvation. And yet, those gentlemen are quite unlikely to come up in your children's studies unless you point them out. Then there's the Protestant Reformation, in which the reformers sometimes became tyrants themselves, burning their fellows for heretical viewpoints. Are we going to teach about Luther's theses without bringing up Servetus, or Castellio's impassioned plea to Calvin to understand that "I must be saved or lost by my own personal faith, not by that of another"?

In addition, we're followers of the Well-Trained Mind method, which means that we study history in three four-year stages. My kids are all still in grammar stage, which is mostly about getting them interested in the exciting, colorful narrative of history. In the Logic stage (5th-8th grade), we're supposed to include primary sources (first person accounts, documents, artifacts) wherever possible. The WTM boards are conspicuously silent on this topic. A search will generally result in a handful of threads bemoaning the expense of Jackdaws, and insisting that all primary sources can be found using Google (true, but somewhat lacking in authentic feel). The usual avalanche of threads about implementation is missing entirely. Worried that figuring out how to do this on my own would be a slow process, I decided to whet the kids' appetites early, and gain some experience tracking down resources in the process. It's worked out really well. Reading about George Washington or Catherine the Great is one thing. Reading their own words, in small doses, personalizes the experience for my kids.

Copywork is a pretty easy place to begin integrating all of this. For those who don't know, copywork is, on one level, simply handwriting practice. However, instead of the handwriting workbooks you probably remember, in which we wrote various random words and sentences, copywork is a series of quotes or poems generally chosen for their beautiful language, religious or historical significance, or general usefulness to the child. As children grow older, copybooks become personal journals in which they write down quotes they have read and wish to remember.

Basic handwriting fontware such as Educational Fontware makes it easy to create your own copywork for your children. I use Word, and can make blank lines to be filled in, or dotted letters to be traced. If anyone would like a look at the copybooks I've made over the past two years, I'm happy to put them up on Google docs. Tracking down the quotes is, of course, the most time-consuming part of the process. Internet searches, done carefully and verified, are very useful. The Library of Congress has scanned documents in an eReader format, which was fantastically useful this year. I included several quotes from George Washington's personal correspondence in our 2009-2010 copybook. I also request books from the library. I also pull source material from the library. There are actually quite a few books of primary source materials for kids.

Here's a longer passage my kids are about to begin, which will take them several days:

"The chests were then opened, the tea emptied over the side, and the chests thrown overboard. Perfect regularity prevailed during the whole transaction. Although there were many people on the wharf, entire silence prevailed -- no clamor, no talking. Nothing was meddled with but the teas on board."
-Robert Sessions, participant, on the Boston Tea Party.

(Will will copy something of this length. Posy will simply trace dotted letters. We read and discuss each quote.)

This year (Early Modern), I've included excerpts from Abigail Adams's "Remember the Ladies" letter, written to her husband. I also tracked down an epitaph written on a monument dedicated to our ancestor, who was murdered by Tories for his revolutionary activities. I contrasted the writings of Christopher Columbus with those of Bartholomew de las Casas. My favorite passage this year came from a letter written by Abraham Lincoln's law partner in which he states that the phrase, "of the people, by the people, for the people" was culled by Lincoln from the sermons of Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker. (Herndon himself brought copies of the sermons to Lincoln, and saw him mark the passage.)

My hope is that doing this sort of activity will place my children inside the bubble of each historical event. I hope that it will cultivate in them a belief in the importance of primary sources when studying history. And I hope that it will imbue them with the sense that they and the historical figures whose words they read are members of a community of writers, whose words are connected by years into a narrative fabric of human experience.

Next time, DIY Part Two, or, Why I Never List A Reading Curriculum

Aw, Thanks

2010-03-02T18:10:00.001-08:00

Smrt Mama over at Smrt Lernins gave me a Beautiful Blogger Award. Her dry humor quickly found a place on my regular reading list, and I guess she must head over here sometimes, too, although with all these ATL mamas blogging, I can't be sure. The mutual admiration society will now come to order! Thank you, Smrt Mama.

Here are rules to accepting the nomination:

1. Thank the person who nominated you
2. Copy the award and paste it on your blog
3. Link to the person who nominated you for the award
4. List 7 interesting things about yourself
5. Nominate 7 beautiful bloggers

So, that would leave me with numbers 4. and 5. left to do, right? Seven interesting things about me...

1. In a previous incarnation, I worked with emotionally disturbed children. ED kids yell great stuff. Some of my favorites included: "F*ckin' sammich!", "GRAAAAAND CAAAANYON!" and "Wanka wanka!" (a tiny person used this sound effect when he very unexpected honked my friend-who-will-not-be-named's breasts). This may possibly give you insight into my completely warped sense of humor.
2. Left to my own devices (by the children), I would still read more YA lit than I would read fiction for grownups.
3. I like sentence diagramming.
4. I have unlucky ancestors. I appear to be related to one man who was beheaded for being a Calvinist, another who was born on board the ship carrying his mother to America, and another who was killed because his attackers mistook him for his son.
5. I have watched four episodes of Supernanny (including the Supermanny special) this week b/c of that thread on WTM.
6. I put crushed red peppers or tabasco sauce on almost everything I eat. I like those dark chocolate bars with peppers in them. I have been known to sneak cayenne into brownie batter.
7. In high school, I took a career aptitude test that said I had evenly matched aptitude for teaching, the military, forestry, and catering. The life I am living right this minute completely explains those results.

Seven beautiful bloggers? That's easy, except I'm going to leave one beloved person out b/c I'm thinking her blog's not public right now.

1. Dogwood Forest Creek School
2. Losing Sheep Counting Sleep
3. Hecate's Academy
4. Rebel Kids Homeschool
5. Are You A Good Witch, Or A Bad Witch?
6. Handmade Homeschool
7. Everyday Unitarian

A Reply to Ariel Gore

2010-03-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

A recent New York Times review of Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project caught Ariel Gore's eye. I suspect that this is because Ariel's latest book, Bluebird: Women and the Psychology of Happiness, was lumped by the reviewer into Rubin's sub-genre of self-help books.

Ariel asked,

It's really so exactly like the Victorian good-wife manuals I read up on... I do not know what to say.

I mean, am I the only one who thinks this story is frightening? Or is it just like "Yeah. yeah, Ariel, go on a diet and maybe you'll understand."?

No, she's not the only one.

It's disturbing to see those two books mentioned in the same article. Ariel, the founder of hipMama, found the lever that controls the hydraulics on the motherhood pedestal early on. Since then, she's consistently celebrated the hard damn work of mothering our children, and the equally painful and transcendent process of growing into ourselves. The pedestal still exists, but I can see the top of it even on a bad day, and I regularly hear the hum of it descending to the accompaniment of, "...And another thing." Ariel (and many others) worked to cultivate a community of mothers, of activists, of writers that sustained me through the most difficult parts of early motherhood, and continues to do so to this day. Seeing Gretchen Rubin talk about gold stars and the best sellers list just frankly ticks me off. If those are her goals, that's nice for her. We all like gold stars. They're seductive. But they're not the point. At all.

This seems to me a simple case of selling hype over substance. It's disturbing, but not surprising, to realize that American women are being sold methods to achieve happiness by a member of the caste that led the way to, and now sits perched atop, the financial ruin of the last few years. As Gretchen Rubin herself has said, very few of the ideas contained in her book are new ones. She's simply rebranded them, and stands to profit from the rebranding. In the meantime, women who try to approximate her sunny demeanor and fail will most likely neglect to realize that the resources at her disposal are comparatively enormous. Rubin's first book, Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide, was a dishy look at the sorts of eccentricities the super-rich can afford to cultivate. A photo-essay/coffee table book called Profane Waste continues this line of exploration. It is, then, astonishing to me that Rubin could publish The Happiness Project with a straight face. A woman privileged enough to turn up on The Real Housewives of New York City telling us to keep our beds made? Surely this must be self-satire. As most middle-Americans could probably tell her, we know that Bravo's Housewives plan benefits to occupy themselves and be the cool kids in their peer group. It ain't all about distributing largesse. Lady Bountiful doesn't always leave us weeping with gratitude. Sometimes her myopy just plain pisses us off.

The Happiness Project did just what it was supposed to do: it had positive results for the author. However, it has the potential to do harm to women who fail to appreciate the irony of an extremely wealthy woman with hired help telling them that they just need to sing in the morning.

Have I Shilled For Anyone Lately?

2010-02-24T17:25:00.000-08:00

Here are some favorites of ours:

Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child

Seriously the best podcast ever. Well, the best kids' music podcast, anyway. How else would we learn about things like The World's Worst Dance Song (I'm a Utility Pole), or Velveeta Girl and Squatsy? Bill, Ella and Liam (dad and kids) are awesome hosts. We have seriously considered driving from NY to Amherst, Mass. to catch a live show. That's how much we love them. But the podcast is free.

Which Way To The Dragon! Poems for the Coming on Strong

You know if you have one. We have three.

Pretend Soup and Honest Pretzels

These are awesome books for beginning cooks. We've had them around for years, but Will is going through them like a house on fire. He's made Carrot Pennies, some kind of Pancake Puff, Pancakes, and a bunch of other things...and they've all been good! We just requested Salad People from the library, but haven't read it yet.

Cogs is a new obsession around here. It's basically a sliding tile game, but it has some physical science elements, since you are rearranging the tiles to make various inventions function. The game has a very steampunk look, with lots of gears and steam pipes...even some hot air balloons. You can buy it for the desktop, but it's only 99 cents as an iPod/iPhone app.

Brief Rant

2010-02-22T11:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Midwest Homeschool Convention,

Thank you SO much for offering a children's program at the convention. What a great resource for the "thousands of homeschoolers from 22 states" who plan to attend.

You know what would be even better? A program at which *all* children were welcome. Or at least, a program at which "welcome" was not followed by "to find Jesus".

Children’s Conferences International is coming to serve at the Midwest Homeschool Convention in Cincinnati! We are excited that your child(ren) will be joining us for “STAR PATROL”, where they will enjoy dramatized stories, singing, ventriloquism and scripture memory, all designed to strengthen their walk with God.

If there's one thing Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, UU, pagan, atheist, Quaker, agnostic or just-not-y'all's brand of Christian kids want, it's scripture delivered by puppets who want to strengthen their walk with God.

I know, I know. Demographics. Poo on it all anyway. PB doesn't want to skip the whole thing and go to the Newport Aquarium, he wants to be involved. It's going to be a blast not losing the four year old in the convention center, huh?

Harrius Potter is the Best Idea Ever!

2010-02-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

So, there has been much talk lately about the utility of teaching one's kids dead languages. It amuses me that this talk is taking place on a 15,000-member board devoted to classical homeschooling, but whatever. If it's genuinely important enough to do, it's debate-worthy.

Most classical homeschoolers do Latin, if they do a classical language. People who aren't planning on sticking with classical languages for the long haul seem to fall into several categories:

1. How Illogical! My kids don't need Latin/Greek to learn intellectual discipline, vocabulary, thinking skills and so on. They can do that in other ways, and besides, Spanish/Mandarin/Farsi is much more useful in today's world.

2. Cliff Notes: Sure, Latin and Greek teach us loads of roots of English and many other languages, but I can just do a root-based vocabulary program and get all that.

3. We Just Stopped By: Well, we'll do Latin/Greek for a while, but we'll drop it for modern languages before high school.

4. Latin, But There's A Limit, People! WTF? Why would you do Latin AND Greek?

Then, there are the Classicophiles.

I don't really know how to explain how we ended up in this category, other than to say that, when we started Latin and later, Greek, something clicked. We like them.

We like the way Latin sounds. We dig Roman history. We like noticing derivatives in our reading and conversation. We get a kick out of the Greek alphabet. Posy can read words transliterated into Greek as well as she can read English. It just makes sense to her. There's a mythology Renaissance going on around here thanks to the Percy Jackson books, and the kids keep noticing all the Latin J.K. Rowling cleverly wove throughout the Harry Potter series.

We plan to stick with it through High School. At the moment, my goal as Head-Magistra-In-Charge-Of-Curriculum is that each kid will read one major work in its original language each year, 9-12; the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Aeneid will top the list; the rest is less defined. Our Greek focus will be on works in Attic (ancient greek). Right now, we're doing Koine (biblical greek). No good Attic programs for elementary schoolers. Go figure.

This is not to say that no one wants to learn any modern languages. Will wants Mandarin eventually. Posy hasn't expressed a preference yet, but I've toyed with the idea of taking up Gaelic, Slovak (languages to which I am linked by family heritage), or even Arabic. After all, if I'm going to read Homeric hymns or the New Testament in Greek, why not read the Koran in Arabic? One thing about learning Greek and Latin: people make it sound so difficult that you end up feeling like you can do anything.

We come at it from various angles (though we do this best with Latin, since we started it first). That's why you'll read references here to text-based resources such as Song School Latin and Lively Latin (though both have audio components), immersion resources such as Rosetta Stone, and reading/translation based programs like Minimus. I see no reason to look down my nose at Winnie Ille Pu, or Harrius Potter, or even Virent Ova! Viret Perna! (Eggs that are green! Ham that is green!) They all look like great motivators to me. We like fun, and fun is good.

Greek...well, if anyone has a list of books translated into Koine that kids might like (other than the New Testament), that would be great. There's going to be a bit of a disconnect there, I think. But we're looking. We'll stick with it, though I'm ditching the Henle program I've been using. I love Latin. I hate Henle. So, if you've decided to throw in the towel, send me your Cambridge or Ecce Romani! Will work for Latin.

Ow.

2010-02-12T15:29:00.000-08:00

As I have posted elsewhere, if you can't get ahold of me right now, worry not. I have a scratched cornea, and thus I have restricted screen (and book) access. This is a terrible fate, but I'm OK. Aside from the fact that our new Greek came and my fingers are itching. Oh, and that I will be staggering around with only one contact in for the next two weeks because I haven't yet replaced the glasses my puppy ate this past autumn. Also that my one-eyed depth perception was just wonky enough to cause me to bang my side-view mirror on our gatepost and break off a piece of the plastic housing. Yeah. Fun times.

Would you like to hear how it happened? It's short and sweet. No really, it's sweet. Early Wednesday morning, Graeme woke up and called me. I went in to perform the usual mommy routine, in which I tuck him back in, kiss him, and tell him to sleep tight. His traditional, stream-of-consciousness answer, during which he is already mostly *un*conscious, is: "Goodnightsleeptightdon'tletthebedbugsbiteseeyouinthemorninglight." This time, however, he said, "Wait! I need to give you a hug and a kiss!" and reached for my neck...and missed. Ow.

When I later drew Will (Graeme's bunkmate) into another room to ask him, sotto voce, not to mention my injury in hopes that Graeme didn't remember what happened, s small voice piped up, "It's OK, Mommy. I know what happened. I know I poked you in the eye. I will give you a hug. But this time, I will be *very careful*."

It really is funny. I spend a fair amount of every day pleading with my children to be aware of where their pencil points are and to, for goodness' sake, stop waving them around. It absolutely figures that when I finally did get poked in the eye, it was a finger, and I literally never saw it coming.

What Passes For A Weekly Review Around Here

2010-02-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am reviewing last week this Tuesday. But I am soldiering on. Because sometimes this blog ends up being an amalgamation of windows into our lives rather than an actual, substantive blog.

Will:

The subject we spend the most time teaching Will is the art of Expeditiousness. Otherwise known as S*&t or Get Off the Pot (he needs to work on that, too). It comes and goes. Typically, he spends a lot of time villainizing me and any given assignment, then says, when he finally does it, "Wow, this is actually pretty interesting." Which causes me to make head-shaped depressions in our wall.

When he does work, we're having a lot of fun. Here's the type of thing Miquon asks you in 3rd grade, for those of you who are interested:

(8 x 10) + (8 x 4) = _____ + 32 = _____

4 x ____ + 4 x 5 = 4 x 105

I'm finding that their approach has resulted in lots of mental math, even though we didn't use the rods as much as we were supposed to. Will's also more flexible about breaking things down in more than one way. His approaches to problem solving sometimes surprise me, but he's very good at articulating his thought processes, and they make all kinds of sense. I think Miquon has done what we wanted: given him a flexible, intuitive approach to math. This week, they segued over to fractions and jumped immediately into both adding and multiplying them, in ways that illustrate the concept but don't require him to mess around with denominators quite yet. By the time he does need to, he'll have a firm grasp of why.

His writing is coming right along. He asked to alternate between CW models and making up original stories, so we've been doing that. Here's his original story for last week, which bodes to be the first in an installment (I blame this on WRVO):

One day a knight ran into the throne room and said, "The princess has been captured!" The kind quickly sent for the best knights in the kingdom and told them to find the princess. One went to a fire planet. The other went to a jungle planet, and the last went to an ice planet. None of them ever returned.

Three years later...

One day, a hero whose name was William heard that the princess had gone missing. He set about doing his task. He heard that a UFO had crashed in the marsh. He went to the marsh, got in the UFO and went to save the princess.

During our editing sessions, it has become clear that his spelling errors are frustrating him. so we've started using Spelling Power. So far, we like it. It's quick and easy to do, and reminds him of patterns he sees frequently in his reading but doesn't always recall when he's drafting a piece of writing.

I'm thinking about jettisoning CW next year entirely, and using Classical Rhetoric For the Modern Student to inform the assignments I give Will. I feel like CW provides a level of hand holding I don't actually need, without providing the higher level deconstruction of what we're doing that I want. Perhaps that's b/c we're still on an early level. Readers' thoughts are appreciated.

Will's starting to muck around with imperfect and future tense in Latin. He's settled into his Latin studies. No real news, but we're chugging along. Same with Greek. We're all working on memorizing the dipthongs right now, and reveling in the actual Greek vocabulary that begins at the end of Greek Alphabet Code Cracker. Our Elementary Greek workbooks came yesterday, but we're still waiting for the text and CD.

Both kids are immersed in the Liberty's Kids DVDs right now. They're sort of trippy to watch. Very hokey, typical DiC animation...but with people like Walter Cronkite and Michael Douglas doing the voices...and, notably, Sylvester Stallone playing Paul Revere. Yo, the British are comin'. I keep waiting for the horse to snap in half under him. The kids are enjoying it, though. Will's drawing the Boston Tea Party in his journal right now, in fact. What I'm hoping is that watching hokey cartoons will result in friendly familiarity with historical figures and events, and we'll then use that to dig through the HUGE pile of books downstairs. Every time we do Chinese history, we're supposed to drag out Long Is A Dragon, but when we do the Revolutionary War, wowee. We're the only people east of the Mississippi NOT getting snow this week, but it's snowing books.

I'm working on the first list of assigned silent reading Will has ever had. He's been reading The Great Fire by Monica Dickens aloud to us, and he's almost done. He's racing me through The Lightning Thief; not sure what will happen with that one. He bought a copy with holiday gift cards, but hadn't been reading it until I asked if I could. Then he grabbed it up and started devouring it.

Posy:

Girlfriend is tearing through ETC. She's partway through Book 3. Yesterday, she wrote the this in a small journal she keeps under her bed:

Im mising mi math

der diurey
i fwnd mi math
luv Rosey

She could easily read herself simple picture books at this point, but is insisting on reading things that look like chapter books...like Geronimo Stilton, which my friend Tami's daughter M. got us hooked on. We checked out a stack of them from the library yesterday, because Posy is very insistent that she has finished the one we got from T and M.

Miquon had her messing with long columns of numbers last week. Some carrying was required, but part of the point was to draw her attention to ways she could combine numbers in the column to make the addition easier. So, they'd give her this huge string of numbers, but within them would be a bunch of ways to make ten. I'm seeing progress in her mathematical thinking.

She's very good at translating simple Greek words. I love doing Greek with Posy.

We're...not behind on science, exactly. I'm demotivated. We have more experiments available to us than we could ever get through by next fall, so I'm not terribly stressed out about letting it take a backseat for a few weeks while we catch up on other things.

New Favorite Quote

2010-02-01T09:18:00.001-08:00

"Democratic education ought to mean, not the education which democrats like, but the education which will preserve democracy."

-Aristotle

For Will

2010-02-01T06:02:00.000-08:00

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Toying With Curricula

2010-01-27T10:16:00.000-08:00

If you are not a homeschooler, this post will bore you terribly. Just sayin'. If you *are* a homeschooler, however, I'm about to feed that jones of yours. Nothing like tax season to get the curriculum adrenaline pumping, is there?

There are three levels on which we're dealing with curricular spending right now.

First, we're finishing up Greek Code Cracker. After a lot of thought, we're going to transition over to Elementary Greek...for all three of us (me, Will and Posy). If I could find an Attic resource I thought I could realistically use with the kids, I'd do it, but it ain't happening. The pacing of Hey, Andrew looks like it would pose a problem for us, so I ruled that out. And Galore Park's Greek Prep does not appear to be coming out any time soon, though I'd snap it up in a heartbeat if it did, at least for me and Will.

Second, we tend to change things up in the summer. For example, we switch from Lively Latin to Minimus (this, at least, we already own). Minimus gives the kids a chance to read funny little Latin stories and do some applied translation. The characters and setting are also based around artifacts found at a Roman settlement in England called Vindolanda. There are frequent photographs of actual finds from the site, including writing samples.

This summer, I'm contemplating trying out RightStart's Abacus and accompanying materials. We're hoping to hold a book discussion group, possibly using Junior Great Books. I'd also like to do some activities about library skills and vetting resources, so we may be making some purchases from Upstart. The stuff we do diligently for the rest of the year tends to be more relaxed.

Only then do we arrive at purchasing for next fall.

Miquon will have run its course by then, so Will needs a new math program. Right now, I'm planning on using an amalgam of Singapore, Japanese math, and an online program that gets excellent reviews. Once I've got them all in hand, I'll determine which will be the spine, and which I'll use to supplement.

We love the Tin Man logic curriculum we're using this year, but there's only one year-long Tin Man curriculum at the moment. For next year, we'll use their Level 3 Enrichment packets and Logic Liftoff from Prufrock Press. I'm also hoping to use some mystery-style resources, one each for Will and Posy.

I'm also going to cop to having been seduced by the increasingly popular Michael Clay Thompson grammar materials. Not that we don't like Classical Writing: we do. However, I have this crazy idea that I can use MCT materials to inform the grammar portion of CW. So, we're going to try it and see what happens.

Next year is our Physics year for science. So far, I'm borrowing pretty liberally from patchfire's list:

Thames and Kosmos Physics Workshop
Delta's Science in a Nutshell: Sound Vibrations
TOPS's Electricity and Magnetism guides and materials
(I'm not going to mess with Delta's Water Physics...too much overlap with our Chemistry Nutshells. Also, I'm all ears if someone's got a better Color and Light suggestion).

Nope, still not done.

I need opinions about Artistic Pursuits.

Technically, Will is a fourth grader next year. So we'd use the first 4th-6th book with him, right? However, neither of the kids have done Book 2 of the K-3rd set yet. Or Book 3, for that matter. And I don't see a great artists course included in the 4th-6th materials, so I'm keeping Book 2 on the table, at least for the moment. I think both kids would like using it.

On the other hand, Posy does art in her sleep...or at least, in her bed. She made all four bedposts into people. Drew faces on them and dressed them up in her clothes. She draws and paints constantly. She builds things out of our recyclables. So, I think that I could put both kids into 4th-6th Book 1, and she'd be happy as a clam.

So, what do I do about this 2nd grade-4th grade divide? I don't really buy both K-3 Book 2 AND 4-6 Book 1, do I? Tell me I don't.

In the Margins

2010-01-26T07:49:00.000-08:00

Posy is an artist. She's constantly drawing, painting and crafting. Therefore, it should not be surprising that I frequently find "presents" in the margins of her work. Here are a few recent ones:

I am planning to use transfer paper and embroider some of her art onto things, per Soulemama's instructions. I could, like a friend of mine, get a tattoo instead, but I don't have enough skin for all the things she's drawn that I like!

Buggin'

2010-01-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

Well, the Food Drive was definitely the highlight of the week. Tuesday night, Posy got sick in the middle of Spiral Scouts (poor baby). (We were building bird feeders and houses, and they were awesome, but I'm not sure whose camera the pics are on...can't find them.) By Thursday, we thought we were out of the woods, but no such luck. At one a.m., Graeme woke us up, showing symptoms of the same stomach bug. He had a miserable night, but was such a sweetie-pie. Being sick was An Important Event, and he vowed to tell everyone he knew. He also thanked me for saving his life. Friday night it was my turn. Saturday night, Will's. Today, we are mostly better, but do not say one word about PB. He is at work, and we are all holding our breath.

All I can say is that I am so, so grateful we were sick in sequence, rather than concurrently. That was a huge blessing.

Between Graeme getting well and me getting sick, the (correct) yarn for my Shalom arrived, allowing me to put a new tool to the test.

This is my homemade swift!

(A few of the clips are misplaced in that photo, but oh, well.) I made this a couple of weeks ago, using webecca's directions. I didn't initially have all the supplies I needed, but when the kids (who were supposed to be in bed) realized what was going on, they cannibalized objects from around the house and had it (mostly) working within five minutes. They even fashioned a turntable out of legos, although it was pretty tipsy, and all agree the lazy susan ($5 at Target) works much better. Here it is in action:

Four of the clips connect the hangers to the basket/box, and the others keep the skein from sliding off the hangers. This worked very smoothly. I had two big balls of Cascade Eco Wool within a few minutes. Much, much easier than using chair backs. I felt fine until about 5 a.m. the following morning, so I made it through the second yoke of the collar. Hopefully the second time's a charm!

While Will and I were battling the bug this weekend, someone snapped a blurry photo of a "dollhouse" Graeme and Posy invented (the doll bed under the desk was made by their Grandad when I was a child):

And here is my sweet, sweet big boy, who is excellent recuperative company:

Where've You Been?

2010-01-18T12:20:00.000-08:00

I went over to look at my mom's friend's blog (we have loads in common...it's almost scary) and she had done one of these. It says I can facebook it, but my mom won't see it there, and she's the only person likely to be able to correct me on this:

visited 36 states (72%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Some of these are places I've been through, rather than visited. For example, I remember going to Four Corners, U.S.A., which puts me in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. I went to my mom's cousin's wedding when I was little, which puts me in Michigan. And I *think* I went through Connecticut on my way to Plymouth Village and Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts. But Arkansas is bugging me. Surely I must have been there at some point, right? It would be just plain silly if I hadn't...or mysterious. What dark secret dwells in Arkansas?

**AHA! I HAVE been to Arkansas! And four more states I didn't know about. Thanks, Mom!**

(And believe it or not, I do remember getting stuck on Pike's Peak. Wasn't that where we saw Prairie Dogs "all over the road"? )

Drive Day

2010-01-18T10:15:00.000-08:00

The kids and I left the house at 6:30 a.m. to go unlock our church for the Food Drive. It was, thankfully, much warmer out than last year. In fact, the mist was just as thick at noon as it was at dawn.

Thank you so much to everyone who donated and helped! We took over $1500 worth of food and clothing to the Food Bank of Greater Utica. Terry, Gwinnie and Ian, Malcolm, Kristin B., Diane S. and Bill G., thank you so much for hauling, sorting, cleaning up afterwards, and just generally being good company! Thanks to Linda for making up receipt forms for donors. Thanks to all the UU Utica members who, as always, are so supportive of service events, and thank you to the O.D. for running the story! We got about half of our donations as a direct result of the publicity.

Alas, in the process of remembering posterboard and having the kids lay out their winter gear the night before, I forgot to bring a camera. I am a lousy visual blogger. I need some mentoring, I think.

Weirdly, the kids did all their homeschooling assignments, which I'd brought in case of lulls, in record time. So we didn't even miss a day. I was not expecting that.

Now we're home, wet from a last minute romp in the snow. Will was dying to make grilled cheese sandwiches, and I was dying to let him. We're going to have a quiet afternoon...watching Shark Week on Netflix instant play.

Magical Powers

2010-01-14T11:53:00.000-08:00

Graeme is mighty. I know this because he frequently leaps into a room in dress-up regalia, fists in the air, yelling "Mighty!" like a dwarf straight out of Tolkien.

However, he also has other, more mysterious gifts.

In the lobby of the building where Posy takes ballet lessons, there is a set of three candy machines of the put-a-quarter-in-and-turn-the-knob variety. Affixed to one is a sign, which reads: "This machine is broken. Or at least, it will eat your money and not give you candy."

Graeme turns it compulsively every single week. We have discussed the unlikelihood of candy at great length, but he has persisted for a long, wearying time.

Then, a few weeks ago, he turned it and *plink*! One lone orange candy whisked down the chute and into his hand. He was terribly excited. I suspected it had a chequered past, but it was in his mouth before I could say anything.

The next week...*plink, plink*. Two. "I did it again!"

And this week? This week, our young hero cranked the knob, and a jackpot of skittles erupted from the machine. Far more than a quarter's worth.

Last night, Graeme was snuggling with his mama, and explaining the grand backstory of his latest pretend. Much of it had to do with magic. Suddenly, his eyes widened.

"And, Mom!" he exclaimed, "I HAVE magic! I make candy come out of the broken machine! *That's* my power!"

Volunteer On MLK Day 2010!

2010-01-11T10:27:00.000-08:00

You know you wanna! If you're a public schooler the kids are off, and if you homeschool, could there be a better reason to cancel your lessons than a service project? (Keep reading...)

Countdown to MLK Day - 220pxgreat free widgetsWidgetboxMore info

Head over to Serve.gov and plug in your zip code. Round here, we're having a Food Drive. We need one! After the holidays, donations start to peter out, and there's a whole lot of winter left. Last year, the Food Bank of Greater Utica had more volunteers than its director had ever seen on MLK Day! Let's maintain that high level of energy this year and bring in even more food, winter clothing and blankets!

Drop off food at UU Utica during office hours, or bring them on Sunday. Drop items off Monday morning between 7 a.m. and noon, or help us staff the site. Better yet, start a new drop at an additional location! Last year, two volunteers staffed a site on Clinton Green and brought a carload of great stuff to the Food Bank. Students at the local Sylvan Learning Center kicked in, as well. We'd love to have your help!

Neato

2010-01-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

I moved the "States and Capitals" page of Will's Mnemosyne binder to the "Daily" tab a while ago. He was excited about it, and although I asked him to start with about ten states, he redrew my pencil line to encompass more than twice that many. All this time, he's been refusing to recite them orally, and I knew I'd have to make an issue of it eventually in order to see how much he was remembering. Today he agreed to do a matching test if I drew it up. Guess what? He correctly identified the capitals of all twenty-six states he's been practicing.

That was a nice start to the day.

WRVO Strikes Again

2010-01-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

Will has been enthusing for days about an episode of the WRVO Playhouse about a red skeleton. I figured it must be something suspenseful, along the lines of The Shadow.

He just shanghaied both of his siblings and cued the program on his iPod Shuffle. The Red Skelton Show? Who knew variety shows appealed to eight-year-old boys?

We picked Juno up from her spaying this morning. She's resting on a comforter in the bathroom so that she won't race up and down the stairs. She was completely silent and docile until the moment I got her into the car, then proceeded to explode into affection so wild that her entire head lodged itself inside the neck of my shirt. Poor baby. We came back.

Her poor shaved belly is going to suffer on walks until the hair grows in again. Anyone got a simple pattern for a fleece dog sweater/jacket that will cover her tummy?

Update

2010-01-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

After much delay, we finally got an engineer's report and an estimate. The engineer wants us to build a whole new leach bed at a fair distance from the area where our dry well is now. This necessitates trucking in materials and using a front loader to move them to the appropriate location. The first quote we got was...wait for it...18,000 dollars.

This is the sort of information that literally just leaves one numb. That's about all I can say about it right now. We're looking into alternative systems (including ATUs and composting toilet systems) and grant/loan programs. Any information a reader might have would be gratefully accepted. We will plead with the codes officer for a scaled back recommendation. I mention it b/c it's a panicky background hum to everything we're doing just now.

Also, PB just survived a round of layoffs. We are exceeding grateful, but leery of how much his workload is likely to increase.

So, there's the bad news out of the way.

All the holiday gifts got done in the end. I'll post the knitted ones on Ravelry at some point, but not just now. Knitting is such a soothing and orderly thing to do when you're worried. I took a page out of Soulemama's book and cast on Shalom. I've been wanting an all-purpose olive green cardi for a long time, so I'm using Soulemama's modifications to add sleeves and eliminate body shaping. I'm enjoying the project (the rib is very dimensional and cool), but I'll have an odd fix to do. I couldn't figure out how to cast on mid-row without having these long, carried-on pieces of yarn. I tried knitting on, ripped it back, looked it up, did a cabled cast-on, ripped that back, turned the work and did a cabled cast-on on the other needle...nothing worked. At this point, I'm thinking I'll clamp the yarn with binder clips so it can't disappear into my sweater, cut it in the middle and splice the ends to scrap yarn to make them long enough to weave back in. If you're currently screaming, "Nooooooo!" at the screen in slo-mo, email me before I do it and tell me what to do instead.

Two wonderful, soul-sustaining gifts came my way over the holidays: a new, non-destructive sewing machine, and snowshoes. My young scouts are working on their Fiber Arts badge this year, so anticipate more projects. I absolutely love my machine.

I've been snowshoeing (I always end up typing showsnewing) with Juno so that we can still hit the hiking trails on our morning walks. I love being out in the snowy hush first thing in the morning (although some days it's too cold and dark and snowy to go). I can't figure out how to stay right of the cross-country ski tracks with a dog on a leash, though. Anyone have any tips?

We're still plugging along at everything, homeschool-wise. It's amazing how little there is to say when all the curricular resources are working out. There is not one thing I don't like. I wish oldest boy would drag his feet a little less. I'd like to use Spelling Power with him for a bit, and I'd like everyone to be doing Dance Mat Typing more regularly. That's it. Otherwise, everything is good. We made Greek Code Cracker last longer than I expected. When we're done, I expect to switch to Elementary Greek. (I probably mentioned Hey, Andrew before, but have changed my mind.) Posy's about done with Explode the Code 2. Will has been buzzing through Classical Writing Aesop, and I'd like to use it for one more year before switching to Homer, so I've started alternating models with weeks in which he composes original stories. Hes writing a pourquoi tale this week about why roosters crow (to scare off basilisks, of course).

Will is about finished with the second volume of Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles. I am loving having a chapter book reader! He loves to lean out of the bunk and tell me what page he's on, or what's happening. He reads to his siblings sometimes in the car.

Overall, if we can deal with the scary financial stuff, life is good.

And Now, the Down Side

2009-11-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

The septic tank won, after all. It's old. Super old, with a metal lid that is, as Randy the septic guy said, "like swiss cheese". I've got corrugated roofing over the hole, which is under our wooden entry deck, for now, but we have to put some kind of cap on it before it rains even if we are insanely optimistic about our ability to baby the tank through until spring...which we're not.

Then, there's the issue of replacing the tank. Which means excavating much of our front yard, yanking out three years worth of Mother's Day rosebushes (which were already replacements for the rosebushes I've left behind over the last eight years). Oh, and ripping out the deck. Which begs the question of whether we'll even be able to get something in place afterwards (we're racing the snow and ice) that allows us to use our main entry this winter.

Then there's the issue of Christmas.

I am so tired, y'all. We both work really hard, and I'm so, so grateful for all that we have...it's just that I find the sensation of treading water worrisome, and we've been treading water for a very long time. You know what I mean.

Love Our Latin

2009-11-17T08:17:00.000-08:00

Can I just take a second to say how much I like Lively Latin? Here are the things I dig:

•pdf format (Allowed to print multiple copies for single-household use.)
•Integrated Latin, Grammar, Roman History and Derivative Study
•Colorful format
•Nice balance: Reinforces concepts without too much busywork
•Downloadable mp3 vocabulary practice (Classical or Ecclesiastical), which went straight on my iPod and is used frequently in the car
•Online games

And then there's the Magistra's sense of humor:

Will, of course, chose to answer from the shark's point of view.

Monarch Life Cycle

2009-11-13T07:22:00.000-08:00

These are the Monarch Life Cycle notebooking pages the kids did today. I was blown away by how much Posy wrote!

Here's what she wrote:

The ckabrpilz aor on the milckweed.
The ckadrpiilrz or in the ckoon.
Naw the katapilrz or batrflis.

Translation:

The caterpillars are on the milkweed.
The caterpillars are in the cocoon. (She knows it's a chrysalis, but said she couldn't spell it.)
Now the caterpillars are butterflies.

I'm loving how much closer her approximations for "caterpillar" got each time.

Here's Will's. He was hoping that in-picture captioning would be sufficient, but I think Posy roused his pride a bit.

"Frst a egg. Then a katerpller, a chriselis and a buterfly. Wen ther katerpilers they et milkweed."

His spelling accuracy is slowly increasing. He is my perfectionist child, so I try not to mention it, lest he refuse to write anything he can't spell perfectly. It looks like one of two things will happen. Either his reading sight vocabulary and his spelling will overlap until they match, or he'll submit to Explode the Code 4/5/6 or Spelling Power and go through it very quickly. He was always anti-workbook, but he's a bit nonplussed by the fact that Posy's always dogging his heels!

Thank You, Monarch Fairy!

2009-11-13T05:40:00.000-08:00

In other news, guess what? (I know, two posts in a day, but this is really cool.)

A lovely, wonderful, amazing donor contacted me and offered to fund our participation in Monarchs in Space! Yesterday we got a very special overnighted package, which looked exactly like the one in this article.

Inside we found this:

Three of those containers are filled with Monarch caterpillar diet. The other two, the ones that are upside down, housed three tiny, third instar caterpillars each. They are miniscule, smaller than any we've ever found outside.

We're very lucky to be participating, as they were only looking for 20 classes to participate, and ended up getting hundreds of responses. In the end, over four hundred classrooms and homeschools are involved in this project. Because they didn't have enough rearing chambers for everyone, we followed their directions and made our own. Here is Posy using sandpaper to roughen the top of the chamber, to make it easier for the caterpillars to anchor themselves when they pupate. (Grammie, did you have any idea the gladware you sent the Halloween cookies in would serve such a lofty purpose?)

We used a hot glue gun to affix pill box compartments to hold the food, and a nectar feeder for later. We also poked many pinholes in the lid. Then came the tricky part...moving these extremely tiny beings to their new homes without injuring them. Here's Will, trying to encourage one of them onto a paintbrush.

The second batch:

Our primary group, all settled in (you'll want to click on this one):

Technically, we were supposed to move them in once we were sure they were fourth instar, but because I have a little guy who likes to get into things, discretion seemed the better part of valor. Because the caterpillars going on the shuttle are being housed in the dark for the last 90 hours before launch, our caterpillars are currently residing in our supply closet.

The one thing we still need to sort out is temperature. It's 60 degrees in the closet, which is warmer than some of the house, but the astronauts are keeping theirs at a controlled temperature of 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Ours will not develop on the same timetable if they're colder. We are thinking of constructing a raised apparatus to put the rearing chambers on, so we can put a heating pad below them on low without it coming into direct contact with the side of the chamber. We'll see. At the moment, we're just really excited to be involved.

Dear NaNo Widow(er)s

2009-11-13T05:20:00.001-08:00

I have been neglecting this blog in favor of NaNoWriMo. For those who have no clue what I'm talking about, that's National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words in the month of November. The widget on the top left-hand side of the blog shows my progress. I'm pleased so far, mostly because I'm on the downhill side of the mountain several days ahead of time. OTOH, I suspect if I'm not done by Thanksgiving, I'm in trouble, because my focus will of necessity shift to Solstice and Christmas gifts at that point. Still, from 12,500 to 25,000 was a struggle. Now that I'm over the hump, I seem to have enough potential scenes jotted down in my journal to round things out, although of course any 200+ page document written in a month is going to need heavy editing.

The kids are becoming weary of being warned to play quietly somewhere while I write, but they've been really good sports for two weeks, so I can't complain. Will in particular is fascinated. He hangs over the end of his bunk bed at night grilling me about the plot (which I have not shared), and occasionally tries to sneak a peek at the computer. If that's the reason for his sudden extreme cooperativeness with regard to Classical Writing, I'm all for it.

Actually, there is a youth site for NaNoWriMo, which you can access from the link above. There are three fantastic free guides available for kids interested in NaNo, and they're downloadable pdf files (even better), so if you're doing the Book Arts Bash or something similar with your homeschoolers, I suggest you take a look.

eRabbits

2009-11-11T10:13:00.000-08:00

Posy and I have an extremely stupid inside joke about rabbits. In fact, she tends to have rodents on the brain. She has a hilarious imaginary chipmunk language, and bursts into it without warning. Today, during a pause, she found a bag of pink pearl erasers. The next time I looked up, she'd done this:

Mad Bunny and Will's subsequent Evil Cat:

Bunnies of the World (during Geography)

Very Very Cool Thing

2009-11-04T15:52:00.001-08:00

I got this letter today. There is no way we can pull $46.95 out of the air by Friday, but as the head of a family of dedicated Monarch taggers, I am just drooling. I don't dare show the kids, but I thought some other reader might want to jump on this.

WANTED: Up to 20 schools (in the U.S., east of the Rocky Mountains) to follow the development of monarchs on the International Space Station.

We need to have you commit to this program by 5PM on Friday afternoon (November 6th) - sorry for the short notice! :-)

--------------------
Background
--------------------
The next Space Shuttle launch is scheduled for November 16th. Atlantis will carry three 4th instar monarch caterpillars to the International Space Station (ISS) in a small rearing chamber. This chamber will be placed in an incubator aboard the ISS where the developing monarchs will be monitored. Still and video cameras will continually capture images, which will be made available online.

We have prepared a text that outlines normal development of monarchs from the fourth instar until emergence as adults. This detailed text is written for adults and contains an extensive glossary. It is intended to provide the information teachers need to answer student questions and as a guide to the five major challenges monarchs face in the nearly weightless environment of the International Space Station.

--------------------
Participation
--------------------
If you would like your school or classroom to participate, please contact us at monarch@ku.edu before 5PM this Friday (November 6th).

Monarch Watch will send a special monarch larva kit to participating schools. The monarch kit costs $17.95 and the overnight shipping will be an additional $26 for a total of $43.95. BioServe Space Technologies will send participating classrooms a kit that includes a rearing chamber (similar to the one going into space) with instructions.

The kit consists of six 3rd instar larvae on artificial diet and additional cups of diet. Three larvae will be loaded into the rearing chamber. One of the cups with diet will be used to fill the feeding trays in the chamber you will receive from BioServe. The other cups of diet can be used to feed the remaining larvae until they are ready to add to the finishing cups. Additional instructions will be provided regarding these points.

If you participate in this program your students will be able to follow the shuttle mission to the space station and the development of the monarchs in space for at least two weeks.

The background materials, additional instructions, and relevant links will be available at www.monarchwatch.org

If you have any questions, please let us know!

Jim
-- Jim Lovett
Monarch Watch
http://monarchwatch.org

Halloween Ramp-Up

2009-10-30T15:34:00.001-07:00

Grey Day

2009-10-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

I am paying just enough attention to the world around me to know that Margaret Atwood is on Diane Rehm today (without Diane...hope she's not doing the upper respiratory thing again), and there's no Glee this week because of all you baseball fans. Meh.

Will and Po are in my room playing math drill games on the computer. One of them involves a medieval soundtrack and arrows enthusiastically *thwapping* targets, followed by dim cheering. Graeme is wearing Posy's old footie pajamas, and is interfering with the keyboard and mouse and generally being a nuisance to them. I have sadly fallen down on lapbooking for him, but he's very into his Kumon "Tracing" book just now, which means he's in much the same place Posy was at his age. She spent loads of quality time upside-down in the beanbag chair with a set of dry-erase alphabet cards. We lived in a tiny rental (Lancasterites can think of Diana H's old rental and get the general idea) at the time, so a stationary activity was a very good thing.

Greek enthusiasm temporarily created a sort of anti-Latin backlash around here: "What? It's not GREEK day? I hate Latin!" This seems to have mostly worn off, finally. And I can't help noticing that Will has accomplished more this fall than I've ever seen him do. He's also memorizing a portion of "Horatius", by Thomas Babington Macauley. It's pretty cool:

And nearer fast and nearer,
Doth the red whirlwind come;
And louder still and still more loud,
From underneath that rolling cloud,
Is heard the trumpet's war-note proud,
The trampling, and the hum.
And plainly and more plainly
Now through the gloom appears,
Far to left and far to right,
In broken gleams of dark-blue light,
The long array of helmets bright,
The long array of spears.

There's more, but we do our memory work bit by bit.

He's having an easier time than Posy and I. She hates Latin number words and Roman numerals, and is stuck on one lesson of Rosetta Stone as a result. I require 80% or better to move to the next lesson, with periodic review, but this one is bugging her so much that she has permission to go on as long as she practices it once a day. I hate the third declension, and can sympathize. Every time I sit down to do Latin, I wind up reviewing the third declension until some interruption (child, phone) ends my study time. For some reason, I am having trouble memorizing rules like:

But masculini generis are words in -os, -nis, -guis, and -cis, in -es (-itis) and ex (-icis); as neuter mark the -us (with -ris).

A great big part of me dislikes Henle for Latin Study. The text, answer key and grammar are all separate texts, so I'm constantly flipping back and forth in books too small to adequately hold open. It's driving me crazy. Unable to locate an option that would irritate me less, I'm sticking with it, at the moment. I'm excited to get ahold of Elementary Greek, though. It's much more user-friendly and incremental.

Answer me this: Why doesn't LibraryThing have an iPhone widget? LibraryThing, I love you, but look what I found:

Delicious Monster

Observe, LibraryThing. I can hold the books up to my webcam and they scan. iPod co-ordination! Boolean operators and self-categorizing shelves! Lending library features that coordinate with my address book! LOOK! I love you, but make me a better offer, guys, or I'm going to have to export my XML file and start seeing other...monsters. Hmm. I guess if none of them are named Edward, it's forgivable. Ooh, on that front, if you're on GoodReads, I will soon post my review of Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. Cause everyone needs another vampire book.

It's a grey day, and it's grocery day, so there's nothing much to eat around here. Irrationally, while I have no ideas for lunch, I want to make brownies. Then we can work on our Halloween costumes, and read some of these cool samurai books that need to go back to the library. (Our library books are usually in my goodreads widget in the sidebar, if you want to see.)

October Sum Up

2009-10-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

•PB started working on our unfinished back room. We're a good ways out from it being habitable, but it's exciting anyway.
•I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, which strikes me as sort of insane, but I'm still doing it.
•We're looking forward to Halloween and Samhain. On the Halloween front, we have a colonial-era skeleton, Nymphadora Tonks, and a knight. Samhain is always a time of deep renewal for us. I plan to shut off the phone and ignore distractions. And cook an amazing spread.
•I learned to butcher a chicken last week. Being an eighteen-year vegetarian, this is somewhat remarkable. As I contemplate the flinty sensation I experienced when I caught one of our layers eating an egg yesterday, I'm thinking it may be time to find out how some chicken soup goes down.
•The kids are thriving. I'm sort of bored with Miquon, but they both seem content. Probably because I'm letting them play too many math games online in the name of fact memorization. The more things work, the less I seem to have to say about them. I'm very content with our curriculum this year.
•One thing I'm NOT happy about is how little family chapter book reading we're doing. I attribute this to a busier than ever curriculum coupled with continued work outdoors. Hopefully the snow, when it flies, will provide some balance.
•Will was "caught reading" one of the Andrew Lang fairy books aloud to his siblings. He's moderately obsessed with the Roanoke colonists and wild for Picard's Enterprise. He has converted all of his Classical Writing assignments to analogous tales, finding this more interesting than plain old retelling. I'll post some eventually. They crack me up. He's very tall and never seems to have enough pants.
•Posy is doing crazy amounts of art, tangling her hair in the wind, and making up a chipmunk language. She's also very serious about her complex block constructions. The dog knocks them down (inadvertently) and Graeme does likewise (not inadvertently) and it's always a big crisis. Now she wants a camera so she can photograph them.
•Graeme is a sly, sword-wielding trickster. His response to any denial of his wishes is one of several variations on, "Oh, yes I can!" followed by immediate action. The dog is more obedient to my imperious three-year-old than to anyone else but me. He has also begun spiking his hair.

Nesting

2009-10-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

Now that fall classes are behind us, we have more time to do things around the homestead...and we need every minute! We did take time out to go to an enormous corn maze not far from here, and that was a blast. The rest of the weekend was spent weeding through years of moving boxes. I found a big tote full of sewing stash I'd forgotten about. PB finally caved in and agreed that we can press the library card catalog drawers into some kind of service instead of letting them languish in storage. He also quickly cobbled together a few shelves from scrap wood, and...we can finally fit (both) cars in the garage! That's no small deal in the land of snow and ice.

I'm feeling a relentless need to shut the garden down and tidy up the yard. Some of the small tasks that need doing now will be big hassles if we leave them until spring. Then there's the weather forecast...wet snow on the Tug Hill Plateau tomorrow. Nothing like a taste of winter to properly motivate...me. It was in that spirit that I hustled five lawn bags full of someone else's pine needles into my car on Saturday. Today I used them to mulch some of my front beds. I mowed about everything, including the paths through our meadows and woods. The kids came out and helped me pick broccoli and pull onions. I stripped (more) leaves off the brussels sprouts. I salvaged a bunch of only-slightly-frostbitten peppers and the last of the fennel, and ripped out most of the pepper and eggplant plants. I filled one of the big old Trader Joe's size canvas sacks with wild rosehips. Finally, I noticed that the dry beans were beginning to split their pods, so I filled two garbage bags with bean plants/pods, and I'll be shelling those tomorrow. This is *after* homeschooling all morning, my friends. I feel like a rock star. A rock star in need of a shower, but still.

We've been watching Colonial House, and we finished that today. We liked it, with some caveats. I wasn't really expecting to relate best to the Southern Baptist family, but I found myself frustrated with several participants' failure to fully embrace the experiment. Grandstanding about one's refusal to attend the Sunday sabbath service when we all know perfectly well that:

A. It was much more liberal in tone than actual colonial services were
B. Observing the Sabbath was an integral part of colonial life

struck me as self-serving and disingenuous. Likewise slacking off on work. Knowing you aren't actually going to be there in the winter to starve is nice, and all, but *embrace the experience*! We have a lot of commitments that conspire to keep us out of our garden, and the kids were still shaking their heads at all the slacking, which was quite deliberate and frankly celebrated. I'm hoping Frontier House will be less frustrating in that regard (they did have to build their own houses for that one, right?)

One last interesting piece of news...a trait that's often mentioned with regard to English Shepherds is that they're good at rodent control. As we live in an old farmhouse, this was an attractive quality, but we weren't sure if Juno's mama had provided any instruction, and didn't know how to encourage her. No need. She rooted out at least three nests of field mice and voles in the garden today...and ate them right up. I felt a tiny bit guilty, until I thought about all those rodents trying to move into our garage, house and barn when the snow flies. Good dog.

A Matter of Perspective

2009-10-09T19:18:00.000-07:00

Graeme came into the kitchen tonight to chat with me while I did dishes. As we finished up, I told him to get his toothbrush, because it was time for bed.

"No!" he exclaimed. "I can't go to bed! Will talks to me all the time. He just won't quit bugging me. I won't be able to sleep."

My recollection being somewhat different, I said, "That doesn't sound right to me. You're the one I hear singing in there at night."

"No! No! I will show you! Come here!"

Being elbow deep in suds at that moment, I declined.

"That's OK. I think...(runs to kitchen doorway, apparently judging the acoustics) Yeah! You can hear it from here." (Sound of feet pattering down the hallway to the family room, where Will is immersed in an episode of The Seeker.)

"Will, say something! Will, talk to me! Will, talk to me right now...Talk! Talk! Talk! Talk! Talk! Talk! Talk!"

"Graeme, STOP IT!"

"See mom, he did it! That's what he does! He says that all the time!"

A Slightly Less Important Reason...

2009-10-03T13:59:00.000-07:00

...to learn Latin.

When I was in high school, I used a vocabulary text that's probably recognizable to many readers. It's called Sadlier-Oxford Vocabulary Workshop, and it's probably the most commonly used vocabulary text in the country, although grammar and vocabulary are increasingly ignored at the high school level, as my SAT students attest.

My senior year, one of my vocabulary words was "defenestrate". Here is a quick demonstration:

Of course I remembered it forever.

Then, when I began Latin with Will and Rosy, one of the first words that came up was fenestra (window). "Guess how you're going to remember this one?" I cackled.

Two weeks ago, I helped a student who comes in for individual PSAT prep with a history essay. The next week, he brought me two questions he'd been unsure of on an AP Euro test, and we discussed them. "But you know what was really ridiculous?" he said, "The Defenestrations of Prague!"

Hmmm. Methinks American History and "World Cultures" provided me with an insufficient knowledge of European history. Thanks, Shawnee H.S.. In case you too, dear reader, are scratching your head, here are two different explanations, both presented by the excellent students in modern-day AP Euro classes. Their teachers apparently inflict this assignment on them quite often.

First, a description of the second defenestration, which was not quite so fatal as the first:

Next, an alternate telling, highly suspect, starring Sailor Moon in a bad mood, and featuring stop-animation:

Only now do I fully appreciate the genuine foresight Sadlier-Oxford employed when they insisted that I understand how to properly defenestrate. Thankfully, SOTW 3 covers the Thirty Years' War, and specifically mentions the Defenestrations of Prague. I'm so relieved that Latin will enable my children to comprehend the...gravity...of this event.

Chatty

2009-10-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

I finally cut everybody's hair. It looked like I'd been shearing sheep around here. Crazy. Graeme asked for a change. First he wanted his hair "like Captain Janeway's!" Which begged the question...chin length?

Or "Bun of Steel"?

Several unnamed persons expressed gratitude that he hadn't asked for a "Picard cut":

But in the end, he most wanted to be like his big brother, so we went with this:

Spring and autumn are always busy seasons here. I teach an SAT prep class twice a year, which takes up most of Sunday. Right now, I'm running straight from my RE class to that. I also tutor on Saturday mornings, so there goes most of the weekend. Between that and homeschooling on the weekdays, it's hard to get the garden shut down for the winter, but we're working on it. Once the deer start just crashing through the deer fence, it's all over but the shouting.

We're still getting beautiful broccoli. We finally found the solution to our ongoing groundhog problem, which was to build an entire box of deer mesh around the broccoli row, and hold it down with rocks and stakes along the bottom. The brussels sprouts are in there too, and they look good. I've put many bags of chard and eggplant into the freezer, and will bring in the rest of the spaghetti squash this weekend. I need to plant garlic, and mulch the leeks with straw. We didn't have the funds to do any cover cropping this year, so I'm planning to drag this year's compost, all the leaves I can come up with, and the straw from an upcoming fall clean-out of the barn out there and see what I can do.

I also repainted Posy's bedroom, which was what she wanted for her birthday. Ordinarily, I like bright primary colors, and so does she, but various walls/slopes were yellow, red and purplish-blue, and it just made it way too clear where the room began and ended (it's a tiny room with no closet). It feels like it just about doubled in size. Now I just need to make curtains! The before pic was taken when we originally looked at the house, so nothing is ours but the walls.

Before:

After:

We finally got to devote a substantial amount of time to history. We sorely needed it. We're just about "caught up" to where I'd intended to be by now. Despite the fact that we're reading about the founding of Jamestown Colony, we also watched most of Elizabeth: The Golden Age yesterday. (We had to skip a few parts, but not as many as I'd remembered...I think I'd made it out in my head to be comparable to Cate Blanchett's earlier role in Elizabeth, but it's much tamer.) We are Queen Elizabeth junkies at our house. The kids loved the scene where she rides out in armour and announces to her troops that she has decided to live or die among them.

Fall is dedicated soup season at our house, so I've had one pot or another on the stove all week. Curried Butternut Squash Soup on Tuesday, Squash and Corn Chowder yesterday, and most likely Potato Leek Soup today or tomorrow. I also found another breakfast winner:

Apple Oatmeal Upside-Down Cake

3/4 c. rolled oats
3/4 c. buttermilk (although yogurt, sour cream or juice would do, as well)
2 T. oil (optional)
2 eggs
1 T. butter, melted
1 c. brown sugar
1 large Granny Smith apple, peeled and sliced in rounds
1 1/4 c. whole wheat flour
1 t. baking soda
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ground cloves
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. nutmeg

•Preheat oven to 350.
•Combine oats, buttermilk and oil in a small bowl. Let sit for 10 minutes. Stir in egg.
•Pour butter in the bottom of a greased 9 inch cake pan. Sprinkle with 1/4 c. sugar. Arrange the apple slices in a single layer on top of the sugar.
•Blend flour, remaining 3/4 c. sugar, soda, salt and spices in a large bowl. Use a pastry cutter or fork to break up any lumps of brown sugar. Add oat and buttermilk mixture. Stir until moist. Pour batter into pan.
•Bake for 30 minutes or until a butter knife inserted in center comes out clean. Cool *in the pan* for ten minutes. Place a plate upside down on top of cake and invert cake onto plate. Cut into wedges.

We've had this twice this week. It's a quick hot breakfast.

Life has pulled us out of our routine (and our home) more often than not lately, so I'm enjoying being a homebody when I can.

Things I Love So Far

2009-09-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Love it or leave it threads are common on homeschooling boards at this time of year. There are so many curricula to try, and we get most of our information through personal reviews. I can't honestly say I dislike anything we've chosen for this year, but here are the big wins so far:

•Artistic Pursuits - In the past, I've used Discovering the Masters. I love this book for several reasons. It gives children a personal connection to each artist, it exposes them to many different mediums, it doesn't dumb things down...it's superior to our local art classes, and that's a fact. However, over time I found that:

A. I kept needing materials during tight financial periods
B. I didn't feel like we were hitting the basics such as composition, line and form
C. It's only one book: it doesn't last forever
D. I have trouble coordinating library art books requests with the windows in which I actually need the books.

Artistic Pursuits doesn't require an inordinate amount of supplies, but the authors are fairly specific about quality/brand.

The curriculum extends through Sr. High.

It's very, very plug and play, while covering everything I want to cover.

There are full-color art prints (smallish, but big enough) integrated into each lesson.

In addition, I feel like they've made some smart choices. I was dubious about the use of watercolor crayons, mostly because Waldorfy preschool mamas like I've traditionally been introduce quality watercolors early on...but when I look at what the kids are being asked to do, I think the crayons give them a lot of control and minimize frustration. We all love this curriculum.

•Delta Science In A Nutshell - I *have* actually used this program before, in a classroom. I used their ocean science materials and loved them. I chose them this year because I liked the RS4K Chemistry texts, but they're short, and the experiments are perhaps oversimplified. I could see we'd be done by Thanksgiving, and then what? I bought the Investigating Matter cluster, and it was pricey for homeschool materials (for me, I mean, not compared to, say, Winterpromise), but worth every cent. We will easily fill the year without completing every experiment. We've got ALL the materials we need and some to spare, with the exception of very basic household materials, like paper towels or cabbage. They've even included things like drinking straws, string, masking tape and baking soda. There are also applied assessments for each of the units included (Liquids, Gases, Solids and Physical and Chemical Changes). The child works through an experiment correctly, and records and explains his or her results. There's a list of remediation activities in case the child has trouble performing the assessment activity.

My only two complaints (and they're minor) are as follows:

•Send us separate student log pages, or at least put all of them at the back of the book, so we can easily remove them and take them to a print shop for copying/binding. I am using generic notebooking pages for most activities instead, just because they're easier for me to get to.

•It's *almost* too much information to take in. I had to go through the book several times to make sense of everything, and I've ended up drawing up my own schedule for the experiments, as some of the nutshells repeat concepts. (A cluster is basically 4-6 stand-alone nutshells slapped together in one book/bin.) If anyone would like to see my schedule, I'll slap it up in Google docs and post a link.

I will use this resource again as we finish up our first four year rotation and begin our second; however, their Physical Science nutshells offer so many options...if I had to pick right now, I'd be stumped. There are also other good programs out there using toys to teach physics, and I want to look into those. I will definitely use Delta Nutshells for our next Life Science rotation, though I won't choose the Living Things cluster, which looks pretty basic for any but the youngest homeschooling students. (Observing earthworms, parts of plants). I'll most likely try Microworlds, Ponds and Streams, Oceans Alive! and parts of the Human Body Cluster, coupled with a Nature Study course. For Earth Science, it depends what you've done. Unless it's your first rotation, many families will already have done the rock cycle and weather to death. We've also done lots of work with fossils every year, due to Will's strong interest. For us, the most useful Earth Science nutshells would be Breaking Earth's Hold, Oceans In Motion, Planets and Stars, Soil Studies and Weather Wise.

Are They Thinking? by Tin Man Press and Greek Code Cracker by Classical Academic Press are also both big hits. The mystery solving-format of GCC is very entertaining, and the visual puzzles in Are They Thinking? have me breathing a sigh of relief. They're a much better fit for Posy, and Will could use a little more whimsy in his life. Will and Po are doing both subjects as a team, and I think it helps them to appreciate and rely on each other's strengths.

Have you written a "love it or leave it" post lately? Put the link in a comment!

Miss Sophie

2009-09-24T05:20:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I posted a link to this blog post on my facebook page. It's a terrific editorial piece, although it seems strange to call it that when the author is writing about her daughter.

I've followed along for years as this family struggled through the healthcare system in an effort to protect and heal their child. Sophie's an amazing kid, but what really smacks you right in the face is the sense of familiarity. Show me someone who's never had to spend hours on the phone debating what seems to be the almost automatic rejection of their healthcare claims, and I'll show you someone who has never, ever been sick. Frankly, even with really "good" insurance, teacher insurance, I've had to call and argue about simple things like childhood vaccinations. I've had to fight to get low-intervention, inexpensive, non-hospital births covered. Imagine having a child who is chronically, seriously ill. Imagine the amount of loophole dodging, brick wall head-beating, and just plain dogged persistence you would have to engage in to get one serious claim through, even if your child was covered on your insurance.

Tonight, at 9 p.m. EST, PBS is airing a special report on healthcare reform. Sophie is featured. I'll be tuning in, and I hope you'll do so as well.

And, in a special aside to those of you who signed me up for Tea Party spam-mail (you know who you are), I'd just like to say shame on you. I'm not going to even entertain the possibility that you're a bunch of conservative atheists, so out of Christian charity, you can sit your angry butts down for an hour and a half and watch this show. I've been a good sport and read (most of the) emails; it's the least you can do.

*And yes, I stand by that last statement. There are plenty of politically and religiously conservative folks whose motives I trust, and they would have told me they were signing me up for those emails, and asked to debate about it later.*

New This Week

2009-09-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

•Three extra kids at our house Saturday-Friday
•Delivery men
•Minor household demolition
•More delivery men
•Paranoid SAT students
•Emails that breed like rabbits
•Dogs and cats, living together...

Mass hysteria!

No, not really, not that last one. But we did have a birthday party for a suddenly six year old girl, and a follow-up party for the poor, deprived cat. I discovered, to my chagrin, that I like Writing With Ease, and Rightstart Math. I don't need any more curricula to like! Oh, and I now have a bed that's taller than me. Which isn't actually saying all that much (see how I beat you to the short joke?), but that's OK. I have a busy weekend, a Mike's Hard in one hand, and a new episode of Top Chef from my friend, iTunes, so I'm going to go use my iPod for non-homeschooling purposes, and I'll talk to you good people on Monday, by which time I'll know if I'm a flop as an RE teacher or not.

*mwah*
Saille.

Privacy and Responsibility

2009-09-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

The new UU World arrived this week, and in it I found an article entitled, "Reach Out To Become A Public Church", by Michael Durall. This topic excites me. I see Unitarian Universalism as a voice of transcendence in a world of religious polarization. I see it as an enduring and ever more urgently needed movement. However, as I read the article I found that Mr. Durall and I began to part ways. Here's the quote that caught my attention:

I believe that many of Unitarian Universalism’s perceived strengths are in actuality its most significant liabilities. Murry’s phrase “private sphere” is an excellent example of a perceived UU strength that is actually a liability. The fourth Unitarian Universalist Principle, “A free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” is the quintessential private spirituality and may be detrimental to future growth.

As our Spirit Play teacher would say, "I wonder if a free and responsible search for truth and meaning equals private spirituality?"

It has been said that no man is free until all men are free. Lila Watson is more specific: "If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time…But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." For me, this has always been the subtext to the "free and responsible search for truth and meaning". I have never seen it as an act that occurred in seclusion, or one that was self-centered. I would argue that joining a faith community belies the desire for one's search to be entirely private, and that truth is not always cerebral in nature. We can come to truth in messy, physical, hands-on ways.

Further, I believe that the "free and responsible search for truth and meaning" is the reason why social action and Unitarian Universalism are so intimately connected. UU, for those who choose it, is the answer to the question, "What good is religion?" The embrace of this "chosen faith" necessarily leads to the question, "What good am I?" Action is the best answer to that question.

I agree whole-heartedly with the author's call to public service. My main reservation is that I've heard this particular type of call before, and I feel that it is based on a central misunderstanding. It's not that UUs don't reach out; it's that we reach in so many directions at once.

Pick up the newspaper, share fellowship after services, and you will find Unitarian Universalist fingers in just about every pie: political campaigns, healthcare reform, poverty and homelessness, the environment, animal rescue, social justice...for every cause in which I've taken an interest, there has been a contact person at my church.

The action the author is espousing, the action of a "public church", requires a community decision to focus on one cause. How does that occur? Is it that some communities are better at reaching consensus? Or is it simply that, in particular communities, a moment arrives in which one need, one cause, is undeniably urgent?

I understand the enthusiastic belief that we can move mountains, and I am likewise eager to see us do so. However, in this case, rather than asking, "Why aren't we doing something big?" the more important question is, "What big thing urgently needs doing?" The answer to that question could mobilize UUs on a far greater scale...as it has done before.

Yum!

2009-09-09T16:53:00.001-07:00

I think I've got my recipe for gingerbread muffins more or less perfected. Since I didn't do Muffin Tin Monday this week after all (we had company), I thought I'd post it instead. The baking soda and buttermilk prevent the bitterness sometimes found in all-baking-powder recipes.

Gingerbread Muffins

Preheat oven to 500. (Yes, really.)

2 c. flour (I use all whole wheat, but you can mix white and wheat)
1/2 c. sugar (I've found this necessary...YMMV)
1/2 t. salt
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. nutmeg
1/2 t. ginger

Blend these thoroughly in a bowl.

1 c. buttermilk
1/2 c. molasses
2 eggs
1/4 c. applesauce (or 1/2 stick of butter)

Whisk these ingredients together with a fork until the mixture has a uniform consistency.

Blend the wet and dry ingredients together until you can't find any dry flour. Use a light hand. Spoon batter into 12 prepared muffin cups. I use stoneware, so it's seasoned, but I like foil muffin papers when I'm in a hurry or baking for a potluck. Place muffin pan in the oven, close it, and immediately drop the temperature to 400. Resist the temptation to open the oven during baking. Muffins are done in 20 minutes or when a butter knife comes out clean.

Good spreads: Any kind of marmalade (apple ginger is my favorite), cream cheese.

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Community

2009-09-04T18:17:00.000-07:00

Football season has begun, leaving the kids and me on our own tonight. Because the dog had been deprived of both morning and evening walk, when I took her out I went further up the property than I'd otherwise have done, to a right-of-way, once a road, now forgotten unless specifically needed by farmers. I walked a little way up, stopped to let the deer clear out, and turned to look back down the hill. As I did, what I noticed most of all was how much I wished there was a small house just there, with a like-minded neighbor in it.

Perhaps the most basic fact about my life is that I'm eternally in transit. I'm thirty-five, and have never lived longer than six years in any one place. I've lived in twenty different homes, one for every one and three-quarters years I've spent on the planet. On one hand, this gives me intimate associations with Oklahoma prairies and the Pine Barrens, with the Ohio hills and the Ohio flatlands and barrier islands and the Adirondack mountains. On the other hand, it makes me feel rootless. I am forever starting over, dwelling in the future possible and trying not to mourn over what's left behind.

It gets tiring.

Leaving people behind is even harder, especially when you're a child. It's like having vanishing friends.

Starting over was one of the worst things about school, and it left me unable to deny the social stratification that takes place there. If you've been the new kid in class, you're intimately familiar with the cynical, calculating process of being appraised by various factions. I usually headed for the table with the most misfits. I felt safer there. Misfits have more refined social sensibilities, as a rule.

That didn't change as I reached adulthood. Misfits were interesting, original, and generally kinder. Normalcy and its drive toward self-perpetuation were exhausting.

Thankfully, unlike previous generations of misfits, I had the internet at my disposal to fill in the gaps. I was never without social discourse or intellectual challenge. It was always there for the finding. I owe all of those voices, the misfit mamas, the writer mamas, the homesteaders, the homeschoolers, my most earnest thanks.

The best local community, for me, was found in the small intimacies of life: shared meals, walking from place to place together, and later, sharing responsibility for our children, supporting the acts that fed and clothed and enriched our families.

It's harder to do at a remove. Fifteen minutes' worth of fuel can be an annoying obstacle.

I don't particularly want to live in a town, although I know it would simplify the finding of these things. I'm not prepared to abdicate the acts of growing our own food and raising our own eggs, of wandering wild places and gathering food no one tended at all. I'd like to do more of these things. I'd like to do them with greater skill.

But I'd like to have some company. I'd like the children to be able to run back and forth between houses. I'd like a weeding companion. I'd like the clatter of extra children in and out of my home. I'd like the flexibility and intimacy of sharing childcare with other deeply trusted adults. I'd like carrying over bread and books and produce without getting into my car.

Like so many dreams, there's such simplicity in the big picture, and such a devil in the details.

Sick

2009-09-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

Contracted something vaguely flu-like Monday night, though Dr. says she thinks it's not of the piggy variety. Low fever, chills, sore throat, nose...all the fun bonuses. I would hope it *was* the flu, and that we were just getting it out of the way early, except that we have out-of-town visitors. Hopefully I've got it mostly knocked, now. Managed to mostly homeschool anyway, but it has officially been little fun. We got a HUGE stack of library books today to re-ignite my ardor. See sidebar.

Muffin Tin Monday

2009-08-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

First week, remember?

I scored one of the silicone tins for not-too-much at Target over the weekend.

Below we have, of course, peanuts and popcorn. Then, we have two striped big tops, one of cheddar cheese (with lots more cheese underneath) and one of vanilla and strawberry yogurt. Top center is a hummus clown, and bottom center is full of crackers for dipping.

I did cheat and add a plate of apples for yogurt dipping.

Given that I tend to be a you-know-where-the-hummus-and-bowls-are kind of mama, it's actually fun to devote this much attention to being silly once in a while. And the kids unquestionably loved it.

Another thing making me happy...herb gardens do not get late blight. Take that, late blight! Pow, pow, pow!

Sunday Reading

2009-08-31T06:56:00.000-07:00

Normally I post the Sunday Reading on, well, Sunday, when it can be easily ignored by those who do not share my particular religious leanings. However, in the hustle and bustle of fall homeschooling, this seems appropriate for a wider audience.

You Be Glad At That Star

Several years ago and shortly after twilight our 3 1/2-year-old tried to gain his parents' attention to a shining star.

The parents were busy with time and schedules, the irritabilities of the day and other worthy preoccupations. "Yes, yes, we see the star -- now I'm busy, don't bother me." On hearing this the young one launched through the porch door, fixed us with a fiery gaze and said, "You be glad at that star!"

I will not forget the incident or his perfect words. It was one of those rare moments when you get everything you need for the good of your soul -- reprimand, disclosure and blessing. It was especially good for me, that surprising moment, because I am one who responds automatically and negatively to the usual exhortations to pause-and-be-more-appreciative-of-life-unquote. Fortunately, I was caught grandly off guard.

There is a notion, with some truth in it, that we cannot command joy, happiness, appreciation, fulfillment. We do not engineer the seasons of the soul or enjoin the quality of mood in another, and yet, I do believe there is right and wisdom in that imperative declaration -- you be glad at that star!

If we cannot impel ourselves into a stellar gladness, we can at least clean the dirt from the lens of our perception; if we cannot dictate our own fulfillment, we can at least steer in the right direction; if we cannot exact a guarantee for a more appreciative awareness of our world -- for persons and stars and breathing and tastes and the incalculable gift of every day -- we can at least prescribe some of the conditions through which an increased awareness is more likely to open up the skies, for us and for our children.

It is not always the great evils that obstruct and waylay our joy. It is our unnecessary and undignified surrender to the petty enemies: and I suggest it is our duty to scheme against them and make them subservient to human decree -- time and schedules, our irritabilities of the day, and other worthy preoccupations. Matters more subtle and humane should command our lives. You be glad at that star.

Fret not yourself, it tends only to evil.
Psalm 37:8

--Clarke Wells

Hoorah!

2009-08-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

I am so excited!

Our (tiny) branch library is wonderfully close to our house. I have always spent hours browsing and researching in libraries...however, since Graeme was such a danger-baby, while we've constantly *used* the library, we have not made a habit of hanging out there as a family. (The summer program is an exception, but it's busy and structured.) Over the last year or so, I've really felt a hole where that time ought to be. Deep down, I feel every child ought to have a casual familiarity with the library. You can't trip over unsuspected wonders if you don't have time to wander around. And, unfortunately, even as Graeme became more biddable, the library's hours were usually in the evenings, which are taken up by scouting, dance class, my part time job, and a variety of church meetings.

I realized recently that the summer hours seemed to have changed this year, and when I looked at their website...

Hallelujah! Honest to goodness daytime hours that align with our slated History time...three days a week! Since we spend a fair amount of our history time browsing through books we request from said library, this is doggone near perfect. Finally, we can come get our books, sack out, and read right there! (We can also immediately give back the books that don't seem useful.)

Do you homeschool at your library? Tell me about it.

Artistic Pursuits Week One

2009-08-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

Fridays we mix things up a bit. We don't do any of the seatwork we do on the other four days. Instead, we have longer science and art workshop kind of activities, and (hopefully) piano lessons in the afternoon, starting *next* week.

For science, we spent time going through all the cool supplies in our Delta Science-in-a-Nutshell Cluster, and talking about safety. We didn't look much at our RS4K Chemistry books, but then, Will's been reading the PreLevel all summer. It was in his room this morning, in point of fact, although I know I stole it back late last week. Then we read How To Think Like A Scientist, which is a fantastic book. I wish I'd had it years ago.

Browse Inside this book

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Our first week of Artistic Pursuits involved composition and charcoal drawing. These were the kids' favorites:

Will's (a village ringed with mountains, at sunrise):

Posy's (a house by the ocean in Florida):

Mama's (Guess who?):

In The Name of Fun

2009-08-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

One comment I've heard from quite a few people over the years is, "Oh, I could never homeschool. There's no way my kid would listen to me."

Because my oldest tends to catastrophize when he's processing a new situation, I've certainly had my share of "He would never do this to a public school teacher" moments. We get through it. Each time Will has struggled with something, we've come out the other side, one way or another. Over time, we've developed a bond of trust that means much more to me than the automatic authority I was tendered as the grown-up at the front of the classroom.

Still, homeschooling is one more area (and it's a big one) in which the buck stops with mom.

Then there's the fact that my house and garden are my full-time workplace. I have trouble remembering about that laid-back weekend mentality.

Now, add in extra-curricular activities. PB and I are both leaders of our kids' co-ed scouting group. We've volunteered, over the years, in the church nursery, RE classes, and church camp. I would rather support these activities with my time than have them be unavailable, but I find that I have to make concerted efforts within my community to assert that my kids need mentors besides me and PB, and to choose to work with age groups my children aren't currently in.

This year, I've added an additional goal. Fun.

Sounds obvious, right? And I do think a lot of the things we do ARE fun. But if you ever had a mom who was the scout leader, you remember the flurry of preparation behind the scenes. You remember the harried mama who was just trying to get there with all her kids and the required materials. The activities were fun. Mama, sometimes not so much.

Two fun things I'm starting up involve food.

First, I've been surprising them with hot breakfasts. We're usually cereal/bagel/yogurt monkeys around here on the weekdays. However, I now get up to walk the dog before PB leaves for work (much earlier than I was doing). And this year, we've set our instructional schedule to begin at nine. Which means that I now have a nice big window between the two. Some of that is spent chasing people around with hairbrushes, but there's plenty of time to throw muffins in the oven, or make breakfast burritos. If someone pulls an early bird, s/he can help me cook.

The other thing I've decided to try is Muffin Tin Mondays. I admit to being a sucker for the gimmicky ideas homeschoolers come up with to enliven certain days of the week. I dig weekly blog open house, though I've lapsed. I get a kick out of Wordless Wednesdays. Did someone add a poetry day? I can't remember. At any rate, the idea with Muffin Tin Mondays is to make a snacky lunch (something me and 'Nother Mommy used to do anyway, back in the days of constant playdates), and put each component into a different cup of a six cup muffin tin to serve it. Sometimes there's a theme, sometimes not. Some people are using those colorful silicone muffin tins. (There appear to be silicone muffin "papers" now, too?) I've had reservations about actually cooking in these, but I can see how they'd be fun serving dishes. This is the kind of thing my kids have always loved. They saw a post about it on Blog, She Wrote and got really excited, so I'm on the hunt for cheapo six-cup tins this weekend, and we'll try it on Monday.

Lastly, although it's not new, as such, I'm going to keep the afternoon sewing/crafting we started last year. Will and Posy have both advanced their sewing skills, and they love doing it. I'm hoping to have actual knitters by the end of this year. We're also going to spend some time on Handmade Homeschool picking things we'd like to try.

What do you do with your kids for fun?

Library Elf

2009-08-25T05:54:00.000-07:00

If you use the MidYork Library System, would you consider asking Library Elf to add them? Send them the name of the system and the MidYork website link here. Provided my local branch actually does go computerized in the near future, this would make my life SO much easier.

Grassroots Homeschool

First UU of Rochester 's Amazing Viral Video

Curriculum 2011-2012

On "Parents, Don't Dress Your Girls Like Tramps"

Happy Birthday, Graeme!

Those Suspicious Homeschoolers

Requests and Offerings

Citizen Science

Next Year's Plans

Greek for Children Errata

Catch-Up Part One: The Day-to-Day

NaNoWriMo Victory Dance!!!

The Elusive Chutney

GoodReads for Homeschooling?

Review: Greek For Children

Good Finds: Between the Folds

Na-Na-Na-Na NaNo

I'm On Fire! (Wait, That's the Fever Talking...)

Why Do NaNoWriMo?

"Neutrality": Are Teachers Talking Back?

It's Not Neutrality; It's Negligence.

Weekly Review: Weeks Six and Seven

Why Did They Change the SAT?

Weekly Review: Week Five

Will's MCT Poems

Why Do Newark Schools Need Money?

Teachers in the Family?

Weekly Review: Weeks Three and Four

Weekly Review: Week Two

MCT Writing Sample

Weekly Review: Week One

Our Loop Schedule

Digging My Way Out

Getting Closer...

Reading List Decisions

Field Trip!

Flat Stanley

Handyman

Woes of the Head Librarian

Birding Help!

Not An Unschooler

We're Having Too Much Fun

RIP Mike

Scores

Duck!

Early Phonics

When Grammarphiles Get Silly

Sunday Reading

Mwahaha...A *Real* Curriculum Sale!

Teacher Appreciation Day

Homeschooling Economics

Math D'oh!

MidWest Conference

DIY Curriculum, Part Two

DIY Curriculum, Part One

Aw, Thanks

A Reply to Ariel Gore

Have I Shilled For Anyone Lately?

Brief Rant

Harrius Potter is the Best Idea Ever!

Ow.

What Passes For A Weekly Review Around Here

New Favorite Quote

For Will

Toying With Curricula

In the Margins

Buggin'

Where've You Been?

Drive Day

Magical Powers

Volunteer On MLK Day 2010!

Neato

WRVO Strikes Again

Update

And Now, the Down Side

Love Our Latin

Monarch Life Cycle

Thank You, Monarch Fairy!

Dear NaNo Widow(er)s

eRabbits

Mwahaha...A Real Curriculum Sale!