Work Plans for the Week of April 17, 2017: Climate, the Celts, and CAMPING!!!

We had just the kind of school week that we'd all been needing last week--a relaxed one! I'd planned on a three-day school week, but that evolved into a two-day week after some friends came around one day to hang out with us; the kids played freeze tag and did whatever else kids do, while the moms dug saplings out of my side garden (I know! What kind of friend just picks up a shovel and helps someone dig up saplings for an hour?!? A GOOD one!) and then bummed around the old dump out in the back of my woods looking for vintage bottles.

And then we ate cookie dough. Which my friend ALSO brought. You want her phone number now, don't you?

We also had a super relaxing Easter holiday, with, yes, the epic Easter clue hunt that the Easter bunny always sends the kids on (this year, they had a Caesar cipher to solve, and one of the clues was separated into five different eggs, all of which they had to find to solve it--mwa-ha-ha!), bunny-shaped cinnamon rolls for breakfast, egg-dyeing--

Have you ever drawn on hot eggs with crayons? It's really awesome, and easy to do when you've only just boiled your eggs because you're not prepared.

--cheese and crackers served picnic-style on our bed for lunch while we watched the black-and-white King Kong, during which I fell asleep and napped for two hours!!! (this is a huge accomplishment, because the sleep log in my Fitbit is normally a tragedy), some dad and daughter time working on Will's dog house, and then a kid and mom made Easter dinner--

These bunny rolls would have looked "better" if an adult had made them, but I wouldn't trade kid-made bunny rolls for the world!

Matt made us this cocktail, which was only okay--it would have been yummier with a frozen banana tossed in, I say!

--after which we all lay on my bed like slowly digesting slugs and watched the new Doctor Who.

So yes, it was a relaxing day!

So what if a few things that I'd wanted to do last week didn't get done. We're starting this week feeling relaxed and refreshed (at least I am!), and that's way better for our productivity... and, fine, our mental health... than getting all the things done last week would have been.

I do plan to get all the things done this week, even though it's also just a four-day school week, as on Friday, the kids and I will embark on a camping trip with our Girl Scout troop, leaving poor Matt home alone to walk the dog and work on the tree house, but mostly to play video games and eat giant sandwiches all weekend.

Our memory work for the week is the dreadfully slow-going list of common prepositions (these just will NOT stick in the children's heads!), the also slow-going and non-sticky list of helping verbs (although Syd has used this memorized knowledge recently, so I know it's sticking somewhat), the names of the Platonic solids, the names of Jesus' twelve apostles from the Christian Bible, and a review of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

Books of Day are mostly books on the Ancient Celts, fairy tales and a couple of factual books and one graphic novel retelling of Beowulf. Other daily work consists of one lesson a day in Junior Analytical Grammar for Syd, ten minutes a day journaling or writing from a story starter prompt (I'm going to see if the kids will actually write this in cursive for a change, to save them having to do cursive copywork separately, but if they "forget," then cursive copywork it will be!), typing practice on Typing.com,  progress on their MENSA reading lists (Will generally reads an entire book, while Syd usually reads a chapter in her current one), Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd, a Hoffman Academy lesson or keyboard practice for both kids, and for Will, SAT prep through Khan Academy.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Story of Science this week is again on Aristotle--he's quite the important guy! On this day, the kids will read the chapter in their textbook and answer the reading comprehension questions in their Quest Guide. We'll also be stargazing for 30 minutes every clear night this week, an activity that I bet we can also manage to do on our camping trip!

Will doesn't have grammar daily for a while, as she's finished her first season of Analytical Grammar and is instead working through 2-3 lessons a week in the Review and Reinforcement workbook. Once a week, then, I've been giving her the quick-and-easy logic reinforcement of a mind bender to complete. I do them with her, and Syd has been asking to do one, too, so I've been giving her one from the lower level book.

The table of symbols for the decanomial square is one activity that we played with friends last week instead of doing, so we'll do that today, instead. I'm eager to show the kids how to use the table, with the decanomial square manipulatives as illustrations, to make equations. I think this will make Will's Math Mammoth units this week on solving two-part equations make much more sense. Syd is still working on fraction calculations in her Math Mammoth, so I might have to pause her lessons for a more hands-on look at dividing fractions--I remember that I had to spend a long time on that unit with Will.

There is SO much to do to prepare for our weekend camping trip, from practicing with the tents (as this is a Girl Scout trip, the girls will be expected to do most of the jobs) to figuring out a group menu and buying the supplies and reminding myself how to work the EZ-Up that I'm going to use instead of a dining fly to printing out the Junior Ranger books that we'll be working on there to give the kids a head start. And I haven't even mentioned packing! We definitely need to be working on getting ready every day this week!

TUESDAY: The kids' request to study Medieval history is about to get a little more complicated, as Matt and I just this weekend re-ran the numbers for the billionth time, re-re-re-reviewed our budget, and then booked our summer vacation to Greece!!!!!!!!!!! MUCH more on that later,  but if you know me at all you know that I am physically incapable of taking my children on a vacation without making them study for it first, so next week will commence a unit study on Greece, whose history will have to play nicely with both the non-Greek bits of Story of Science but also ALL the Medieval bits of our medieval history study. I'm not willing to ditch a subject that the children requested, however, and Will has said that history and science are the *only* school subjects that she likes (sigh...), so they WILL place nicely together. I will MAKE them play nicely together.

That being said, we are going to do the Medieval history study a LOT more slowly than I had previously thought we would. I'd assumed we'd do a chapter a week in Story of the World volume 2, with a hands-on activity or project every day, likely, but this week we're only studying one third of chapter 2, specifically the material on the Ancient Celts. Even so, we're managing to spend three days of our four-day school week on the Celts, and we may do more with them next week. The Ancient Celts are just too interesting to zip past! On this day, the kids will read/listen to chapter 2 of Story of the World volume 2, and then do the reading comprehension questions from the activity book. We may or may not actually do the mapwork that covers the entire chapter--I've got more specific mapwork in mind for the Anglo-Saxons that we'll meet later in this chapter.

Even in this four-day school week, I can no longer put off the second science unit that the kids wanted to study, so we'll move slowly through that one, too. The text that we'll be starting with, Explore Weather and Climate, is a little simple, but I can increase the level of instruction during our lessons and with supplemental reading and viewing and projects. While the kids work on this fruit pizza climate zone map, for instance, we'll actually also be reviewing biomes, which we studied last summer. The further activities that we'll do next week will include more hands-on hard science.

WEDNESDAY: We HAVE to get this darn chili recipe made--for one thing, the meat that I've set aside for it will go bad if we don't! This is another Tuesday project from last week that hopefully will finally get done.

Perhaps it can be our celebratory dinner after we spend the evening LARPing. The kids LOVE it when we LARP for school--the best was World War 1 trench warfare, but we also made up an amazing Escape from Alcatraz game last summer during our California unit study. I forgot to blog about it because I didn't have any photos from this night-time game, but it was ridiculously fun, and terrifyingly nerve-wracking, so I'll tell you about it sometime if you're interested. Anyway, I wanted to think up some game of Ancient Celts vs. Roman soldiers, but couldn't come up with anything great that involved just four players (other than Capture the Flag, maybe, but the point of the activity is that the Roman soldiers should have too much territory to defend and the Celts should just be invaders, so Capture the Flag doesn't automatically work), so I've decided to make the kids do the planning instead of me. They'll have to come up with a LARP game whose rules fit with what we know happened between the Romans and Celts, and then, because neither of them would agree to being stripped to the waist, painted in woad (or blue clown makeup...), and having their hair gelled up in frightful spikes, I'll just let them do it to Daddy! He'll be a wonderful Celtic warrior! Of course, they'll have to do battle while wearing tunics, so they'll look pretty cute, too...

Syd has yet to research her baking project for the week, so I don't yet know what that's going to entail. Last week, she wanted to make Jolly Rancher cotton candy using her sister's cotton candy maker. Um... Jolly Rancher cotton candy is DELICIOUS!!!!!!! I'm pretty excited to see what we're going to get to taste this week.

Today is the day that Will is going to go over our week's expenses and tell us what we're doing wrong with our lives. The Budgeting badge seems so dry to me, but she's really seeming to enjoy it.

THURSDAY: One of the celestial phenomenon that Aristotle had to work REALLY hard to explain with his celestial spheres model is retrograde motion, the weird backwards jog that planets appear to take when Earth passes them in its orbit. This can be an extremely hard concept to visualize--unless you go out on the driveway and visualize it! We'll be doing a live model demonstration as well as watching a couple of videos that I think make the concept very clear.

All the stargazing this week (assuming that the nights are clear) are premised on both this study of the planets in Story of Science and the Celts in Story of the World. Story of the World doesn't cover Stonehenge, which was already long built by the time we enter the story, but we're going to study Stonehenge, because 1) it's valuable background information to the religion and lifestyle of the Iron Age Celts, and 2) it's freaking awesome! I don't have all of the resources pulled for this lesson yet, but I do know that we'll be building some models. I mean, how could you not?!?

Syd is still working on the Scribe badge, and I'm hoping to compile her writings into a book that we can have printed for her. This kid has such a creative mind!

FRIDAY/SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Camping camping camping!!! While Matt holds down the home fort, our Girl Scouts are going to have the time of their lives, spending part of their Girl Scout cookie sale profits on this trip that they've been looking forward to for nearly a year. We'll get home on Sunday night--will we see a completed tree house upon our arrival? Will Matt have finally repaired my treadmill? Will the side yard be free of saplings?--and then take Monday off so that I, for one, can finally get some sleep. And then we'll be back at work on Tuesday!

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Story of the World Map Work

I feel like we have to listen to each chapter of Story of the World a few times before everyone has really mastered all of the information. One of the many nice things about our audio version of Story of the World is that this repetition is painless--simply find some busywork, press play, and have a seat! Usually the busywork consists of coloring pages related to the chapter; these have the added benefit of encouraging even more content mastery later, since the girls usually show Matt their pictures later, and he'll ask them questions about it. For instance, this morning we got to tell him the story of Set and Osiris and the coffin, as he admired a picture that Syd had colored of a scene from that story.

So usually each Story of the World chapter goes like this:

• WEEK ONE: Listen to the chapter (and a couple of later ones) as the girls color, then introduce the quiz questions. I copy these onto index cards and they become part of our history memory work forever.
• WEEK TWO: Listen to the chapter as the girls color, then do the chapter's map work.
• WEEK THREE: Listen to the chapter as the girls color, then add in the new timeline cards. These timeline card are switched off and on with the quiz questions for history memory work.
• WEEKS FOUR UNTIL WE MOVE ON: Watch a documentary or read a non-fiction or living history book, then do a hands-on enrichment activity centered on the chapter's content.

This past week, it was map work day for our chapter, so the girls colored, and then we got out the Prismacolors, photocopied the map, pulled up Google Earth on the computer, found the globe, and got to work!

I like to arrange Google Earth so that what you see on the screen is almost exactly what the paper map shows, and then when we discuss the placement of various items on the paper map, I can zoom Google Earth in to look at the real item, such as the Sphinx or the Nile Delta or the mountains of Upper Egypt, close-up.

I also like context, and a lot of it, so much of our conversation goes like, "The geographic area of Sumer is called Iraq now. Iraq was who the US fought against in the Persian Gulf War. Right, there's the Persian Gulf! Your Uncle Dickie fought in that war. He worked with these crazy-looking planes called AWACs. Want to see what they looked like?" etc., etc.

Also good for context? A great big globe!

There are some more involved map projects that we also like, and that we've done already for Egypt--the salt dough maps of Egypt turned out great, but NOTHING beats a cookie map!

I might actually consider doing that cookie map again, because we last did it a while ago, but yesterday we JUST made cake clocks.

There's only so much deliciousness that one school week can handle!

Sunset of the Sabertooth and Story of the World Ancient Times

Still on chapter one, volume one of Story of the World! We actually haven't studied in Story of the World in a while--we were doing Disney crafts, and writing Martin Luther King Jr.'s biography, and goofing around outside instead. However, the girls are fanatically fond of their monthly online Magic Tree House Club meeting (as they are of Magic Tree House and Story of the World audiobooks, in general, even if we aren't "studying" them--so much for the necessity of formal history study!), and since September's book was Sunset of the Sabertooth, I thought it was an excellent opportunity to jump back into the time period, complete one last study from it, and then wrap it up to move on.

To prepare for Magic Tree House Club, the girls listened to Sunset of the Sabertooth and read Sabertooths and the Ice Age, the Magic Tree House Research Guide associated with the book. The Magic Tree House Club meetings are fabulous--Willow loves the leader, who keeps the kids focused and engaged, leads them through some very difficult reading comprehension quizzes (on which Willow always does MUCH better than I do!), offers a ton of contextual information on the topic, teaches them appropriate online etiquette, and presents a fun hands-on craft or two associated with each book.

The craft for this book was clay pinch pots. I bought some air-dry clay (if we'd been back at my childhood home down South, I would have known the perfect place to dig for red clay, but I don't know a good spot here--hence the store-bought clay), showed the girls a video on hand-building with clay--



--laid down some newspaper, and let them go!

The girls had a fabulous time, completely immersed in their project. They each started off with a pinch pot, sure, but I was amused to see that Willow also created for herself a long-stemmed wine glass out of the clay, and Sydney made herself an entire dinner set--bowl, plate, cup, AND fork and spoon.

Even though I KNOW how important sensorial work is for kids, and how drawn they are to it, I was surprised at how much the girls loved playing with clay. We always have a ton of play dough, since I'm always making custom orders of it for my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, and the kids go off and on it, but never anymore with the level of passion that I saw here. I wonder if it has to do with density? One of the reasons why play dough is so good for little kids is that manipulating it strengthens their little fingers and hands--it still feels good to older kids, sure, but it's no longer a challenge to their muscles. Clay, however, is dense! It was certainly challenging for my kiddos to manipulate, and I wonder if that was part of the appeal?

A local artist offers homeschool ceramics classes, which so far I've never considered, since I like to encourage the girls to instead do activities that we can't do at home--gymnastics, ice skating, ballet, etc. Better value for the money, don't you know? I'm thinking now, though, that a session of ceramics from a local artist might be something that would really strike their fancy. Of course, it will have to wait until spring, since I just moved our half-day volunteer gig to the day that the ceramics class meets to accommodate Willow's ice skating classes, and I can't shift it again because Will also does running club three times a week to train for a 5K next month, and after that the girls and I are going on another long road trip, anyway...

Guess I'm going to pick up another tub of clay from the store today!

Here are the other resources that we used to study Ice Age animals:

Oh, What a Lovely War! LARP Trench Warfare for our World War 1 Study

I know I say this about practically everything that we do as homeschoolers, but this. THIS WAS THE BEST!!!

As part of a long unit on World War 2, we're currently completing a short unit on World War 1--we'll study it in depth another time, but right now I'm primarily interested in having the children understand how World War 1 affected World War 2, so I'm emphasizing the timeline of events (using Story of the World, maps, and plenty of ready-reference), the conduct of the war (focusing on trench warfare), and the consequences of the war (also primarily using Story of the World and maps, but we're also going to watch a documentary on Jesse Owens this weekend).

To that end, after reading about trench warfare in Eyewitness World War 1 and watching this opening scene from All Quiet on the Western Front (I'd not recommend a Google Image search on this subject, as the results would be too upsetting for elementary children)--

I set up a LARP trench warfare activity for the kids. Here's what we used:

• inverted spray paint. It paints on the ground, and we use this a TON for various yard games and projects.
• measuring tape
• two small shovels. I'd been kind of wanting child-sized, REAL shovels for a while, the better to put the children to work for me, so this was my excuse to buy them. 
• water guns
• water balloons
• bandanas.
• bicycle helmets (optional). I'd wanted to add various items of clothing to imitate soldiers' uniforms, such as bicycle helmets and vests, but the day was too hot for that. Although heat exhaustion *would* be authentic...

First, Syd and I measured out a battlefield. We needed space for two trenches, far enough apart to make hitting the other side with water balloons and water guns challenging but not impossible, with a No Man's Land in between. Syd decided on a distance of about 13 feet, and it worked great.

The kids filled up a supply of water balloons, filled up a bucket to serve as a reservoir for water gun refilling, and dragged it all out to our war zone.

I wasn't sure how much effort the kids would want to put into digging their trenches, so I simply left them to it, asking them to tell me when they were both finished. This is what it looked like while they were working, before I sneaked off to have a snack and read for a bit:

This day was the only day this week that it didn't rain (and it's raining again today, sigh...), so the ground was quite soft, which helped the kids create some truly epic trenches for themselves:

Notice the piling up of the dirt to make a barrier in front of the trench? Good form!

When the kids were finished, they each ended up with a trench and barrier deep enough to crouch behind. Pretty perfect, I think:

When the kids had filled all the water balloons, they were left with an odd number, so it was decided that I would begin the war by playing the part of terrorist Gavrilo Princip and tossing a symbolic water balloon into the air; this was done, and war had begun!

Prior to the beginning of the war, there had been much debate about who wanted to be which country; Will wanted Germany, but Syd wanted Austria. Then she wanted Russia. When you're playing war, why does everybody ALWAYS want to be the bad guys?

Finally, Syd was persuaded to play France, so safely ensconced in their trenches, France and Germany commenced their bombardment:

See the water balloon?

Germany goes over the top!

Retreat!

 France and Germany both wore bandanas around their necks. Every now and then, I would shout "Gas! Gas! Gas!" and the soldiers would have to put on their gas masks:


When someone needed to refill her water gun or rebuild her trench, she could shout, "Armistice!", and temporarily pause the war:

And then, back to war!

Of course, things got out of hand. First, France chased down Germany, knocked her down, and threw a bomb in her face. In retaliation, Germany kicked in France's trench and stole the rest of her bombs. France looked like this--

--and Germany looked like this:

Fortunately, France recovered (after I reminded her that FRANCE wins, not Germany), and all was again well:

This activity turned out WAY better than I'd hoped it would. The kids were really into it, they remembered enough from our World War 1 studies to naturally add some authenticity to their role-play, they got some great exercise and had a fabulous time, and I seriously doubt that they will ever forget the major contenders or major form of warfare of World War 1.

The kids asked to leave the trenches in place, which is fine, but I required them to pick up all water balloon shrapnel at the end of the game. Eventually, I'll have them fill their trenches back in, although if they wanted to use that space to make a couple of permanent forts...

...well, I wouldn't protest.

Story of the World Chapter Two Timeline Review

Our Story of the World Study looks mostly like this:

1. Week One: Listen to our current chapter on audiobook. Answer the quiz questions and review all prior quiz questions. Add the current quiz questions to the girls' list of material to practice daily that week.
2. Week Two: Listen again to our current chapter on audiobook. Complete the map work from the Story of the World Activity Book. Compare the completed map to our other geography references--Google Earth, our Montessori puzzle maps, our family atlas, etc.
3. Week Three: Read a picture book or watch a documentary related to our current study. Add new timeline cards to our materials, and glue them to our big basement timeline. Order all the timeline cards covered so far, and add ordering the timeline cards to the girls' list of material to practice daily that week.
4. Weeks Four and Beyond: Read more picture books, watch more documentaries, and complete other unit-based hands-on studies and related memory work until at least one of the kids feels ready to move on.

I always think it's exciting to add new material to our big basement timeline: 

It's still not a project that the girls ever show a lot of interest in outside of the school-time study that we do with it (although they do always perk up when I suggest putting something that they're otherwise interested in, some book or myth, on the timeline), but it makes me, personally, very happy to have it, and I think that one of these days they'll grow into it and get excited about it and take ownership of it.

Since we come back to Egypt again in Chapter 4, for Chapter 2 we'll be doing projects that deal specifically with the geography and mythology of Ancient Egypt. For books, I've checked out every single story about Egyptian gods and goddesses from our public library (yes, I AM that obnoxious!), and my hope is to have the girls record some sort of family tree/genealogy for each figure, as well as a summary of some of their stories. I'm not yet sure how this will work--a homemade book with a page for each figure and brief summaries, as well as video recordings of the girls re-telling their stories, perhaps?

Other projects that are in the running, as long as interest holds out:

• cookie map of Egypt--The girls are CONSTANTLY on the lookout for things to recreate in cookie form! I think we'll do a cookie of modern Egypt, and decorate with frosting and candy to represent the boundaries of Ancient Egypt, the Nile, and the location of major ancient monuments.
• A Coloring Book of Ancient Egypt depicting tomb art (we can do more of these in Chapter 4, when the pyramids are discussed)
• map of Ancient Egypt flip book
• labeled map of Ancient Egypt coloring page
• interpretations of the myths--I want to keep encouraging the girls to think about how stories are continually re-interpreted and used to give different meanings to different times (this will help when SOTW begins to avidly re-tell the Christian myths), so I'm considering having us watch Stargate all together, or listen to the audiobook of The Red Pyramid, which both contain some really fun re-interpretations of Egyptian mythology.
• paper models of the Egyptian gods and goddesses
• posters of the Egyptian gods and goddesses for matching games and memory work
• I SUPER want to buy these Egyptian gods and goddesses toys!!! I won't, though.
• Egyptian gods and goddesses coloring pages--these would be perfect for the book that I want the girls to make.

Okay, that's a crazy amount of projects, but it's okay, because we only have to do the fun ones.

And two chapters later, we can start mummifying things!

Work Plans for the Week of April 3, 2017: Party Planning and the Platonic Solids

Call it a boon for our first week of the new semester, but last week's school went quite well. The kids have a little more daily work than they did last semester, with the accompanying daily reminder to work efficiently and the daily threat, also accompanying, that I am only available to help them until a certain hour each day, and if they still have tasks remaining that require me after that hour, then they cannot finish their schoolwork for the day--and therefore cannot have their hour of screens! The horror!

Schoolwork, then, although it hasn't been completed as efficiently as I'd desire, has been completed efficiently enough to avoid this terrible fate. And the kids still have had time to wander around outside, cut stuff with their pocket knives, bake elaborate and decadent concoctions, such as tie-dyed cupcakes, from scratch--


--go to the mall with friends, read a metric ton of books, and, yes, zone out with Minecraft and Dragon Quest and My Little Pony.

Syd also had a sick day last week, with some mysterious bug that's going around our town--one-by-one, people are struck down for 1-2 days with a fever, and when that finally breaks they're left with a cough and a runny nose. It may be Will's turn this week, or it may hit the adults, sigh. The only work from that sick day that we really have to make up, however,  is Home Ec, because I sure as heck wasn't going to let any kid cook me penne when she'd just been sick!

Daily work this week includes our ten minutes of memory work during the first car ride that we take (if we don't go anywhere in the car that day, we don't do memory work, but still--that adds up to 50-60 minutes of memory work every week!), more progress on the kids' MENSA reading lists in lieu of a Book of the Day (I lagged a bit in picking up library hold requests, so the kids didn't work on this as much as they could have last week if I'd supported them better), journaling or writing to a story starter prompt for ten minutes, Wordly Wise for Will (if she continues at her current pace, she'll finish the book in six or so weeks and then will take a good, long break from it), a word ladder for Syd, SAT prep on Khan Academy for Will, Junior Analytical Grammar for Syd, typing on Typing.com for both kids, and cursive copywork, also for both kids. For cursive this week, they'll be pulling quotes from Aristotle from their Story of Science book, just one quote a day, just enough to keep them in practice as neither of them choose to write in cursive at any other time, sigh.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: In Math Mammoth, Syd is still multiplying fractions and decimals, and Will is starting two-step equations. Will also has three days of work from Analytical Grammar's Review and Reinforcement workbook this week; that should give her a little over a month before she starts the next season of Analytical Grammar, but I may cut the work down to two worksheets a week and give her longer between seasons.

Chapter 11 of Story of Science concerns Aristotle and Plato and their different ways of thinking about the the world. The kids have reading comprehension questions in their quest guides, and they will mark all the locations in Ancient Greece mentioned in this chapter on their maps of Ancient Greece as a review.

Ugh, how many times will the kid have to repeat this Gardener badge experiment before she remembers to attend it daily?!? Hopefully just this one last time! Will has decided to make Luna a dog house as the culminating project for her Woodworker badge; I'll be curious to see exactly how much I have to help with that--she's growing up to be so capable!

The kids reviewed their Hoffman Academy lessons last week (although Will, the most unenthusiastic piano player who ever tickled the keys, somehow managed to do this without once tickling the keys), so this week they will watch a new lesson. I'm limiting them to one lesson a week, with practice on the other days, as Will otherwise tries to blow through a lesson a day in the hopes that when she's finished them all I'll let her stop.

Decorating Easter eggs is one holiday activity that the kids never seem to get too old for! I bought a nice stash of wooden eggs last year, so we have several to try some fun new techniques on today.

Syd has a couple of extra daily activities that Will doesn't this week. The Trashion/Refashion Show is on Sunday, so she needs to practice her runway routine daily, as well as finish up a couple of final bits of her garment. I also have to allow her plenty of time to make the present for a friend's birthday sleepover this weekend, as her favorite thing is to reach beyond her grasp, fail, get frustrated, and sulk. Good times.

TUESDAY: Nobody has any extracurriculars today, other than our regular playgroup, so we should be able to block out plenty of time for the kids to make their baked penne, with puppy chow for dessert. I love a school assignment that requires me to NOT make dinner!

Our Girl Scout troop is throwing a party for a local preschool--next week! The project is entirely girl-led, with the girls deciding on the theme and the activities, then breaking into committees and figuring out books to read, crafts and songs, a snack, and favor bags. Now each of the kids has plenty of assignments, so they'll have plenty to do working on this every day for the rest of the week.

Syd's word ladders work for vocabulary and logic, so until she's completed that book, I've added in a simple weekly logic activity for Will. I LOVED mind benders when I was her age, so I'm eager to see if she likes them as much as I did. If so, this series has two more levels of books to work from.

WEDNESDAY: Now that we've established geohistorical context for Aristotle and Plato, the kids will complete a couple of hands-on enrichment assignments to help them remember a key concept for each. On this day, they'll work together to assemble the Platonic solids from nets. I think that we'll use colorful paper, just as this tute shows, and then hang them in the playroom to look pretty. This will also serve as a review of their identifications.

We're adding in a new unit this week--the kids requested Medieval history, so we're starting volume 2 of Story of the World. On this day, we'll just read/listen to the chapter, then go over the reading comprehension questions in the activity book.

Syd's special unit this semester is cooking and baking. This week, she wants to bake the cinnamon rolls from the Nerdy Nummies cookbook--to say that I'm excited is an understatement! I hope she succeeds, as I've actually tried cinnamon rolls from scratch two different times, and I've not been happy with either batch.

THURSDAY: Today's Story of Science enrichment is Aristotle's celestial spheres. I want the kids to understand what the great minds of the ancient civilizations thought of our universe, and Aristotle's concept is one of the most beautiful of concepts--totally wrong, of course, but beautiful. I'll give the kids the option of making either a two-dimensional model of the celestial spheres on poster board, using a compass, or a three-dimensional model with Sculpey. I'll be curious to see who chooses what.

The Story of the World mapwork takes just a few minutes, although it is parent-directed. To make it a little more sophisticated, I'll likely ask the children to also mark the important Greek cities on the map.

FRIDAY: Syd is learning how to multiply fractions in her current math unit, and Will could always use a review, as she struggled with remembering the algorithm a little during her rational numbers unit. I caught her inverting as if she was dividing a couple of times, which tells me that she doesn't yet truly understand the concept of what she's doing. So on this day, the kids will make some models of multiplying with fractions on transparencies or cellophane, and we'll put them in the window to look pretty and to serve as a reminder of what multiplying a fraction really looks like. The idea is that if you can visualize what 1/3 times 1/3 should look like, you're unlikely to tell me that the answer is 1.

This week's SOTW chapter is really just a background on the fall of the Roman Empire, so the only enrichment that the kids are going to do is to play around on the BBC site for Ancient Rome. I imagine that there will be more hands-on assignments in future weeks.

The Junior Underwater Explorer badge is another book that the kids picked up during our road trip, so they should have already started on it. I really like this book because it includes some hands-on activities--those red-boxed ones that I told the children that they had to do. They should be able to complete them all independently, which is the gold standard for Friday work--by Friday, I'm tired!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The kids have their regular Saturday extracurriculars, and Syd has a sleepover, which means special time with Will. That will flip the next day, as Syd and I will spend nearly the entire day prepping for that evening's Trashion/Refashion Show, where Supergirl of the Night will make her debut. Afterwards, it'll have to be straight to bed, because the next day these girls are throwing a party for some very, very, VERY excited little preschoolers!

Work Plans for the Week of April 24, 2017: The Sun and Stars and Seasons

We had an unexpectedly relaxing week and weekend, as a severe weather forecast caused us to cancel our weekend Girl Scout camping trip, sigh... Ah, well. My Girl Scouts instead spent Friday hiking locally, and came over Friday night to roast hot dogs and s'mores around our backyard campfire in the drizzle, so their little hearts felt satisfied, I think.

And since much of our week was intended to be spent prepping for that camping trip, and much of our weekend camping, we enjoyed light work and much free time. There was a lot of coloring and imaginative play, the children sculpted Stonehenge out of air dry clay, they painted their parents in woad--


--and then we had a battle. We're a competitive people and we play really rough, so you will not be surprised that at one point, I found myself flat on my back on top of Will, who was wrapped around me like Yoda on Luke and attempting to wrestle me over, and with one hand tight around the ankle of Syd, who was attempting to kick me off. I was also, I should say, screaming at Matt to hurry and grab all of the sheep and run.

The kids won when it was their turn to play the Celts, although it was a close call. Will tackled Matt and wrestled him into submission before stealing all of our sheep, and I could not help because I was currently sitting on Syd and mushing her face into the ground to keep her from getting enough leverage to buck me off.

It was a fabulous game, although I must also probably mention that thanks to that game, plus spending 30 minutes earlier that day stirring 9 pounds of play dough with a wooden spoon, plus getting shoved into a wall by an escaping Luna the next day, I spent the entire weekend not really able to move my right shoulder. Probably a good thing that we're skipping fencing this session...

Anyway, this week happens to have a LOT more academics in it, so it's good that we're nice and rested up! Our Memory Work this week consists of review of Sonnet 116 and the helping verbs list, more work on the list of commonly used prepositions, Pythagorean triples, Jesus' disciples, and Platonic solids, and later this week we'll begin to memorize the first eleven lines of Beowulf--in Old English!

Books of the Day are mostly some leftover texts on the Civil War that are interesting, but not interesting enough to have been included in our short review unit, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, Girls Who Rocked the World, and The Road to There for Will, although I might give Girls Who Rocked the World to Syd next week, as it fits well with the work she's been doing for her Girl Scout Junior Agent of Change Journey.

Other daily work consists of at least ten minutes of creative writing (and don't worry--Will times it!), typing practice on Typing.com, progress in their MENSA reading lists (Syd usually reads a chapter from her latest book, and Will usually reads an entire book), Worldly Wise book 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd, SAT prep through Khan Academy for Will, and keyboard lessons through Hoffman Academy for both, then practice for the rest of the week. It was overcast all last week, so we're going to continue trying to stargaze for at least 30 minutes each night--just give us a couple of clear nights, please, Mother Nature!

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: We unexpectedly spent most of the day at a nearby state park today. It went like this: I started this post, decided that I'd share with you that beautiful picture of Matt and I painted in woad, and hopped up to fetch my camera. Hmm, it was not in the backpack that I'd taken on Friday's hike, which was the last place I had it. That backpack, actually, was Syd's responsibility to pack up at the park and bring to the car, as I ran ahead to give some supplies to another Girl Scout who needed to leave...

These nice people later picked my camera up from that picnic shelter--

They're just kidding about the ransom.

--and brought it to the park office, where we drove over to get it today, staying to hike and do schoolwork all afternoon, since we were already there.

This good dog is hanging out with me while her girls explore a cave. I explored this cave already on Friday with seven Girl Scouts and two cell phones for light, only one of which actually had a flashlight app installed. Today we brought an actual flashlight!

And yes, she fell asleep in the sun, surround by schoolwork.

So... yeah. The good Samaritans totally saw some very weird woad-painting pics on my camera, as well as what I now recognize are too many photos of this cat:


Whatever. Thanks for turning in my camera, Kind Strangers!

In Math Mammoth this week, Will is finishing up a graphing unit, then reviewing a semester's worth of work, and Syd is now dividing fractions. Syd has Junior Analytical Grammar daily still, although Will is just doing two days a week of the Reinforcement and Review workbook. On this day, then, instead of grammar, Will has a mind bender as a fun logic exercise.

In Story of Science, the Greeks have finally admitted that our Solar System is heliocentric. Yay, Aristarchus! This is a great time to wedge in some context for our upcoming summer astronomy unit, and so you'll see that we're spending quite a bit of time studying how the tilt of Earth's axis causes seasons and affects climate and temperatures worldwide--we also need to cover this for our weather unit, so we're being quite cross-curricular this week! The kids will answer the reading comprehension questions from their Story of Science chapter in their Quest Guides, but will also have a review with me of the major lines of latitude and longitude. Will has some extra reading on the subject of map projections, and will be outlining the pros and cons of the major map projections (I'm a fan of the Winkel tripel projection, myself). I'll also expect the kids to use latitude and longitude to describe the five locations whose temperatures they'll be tracking and graphing this week.  With ten total locations tracked this week, we should get some good data to compare!

I think I've found a modern Greek curriculum to purchase, but it's spendy so I'm still on the fence. Until then, I'm having the children slowly move through the Greek alphabet, just the way a small Greek child would--with tracing and writing, saying the letter sounds, and singing the alphabet song. It gives them something to get started on, at least, until I finally bite the bullet, spend the cash, and have Level One of Greek123 in hand.

TUESDAY: Using the decanomial square to write equations went well last week, but we didn't do a lot of simplifying the equations. This week, when we use the decanomial square to explore binomial squares, we'll be able to do a LOT of simplifying!

Now that we're for sure going to Greece this summer, it's time to put up a wall map so we can visualize all of the places we're studying--and the places we're going to see! We're AAA members, so Matt swung by their office and got us a map of Greece that the kids will help me mount. I've made them a list of the Greek scientists and mathematicians whom we've studied so far, so they can mark their birthplaces, I'm thinking with washi tape so I can peel it off when we're ready to pack the map for our trip. If the kids seem inspired, I'm also prepared to pull up Google Earth on their computer and show them how to find the major sites--I just managed to distract myself for half an hour by browsing the street view of Athens while testing this, so I'd say it's pretty fun!

We're still in chapter 2 of Story of the World v. 2, although really it's just our spine, as I've added so many additional resources and activities to up the rigor. On this day, the kids will re-read the chapter, review the quiz questions, and then color in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from this map, using the greedy algorithm of map coloring that we learned a while ago.

WEDNESDAY: The activity in the Story of Science Quest Guide asks kids to use a pre-printed sunrise table as their data source, but I'll have my two figure out how to obtain the real information. Thank goodness for the internet! As part of our lesson, I'll also be showing them this interactive online demonstration of the Earth's rotation.

We'll have an actual dinner today, not sandwiches or macaroni and cheese from a box, on account of part of the kids' schoolwork on this day is to cook it! The recipe includes a made-from-scratch pie crust, and I'll be very interested to see how that turns out.

I don't know if you've done a lot of research on the BBC Schools website, but they have some amazing resources, especially for periods like World War 2 and the Anglo-Saxons. I mean, obviously! The kids will love the fact that playing around on this site is their schoolwork for the day, but there's also such great information on the site that it's totally worth it.

I'm not 100% positive that Dinosaur National Monument accepts Junior Ranger badges by mail, but their Junior Ranger book is downloadable from their website and kids are able to complete it using close reading and/or online research, so we're giving it a shot.

THURSDAY: The Brainpop video on the seasons is geared more towards Syd's grade level, but Will still loves Brainpop, and there's no harm in not challenging your brain every single second of the school day. The videos are at a great level for Syd, though, as are the quizzes and activities.

I am SO excited to be sharing Beowulf with the kids! I have actually translated the entire thing myself for a class, and I'm thinking that it's challenging, but do-able, for Will to try to do the first eleven lines. I mean, she already knows the gist of what they should say quite well, thanks to her nerdy mum quoting it. We'll have a lesson on Beowulf, and then watch parts of the BEST performance of Beowulf that you can possibly see, that done by Benjamin Bagby. If you ever get a chance to see him live, as I did in grad school, do it! The kids don't know it yet, but they're also going to take on learning those first eleven lines by heart.

FRIDAY/SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The kids have an all-day wilderness class on Friday, so I can finally get some work done. Saturday brings ballet, then the kids and I will head off to an overnight event for Girl Scout leaders and their daughters. We'll come home on Sunday and I'll probably go back to bed, because I can barely manage to sleep the night through at home in my own bed, much less in a platform tent with a bunch of giggling little girls all around me.

What are YOUR plans for the week?