Work Plans for the Week of November 15, 2015: Thanksgiving!

I cannot WAIT for next week! School was successful last week, but it felt like a lot of work--halfway through the week, we had a Come to Jesus/major crackdown on screen time, and at the same time I began to make sure that my children were feeding themselves a good breakfast and lunch, primarily by preparing it myself. For years, the kids have mostly been on their own for those two meals (unless I had some leftovers to use up!), and had been perfectly content and successful with that, but recently Will has been both subsisting on slices of bread and/or homemade cookies and/or nothing at all for those meals AND living her life with a raging bad attitude.

That same kid is so independent that it's easy to just let her go and do her own thing, but her overall mood has markedly improved with this structure. I swear, parenting a tween is shockingly similar to parenting a toddler!

Anyway, one more school week and then we'll enjoy our well-earned vacation.

Memory work this week consists of spelling words, Mandarin vocabulary, a page of cursive practice, and, for Syd, review of her Nutcracker choreography. Books of the Day include a couple of chapter books that I hope Syd will enjoy (she prefers to read comics), a children's encyclopedia on rocks and gems that Will has already read this morning and loved so much that I now have planning an entire unit on my to-do list, and some non-fiction and living fiction on various Native American peoples.

And here's the rest of our week!

MONDAY: We got started off on the wrong foot with last week's essay assignment, as instead of following my gold-standard essay writing system, I let one kid skive off of her brainstorming and the other skive off of her outline. The results were... unsatisfactory. This week we're doing the whole assignment over again--the right way, this time!

The kids are just about done with their fractions and multi-digit multiplication units in Math Mammoth. I've peeked at their next units, and hopefully they'll be as trouble-free as these have mostly been!

As we do every year, we're completing a brief Thanksgiving unit this week--I love holidays with a historical basis! I'm in the planning stages of a Revolutionary War unit for next semester, so this unit is actually a good prequel for our later studies, or perhaps I'll just decide to continue on from here, since we've previously studied North American prehistory, ancient Native Americans, and Christopher Columbus. This day's activity is the Scholastic website on the first Thanksgiving; it's a good overview, with some engaging video and audio clips, and is plenty to remind the kids of the basic facts so that we can do some enrichment later this week.

We've got our regular volunteer gig with the food pantry today--we missed it last week, since we went on a field trip, instead, and we might miss it again next week, so we'll make sure to work extra hard today!

TUESDAY: I regret buying the entire set of Draw Write Now, simply because I don't think we use it enough to justify the cost, but Book 3 does have a unit on the first Thanksgiving, so I might as well whip it on out! Both of the kids enjoy step-by-step drawing instruction like this, and it's an excellent fine motor activity and confidence builder.

I always look forward to our weekly homeschool play group. There's a group of little girls there who are just right for Syd, and even Will can be tempted into looking up from her book and playing with the other children. Here, as well, I've finally found a supportive group of friendly parents. I'd been bullied by just a couple of people in our previous group for years, and I accepted it quietly for the sake of the children's enjoyment of the park days together with their friends, but now that I finally put in the effort to switch groups, I've found that it's a much better fit for all of us, and I can't believe that I stayed in such a toxic situation for so long. I'm more than a little embarrassed at myself, you know? Anyway, nobody is mean to me at this playgroup or on its message board, so yay!

WEDNESDAY: Today's math enrichment activity is really just a plan to indulge in more sweets. Making the batch of rice krispy treats in a couple of 9"x13" pans, however, will allow the children to do a lot of exploring with equivalent fractions and unlike fractional parts, so it IS quite educational, you see. Ahem.

After Syd's ballet class, we'll probably all kick around campus for a while, then I'm dragging everyone to a choir concert with pieces based on the poetry of Walt Whitman. I'm super excited, and I'm hoping everyone else enjoys it, too.

THURSDAY: Will's horseback riding instructor has to take a brief hiatus from lessons, so that leaves space for one more academic assignment on this day--mwa-ha-ha! That allows us to finish up our Thanksgiving unit with the Plimoth Plantation web site and a project making a model Mayflower and a model wetu. We'll be using this paper Mayflower template for the one, and Google Images, pipe cleaners, and brown paper bags for the other.

FRIDAY: A "clue hunt" is the final activity for the Girl Scout Junior Detective badge--I'm hoping the kids will enjoy setting this up for each other and won't fight over it. I'm even planning to provide treasure at the end!

It's been a while since we've had Friday Fossil Prep. It doesn't replace a more organized science unit, of course (what should we do next--astronomy, rocks and minerals, or chemistry?), but our fossil prep skills are valuable, and this is a great way to keep them up. Besides, nobody is going to clean, organize, and display our own fossils if we don't!

Will still adores her podcasting workshops. This may be the last one, and then at some point, ideally the children will have a real podcast to share with us!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Will has ice skating class, but all other lessons and classes are on hiatus for Thanksgiving, which means that by noon on Saturday, we'll be on vacation!

Which day of vacation am I looking forward to the most? Sushi Buffet for Lunch Day? Star Wars Movie Marathon Day? Sit around the House and Eat Yummy Food Day? Day Trip Day?

There's also Yard Work Day, but nobody's clamoring to have that one as their favorite.

Hawaii with Kids: Sightseeing on Oahu

We didn't have as much time on Oahu as we did the Big Island, and out of the loving embrace of my in-laws our too-expensive hotel was also kind of crummy, so during this leg of our trip we were quite happy to be out and about every single second!

Although I love the planning stage of a vacation almost as much as I love the actual trip, on both islands my favorite activity is actually to simply hop in the car, decide which way round we're going, and then to simply drive along the coast. There are beautiful vistas and engaging stopping points practically every mile, so the biggest challenge is deciding which stops to skip so that you can actually make some headway.

My advice: don't skip any of the stops!

This is Koko Crater. Will was so afraid that I'd insist on actually hiking up the 1,048 steps to its summit that she wouldn't even leave the car when we stopped to look at it. And yes, if she had gotten out, I may very well have dragged us there.

 We were lucky to see Halona Blowhole in action, as the conditions aren't always right for it:

Something that I know that I've mentioned a few times already, but haven't really shown you, is our family obsession with shave ice. We had it a few times on the Big Island, and it was yummy and all, but here on Oahu, it. Was. Exceptional.

At a roadside stand not far from Makapu'u Beach, we ate the best shave ice of our entire trip. This, my friends, is rainbow shave ice with a "snowcap," sweetened condensed milk that's drizzled on top. It's astoundingly delicious:

The rest of the family likes their shave ice pretty well, too!

At Makapu'u Beach (that's a seabird sanctuary there in the distance), the big entertainment was Will finding a coconut, tossing it into the ocean, and then the rest of us watching it forever to see where it would go.

See the coconut?

We didn't visit any restaurants in Oahu, although we tried to go to Treetops twice, only to be thwarted each time by the fact that their website misrepresents their hours and the Hawaiian buffet brunch that we kept wanting attend was never ready when the website said it would be. We did, however, visit a Japanese cafe and I ordered a drink called a "jelly coffee." 

I regret that decision still.

On another day, we intended to briefly check out the Bishop Museum, to which we get free entry as both it and our hometown museum both participate in the ASTC Passport Program, but somehow, unsurprisingly, we managed to stay all day:

Aquaponics in a fish tank! I have several more detailed photos of this setup in my drive, and the entry "Figure out fish tank aquaponics" in my planner.

The surfing lesson that I wasn't sure would happen? It happened! Will really wanted it, so we set it up for her, and then were really excited when later that same morning, we found this big exhibit on Duke Kahanamoku. I've now got a couple more reading and watching activities based on him set up in our school to-do list.

We saw several full-sized replicas of a heiau on the Big Island, but this model actually makes the complete set-up easier to understand:

Will is in LOVE with koa wood and shark tooth weaponry. There are a few reasonably priced replicas available online...

Much of their day is spent in this type of interaction:

Thanks to the information on this display, I now also have "Research atlas beetles as pets" on my to-do list. Sigh...

The kids and I normally focus our art collections around fanart and uber-contemporary pop culture response pieces, but now I'm seriously looking for some volcano art to add:

The Bishop Museum was also great if you're studying Hawaiian cosmology or the monarchy, because it has extensive collections on both. I spent the most time in those two places, while Matt supervised the children in the science building. 

On our way to that building for the first time, we were walking directly behind another couple, there with a larger group of people. The guy said something to his partner that I didn't hear, and in response she barked QUITE loudly enough for ALL of us to hear, "Well, if you don't change your attitude then we might as well return those laser light show tickets!"

For the rest of the trip, any instances of misbehavior on the part of any family member was met with the threat of losing their laser light show tickets.

Work Plans for the Week of November 9, 2015: Coloring, Chemistry, Essays, and Europe

I'm beginning to think that there is no longer any hope of having a single homeschooling day completely at home together until January, at least. Who knew that I'd ever be longing for mid-winter!

School last week went well, but as an introvert I'm already weary of the ramping up of the schedule that occurs as holiday prep, winter extracurriculars, and other seasonal activities all collide. And thank goodness for Matt, because only he could EVER navigate the Saturdays that have lately become all about driving kids to ballet, ice skating, Mandarin class, more ballet, some sort of cultural or science festival at the library or local museum, and, more often than not, a birthday party--or two!

It's a little silly, I know, because as a homeschooler I should be able to mediate our activities better than this, but I have always been bad about passing up opportunities for the children. Free robotics workshops all semester? You bet! A free series of girls-only podcasting workshops? We'll be there! Free foreign language classes? We'll put it on our calendar! A field trip to a baking powder factory combined with a cooking lesson? Definitely! An essay contest? Sure! A coloring contest? Well, why not?!? Spelling bee? Let's start studying! A Revolutionary War class on a Minecraft server? Why, the kids love Minecraft!

Anyway, I am seriously digressing during this precious peaceful time when both of my children are contentedly working on their math. Instead, let me tell you about THIS week! Memory work includes cursive, spelling, and Mandarin, and Books of the Day consist of non-fiction books about Native American peoples, a couple of Calvin Coconut books for Syd, and some living picture books on totally random topics. In addition to that, Will has a Minecraft class on the Revolutionary War that began this week. For now, I'm having her work on it during her screen time, so that I can evaluate how much time she's going to spend on it. Next week, I may reserve time for it in our weekly schedule.

And here's the rest of our week!


MONDAY: We took a field trip to the Clabber Girl Museum and Bake Shop on this day. Syd acted out for quite a bit of the time (she didn't think that the museum was going to be kid-friendly... until she discovered that half the museum is a pretend play area. SIGH!!!), but both kids thoroughly enjoyed both the pretzel-making class--

--and the scavenger hunt that was part of our field trip experience:

I was pleasantly surprised that the grocery store that was set up for pretend play was a World War 2-era grocery. Bonus enrichment for our history study!

These are ration point-friendly recipes that the company sent out during the war. Will is going to try this one!

As part of their scavenger hunt, the children were asked to create a meal from this store with a total cost of less than $1. All of the children's meals pretty much consisted of doughnuts and sausage.

A pretend play saloon! This cracked me up.

The children don't have any other schoolwork or special chores on field trip days, although they did make a second batch of those delicious soft pretzels at home that night. Yum!

TUESDAY: We're still in the same Math Mammoth units--multi-digit multiplication for Syd and fractions for Will. Will, in particular, seems so comfortable with fractions that I'm thinking of encouraging her to do double assignments next week so that she can advance more quickly. Perhaps we'll have Double Math Week instead of Free Week!

There's a local coloring contest whose winner gets to throw the switch to turn on the downtown Christmas lights in Indianapolis, and so I'm having the children enter that contest today, just for fun. Our homeschool group's play group and the children's robotics class will round out our day nicely!

WEDNESDAY: Both children have been showing the need for a little more multiplication drilling, and that's what these color-by-number worksheets are in disguise. Mwa-ha-ha!

You know we love our essay contests, so for the rest of this week the children will be working on yet another one, this one a personal essay about their volunteer work. Good thing that they regularly do some!

I've been thinking about what science unit we might want to tackle next, and chemistry is always a popular choice. I want to make a DIY chemistry set that will encourage open exploration of substances, as well as provide guided experiments, and I'm hoping that the children will enjoy helping me do some of the research for this project. If nothing else, I bet that looking up ideas for chemistry experiments is going to inspire a lot of chemistry experiments on this day!

THURSDAY: Although I've got a couple more projects in mind for our World War 2 study, we're almost finished with the bulk of it--in fact, this day's study of the atomic bomb and the next day's review of the geography of the war will just about finish us up! Perhaps Will will make us fried meat patties as a Victory Day treat.

FRIDAY: We've done a lot of war-related mapwork, but not much that's really let the children look at the entire theater of war as a whole. I know they both enjoy pin flag maps, and I think that they'll enjoy doing this one that's focused on important places from World War 2.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Ballet, ice skating, a science fest, Mandarin, more ballet, and a slumber party for Syd. I swear, next week we WILL stay home more!

I mean, probably we will...

Hawaii with Kids: The Beaches of Oahu

I loved the beaches of the Big Island. I loved the coarse, black sand. I loved the lava rocks. I loved the sea turtles.

But, oh! The beaches of Oahu! These are the beaches of paradise:

This, for instance, is Kuhio Beach, in Waikiki. It was simply the local beach, a short walk from our lousy hotel.

And yet? It was marvelous. We went there almost every morning, Syd even managing to get herself invited to a playdate there one day, and almost every evening for sunset, as we did on this particular evening:

Look! I'm taking one of those mommy blogger feet photos!

After the sunset we'd rinse off and walk back to the hotel by way of a grocery store where, I kid you not, there was to be found the most delicious, and cheapest, sushi that I have ever eaten. You know that normally I am all about eating plain groceries on vacations to save money (and we did that on this trip, and I know that we saved money over restaurants, but it hardly felt like it at the time when two days of groceries cost as much as we'd spend in five days at home), but when I can fill my tummy on amazing, fresh sushi, AND doing so is cheaper than eating a sandwich, then friends, I ate sushi for dinner every single night!

And for breakfast one day. It was awesome.

But of course we didn't spend our entire vacation four blocks from our hotel! We also drove up and down the coast, seeking out the best beaches to be found, and find them we did.

This is Sandy Beach, where the waves were probably a little too strong to safely play in them. We played in them anyway!

Kailua Beach, however, is the best beach on Oahu. The. Best. Beach. It's not too wavy, not too rocky, nice and sandy, and pleasantly shady. On one visit there, we watched the Banksy of sand castles happen upon an abandoned inflatable raft and spend an hour painstakingly craft a big-assed sand person laying on it before wandering off again, leaving his art to the gasps of every meandering passer-by.

Another time, we watched a heavily pregnant woman obsessively dictate a pregnancy photo shoot with her partner. She had this giant list of what I assume were poses that she kept referring to, and loads of props, such as paper cut-outs of the baby's name, and a little laundry line of baby clothes, and she'd pose for her partner, but then look over all of his photos and then pose again because they weren't good enough. The best poses were the ones that she wanted of them walking hand-in-hand down the beach, but it was just the two of them, so her partner set up the camera on a tripod with the self-timer, then they held hands and put one foot in the air each as if they were walking while they waited for the shutter. Matt had to keep chastising me, on account of I was visibly far too invested in their photo shoot to play off any semblance of normality.

Finally, I was pretty much instructed to please just go out into the water if I wanted to act weird.

So I did!

And then I came back, because I couldn't see the pregnant woman's newest prop from the water. It was a sonogram!!!

We liked this beach so much because it had waves AND you could swim--a rare combination this time of year in Oahu!

See? Shade! Don't Matt's legs look pink? Poor guy doesn't have a speck of melanin in his epidermis.

 Going to the beach every day like this, playing in the water, digging in the sand, was marvelous beyond words. When Matt and I have a beach house in Hawaii one day, we'll invite you out to visit us so that you can see for yourself!

Hawaii with Kids: Pearl Harbor

This single day trip is the reason for our several-months' study of World War 2. We all know how much more vividly history reveals itself when you can see where it took place, and when else are we going to visit one of the most important places of World War 2? Sometime else, certainly, but not in the near future.

Pearl Harbor is a chance that I simply couldn't not make the most of.

AND it has a Junior Ranger badge! Random aside: I printed these Junior Ranger badge books prior to our trip and packed them, because at that time the World War 2 Valor in the Pacific National Monument web site (isn't that name a mouthful? It's also silly, because NOBODY refers to it as anything but "Pearl Harbor," and yet when you Google "Pearl Harbor," the National Park site is not the first result because that's not actually its name) was stating that it was sometimes out of stock of them. However, when the kids went to show their completed badge books to the park ranger, he gave me a funny look and asked me if I'd copied them. It turns out that they actually SELL these badge books in the park! Yellowstone also does that, and it's a practice that I loathe. I think it's a shame to charge children for such a valuable enrichment activity that can only increase their appreciation of the park. Anyway...

I did not pitch a fit in the middle of Pearl Harbor because I did not have to buy my children their Junior Ranger books; instead, we happily used them as a spine for doing and seeing every single thing in the park:

To be fair, the Junior Ranger books were excellent, and the activities that they asked for, such as this one that has Syd physically locating herself on a a giant world map set into the concrete, immeasurably increased their understanding of both the events of Pearl Harbor and of the war as a whole. That's an even bigger reason why they should be free!

This activity was really cool. At the entrance to this gallery, the children each had to choose one individual from a wall of names and photos. Their person was included somewhere in that gallery's displays to find, and at the gallery's exit, they could find out what happened to that person after the war.

There were incredibly detailed models of both the USS Arizona and a Japanese aircraft carrier.

I tend to be rather shockingly frugal in many capacities, so the fact that I happily paid the online convenience fee to pre-book our ferry tickets to the actual USS Arizona Memorial is a testament to how much going there meant to me.

This is the Bowfin, a World War 2-era submarine. Just days prior, the children's grandfather, a former Naval officer who was stationed on a submarine, had given them a lesson on submarines, and Will, who acted at the time as if she wasn't paying a lick of attention, now, long after her grandfather could appreciate it, was able to spout off tons of information from his lesson.

Fair warning if you, yourself, take a trip here: the kids were underwhelmed by the USS Arizona Memorial, and Syd acted out so much that Matt snapped at her and earned the disapproving glare of a total stranger. The memorial is a small, crowded space, with nothing to do and only sights like this to see. If you've got wild ones, you may want to tag team with your co-parent so that they can stay running around on dry land.

I, however, think it's beautiful.

I thought this relief map of the island was cool:

In this activity, the kids are looking for Medal of Honor recipients among the fallen. It was an elegant way to inspire a discussion of their acts of bravery. This memorial is also interesting as it includes the names of the civilians who died--many of them children, many of them due to friendly fire when soldiers incorrectly prepared their anti-aircraft weapons in the chaos and instead of exploding in the air, they fell to the ground and exploded. There were also a lot of casualties among citizens who happened to be in the air flying their own private planes or taking flying lessons.

Here's the original rough draft of Roosevelt's speech in which you can see that one of the most famous lines in history was almost much less powerful. Rhetoric is important, my Friends!

Torpedo--this is what destroyed the battleships.

This display was my favorite. It's a model of the USS Arizona as it is now, underwater.

Just a few days after we returned from Hawaii, when we were still on Hawaii time, we were lucky enough to see that the National Park Service was staging a dive to the USS Arizona Memorial, and they broadcast it live. It's wonderful, and you should certainly watch it when you're working on your own World War 2 studies.

While you can, of course, study World War 2 without taking a trip to Hawaii, I could not believe how much this one visit added to the children's (and my!) understanding of the events of World War 2. It's made me jealous of every single schoolchild who lives within driving distance of a national landmark. It's recommitted me to the learning-by-traveling that we still do, but not as much as we did when the children were younger.

And in the airport on the way home, when I asked the kids where they wanted to travel to next and Will said, "Castles!" I told her that we probably wouldn't go there next, necessarily, but a trip to Europe *would* make an excellent spine for a homeschool, now wouldn't it?

Two years to save for it, a year to study for it, and perhaps we'll find ourselves in Europe sometime in 2017...