Cruise to Alaska Day 08: Sitka

We were up and at 'em early this morning on our adventures in Sitka!

We fueled ourselves with caffeine and sugar in the ship's coffee bar. I don't know what those delicious creme brulee doughnut thingies were, just that I ate them obsessively every single morning for second breakfast, and they were DELICIOUS.

I think you'll agree that Matt looks pretty great in his rain gear, like a sexy salmon fisherman. Of course, we're actually going sea kayaking, not salmon fishing, but whatever. In related news, one of our bus drivers taught us this way to name the five types of salmon using your hand, and also what a "king salmon salute" is.

The more gear I put on, however, the surer I am that I am going to drown.

But could one choose a more beautiful place to drown?

There are very few house permits available for this sheltered cove, and it's apparently a prized location for its privacy, although as far as I'm concerned, not only would you have a clear view of all the other cabins from your porch, but you've also got, you know, KAYAKERS paddling by you every day.

Paddlers like us!

We paddled along the intertidal area, so that we could see blue crabs, urchins, and plenty of starfish like this little guy, who got put back where we found him.

Don't we look happy here? I highly recommend tandem kayaking in lieu of (or in addition to) marriage counseling. As the front person in the kayak I was supposed to be the navigator, which means that Matt was SUPPOSED to paddle where I wanted, but I want to paddle as close to the rocks as possible to see all the critters, and Matt wanted to paddle as far away from the rocks as possible because he's lame. So he would basically paddle against me, and we wouldn't go anywhere, and we would hiss horrible things at each other while young honeymooning couples paddled smoothly past us in beautiful tandem. Let me tell you, we worked through a LOT of shit on that 90-minute paddle, and look at us afterwards!

There were eagles on the paddle, but it was too difficult to take photos. Fortunately, eagles just hang around in Alaska like pigeons or starlings, leaving plenty to photograph as we tromped around town later.

We passed a science museum that made me sad because if the kids had been with us we'd have for sure spent half the day there, but fortunately we found the beach right afterwards, and spent the rest of our time in Sitka there.

Another blue crab, and look, Matt, you don't have to paddle near the rocks to look at it!

Don't fall down onto these. I'm telling you--it hurts!

And just look at this beauty that I found! Matt put wrapped it up in bubble wrap for me, and it's my favorite souvenir, our only one from Sitka, although I super wanted some of this expensive fancy salt.

Oh, just a little lobster for lunch! I may have eaten lobster for dinner, as well, although the only thing that I really remember from dinner is that my waiter made one of those fancy milk foam drawings on top of my after-dinner cappuccino. I loved all the little luxuries just as much as the big ones!

Work Plans for the Week of September 6, 2016: Sharks, Patriots, and Getting Out the Vote

I could get used to these four-day school weeks! We crammed a lot into last week's four-day week, and it still felt great because it was only four days for all of the brain hat making, Scratch coding--

--human eye diagramming, Spanish learning, and math doing.

Well, maybe math didn't feel great for one of us:

The kid hates math because she loves mastery, and in math, as soon as she's mastered something, I make her move on. I should probably break down her Math Mammoth curriculum to make room for more review, but that would take more time than just mindlessly handing her the next lesson in the series every day, sigh.

And then we had a three-day weekend to refresh us (indoor trampoline park! Cupcakes! Drive-in movies! Tree house! Friends!), and now we have another short, four-day school week to zip through before there's yet another delightful weekend. Daily work this week includes progress in each kid's Wordly Wise, work on Scratch (Will still uses Coding Games in Scratch, but Syd has fallen in love with animation, and instead makes a new cartoon every day), and one journal entry (well, Syd journals, but I've given up on Will and this week will instead require her to do a page a day in the last half of Syd's abandoned cursive handwriting workbook). Books of the Day are a couple of novels, a couple of books about sharks, and this LEGO Shakespeare.

And here's the rest of our week!



TUESDAY: Will is finishing up her Math Mammoth unit this week and moving to the next, and although Syd is reviewing multiplication and division algorithms, she didn't correctly reproduce the algorithm to multiply multi-digit numbers during our chalk in the driveway activity, so I've paused her for some more review drills before she continues.

The lesson on sharks in aquariums, however, went AMAZINGLY well! The kids both dove in and put a ton of effort into researching aquariums that have sharks. Will even found an aquarium that I didn't know about, close enough that we can actually make a day trip to visit it this winter--how's that for a successful research project?

We've also learned that we need to save all of our money so that we can go swim with whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium.

Spanish vocab on this day was all animals--easy-peasy, after last week's Bill Martin, Jr. books in Spanish!

WEDNESDAY: Our From Colonies to Country chapters this week cover the ordinary people from the American Revolution, the soldiers and citizens. On this day, I want the kids to put themselves in the place of an average citizen and take a stand on the Revolution. If either kid really gets into the idea, we can copy out the letters on nice paper, age them, and even send them to someone--California grandparents, perhaps? Either way, it will be excellent practice writing a persuasive essay.

The multi-level Girl Scout badge, I Promised a Girl Scout I Would Vote, is a terrific civics unit, and I recommend it to you even if you don't have a Girl Scout. On this day, the kids will complete the activity that asks them to research and identify every one of their elected representatives, from the president of the United States all the way down to the mayor. I'm requiring that the kids fill out this form in their best handwriting, so that we can take it with us on Thursday to our volunteer gig taking voter registrations!

In a little bit, though, we're going to grab our swim gear and inner tubes and head off for an afternoon at the lakeshore, where we're going to take sand samples for Thursday's geology activity and practice how to be shark safe in the water for today's sharks unit. Next week, we begin our dissection of the dogfish shark!

THURSDAY: When a kid completes her Math Mammoth unit, she gets a day off of math and a small celebration of her choice. On this day, Will wants ice cream!

Before Pony Club but perhaps after ice cream, we'll be manning a voter registration table at our local food pantry, helping people get registered, checking their registrations, and helping them sign up for absentee voting, if they wish. The kids aren't super excited about it, but it's just one hour once a week for the rest of September, and it's going to be a valuable experience in real-life civic responsibility.

I do not actually know who Thaddeus Koscuisko was, except that he was a guy in the American Revolution and his house has a Junior Ranger badge, which the kids will earn when we're in Philadelphia. I guess the kids can tell me what he did that was so great!

We are now studying sedimentary rocks, and on this day, we'll be examining sand from a few different places, to study how it can be sorted and categorized based on the rounding of the grains. We just have a couple more weeks with this particular text, and then we'll move into some ones that are more Syd-friendly for review.

FRIDAY: In order to make the similarities and differences between the British and American soldiers clearer, the kids will be exploring this website, although I think this comic really illustrates everything that you need to know. I SUPER want to make these cute clothespin dolls, so I might make that a family craft project on another day.

Have you added your kids to my 2016 Children's Pen Pal Exchange? If not, you should totally do it--the deadline is Friday! On this day, Will is going to write her introductory letter for the exchange, while Syd continues to work on her Making Friends badge--she's completing it mostly independently, although she's going to get together with a friend to plan the party that she wants to be the culmination of her badge work.

The kids are going to be doing another infographic for their shark lesson on this day, both as a review of infographic composition and as a science/geography study of one threatened shark species. This is the last review activity for our sharks MOOC, which was one of the most successful things that we've done in our homeschool. After our road trip, we're absolutely going to be doing another animal science-themed MOOC.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We are 100% back in the swing of children's extracurriculars, so there's Pony Club and ballet to transport the young ones to and from, and otherwise... I'm hoping for the farmer's market. Some yardwork. For Matt and the kids to put a few more boards on the tree house. Maybe a good movie at the drive-in? Maybe another afternoon at the lakeshore?

What are YOU up to this week?

Join the 2016 Children's Pen Pal Exchange!

I'm pretty excited to be organizing a children's pen pal exchange! The inspiration is an activity in Will's Finding Common Ground Cadette Girl Scout badge: the badge asks her to get to know someone different from her, but the suggested activities seemed a little shallow to me, mostly involved with interviewing someone and then moving on with your life.

That's not really getting to know someone. I want my kid to learn how to REALLY get to know someone, because it is absolutely a skill. Think about it: in order to truly get to know someone, you have to be able to connect with them, to let them in by sharing things about yourself, not just asking them things about themselves. You have to find out not just facts and background, but what their sense of humor is like, what their spirit is. Do they have a dry sense of humor? Do they prefer to talk about books or about people? Do they like to travel? Do they tell jokes? Do they tell stories? 

That's the kind of getting to know someone that I think that kids should be practicing, and what better way to try it out than with a pen pal exchange?

My goals for this project (at least for my own children!) are to give our kids an opportunity to practice the art of letter writing, to experience the fun of sending and receiving letters, and, most of all, to make connections with other children. If you think that your kids might like that, too, then read on and see if you might light to register to be part of this year's exchange.

As part of the pen pal exchange, your child can expect to receive an introductory letter from every child in his/her small group (I’ll be passing out the names and contact info of the children in your child’s small group to each of the participants in that group; please respect this information as private, to be used only for this year’s pen pal exchange). In exchange, your child is expected to write an introductory letter that you can photocopy and mail to each of the other children in the group.

Within two weeks of the receipt of these introductory letters, your child will be expected to:

1.       Reply to the child whose name I have assigned to you. This requirement is to make sure that all the children in the group receive at least one response.
2.       Reply to at least one other letter of your child’s choosing. Your child can, of course, respond to as many of the letters as he/she likes.

Soon after that, your child should receive their own responses! There are no requirements beyond this initial introduction and response, but it’s my hope that the children will want to continue to correspond with their pen pals.

Here is the time frame of the exchange:

Sept. 10-11: I will send you the contact information of the children in your small group.

Sept. 12-18: Your child should compose their introductory letter and mail it to each of the children in their small group.

Sept. 19-Oct. 3: Your child should receive introductory letters from each of the other children in their group soon. Within two weeks of receipt of these letters, your child should respond to both their assigned partner and at least one other child of their choosing (more if they like!).

If you would like to participate, please send the following information to my email address (pumpkin.bear@rocketmail.com) by Sept.  9:

•     Your child’s first and last name
•      Your child’s age
•      three things about your child that could connect him/her to a pen pal: hobbies, interests, pets, circumstances, etc.
•      three things that your child would like to have in a pen pal: similar age, gender, specific interests, location, etc.

Please send a separate response for each of your children; it will help me keep them organized!

I’ll do my best to put children into small groups that will start them along the path to connecting with each other, and then the rest is up to them!

Cruise to Alaska Day 07: Haines

Thank goodness, my photos did not all get deleted! Yay for computer repair shops!

On a side note, if you have an online backup service that you're very happy with, please let me know.

Now, back to our regularly-scheduled programming--I have some eagles and mountains to show you!

Our day in Haines began with, yes, indeed, another breakfast so large that it required a second plate:

And then it was off to adventures!

We actually tendered from the ship on this morning, since the tide was high and the dock was too low.

Tendering is also cool because we also get to ride in a lifeboat! The maximum capacity for tendering in this vessel was 50 fewer people than its maximum capacity as a lifeboat, which means that in case of emergency we'd be packed in, as Will puts it, "like tuna in a Tupperware."

Haines was a VERY sleepy little town, and we did not find many humans other than those from our cruise ship when we went out and about to explore.

Our bus driver, however, did point out this totem pole to us. It's a modern creation, and includes something very relevant both to us and, it seems, to Haines.

It's a tourist! See him getting off of a boat, with a camera around his neck, and his blue jeans and his shirt with "ALASKA" on it? That's basically me, although my shirt had a squid on it.

Our organized excursion was a raft float through an eagle preserve with Chilkat Guides. We were required to wear not only life jackets, but also those knee-high boots. Doesn't Matt look cute?

Remember how I'm kind of afraid of the water? Wonder why all of our excursions took place on the water? Me, too! I thought that I was about to die most of the time, but the fact that I didn't was probably good for me.

And we. Saw. EAGLES!!!!!!11!!!!!!!

And pretty scenery.

Sometimes with eagles.

I was the first one to spot this eagle's nest.

We didn't visit the Hammer Museum, but we nevertheless heard all about it, as people were STILL talking about this decade-old trademark dispute.  We also didn't buy the autographed books that our tour guide had written and was selling, but they're weird enough that I'm going to inter-library loan them. And we visited this really cool handmade knife shop, but I did not buy Will a souvenir, because I am mean and I had just bought her a big dagger for her birthday.

Work Plans for the Week of August 30, 2016: Neurobiology, Prime Numbers, and the Declaration of Independence

We had a fine, fun week last week! We made time for playdates and movies and swimming dates (possibly our last swimming date at the public pool for the season, sigh...), and still got a lot of really interesting, creative, hands-on work done:

Trying to mimic a shark's liver and give these empty juice bottles neutral buoyancy--it took a LOT of problem-solving and experimentation!

I had been worried that this hands-on math activity wasn't "hands-on" enough, but it actually turned out to be really useful for both kids.

Diffusion of liquid watercolors into clear gelatin and the osmosis of various solutions through an egg membrane--we're actually still playing with those eggs!

Our weekend turned out to be just as busy, as not only did the kids and Matt have their "cookie concert" (one of the rewards for selling a ton of cookies was free admission for our entire troop to a Rachel Platten concert!), but we did finally manage to get to Holiday World (another cookie-selling reward), and it was so freaking awesome that we're totally going to go back again next year--so fun to no longer have one kid who won't ride anything scary, but to have two kids who are even more into thrill rides than I am, AND who can go on them independently after The Legend wiped out Dad and The Voyage wiped out Mom.

Nevertheless, after that non-stop weekend, I declared Monday a homeschool holiday... a holiday in which the kids had to help me clean for an hour and the younger kid had to finish up the last of Friday's schoolwork and go to ballet while the older kid and I went to fencing, of course, but a holiday nonetheless. But we were back to work on Tuesday, and back to our full fall schedule.

Books of the Week for the older kid are almost entirely novels that I've seen recommended in one place or another, while the younger kid begins the Princess Tales series, and has a book of reversible poems to try out, and a couple of other random non-fiction books that I'll give to the older kid in turn next week. Daily work consists of more journaling in cursive (the younger kid has really taken to this, but I'll need to consider giving the older kid writing prompts next semester), consistent work in Wordly Wise (the younger kid is in Book 4, and the older kid is in Book 6), and more progress through Coding Games in Scratch (the older kid has been enjoying working through the book, but the younger kid prefers to use her time to make some dang awesome cartoons, if I don't say so myself).

And here's the rest of our week!

TUESDAY: In Math Mammoth, the older kid is still working through fraction calculation and the younger kid is still reviewing multi-stage multiplication and division, so their hands-on math enrichment is something that I think will help with both--prime numbers! I asked them to figure out which numbers from 1-100 were prime, which involved a lot of interesting problem-solving and logical thinking, but I'm also asking them to memorize those primes. This knowledge will make division, multiplication, and factoring and finding least common denominators much easier.

For our shark unit, the kids (and I!) reviewed the MOOC's unit on the shark brain, and then the kids constructed this human brain model and compared the anatomies. Playgroup and Girl Scout stuff with friends and the library and fencing made us run out of time for more learning about the human brain, but I plan to sneakily sneak it in later this week.

We had to double up on Song School Spanish this week, but fortunately the two chapters are related. I was worried that this book would be too baby-ish, but at the rate that we're moving, it's actually perfect. The kids are getting some good vocabulary that they can use as cognates for other Romance languages, and a little bit of conversation practice with me.

WEDNESDAY: In our American Revolution unit, this is the week for the Declaration of Independence! On this day, the kids will be adding pages in their notebooks for Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Hancock, using the mini books from this lapbook. So far this notebook IS working better than last year's World War 2 notebook, and I am tentatively hoping that my plans for the kids to add to their notebooks during our vacation will work out, as well.

The kids seemed to have fun doing a straight-up craft project with me last week, so I thought I'd try it again as a little mid-week break in our rigorous semester. I've had this comped copy of Pattern Play for a while, and it looks to be a quick, easy, and satisfying experience. The older kid needs more scissors practice, anyway--she refuses to use her left-handed scissors in her left hand, even though her right-handed cutting is a tragedy, so I've given up and given her back the right-handed scissors. Her cutting is still a tragedy, but at least she can see where she's cutting now!

Today's comparative shark/human anatomy focus is the eye. The shark's eye has some interesting differences, most of which I'll expect the kids to be able to explain after reviewing the shark eye information in our MOOC and doing the research required to be able to complete this diagram of the human eye (I removed the answer key, so they'll really have to work for it!).

Fortunately, we don't have evening extracurriculars on this day, since the kids and I will be attending the training required to enable us to run a voter registration table at our local food pantry. I'm excited about this opportunity, and it will satisfy some crucial components of a couple of Girl Scout badges and our election unit study.

THURSDAY: Speaking of the elections... the older kid is fascinated by independent and third-party candidates. The kids will be reading the section on these types of candidates in Election 2016, and then researching online to find some of them and see what their stances are. I'm not ashamed to tell you that we'll likely be doing a lot of laughing and poking fun at these brave folks!

We'll review the chapters in From Colonies to Country once again (the older kid generally reads them, but the younger kid and I enjoy listening to them while coloring), and then the kids will see what they can accomplish ahead of time in their Independence Hall Junior Ranger books. I'm about to start planning our specific agenda for our road trip, and I hope that I can score us tickets to tour Independence Hall!

Our rocks and minerals unit isn't going as well as I'd like, and I have to say that I'm looking forward to leaving it behind at the end of this semester and reapproaching it in a different way another time. The text is too difficult for the younger kid, and I'm having trouble distilling it for her and providing interesting hands-on activities that illustrate the important concepts. The older kid is getting a little more out of it, but in the end, I'm just going to have to think of it as an overview of the topic, and try to do a better job with geology next time. For the time being, however, we're going to see it through, which means reading the rest of the chapter, having the older kid complete the assessment, and then taking the time to look deeply at our igneous rock samples. Hopefully, they will then be able to recognize an igneous rock when they see one!

FRIDAY: After one last review of this week's content from From Colonies to Country, the kids will get to play a little, practicing writing with a quill pen--don't let me forget to buy some ink before Friday! We'll also use this time to do a close reading of a reproduction of the Declaration of Independence that we own, and perhaps copy it out a little. Little do the children know that the first several lines of the Declaration of Independence will also become part of their memory work--mwa-ha-ha!

The kids both have some interesting work to do on their Girl Scout badges on this day: the older kid has to come up with creative decision-making strategies for her Finding Common Ground badge (hopefully they will not include trial by fire or dancing with snakes, etc.), and the younger kid has decided that the ultimate expression of her Social Butterfly badge would be to plan a party for her friends, in collaboration with another girl. I'm happy to leave them to it!

Using Ocearch, we have a favorite shark whose movements we track. On this day, the kids will be thinking more about Finley's movements, especially compared to other tiger sharks, and trying to come up with hypotheses to explain them. We probably won't actually get to test them, but you never know!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY/MONDAY: After the running around--fun running around, but running around, nevertheless--that we did last weekend, I am hoping for a quiet long weekend this week. The kids are dying to actually get the ground broken on their long-planned treehouse. There's an indoor trampoline park that just opened and that we tragically have not yet visited. The drive-in's movie line-up is absolutely terrific.

And napping. I feel like we should do a lot of napping this weekend.

Work Plans for the Week of August 22, 2016: Sharks, Osmosis, and the Boston Tea Party

We had a great first week back in our new school schedule, both productive and fun. The two-nights-in-a-row fencing schedule wore out both me and Will, but I know that my skills, at least, really improved on that second night with the first night's corrections fresh in my mind (I now have a much better en garde position, with my sabre better protecting my 3, and although my balestra is still pretty miserable, I can at least leave the ground with it now). The kids were just as furious as I'd hoped they'd be about our Skittles Intolerable Acts game, they dove into their Coding Games in Scratch assignments, they both got all of their work completed every day, although this one is now giving me trouble over schoolwork, sigh--

That's her personal sketchbook, NOT her math...

--and we still had loads of time for playdates at the local public pool, hiking and creek stomping, celebratory doughnuts, shark film festivals, goofing around, and game playing:

This is Munchkin, a game that Will and I really enjoy, although we haven't quite gotten the rest of the family into the fun, yet.

This week's Memory Work will consist of reinforcing the Thirteen Colonies and the Gettysburg Address, beginning "Paul Revere's Ride" (little do the poor little lambs know that I will be forcing them to recite the Gettysburg Address and "Paul Revere's Ride" in front of suitable locations on our trip, mwa-ha-ha!), reviewing fraction terminology, and working on facts from our sharks and rocks/minerals units. Books of the Day are again a hodge-podge of picture books, short non-fiction books, and novels that I simply think the children would like. Daily work includes one journal entry in cursive (Syd loves writing in her journal, but Will still does the bare minimum), progress through Coding Games in Scratch (they both love this one, and seem to enjoy creating their own games as well as playing the ones that others have created), and work in their Wordly Wise (it's Will who loves this one, and Syd who trudges through it as slowly as possible).

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Will's week in Math Mammoth is all calculating with fractions, while Syd is reviewing the four operations and the Order of Operations. Our math enrichment this week is an exercise in finding equivalent fractions using Cuisenaire rods and fraction strips--Will already knows how to find equivalent fractions, but she calculates that by dividing by the Greatest Common Factor or Multiplying by the Lowest Common Multiple, and I want to make sure that she can SEE these fractions, as well. Syd knows the definitions from our Memory Work, so even though she won't encounter fractions again in her Math Mammoth for a while, this might help her have the concept better cemented when they roll around again.

A lot of what the kids learn about the Battle of Lexington and Concord will be done on-site, when we visit there in a couple of months, and through conversation and lecture, so this week's history is actually a little less intense, even though this is one of my favorite chapters in the American Revolution. We'll be reading/listening to the relevant chapters in From Colonies to Country several times, and on this day, we'll also be going over the events as we look at these animated maps of pre-Revolution America and the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

The kids are doing great with Song School Spanish, working through it independently and memorizing its vocabulary like champs. I'm still trying to figure out if we'll be doing Latin and/or Mandarin in our next school semester, so I'm happy that I have some independent language work for them to do while I contemplate and wait for further information.

Our sharks unit will be really interesting this week, as we're focusing on shark anatomy. The kids weren't into human anatomy last semester and so I dropped it, but this week I'll be sneaking some human anatomy back in as we study it comparatively with shark anatomy. Not on this day, though--on this day, the kids are going to study and memorize the caudal fin types, which are crucial to the positive identification of different shark species.

TUESDAY: There are several interesting reasons why sharks can attain neutral buoyancy, among them its oily liver, which is what we'll be looking at in detail on this day, as the kids revisit our previous liquid density lessons with this experiment in which they're going to attempt to obtain neutral buoyancy using oil, water, and a small plastic bottle.

For a lesson on osmoregulation later this week, the kids will need to understand osmosis and diffusion, so I've set that up as a series of separate lessons. We'll watch the Khan Academy videos, which explain them pretty well, although the set-up to the osmosis lesson is misleading, in my opinion, and then set up two different demonstrations to revisit later this week, one on diffusion that requires us to make several petri dishes of clear gelatin, and one on osmosis that requires us to put several eggs in a vinegar bath in order to strip away their shells.

Playgroup was cancelled last week due to bad weather, so everyone will be extra excited to get back to it this week! We came out of that weeks-long rainstorm into gorgeous temperatures, so I won't be surprised if it turns into an all-afternoon event--I'll bring along our fencing gear for our evening class, just in case.

WEDNESDAY: We'll review and discuss our From Colonies to Country chapters, then the kids will complete this lapbook page on John Adams as a placeholder for our further work on him. It's on my to-do list to preview that John Adams mini-series that was on HBO several years ago--I remember that I liked it, but I don't remember if it's suitable for children. I'm hoping that at least the Boston Massacre episode will be watchable.

We'll review the Khan Academy video on diffusion, then the children will measure the diffusion of several different liquids and solutions into the gelatin that we set up earlier. It's a simple demonstration, but should cement the concept into their minds.

This day's shark lesson is more a lesson on the human heart than it is sharks, but don't tell the kids! In order to understand how the shark's heart differs from the human heart, you have to understand how the human heart works, so that's what we'll be studying with videos and this coloring diagram. After you know that, then it's simple to see how the shark's two-chambered heart is different, since all it has to do is run the blood by its gills to oxygenate it. Simple and efficient!

THURSDAY: I made the kids watch part of the Democratic National Convention with me, but we were traveling during the Republican National Convention, so we're only now doing the relevant lesson in Election 2016. To help them understand the text, we'll look up clips and commentary on the two conventions, and then discuss them.

The kids have an art lesson with Matt, or sometimes me, every weekend, but I'm going to sneak in an extra art lesson on this day, since I've been wanting to do it for a while. There's a lesson in Three-Dimensional Art Adventures (which I received free from a publicist, which is why I have it before its publication date) that covers making reliefs out of air-dry clay and painting them, but the kids love Sculpey so much that I think we're going to try this lesson in miniature, using that and skipping the painting.

The text on igneous rock that we're reading on this day is very dry, but Will should be able to handle it, and Syd only needs to distill from it how igneous rock is formed. I'm still feeling out how to handle the rock collection and identification portion of this unit, as I'm finding it hard to organize, so I'm hoping that it will work to have the kids select igneous rocks from their personal collection, to be further analyzed and identified later.

FRIDAY: There's actually very little that the kids can do in advance in their Minute Man National Park Junior Ranger books, but every little bit counts when you're sitting in a national park, cooling your heels on a park bench and waiting for your kid to finish their work. Every word search that they do at home is a word search that they're not doing on that park bench!

The kids did read-alongs in Spanish using TumbleBooks last week, and it went okay, but for this week I've requested several juvenile Spanish language books from the library. It's tricky, because the text needs to be simple enough that the kids can pick up what's being said using contextual cues, but many books that simple also have the English language side-by-side, which is useless for this purpose as the kids will simply read the English. I've chosen some Sandra Boynton, Eric Carle, and Dr. Seuss that I hope will work well.

The kids didn't take as much footage of last week's creek stomping adventure as I'd hoped they would, so I don't know if they'll have enough to enable them to finish the last projects for their Girl Scout badges, but that's for them to figure out, not me!

Finally, we get to our osmosis demonstration and our explanation of osmoregulation! Fortunately, we have a perfect cell model right there in our chicken coop--the egg! After setting this project up on Tuesday, the eggs should be nice and shell-less by now, so the kids will be able to play with the process of osmosis and thereby understand how sharks don't a) shrivel up or b) expand to bursting in the ocean.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We didn't get all of the adventures done that we wanted to do last weekend, except for the shark move marathon (somehow we can always make time for lying in bed and watching sharks eat people!), and we're not going to have time for them this weekend, either, what with Pony Club and a concert that the kids earned by selling a butt-load of Girl Scout cookies over the winter. I'm a little bummed about that, because there are other summer adventures that I really want to do, as well, but when you actually take a vacation in the summer, not the fall as we usually do, then summer goes by FAST!

We're Obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien

We are a family who has a nightly read-aloud.

Well, not nightly. We skip nights that Will and I have fencing, and many nights lately we've been choosing to watch the Olympics instead (who knew that women's weight-lifting would be so AWESOME!?!), and there are some weeks that we just forget about it entirely, but we always find our way back to it, because it's family tradition.

I don't remember what we read before The Lost World, but after that we read The Hobbit, and now we're reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, because of course.

I say "we", although it's Matt who, as a rule, does the actual reading out loud. The kids and I sometimes brush each others' hair, or work a puzzle, or fiddle with something quiet, or just sit and listen (although I am in serious danger of falling asleep if I just sit and listen--perhaps I need Matt to wake up and read to me when I'm perennially awake at 3 am!). A few weeks ago a publicist sent us a free copy of this Tolkien coloring book, and since then it's been the favored activity to do while listening to Lord of the Rings.

Because of COURSE!

Here we are from a few nights ago. Will and I are coloring pages from the Tolkien coloring book, Syd is playing with kinetic sand, and Matt is on the couch, reading to us.

This particular coloring book has actually sneaked into the rest of our days, as well, lately--here's a photo that I snapped of our work table one school morning. It wasn't until I was editing the photo that I noticed that while Syd is deep inside her Book of the Day, Will is totally working on a Tolkien coloring book page, the little rascal!

Years ago, I got the entire family into the habit of photocopying whatever page they want to color. I like to buy nice coloring books, particularly nice ones in the topics of history, biology and botany, and the arts and humanities, and I want to be able to re-use them. It's also nice because we copy our pages onto cardstock, which is really good both for high-quality markers and colored pencils. Here are some of the pages that we've completed in the last week or so:

Me!

Will: she chose this one for the giant crystals.

Syd, WIP

Syd, completed.

Although we pause often during the read-aloud for conversation or ready-reference, Will has lately become VERY interested in Tolkien, and so we've been exploring him more outside of our evening reading time. Matt and I gave her a bit of a summary of the Silmarillion when she noticed that she was coloring a page from it and asked about it, and she didn't mention it again for a few days, but the other day at fencing, when we had to go around and say our names and one interesting thing that we'd done this summer, one of the high school saber fencers said that he'd read the Silmarillion.

Well, it was ON.

One thing that I should mention right now is that the kids have not seen the Lord of the Rings films. Matt and I LOVE them--hell, I adore them!--but I am deeply adverse to letting a child see a film before she's read the books. Do you know how, when you read a book, the characters come alive in your imagination, and you know exactly what they look like? It doesn't happen that way if you've seen the movie first, I declare. I think that if you see the movie first, not only will the many subtleties in the book be spoiled for you, but you will forever read that book and picture the film's actors as your characters.

We did watch the Hobbit films after we finished the book, and although I attempted to pass on my great love for John Watson in the title role, everyone was disappointed in them. I have also screened the following resources that I'm going to share with you, and I let the songs pass, but I won't let the kids read anything that tells the plot of the Lord of the Rings further than we've read.

For Friends, my children are, as yet, unspoiled in the plot of the Lord of the Rings. I have done many things wrong as a parent, but this? My children are going to journey with Frodo, have nightmares about the Ring Wraiths, call out to Tom Bombadil for help, and fall in love with Sam.

This I am going to do right!

Anyway, here are some of the Tolkien resources that we've been enjoying. Some are for the kids, some for the adults, some for the whole family. Pre-screen them so that you don't spoil any plot points for your kids!

• Following the Hobbit Trail. I haven't shown this to the kids, because it's full of spoilers, but it's a really cool infographic. You know that we love infographics!
• Interactive Map of The Hobbit. This is based on the movie version, so you can play with this after you've read The Hobbit and seen the movies.
• LOTR Project: Interactive maps, timelines, genealogies, and more!
• Minas Tirith paper model. The entire family is going to have to work on this one together.
• Astronomer Recreates the Middle Earth Solar System: This will be cool to bring up when we're studying astronomy next semester.
• Our Fabric Wall Hanging. Have I shown this to you yet? I bought it as a present for the entire family after we finished The Hobbit, and it's hanging in prominence in our big family room.
• Syd's Skirt. Here's what I did with the rest of that fabric!
• "That's What Bilbo Baggins Hates." Friends, Tolkien sings this himself. It's a treasure.
• The Tolkien Professor: They're a little dry for kids, but I enjoy these streamable lectures on Tolkien and his works.
• The Tolkien Society. You can find more resources for studying and teaching Tolkien here. I'd highly recommend going off on the rabbit trail of Old English and Anglo-Saxon runes, as this was a major interest of Tolkien. I actually studied Old English in grad school, and read Beowulf in its entirety in the original language, so I will for sure be encouraging the kids in this!
• The Unexpected Party Menu: We are totally doing this when we eventually get a working oven again.
• Elevenses and Then Some. Yes, it's another menu of Tolkien-themed food. I don't know if you know this by now, but my kids and I share a deep love of our noms, and we often happily discuss the hobbits' six meals and the necessity that we model ourselves after them on this.
• Unit Study. If you want to turn this into a literature study, here's a complete one from Houghton-Mifflin.
• Common Core High School Study. This is more focused on strategy than content, but it has some good, usable methods.

P.S. Two things:

1. I'm on the lookout for a vintage hardback copy of The Hobbit, the one with the pull-out map in the front. Tell me if you see one for a good price!

2. It occurs to me that although I've written about it on CAGW, I've never shown you here the hallway where I like to keep mementos of our travels. I stenciled a quote from The Lord of the Rings above it. Here it is!

Work Plans for the Week of August 15, 2016: Sharks, Intolerable Acts, and Molecular Modeling

NOTE: My vacation posts are on indefinite hiatus, as my external hard drive that contains them (as well as all of the other digital photos that I've ever taken) is currently in a repair shop where someone is attempting to recover its data.

Can I just whine at you for a minute here? I have my health, I have two great kids and a wonderful life partner, we have enough money to support ourselves and still be able to save for amazing vacations, one of which we went on just last month, and yet... I feel like I have suffered an inordinate number of losses this year. I have lost my grandfather. My best friend. And on top of that, several chickens from our flock have been killed this summer. Arrow incubated three adorable chicks, and they each died. We really wanted to adopt Thundercat, the kitten that Matt found in our yard, but he had feline leukemia and so the shelter euthanized him. And now, today, I have possibly lost my personal copy of every digital photo that I have ever taken of my children, my husband, our pets, my grandfather, my best friend, our vacations. All that I possibly have left are the small-scale jpegs of what I've posted on my blog. Small potatoes, I know, because I still have my children, and my husband, many of our pets, my memories of Pappa and Mac, and our vacations, and yet it still seems like a lot. It seems like I have less emotional reserves to deal with every new loss, no matter how minor, no matter how much it's nothing compared to my constant grief over Pappa and Mac.

So here's to hoping for a crackerjack computer repair person who is right this second recovering every single precious digital file in its pristine condition, and to a final few months of the year that contain no more living things or dearly beloved treasures ceasing their existence from my life. Okay?

Okay!

We're back to weekly work plans this week. From the week after the kids got back from vacation through last week, I made them daily work plans, as each week the kids had too many time-consuming activities (a sleepover at the zoo! A two-day volunteer orientation at the Children's Museum!) to make weekly work plans that progressed our various units of study practical. Instead, they kept rolling with their Math Mammoth, I got them used to journaling every day, we began a sharks unit that we'll be continuing through the next seven weeks, we began a Scratch coding unit that we'll also be continuing--

--and, of course, we read a LOT of books:

Here, the older kid is reading about old bestiaries, and I've been sketching the animal descriptions for her: a beaver with a waffle tail, a beaver with a tail flat like a fish, and a dove with contemplative wings.

Time at the table with the kids while they mostly worked independently gave ME time to plan out our next seven weeks. I'd like to finish several units of study before our next big vacation, including our rocks and minerals unit (with a culminating project of identifying at least 30 of our own rocks and minerals from our personal collection), our sharks unit (with a culminating project of an actual shark dissection!), an easy-breezy Spanish language unit, and, of course, our American Revolution unit!

Although Will won't take her first AP or SAT 2 exams until eighth grade, I'm deliberately including that material in our relevant studies.

This week is the first week of this seven-week session. Books of the Day are a hodge-podge this week of novels that I thought the children would enjoy, a funny book on chemistry for the older kid, an interesting book on battlefields, also for her, a book on the history of architecture for the younger kid, a Peter Benchley memoir on the ocean for the older kid... see? A hodge-podge! Other daily work consists of journaling, consistent work in Wordly Wise (the older kid is almost done with Book 6, but the younger kid, who loathes memorizing spelling words, is still in the middle of Book 4. Fortunately, it's not a race!), and consistent work in Coding Games in Scratch, a Scratch programming book that I got from the library and that the kids both really seem to love.

Oh, and we're also super excited that CNN Student News starts back up again this week! Tradition holds that we begin each school day with Carl Azuz, and it seriously makes the transition to schoolwork so much easier. Also, we LOVE it!

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: The older kid is a changed kid these days. It's been months since she pulled a full-on schoolwork rebellion; nowadays, she may not begin her work first thing in the morning, but every school day, she will wander over to the table at some point without prompting, and then buckle down and muscle through everything that I've assigned her. I am SO appreciative of how big of a difference it makes.

Of course, the younger kid now has to be coaxed/encouraged/bullied to get HER work done these days, so maybe schoolwork balkiness is simply something that strikes children of a certain age.

I tell you this because the older kid has already finished her math and history today--in Math Mammoth, she's spiraled back around to fractions for a short time, and in history, we listened to chapters 7-11 of From Colonies to Country, pausing often to discuss them (the older, for instance, always insists on learning England's point of view). Our entire week this week is focused on the build-up to the rebellion, primarily the Intolerable Acts, and I was pleased that the older kid naturally wanted to discuss the differences between the British and colonists' point of view, because today's enrichment activity is the online game Mission US: Colony or Crown. The older kid has played all of the Mission: US games before in her free time, but told me that she wouldn't mind a replay, and in fact, after she finished Colony or Crown, she asked if she could play the other Mission: US games, and I told her that she could, of COURSE.

I mean, gee, Mom, do you mind if I keep learning? What other answer could I possibly give?!?

The younger kid had a late start today, so she's only finished listening to the History of US chapters with us (although she did get a lot of work done on her Tolkien coloring book selection, and she has had a Percy Jackson audiobook glued to her ears for every second that we haven't been listening to History of US). She's finishing up decimals in her own Math Mammoth this week, and then will be ready to begin the 5th grade material next week.

Song School Spanish is pretty baby-ish for my 10-and 12-year-olds, but that means that we can zip through it. All I want them to do is get the vocabulary down, because if they don't continue Mandarin this fall, we'll start Latin, and they'll appreciate the cognate boost from knowing words from another Romance language. I'm a little unusual in that my pedagogical focus isn't necessarily on the children developing authentic accents and good conversation skills--if they continue Mandarin, then sure, and I'll hire tutors as needed to teach them that, but I think that another great foundation for language study is simply studying it, memorizing the vocabulary and understanding the grammar, conversing, yes, but also composing. If they have to work hard to correct their accent later, then so be it, but the possibility of that is certainly no excuse to not learn the language at all right now.

*Steps down off of soapbox.*

Math enrichment this week is something simple, just a sweet little origami heart tutorial, an easy way to review some visual fraction concepts and symmetry terminology. I'll continue weekly math enrichment throughout this seven-week unit, but most of our other subjects are going to be so rigorous that I can't promise that any of the math enrichment activities will be less sweet and simple than this one.

Our sharks unit is truly kid-led, and truly follows their passions. I originally signed up for the four-week sharks MOOC from Cornell just because the kids like animals, and it seemed fitting to study the ocean right before they left for California. By the end of the first day's lesson, however, the older kid had told me that now she wants to be a marine biologist instead of a lawyer, and by the end of the first week the younger kid told me that she wants to work with animals, maybe in a zoo, instead of being a hairdresser and ballerina.

It took us far longer than four weeks to complete the class the first time, with everyone working at her own pace, but now that we're done, we're going to be reviewing it again over the next four weeks, this time with plenty of hands-on enrichment activities to cement the concepts. After that, we'll spend 2-3 weeks on the big promised pay-off for this unit: the dissection of an actual shark specimen! The younger kid isn't so sure about this one, but the older kid is THRILLED.

On this day, we're reviewing the class videos that explain the ocean zones, and the regions that sharks inhabit. Using some online diagrams as a reference, the kids will paint and label a large chart for our wall that combines all of this information, and that can be populated in the future by cut-out pictures of the specific shark species that we study. We'll also, of course, be covering that information in our daily memory work in the car until it's nice and cemented into all of our minds.

TUESDAY: We'll review this week's chapters of From Colonies to Country, then the kids will complete this quick and easy lapbook activity on England's reasons for taxing the colonies, and put that into their American Revolution notebooks. I'm making the kids make their notebooks MUCH more organized than last year's World War 2 notebooks were, and my plan is to make them take the notebooks with us on our trip, and add information from the various sites that we visit to the relevant pages. We'll see how that goes...

Regardless, England's reasons for taxing the colonies will be added to our daily Memory Work.

We're still working on molecular modeling, because that concept is so important to the understanding of mineral formation, in particular, but this is our last week studying our chapter on minerals, so next week we'll be moving on to different geologic processes as we study igneous and sedimentary rocks. I want to make sure that the kids really understand molecular modeling, so we're basically doing the same model twice this week, once on this day with gumdrops and toothpicks, and again on the next day in an online simulator. My goal for the kids is that whenever they're presented with a newly identified specimen, they wonder what it's made of and how its molecules form. And then maybe they'll look it up!

Our town is basically made of rain recently, so it's likely that our homeschool group's playgroup will be cancelled, or will meet somewhere more mellow, like the library. I, personally, wouldn't mind the free time, I suppose--the older kid and I start fencing two evenings a week this week, and although I enjoy fencing, I'm a little bit dreading the time commitment.

WEDNESDAY: The kids by now know the types of taxes that England put on the colonists, and they understand England's reasoning, so to make sure they also understand the reasoning of the colonists, we're going to do one of my favorite history activities: role play! I will be England, the children will be colonists, and there will be Skittles involved (I wanted M&Ms, but the colonists overruled me at the grocery store, sigh...). I'm telling you right now that if the children are not crying in frustration by the end of the game, then Great Britain has not done its job.

We'll explore shark anatomy a LOT more deeply in the coming weeks, but external anatomy, particularly fins, is crucial to positive identification, so it's one of the first things that one should memorize. We'll be covering this in memory work, as well, but I want the kids to feel like they can apply their knowledge; fortunately, I used my staff discount at the Children's Museum to splurge on some Safari, Ltc. shark toys last week, so I'll be tasking the kids with identifying the external anatomy of each shark toy, AND with cross-referencing it with a species guide to evaluate the accuracy of each toy's depiction.

THURSDAY: Explore Rocks and Minerals is a really cool book with lots of fun activities, but it doesn't really go in the direction that I want to go for our unit. It does have one especially good reading selection on minerals, though, so on this day I'm asking the kids to read that selection, then they can choose an activity from the book that tickles their fancy. We might have to do this activity over the weekend, depending on what materials are required, and I won't push them if nothing seems to excite them, but hopefully they'll enjoy the chance to choose and complete something.

By this time, we'll have gone over the same old ground of England taxing the colonies that the kids are likely to be sick of it, but it's such an important concept that I can't help but cover it thoroughly. We'll have one last overview, then, this time in a super-fun Brainpop format.

We likely won't be doing a ton on the order of classification in our sharks unit, but we have studied it before, so since the class covers it this week, I'm taking the opportunity to have the kids review how the order of classification works, and to remind them that Wikipedia, of all places, is an excellent resource for studying it. When we do focus on a specific species, I'll expect the kids to be able to instantly find that species' order of classification for me, and to be able to explain it.

FRIDAY: Finally, we're moving on! Chapter 12 in From Colonies to Country introduces us to a few of the major players in the rebellion. The kids will use these lapbook pages to record the basic info for a couple of key ones, then they'll put them in their notebooks, to be added to later.

Since we're going through simple Spanish vocabulary so quickly, I'm already expecting the kids to be able to read some very simple Spanish books by this day. We'll search out a board book or an early reader with a lot of contextual clues, but the goal is to get the kids USING their knowledge.

This woodworking project might continue into the weekend, but that's okay. One of the stops on our road trip will hopefully be a beach in Maryland that is renowned for its shark tooth fossils, and I'm told that the best way to collect these fossils is to build the sifter that we're going to start building on this day. It's more of a practical life project than a shark biology project, then, but I think that the kids are going to start getting really excited about hunting for fossil shark teeth when we start to make it.

The younger kid actually won't have math on this day, since she should have finished her Math Mammoth year the day before. She'll start the next year's work right away on Monday next week, but on this day she gets a free day and a small celebration of her choosing: doughnuts. We'll likely buy them on our way to the older kid's destination of choosing: a local creek. Both kids need to work with their cameras to finish up Girl Scout badges--Digital Photographer for the younger kid, and Digital Filmmaker for the older kid. The older kid is pickier, so I left the choice up to her about what activity she'd like to film and make a movie out of for her badge and she chose creek stomping, so creek stomping is where we'll be, doughnuts in hand, for most of the day on this day!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Our only activity that's set in stone this weekend is Pony Club for the older kid, and yet it's actually going to be a weekend that's fairly packed with activity. The older kid is likely going to be leading Family Meeting for the first time, so god knows how that will go. Matt holds an art class for the children every weekend, and this weekend he'll also be giving them a lecture on pre-Revolution America. The entire family cleans the entire house on Sundays, so that I don't lose the rest of my sanity in the coming week. We also may break ground on the backyard tree house, if it ever stops raining. And if it stops raining for a good long while, we have tickets to Holiday World that the kids earned from cookie sales this winter!

I REALLY hope we get to Holiday World this weekend.