Monday, June 5, 2017

Work Plans for the Week of June 5, 2017: Homeschooling 1.5 Kids

Our summer homeschool schedule is in full swing! Last week we completed not just a three-day school week, but also a full-day field trip to the zoo and another whole afternoon at the local swimming pool with friends, and we spent part of the weekend showing this suddenly practically grown up kid how to navigate our local university's campus to find her biology class that begins this week.



Even on a Sunday, the campus was crawling with freshmen being oriented with their families, marveling at the sites and doing scavenger hunts on their smartphones and asking us for directions, and taking lots and lots and lots of photos of their soon-to-be freshmen all over campus.

Since we had Luna with us, we decided that Luna, too, was a soon-to-be freshman having her freshman orientation, and so with great excitement, we posed her all over campus and took her photo at all the iconic spots:









Syd was also super busy this weekend--her dream was to run a bake stand near the entrance to the drive-in and before its weekend movies. She baked all day on Friday, and ran her stand both Friday and Saturday evenings:



It was a modest success and a huge learning experience, but enough work that Syd is still debating if she wants to try it again.

This week, thanks to her adventures in biology, Will is really only going to be homeschooling with us for two full days. I'm looking forward to the chance to spend some one-on-one time with Syd, both so that I can give her more encouragement to focus on the book work that she likes to sneak away from when I'm distracted by Will, and so that we can spend more time doing the hands-on projects that she loves so much.

Our memory work for the week is really just measurement conversions--how fun to be on the verge of wrapping up another semester!--and Books of the Day this week are mostly books about Greece (of course!), but also a selection or two on the Celts, whom the kids remain in love with. Of course!

Other daily work includes typing practice with Typing.com, keyboard lessons and practice with Hoffman Academy, progress on their MENSA reading lists, creative writing for Syd and cursive copywork for Will (next semester I'm going to have to create or buy a rhetoric program for Will, since she refuses to write regularly), and SAT prep through Khan Academy for Will.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: In Math Mammoth this week, Syd is still doing geometry and Will is still reviewing percents. She'll be finishing pre-algebra this summer so that she can start Algebra 1 in the fall, and that's the main reason why I'm asking her to keep plugging away in her math even on her biology class days. Math, SAT prep, Greek review, and her Book of the Day shouldn't take her more than an hour or so to finish, though, so she should be able to manage it all without feeling overworked, especially if she gets off her butt and does it this morning like I'm asking her to, instead of waiting until she comes home tonight hungry and tired and done with interacting with other humans.

Syd has a full schedule on this day, including the rest of her daily work and a new curriculum of Greek and Latin roots that I'm borrowing from the university library to try out while Will is between Wordly Wise books (she's finished Book 7, and I won't assign Book 8 until next semester). At a glance, I doubt that it's something that we'd use consistently, but it looks like it might be a workable pick-up-and-go solution that I can turn to when we're between semesters, or in gap weeks.

We're still using Greek123 for Greek, although I need to add in much more alphabet recognition and phonics drills in the next few weeks, because my goal is that we should at least be able to sound out Greek words while we're in Greece, and our curriculum is introducing letters so slowly that we won't have covered the full alphabet with it alone before we leave. For alphabet practice, I like these worksheets, and for phonics, we watch these videos over and over again.

In Girl Scouts, Syd will be bridging to Cadette in the fall, and, as always, there are still so many things that she wants to do as a Junior first! We've also recently learned that Girl Scouts can earn retired badges, which brings the possible badges to explore and try up to... oh, infinity? On this day, Syd can plan what activities she wants to complete to earn the retired Outdoor Cook badge. She enjoys cooking enough that she'll likely want to do the actual activities in her free time--hopefully at dinnertime, so that I don't have to cook!

Playing with Perler beads is just a chance for Syd and I to sit down and hang out together. I know that as homeschoolers, we're together more than most eleven-year-olds and their mothers, but I still feel like it's easy to slip into each of us doing our own thing in different parts of the house or yard, coming together mainly when I want her to help me with a chore or do her schoolwork or eat a meal or watch a video with me. So I'm deliberately making time to do stuff that Syd likes when it's just us together.

That is, if she still wants to hang out with me when she knows that I'm also going to make her go through all of her clothes with me today, too!

TUESDAY: Will doesn't have class on this day, so this is my chance to get through the material that I want to cover with both kids this week.

The kids have been working on this Junior Archaeologist badge for a couple of weeks already, but it's a lot more rigorous than most Junior Ranger badges, and calls for several hands-on activities--in particular, an excavating exercise that requires each child to excavate one of our trash bins and make some educated guesses about the society that produced this trash. The kids have been putting off that one, I'm sure you can guess why, so I believe that it's now the only activity left in their book. Guess that they'll have to do it on this day, then!

I LOVE the Greco-Persian Wars, and I'm SUPER excited that we're covering it this week! On our trip, we'll be near Marathon but likely won't go there, but there's a slim chance that we could visit Thermopylae on our driving tour, and anyway, the wars are fascinating and awesome. On this day, the kids will read the account of the wars in Story of the World volume 1, answer the reading comprehension questions, complete the mapwork on our road map of Greece, and add the timeline figures to the timeline that we made last week. I'll show you that timeline another day, but I'll just tell you right now that I love it.

Our extra math on this day isn't really hands-on, but it is an interesting exploration of pi in geo-historical context. The idea is that the kids calculate the ratios that were used for pi by various societies over time, and evaluate them based on their accuracy. It's also related to our Greek and History of Science studies, as we've previously studied--and tried for ourselves!--Archimedes method of finding pi using polygons.

WEDNESDAY: The entire family is planning a remodel of the children's bedroom, the bulk of which Matt and I will do while the kids are at sleepaway camp later this summer, but the kids are helping where they can. We've got some cute things that we'll be hanging in their windows, and I'll be sewing them some new curtains, so on this day Syd can help me wash their filthy windows, so that all of their new window treatments will look nice.

Syd and I have also been wanting to make the original Girl Scout cookie recipe for a while, AND I bought us a trefoil cookie cutter when we were in Savannah, so while Will is studying biology, Syd and I can bake cookies! While they're baking, we can hang out and Syd can finish the weaving that is one of her projects for the prehistory unit of our history of fashion study. I actually forced Will to finish up the UFO on our other peg loom this weekend, because I've been wanting to try my hand at small scale yarn weaving, too!

THURSDAY: I have a lot of books and videos that I want to show the kids to flesh out the Greco-Persian Wars, but this online timeline is the best that I've seen for making sense of a battle. Reading carefully through it and exploring the links should give them an excellent feel for what took place.

Our whole family still loves the working thermometer that the kids made, so I'm looking forward to adding a working barometer to our homemade meteorological tools, now that we've studied and modeled air pressure. And just in case you thought that I might gloss over the Byzantine Empire in our Medieval history study, because the kids are so interested in European history, you should know that 1) of course I'm not and 2) the monastery that we'll be visiting in Greece is an Eastern Orthodox one and so of COURSE I'm not going to gloss over the Byzantine Empire! We'll learn more about it and its religion on this day, and then the kids can try their hands at the most complicated mosaic-making that we've done so far.

Because Byzantine mosaics are complicated, y'all.

FRIDAY: Syd will have her spelling and vocabulary tests today (Will has hers on Thursday), but otherwise I'm hoping that we'll have a leisurely day, with just her daily work to attend to. Last Friday she spent the ENTIRE day working on her bake stand, so much so that she had to do Friday's school on the weekend, so if she wants to run her bake stand again, that will be her Friday again this week. If she doesn't, though, we can just finish up school, and then spend the afternoon however we wish.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Obedience school and Pony Club take up all of Saturday morning, which means that once again I'm not going to make it to the farmer's market, sigh. We could make it to the u-pick strawberry farm, though, and to the huge outdoor experiences festival that the kids look forward to every year. Syd may or may not be running a bake stand. Matt and I may or may not be building shelves for record albums or lofting the kids' bunk beds to make storage space underneath. The wall behind their bed used to be a closet, and so that's also a mess, uneven and mismatched to the rest of the room, and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to even it out so that I can do something with it.

Maybe I'll just sit and stare at it all day on Sunday until something comes to me.

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Friday, June 2, 2017

Yet Another Day at the Zoo

I know that zoo photos are really only interesting to the person who took them, but oh, well--here are a bunch of photos of our recent trip to the Indianapolis Zoo!


On the drive home, the kids sat in the backseat (just a few more weeks of backseat living for my almost teenager!) and discussed their plans for the future. Syd attested that although she really wanted to work with dolphins when she grew up, being a zookeeper would be a good career, too, and Willow agreed that although she really wanted to be a marine biologist, zookeeper would be an acceptable backup career for her, as well.

I'd call that a successful day at the zoo!

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Work Plans for the Week of May 30, 2017: Let's Try That Again, Shall We?

Last week was not a successful week, schoolwork-wise. For a variety of reasons, the kids got very little done. They did keep up well with their math, and Will kept up with grammar, but I have to create and enforce a different system for finished work this week, because both kids have begun to simply set their finished work next to their work areas, instead of bringing it to me. If I don't see it, I don't mark it, and they blithely move on the next day, and if they've made errors, those are compiled the further they advance, sigh. Will, in particular, is not going to be pleased that she somehow forgot what a linking verb is between Lessons 11 and 12, and Syd refuses to understand that drawing her angles on a separate page, and then "losing" that page before I had a chance to see it, has the same result as not drawing the angles at all--she's doing it again today!

Regardless, the week as a whole was full and happy. The kids spent loads of time preparing for a Girl Scout meeting that was an outdoor cookout feast--


--Will has been working with Luna several times a day on their homework from obedience school--



--we spent a full day at the Children's Museum, volunteering and playing, the kids spent another full day at their wilderness class, and then we spent the weekend visiting family in Michigan.

Yesterday we took lots of naps.

Because of that, you'll find the annotations for most of this week's assignments in last week's post, where they were first assigned. And honestly, we may not be much more productive this weekend--summer activities, such as this afternoon's trip to the public pool and tomorrow's all-day trip to the zoo, are peppered throughout the coming days, but heck. Why homeschool if it's not so we can go to the pool with friends, and spend the whole day at the zoo just because we want to?

Memory work for the week consists of the first eleven lines of Beowulf recited in Anglo-Saxon, standard conversions, and Greek vocabulary. Books of the Day include some sneaky selections from the kids' MENSA reading lists, a biography of Juliette Gordon Low, a leftover book on the Celts, and the rest of the One Crazy Summer trilogy for Will. Other daily work includes creative writing for Syd and cursive copywork for Will, typing practicing on Typing.com and progress on their MENSA reading lists for both, Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd, a Greek language lesson or review and a Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson or practice for both, and SAT prep on Khan Academy for Will.

And here's the rest of our week!

TUESDAY: At least hiding their work from me until I find it while tidying over the weekend lets me give them exact assignments for Math Mammoth and Analytical Grammar this week--usually the kids just correct the latest lesson and complete the next lesson. Notice that for each of these, I've also instructed them to give their work directly to an adult to mark. They put their completed assignments in the face of an adult, or their work plans for the day aren't complete--mwa-ha-ha!

Most of the rest of this day's work is reassigned from last week, although Will has some extra time to work on a Girl Scout badge, and Syd has big plans to run a bake stand in our driveway before the drive-in movies this weekend (it's kind of genius, because almost every car headed to the drive-in will have to drive by her bake stand first, and if it's a nice weekend for an outdoor movie, traffic will be stalled, meaning that every car will have plenty of time to just sit there and look at her mouth-watering treats), so she'll be working on that every school day this week, in preparation for her Friday debut.

WEDNESDAY: Day at the zoo! If there's one thing that you can guarantee about my kids, it's that they're game for any and every trip to any and every zoo and aquarium that you offer them. We're going to have a wonderful time.

THURSDAY: The only new assignment on this day is more work on Girl Scout badges--with so much make-up work to do this week, we're not really able to progress in most of our units, so Girl Scouts is filling the few gaps in the school week. Good thing there's ALWAYS something to do in Girl Scouts!

FRIDAY: Since our only Medieval history assignment last week was our field trip to look at Medieval manuscripts in the Lilly Library--which was AMAZING, by the way!--we actually are free to move on in our Medieval history unit this week. I didn't spend a ton of time looking up enrichment activities or projects for this week's chapter in Story of the World v. 2, but at least the kids can get it read and get the quiz and mapwork done, and I'll have a chance for more research this week.

One of the few flaws in our Story of the World spine is its lack of dates in the text. The author doesn't want the kids focusing on memorizing dates at the expense of understanding the events and their context, but it's just one more thing that I have to add to the curriculum to better suit my older children. I'll be printing one nice copy of this timeline, and for use in a binder or as a pull-out, and the kids can help me order and construct it and then add timeline figures for what we've already studied this semester. It's no basement timeline, but I'm hoping that it will be a suitable replacement.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: No three-day weekend this weekend! Luna has obedience school, but thankfully that's our only scheduled activity, because summer extracurriculars begin next week.

And we'll have a five-day school week for a change!

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Friday, May 26, 2017

Physics and Force at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

We really like volunteering at the Children's Museum. It fits our varied skill sets and energies well, and I've been profoundly changed by the simple environment of respect and empowerment shared with even the youngest of us that exists there. Even the youngest of us is spoken to and with respectfully, as equals. Even the youngest of us is given big responsibilities, and empowered to fulfill them. And on this particular day, the not-quite-youngest of us was enlisted with a very big responsibility, and empowered to fulfill it all on her own.

Look at my big kid, running all by herself a tabletop activity at the world's largest children's museum:


She was completely in charge of this tabletop demonstration of centrifugal force. There are three settings on that Hot Wheels track, by means of which children could experiment with force and acceleration and evaluate how they affected the Hot Wheels car's ability to loop the loop.

When asked later, she claims that her main takeaway is that 55% of children, when presented with a button that you're obviously meant to push, attempted to pull it instead. I, however, sneaked many looks at her as she led everyone from toddlers to teens older than she through the activity, and just between us, I'll tell you that she took away a lot more than that. This kid is confident, and knowledgeable, and funny, gentler with those younger and smaller than she, unabashed when speaking to those older and bigger. She's growing up just the way I'd hoped she would.

Syd and I ran a less exciting table, charged with interesting and engaging children in the concept of the inclined plane, and a comparison of linear motion with rotational motion on that plane. The opening concept is kind of a yawner: you've got two inclined Hot Wheels tracks set up, and a couple of stacked Duplo bricks and a Hot Wheels car to test them on. Kid comes up, you ask Kid if Kid wants to play a game, Kid says yes because duh, you tell Kid you're going to race and Kid can choose to be the block or the car, Kid chooses, you race, you extrapolate on potential energy, linear motion vs. rotational motion, friction, etc.

After a couple of iterations, Syd and I found ways to make this game more fun, though, and more leveled, because leveling tabletop activities is very important when you've got an audience of anyone and everyone. Block vs. Car is pretty great for preschoolers and kindy types, but for younger preschoolers and toddlers, a much better game goes something like, "Can you make the car go down the ramp? Wow! Can you make the block go down the ramp? Ooh, I saw you had to do something different to make the block go down!" and then just let them tool around with cars and blocks and ramps until they're done or their parents drag them away.

For older kids, and especially for school groups, you play out Block vs. Car, getting the rest of the kids to be the judges if there's a ton of them crowded around your table, but then you start to add on challenges. Round #2 allows the kid in charge of Block to do anything she wants, short of injuring competitors or bystanders, to give Block the advantage. Car can't do anything differently. The kid will usually change the angle of Block's track, or push Block to get it to move faster. One kid, who I flat-out told is a genius, also flipped Block over so that only the pegs were touching the track, not the flat side. When Block wins, you ask the kid what she did differently and talk about why that worked. Switch players if you can, and Round #3 can either be a no-holds-barred race in which both Car and Block can try to get their pieces to win, or you can do another round of Block only, but Block has to do something different from what was done last time. If you change the rules slightly for every round, even teenagers will excitedly play round after round after round. It was pretty amusing to be a part of.

I completely forgot to take photos of our table, but here's, like, two seconds of us goofing around when we were between visitors:



I often joke with the kids that wherever we are, I'm the nerdiest one in the room, so they are always extra thrilled when they see that I've found a nerdy soulmate. As we were packing up our activities, we were discussing Hot Wheels with the museum staffer who was in charge of us. I mentioned that when I was my kids' age, my prize possession was a Hot Wheels recreation of the General Lee. He then told me that in his friend's latest Loot Crate, she'd gotten a Hot Wheels recreation of the '67 Impala from Supernatural. I was all, "I LOOOOVE Supernatural!," and he was all, "Oh, really? Do you want to see pics of my Supernatural cosplay?"

I may have asked him to be my best friend. Also, yes, of COURSE I wanted to see pics of his Supernatural cosplay! The kids looked on with benign bemusement as the staffer and I discussed conventions and cosplay and how you can't spray paint foam when making your costume weapons, because the foam will melt, and also people who obsess over avoiding anachronisms in their cosplay are fine, UNTIL they begin to nitpick your cosplay, which isn't meant to be bound to one specific scene from one specific genre, ugh.

It's possibly a little odd how often I find myself looking at some stranger's cosplay pics on their phone, but it's one of my great pleasures.

The kids don't always want to hang out at the museum the way they used to when they were small, but on this day, they seemed determined to embody the idea that since they'd just Worked Hard, it was time for them to Play Hard, and they spent the whole dang rest of the day there, playing like toddlers.

Don't believe me? Here they are in the Ice Cream Shoppe, last visited with this much enthusiasm when they were six and eight:


Here is Syd's Smilosaurus:


And here is Will in the gift shop:



We have a friend who works there, and after I complained to her that "ugh, these kids always have to look at every single thing every single time we come!" she was all, "Well, of course! Ooh, come look at the new stuff we got in!" And there were friends in the Paleo Lab window to chat with, and the kids just had to go to the program on hadrosaurs--





--and if we're down in Dinosphere we might as well see everything else, too--




--and of course we had to go to the racing exhibit, because it IS Indy 500 week and we ARE in Indianapolis--



--but I think everyone had the most fun visiting the newest exhibit, themed around the circus.

This is a baby Rola Bola:


Here's how the professionals do it.

Here's a baby Roman ladder:







--and here's how the professionals do it!

My sore arms attest that the Roman ladder is great for the biceps.

We have lately been obsessed with Philippe Petit, from both The Man Who Walked Between the Towers and Man on Wire. I think I'm going to spring for a beginner's slackline kit, although Syd would prefer to start straightaway with a tightrope, but we were all pretty excited to see this baby tightrope:



And here's how a professional does it!

And if you've ever been to the Children's Museum, you know that you obviously can't get away without riding the carousel:


Our volunteer badges let us ride for free, and on this day the children took full advantage of that. I sat on a bench by the domino table and read several chapters of my book, looking up every now and then to watch my two race to choose their favorite steeds, happily ride away, then exit at the end and race around to the beginning to do the same thing over and over and over again. I'd look up to find them mid-ride, their heads bent together in discussion, or at the beginning of the ride, jostling between each other to see who could get to the stag first. I swear, they were having a better time than most of the toddlers.

I love this about the Children's Museum, or homeschooling, or maybe simply my kids. They're both mature and immature, in control and absolutely silly, working hard and playing hard. They feel capable of giving their best to an often wearying, often tedious job for two full hours, and they feel able to spend the next three goofing off and having fun, occasionally side-by-side with a small child they'd been instructing just that morning. How many other kids their ages do you know who can genuinely be themselves in that way, who can let all of the facets of who they are shine in one setting, with the same people?

Heck, how many adults do you know who can do that?