Earth Hour 2016 and 1980s Trivial Pursuit

We LOVE Earth Hour, and diligently celebrate it every single year. The tradition involves candles, of course--lots of candles!--

--but also the Playing of a Board Game. During this Earth Hour, I introduced for the very first time the game Trivial Pursuit. I have my Junior edition from the 80s, so it's partly perfect, because a lot of the questions are at their level, and partly ridiculous, because it's from the 1980s. Here, for example, is a small selection of the questions from my edition:

• "What cheese spread is a whiz to put on toast?"
• "How many Vikings landed on Mars in 1976?"
• "What country is the Leaning Tower of Pisa in?"
• "Was The Police's debut album titled Zenyatta, Mondatta, Outlandos d'Amour, or Magilla Gorilla?"
• "What horse does Alec Ramsey tame when he's shipwrecked on a desert island in a popular novel?"
• "Could the world champion men's high jumper outjump the champion jumping horse?"
• "What letter adorns the flag of the Legion of Super-Heroes?"
• "What are Chesterfield, camel's-hair, raccoon and Burberry all styles of?"
• "What's a person who doesn't eat meat called?"
• "What's the highest mountain in the world?"

We skipped any questions that we thought the kids wouldn't possibly be able to answer, but I was surprised at how many questions were relevant--my children have a good-enough background in history, geography, literature, and science to hold their own in 1980s children's trivia games!

Trivial Pursuit wasn't a great game to play by candle-light, as the light was a little dim for reading tiny print by, and we spent an awful lot of time asking each other "Did I land on a pink or an orange? Oh, a yellow!":

We played it again the next day, and found it much more comfy!

Although we do Earth Hour every year, this particular Earth Hour was especially appropriate, as we'd only recently completed a 24-hour electronics fast for Will's Cadette World Thinking Day badge. In the past, I'd been treating Earth Hour as purely environmentally-motivated, but World Thinking Day is all about using these experiences to make connections and think globally, so it was a great chance to discuss the lack of electricity in many communities in many parts of the world, and how that might affect people, in both good and bad ways. Lots of time to play games together in the dim light. Awfully hard to read your textbooks or complete your schoolwork. If you're motivated to cover global issues with your kiddos, I highly recommend incorporating an electronics fast into your overall Earth Hour experience. And if you're feeling especially motivated, there's also a World Water Day!

Civil Rights for Kids

We first studied Civil Rights back in 2012, in preparation for a trip to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta (and we have to go back again, because they have a Junior Ranger program!), but it's been a regular component of our curriculum since then.

My methodology has remained consistent, because it seems to work well for my kids. We memorize dates, because they make a good scaffold for whatever context we later add, we explore biographies and living histories, and through those, we unpack a particular issue or event.

Because this study is mostly memorization, conversation, and reading, it works well both for my kid who will do anything that I ask her to, and my kid who will do nothing that I ask her to. The contrary kid has the gifts of a sharp memory, a passion for books, and a love of philosophy and debate; she can't help but learn this way. The amiable kid will power through anything that doesn't have a "correct" answer for her to freak out about, loves stories, and couldn't stop talking if I paid her to; she'd be happy adding in lots of hands-on projects, but this is also a good way for her to learn.

The first time that we studied dates (and put them on our big basement timeline--how I miss you!), Martin Luther King, Jr. was the perfect biography to explore, because, of course, he was present at so many of these crucial events. We read plenty about his life, but our main emphasis was on his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with this book in hand to help us unpack and understand that speech:
Since then, we've studied the Civil War (crucial for understanding racism and the need for Civil Rights), Native Americans (another historically disenfranchised people), and other African-American scientists and inventors (remember Will's prize-winning essay on Patricia Bath last year?), but recently, we all found ourselves in the middle of a unit on school segregation and desegregation. It started with this audiobook--
--part of the Dear America series. I've found that series spotty in how well it can keep the kids' interest, but this one enthralled them. We listened to it in the car, and even Will, who prefers books about animals to books about people, and books about magical people to books about real people, was an avid listener. So this was the living biography that inspired us.

For the dates and facts, I turned to our very own town, which sports two former colored schools. One of them, the first colored school in town, is located downtown, blocks from campus. It's now our county's history museum, so we've visited there often. Kids attended this school until the local university moved to its current spot. The Powers that Be didn't want a colored school so close to the university, so they built a new school further to the west, on the far side of the furniture factory that employed quite a lot of the town, reasoning that with the school way over there, African-Americans would have no reason to approach the university's campus.

Nice, huh?

This second colored school, the one that non-Caucasian children attended until desegregation reached our town, is now the community center that my kids, like many other homeschooled kids in our town, are in and out of multiple times each week. In fact, we're there right now--the kids are in math class, and I'm in the library getting some writing done.

A few weeks ago, I set up a time for the community center's program coordinator to talk to our homeschool group about the building's history. She discussed segregation in our town, described the layout and conditions of the school, and walked us through the former classrooms (which we've seen many times before, as one room is the library and the other is the math classroom!) to show us the surprising number of original features that still exist. The blackboards are the same blackboards that were used by the colored school! How cool is it that my kids are now part of their history?

We've very lucky in that the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, a place that we visit probably once a month, also has what I imagine has to be the world's only Civil Rights exhibit that's geared specifically to a child audience. It's called The Power of Children, and although it was a little too scary for the kids when they were younger, it's now perfect for them.

The exhibit focuses on three children famous for their experiences of discrimination. We haven't yet visited the Anne Frank section (although now that we're studying World War II, we will), but recently, the kids spent a long time exploring the sections on Ruby Bridges and Ryan White.

The Ruby Bridges section did a wonderful job personalizing discrimination for two little white girls who've never personally experienced it:

It also had plenty of artifacts that I was interested to see. I'm racking my brain, and I don't think that I've ever seen artifacts like these on display before:

Much of the exhibit focused on the inequities of segregated schools, and the inequities that Bridges faced in her first year at the integrated school:

The unfairness was abundantly clear.

The kids seemed to feel less in response to the Ryan White exhibit, partly because they were distracted by White's truly epic amount of 80s era swag. Alf! Star Wars! Max Headroom! But they had a LOT of fun filming this news report!

I, however, adored the Ryan White exhibit. First of all, I remember hearing about White when I was a kid; he was a few years older than me, and I was struck by his story. This exhibit also makes his story very real, because, of course, he's from Indiana, and the school that he was driven out of and the school that he was made welcome in are both Indiana schools. White's mother donated most of the artifacts that make his exhibit so vivid, and she's also a regular visitor and speaker at the museum.

While there are clearly people in Indiana who need to relearn the anti-discrimination, anti-bigotry ethic, as evidenced by the RFRA nonsense that my state is now undergoing, I hope that my kiddos will never be the kind of people who dehumanize another, or who stand by and let it happen.

Here are some of the other resources that we've been using in our Civil Rights studies:

Fire Station Field Trip

I know that fire station field trips sound like something for the preschool set, but I assure you that there's much about fire safety, civics, and STEM-in-action to be learned by even my advanced scholars of the fifth and third grades.

For instance, yes, we covered stop, drop, and roll, and why you shouldn't play with matches and lighters (I shared a quiet look and laugh with another mom during this portion of the presentation, as I'd previously told her how I prepped the kids to give the "correct" answers to the firefighters by explaining to them that the firefighters are much more conservative on this issue than our family is, and it's best not to upset them by telling them that your mommy lets you light matches, yes?), and what a firefighter in full gear looks like and why you shouldn't hide from them, but there was a lot more information suitable for the older kids that they are now.

We got an excellent review of emergency escape plans, a wonderful explanation of the importance practice; the firefighter carefully explained to the children that the smoke and noise of a fire are extremely disorienting, so you won't be able to navigate your home as well as you think you will, and if you're suddenly woken up, the disorientation will be even more severe. The firefighter suggested that we practice our escape plan on hands and knees, as that's how we'd move most safely in a real fire. He also suggested that we practice middle-of-the-night fire drills, because he said that many children simply won't wake up to a smoke alarm, and even more children will simply roll over, bury their heads in their pillows, and fall back asleep.

Everyone loves touring the fire trucks, of course--

Yes, Syd chose to wear her fashion show outfit on this day.

But I was also pleased that we got a look at some vehicle rescue gear, including the jaws of life (the firefighter explained that the jaws of life work using hydraulic power, and on the way home we had an excellent discussion of hydraulic and pneumatic power, and our vacation to Disney World!) and this wonderful airborne ladder:

This field trip inspired us to get our emergency evacuation plan for this new house down pat (thank goodness for our bizarre FIVE doors to the outside, our bizarre crank windows that won't have to be broken to be turned into escape routes, and a certain drive-in movie sign that makes a fabulous meet-up point), and fits right in with both levels of the Girl Scout First Aid badge, for which we're undertaking a study of medical and emergency personnel of all sorts.

I also think this trip has inspired our culinary efforts, as these firefighters are definitely getting a big basket of muffins hand-delivered after the kids return from their California vacation!

Future US President Visits the Indiana Statehouse

I've known for years that Will is interested in politics and the government, but until recently, my supporting role in this interest has mostly been to focus on active citizenship--voting, campaigning for a favored politician, following the news and forming opinions, letters to the editor and comment cards to businesses, etc.

One of the first things that Will did after she began to free school, however, was latch onto the Inside Government Girl Scout badge, and begin to work towards earning it. We've had a lot of success this year using Girl Scout badges as a curriculum spine, so later I'll go into all the activities and resources that we engaged with for this unit, both from the badge book and from my own research, but one particular badge book activity is a field trip to a center of local or state government (national, too, I suppose, but how many Girl Scouts could swing that one?). Will really, really wanted to visit the Indiana Statehouse for this activity, and I was shocked at how easy this was to set up.

Our capitol building, the Indiana Statehouse, has a public tour department that offers public tours every hour. The site said that they often had scheduled groups come during these times, but that even those scheduled tours were also open to the public, so I emailed the office, told them what day we planned to visit and what grades the children are, and asked if there were any scheduled tours that day that would be particularly appropriate for us.

The office replied with the times of several school group tours with children in the correct grade ranges, and gave a recommendation about which group we'd like best. I took their advice, and that's how we busted out our front door SO early one morning, barreled down the highway with all the day commuters in order to be in Indianapolis, parked in a garage, sans camera (forgot it in the car but didn't have time to go back for it), hoofed downtown, through security, and were waiting in the rotunda of the Indiana Statehouse bright and early at 9:00 sharp.

Let me just tell you right now: IT WAS WORTH THE STRESS! I don't know if every tour is this amazing, or if it had to do with the fact that one of the children in this tour group was the grandson of one of the state reps, but this tour was an incredible experience, so far beyond what I'd expected that I can still hardly believe it.

The docent didn't go into much detail about the Statehouse's architecture (except to note the Indiana limestone, of COURSE), but I snapped a few lousy camera phone shots to help us remember:

We found The Gettysburg Address! I love it when we find references to previous studies.

The tour itself was wonderfully, appropriately focused on the three branches of government, the seats of all of which are located at the Statehouse:

reading about the governor-- 

--and then standing right outside his office door!

 The docent led us to the House of Representatives, where we all got to sit where the state representatives sit, while first Representative Robert Behning explained to the children why voting is important, in a really kid-friendly way:

He referenced several practical matters that affect children's lives, such as the length of the school day, and sales tax, and explained that it's voting that decides these matters (more or less), and that if the children want to help decide them, they have to vote when they're older.

I *think* it was Rep. Christina Hale who spoke to the children next, and I'm bummed that I didn't write down her name so that I could remember for sure, because her speech to the children was inspiring. She told the children how important it was that they consider running for office when they're old enough, because they have contributions to society that they can make. She told them that this responsibility is especially important if they're girls or are not Caucasian, because their contributions are currently under-represented in public office.

Syd liked the idea of this:


As an aside--I really liked the group of schoolchildren with whom we toured. They were bright, eager, engaged, participative fourth graders who were funny and clever and outgoing, and didn't seem to bat a single eyelash at a couple of random kids tagging along on their field trip...

...even when the random kids didn't appear to understand how to walk in single file. Seriously, my kids can stand in line like champs, and they get the reasoning behind that, but I suppose that walking in line must simply be a matter in which they're not well socialized, because they just don't understand the concept. The hallways are wide at the Indiana Statehouse--why not walk wherever you would like? To be fair, since I can't name a single instance as an adult in which I have walked in single file, I don't really super care, but I did continually berate them in a whisper on this trip until they finally agreed to do it--more or less:

They preferred to be at the front or back of the line, because the middle of the line, with its personal space invasions, totally baffled them.

 The Senate space is far roomier, so instead we piled into the public viewing gallery above it while a senator's aide gave a presentation and tossed souvenir pins to the children:

My favorite experience, however, was the visit to the State Supreme Court. I like the impartiality of judges more than I like the politics of any of the reps, and I absolutely loved our presentation by State Supreme Court Justice Rush:

She spoke to the children about her previous experience in juvenile court, and she clearly has an affinity with children, because her body language was so welcoming, and her speech so suited to them. She spoke in detail about all the studies required in becoming a Supreme Court justice, and all the reading and research and writing that's required of them, and told the children that if they liked to read, and were interested in things being fair, that they should consider becoming a judge when they grow up. She also pointed out the portrait gallery of justices on the walls of the chamber, and told some stories about some of them, and she, too, explained to the children that diversity among the justices is crucial to reaching fair decisions, and especially encouraged any children who might bring a different perspective--girls, in particular--to become a judge.

After this beautiful, inspiring speech about why girls, in particular, were needed in the justice system, she asked all the girls who were thinking about becoming a judge to raise their hands. All the little girls except Will dutifully put their hands up. Later, I asked Will why she didn't raise her hand, too.

"You don't want to maybe be a judge when you grow up? Justice Rush said that judges have to like to read, and you LOVE to read."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm going to be president when I grow up."

Oh.

The docent actually did an activity with the children in which she demonstrated very clearly what each child would need to do, starting now, in order to become a Supreme Court Justice or the president one day, so Will's short-term goals are to study hard, be active in extracurriculars, become the president of a club, and serve as a page in the Indiana Statehouse when she turns twelve. 

Long-term goals: State senator. Governor for two terms. Bus campaign tour of the country. President of the United States.

She promises me that I can live at the White House with her if I want to. 

Homeschooling Social Studies and Creative Writing through Girl Scouts: A School Day Storyboard Project for World Thinking Day

The kids have both been working very hard on their World Thinking Day badges, and although our excellent-at-the-time discussion of how children perceive their educations, particularly in places where academics are a privilege, not a right, has not stopped them from fussing about math or whining about having to figure out how to spell their names in hieroglyphics, as I'd unaccountably hoped it would (sigh), they've never-the-less been working happily and enthusiastically on projects that would make them gripe if I asked them to complete, but that fill them with excitement and inspiration since it's in pursuit of that badge.

And that's how the younger kid spent the other day practicing storytelling and sequencing, composition and handwriting, design and decoration, etc., while creating a storyboard illustrating a typical school day for her. The day before the "typical day," she looked at our work plans for the next day and wrote a list of the photos that she wanted to take--her feeding the chickens, completing her math worksheet, practicing the keyboard, and so on:

The next day, every time she started a new subject, she gave someone her instant camera, told us what to shoot, and then "posed" herself, which was pretty hilarious since, although I do sometimes ask them to hold up something they've done and show me so that I can take a photo, I have never posed my kids to take a photo. But the kid, for each photo, was intent on doing something very specific, like holding up her test tube of litmus solution that she'd just made in a way that made it look like she was shaking it, looking at it curiously, and then freezing so I could get the shot, or holding her multiplication tables up very high as she "studied" them:

The school day starts early around here. Some people are even in their bathrobes!

The big benefit to using the instant camera is that she got her photos immediately without fuss, and she could keep them organized throughout the day, as well as handle them, study them, and thus come up with more ideas about refining her project.

At the end of the day, she created her storyboard by labeling the photos, gluing them in order to a large piece of Bristol board, then decorating it:

Obviously, it now has pride of place on the wall:

As I watched my younger kid complete this project, I was fascinated, shocked, and disappointed at what *I* learned from it, namely that she has a very strict definition of what comprises her "school" day. One of the reasons why I thought this storyboard project would be so fun, and why I encouraged her to choose it, is that I imagined the photos that we could take of the kid making waffles for breakfast in her pajamas, meeting a friend at the park for an impromptu midday sledding date, playing ponies with her sister, designing a pillow for the cats out of fabric scraps and then sewing it, going swimming at the Y, going to math class, ice skating--all the things, in other words, that she actually DOES on typical school days. It's not all "school" stuff, sure, but it's all made possible by the fact that we homeschool.

And yet the kid did not see it that way! She was adamant that she should only photograph and include the actual school stuff--math worksheets, science experiment, spelling practice, etc. For some reason, she also wanted to include her chores, but refused to include anything outside the housework and formal academics that I think comprise the least amount of her day. I think this makes her school day actually look kind of dire, always at that table or put to work:

I find this so interesting, because I have so many conversations with the kids (mostly the older one) about their attitudes to schoolwork, how I'm not sitting right next to them for an hour talking them through word problems because I'm mean, or asking them to memorize fifty spelling words because I want them to be unhappy. 

Perhaps I should also be having conversations that sound more like, "Yes, you two can run over to the park for an hour at 1:00 pm on a Tuesday just to stomp around on the frozen creek, come home frozen yourselves, take an hour-long hot bath, then work on those spelling words with a mug of hot chocolate at your elbow because we homeschool," or "You know, you were able to spend the morning outside reading in the chicken yard with a chicken on your lap because we homeschool," or "We only have the free time to allow you to enroll in horseback riding and aerial silks and ice skating class and nature class and chess club and Girl Scouts because we homeschool." 

I don't know if I've ever really pointed out to them how much of our whole lifestyle revolves around the fact that we homeschool, how we could only go on that November road trip to see wild ponies and Washington, D.C. because we homeschool, how all those spring afternoons spent at the park with their friends are actually homeschool playgroups that take place while their schooled friends are at school, how the fact that they've never been woken up in the morning in their lives (do they even know that other kids get woken up in the morning?) has only been possible because we homeschool.

So much education for EVERYONE is going into this Girl Scout badge!