Disney Day #2: EPCOT

One of the sadly inevitable facts about my children is that they do not sleep in. Well, Syd seems to have the potential to sleep in, but the sadly inevitable fact about her is that she shares a room with her sister, and her sister always wakes her up. Therefore, no matter how late we may have gotten in after Fantasmic the night before, when the alarm went off in the master bedroom at 7:15 the next morning, Matt and I trudged sleepily into the living room to find both girls wide awake, watching Disney Junior (yay for condo cable!) and eating leftover frozen pizza.

That inability to sleep is what makes me worry that the girls are not well-rested after a late night, but it does make getting to EPCOT by its 9:00 am opening, Hot Pockets in three hands (I still think they're gross!), travel coffee mug in the remaining hand, classic Disney songs playing on the ipod hooked into the car stereo, MUCH easier:

EPCOT is the one park in which, even with absolutely zero lines for even the most popular attractions like Soarin'--

--I left at the end of the night feeling like there was a lot of stuff that we simply didn't get to. It's a big park, for one thing, and some attractions close early (we missed out on "Captain EO" and "Journey into Imagination with Figment", which closed two hours before the rest of EPCOT), but there are also so many OTHER things to do in EPCOT that you could probably meander and browse and sight-see happily for a week without getting bored.

For instance, EPCOT is character heaven!

Mary Poppins

Snow White

Tigger and Pooh

It was in this park that, to my surprise, both girls got REALLY into meeting the characters. After carefully watching other children's encounters, Willow used some of her spending money to buy herself an autograph book, too, but even without it, with just hugs and hand-shaking, character encounters were so engaging for everyone! I knew that the princesses and other "face" characters would carry on small talk with the kids, and that was really cute to watch, but I had no idea how interactive the costumed characters would be, too. Everyone was completely delighted by every character that we met, and we met a lot!

In the past both girls have had trouble answering even simple questions on the fly when conversing with strange adults (Willow is notorious for answering, when asked what grade she's in or what school she attends, "I don't go to school"). After our first Disney day, when I saw how engaging everyone at Disney is, I actually drilled the children on their ages, their home state, their schooling situation, and their grades (When I first did this, Sydney said that she was from Arkansas and was a kindergartner, and Willow had to think about how old she was, sigh). One of the really unexpected results of our Disney trip is that both girls are now very good at answering these questions, and introducing themselves, and thanking someone when complimented, etc. My shining moment was when Snow White asked Willow what school she attends.

"I homeschool," said Will.

"Oh, you must be very smart!" said Snow White.

"I am," Willow replied.

We had lunch reservations at Les Chefs de France, which Matt had wanted to try. I had expected the food to be more French, I suppose, or maybe just to have more French options, but the adults' quiches and Willow's flounder were quite tasty (as were Sydney's pasta and chicken strips, after she refused to order anything French)--

--and Les Chefs de France is also special because it's the restaurant that Remy, the rat from Ratatouille, now cooks at. Why, yes, we DID meet him! 

One of the waiters rolls him around on a serving cart to greet diners, and although Remy was pretty darn cute, this waiter was way funny.

I was too close to get Sydney and Remy in the same frame, but here she is interacting with him. Just look at the expression on her face!

In the World Showcase, both girls got really into Kidcot, a free program that lets kids color a big cardboard bear on a stick and then take it around to the Kidcot tables in all the other countries to get it stamped. In many of the countries, the docents would also write the child's name in the language of their country on the bear, or draw their country's flag on it. I would have vastly preferred if the Kidcot locations had always been in the cultural areas of each country--

Morocco

 --rather than mostly in the indoor mall area of each country, which meant that, in my opinion, we spent WAY too much time in gift shops, but the kids LOVED the program, and Willow even insisted on spending part of our evening going partway back around the World Showcase, to get stamps from the couple of countries that we'd passed before starting Kidcot.

Sydney did a lot of shopping in the World Showcase. I saw a lot of stuff that I'd like to buy, but managed to abstain--I actually came out under budget for souvenirs, if you can believe it, never finding the perfect giant coffee mug for myself, and spending less on the couple of souvenirs that I'd planned to treat the girls to than I thought that I'd spend.

 There aren't as many rides in EPCOT as in the other parks, so we rode them all--Spaceship Earth, Living with the Land (we rode this one with only one other family, who seemed profoundly unamused at our delight with the ride--"Look, cotton bolls! Papaya! Ooh, giant chard!"), Soarin' three times, The Seas with Nemo and Friends twice for Syd and Matt (Willow flatly refused to ride it a second time, and I was happy to accompany her to the aquarium instead), Mission: Space once without spin and once for Matt and the girls with spin (spinny rides make me vomit, so I window-shopped instead), the Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros, and Maelstrom, which I do believe wins the award for most rides. We all rode it three times in a row, then Matt and Syd rode it another three times while Syd and I did Kidcot--they'd only planned to ride it once more, but they couldn't refuse the CM's invitation to keep jumping back on board through the exit, since there was no wait for the ride. Throughout our entire Disney trip, the only thing that we got sick of was retracing our steps through seemingly miles and miles of empty queue every single time we wanted to re-ride a ride.

 Overall, I think that The Seas was our favorite building--

--and we probably could have spent most of our EPCOT day there. The kiddos LOVED the aquarium--

--and we ALL adored Turtle Talk with Crush. I wish that I'd prepped the girls ahead of time with questions for him, but still, you should have seen their faces when he swam down, looked right at them, and said "Hello, little dudes." 

This day was Sydney's hardest day, mostly because, although she liked all the sight-seeing, she really just wanted to go on rides, and so there were a couple of tantrums to help break up the day, and a couple of benches upon whom I'm sure hers was not the first time-out to be held. 

Nevertheless, even though it was late, both kids perked way back up for IllumiNations, which, you probably don't want to hear, I found enjoyable, but not necessarily impressive enough to warrant the late night and the standing at the edge of the lagoon for half an hour, etc. This was the only park that we really walked around in the dark in, though, which was an additional adventure for my kids who all summer have been going to bed while it's still light out:

They were happy enough to hop into their own beds at the end of it, though, and here's what I saw when I went into their room to kiss them goodnight:

Two kids, sound asleep, ready for Animal Kingdom in the morning!

Disney Day #1: Disney's Hollywood Studios

You're going to laugh when I tell you that I had these touring plans. I'd been reading The Unofficial Guide Walt Disney World, and it had whole lists of plans--where to go first, what to walk to immediately afterwards, what to then get a Fastpass to and what to go to next, etc.--that if you followed them, you wouldn't have to stand in the two-hour lines for each ride that everyone had been telling me about.

So I had these touring plans, I had all the advice in my head from all the many WDW guidebooks that I'd checked out of the library over the past year, I had a year's worth of lurking on the Disboards to think about, and I had print-outs of detailed descriptions of crowd levels at every park every day from EasyWDW... but I didn't need the touring plans. There just weren't any crowds to have to negotiate a strategy around.

We got inside the park about 20 minutes after opening (due to a stint at Guest Relations to fix up a kerfuffle made by the cast member who'd issued our tickets the night before--one of the very few negative things about the YES Program is the fact that since so relatively few tickets are issued through them, the workers seemed to have some trouble figuring them out at first), admired everything there was to see on our way to the back of the park, and were pleased to see that the line for Toy Story Midway Mania was still at just 20 minutes; my guidebooks had suggested that after a half hour on, the line for Toy Story would be so long that we might want to just Fastpass it and come back later.

Little did I know that 20 minutes was about the longest that we'd ever wait in line for anything during our entire trip!

Of course, the queuing areas for all the rides are pretty great to ease your wait, so much so that often we'd let other families pass us in ride lines so that we could stop and enjoy things. For instance, the Toy Story queue is designed as if you're toy-sized, with giant toys and games all around you:

With lines so short, it didn't take us long to get into the habit of riding our favorite rides several times, either popping right back into line when wait times were listed as 0-10 minutes, or, as with this one, Fastpassing a later ride because who wants to stand in line for 20 whole minutes, right? Because both Matt and I have more fun seeing how our kids react to things than experiencing them ourselves (of course!), it was a good way for each of us to get to ride with each of the kids--

--and very rarely, to even ride with each other!

Hollywood Studios seems to have the most thrill rides of all the parks, so we did a lot of rider swapping here, since the older kid is mainly uninterested in thrill rides. Disney has a great system for this--if you're with a group and one of your kids can't or won't ride, you just tell the CM who's at the entrance of the ride to greet you, and they'll tell you how to rider swap for that ride. In the Magic Kingdom, that mainly involved the other parent getting a sweet group Fastpass to come back later, and then wandering off to do something else with the non-riding kid for a bit, but in Hollywood Studios, the entire group got to stick together throughout the line, then when it was time to get on the ride, the non-riding people got escorted to the exit, where they'd meet the rest of the group after they'd ridden, swap off whoever didn't want to ride at all, then pop back in through the exit and get escorted right onto the ride! I liked this latter method quite a bit better, because going through the line was fun for the older kid, even though she didn't ride, and it occasionally convinced her that maybe she would ride just once, after all. 

The other thing about rider swapping is that the younger kid got to ride SO many times! A CM would escort Matt and the older kid through the exit while the younger kid and I rode, then we'd meet them at the exit after our ride. I'd take the older kid, Matt would take the younger kid, they'd go back through the exit, and the CM would put them both on the ride, allowing the younger kid to ride everything twice in a row with no waiting. 

The younger kid was definitely our thrill ride addict on this trip, and because of her I did something that you are NOT going to approve of, I know. You see, Rock n' Roller Coaster, the Aerosmith-themed roller coaster--

--that goes from 0 to 57 mph in less than three seconds, has two inversions, and puts you through over 4g at times, has a minimum height requirement of 48". 

The child is 46" tall.

She rode Rock n' Roller Coaster twice.

Yes, I snuck my too-short child on an inverted roller coaster TWICE! For what little credit you'll give me, I did make sure that she kept her head well back in the headrests to avoid whiplash, and I clutched her leg very hard. 

I would have snuck her on a third time, but a CM finally spotted her and measured her that time, so Matt and a pouting younger kid sat the ride out while I rode with the older kid, who had gathered her courage and decided to give the coaster a whirl:

Rehearsing her big moment while sitting in the test seat

She both loved it AND didn't want to ride it again.

We rider swapped again so that the younger kid could ride Tower of Terror with me while the older kid sat it out--

--but while I LOVED Tower of Terror (I love free-fall rides), the younger kid did NOT want to ride it a second time in a row when I swapped with Matt. This was a good thing, because poor Matt ended up STUCK on Tower of Terror for about 20 minutes, poor guy. Fortunately the ride broke down after it was back on the ground, just before the exit, so he didn't have to worry about falling to his death for reals, but he rode with a large contingent of international folks, and the break-down announcement was only given in English, so he said that he found himself a sort of unofficial sign language spokesman to his fellow riders, to assure them that their mutual captivity would end at some point.

We rode a ton more rides, including Star Tours, which we rode at least five times (the line estimate ranged from 0-5 minutes each time), including one time in which Matt was picked to be the rebel spy--

--saw a ton more shows-- 

Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular

The Little Mermaid

 --ate some ice cream--

--watched a parade, getting our first experience of how truly interactive all the characters, even the singers and dancers are (this kid was thrilled when a dancer that she was beaming at came over and danced just for her!)--

--window shopped--

I still sort of think that I should have bought myself this Indiana Jones fedora.

--looked around--

--and met Mickey, of course!

After we'd seen a lot and ridden a lot, we meandered by the Jedi Training Academy. I hadn't really considered it earlier, both because I'd been led to believe that the entire day's spots would fill up too quickly to bother with, and because both kids can be reticent, sometimes, so I wasn't sure if they'd enjoy it, but as we walked past a Jedi Training Academy show in progress after our fifth time on Star Tours, the kids did not have to tell me twice that they'd like to do it, and before they could change their minds, there my younglings were in their robes, ready to take the stage:

This was easily my favorite part of our entire vacation, and I filmed it as thoroughly as only a fangirl + stage mom could:

The younger kid's true allegiance may have been in question (oops!), but there is no doubt that my older kid kicks the crap out of Darth Vader!

I can't BELIEVE that they won't let adults do the Jedi Training Academy!

We fed the kids their packed dinner (Matt and I planned to eat frozen pizza back at the condo for our dinner), rode Star Tours one more time, bought the kids DIY droids at the Droid Factory, took the younger kid back to the Tower of Terror gift shop so that she could buy a ridiculous lollipop (each kid had $80 to spend, representing the sum total of their Christmas and birthday money from grandparents), bought frozen lemonade (well, I had a frozen margarita, but it was so hot out that I kind of got a headache from the tequila and then I regretted it as much as one can regret a margarita, which is not very much), and then zipped inside the stadium to snag great seats for Fantasmic.

If you've been to Disney World, yourself, you're probably going to hate me for saying this, but I wasn't that into the nighttime shows. We only went to Fantasmic and IllumiNations, and even with those two I spent basically the entire time fretting about how late the kiddos were going to get to bed versus how early I'd like to get out of the condo the next morning. To me, it was better to go to bed early every night and arrive fresh and happy at park opening than to stay out late, get overstimulated by a show, and slog, exhausted, all the way back across the park and off to bed two hours late. And yes, we WERE exhausted! I know it's just walking, and slowly at that, but it's a lot of walking, and it's also still pretty hot; I can't speak for anyone else, but it was Day Four before I felt really used to the exercise and the temperature combined.

Another inevitable fact about Florida in September is that it rains for a little bit almost every day, and so although Fantasmic was pretty amazing (the dragon! the fountains of water! the princesses on boats!), I wasn't too broken up when a downpour started just a few minutes before the show was over and we were all let out early.

Although the rain couldn't have lasted more than 15 minutes, we were DRENCHED, so there were hot showers before putting the kids to bed, then cable TV, frozen pizza, and an early bedtime for ourselves, with the alarm set for EPCOT in the morning!

Driving to Disney World

Finally, our long-awaited, much anticipated, and well-deserved vacation to Florida commenced!

I'm not ashamed to tell you that I spent a full year planning and saving for this trip. Seriously, I was checking prices a year ago this September to get an idea of what things would cost, I paid in full for the tickets to Walt Disney World in February, and the condo that we'd be staying at not long after. I paid for our character breakfast in Cinderella's castle about six months before the trip, made reservations at the couple of other Disney restaurants that we wanted to visit, and paid for a condo on the island off of the Gulf Coast of Florida that I had my heart set on visiting for a few days after Disney.

And then I started saving money for our actual trip.

I knew that I wanted to visit Walt Disney World in the off-season, but I wanted to go when it was still hot, so that we'd enjoy our few days at the beach afterwards. My friend Jenny suggested that the first week in September after Labor Day would be good, because nearly all schoolchildren would be back in school by then, and even parents who would pull their kids out of school for a vacation probably wouldn't do so at the start of the school year. The parks still had a good contingent of international families, perhaps because of the weather, so it wasn't completely dead--I've heard, though, that in times when the parks ARE really dead, like late January and February, a lot of rides get taken down for maintenance, so I'm pretty confident that we went to Walt Disney World at just about the best time of the year for a homeschooling family to go.

The tickets that I bought are through Disney's YES Program--highly educational, and sold at a deep discount  from traditional tickets. To be eligible for the tickets, the girls and I signed up for a class for 5-8-year-olds to be taken one morning inside the Magic Kingdom. The flip side to the YES Program tickets is that they don't work with Disney's Magic Your Way packages--you can buy a room at the Disney resorts, for instance, without purchasing a package, but you can't buy a dining plan, nor are you eligible for the Free Dining promotions that Disney offers during these off-seasons. This threw me for a while, because I'd had it in my head that we'd do the dining program and then use all our table service credits for character meals, an extravagance that I otherwise wouldn't choose.

However, as I was shopping around online, I discovered that giant resort-type condos, with full kitchens to cook in, separate bedrooms for the kids, giant swimming pools, and locations minutes from Walt Disney World were available at this time of year for rates less than the cheapest Walt Disney World resort rooms. Considering that we could cook for ourselves for basically the cost of our regular grocery budget (it turned out to be a little more, since I chose only quick-to-cook and easy to clean up meals, but not much more), and that honestly, most days we all prefer quick and easy homecooked food to sitting down in a restaurant, we ended up being a lot more comfortable in our accommodations outside of Walt Disney World than we'd have been inside, and for less money, and the deep discount on our YES Program tickets more than made up for missing out on the free dining promotion. I also budgeted in paying for parking every day at Walt Disney World (even with this, the outside accommodations were cheaper), and that was us all set!

The other moms in my homeschool Park Day group spent many Thursday afternoons helping me plan my grocery list for the trip. My friend Betsy convinced me to take our cooler again--I took it on our Florida trip last year, but with just me and my girls it was a lot of extra work just to have refrigerated food--since Matt would be on the trip to help, so we shopped a couple of weeks before the trip for granola bars, cereal, disposable dinnerware (ugh, I know--but SO easy!), chips, juice boxes, peanut butter, jelly, and the energy drinks that Matt feels like he can't do a road trip without (I've never tasted one, but they smell like cough medicine), and then a couple of days before the trip for fruit, fresh veggies, sliced cheese, lunchmeat, yogurt cups, sandwich bread, guacamole, and deli cookies for the road trip.

And so we ate sandwiches for two days! The kids didn't give a flip--they're used to eating nothing but sandwiches and fruit while traveling cross-country with me--and Matt, who otherwise can be really picky about mealtimes, was encouraged by my pep talks about how much time and money we were saving over fast food, and comforted by nobody saying a peep about his giant sandwiches stuffed full with a ridiculous amount of lunch meat (normally I tease him, because seriously, who needs to eat a solid inch of turkey in a sandwich?).

We ate sandwiches, listened to audiobooks (Peter and the Starcatchers and Longitude) and podcasts (Freakanomics and This American Life), let the girls watch Magic School Bus on my laptop (I used my homeschool budget to buy the complete set, and I've been thrilled with it on this road trip), and posed with freaky coin-operated rides outside of gas stations:

Seriously, that thing is crazy, right? And you'll never guess who it's supposed to be:

Casper the Friendly Ghost!

We drove as far as we could in one day, stayed in a hotel that we got a coupon for out of one of those coupon books that you get from visitor's centers at the borders of states (I LOVE those places--we always stop at them, and the girls and I collect dozens of brochures to pore over in longing to visit the Cabbage Patch Museum, or the Coca-Cola factory, or some Six Flags or other), swam and ate the hotel's free continental breakfast in the morning and were STILL out of there by 10:00 am, and were safely checked into our condo in Orlando by 2:30 pm.

I'd planned this early afternoon arrival so that we'd have plenty of time to grocery shop, pick up our park tickets, and get to bed nice and early, but since the girls and I had spent so much time studying Africa last spring, one of the things that I'd REALLY wanted to do and so reserved a table and budgeted for was to eat at Boma, the African-themed restaurant at the Animal Kingdom Lodge on the WDW property. There isn't an African-themed restaurant in our hometown (there IS one in Indianapolis, an Ethiopian restaurant, but I'm the only one in the family who's eaten there), so this was kind of the last remaining thing to do on my list of unit study activities for Africa.

The Animal Kingdom Lodge itself is also nice to sightsee in on a day when you can't go to Disney, because it's immense, full of African museum pieces, has docents and interpreters and demonstrations and hands-on tables, and has a backyard that abuts a savanna of herbivores--we spied ostriches, and giraffes, and zebras, and various other hoofed little guys while walking around and stretching our legs, waiting for our reservation. The girls ran and ran and ran around, barely able to take anything in because of their excitement, and that still counted as good behavior in this place just full of families.

We had the earliest dinner reservation in Boma, so although we had to wait a bit for the restaurant to open (in both of the other restaurants that we ate at in WDW, we were seated early when we arrived early), we entered the restaurant through a line of drummers on one side and clapping waitstaff on the other side--it was both super-cool, and over after just a few minutes, so that only the first few families got to experience it.

As I write about our days in WDW, I am going to constantly bemoan the indoor lighting--it's unilaterally dim, and in some popular places seems designed so that only the WDW Photopass photographers, with their extra-bright on-camera flashes, get good photos--and because the rotten lighting often turned me off I was surprised that I came home with fewer photos than I'd anticipated. I bemoan the lighting here, as well, but the food was so amazing that I took photos of it anyway.

Boma is set up as a buffet--good for picky eaters, and also good for tasting every single thing on the menu, nearly none of which I'd ever tasted before. Here we have watermelon rind salad, salad with jicama and apples, fruit, curried pasta salad, couscous with raisins and apples, and, my new most favorite food ever, coconut rice:

Here we have fufu, bobotie, salmon with pistachios, flatbread with two different kinds of hummus, veggies, more coconut rice (NOM!), and in the background to the left, a zebra dome containing rum-soaked cake:

It probably wasn't the perfect day to visit a buffet restaurant--I tasted a lot, and got super-excited over our paper straws, but after two days of sitting in the car I wasn't really hungry, and I don't know if the girls ate ten bites between them (fortunately, although I have MANY flaws, one of my gifts as a parent is that I don't care what/if my kids eat, as long as they're offered healthy foods at conventional mealtimes)--but it was the only day that worked into our schedule, and Matt and I had a ball, anyway. As our WDW days went by, I did become extra grateful that I didn't pay for or try to finagle my way into a Disney Dining Plan, since because of the hot days and, I suppose, nonintuitively because of how tired we always were from all the walking, none of us had much of an appetite, and I can't imagine that we'd have made use of all the food that the dining plan gives you. Picking at sandwiches, eating up all our chips, and enjoying a mid-afternoon ice cream was plenty for us on our park days.

At a Publix on the way back to the condo, we bought frozen pizzas, Hot Pockets (I can't stand them, but Matt and the girls just adore them, ick, and they did turn out to be a much more practical breakfast choice than the cereal and oatmeal that I'd brought, since they could be eaten in the car on the way to the parks), frozen margarita pouches (ahem) and frozen fries and chicken strips. Then we swam, put the kids to bed, soaked in our jetted tub, watched cable, and went to bed early with the alarm set for our day in Hollywood Studios!

On Vacation

See you real soon!

Cave Painting with Story of the World Ancient Times

Why yes, we HAVE been on chapter 1 of volume 1 of The Story of the World for about six months now!

The girls enjoy listening to the audiobooks of all four volumes of Story of the World (which I've burned to mp3 and put on my ipod), so I'd say that they've been skipping around quite a bit of history in their free time, but just when I think that we're ready to move on to, I don't know, chapter TWO?!?, somebody (me) thinks up or comes across another activity related to chapter 1, and somebody else (them) gets hyped up to do it, so there we go.

This time? Cave painting.

Including Paleolithic-era cave painting might be stretching even Bauer's definition of "from the earliest nomads" a little bit, but especially because the girls and I have spent so much time exploring prehistory and the evolution of the earliest humans on our own, I liked the idea of bridging the gap, so to speak, with an activity that connected early nomads to later ones, and I thought it was important to bring more historical (nomads didn't ONLY roam in 7,000 BCE) and geographical context (nomads didn't ONLY roam in the Fertile Crescent) to the study.

Because nomads made lots of cool cave art in lots of cool places during lots of different time periods. My favorite cave painting web sites are these two from France:

• Chauvet Cave
• Lascaux Cave--this site is AMAZING, just so you know. It's a virtual walk-through of the cave, down to the tiniest detail, and you can zoom up in even more detail on each piece of art that you pass, as well as get more information on it.

The Cueva de las Manos in Argentina is also a pretty great cave, but its web site is nothing fancy. 

To make our own cave art, I first created a cave environment by cutting open a ton of brown paper grocery bags and duct taping them all over a wall. The girls' loft bed was still against the wall at that time, so I taped the bags right over the planks of the bed that were against the wall, adding some dimension to the cave, since that was very important to many cave artists. 

Since the cave was a temporary installation, I prepared several pots of tempera (tempera's quality is crap, so it's unsuited to make any art that you want to keep, but it's so cheap that it's perfect for process-based work), and handed it all off to the kids:

I didn't give the kids any instructions (other than "We only paint on the brown paper") but we've read so many books about cave art, and seen so many visual examples, that I shouldn't be surprised at how traditional their work was:

It ended up as QUITE the fabulous cave:

Because we'd all been so intrigued by our study of Cueva de las Manos, I set up a second smaller cave wall specifically to do hand stencils. I used our liquid watercolors in spritz bottles, which work great on brown paper bags:

It was REALLY messy--of COURSE!--but turned out great. The kids both stenciled both of their hands (spritzing that bottle is an excellent fine motor-strengthening activity, especially for the non-dominant hand), and I even convinced Matt that he should join me in stenciling our hands, too, so that we ended up with a Paleolithic family portrait, of sorts:

Other than the aforementioned web sites, here are the other resources that we pored over to learn about cave painting:

• Recipe and Craft Guide to France
• Art: The Definitive Visual Guide
• The Cave Painter of Lascaux
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams
• Europe before Rome

My Latest over at CAGW: Wooden Pallets and Sydney's Latest Moneymaker

My latest over at CAGW:

a round-up of DIY wooden pallet projects

and a way to store melted wax between uses

The kids had SO much fun with their melted wax play--scooping it, pouring it, melting crayons in it, spilling it, scraping it up--

You get the idea.

Sydney, my entrepreneurial child, had another idea, as well. With her sister's help, she set up "Sydney's Beeswax Crafts" on our front sidewalk, directly on the frequently walked and biked path to our neighborhood park:

Here's the first dollar that she earned:

She sold her hand-dipped beeswax candles and her poured beeswax shapes (still warm!), all for $1 each. Including the elderly gentleman who paid her $1 to go inside and go to bed that first evening--it was 8:30 pm, getting dark, and I had long ago despaired of getting the kid to come back inside, myself--my child earned eight dollars selling her beeswax crafts.

This is better than I have done at some craft fairs.

Beginning Grammar in English and Latin

In the two months that Willow has been studying grammar, she really hasn't moved beyond noun/subject, verb, and complete sentence identification and labeling. She'd gotten the hang of it, and then we moved on to doing Mad Libs for a couple of weeks (per the child's request), and when we came back to it and I set her a review of subject/verb identification she had a LOT of trouble, which means that she might have gotten the hang of it in the short term, but the concept is certainly not internalized.

This is okay, of course. First of all, the child is barely eight years old--she's got ample time to learn her grammar. But second of all, I have the feeling that once Willow REALLY understands the concept of subjects and verbs, and what they are and how to spot them, it will be the key to unlocking grammar for her, and I don't think it will be such a struggle, then, to understand the concept of the adjective, the preposition, the conjunction, etc.

To keep the process from becoming tedious, to deepen Willow's understanding of the concepts, and, of course, to further her foreign language study, we've switched over more or less from using Minimus for Latin (Minimus is fun, and we still do it occasionally, but I want a more systematic, academic study) to duplicating Will's study of English grammar with Latin.

It goes like this:

1. As part of Will's study of nouns and verbs, I taught her how to conjugate verbs in the present tense in English, including recognizing the tense and voice:



Notice the Southern translation of second person plural, much to be preferred on account of its specificity.

NOTE: I taught her "to be" in English, because it's critical for verb identification, but not yet in Latin (although we'll do that before we start Latin nouns, I think).

2. I taught her how to conjugate a-verbs in Latin in the present tense. She's memorized two so far ("amare" and "laborare"), and once she's memorized a third, I'll show her the pattern that will enable her to conjugate any a-verb.

Verb translation is good to start with, since you can translate a complete sentence with just one verb:

3. When Will's got the conjugation of a-verbs down pat, it's back to English we go! I think this will be a good time to use KISS Grammar, and whatever other resources I can come up with to supplement it, to learn all the uses of nouns, so that Willow can decline a noun, with understanding, in English.

As she learns the uses for nouns, I'll also teach her how to diagram them.

4. When Will can decline nouns in English, I'll teach her first declension nouns in Latin, the same way that I taught her to conjugate a-verbs.

And that sounds about like third grade grammar!

After that there are so many ways to go, of course. There are adjectives and adverbs, in English and Latin, and prepositions and conjunctions, and then Latin and English will eventually have to deviate, so that Willow can study more conjugations and declensions, and learn more vocabulary, etc., while she moves to different subjects in English grammar.

And perhaps then Willow will want additional languages, as well--Spanish? Greek? French? Middle Welsh?

I really, REALLY hope that my child becomes an even bigger language nerd than me.