Out West 2014: Badlands National Park

We didn't stop after our dinosaur dig! After a tearful goodbye to my edmontosaurus tibia, another dinner of pizza rolls (seriously, three pounds! With all that digging and hiking!), and a final night in Faith, we drove southwest to spend a day at Badlands National Park:

Yes, in about half of my photos that take place in national parks or monuments, you'll see the kids clutching workbooks--they're Junior Ranger books, and the kids LOVED them!

The Junior Ranger books are basically mini unit studies of each national park, encouraging active exploration of the place (usually through scavenger hunts or BINGO games), deeper immersion into some specific aspect (through the requirement to view a film or attend a ranger program), and cross-curricular research and study (the books cover varying subjects, but often history, culture, geology, biology, creative writing, etc.).

When a kid completes her Junior Ranger book, she goes back to any ranger in any of the visitor centers and turns the book in, goes over her work with that ranger and discusses it (and usually, in the case of Will, has a giant conversation about it), and is then awarded an official Junior Ranger badge to wear on her shirt, and is administered the official Junior Ranger oath.

Thrilling, right? And oh, the kids took this so seriously, and were so thrilled to earn each badge. And my favorite part (other than how into it the kids were) is that the rangers clearly took the project equally seriously. Several times we had rangers approach the children in the various national parks as they were working on a specific activity and converse with them about it--like CONVERSE converse, not just quiz them or "help" them. The rangers who went over the children's completed workbooks with them always also engaged the kids in conversation about them; they'd ask the kid to walk through the process of coming to a particular conclusion, correct erroneous information and explain the answer, ask them about their favorite activities or the most interesting things they'd learned, etc. I actually kind of sweated it a couple of times, listening to these conversations--reminded me of my PhD oral exams that I failed!

And you have not seen cute until you've seen my kids' earnest little faces as they repeat, right hands raised, their Junior Ranger oaths. They always put on their badges immediately, of course (Will liked to wear ALL of hers, for days), and when wearing their badges, they were invariably greeted by rangers with "Hello, Junior Ranger!"

Truly, this program just made the park experience for the kids.

And so, Junior Ranger books in two hands, we spent the day walking around the Badlands and climbing on stuff:

There are fossils to discover here, too, particularly some interesting fossils in the evolution of the horse. If you discover a fossil eroding out of the rock, you're to take a photo of it with something standard in the frame (coin, bill, house key, etc.), record its GPS coordinates with your smartphone, then fill out a form about it back in the visitor center. We didn't find any fossils, but we certainly kept a lookout!

Whenever Matt takes my camera, he always snaps cute photos of me--


--but he also takes sneaky photos like these:

That kid and I can't see each other, but clearly we're related!

And here I am on a different hike, once again sunning myself on a rock. Like a lizard.

We spent most of our day at the bottoms of these hills and cliffs and peaks, clambering up and then sliding back down, but toward the end of the day, noses pointed ever westward, our journey through the park took us to an area where we were looking down across vast vistas of Badlands:

Narrow walkway between two huge drops? Gallop across it, of course!

Or, you know, scramble over to the edge of it, sigh.

I love myself some sedimentary layers!

After exploring all this natural beauty all day, hiking and eating sandwiches and climbing on stuff, we settled ourselves back in the car for a drive to what may be the tackiest place in the West.

Stay tuned for Wall Drug!

Work Plans for the Week of August 4, 2014: Back to School!

We're back from our vacation and recently settled in from our move, and that means that we year-rounders are back to school! It's funny that we're beginning today, because it's also the first day of school for public schoolers in our district, and the kids and I usually celebrate NOT Back to School Day as a holiday, but honestly, I just could not wait one more day to get back into our routine. I'm busier, of course, when I spend half the day doing school with the kids, but I crave the order, and frankly, I think the kids do better overall when they're put to work every day.

MONDAY: Will has finished her schoolwork for the day, but Syd, who slept in until a whopping 10:30 this morning (still getting over our vacation, I think), hasn't even started. I made plans to go and collect her from the yard, where she's eating a late lunch and playing, at 3:30, which will give her time to do all her school and do her chores before dinner (all chores MUST be completed BEFORE dinner in order to earn one's dollar). Monday is the day that I do a little enrichment for the coming Math Mammoth units, so Will watched a couple of Khan Academy videos on the order of operations, and then discussed them with me (she kept trying to insist that society is being held back from great discoveries by its insistence on adhering to the order of operations, but I explained to her that nevertheless, one must learn the conventions of a subject before one can break those conventions), and Syd and I are going to make Roman currency out of clay to practice Roman numerals.

I've put us back at the beginning of the verb lessons in First Language Lessons; I'd like to get both books three and four completed this year with both children, and then we can work on such interesting composition studies!

Syd needs more encouragement to read books that are NOT comic books, and Will, although her mispronunciations are super funny, needs more troubleshooting for correct pronunciation, so I'll be asking them to read formally to me for a while--they read to me and to each other often, but I take care not to hyper-vigilantly correct every word when they're reading to me for pleasure. During this time, however, I will hyper-vigilantly correct every word. This morning I taught Will how to correctly pronounce "suite" (hint: it's not pronounced identically to "suit")! I just ask Will to read me a chapter of one of the books that she's currently reading, but I choose Syd's book, and then ask her to finish it on her own. Currently, we're alternating between Dog Diaries and Horse Diaries; they're at the perfect level for her, and I don't scream inside my head listening to them like I do when she reads me Rainbow Magic.

The kids' horseback riding instructor now asks them to research a new horse breed each week and prepare an oral report for her; she also sometimes has Will research an additional topic, if she's asked about it during the lesson. I've got a time set aside on Mondays for this research, especially since it often involves so many little tangents; today, researching the kathiawari, Will and I looked up the Kathiawar peninsula on Google Earth and then spent some time on Youtube watching the sport of tentpegging. Will also looked up and memorized the definition of "cribbing."

We had our first day back at our volunteer gig after a month off, and it was wonderful to be back! I got to man the brand-new meat counter, and even though I thought that I would hate it (all that meat!), I actually loved it (so many people to talk to!), Will was my Assistant Meat Manager and took over for me during breaks (she could probably man it by herself, but I'm afraid she'll tip over and fall into the chest freezer), and Syd shadowed the garden intern and apparently ate her weight in freshly-picked tomatoes.

TUESDAY: The kids will be starting the third and fifth grade Math Mammoth curricula, and we're starting spelling back up (I'll *probably* try to run a Scripps spelling bee through our homeschool group again, so we'll *probably* keep going with spelling as a subject until then).

We're done with Latin, though! I ended up not loving our Latin book by the end of it--I just felt like the kids didn't come away with a lot, you know?--but I'm banking on enrolling them in a children's foreign language class through our local university in the fall, so we'll take a break from languages until then.

I was starting to feel like the kids were just marking time with cursive, as well, so now I'm going to be spot-testing them as we go, and making them repeat work if they forget a letter. Will's print handwriting remains atrocious, so she's GOT to have good-looking cursive!

I had wanted to do this paleontology unit study before our dig, but moving house got in the way, so we'll do it now! I had also wanted to start Waldorf-style form drawing, but there are so many relevant Draw Write Now pages that are at the kids' (and my) level that we can keep working on drawing skills while focusing on new content elsewhere.

WEDNESDAY: Horseback riding class, Magic Tree House Club, LEGO Club! The kids have also had a long break from aerial silks, and I know that they want to go back, but I've got to figure out how to put it into the schedule, first. Maybe in September?

THURSDAY: For US geography, for now, I've decided that I'll just have the kids memorize their states and capitals as a spine, and then we can study new states as we see them (including some upcoming units on South Dakota and Wyoming!). I've got fun, new memorization games to introduce each week and play throughout the week--well, I *hope* that the kids think they're fun!

After the kids have cursive down, I plan to move this weekly letter-writing to their handwriting spot and start with some meatier composition, but for now the kids DO have correspondence to keep up up! Syd wants to write to the lead Barbie designer at Mattel to tell her some ideas that she has for Barbie hair care items, and I'm going to have Will work on making Indiana postcards for our postcard swap, which we're woefully behind on.

FRIDAY: The kids love to start Girl Scout badges, but they don't always keep that same enthusiasm all the way to the finish--with a little encouragement, however (and an assignment or two), Syd ought to be able to finish off her Bugs badge pretty efficiently, and Will her Animal Habitats. Both have done most of the meaningful content that I'd wanted for them, and just need to get that last check mark or two.

A short pioneer unit study is a good fit with what we saw on our road trip, so I *think* that I'll be doing it through these Little House lapbooks. There's a LOT of content in each lapbook, so my idea is to have the two kids collaborate on each one, and then we'll keep the enrichment activities, such as baking sourdough biscuits, to our free time.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We have NOTHING scheduled this weekend--yay! We might be able to do a couple of fun family activities (the kids have already declared their plans to see Planes: Fire and Rescue at the drive-in on one of those days), but we'll have closed on our old house by then, and with the dissolution of our real estate empire, I suppose that we should also think about, I don't know...

...unpacking?

P.S. A neighbor saw our yard sign (yes, yard sign!) for Spots, and came over to tell me that he'd seen her in his backyard--weeks ago, of course--and to let us know that there are actually a couple of streets of houses WAY back behind ours. So we'll be figuring out how to get over there, then putting out more flyers and talking to more people tomorrow evening. I keep trying not to get my hopes up, but I don't feel sick to my stomach right this second, so I must have done so anyway, sigh.

Keep sharing her flyer as you can:

Out West 2014: Family Dino Dig Day 2

One of the many nice things about our two-day dinosaur dig (the Premium Nice Thing being, of course, that we're going to dig for dinosaurs again!!!) is that on this second day, everyone knows exactly what to do, no intro lecture needed, whether it's chipping in to help unload the tools--

--or settling in to make more exciting discoveries:

Matt discovered, excavated, mapped, and wrapped this really cool rib fragment:

Syd excavated--

--and mapped a find, too--

This photo of one of the paleontologists teaching Syd how to map is one of my favorites.

 --and did some field jacketing:

Check out just a part of the growing stash of fossils bound for the museum!

And those are just the small ones!

Bizarrely, I have practically zero photos of Will on this second day of digging, even more inexcusable because this was her tenth birthday! I was intensely focused on my personal Great White Whale of Fossils, however, as I'll show you in a bit, and Will apparently must have puttered and worked contentedly all day to not have gained my notice. 

Except for the van rides, of course... It's a long ride in the van both to the dig site and back, and to the ranch house and back for lunch, and for that whole time we're all just trapped there in the van with each other, for better or worse. On the first day, Will had been pretty quiet, but on this second day, she sat on the ride up next to this bookish, funny, sarcastic, very kind, very intelligent teenaged fellow, and whatever this guy ended up thinking about her, bless his heart, Will decided that she thought that He. Was. AWESOME. 

Side note: When Will thinks that you're awesome, she may demonstrate this to you by means of verbal obnoxiousness. 

Will bantered with this guy for the whole ride, every ride, torturing him with ten-year-old wit (she thought that it was HILARIOUS to repeatedly question the definition of common words, bringing the conversation steadily down to a microcosm of linguistic absurdity), doing her very darnedest to hold her own against his clever eighteen-year-old wit (her darnedest mainly involved the use of lots of sophisticated vocabulary that she knows but doesn't know how to pronounce), laughing her head off so hard that she could barely catch her breath, and basically basking in the attention of this awesome fellow who was so great and so willing to humor her and talk to her not like she was a kid, but like the similarly bookish, funny, sarcastic person that she is. 

Matt and I sat two rows up, alternately trying to pretend like we did not know this crazy child, clarifying her crazier comments so that people didn't think that we were crazy, too ("I swear that she only knows about cannibals from Pippi Longstocking--I don't know why she's telling you about cannibalistic horses"), nervously anticipating what further horrors she might yet unleash, and attempting to reassure the van at large that "um, you can tell she really likes you if she's willing to tell you that sometimes she thinks we're all a story made up by alien robots." 

Long van rides, y'all. LONG van rides, and yet strangely entertaining, like watching two mad geniuses have a meeting of the minds--the crazy and the stunning intellect are so readily exchanged that you kind of stop being able to tell the difference after a while.

 On this second day, the kids also took a little more time to play and explore--

giant piles of rubble=much fun

Here's one of the trenches around the dig site, needed to channel excess water from the work area in case of rain.

--and to help with other miscellaneous tasks around the dig site, such as digging trenches and cutting burlap for field jackets. You can never be sure what a kid's memories will be (Matt and I joke that all of the Ingalls homestead will be remembered solely as "kitten farm," thanks to the litter of farm kitties there), but I hope that these times of focused work interspersed with times of relaxed observation will help the kids remember the dig site and all its many components with greater accuracy.

Although Will may just mainly remember the van rides.

After lunch, we took a side trip up a neighboring bluff to check out the view:

That hill to the right is another potential dig site, although it would be a rough one. It's so weathered, though, that apparently fossils are just sticking up out of the exposed hill!

For most of this day, though, I was profoundly focused on my own project. Partway through the morning, one of the paleontologists cleverly managed to lure me away from my dead area (Goodbye, teensy rib fragments! Goodbye, tendons! Goodbye, broken teeth!) and set me to work excavating this edmontosaurus tibia:

I LOVED this job. LOVED. IT. I cuddled up to that tibia and barely looked away from it for the rest of the day:

THIS is why my collarbone still hurt days later!

The fossil is set straight into the hillside, so to excavate it, you've got to take off ALL the rock on top of it, for its entire length.

BUT you don't want to do too much hacking at the hill without following it up with careful work near the fossil; the fossil could end in a broken point at any time (and wouldn't that be exciting--broken by WHAT?!?--and then you'd have wasted time taking down that hillside for nothing.

Check out my blister wraps! Super hard-core.

Seriously, I LOVED this freaking tibia. I kept talking about it as "my tibia," and telling these really boring stories about it ("And then I was scraping some mud away from my tibia, and all of a sudden I thought that I'd cracked it, so I brushed away the dirt, and it turns out that it was okay! But you can bet that I put more Paleobond on that baby just in case!"), and everyone would listen really patiently and kindly, probably imagining that if it wasn't me going on about my tibia, it would be my kid going on about cannibal horses and their island nation and, you know, pick your poison!

But really, isn't it beautiful?

Sometimes, with these fossils, you squirt Paleobond over the tops of them as you're working, to keep them stable, and at one point I squirted Paleobond all over a freshly-excavated inch of tibia, then went to work away at the hillside on top of it, and immediately forgot about the Paleobond and put my hand straight into it.

I did not need to be debonded, but I *might* discover a tiny section of skin on my tibia when I go in to prep it later this month in the museum. 

Late in the afternoon, likely clearly seeing the developing psychosis in my unhealthy attachment to this edmontosaurus tibia, that same paleontologist lured me away from it with the invitation to help field wrap some huge edmontosaurus bones; this was our final activity at the dinosaur dig:

The two guys who did pretty much the entire excavation of these bones (the guy in green is Will's buddy from my story above) wrapped the bones in aluminum foil to protect them, then are wrapping them first in pre-plastered bandages that we're wetting and handing to them.

After it's got a layer of bandages, we're dipping the lengths of burlap that Syd cut earlier into plaster of Paris and then handing them off to them to be wrapped more thoroughly.

Field jacketing is a MESSY job to begin with, but I'm cracking up here because the little dude to my right is somehow managing to absolutely douse me in plaster with every piece of burlap that he preps. 

See? Doused! There's plaster under my eye, and in my ear, and down the back of my shirt--up to my elbows is a given.

 Here's that finished field jacket, sans the braces that will be done later:

There is not enough that I can say about this family dinosaur dig. It is one of the best things that we have ever done as a family. It was perfect in every way. Of course, since the staff belong to a children's museum, it's redundant for me to tell you that they were GREAT with the kids, but they were actually great with everyone. Every paleontologist would take all the time in the world to carefully explain everything to any digger, whether it was my eight-year-old kid or 37-year-old me; both small children and goofy, over-eager amateurs were treated with respect and seriousness and helped to understand the real science that we were performing. We felt integral to the work at all times, and the patience that must have required for these professionals astounds me. More than once I saw a paleontologist first teach a child the concept of a grid, then teach the child how to read the grid, then teach the child how to apply that information to a grid placed over a dig area, then teach a child how to use that grid to map a find, then teach that child how to draw the find onto a paper grid, then stand next to that child and hold the grid while the child took all the time in heaven and earth to perform that task, never hurrying, never acting impatient, never even hinting at the possibility that anyone other than that child would ever need to step in and take over or "help."

So yes, we all learned an incredible amount, but it was more than just the couple of school days that I marked them as on the kids' homeschool calendar; it was also the best kind of fantasy camp--you know those places where adults can go to pretend to be professional football players or spies or mystery-solving elves for a weekend (I really want to go to this one, by the way)? Well, imagine this like fantasy paleontology camp, only it's not pretend. It's REAL. Matt's rib, and Syd's, and Will's tibia, and mine (ooh, and that giant femur that I helped field jacket!) are real. We really discovered them, and excavated them, and field jacketed them according to professional standards that mean that they can add to the scientific canon of paleontology. They're at a real museum, and later we'll spend time in that museum preparing them and studying them, and maybe there will be something exceptional about them, or maybe they'll simply add to the examples of typical edmontosaurus skeletal anatomy, but regardless, they're part of Science now.

And we did that.

P.S. Lots of people have been telling me stories lately of animals lost for long periods of time, mourned and thought gone forever, who have returned--thank you for that. We're still handing out flyers and still missing our Spots:

If you see her, tell her to get her butt back home to us!