American Revolution Road Trip: Fort Necessity

If you're going to study the American Revolution, then the French and Indian War is as good of a place to start as any.

You could also start, of course, with Columbus and the European colonization of North America.

Or you could start with the pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact.

Heck, you could even start with the Magna Carta, if you had a mind to!

But if you really want to just zero in on the American Revolution, with just enough context to understand how it fits into geographical and historical context, then start with the French and Indian War. You'll learn how the European countries fought over North American land, how the Native Americans were used and lied to and manipulated and exploited, why Great Britain thought that the American colonies needed to pay all those taxes, and most of all...

You'll meet young George Washington!

Since our spine for this study was Joy Hakim's A History of Us, we read the chapters in From Colonies to Country that cover the French and Indian War, but also delved more deeply. In particular, the kids used reference materials to color and label their own maps of North America before the French and Indian War and after it. We also used a lot of the curriculum materials on the Fort Necessity Park's website, in particular the lessons on the Forks of the Ohio, which is important for understanding how disputed territory is guarded and governed, and the lesson on the Native Americans who inhabited the land. It's so easy for the Native American story to get lost in studying the American Revolution that I wanted to make a special point of bringing it in from the beginning, especially as the role that they play in this particular war is so important.

I didn't use any flashcards like these, because there weren't any particular facts that I wanted the children to memorize, but I did have them complete several of the mini books from this lapbook for the American Revolution notebooks, and when we go over them again to review and add photos and new information, I might have them complete a couple more of the books. The kiddos also love BrainPop, and as usual, I was not disappointed when I searched their site for the French and Indian War; they have a video for everything!

Our favorite resource, by far, for the French and Indian War was The War that Made America (it's nevertheless pretty dry, so I only made the kids watch it as far as the Fort Necessity info), but here are some other resources that we used:



And here's what it looked like in real life!

We started, of course, with Second Breakfast while the kids worked on a couple of non-site specific activities from their Junior Ranger books.

Then we did a little role-playing.

And then we saw the fort! Kinda... small, isn't it? This is one of the reasons why I love travel so much. Would you ever have believed that Fort Necessity was this small unless you'd seen it for yourself?

Inside the fence is a tiny little shack, and inside the shack is a rustic little table.

And outside the fence is where the enemy is!

I can't imagine that this fence was much protection, alas, especially as you can easily do things like stick your entire head between the posts.

Here the kids are mapping the site for their Junior Ranger books. We were excited to see the pitiful little earthworks in the background, and much of our study vividly represented the misery of huddling behind these earthworks in the pouring rain, half-submerged in standing water, freezing and getting shot at.

Later we hiked away from the fort...

...past the old treeline and the French encampments...

...and along Braddock's Road, the wagon-rutted path that he had his soldiers painfully widen the whole damn way here. When he was killed, the soldiers buried him in the middle of this road, then they marched over his grave and away. They were worried that his corpse would be defiled if his grave was found, and thought this the best way to conceal it.

It's also a lovely natural area. See the milkweed!

The nice thing about historical battlefields and other events is that places that seemed super far away to them are just a short drive away for us, so it was only a minor detour from Fort Necessity to go see the place that I was SUPER excited to see: Jumonville Glen, where Washington and his scouting party surprised a group of French. What happened here and the mistranslation of a later treaty related to this event represents not just the first bloodshed of the French and Indian War, but also influences the development of George Washington into the soldier and leader that he becomes, AND makes very, very, VERY clear why knowing more than one language is important.

It also turns out that it's a fabulous place to explore, with lots of lovely large rocks to climb:

I'm sorry to say, however, that much of the ground around these beautiful boulders was littered with broken glass. We neglected to bring a trash bag on our short hike, so we each collected a big handful of the trash to bring back with us to the car.

After clambering around big rocks so that we could jump down and surprise the French, we tromped back to the car, deposited our broken glass in our own trash bags, made ourselves big sandwiches, and drove the long drive to Washington, D.C. We're going to take a little break from the Revolution itself to see how our fledgling country turned out!

Homeschool Science: Shark Dissection, and our Sharks Science Study

Back in the summer, partly as a bit of thematically-relevant prep for the kids' trip to California and partly just on a whim, I signed the kids and I up for a free MOOC on sharks and global biodiversity through EdX.

Y'all, this course changed our lives.

One week in, and Will was already telling me that she wants to be a marine biologist when she grows up (considering that her next most recent dream job was global dictator, this is for sure a step in the right direction). Two weeks in, and I knew that I was going to be turning this MOOC into a more extensive study, based on how passionate the kids were about it.

Over two months in, and we've just finished that more extensive study, and we're also now completely obsessed with sharks, so much so that I altered our road trip plans to include some shark-related sites.

We did this MOOC live, with everybody participating at their own pace, and for our recent study we used it again as our spine. Instead of going through the entire course again, I gave the kids specific units from specific weeks, tied to enrichment activities to deepen their understanding of shark biology and to contextualize it with human biology.

We memorized the layers of the ocean, for instance, and the types of shark habitats, with the kids creating a giant poster of this and then putting pictures of sharks on it where they live.

We memorized the external anatomy of the shark, particularly all the types of shark caudal fins.

We conducted a comparative anatomy of the shark's internal organs, including some hands-on experimentation with osmosis and the functioning of a shark's oily liver, and comparisons between the human brain and the shark brain, the human heart and the shark heart, and the human respiratory system and the shark respiratory system.

We discussed pop culture representations of sharks, watching Jaws as our main resource for this (although I really should find a copy of Sharknado for us to watch next...), the conservation of sharks and their use in aquariums (with lots of webcams and a planned visit to the New England Aquarium this month!), and how to stay shark safe in the ocean, practicing shark-safe techniques one afternoon at the lake.

The long-anticipated culminating activity of this sharks study was a dissection of an actual shark, the squalus acanthus, or common dogfish. The dogfish shark is bought by science suppliers from fishing by-catch, and our purchase of it first involved a lot of discussion with the kids in which I made clear my reservations about using animals in science but also admitted what educational experiences they would gain from it. The kids did decide that they wanted the experience of dissecting a real animal, and promised that they would treat the shark's corpse respectfully throughout, which they did.

We will revisit the use of animals in our science studies on a case-by-case basis.

We split up our complete shark dissection into four separate sessions--Home Science Tools, where I purchased the shark, assured me that I would be able to re-seal the shark into its bag between sessions, but at the beginning of the fourth session, I noticed that the shark was getting moldy and told the kids that we had to finish up the rest of our dissection on that day. In retrospect, I should have stored it in its bag and in the refrigerator, but who really wants a bagged shark corpse sitting next to the pasta salad?

Funnily, since this was a shark dissection, the session that the kids seemed to enjoy the most was the one on external anatomy. They had a fabulous time finding all of the external features of the shark, poking at them a bit, and photographing them for posterity. Our USB microscope was crucial for this, and I don't know how we could have done the dissection without it:

teeth

skin

a view inside the nares

electroreceptors known as the ampullae of lorenzini

examining the cornea

gill slits 

examining the caudal fin

Home Science Tools provided a brochure on shark dissection, but we vastly preferred The Photomanual and Dissection Guide of the Shark, which is far more informative, although you have to skip around in it in order to conduct an orderly dissection. It's best to consult several sources, I learned, so I also used a few more books from our local university library as reference, as well as several Youtube videos of variable quality.

And here we are finally cutting our shark open!

The cartilage is hard to cut through, so I helped some, but I wanted the kids to do most of the work themselves:

Frankly, I was completely over this shark dissection halfway through our exploration of the shark's stomach contents--fish spines, a gill system, couple of shells, lots of scales and slime.

See those stomach contents? Shudder.

 But I put on my game face and we sailed through the circulatory system--

--the respiratory system--

 --and the skeletal system.

This dissection was hard for me to get through, although I didn't let the kids know it. I'd given them my objections, they'd made an informed decision to do the dissection anyway, and what they needed to do it properly was a guide and mentor, not a moaning sicky-face. To be fair, though, I did take the rest of the day off after this, and I 100% left the clean-up to them while I took a hot shower, then lounged in my bed with a glass of wine and a good book.

Overall, this sharks unit was a terrific science study. We had a good spine, were able to use lots of supporting resources, conducted plenty of interesting hands-on activities, and are able to extend our study with a couple of detours on our upcoming road trip. The kids have always loved science, and always loved animals, but we've now discovered that they also very much love animal biology. Next semester, we're going to try another EdX course, this one on animal behavior, although my plan is to review it myself first so that I can incorporate enrichment activities the first time around.

And we might end up dissecting a sheep's brain...

Here are some other resources that we enjoyed during this sharks unit:

• TEDtalk playlist all about sharks
• Sharks of the World matching game
• Sharkopedia
• newspaper shark craft
• track a shark with Ocearch
• Chondricthyan Tree of Life
• LEGO sharks

Pattern Play Paper Animals in the Playroom

I can't decide if I like these or not.

The kids and I got this book, Pattern Play, free from some publicist or another (fun fact: when you blog, sometimes you get random packages of free stuff in the mail. Usually I know who they're from, but seriously, sometimes I don't! Should I be concerned that anonymous publicists apparently have my home address?), and while we super liked constructing the animals--

--I was kind of freaking out as we were making them, because omg our house is so cluttered already. There is already so much crap on display, from decorative bean mosaics to layers of the ocean posters to potted plants to Harry Potter fanart to jars with colored sand layered in them to coconut monkeys to the freaking Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria!!11!!!! (and yes, I did compile that list from what's basically right in front of me as I sit here at our school table. I'm not even telling you about our table covered in school stuff and the entire wall of books and the keyboard and telescope AND camera tripod in the corner. Sigh...)

Where the hell are a bunch of adorable 3D stand-up paper animals supposed to live, I ask you?!? In bed with me? Next to the cat dish? On top of the dryer?

Or--ooh!--how about in a mobile hanging over the kids' computer? They'd flutter and waft in such a lovely fashion. We don't have any mobiles in the house! In fact, I've never even made a mobile before!

How hard could it be?

Uh...

The first couple of steps that I figured out were brilliant. We found the balance point for each animal as we were constructing it, poked a hole there--

--and threaded a piece of invisible thread through. Then we glued the two sides together, sandwiching the thread between them.

Not. A. Problem.

I bought a super thin dowel, and cut it into some pieces.

Totally doable. 

Then I tied a piece of fishing line to the dead center of the smallest piece--okay, that was pretty fiddly--and hot glued it in place.

Done and done.

The next step, as far as I could figure, was to hang an animal from each end of the dowel, right in the place where the whole thing balanced, and glue it in place.

This. Was. IMPOSSIBLE!

The thread was really slick, and didn't want to knot. I finally got a loop in each piece, then had Syd hold the dowel up by its thread while I balanced the two animals from it. Her arm got tired. I had to let go of the contraption to see if it balanced, but if I let go too much one end of the dowel would fly up and the animals would fall off. The thing would be unbalanced one way, but adjusting one animal by a millimeter would drastically imbalance it the other way.

How the hell to people make mobiles?!?

After a really, really, REALLY long time, I said to hell with it and Syd and I taped some animals, strung to fishing line, from the top of the high shelf above their window seat:

They still flutter and waft, but there was very little engineering required.

Another neat thing about this book is that after you cut each animal out, you have the rest of the patterned paper left to play with. When I was thinking of making my mobile masterpiece, I was thinking that we'd use the circle punch to cut out a lot of circles from the paper, then sandwich the invisible string between an entire line of them and also use that in the mobile.

Now, however, I'm thinking I might do the same thing, but maybe as a garland.

In other news, does anyone have a good mobile-making tutorial to recommend to me?

Homeschool Math: The Decanomial Square and Its Extensions

Just yesterday, I told a friend that if I'd had preschool to do all over again, I'd have skipped Montessori and saved the money.

When I said that, I was thinking of 1) how expensive Montessori was, and 2) how I'd primarily thought of myself as using it for childcare and social experiences, and so I'd perhaps have been better served with a a cheaper alternative.

It didn't take much reflecting on my statement, however, to realize that I was wrong. I'm glad that we didn't continue with Montessori, of course, because homeschooling has been vastly superior to any available alternatives, but Montessori, I think, has deeply affected how my children view learning, and how I mentor and mediate their learning.

Montessori is where I developed my firm philosophy of--other than screentime limits--never disturbing a busy child. Children's focused concentration is precious and not something to be lightly interrupted. That focused concentration, whether directed at "work" or play or nothing at all, as far as you can tell, is children thinking deeply and hard and they'll later be able to apply that focused concentration to their other work and studies.

Montessori is where I first saw work plans, and now I couldn't imagine our homeschool without them. For the kids, a work plan is expectation management, empowerment in how they're going to conduct their day, and a good model of clarity and organization that leads to a solid work ethic.

Montessori is where I became firmly convinced of the vital importance of hands-on manipulatives, especially for math. We think of math as cerebral, but it's also visceral and and intuitive and sensorial; you may know how to do long division on paper, for instance, but when you physically do long division, you understand how it works for real.

Much of our own math manipulatives, then, are Montessori-style, even if I create them myself and alter them from the specified Montessori format. The decanomial square, for instance, is a physical model of the multiplication table. In Montessori, kids compile a slightly abstract paper model (Montessori relies on the reinforcement of the color coding of numerical values, which kids have long internalized by this time, so that they can get away with having a less concrete representation) that they then will recreate with the bead manipulatives that they use. Kids can do some really sophisticated extension work with this material, including bringing out some of their old preschool manipulatives (the pink tower and the brown stair, in particular) to make clear the relationship between all of these different ways of representing numbers.

We use Cuisenaire rods instead of the Montessori bead materials, and we sure as heck don't have a school's worth of them to build ourselves a decanomial square with, so I didn't want to use a decanomial square that relied on color-coding to impart much of its crucial information. Instead, I wanted to make it gridded with centimeters throughout, and make the relationship of each piece to the number that it represents (as well as its area and perimeter and the length of each side) clear that way.

Thank goodness that my husband is a graphic designer!

Matt designed the decanomial square that we used (we need to figure out how to best format it for a home printer, and then my goal is to make it available for sale if there are any other Montessori-obsessed homeschoolers out there), and although he color-coded it to our Cuisenaire rods, I printed it onto cardstock in shades of grey, on account of I'm too lazy to replace the color ink cartridges on my printer. Syd then helped me assemble the pieces into the complete square and then cut them out.

In a Montessori setting, you would model the assembly of the decanomial square in an organized way, but I'm mean, so I gave it to the kids as a puzzle, with no other clue than that the finished piece would be a perfect square. I made them figure it out completely without my assistance, and wouldn't you know it, but they eventually (after some griping, and then some settling down to get to work) did present me with a perfectly assembled decanomial square!

That process was one complete math enrichment work for one school week, but last week we played some more with the decanomial square, extending our understanding of what it can offer. First, I had the children build the square again, which they did this time with minimal fuss (other than losing the 2x2 square, sigh, which we actually really needed for this lesson. Oh, well... I do intend to replace this particular model with the colorful one as soon as I can get Matt to replace the ink cartridges for my lazy ass, so then this entire greyscale one will be just spare parts).

Then, I demonstrated one of my favorite equations in all of math: the Pythagorean theorem. Will has encountered this before, and Syd has worked with squares before, so it was a good lesson for them both. I set up the 3x3 square and the 4x4 square at right angles to each other, and told them that these were two sides of a right triangle, sides a and b. They needed to find the square whose side made the perfect hypotenuse, or side c.

And they did!


A squared plus b squared equals c squared! If you worked hand-in-hand with a good graphic design program, it wouldn't be hard to print out physical models on the spot of the hypotenuse of various other right triangles. You could print out a square with sides exactly 5.3851640713 cm long, for instance, to go with your 2x2 square and 5x5 square.

Hmmm, maybe that's another set of models that Matt should design for me?

Most of our work, however, involved using the pieces of the decanomial square to build equations (pre-algebra for the win!). We set out one piece of the square, then covered it completely by puzzling together other pieces--

  

--then wrote an equation to represent that model:

For instance, one equation might read:  5 squared (ugh, I wish I could find the superscript hotkey without looking it up! Soooo lazy!) = 4 squared + 4 + 5. (I didn't mention it, but do you notice that this is also the Pythagorean theorem? So cool!) Another might read: 3 squared = 3 + (2x3).

That was the extent of this particular extension lesson, but there are so many more things to do with the decanomial square, and we'll be revisiting it often throughout algebra and geometry and possibly into trigonometry. I'm currently on the lookout, for instance, for a cheap version of the Montessori pink tower (you *can* DIY it, but with a to-do list as long as mine...) so that we can have physical models of the cubes represented in the decanomial square.

When I've finally gotten my hands on one, I'll be VERY curious to see if the kids remember it from their own Montessori preschool days. Between the two of them, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd built it a hundred times over the years that they were there.

Work Plans for the Week of September 26: An End to Rocks and the Revolution (But Not to Civics)

Don't tell the older kid, but next semester, I'm going to be upping her schoolwork load.

Twelve has been kind of a magic number for this kid. The kid who used to struggle daily, constantly, with her deep desire not to do anything that anyone else wanted her to do, nor to do anything at all tedious, is now my kid who gets all her schoolwork done every day, quickly, without prompting. She can get an entire day's schoolwork done in two hours or less if she puts her mind to it, and she usually does!

That would be just about an ideal amount of time for a younger kid, but now that the older kid is middle school-aged, I think she can handle more, especially since she's getting her current workload done so easily. The younger kid, on the other hand, is having a hard transition to ten, and the current workload is already more than she's willing to do without fuss. So after our vacation, the kids will come to the new semester with redesigned work plan templates, and they won't be completely identical.

And the older kid's will have more work on it. Don't tell!

Last week's school week went well, especially with that mid-week romp up to the Children's Museum to break it up. We also finished up our shark dissection, Lordy Hallelujah, played at the creek with friends, did interesting things to rocks, and the younger kid made us candy sushi:

The kids learned how to play lacrosse (neither of them liked it, but at least now they know!), they've both just almost got the prime numbers through 100 memorized, and I think this strategy for our American Revolution notebooks is going to work:

Books of the Day for this week include some shout-outs to current and upcoming studies (the younger kid loves the Goddess Girls series, and the older kid likes the I Survived series, which is a little hard-core for the younger kid). Daily work includes probably our last week of having Scratch on the work plans--the older kid has just about made it through Coding Games in Scratch, and the younger kid, who has long abandoned the book in favor of making daily cartoons in Scratch, likes it enough that I think she'll keep it in mind for her screen-time, if she can ever get over her Roblox obsession (and here I thought that I hated Minecraft. There's always something worse!!!). The kids will also be alternating their cursive/journaling with replying to pen pal letters--they need to write at least two replies this week--and are expected to each earn $50 for vacation spending money this week. I make a special list of chores and prices for vacation money-earning, including as options chores and activities like doing extra work in math or composition, and crap like finishing up craft WIPs and helping me go through their fall wardrobes, etc. And finally, the older kid should be finishing Wordly Wise book 6, earning herself a treat (I keep trying to remind the children that treats can also be things like a trip to the indoor trampoline park or the library or an extra hour of screen-time, but they inevitably ALWAYS choose a) doughnuts or b) ice cream. Sigh...).

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: In Math Mammoth this week, the younger kid is learning about ratios and the older kid is finishing percents. I'm pleased about this, because our math enrichment this week will fit both of them very well!

We're finishing up Song School Spanish this week. I have several Spanish curricula to explore for next semester with the younger kid, although fortunately over the weekend I found a couple of Mandarin texts that will work to flesh out the older kid's Mandarin classes. I'd hoped to start her on one of the textbooks this week, but the weekend got away from me and I forgot to include it in my lesson plans. Oh, well!

I'm excited to have finished our rocks and minerals text last week, so that this week we can move into the younger kid-friendly rocks and minerals science kit that I've been looking forward to. We're starting it this week, with the plan that the kids can finish it when we come home from vacation but before we begin our new semester, and I'm really, really, REALLY hoping that it's as user-friendly and adapted for independent work as it looks.

Are you as excited about tonight's presidential debate as I am? We've got a big night planned of me and the older kid racing home from fencing and then all of us eating pizza in front of the TV and cheering/jeering. To that end, the kids will be reading the pages on the debates in Election 2016, and then watching clips of other debates from previous years to help them understand what they'll be looking at and should be watching for tonight.

We've got a lot of chapters in From Colonies to Country to get through this week, but they're all about the Constitution, so it should work to read/listen to them as a unit. On this day, the kids will be working on what they can complete from the Junior Ranger book for the Germantown White House in Philadelphia. Do NOT let me forget to gather up all of these half-completed Junior Ranger books and take them with us on our road trip!

TUESDAY: I LOVE the videos on Brainpop, and so do the kids! I'm surprised at how often I find relevant videos there, especially in the sciences and history. The kids really enjoy the videos, and I like that there's a quiz afterwards to confirm that they've understood the content. On this day, the kids will be watching the Brainpop video on the Constitutional Convention.

In other news, I just had a panic attack upon writing that previous sentence, when doing so reminded me that I had NOT yet reserved our tickets to tour Independence Hall!!! You will be relieved to know that I immediately went to remedy that, there were happily tickets available, and now we're all set. Now you just need to help me convince the rest of my family that we do need to go look at the Liberty Bell again, as well. They claim that we've already seen it; I claim that we're going to be just across the freaking street, People! Come ON!

Step 3 of the Cadette Finding Common Ground badge asks the Girl Scout to analyze a civil debate. Can you think of a more perfect activity to do on the day after the Clinton/Trump debate? The older kid loves politics, so this should be right in her wheelhouse. For the Junior Social Butterfly badge, the younger kid and a sister Scout are planning to host a tea party for the other Girl Scouts in our troop. I'm going to encourage her to press flowers on this day, as the girls decided they wanted to give pressed flower bookmarks out as party favors but flower season is nearly over, but I'm also planning to encourage her to search Pinterest for tea party ideas, so who knows what else she'll come up with?

WEDNESDAY: This American Revolution coloring book is actually a nice review activity for our unit, and will be pleasant for the kids to work on while we listen to our chapters in From Colonies to Country; don't you just love coloring while listening to audiobooks? I don't expect them to finish on this day, but I think that it will actually make a nice activity to work on while on our road trip.

The older kid is almost finished with the Finding Common Ground badge, which I've been really pleased with; it's a great one for a tween, all about how to handle conflict and work and communicate with others--can you think of someone who doesn't need more practice in that? For this activity, she has to study a historical compromise, working out why it was necessary, how it came about, and what would have happened if it hadn't. Since this is our Constitution week, I'll be limiting her to either the 3/5 Compromise or the Connecticut Compromise, either of which will add a lot of interesting insight and context to her understanding of American history.

The younger kid isn't particularly enthusiastic about the Inside Government badge, especially compared to how much the older kid loved that one at her age, but it's loo relevant to not do right now in election season, at the end of our American Revolution study, and on the cusp of our road trip to the nation's capitol. I'll leave how she interprets each step up to her, then, and see what activities she chooses to do.

THURSDAY: I am really stoked about our math enrichment for this week, and I know that the kids are going to be, too! It'll be pretty involved, but the basic concept is to both graph and record the fractions/decimals/percentages/ratios of the various colors of candies in various small bags. It will be a lot of real-world work that should make abundantly clear the relationship between all of those ways of representing amounts, and, well... candy!

FRIDAY: Yet another field trip day! We'll be attending our VERY well-loved Children's Farm Festival, which, to be fair, is by now a little young for the kids, but they adore it so much that I have to take them, at least for one more year.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Ballet, Chinese, attending either a ballet performance or a local play (all the fun things are on the same weekend, dang it!), working on the world's most difficult to assemble tree house, and napping. Lots of napping.

What are YOU up to this week?

Homeschool Geology: The Acid Test for Carbonate Rocks

One of the freedoms of homeschooling that is deeply important to me is our ability to do projects that are not watered down in deference to a child's age or level of experience. If I think that my second-grader can handle writing a ten-page research paper, then that's what I can mentor her to do. If I think that my fourth- and sixth-grader can handle a six-month study of World War 2, then that's what we study for six months. If I think that my fifth- and seventh-grader would be interested in dissecting a shark (and they are!) or can safely handle dangerous chemicals, then I buy them a preserved shark specimen AND a small bottle of hydrochloric acid.

Unfortunately, some materials can be difficult for a homeschooling parent to purchase. For the shark specimen, for instance, I super wanted the pregnant shark triple-injected with latex that Will was absolutely drooling over, but Carolina Science doesn't ship to residences (seriously, though--what mischief could I possibly get up to with a preserved shark in my own house?), so I had to settle on this less desirable, poorer quality shark from Home Science Tools. Home Science Tools also let me purchase hydrochloric acid, something else that Carolina Science won't, sigh, so that the kids and I could use it to test rock and mineral specimens.

Hydrochloric acid is useful for positively identifying carbonate rocks and minerals, which we have a lot of here in Indiana. Yay, limestone! To perform this test at home, you will need:

• hydrochloric acid
• very small glass bottle. You can also use a small plastic squeeze bottle, but I felt more confident storing hydrochloric acid in glass.
• three eyedroppers. These are a dime a dozen (sometimes literally, if you keep your eye out for deals!), so I disposed of the eyedroppers that the kids used for the hydrochloric acid and the dilute solution. When we work with the acid more extensively, I might just rinse them well and store them separately.
• rock samples. I had the kids choose their own samples, but I sneakily made sure that there were some carbonate rocks in the mix.
• safety gear, including goggles, gloves, and sleeved shirts. We used safety goggles, non-latex gloves, and long-sleeved shirts or hoodies. If I ever see a good deal, I would like to invest in lab coats, as they're the ideal protection for experiments like these, but until then... hoodies!

To set up the experiment, we removed everything from the kitchen table, covered the surface well in old newspapers, and I laid out all of the supplies to be easily accessible. Nobody is knocking over a full jar of hydrochloric acid on my watch!

Next, I lectured the children on what we would do for a hydrochloric acid spill or exposure to skin, eyes, or mouth. I lectured them until they began to look worried, and then I dwelled a little longer on emergency eye wash procedures, just for fun. There are also some good Youtube videos on lab safety, if you want someone else to worry your children. For bonus points, there's a great scene in Parks and Recreation in which one of the characters has to demonstrate how to use an eye wash station--it's super funny AND provides added incentive to be extra-safe in the lab so that you never have to experience one for yourself!

Next, we made the dilute solution of hydrochloric acid. If your kids are studying fractions, decimals, percents, and/or ratios, this is a great time to have them use them in a real-world situation. A good solution is 10% hydrochloric acid; you can translate that into fractions and decimals, and have the kid figure out how that works out into actual drops of hydrochloric acid and water. Ratios are deceptively tricky, in that a 10% solution of hydrochloric acid is NOT a ratio of 10:1 water to hydrochloric acid, right? It's 9:1! Yay, math!

The kids took turns measuring out the solution (and it was the older one who managed to slop hydrochloric acid all down the side of the bottle, sigh), and then I agitated it to mix it.

To test the rocks, all you have to do is dispense a drop of the dilute solution onto its surface and observe carefully to see if any magic happens:

And here's the magic!

There are more interesting things that you can do with this experiment, such as looking at the effervescence through a magnifier, or grinding the reactive rocks down and then dropping the solution onto them (hint: they'll be even MORE reactive!), or comparing reactions between the solution and vinegar. 

And don't worry: I already told Will that no, we will NOT be combining hydrochloric acid with bleach to make chlorine gas. Although it *would* make our trench warfare LARPing even more realistic...

Work Plans for the Week of September 19: A Revolution, A Field Trip, and Shark Innards

Last week's school week started strong but petered out before the end (mostly thanks to the fact that we added a new item to our list of broken stuff around our house: now it's the oven, washing machine, dryer, my camera AND MY COMPUTER!!!!1!!!!), so I had to move a couple of Friday's activities to today, alas. Fortunately, none of them were from the units that we're busting our butts to finish before our vacation, so it's no biggie.

We did get most of our schoolwork done, though, mixing up a full day at the art museum and outings with friends and the making of treats and lots of play time and reading time with awesome stuff like shark dissection--

--which we're going to be doing more of this week, and building the decanomial square--

--which we're going to be playing more with this week.

Books of the Day include more novels (including Regarding the Fountain, which I am SUPER excited to introduce to the younger kid), more random non-fiction books (Matt found the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weaponry and thought that the older kid might like it. I think he's right!), and several selections on civics, political parties, how the government works, and the like. We're really pushing hard on our civics study, which I'd like to continue through Election Day.

Other daily work includes journaling for the younger kid, cursive copywork for the older kid (she was putting zero effort into her own journaling, so I have to think up a better daily creative writing assignment for her for next semester), progress in Wordly Wise (the older kid is on track to finish Book 6 before we leave for our road trip, but the younger kid is taking a snail's pace through Book 4; I may be more strict with her progress next semester), and work in Scratch (the older kid has mostly abandoned this, but the younger kid is still making a new cartoon almost every day, so I'm going to keep encouraging it at least through this semester).

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: The older kid resumed Mandarin class last weekend. The younger kid may or may not attend with her; at first, she flat-out refused, but since the older kid reported that two of their friends are also in the class this semester, she's now said that she'll "try it" next weekend. Regardless, the younger kid has also said that she wants to continue our Spanish study after we finish Song School Spanish next week, so I'm currently researching options for that.

For now, however, both kids are continuing their work in Song School Spanish, and for this week, at least, the older kid is sharing her Mandarin review with the younger kid.

In Math Mammoth this week, the older kid is continuing in percents, and the younger kid is doing an entire week of fractional problem solving before she moves into ratios next week.

Friday's science is one of the subjects that we simply did not get to on Friday (we got caught in a rainstorm on the way to the library, so that when we got home it felt far more appropriate to put on pajamas and read comic books than it did to finish our school work), so we'll be reading the unit on sedimentary rocks and using a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid to test rock samples today. We also begin our study of the internal anatomy of the shark today with the digestive system.

We had a fabulous family trip to the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park yesterday, including conversing with the world best and most enthusiastic park ranger, so today, while the kids listen to our chapters in History of Us, they can use the brochures and postcards from the site, as well as the information that they learned, to make a page for George Rogers Clark in their American Revolution notebooks. This will ideally be practice for what I'd like them to do with the other sites that we'll be visiting on our road trip.

TUESDAY: We missed our homeschool group's playgroup for our field trip to the Indianapolis Museum of Art last week, so the younger kid, at least, is very eager to get back to playgroup this week. The older kid doesn't anticipate playgroup the way that the younger kid does, but she's got her own friends there, and she enjoys herself much more than she'll tell you she does.

History of Us is actually a little light on all of the actual battles of the American Revolution, and I'm not sure, either, how many of the battlefields we'll actually go see on our trip (many of them really are, unfortunately, simply grassy fields in the middle of nowhere), but I at least want the kids to be able to put the battles in geographic and historical context, so they'll be completing this battlefield map/timeline and then memorizing the information.

The younger kid's Inside Government Girl Scout badge is one of the studies that I'd like to get completed by Election Day, while the older kid's Animal Helpers badge is simply one that she started with great enthusiasm and then lost interest in, meaning that she just has a couple more activities for me to encourage her to do. Both badges are good cross-curricular unit studies that the children can work on mostly independently, so yay!

WEDNESDAY: Field trip to the Children's Museum!

THURSDAY: Of course the second that we committed to working a weekly voter registration table, the laptop that I intended to rely on to do this voter registration began to catastrophically fail. I'm hoping I can baby it along to do the work we need to do on this day, and then by next week, I will ideally have a brand-new laptop to zip through the work!

I'm banking on the fact that one day of dissolving rocks with hydrochloric acid will not be enough for my little scientists. Even if it is, I'm betting we can find some other cool stuff to dissolve--for one thing, the older kid did lose a molar recently...

The kids built the decanomial square last week, so on this day I'm hoping to explore some extension activities with them--equation creating, pattern making, cubing, etc.

FRIDAY: After reviewing our From Colonies to Country chapters, the kids will zoom in on the Articles of Confederation with this Brainpop lesson.

Our Friday Spanish books remain a big hit. We're a little tired of Sandra Boynton and Bill Martin, Jr., but I've got some Dr. Seuss that I think will work well as a substitute.

The Bicentennial Patch is another special patch program just for this year, since 2016 is Indiana's Bicentennial. We do all of the activities required for the patch (outdoor activities, healthy living, arts and culture, and history) pretty regularly, but we could probably stand another visit to a state park or IU sporting event.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We're back in the groove of a thousand and one Saturday extracurriculars, so I'll attempt to spare my family yet another Sunday day trip and let them lie on the couch and work on their tree house. Except... there is the local university's fall ballet that we *could* attend, and there's a play coming out this weekend that I'd like to go to with Matt, and it *is* about time to go to the apple orchard...

What are YOU up to this week?