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!

Out West 2014: Family Dino Dig Day 1

As you may know (since I've been going on and on and ON about it for at least a year now, ever since I started planning and budgeting for it), all four of us made our wild, unwieldy road trip out to the west to participate in a family dinosaur dig through the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

The dig takes place a little northeast of Faith, South Dakota, on a private ranch that contains some incredible caches of edmontosaurus bones. Although we're amateurs, this is a real, working dig, with real discoveries to be made, all the finds going to the museum's collection for processing and study. Paleontologists from the museum worked alongside us and assisted us in all aspects of the excavation, teaching us and letting us do ourselves the digging, mapping, field jacketing, trench digging, burlap cutting, and most everything else required to run a dig.

And Faith itself, regardless of all this, is just an exciting place to be digging for dinosaurs:

Have you heard about the discovery of Sue, followed by the even bigger scandal surrounding her? Sue is a big interest of mine, and I'm going to talk more about her later in our trip, but until then, you MUST read this book: Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of Largest, Most Fought Over T. Rex Ever Found. It's fascinating, and then I'll get to discuss it with you! I SUPER want to discuss it with you.

On the first day of our two-day dig, we got to begin with surface collecting. This is a fun way to start, because for the rest of our time here, we'd primarily be digging for the museum, but in surface collecting, we primarily get to find fossils for ourselves! The surface collection site is an exposed hillside with lots of erosion--

--and so there are lots of tiny fossil fragments and hopefully some edmontosaurus teeth that have been exposed; none of these are scientifically significant, so we can have them... IF we can find them:

Here are some of my finds--they look a LOT like surface rocks, don't they?

During this time that's really supposed to be just for fun (and a lesson on how to identify fossils in the rock, useful for our imminent excavating), Will nevertheless managed to make a significant discovery, a complete pachycephalosaurus tooth, including some root structure:

Isn't it beautiful? It's quite different from an edmontosaurus tooth, and is the first one of its kind ever found at this dig site! Just sit back and think about that for a minute--my kid was the first human ever to see that tooth that once upon a time was inside of a pachycephalosaurus' MOUTH.

Mind. Blown.

I did that all day, both days, by the way--spent my dino dig time constantly getting my mind blown. Sometimes I'd dig for an hour and find some small little thing that's a dime a dozen out there--tendon, teensy rib fragment, etc.--and one of the paleontologists would start to commiserate, but I'd be all, "I. Found. A RIB FRAGMENT!!!", and I'd cradle it in my hand, and go show my loved ones, and that paleontologist would dutifully back-pedal and enthusiastically congratulate me and admire my rib fragment for me.

Because this find of Will's WAS scientifically significant, it needed to go into the museum's collection, but first the paleontologist spent tons of time with Will talking about the tooth with her and telling her all about it--

--and then having her assist him in recording the information about it and tagging its location:

Will didn't think that having to give up her tooth sucked at all, on account of how clearly important it was, and how special everyone made her feel for discovering it. She's the one who found the pachy tooth!

Here's what our dig site looks like:

There are tents set up over the major dig areas. That's me in the yellow by the far tent, probably making one of the paleontologists admire yet another teensy rib fragment that I'd found.

The dig site is on private property, part of a local ranch, so much of the drive takes place down these... wheel tracks... across the prairie. There are birds, and horses, and a prairie dog town, and one morning we saw antelope.

Here's the site looking in the other direction:

Our tools are in the foreground, with the tool shed in the back. Off camera to the left is the outhouse. Up that hill in the background is where we did our surface collecting.

Arriving at the site, we'd unpack all the tools and supplies from the tool shed and van, coat our skin with sunscreen and bug repellant, and grab a clam shucker, an x-acto knife, a squeeze bottle of Paleobond, a paintbrush, a broom and dustpan, and a bucket. We'd also collect an assortment of carpet squares and knee pads to pad our area, as we all tended to sit and kneel and lie on and crawl around the hard ground at really weird angles while we were focused on our digging. My knees were red and sore by the end of the second day, because I wasn't real great at remembering to pad my area, and days after the dig was over I still had one sore spot under my collar bone, of all places, which I vaguely remembered probably using as a pivot point when I spent an afternoon digging an edmontosaurus tibia out of a hole in the hill.

See Syd's well-padded dig area?

To start, you just chip away at the hill with your clam shucker:

 If you're in a good spot, the sedimentary layers will just crumble away in bits as you work; if you're in a bad spot, you'll be slogging through muck, but you only stick with a spot like that if you're uncovering a bone that's already been found. 

Syd was supposed to be helping our group leader excavate that fossil, on account of she LOVED our group leader and vastly preferred working with her over working with me (humph!), but instead she started expanding the trench around it--and she made a discovery there!

You must often brush the dirt away from your dig area and sweep all the excess into a dustpan and dump it in your bucket:

This keeps your dig area clear and will help you see when you uncover something.

If your clam shucker hits something, or if the crumbled hillside reveals something that doesn't look like the rock around it--

Another rib fragment!!! That thing used to be inside an edmontosaurus' BODY!!!

That's a tooth!

--then you put the clam shucker away, point in the ground, and take up the x-acto knife to carefully scrape the dirt and rock away until you can see what you've discovered:

See Will with her x-acto there? One of my many favorite things about this group is the way that all the adults were happy to engage with any of the kids; Will is working with another kid's mom here, while that mom's kid helps one of the paleontologists dig a trench to prevent flooding at the site.

And when you think that what you've discovered isn't just a random rock (it sometimes turns out to be a rock anyway) but a fossil, you call over one of the paleontologists, who'll examine it, consult with you about it, and guide you on how to proceed with your dig:

After consultation, Syd proceeds apace excavating her own discovery.

Matt basically had to remove ALL the hillside above this fossil to uncover it.

Sometimes, even though you're SUPER careful and you love fossils SO much, as you excavate them you kinda... break them a little. That's why we get to excavate edmontosaurus, not T-Rex, you know? Even so, every time this happened I pretty much had a little panic attack and insisted that I had just broken Science. Because this, this fragmented edmontosaurus tooth that I just chipped, how will we now know if maybe that chipped piece had something really important in it, like a microfossilized piece of dinosaur tartar?!?

This is why we all carry Paleobond. Paleobond is our friend. Paleobond turns this--

That's me, breaking Science.

--and this--

Yep. Much Science. All broken.

--back into this:

Just so you know, I actually did a really bad job with the Paleobond on that fossil there. The seams clearly don't line up, which is why you're supposed to Paleobond it when it's still in the ground. I got to keep that tendon, however, it not being scientifically significant, so the Paleobond is really just a way for me to keep the pieces together, I claim.

Paleobond is basically superglue--SCIENTIFIC superglue--so it was not a big deal when this inevitably happened:

See the kid. See the fossil:

See the really SHINY fossil. Hey, that's a lot of Paleobond there, Kid! Ummm... Kid, why won't you let go of the fossil?

Debonder to the rescue!!!

So after you've broken your fossil discovery and glued it back together, and after you've glued yourself to it and gotten debonded, and after you've finished excavating it, all but the bottom, one of the paleontologists helps you log it (you get your name on that fossil's record forever if you've discovered it or worked on it)--

--and tag it--

--and map it:

Check out that kid learning how to translate information to a coordinate plane.

Smaller fossils can get wrapped and packed, but the bigger pieces get field jackets, which you also help to do:

The day just flies by, and the ride back to the hotel is miraculously full of quiet, dozy kids instead of energetic, hyper-excited ones.

When we got back, we walked down the block and around the corner to Faith's small grocery store, to see if there was something there that might make better use of our in-room microwave (Can't dig dinosaurs all day and eat peanut butter sandwiches for dinner that night!). We did find microwave meals, and yogurts, and some more fruit, but Matt--

Okay, let me tell you this story first: In college, Matt pretty much ate junk food all the time. There was a Pizza Hut in our Student Union, and I swear that Matt ate a pepperoni personal pan pizza for lunch and dinner every single school day for two solid semesters. We went grocery shopping together once for food to take to my apartment, and he bought chicken nuggets IN NOVELTY SHAPES. Seriously, rocket shaped chicken nuggets--why was I not concerned that I was dating a five-year-old?

Anyway, along with all the other crap, Matt always bought Better Cheddars--not Cheez-Its, not Goldfish crackers, but Better Cheddars. Matt's also a fussy eater, and he ONLY liked Better Cheddars. Novelty chicken nuggets with Better Cheddars for dinner, Kern's nectar to wash it down, and Twizzlers for dessert--that was Matt's idea of a fine meal indeed.

After we moved here from Texas, Matt was gutted to discover that he could no longer buy Better Cheddars at the grocery store. Where had they gone?!? We even kept an eye out for them when we traveled--buying some sandwich bread and yogurt in Florida? Let's see if there are Better Cheddars!--but had not ever seen them again since Texas.

So we're in the Dakota Mart, Matt's just somehow convinced me that pizza rolls are acceptable as dinner food (Hmm, I can't for the life of me think of how I managed to gain three pounds on this road trip even after the loads of vigorous exercise that I got... wait until I tell you about the winery visit, and how I may have downed half a bottle of wine every night for a week), and we're walking through the chips aisle on our way to the register, when I spot it. Like a rib fragment sticking out of the hillside, discernible from the rock around it only by its shape and slight color difference, there, surrounded by shelves of boxes of orange cheese crackers of all kinds, are four boxes of Better Cheddars.

Reader, we bought them all.