An Ode to Geomags

Note: No, there are no weekly work plans this week! Near the end of last week, I began to suspect that in my own desire to stay busy to distract myself from my grief over Pappa, I've been over-scheduling the children, as well. I mean, I certainly have less time to feel sad when there's a full day of schoolwork every day AND an hours-long field trip AND a playdate AND a class or extracurricular to drive to AND some time spent shilling for cookie orders on the way there or back.

And the children, my good sports, did actually manage to get most of their schoolwork done, even so, but I began to see them gently reacting to my over-planning in probably the best way that a child can: with play. I'd go to tell them that it was time to begin schoolwork for the day, to find one or both deeply immersed in their toys, and I'd back off. Hours later, there they'd still be, happily playing. You know that I rarely disturb a focused child, so it was certainly the most efficient and least confrontational way for them to get more time for themselves.

We're going to keep that up this week, I think. I'm still going to require the kids to do their math every day, and work on their memory work (Mandarin started again last week!), and I have a selection of odd little projects--another Nature documentary that I've been wanting them to watch, thank-you letters for Christmas presents, extension recipes from Your Kids: Cooking, homemade Valentines for an exchange next week, etc.--of which I'll ask the children to choose one and I'll choose one for them each day, and, of course, there are still plenty of extracurriculars and loads of Girl Scout cookie selling, but ideally, this project-focused week will give us a chance to rest, reset, and refocus on next week.

One of the toys that was played with the most last week was the Geomags. I think that I've written about these before, and that's because they're perennial favorites, one of the few toys that have been loved right out of the box and universally for years.

They're pricey as hell, but totally worth it for us, since they're also played with so well. Every now and then, I'll add to the kids' collection for some holiday or other--the younger kid, for instance, received the pink Geomags set one Christmas, and I think another Christmas brought them the professional set. Here's basically what we have so far:



Several weeks ago, the kids became interested in using the Geomags to build anti-gravity and "perpetual motion" machines, inspired in great part by this anti-gravity spinner and this perpetual motion machine. The younger kid worked on building a triangular prism that would sit suspended inside this cube construction--

--while the older kid actually got her anti-gravity spinner to work!

The kids are both also really interested in building pyramids--when we first got these Geomags, and for years afterwards, they'd build a simple pyramid that they could transform into a "scooter dog," and they'd make it and then play pretend games with it. I haven't seen scooter dog in a long time, but I have seen several of these lying around:

Another interesting thing that I've noticed lately is the younger kid's desire to sort the metal marbles on top of the colored panels. I'm not sure what she's exploring with this, but she does it over and over, so something fascinating must be going on with it in her brain:

For the kids' next birthdays, I'm pretty sure that I'll be giving at least one of them a new Geomag set, as I've been noticing that the kids have sometimes been using ALL of the Geomags in their constructions. Here are my top contenders:

Right now, coloring books are also on the birthday wish-lists, as right this second, finished with two brief playdates with friends (while their moms and I sorted Girl Scout cookies) and our volunteer gig, procrastinating on her math, and about to be asked to help me make dinner, the younger kid is once again sitting at the table, listening to Harriet the Spy on audiobook and coloring.

She's just as busy as she needs to be.

Rock Climbers

We have gone three times in the past three weeks, and we are in love:

And yes, I get to climb, too! Although on the field trip with our homeschool group I stuck to belaying all the children, on the field trip with my Girl Scout troop Matt was able to come, as well, so he and I could take turns belaying each other:

I HIGHLY recommend rock climbing. In fact, I can't believe that we haven't gone before this! It's great exercise, in that it's both accessible (no matter how out of shape you are, you can get at least a little way up the wall) and super-challenging, it's an excellent family bonding activity, it wears the kids out so that they sleep really well that night...

...and it's fun!

Work Plans for the Week of January 25, 2016

Last week, I was singing the praises of Monday holidays, not quite remembering that we had another one this week!

It wasn't a stay-at-home Monday holiday, but rather a skiing-all-day-with-our-friends Monday holiday. And it. Was. Wonderful. Can I just say again how happy it makes me that as homeschoolers, we've finally found our people?

It's a VERY good feeling.

I hope, then, that this week's short week goes as well as last week's short week. Although they take much more time, our hands-on projects, in particular, are well worth the extra effort. Just this morning, sitting and coloring their Mayflower map project while listening to Making Thirteen Colonies, the little kid told me that this exact thing, listening to an audiobook while coloring, is her favorite thing to do.

Happy kid, doing her favorite activity as part of school.

Here's another favorite activity that she did for school last week: the little kid decided that her Project of the Week last week was to bake and decorate a cake. The cake is just a boxed mix, and the frosting is from a can, but look at that decoration!

I'd say she definitely has a passion for food.

Another hands-on project that turned out fabulously was this Quick Six elements game:

We cut out and colored the cards while listening to Test Tube podcasts--more coloring while listening! I changed the rules of the game by including one black and white Periodic Table; when you slap your element, you also get to color it in your color. At the end of the game, I also declared winners in random Periodic Table categories--the kid who'd colored the uppermost and lowermost elements, the kid with the most elements in a row, etc. Both kids are fascinated by the Periodic Table of Elements, so even though we're moving on to molecules this week, we'll keep playing with elements.

And finally, even though I wrote an entire post about how much we love this paper model of Jamestown, here's just one more photo I took when I found the little kid playing with the houses again the other day:

They are absurdly cute. When we're done with the colonies, this model is totally going on the play shelves with the dolls and other small toys.

The little kid's  Project of the Week this week is to come up with her Trashion/Refashion Show design, because yes, it's that time again. The big kid really just wants to play on the computer this week, so her Project of the Week is to "evaluate" the links on my Educational Links page; I'm hoping that she finds something in particular that piques her interest and inspires her to further exploration.

Books of the Week include several books on China (that's the country that my Girl Scout troop is representing next month at the Girl Scout Geography Fair), a couple of chapter books for the little kid (hoping to pique HER interest!), and a couple of living books about flight for the big kid, to encourage her particular area of interest.

This week's sensory material is the light table. For some reason, I can't find what I did with the translucent pattern blocks after the last time that we used them, so I've been bringing out random things to play with every day--Geomags, lenses, colored sand, etc. I've been surprised to see that the big kid hasn't taken a ton of interest in these sensory offerings, since exposing her, in particular, to them was my primary motivation. The little kid, however, does take a ton of interest, and the big kid does look up from her novel in hand to engage in them enough that continuing my offerings is justified. I need to sit down and make a plan, however, as scrounging around on a Sunday afternoon for sensory materials is not my favorite thing.

And here's the rest of our week!

TUESDAY: I ended up assigning too much work on this day, as I didn't anticipate that we'd spend four full hours at the rock climbing place just a day after our all-day ski trip... but we did! I did require the kids to do their math and cursive and start their history, but we're finishing that history project this morning, and we'll start working on the documentary today.

For math, the little kid is still working on her Math Mammoth unit on length and measurement--there's some good calculating going on, and I'm pleased to see that it's going smoothly, which means that she has, indeed, mastered those skills. Yay! The big kid's review in Math Mammoth last week led to me actually assign her some more work on dividing fractions on this day, so she'll review some more today, and then hopefully be able to move on to geometry, where I think she'll be VERY happy to find herself.

Instead of their cursive workbooks, this week the kids will be copying a William Bradford quote every day--the bottom one here. Not only do I hope that this will cause them to naturally remember the quote, but it's also a good test of how much cursive they're retaining. The big kid already pitched a fit when it became clear to me that she didn't remember how to make a cursive capital B, but after much explanation that the ability to make a cursive capital B is required before she can go on to more pleasant things in life, she complied... eventually. And now she's sitting on the floor happily eating deli chicken and brie and reading, so the task didn't crush her spirit, after all.

We're also STILL working on memorizing "No Man is an Island" this week. The problem is that the children don't really like the poem, sigh. The curriculum does warn that it has a weak rhyme scheme, but I hadn't expected them to be so put off by that, and I, personally, find the last two lines of the poem powerful. We're mostly there, though, so I'm making them muscle on through, but I'll look harder at the next poem that I think about assigning them to memorize.

I also switched our days for history and home ec after I wrote these plans, because we didn't have macaroni yesterday. Now we have macaroni, so we'll cook today, as well.

WEDNESDAY: The history project that the kids are completing while listening to Making Thirteen Colonies is the Mayflower map from Interactive 3D Maps: American History. There are several interactive maps in this book that I think that we'll be doing for our American Revolution unit--I'm particularly looking forward to the map of Paul Revere's ride!

Way back in the summer, my Girl Scout troop voted for the little kid's service project proposal, which was to make a documentary/commercial promoting our local Humane Society. I've pushed it to the back burner for far too long, so my two will start beta testing the project this week with what is hopefully our final evolution of the idea: short films that focus on pets adopted from the animal shelter and that include the encouragement to adopt your own pet there, as well. The big kid is not happy that the troop voted for her sister's plan, so she's going to practice being a sister to every Girl Scout and also work on her Cadette Digital Moviemaker badge. The little kid, as well as leading the service project, will be using it to complete some of the requirements of her Junior Animal Habitats badge. The goal is that after my two have successfully completed a documentary on our own Spots and Gracie, they'll screen the documentary for the rest of the troop, then lead the other kids in making their own documentaries about other pets adopted from the shelter.

Our second lesson in the Your Kids: Cooking curriculum is macaroni and cheese--yum! Even though I *just* said that we'd do it today, just after I said that, I received a spontaneous invitation for the kids to go bouldering with a friend, so they're doing that instead. Macaroni and cheese is easily enough made on the weekend, if it doesn't get made on a Wednesday.

And so are pet documentaries, now that I think about it...

THURSDAY: I am SO excited for science today! After studying atoms and elements, the kids will be learning how they combine into molecules and create chemical reactions. We'll demonstrate this by exploring the way that H2O2 longs to break down into H20 and 0. In other words, we're going to make elephant toothpaste!!!

It's going to be AWESOME!

This NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Project lesson today may decide if we continue with the curriculum or try something else for writing. So far, the lessons have all been about identifying and evaluating novels, and the kids have completed them not at all enthusiastically, but not actually reluctantly, either. If they're willing to think about and create a main character just as willingly, with or without enthusiasm, then I'll trust that the curriculum has hooked them, and we're off to write our novels! If they balk, then we'll try out something else for composition and come back to this unit another time.

Again, though, we've also got a just-scheduled playdate on this day, so I won't be super surprised if we're too busy to finish school. Schoolwork is important, but so are friends and rock climbing and skiing and spontaneous playdates.

FRIDAY: The election unit IS a big hit, especially with the big kid. She has always been into politics, and she's really seeming to enjoy these assignments. This week's reading is about the products of campaigns--advertisements, endorsements, interviews, debates--so the kids will research examples of these from our current candidates.

Last week, the kids did coloring pages of the female and male reproductive anatomy while I forced them to watch the relevant Crash Course videos. The videos turned out to be way over their heads with scientific explanations, but we watched them together, anyway--I never know what will stick, especially with the big kid, and anyway, I wanted the information, myself. Because the videos were so difficult, however, I want one more lesson to cement the female reproductive anatomy before we move into the process of menstruation, so on this day we'll be making some festive salt dough models of the female reproductive system.

And yes, I'm super hoping that they'll be adorable.

Also on the sculpture theme, the kids have a clay building class on this day. If they're allowed to build from their imaginations, I hope that they don't choose to build female reproductive systems!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Ballet, ice skating, and Mandarin on Saturday, and *maybe* we're also going to the Varsity Vocals Quarter Finals, because the big kid and I are major dorks who looooooove watching show choirs. There. I said it.

On Sunday, then, after such an epic week, I am fully committed to spending the day in my pajamas, and getting as much of the rest of the family as I can to go along with me on this.

As for me, this week I've got a HUGE etsy order to work on, some writing assignments to complete per usual, more Girl Scout stuff to plan and organize, the playroom to reorganize now that all the massive shelves are built--yay!--and a couple of craft books to make projects from so that I can review them.

But not on Sunday, though. Sunday I'll be in my pajamas, watching Youtube videos of all the great show choirs that I saw compete the previous night...

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

American Revolution Unit Study: Jamestown Paper Model and History of Us

After our unit on Hawaii/vacation to Hawaii, I am ALL ABOUT conducting a major unit study that culminates in a road trip on that theme.

Our next big unit study/road trip?

The American Revolution!

I'm super excited, because I LOVE traveling, as do the kids. I've also promised them many Junior Ranger badges, one of their favorite things about traveling, and the fact that we have Syd's free Every Kid in a Park national parks pass is cake AND icing AND candy decorations on top!

I'm still in the early planning stages of our road trip, but if you want to see what I've got so far--and especially if you want to make suggestions about where else we should go!--then you can check out my Roadtrippers route here. Even though I've got Assateague Island National Seashore on the route, as it's less than an hour from Washington, DC, we're really probably not actually going to go further south than DC (I SUPER want to see the wild ponies again, but the kids and I *have* already been there...), which means that we won't actually see Jamestown, Virginia, in person.

All the better, then, to make a model of it!

For background information and historical context, we're moving quickly through Joy Hakim's Making Thirteen Colonies, before we begin with studying the American Revolution itself. We'll use Hakim's From Colonies to Country as our spine for that, and then finish up with The New Nation. After that, we may continue with US history, or may move on to a different historical subject altogether--we'll see!

Anyway, for history this week we listened to the first four chapters of Making Thirteen Colonies. Sidebar: I LOVE that both Story of the World and History of Us have audiobook versions. Their narrative style works well as audio, and it allows the entire family to absorb the same material, while working on a related hands-on project, such as coloring pages or the model-making that we did here.

These chapters cover a wide swath of historical background on the Age of Exploration that we'll dive deep into another time, but they also discuss the founding of Jamestown, and that's what we focused on here. My goal was to familiarize the children with the basic structure and organization of a typical colonial town, so I had the kids each play through the Jamestown Online Adventure, and then we worked together as a family to create this paper model of Jamestown.

The kids did all the coloring (we LOVE Prismacolor colored pencils, although lately I've tried replacing a few of the stubs with the Dick Blick brand, to see if I like them enough to switch. I remain undecided) and cutting out--

--and I helped only by assembling the fiddly outer wall myself. Pro tip: Use hot glue instead of the white glue or tape that the tutorial calls for.

Here is a testament to how fun this project is:

WILL cut out every single house and assembled them. Happily! Frankly, this is the first time that I have ever seen my 11-year-old lefty cut anything with precision. Her scissors skills, up until this very moment, have been tragic, largely because although I have always provided her with left-handed scissors, she has always insisted on attempting to cut right-handed, and she is in no way naturally ambidextrous enough to have accomplished it before. As with her print handwriting, which she also learned there, and is also terrible, I suspect that her Montessori preschool/kindergarten did not focus enough attention on teaching her proper left-handed techniques. I have spent years--and am still spending those years!--working with her on her cursive handwriting, so knowing that time and maturity is improving her scissors skills is a huge relief.

As for the reason why she enjoyed cutting out and assembling these houses so much?

They. Are. ADORABLE!!!

Seriously, I know that this is meant to be a paper model and accuracy is key, of course, but this paper Jamestown is one of the cutest things that we have ever created. It's wee and the houses are sweet. You don't have to glue them down, so you can play with them and rearrange them. It's a terrific little small world that, if you've got young ones who love such play, would be worth making FOR them, simply so they could have it to enjoy:

Each of us has been found with our head on the table, peering in the little doors. It's enchanting.

The kids have already used it for pretend play--here, you'll see the game entitled Gracie is Godzilla--

--and although it's still on our school table, after we move on from Jamestown I'll put tiny Jamestown on the shelves in the playroom where I keep the children's small world toys. I think they're going to be playing with this one a lot!

P.S. We're not using many more resources to study Jamestown, but here are some more that I found in my research:

• chapter-level resources for Making Thirteen Colonies from Amy's Wandering
• colonial life and Jamestown activities from 124 Homeschool 4 Me
• Colonial National Historic Park for Jamestown and Yorktown

The Kid Cooks Nerdy Nummies

Hallelujah, because Syd loves to cook!

Syd's an adventurous cook who loves to try ambitious new recipes, and even though she suffers from perfectionism in her schoolwork and many other pursuits, she happily has a much higher tolerance for failure in the kitchen. She likes to invent her own recipes and see how they turn out, she likes to cook from a recipe book, and she very, very, VERY much likes to decorate her sweet creations with frosting and candy.

I was a little worried when Syd chose, for her Project of the Week last week, to make a couple of the recipes from Nerdy Nummies, a copy of which we have checked out from our public library. The recipes look very adorable, but every single one includes a lot of those decorative fiddly details that I just have no patience with.

Fortunately, Syd has all the patience for decorative fiddly details!

Here she is making the manna and health potions, substituting Kool-aid (I know, I know...) for the raspberry and blueberry syrup that the recipe calls for:

She poured the Kool-aid into little bottles, just as the recipe shows, and even made little labels for them, but the recipe also calls for half-and-half or cream or something to be poured on top, and that step just flat-out doesn't work when you're using Kool-aid instead of syrup and soda--the dairy sort of congealed into a disturbing, blobby mess at the bottom.

Oh, well. We just drank the Kool-aid!

The robot brownie pops, on the other hand, turned out SUPER cute. We had a lot of trouble with the candy melts, as they never did melt enough to dip the brownie pops in as the recipe shows (and Syd actually scorched a batch trying to get them melty enough), but once I just took a knife and frosted each one for her with the candy melts, gritting my teeth because she also didn't put the sticks in far enough and they wanted to fall apart from the weight of the frosting, then Syd was able to do what, for her, was the whole point of the activity:

Making robots!!!

Did they not turn out adorable?!? And they actually weren't hard to make, just fiddly, and I definitely need to do some more research on candy melts that are actually dippable.

Syd's Project of the Week this week is to bake another cake and decorate it, likely with even more candy. This is clearly her area of interest right now, so I'm also researching this week more ways to engage and support her. If you've got tips for hackschooling cake decorating or recommendations for quality kid-friendly baking and decorating supplies, please let me know!

Work Plans for the Week of January 19, 2016

I LOVE Monday holidays! You get that three-day weekend to look forward to the entire week before, then you get a three-day weekend, and THEN you get a short work week! It's like a bonus holiday!

And that's why I'm pretty stoked to be starting this week already at Tuesday. Last week's school week was a little hairy; the kids had been away from a regular school schedule for quite a while, and I'm definitely putting more work on their schedules now than I was in the last couple of weeks before that break. I know that it's an appropriate amount of work for them IF they focus, but wow, did they struggle with focus last week! We didn't actually get everything from last week's work plan finished until yesterday, so this week's goal is for sure to get all their daily work finished on the day that it is assigned. If nothing else, their Momma needs a homework-free weekend to recover!

Books of the Day this week include a few living picture books about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust (the older kid has a field trip coming up to hear from a Holocaust survivor, so I'm trying to prepare her for this), a couple of books on habitats and ecosystems (the younger kid is working on her Animal Habitats Girl Scout badge), a Cynthia Rylant novel for the younger kid and a Dolores Huerta biography for the older kid, and a couple of collections of comic strips that hopefully will expand the children's horizons beyond the VERY well-worn, Garfield, Foxtrot, and Calvin and Hobbes.

The younger kid's Project of the Week is to do more baking (or, rather, to do more decorating, as it's pretty clear that covering sweet treats with icing and candy is her real goal). The older kid's Project of the Week is to finish setting up her online Girl Scout cookie store (she can ship across the US! And take donations of Girl Scout cookies for US soldiers! Message me with your email address if you'd like her to add you to her invitation list!), and to explore more marketing opportunities for her cookies. She actually checked out a couple of business books from the library this weekend, and initiated a conversation with me about how she could "empower" the younger kid to sell more cookies--clearly she's also reading those books!

I may have mentioned last week that in these dark winter days, I'm feeling the need to add more sensory experiences to the children's environment, so last week I got out the kinetic sand and left it enticingly on the table:

I'm still vacuuming kinetic sand off the floor, however, so this week I'm simply setting out our Mason jar of homemade waxed yarn. Maybe I'll keep alternating a week of a messy sensory experience with a week of a non-messy one?

And here's the rest of our week!


TUESDAY: The older kid just has a little more fraction conversion work to do in her Math Mammoth before she can review and move on, while the younger kid will spend the week measuring length in her Math Mammoth. Usually, I like to spend the first lesson of the week with some hands-on math enrichment, but first I need the kids to get back into the habit of working well on their math curriculum without all the stalling and complaints and plain-old tantrums that I got last week, ugh.

I'm attempting to guide each kid through earning a Girl Scout badge each month--they're both WAY into earning Girl Scout badges, but still need some mentoring to help them finish badge work. This month, we're working on the Junior Animal Habitats badge and the Cadette Animal Helpers badge. For the Animal Helpers badge, we'll be watching the PBS Nature series that explores the evolution of the dog as a human companion, and for the Animal Habitats badge, the children will be making a to-do list of everything that they need to do to make an appropriate habitat for a pet dog.

Yes, Friends, this *may* be the Year of the Pet Dog!

The kids both loved the first lesson in the Your Kids: Cooking curriculum that we started last week. The Your Kids: Cooking website has a set of free extension recipes for this lesson, so the kids can choose some of them to create this week. We'll be eating blintzes and Monte Cristos for dinner all week, hopefully--yum!

Today, we have both our weekly homeschool group's playgroup, AND the older kid and I have our first fencing class! I didn't make room for it in our weekly work plans the way that I usually do, because taking Monday off means that the rest of our week's schedule needs to be somewhat strict, but I feel that the rest of our day is light enough that the children should still have plenty of free time.

Daily work this week includes a page of cursive, daily review of "No Man is an Island," with the goal of finishing its memorization this week, and daily chores. We've been busy enough that I deleted any "special" chores this week; I'd forgotten, when I wrote last week's work plans, that the kids are also spending a good hour every day selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. I just need to resign myself to the fact that our house will be made of chaos until cookie season is finished.

WEDNESDAY: I've decided to use Joy Hakim's History of Us as a spine for our American Revolution unit. It not only covers the American Revolution in excellent detail, but, by moving more quickly through the books that come immediately before and after the one on American Revolution, we'll also be able to put the war into historical context. So, for now, we're moving quickly through Making Thirteen Colonies, reading the first four chapters on this day, and then zooming in on the makeup of a colonial town. We won't be visiting Jamestown on our American Revolution road trip this summer, alas, as I don't think that we'll be going as far south as Virginia, but there's both an online game and a free downloadable paper model that should give the kids a good idea of what it, and a typical town of the era, looked like.

The younger kid's ballet starts up again on this evening--she's thrilled to get back on the dance floor! Mental note to myself: is her uniform clean? Surely not...

THURSDAY: Although we really are just studying this particular chapter of our science textbook in order to get the background information about atoms and molecules that the kids will need to understand the molecular structure of rocks and minerals, I'm going to devote one more week to the atoms and elements lesson. Last week, we studied atoms, and this week, we'll study the Periodic Table of Elements. I want the children to be able to read and decipher the table, so we'll be playing this free downloadable card game, with a couple of modifications, to help them become more familiar with it.

Instead of a STEM activity at home, on this afternoon I'll be giving the kids the run of our local hands-on museum. They can explore and learn, my friend and I can chit-chat--win and WIN!

I've been thinking for a while now that Will would LOVE to join our local chapter of Pony Club, but a kid can only have so many extracurriculars, you know? Nevertheless, this semester may finally be the semester, even if she has to drop Mandarin class for it, sigh. Either way, I'll at least send her to the planning meeting to suss it out.

FRIDAY: The older kid, at least, really loves our study of the 2016 presidential election. She is interested in all things government and politics, and has already expressed the desire to be a lawyer (Matt and I think that her real dream job is dictator to a small island nation, but you almost have to be born into that job). On this day, the kids will continue their reading to learn about what makes a politician liberal and conservative, and then they'll have to research each of the presidential candidates to discover which are which. They'll also have to point to primary source evidence--not just a third person's opinion!--to prove each evaluation.

I think that I have just about completed my lesson plans for our female reproductive system study! On this day, we'll be memorizing the anatomy of the female and female reproductive systems, both with diagrams that are also coloring pages, and by watching the Crash Course episodes on the female reproductive system and the male reproductive system. I previewed both videos, of course, and while there are a couple of visuals that are *maybe* a little bluer than I'd prefer, the information in these videos is by far the most thorough.

FYI: Every time that I say that we're reading something or watching something for our lesson, you can assume that there's also a lecture/discussion on that material. A discussion requires that the children engage with the material in a way that reading or watching doesn't, and a lecture, even if it's just me explaining the same concept in different words, will always inspire the kids to ask questions and become curious about things that they simply don't when only watching or reading.

Finally, on this day we'll be completing the second lesson in the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Program. I still don't totally know if I'll actually have the children write "novels," but this lesson requires a child to form opinions, backed up with textual evidence, about books that they've read, and that's a great skill to master!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Ballet, ice skating, chess club, shilling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. Playing in the snow, if the forecast is correct. Watching The Martian on DVD and eating pizza, if I have my way!

As for me, I'll spend this week organizing a LOT of Girl Scout stuff--it's a busy season for Girl Scouts!--completing a few writing assignments, working on a quilt, and seriously contemplating moving my work bench and circular saw indoors so that I can make some shelves. Is that crazy? All the sawdust!

Still.... shelves!!!!!!!

Junior Ranger Field Trip: Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site

One of the interesting things about the drive to my hometown is that there are two completely different routes that you can take to get there (south, then west, or west, then south), and yet both routes take approximately the same time.

When we visited the Pink Palace Museum and the Little Rock Central High National Historic Site, we drove south, then west. When we visited the Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, we drove west, then south.

Here, then, at the junction of west and south, is where Grant lived for a time with his in-laws. 

But one of the interesting things about the in-laws?

They owned slaves.

That was actually the most interesting thing about the national historic site, as well, since the museum seems to have taken great care to document what they can about the lives of the enslaved African American workforce who lived and labored here. Unfortunately, a lot of it is speculation, as there of course wouldn't be much textual evidence of the personal lives of the enslaved people--

--but there were a few instances where the family made revelations that seem shocking to us, but must have been commonplace to them. The following letter, for instance, is both powerful and disturbing, as in it, a member of the family is recording the sale of teenagers and children; the one-year-old is, at least, being sold with her seventeen-year-old mother, but the six-year-old little girl who is also being sold is certainly not her daughter, nor the daughter of the eighteen-year-old being sold. As well, the seventeen-year-old is described as a "mulatress," which I explained to Will meant that her mother had been sexually abused by a white slave owner, probably one of the men in the family.


The kids weren't as interested in the museum portion of the historic site--

Syd is buying things for this room using 1850s currency values.

--although Will, of course, found the barn--

--and the horse stuff!

Matt was all, "Why are you taking my picture, Woman?"

He clearly needs a Ulysses S Grant coat of his own.

Just between you and me, it's because he's so pretty.

 Oh, and check this out--Ulysses S Grant's hair!

The Junior Ranger activities were pretty challenging here, which is awesome--I'm a little disappointed every time I see a word search or a maze in a Junior Ranger book, because really? You've got an entire national park full of information to encourage a child to explore, and instead you're going to have her sit here and do a maze?

Anyway, the activities here were great ones that required a lot of research and the use of environmental clues, although some of the information was presented during our tour, and therefore although we knew we'd heard it, the kids had a lot of trouble remembering the specific details. Such was the case with the last name of the enslaved man that Ulysses S Grant had freed. I knew that our tour guide had said it, but we couldn't remember it, and in the site's film, which we watched at the end of our visit, they only said his first name.

Will eventually had to leave that one answer blank when she presented her book to the Park Ranger. I was surprised that the Park Ranger gently chastised her for not having this answer, and told her that the man's last name could be found in the film. I chimed in with, "Hmmm... have you seen the film recently?" 

This same Park Ranger, as we were chatting a few minutes later, also informed me that homeschooled children are "less curious" than children in schools, because when she leads field trips, she claims that the children in homeschool groups ask fewer questions than the children in school groups.

I, of course, told her that homeschooled children are accustomed to using all kinds of research to get their questions answered, and are just as likely to browse the museum and read the informational signs as they are to simply blurt a question out to the nearest authority figure. I may have imparted this information a tad tartly, because the Park Ranger next shared with us the location of a nearby ice cream shop that's somewhat of a local secret, and by the time we'd driven there and bought ourselves some ice cream (they turn each cup upside-down when they pass it to you, to show off how thick their ice cream is!), I had mostly forgiven her.

Still... my children, less curious than other children. The very idea!