American Revolution Road Trip: Valley Forge and Washington Crossing the Delaware

Today was a day with a lot of driving, so as usual we were up and at 'em and at Valley Forge nice and early (with some fuel on the way, because the younger kid was OBSESSED with Dunkin' Donuts):

We checked out the museum for the site--

Kids and adults both immediately recognized this statue as a copy of one in the Mount Vernon museum (and indeed, upon further study, the placard stated that it WAS donated by them!). This is especially cool because the statues of George Washington in the Mount Vernon museum are apparently the most realistic ones available. They used forensic facial reconstruction to recreate his face at several ages, and his clothing to recreate his build.

I like paleography, so I enjoyed deciphering the inscription on this powder horn, although I couldn't work out a couple of the characters on my own.

 The highlight of Valley Forge, however, is going outside and tromping around all the places!

We didn't tromp around EVERY company's barracks, but we explored this one thoroughly.

A lot of what we know about Valley Forge was informed by Forge, a great read in YA historical fiction (the third book in the series, Ashes, recently came out, so that's next on our car audiobook list after we finish our current series), so we were especially excited to see these barracks, inside and out, as a lot of time in the novel is devoted to their construction:

The earthworks were also interesting to explore. I wouldn't let my kids climb on them (although other people were, and for all I know, it was allowed), so instead one of them hid behind them and shot at me: 

The other major highlight of Valley Forge, for us, was Washington's Headquarters--

--although not for the reasons that you might think, namely George Washington, even though Matt is a big fanboy of his.

Not me, though. I am no Washington fangirl, although his gardens were on point, but you know who I AM a huge fangirl of?

His assistant, Alexander Hamilton!

Alexander Hamilton walked these stairs!

Alexander Hamilton possibly slept in this bedroom!

I'm not the only one, either--there were two docents in the house while we were there, and I heard someone from both of the two families who came in after us ask about Alexander Hamilton!

I didn't hear either of them actually ask about George Washington...

We're not really souvenir buyers, but I did make a couple of amazing discoveries in this gift shop. One is Jeff Shaara's series of historical fiction about the American Revolution, which I've requested from our local library and which I'm deeply hoping is as good as Killer Angels and Panther in the Sky, my two favorite historical fiction books, and the other is that indie game makers have made a TON of board, card, and/or dice games about the American Revolution! I wanted this one the most, but all of them were too spendy for me to purchase without having at least tried them out first--I wish I had access to a board game lending library, or a rental service!

Next on our list we hit the road and came here. Can you tell its historical significance?

It may look like a regular old riverbank, but this is the place where Washington and his army crossed the Delaware!

We looked at it, sure, but you know what? It was also just a really nice day to goof off at a riverbank:

This kid wasn't satisfied until, as usual, she'd soaked her trousers to the thigh and had to change in the car.

This kid wasn't satisfied until, as usual, she'd created an entire bakery's worth of mudpies.

 It was kind of a crappy drive from there to the Boston area afterwards (why do you have so much traffic, New England!?!), but we had our Dark is Rising audiobook series to entertain us, and our sticker books and doodle books and coloring books and puzzle books, and our e-readers and print books...

...and, of course, a Dunkin' Donuts every mile, just in case we needed more sugar and caffeine.

Reader, we did.

Halloween 2016: A Field Trip for Two Hogwarts Students (and Their Professors)

There are some Halloween traditions that we missed out on this year, due to various reasons along the lines of not having an oven, of having too many weekend activities, of me grieving for Mac on his late-October birthday (and dreading that date for many days beforehand), of having kids who are simply older and older, every single year.

We bought the kids' Jack-o-lantern pumpkins at Wal-mart this year instead of at our local, family-owned pumpkin patch, because Wal-mart is open 24 hours a day and weekends aren't and I seriously had that much trouble getting my shit together. I still feel guilty, but fortunately Wal-mart pumpkins carve just as well as the Freeman Farm ones, even if they didn't come with all the good memories of their choosing:

We missed out on a dear friend's yearly Halloween party, if we were going to have a special family adventure on an actual weekend, it had to be that exact day or it would be no day. We took the kids to their first-ever corn maze:

I think they liked it!

They immediately ran off into the distance and left me and Matt to be corn maze failures. Sure, we looked cute and confident--

--but we walked around that maze for something like a mile, making what were apparently increasingly wrong turns:

We finally, finally, FINALLY saw plain air in sight, but when we left the maze, we saw not just our kids waiting patiently on some benches for us to finish the freaking maze already, but that, dang it, we'd accidentally found our way back out the entrance, not the exit. We had to call the kids to come and help us, lest we spend another hour and do the same damn thing!

We also discovered that along with a dog for Will, we deeply need a couple of miniature horses:

And maybe a couple of cows:

But probably not an outhouse:

And yes, this game DOES consist of tossing corncobs into a outhouse. Fun AND relevant!

We didn't make the Haunted Hoops run by our local university's basketball team, but a new tradition that I raced us out the door for one weekday afternoon was trick-or-treating on the university's sorority/fraternity row. Despite the horrifying amount of candy that the children received (fistfuls of candy at a time, my Friends. Fistfuls of candy!), I'm actually really glad that we did this one, because it involved putting on costumes early enough in the afternoon for photographs!

On Halloween night, Will went trick-or-treating early with a friend while Syd had ballet class, and by the time we all met up again it was far too dark for photos, so if it wasn't for this event, horrifying amount of candy or not, I wouldn't have had any photos of us in our costumes, and thanks to a promise that the entire family made me last Halloween night, this was my dream year of having the entire family go as witches and wizards from Hogwarts!

Here, then, is a Gryffindor student. She's technically a year too young to be a first-year, but her wild magic was so powerful and disruptive that she required early enrollment in order to learn to control it. They feed her lots of candy and get her to run laps around the lake like a Labrador Retriever, so that's why she gets to make a special field trip to America for Halloween--here's an entire semester's worth of candy in one night!


Here's her chaperone for this field trip, the Head of Hufflepuff house and the Quidditch coach/Magical Art and Design professor:

They're accompanied by this second-year student from Slytherin house, ostensibly here to gather research for a Muggle Studies project, but we all suspect that she somehow blackmailed the Headmistress into letting her come along, because candy:

In charge of the entire affair is the Head of Ravenclaw house, fencing coach, and Professor of Magical Literature. Someone has to keep this crew in line!

And it's certainly not going to be the Head of Hufflepuff House! Everyone knows that Hufflepuff is the party house!

I specifically told them not to perform magic in front of the Muggles, and yet look at that--caught right in the act of a Wingardium Leviosa!

Clearly the only thing to do is march them around and let college students give them lots of candy:

  

And then march them back home, blessedly too exhausted to throw a fit:

I'm told that holidays get easier, that one day I'll be able to tell the story of the time that I helped Mac dress as the guy who shot Ronald Reagan so that Jodi Foster would love him, and how that involved him getting fired from our library job, but it was okay because they just gave him a different library job, and in this job he had to manage the copy machines, which means that I never had to pay for another photocopy again thanks to all the left-behind copy cards that he scored, and I'll be able to tell that story with genuine happiness at the memory, not grief at the loss. I'll be able to tell the kids about my favorite Halloween costumes as a child without feeling deeply sad about Pappa, who isn't here this year, and all the family-related anxiety that's resulted from that.

What I'm also told, and what I'm really trying to do, although how successful I am at that they'd have to tell you, is to try to focus on the friends and family who are left to me, to be with Matt, to enjoy my girls, to make the kinds of memories that my kids can look back on one day as some of their happiest of the time.

The secret trick is that when I can do that, it actually lessens my own grief for a time. And if I carry on, and get through this year, then I won't have to go through one more first birthday without Mac, or first Christmas without Pappa. The first time that I have to do it will be the hardest, I hope, and the second time onward will be easier.

Work Plans for the Week of October 31, 2016: Handwritten and Handmade!

In the three weeks since we've returned from our American Revolution road trip, we've been between semesters in some ways. We finished our American Revolution unit study and Song School Spanish--

Back to the library for these books!

--as well as our sharks and rocks/minerals studies, and hadn't started (until this week!) our Greek/Roman mythology studies, nor our formal grammar book, nor typing instruction, or our animal behavior MOOC, or Will's SAT exam prep. 

What we did do in those three weeks was continue with Math Mammoth, cursive and journaling, letter writing, Books of the Day, with lots of fun projects, games--

--Girl Scout badge work, and, yes, helping me in the house and yard. Those black walnuts and persimmons aren't going to harvest themselves!

We're back on our official schedule this week, with work plans written by the week and including several units of study that I've written more detailed lesson plans for. Books of the Day this week include some leftovers from our completed rocks and minerals unit, a few civics selections, and a couple of readings inspired by our road trip. Memory work includes continuing "Paul Revere's Ride," identifying and characterizing quadrilaterals, and lots of review of previously studied facts.

And here's the rest of our week, handwritten (on pages from this really cool bullet journal) as I continue to try to figure out how I want to redesign our work plan template:

MONDAY: I may be shooting myself in the foot here a little, beginning our new semester on Halloween AND on a day when we had to bustle out of the house early for dentist appointments, but after the dentist (no cavities for either!), I treated the kids to breakfast and here we sit afterwards, the older kid working on grammar and the younger kid on math.

In Math Mammoth this week, the younger kid is working on calculating with decimals and the older kid is working with quadrilaterals. She's forgotten the names and characteristics of many quadrilaterals, so we've added that to our daily Memory Work and we'll be playing more with quadrilaterals later this week, to reinforce the facts.

The older kid finished her Wordly Wise last semester, and I haven't bought her the Grade 7 book yet, so while the younger kid works on Wordly Wise every day this week, the older kid gets to do a Word Ladder (which means that the younger kid gets to do a Word Ladder, as well, since as soon as the older kid finished hers this morning, the younger kid snatched the book and insisted on completing two puzzles before she'd work on her math). The Word Ladders are too easy for the older kid, alas, and the set doesn't go any higher, so when I pick up her new Wordly Wise, I think I'll add this book of mind benders for her new quick and easy logic work (and probably the next younger book for the younger kid, too).

Analytical Grammar for the older kid and Junior Analytical Grammar for the younger kid are new curricula for us this semester. For my own pedagogical reasons, I've deliberately kept formal grammar study to a minimum thus far. Both kids, though, have an intrinsic knowledge of correct grammar and punctuation and are confident creative writers--they're ready for a grammar curriculum that will give them labels and guidelines. I sprang for the student and teacher books for both sets, although I wish now that I'd just purchased the student books, as the teacher books are really just answer keys, and I don't think I'll need them. Oh, well! Regardless, both books look well-suited to the kid in question, and will make for one more daily work this semester.

We got off track with "A Year of Living Poetically" last semester, but it is something that I'd like to continue; I think that we can get by with doing one poem a month, then adding that poem to our Memory Work to keep it fresh. In at least one of the remaining three-ish weeks every month, I'd like to have the kids work more consciously through their MENSA reading lists, and the other weeks I can toy with poetry composition, book reports, or simply work in different subjects.

The kids have both mastered cursive, but still struggle with writing long passages--they know they want to type their work, but their prior keyboarding lessons haven't stuck. Well, we're going to fix that this semester! I've played with other typing instruction resources in the past several years, but I'm hoping that typing.com is going to be the end-all, be-all solution for us. Here's hoping!

We all loved our sharks MOOC so much that we're doing another one this semester, this time on animal behavior. Although we ended up actually doing our sharks MOOC twice--once along with the class, and then another time on our own with enrichment work that I assigned--I'm planning to do this archived animal behavior class just once, with enrichment activities a combination of my own assignments and class assignments. We've actually did Wednesday's assignment of visiting the animal shelter to interact with companion animals today--we witnessed two dog/cat tests, one pass and one fail, and filled out an application to hopefully adopt Jacob, a one-year-old black lab/Newfoundland. That means that on Wednesday we'll do the nature hike/wild animal observation that was technically today's assignment, and that should work out fine.

TUESDAY: Inspired by her obsessive love of the Percy Jackson series, the younger kid requested a Greek mythology study for this semester. I signed the kids up for the National Mythology Exam, and am using their bibliography as our spine for this study. The basic lesson plans consist of studying one god/goddess per lesson, using the assigned reading (the older kid has more assigned reading than the younger kid), and completing one enrichment activity. This week's activities will be reading the introduction and labeling a map of Ancient Greece, then studying Gaia and her family tree prior to Zeus and beginning a unit-long family tree of the gods and goddesses. The kids will also learn how to write each god/goddess name in Greek, and I'm seriously considering studying Song School Greek concurrently, maybe beginning next week.

Neither kid is enthusiastic about learning an instrument, but I feel like I have to make them give it a try just one more time before I give up on it forever. The younger kid did enjoy Hoffman Academy for a while, and I do have all of their written materials, so we're going to review that for a bit and see if it sticks this time. This week, it's lesson 1!

WEDNESDAY: The older kid needs some more reinforcement in identifying quadrilaterals, so it's time to once again bring out the pattern blocks! We'll be challenging ourselves to build similar figures with the various pieces. Good times will ensue.

THURSDAY: I normally have the kids work together on larger projects, but I think that I'll have them each do their own family tree for their Greek mythology study. The younger kid might want to make hers more decorative, and I can make the older kid put more information on hers.

FRIDAY: We've got a Girl Scout meeting to earn the first aid badge on this morning, and then I'll be staying afterwards to complete my CPR/first aid certification.

The lesson in this day's Animal Behavior MOOC concerns the importance of observation in studying animal behavior, so the kids will practice that with an animal of their own. I'm sure many new discoveries will be made about chickens and cats on this day!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Ballet class, Mandarin class, Nutcracker rehearsal! We may actually finish the tree house this year, if we can just get a couple more good weekends like this one is supposed to be. Or maybe we'll go to the apple orchard instead!

What are your plans for the week?

American Revolution Road Trip: Bay Front Park, Maryland

I was feeling like pretty hot stuff as Matt pulled into the Bay Front Park parking lot; I'd researched this magical place to find fossil shark teeth, found a time when we could go and it would be free (instead of over 50 bucks!), programmed the GPS to guide us there, and there we were, in a small parking lot at the side of a random road outside of a small town in Maryland, just a short hike away from what was going to be a very amazing experience.

(Psst--here's why we were so excited to go here!)

I came down a little bit when we reached the beach and I realized that it was total coincidence that I'd happened to bring us here when the tide was at its lowest, as I hadn't researched THAT at all--oops!

Oh, well! It was, indeed, low tide, so shark tooth hunting we did go!

While Matt and the younger kid walked around a bit and explored and played, the older kid and I became immediately and thoroughly obsessed with finding fossil shark teeth. I handed my camera off to Matt so that I wouldn't drop it in the water, and so most of the photos that you'll see here are his, as he entertains himself waiting for me and the older kid to eventually come out of our shark tooth trances.

He apparently entertained himself in part by finding weird stuff that other people did on the beach.

The younger kid entertained herself by getting cold and wet.

 

And the older kid and I did this!

Our preferred method was to scoop up some of the rocks and sand underneath the flowing water and gently sift it in our hand or shovel, much like we'd learned to do when panning for gold.

But did we find fossil shark teeth, you may be wondering?

We did! We didn't find dozens upon dozens, but in the two hours that we spent there, the older kid and I each found several.

Every time I would decide that we really should go--we still had to drive over to Valley Forge that night!--I'd find another fossil shark tooth, and be re-immersed in hunting, all over again.

Finally, just as the very last rays of sun were hitting the beach, I tore the older kid and myself away from the sharks so that we could take just one walk and experience, you know, the actual beach!

And then it seriously was this dark, so we really did leave!

I have plans to identify, organize, and display the beautiful fossil shark teeth that we collected, but I'll tell you about that another time. For now, put your winter clothes on, because we're headed to Valley Forge!