Homeschool Math: How to Model Algebraic Equations with the Decanomial Square

Math can start getting really abstract when a kid begins algebra, so it's nice to take the time for plenty of hands-on modeling to reinforce the fact that those equations? They're all REAL numbers!

Well, until they aren't. That will be a whole new level of fun!

As always, the kids start by building the decanomial square. The first few times they did this, it took them a while to figure out where everything goes, but now they're old hands at it and can do it seamlessly. They don't know this, but they've internalized the visual patterning of the multiplication table, mwa-ha-ha!



You probably can't read the little squares, but we've labeled the rows and columns of the decanomial square. The row and column for 1 is a, 2 is b, 3 is c, etc.

I then gave the kids graph paper, had them frame out a 10x10 grid, and label every piece of the decanomial square with its designation, by row then column. The little 1x1 piece is a squared. The 1x2 piece is ab. the 10x1 piece is ja. The 10x4 piece is jd. The 10x10 piece is j squared.



After Will looked at her finished chart, she said, "It's like chess notation!"

And that's why they call it algebraic notation! Just another reason why chess is such a great game.

Now that the kids have a reference for all of their labels, they can begin to make equations using the notation:

Notice that Will's top equation, (a+b)b=cb is incorrect. She reworked it when I pointed it out. Below that, Syd is modeling an equation that she wants to write. It will end up reading (cb)b=fb. Is she correct?

 This turned out to be an excellent hands-on exercise. Syd, a fifth grader, happily wrote and solved algebraic equations. Will, a seventh grader, happily multiplied polynomials. They're both internalizing big, intimidating concepts before they can even start to be intimidated by them.

Hopefully, that intimidation will never make itself known!

Work Plans for the Week of May 1, 2017: Ballet, a Birthday, and Britain

I rearranged our priorities last week. The kids are fondest of doing their schoolwork off and on all day--there's no push to complete their work by a specific time each day, except that I don't allow them their hour of screen time until their schoolwork is finished. They're content with this system and it works well for them, but it doesn't really always work well for ME. There's often a kid asking me for a lesson or to help with a project long after I'm longing to turn my brain off for the day--sometimes as late as 9 pm, or later, when I'm already hanging out on my bed with a glass of wine and a Captain America graphic novel.

Last week, then, to start to get a handle on the problem, I asked the kids to meet me at the school table at 10:00 (yes, they're late starters--they like to veg out until 9:00, then do animal chores and have breakfast, then Will has to make herself a cup of tea and veg out some more while she drinks it), and then to work with their best effort for three full hours, with no slacking and no breaks, and we would finish school for the day promptly at 1:00, no matter if we'd completed work plans or not. There was still some slacking and some breaks, which means that Syd didn't always finish, and realistically, I want Will to work for more like 4 hours, not 3, so she didn't always finish, either, but since my goals were to get them accustomed to working for an extended period of time and to remind them of how lovely it is to finish school and have a whole afternoon and evening of freedom, the schedule suited my purposes.

I've also had some difficulty with the kids protesting at our lessons, and inconsistently, as well. First they love food-related projects, and then they don't. First they want to study such-and-such, and then they fuss at the actual assignment. So over the weekend, as I made our lesson plans for this week, I called each kid in individually, showed her every single thing that she didn't complete last week, and asked her if she wanted to complete it this week. If she didn't, I dropped it from the schedule, because it's not worth the fight. Then I went through every single assignment that I had planned for this week, and got their buy-in on every single thing. Will, most particularly, had to be made to understand that for every lesson, I have to see some sort of output from her; she cannot simply read a text and move on with her life. This got her buy-in for some of this week's hands-on projects, when I asked her what she'd rather provide me for output and she drew a blank. It's for sure time, though, to start thinking of more self-directed studies to give her for eighth grade.

After all that, then, it was more fun than I had anticipated to drop all of our responsibilities and head out to an overnight trip that our Girl Scout council put on as a Girl Scout Leader/Daughter Appreciation Event. Staff hosted us at one of the Girl Scout camps and provided fun activities--





--and a catered dinner--



--and prizes--



--and then let us enjoy having the camp all to ourselves for the rest of the day and night:

Camp Dellwood has an amazing wildflower hike, interspersed with exercise equipment. The kids LOVED it!

It was the perfect relaxing weekend before we start a week that will end in maybe a little more relaxing, but will also contain a birthday party and a ballet recital.

Whew!

Daily work is the same this week, with both kids' buy-in: ten minutes of journaling or writing to a prompt; practice on Typing.com; reading from their MENSA reading lists; Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd; a Hoffman Academy lesson or keyboard practice; and SAT prep through Khan Academy for Will. Syd will also be expected to help me with party prep every day this week, whether it's putting together the games and crafts or preparing the food or cleaning the house, AND she has hours of ballet rehearsal every night for her upcoming recital. She's going to be a busy girl!

Books of the Day consist of a couple of selections from the MENSA reading list that I have to be a little more encouraging about, a couple of non-fiction books on Ancient Greece, and a couple of things that I just thought they'd enjoy--a much more in-depth book on backyard chickens for Will, and the complete collection of Madeleine stories for Syd.

I'm not adding anything new to Memory Work this week, so it's still reviews of Platonic Solids, helping verbs, and Sonnet 116; and common prepositions, Pythagorean triples, the first eleven lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, and the apostles of Jesus.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Syd is getting close to the end of Junior Analytical Grammar, which she's pretty thrilled about, as it's not a curriculum that she's loving. Too bad for her, as it's also a curriculum that is for sure teaching her the grammar concepts that I want her to have. When she's finished Junior Analytical Grammar, I'll likely give her a month or two off, and then it's on to Analytical Grammar! Will had a mind bender on this day--she's making such short work of them that I might skip to the middle of the book for her next one.

For now, we're moving very slowly through the Middle Ages, partly because there's so much more to explore than is there in Story of the World volume 2, which I'm using as a spine mostly for the chronology, and partly because we have so much more to do than Medieval history. There's no rush, though, and the kids are loving the study, so crawling away we go! This week, we're still in chapter two of Story of the World, because the kids remain interested in the Anglo-Saxon period and there's a lot more that we can cover. On this day, we're going to learn more about the Sutton Hoo ship burial. You can request free high-resolution images of artifacts held in the British Museum, but for efficiency's sake, they've also prepared a Powerpoint slide of Sutton Hoo artifacts, and that's what I'll be showing the children. Sutton Hoo isn't the first ship burial that we've encountered (there's also one in Beowulf), so we'll be discussing ship burial and burning in a little more depth, as well, using this dissertation as my resource. The kids then have the opportunity to make their own Viking longship, if they'd like, using either this tutorial or this printable, and we can either bury it or fill a Rubbermaid bin with water and burn it--gee, I wonder which they'll choose?

The kids really like completing Junior Ranger badges by mail, so even though it's a bit of work on the weekends, finding a badge program that 1) accepts badge books by mail and 2) has badge books that can be downloaded and can be well completed using internet research, it's worth it. For this week, I found that the Juan Batista de Anza National Trail has a badge program that can be completed online--score!

After loads of research, I finally bought the Level One curriculum in modern Greek from Greek123. If you're interested, I can tell you another time how I figured out which curriculum would be best, but for now I'll just tell you that the philosophy is to learn to read and write the language the way that a native child would; you can move more quickly, of course, using the same texts and workbooks,  and once you have around a third-grade reading knowledge, you can begin to read children's books written in the language, which will improve your skills even more. To make it more fun, and because you can't take a vacation unless you've studied for it, we're doing our Greek lessons nightly as a family, all four of us squeezed around the textbook, all four of us coloring the picture of μαμὰ in our workbooks. The curriculum includes access to an online tutor, so that's what the children will be practicing with every day as part of their work plans. and as it's also very important to expose ourselves to Greek daily (remember how many words a young child needs to hear before kindergarten? That's us!), right now we're listening to a lot of Greek pop hits on Spotify, although I'm hoping to also find some good Greek programming on Youtube.

I'm hoping that Will can finish up her Budgeting badge this week--starting a badge is always the most fun, but if Girl Scouts had their way, they'd do the funnest three activities from each badge, then drop it and start the fun activities for another badge. You've always got to encourage them to finish a badge by giving them more attention for the last couple of activities and making them more fun. For Step 4 of the Budgeting badge, then, I'm encouraging Will to complete the first activity, which is to make a list of her interests, then look for non-profits that are related to that interest. This will also open her up to more possibilities for a Take Action Project for the Breathe Journey that she's working through.

Will didn't do the temperature project last week, but says that she does want to do it this week. Since she's doing that, I won't move forward with our weather unit this week.

TUESDAY: Using the decanomial square to explore binomial squares was an activity that we didn't get to last week, but both children said that they did want to do it this week... we'll see. Syd also didn't interview her friends at playgroup last week, because most of them weren't there--the end of spring semester is a busy time for everyone, even homeschoolers! Rather than try a different activity to meet the badge's requirements, Syd said that she really wanted to try again this week... we'll see. Will could possibly finish her Budgeting badge on this day, by creating a workable budget and savings plan for our upcoming vacation to Greece. At first, I thought that I'd just have her plan for her own spending money, but now I'm thinking that it would be a more valuable experience to ask her to plan a family-wide budget and savings plan. We saved a lot to be able to pay for the vacation before we booked it (we don't carry credit card balances, which is a whole other discussion for a whole other day), but we could certainly do with more money for the trip itself!

Since Will is between seasons of Analytical Grammar, she has a worksheet in her Review and Reinforcement book on Tuesday and Thursday.

WEDNESDAY: Since I want to emphasize Greece even more in our applicable studies, I've decided to pause our Story of Science unit just before our chapter on Ptolemy and use Story of the World volume 1 to cover Greek history to that point. This week, we're covering Ancient Crete, Minos, and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and Daedalus and Icarus. On this day, the kids will read/listen to the chapter, answer the quiz questions, and we'll do the mapwork directly on our travel map of Greece--when we take this map with us to Greece, the kids will have an easy reference for what happened where! I also have some Youtube videos to show them of bull jumping, the Palace at Knossos, and Crete, etc.

The kids have been oddly reluctant to complete their current Your Kids: Cooking lesson, but they both insist that they don't want to skip it. Maybe this week we'll have quiche for dinner? Normally, Syd also has a separate baking assignment just for her, and she LOVES it, but this week her baking assignment is wrapped into party prep--she's going to bake all of the components for her castle cake herself.

THURSDAY: The National Mythology Exam didn't cover Theseus, although I'm sure the kids read that chapter for fun. Nevertheless, they'll read it again on this day, and make a trading card for Theseus.

Will didn't do her Beowulf translation yesterday, but I got out some of my Old English and Middle Welsh texts this weekend to show her, and she was enthusiastic about looking at them, and claims that she does want to try the translation this week. I hope she does, as I'm really looking forward to what she comes up with!

FRIDAY: We'll probably spend a majority of the day in party prep for the next day's fairy tale-themed birthday party, but we'll set aside some time for a lesson on the futhorc, the runic language of Anglo-Saxon Britain. We'll have a lesson and look at some examples, and then the children can create a moveable alphabet of runes, if they wish. When I showed this activity to Will, she claimed that she'd be willing to do it (despite grousing about every single activity that we did last week), but Syd is more likely my sure thing.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Birthday presents. Ballet recital dress rehearsal. Birthday lunch. Party prep. Fairy tale birthday party. Sleep. Wake up. Ballet recital. Frozen yogurt afterwards, perhaps, if we're not already too sugared out from the birthday party.

What are YOUR plans for the week?

A Day Trip to the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park

I have been on an absolute binge of making photo books on Shutterfly (seriously, I'm on my third right now), and as I was looking through my Adobe Lightroom catalog of photos from last summer, I noticed that in the flurry of all of those summer activities, there are several interesting field trips and school activities that I didn't write about.

Absolute gasp, right?

You may not know this, but I don't actually blog in order to braggy brag about my life, but to write about my life--well, *some* parts of my life... and to display my photos, all annotated and edited and organized. And looking at those unedited photos of our George Rogers Clark trip, the, you know, five almost identical photos of each pose that I haven't narrowed down to the one in which most of the family is looking in my direction with non-sour expressions, I immediately noticed photos of things that I'd forgotten the interesting stories behind, and the historical significance of.

Absolute gasp.

So yes, you're getting those photos now, before I forget even MORE of the interesting stories behind them!

Our trip to the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park was part of last summer's American Revolution unit study, but imagine my surprise when before we found that small national park, as we wandered around lost and quibbled with our GPS, we found William Henry Harrison's house!

I'm just excited that we randomly came across William Henry Harrison's house. I actually HATE Harrison!

We thought about going inside, but it was $24 I didn't want to spend, and also I hate William Henry Harrison.

I was more excited about being in the capital of Indiana Territory, on the bicentennial of Indiana's statehood!

Because I didn't write this adventure up promptly, I now don't remember exactly what this little row of buildings was meant to be. A representation of the capital city of Indiana Territory? A small section of historic Vincennes? Something exciting, it seems!



I did a better job with this random section of field, probably because I care deeply about this subject:

I have written before about visiting Prophetstown and the battle that Harrison would later laud as "Tippecanoe" and use to win the presidency (barf). Here's another important part from that history, the site where Tecumseh met Governor Harrison in order to voice his protest at Harrison's sneaky, manipulative dealings with Native Americans.

And because I am THAT big of a nerd, here I have the famous painting of that meeting pulled up on the phone, and I have used it to locate exactly where the meeting took place:



So after booing Harrison and fangirling over Tecumseh some more, we FINALLY made it to the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park. To make what was basically an educational romp through history fun for the kids, we treated them to fast food first. We're pretty great like that.

And then we pointed them at the visitor center to start working on their Junior Ranger badges!



I can't retell the battle for you, as it's been too long since this trip for me to remember all the best details, but the gist of the story is that he was a plucky American soldier who, with his ragtag band of patriots, captured British forts on the frontier.

Also, he captured and executed Native Americans as an intimidation tactic, because the Native Americans were always treated as pawns and manipulated or intimidated into alliances.

This huge monument has a pretty sanitized portrayal of Clark's exploits, and supposedly stands on the site of the former Fort Sackville. The site where Clark executed a bunch of random Native Americans just to make a point is not marked.

The battle also entailed some sneaky sneaking across the river. Here's the river:

I love that my kid uses irony quotes.

I don't know if this was part of the national park site, but as we hiked back from the Wabash River, I spied some old headstones next to a nearby church, so we hopped the little fence and investigated:

Consort, eh?

The kids did, indeed, earn their Junior Ranger badges, and sated on history, we were heading home, when from the car I spied another delightful historical surprise!

Why, it's a prehistoric Native American mound! You know I LOVE those!!!

I could hardly believe it, but we were allowed to hike right up it!


And although the sign prohibited sledding or biking down it, it did NOT prohibit two kids running down it at full speed, coming thisclose to breaking their fool necks:


It was a VERY full day of adventure.

Work Plans for the Week of April 24, 2017: The Sun and Stars and Seasons

We had an unexpectedly relaxing week and weekend, as a severe weather forecast caused us to cancel our weekend Girl Scout camping trip, sigh... Ah, well. My Girl Scouts instead spent Friday hiking locally, and came over Friday night to roast hot dogs and s'mores around our backyard campfire in the drizzle, so their little hearts felt satisfied, I think.

And since much of our week was intended to be spent prepping for that camping trip, and much of our weekend camping, we enjoyed light work and much free time. There was a lot of coloring and imaginative play, the children sculpted Stonehenge out of air dry clay, they painted their parents in woad--


--and then we had a battle. We're a competitive people and we play really rough, so you will not be surprised that at one point, I found myself flat on my back on top of Will, who was wrapped around me like Yoda on Luke and attempting to wrestle me over, and with one hand tight around the ankle of Syd, who was attempting to kick me off. I was also, I should say, screaming at Matt to hurry and grab all of the sheep and run.

The kids won when it was their turn to play the Celts, although it was a close call. Will tackled Matt and wrestled him into submission before stealing all of our sheep, and I could not help because I was currently sitting on Syd and mushing her face into the ground to keep her from getting enough leverage to buck me off.

It was a fabulous game, although I must also probably mention that thanks to that game, plus spending 30 minutes earlier that day stirring 9 pounds of play dough with a wooden spoon, plus getting shoved into a wall by an escaping Luna the next day, I spent the entire weekend not really able to move my right shoulder. Probably a good thing that we're skipping fencing this session...

Anyway, this week happens to have a LOT more academics in it, so it's good that we're nice and rested up! Our Memory Work this week consists of review of Sonnet 116 and the helping verbs list, more work on the list of commonly used prepositions, Pythagorean triples, Jesus' disciples, and Platonic solids, and later this week we'll begin to memorize the first eleven lines of Beowulf--in Old English!

Books of the Day are mostly some leftover texts on the Civil War that are interesting, but not interesting enough to have been included in our short review unit, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, Girls Who Rocked the World, and The Road to There for Will, although I might give Girls Who Rocked the World to Syd next week, as it fits well with the work she's been doing for her Girl Scout Junior Agent of Change Journey.

Other daily work consists of at least ten minutes of creative writing (and don't worry--Will times it!), typing practice on Typing.com, progress in their MENSA reading lists (Syd usually reads a chapter from her latest book, and Will usually reads an entire book), Worldly Wise book 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd, SAT prep through Khan Academy for Will, and keyboard lessons through Hoffman Academy for both, then practice for the rest of the week. It was overcast all last week, so we're going to continue trying to stargaze for at least 30 minutes each night--just give us a couple of clear nights, please, Mother Nature!

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: We unexpectedly spent most of the day at a nearby state park today. It went like this: I started this post, decided that I'd share with you that beautiful picture of Matt and I painted in woad, and hopped up to fetch my camera. Hmm, it was not in the backpack that I'd taken on Friday's hike, which was the last place I had it. That backpack, actually, was Syd's responsibility to pack up at the park and bring to the car, as I ran ahead to give some supplies to another Girl Scout who needed to leave...

These nice people later picked my camera up from that picnic shelter--

They're just kidding about the ransom.

--and brought it to the park office, where we drove over to get it today, staying to hike and do schoolwork all afternoon, since we were already there.

This good dog is hanging out with me while her girls explore a cave. I explored this cave already on Friday with seven Girl Scouts and two cell phones for light, only one of which actually had a flashlight app installed. Today we brought an actual flashlight!

And yes, she fell asleep in the sun, surround by schoolwork.

So... yeah. The good Samaritans totally saw some very weird woad-painting pics on my camera, as well as what I now recognize are too many photos of this cat:


Whatever. Thanks for turning in my camera, Kind Strangers!

In Math Mammoth this week, Will is finishing up a graphing unit, then reviewing a semester's worth of work, and Syd is now dividing fractions. Syd has Junior Analytical Grammar daily still, although Will is just doing two days a week of the Reinforcement and Review workbook. On this day, then, instead of grammar, Will has a mind bender as a fun logic exercise.

In Story of Science, the Greeks have finally admitted that our Solar System is heliocentric. Yay, Aristarchus! This is a great time to wedge in some context for our upcoming summer astronomy unit, and so you'll see that we're spending quite a bit of time studying how the tilt of Earth's axis causes seasons and affects climate and temperatures worldwide--we also need to cover this for our weather unit, so we're being quite cross-curricular this week! The kids will answer the reading comprehension questions from their Story of Science chapter in their Quest Guides, but will also have a review with me of the major lines of latitude and longitude. Will has some extra reading on the subject of map projections, and will be outlining the pros and cons of the major map projections (I'm a fan of the Winkel tripel projection, myself). I'll also expect the kids to use latitude and longitude to describe the five locations whose temperatures they'll be tracking and graphing this week.  With ten total locations tracked this week, we should get some good data to compare!

I think I've found a modern Greek curriculum to purchase, but it's spendy so I'm still on the fence. Until then, I'm having the children slowly move through the Greek alphabet, just the way a small Greek child would--with tracing and writing, saying the letter sounds, and singing the alphabet song. It gives them something to get started on, at least, until I finally bite the bullet, spend the cash, and have Level One of Greek123 in hand.

TUESDAY: Using the decanomial square to write equations went well last week, but we didn't do a lot of simplifying the equations. This week, when we use the decanomial square to explore binomial squares, we'll be able to do a LOT of simplifying!

Now that we're for sure going to Greece this summer, it's time to put up a wall map so we can visualize all of the places we're studying--and the places we're going to see! We're AAA members, so Matt swung by their office and got us a map of Greece that the kids will help me mount. I've made them a list of the Greek scientists and mathematicians whom we've studied so far, so they can mark their birthplaces, I'm thinking with washi tape so I can peel it off when we're ready to pack the map for our trip. If the kids seem inspired, I'm also prepared to pull up Google Earth on their computer and show them how to find the major sites--I just managed to distract myself for half an hour by browsing the street view of Athens while testing this, so I'd say it's pretty fun!

We're still in chapter 2 of Story of the World v. 2, although really it's just our spine, as I've added so many additional resources and activities to up the rigor. On this day, the kids will re-read the chapter, review the quiz questions, and then color in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from this map, using the greedy algorithm of map coloring that we learned a while ago.

WEDNESDAY: The activity in the Story of Science Quest Guide asks kids to use a pre-printed sunrise table as their data source, but I'll have my two figure out how to obtain the real information. Thank goodness for the internet! As part of our lesson, I'll also be showing them this interactive online demonstration of the Earth's rotation.

We'll have an actual dinner today, not sandwiches or macaroni and cheese from a box, on account of part of the kids' schoolwork on this day is to cook it! The recipe includes a made-from-scratch pie crust, and I'll be very interested to see how that turns out.

I don't know if you've done a lot of research on the BBC Schools website, but they have some amazing resources, especially for periods like World War 2 and the Anglo-Saxons. I mean, obviously! The kids will love the fact that playing around on this site is their schoolwork for the day, but there's also such great information on the site that it's totally worth it.

I'm not 100% positive that Dinosaur National Monument accepts Junior Ranger badges by mail, but their Junior Ranger book is downloadable from their website and kids are able to complete it using close reading and/or online research, so we're giving it a shot.

THURSDAY: The Brainpop video on the seasons is geared more towards Syd's grade level, but Will still loves Brainpop, and there's no harm in not challenging your brain every single second of the school day. The videos are at a great level for Syd, though, as are the quizzes and activities.

I am SO excited to be sharing Beowulf with the kids! I have actually translated the entire thing myself for a class, and I'm thinking that it's challenging, but do-able, for Will to try to do the first eleven lines. I mean, she already knows the gist of what they should say quite well, thanks to her nerdy mum quoting it. We'll have a lesson on Beowulf, and then watch parts of the BEST performance of Beowulf that you can possibly see, that done by Benjamin Bagby. If you ever get a chance to see him live, as I did in grad school, do it! The kids don't know it yet, but they're also going to take on learning those first eleven lines by heart.

FRIDAY/SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The kids have an all-day wilderness class on Friday, so I can finally get some work done. Saturday brings ballet, then the kids and I will head off to an overnight event for Girl Scout leaders and their daughters. We'll come home on Sunday and I'll probably go back to bed, because I can barely manage to sleep the night through at home in my own bed, much less in a platform tent with a bunch of giggling little girls all around me.

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Syd Art Update: LOTS More Disney Art Studio, and Homeschool Art Curriculum Queries

Syd is my kiddo who sits are our homeschool table and draws, all day, every day. I ask if she's finished her math and she instead shows me the five pages of mermaids that shes' drawn. I ask to see where she is in her grammar and she shows me fourteen unicorns instead.

Will is really into adult coloring books, and both kids enjoy their dad's weekend art lessons, but Syd, in particular, is also very prone to immersing herself in some particular art or craft and spending hours at it every day. For the past couple of weeks, its been the Disney Art Studio sets that I first reviewed almost six months ago. They were popular with the kids for weeks, then got set aside on the playroom shelves, as things do, waiting, as things do, to be rediscovered. And Syd has rediscovered them with a vengeance!

Here are a few of her creations that I found and photographed the other day:

Syd found the Palace Pets set confusing at first, because these pets aren't canon to the stories, but it's actually teaching you how to draw different animals, and they're just themed on a princess. Once she saw that she could now draw an adorable bunny, she was all about it.

I like the way that Syd draws HER Rapunzel, not the movie version.  

Matt and I struggle a bit with creating a systematic art curriculum for the kids. Should he do a step-by-step development of certain skills? Teach a lesson every weekend that's related to something that we've studied that week (if so, this weekend he could teach the children how to draw Celtic knots! Or have them study shadows, based on our study of Stonehenge! Or spheres, and do a 3D model of Aristotle's celestial spheres!)? Do a completely separate art history unit? I follow a lot of art teacher blogs,  so I know that there are supporting philosophies for all three approaches.

For now, though, the approach seems to be, "Oh, you want me to do art with the kids today? Hmmm... what should we do? Okay, how about this totally random thing?" and of course it goes swimmingly and the kids love it. I should probably continue to let it be an impromptu daddy/daughter thing, since it's going so well, but at some point I'm sure that one needs a systematic development of skills. Perhaps not in the fifth grade, though? Or the seventh?

Ugh. Feel free to tell me how you handle art in YOUR homeschool!

Most of a Day at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park

I had not intended to stay the entire day at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, and that would have been entirely possible if the children had done what I had told them to, and worked on what they could do in their Junior Ranger books ahead of time in the car. Although the [grumpy] Ranger had grumpily informed me, when I told him of my plan, that one wouldn't be able to complete any of the book away from the battlefields, you could actually fully complete over a third of it anywhere you liked, as many pages asked only for close reading of informational passages--a crucial skill to develop, but something that can be done without standing next to a cannon.

But only if your kid actually does what you asked and works on the book that you made a special trip to obtain for her so that she could work on it in advance. Otherwise, you will stand next to a cannon for an hour while she matches soldier ranks using textual evidence and composes pretend diary entries, etc.

But at least you'll have beautiful weather to stand in!

I love this picture, because can you see it? She's trying to follow the soldiers sight line.

I like these displays that help you visualize what the battle looked like where you're standing.

Inside the visitor center, we discovered that our favorite national park orientation film of ALL TIME is now The Campaign of Chattanooga: Death Knell for the Confederacy. Will and I watched it once, then came out basically wailing to each other, "OMG, CALLAWAY!!!!!!! NOOOOO!!!!!!!" And then we found Matt and Syd and shoved them into the theater to watch it, too. Some random bystander watching this looked at Syd and then said to me, "You know that movie's pretty gruesome." I was all, "I KNOW! CALLAWAY!!!!!!!" and then he pretty much backed away from me, smiling nervously.

Sorry, Stranger Trying to Help Me Parent!

The visitor center also fed my obsessive desire to buy land just outside of national parks in order to conduct my own amateur archaeological digs, because they had a whole exhibit on Civil War treasures found by random people!

Good for them. Looters SHOULD get jail time! Or, not jail because I don't think jail is a very good solution in most criminal contexts, but some sort of highly supervised probation/re-education/community service!

See how the tree healed over the bullet hole? The caption said that sawmills stopped accepting trees from the area because they were so studded with bullets.

It felt like a long and cranky drive up to Lookout Mountain Battlefield Visitor Center (especially with a husband who stubbornly refused to accept my gracious backseat driving, grr!), but once we were there, it was well worth it.

I can't imagine a lovelier place to desecrate with carnage:

I'd thought that Matt was safely somewhere else, so that he wouldn't have to see our little Riptide once again trying as hard as she can to break her fool neck. When she finally came away from the ledge, though, and we hiked a little further down the trail, we came upon Matt, standing and glaring at us both, with a clear view of that overhanging rock ledge behind him. Oops!

Although we spent hours longer here than I'd intended to, it actually worked well in that it tired the kids out so much that they barely fought with each other at all on the long drive back home. I finished reading my book, I made next semester's homeschool plans with the kids (informing Will often that no, she didn't *have* to take grammar OR keyboard OR home ec, since I could just enroll her in the local middle school where those classes aren't offered, if she'd prefer...), I planned out a lot of improvements that I doubt that I'll actually have time to make to the garden, listened to a lot of country music on the radio (I LOVE driving through Nashville!), and--not exactly before we knew it, but before we were completely beside ourselves in misery--we were home again, back in our own snug beds with the dog and the cats and the chickens and a home-cooked breakfast in the morning.

Traveling with the family is my favorite thing, and so is coming home afterwards!