Homeschool Field Trip: The Mound Builders of Ohio

In our years homeschooling, we have visited quite a few of the Native American mounds built in the eastern half of our country.

Here's where we've gone:

• Ocmulgee National Monument
• Spiro Mounds
• Cahokia
• Angel Mounds
• Sugar Loaf Mounds

I know of a few more well-preserved Native American mound locations, but last week, the kids and I hit up the last of my must-see list: Serpent Mound!

Serpent Mound is a state park, which made it the only sightseeing destination on our trip where I had to pay admission (other than, you know, the Girl Scout Convention and the My Little Pony movie). Well worth, it, though, to see one of the important effigy mounds in the United States!

The museum for the site is really small. Like, REALLY small. Like, "Where did all of the artifacts that were surely here at one time actually end up because they ain't here now?" small.

Oh, well. At least the mount wasn't entirely destroyed by farmers' plows, I guess.

This part of the museum was super cool, though:

Check it: on the top is what the peoples of this area were up to, while below is what people were doing in the rest of the world. Yay for geohistorical context!

 And this was cool: this is a replica of what the Native Americans used to transport all of that dirt:

Woven basket. Times four billion, probably.

 And now, on to the mound!

This fire tower didn't actually give a great perspective of the mound as a whole, but you could see part of it from your elevated location:

And, of course, it's a lovely spot to take pictures of your loved ones:

I may have made them stand there a little too long...

But to be fair, the sun was in and out of these enormous cloud banks all morning, and it was destroying my ability to white balance. The tone of most of these photos is totally shot.

The mound is a lot shorter than you'd think it would be:

About waist- to chest-height on a kid, I reckon.

 Archaeologists theorize that the curves in the serpent's body are related to astronomical phenomena:

And there is also a very old asteroid crater just to the north of the mound, which probably made the mound site, at the top of the strange bluff, seem even more fantastical to the native people:

These two. Can I just say that my favorite thing about parenting is watching the relationship between these two? My most important job as their parent is helping them nurture it.

I think I'm doing okay at it!

After Serpent Mound, the kids and I drove back country roads the whole way to Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.

I'm just going to say real quick that it annoys me that the Hopewell people are named after the family who later owned this land. Real classy, yo.

I'm kind of fascinated by backyard archaeology, though, the history of archaeological wonders that were once in the hands of random citizens, and how they were preserved (or not) by those people. So I thought this old book mentioning the mound site was super cool:

This museum had more of the site's finds on display--

--but even here, in the smack middle of Ohio, we're still seeing evidence of the British Museum's near monopoly on antiquities:

I checked the British Museum site and found them, by the way, along with a TON more "mound city" artifacts. I guess I know where all that stuff from Serpent Mound is now! 

Check this out! After our sharks study last year, I was able to identify these pretties from half a room away:

Hopewell was also the first of FIVE Junior Ranger badges that the kids earned in three days of this trip:

 They love earning badges, don't get me wrong, but Syd, in particular, can get frustrated with the process, because the challenge level of the activities are so variable from site to site, or even throughout the book. In related news, did you know that I have a rule that when you say you "can't" do something, or you're "not good" at something, you have to do five push-ups?

Rules are rules. The kids think that I'm mean AND crazy, but I do not allow them to speak unkindly about themselves.

I like to do the museum/visitor center first, because I think it allows us to then see the actual stuff with more context and understanding. After we get that, then it's on to the mounds!

Look how nice the weather got for a while! It's going to pour later, but for now my white balance is thrilled:

A couple of these mounds were almost completely destroyed at one point, and a couple were completely excavated and then rebuilt. I don't know how I feel about that. It feels weird.

These two. I'm working here in our big family room while the kids are on the carpet in front of the couch, assembling planispheres as part of their Cadette Night Owl badge requirements, and I just had to tell them off because Will asked Syd for the instructions, Syd refused to hand them over, so Will shoved her and snatched them. I forced them to remind me of how old they were, because at the moment, it was impossible to tell.

This is cool. The mound below is unimproved, representing the way that the entire site looked before an effort was made to restore it.

I should have put a LOT more room to grow into those Junior Ranger vests!

Here's one more weird thing. As we ate our lunch on a picnic table away from the mounds, we all three watched in fascination as some sort of paranormal research group paced the site, circling the mounds. A woman led them while gesturing with her hands, and people followed her with various types of gear:

We only had to make it to nearby Dayton that night, so on a whim I detoured to the newest national park site that I'd been hearing about, the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument. It's just one house with a parking lot, along yet another country road, but we found out, hopped out of the car, ran up the steps, and... the door was locked. A sign told us to knock, and if nobody was there it gave us a telephone number to call, but otherwise, the place was closed! I got out my phone and checked the website, and found that they're open by appointment only?!?

Whatever. Here we are, I guess:

Fun fact: over the next couple of days, I would hear park rangers recommending Charles Young to other visitors, and every. Single. Time I would pipe up and tell that ranger that we'd gone to Charles Young at 3 pm on a Saturday, and it had been closed, locked, and empty. The park rangers were always horrified, bless them. I guess they'd only gotten half the memo!

We Went to the Girl Scout National Convention

I have so many words about GIRL 2017, the Girl Scout National Convention that the kids and I went to last week, but the vast majority of those words are so Girl Scout nerd-centric that I'll save them for the Girl Scout leaders message board that I'm a part of, okay? You probably don't need to know about the SWAP celebrity that I met, or the controversies over the Macy's booth and the taser display, or an in-depth comparison/contrast of the experience of delegates vs. attendees.

You might be interested to know, however, that there was both a dive tank in which girls were receiving SCUBA lessons, and NASA scientists letting girls try out NASA training simulators. There was a real-time service project going on in the back of the hall. Will met a park ranger who gave her the contact information of another ranger who could help her with her Silver Award project. I met the founder of the Little Free Library program, and was too starstruck to ask if I could take my picture with him.

Here's what else we did!

Soooooo many SWAPS were made and exchanged! I'll tell you more about SWAPS another time--especially because I have some SWAP tutorials to share with you!--but here's just a little bit about them. Adults get into them, too, so I made my own SWAPS to share. Except then I gave my SWAPS to Will so that she'd have something to exchange when she realized that she left her Girl Scout bag, with all her SWAPS in it, at home.

Fun fact: Will also forgot her shoes (she wore the Crocs that she slipped on early that morning to go do the chicken chores for the whole road trip), her pajamas, and her surf shirt (she had to wear a T-shirt in the hotel pools, instead). Sigh...

Instead of trading my own SWAPS, then, I took pictures of other SWAPS that I liked--

--and I enjoyed watching the kids share their (and my) SWAPS!

This is one of Syd's.

 We were only doing the Hall of Experiences, not the full convention, and I worried that there wouldn't be enough for the kids to do, but there was actually SO MUCH to do that we didn't get to everything in the long day that we were there! Nearly every booth had one, and often several, activities for the kids:

They're making noisemaking flyers at a booth for a company that hosts STEM enrichment parties for children.

Both kids spent ages at the Makerbot booth!

Syd designed a 3D-printable bunny.

Syd designed a parachute at the COSI booth and tested it in a wind tunnel.

Both kids programmed robots, also at the COSI booth.

The American Electric Power booth had snap circuits.

At the Joann's booth, you could make your own cape!

Chalk of the Town had chalk art.

They made star viewers at one of the NASA booths.

 Okay, here's one Girl Scout nerd thing that I'll share with you: new badges in the making!

I just wish they wouldn't take so long to come out. Will will Bridge to Senior before the Cadette badge comes out, alas.

 Here's another super nerdy Girl Scout thing: there are two companies in the US that make Girl Scout cookies. Their names are Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Bakers, and they make some different cookies. Our region is a Little Brownie Bakers region, and I've never tasted an ABC Bakers Girl Scout cookie, so of course as soon as I saw the ABC Bakers booth I went straight there, told them that I was a Little Brownie Bakers Girl Scout, and the guy running the booth hooked me right up with the ABC Bakers special cookies:

Here you see Thanks-a-Lot and Lemonades. Not shown is Smores, which I think I already ate.

 Of course, that didn't stop us from also visiting the Little Brownie Bakers booth and eating a lot of Samoas and Thin Mints:

more SWAP-making

The Columbus Zoo was there, which is why I have a thousand pictures of my children petting a kangaroo: 

Taking a painting break, and crap! I just remembered that I didn't pick up their paintings at the end of the day--oops!

 

Does she look worn out yet? I was!!!

It was a wonderful day, and both kids came away inspired to do more, learn more, and be of service more. I came away with lots of leader ideas, and information and ideas for even more adventures that the girls could have.

And then we got BACK in the car, because the 3.5 hours that I'd driven early that morning to get to Columbus clearly hadn't been enough. I fought traffic to drive past the Ohio Statehouse so that we could say that we'd seen it (we saw it!), and then another nearly two hours down south,  nearly to the Kentucky border.

We ate sandwiches, swam, watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on my laptop, and then went to bed early, ready for Native American mound viewing on the next day!

Thank-You Notes from Color and Create Greeting Cards

You can probably guess this about me, but I don't buy store-bought greeting cards. I mean, we've got card stock and pens, so why not save the money for sushi and/or doughnuts instead?

Will's getting old enough that she doesn't love making her own cards anymore, so I might stock her up with some stationery cards sometime, if I ever see any with dragonriders or howling wolves or a catalog of medieval swords on the front, but Syd is still my go-to girl for cardmaking. She'll probably draw a fat unicorn on the front of your card, whatever the occasion, but homemade it is!

I received a copy of Color and Create Greeting Cards free for review the other day, though, and it's been kind of that perfect bridge between store-bought and homemade, great for those times when you want to make a handmade card but you're not feeling especially crafty. It's basically adult coloring pages in greeting card form. You can do one whenever the occasion arises, or you can fill them in whenever you like, listening to music and drinking wine, and then just pop one out, ready to go, when it's needed.

Syd and I have been living our lives listening to Story of the World v. 2 in order to keep up with the frantic timeline of Will's AP European History class, so we've been coloring a LOT while the audiobook plays. Although in this pic, it looks like Syd is actually secretly listening to her new obsession, Mr. Terrupt:

Yep, I knew it--Story of the World doesn't come in playaway!

You can fancy these cards up even more, if you're minded to, as I discovered when Will spilled her tea on the edge of the card I was coloring. I let it dry and colored over it on the front, but then Will cut around the design, making the edges more interesting (and cutting off some of that tea stain...) and I used double-sided tape to line the inside with colored paper, hiding the rest of the tea stain and making the card look different and interesting:

You should probably also do this if you insist on coloring your card with permanent markers, as permanent markers will bleed through a little bit, but I think my kids are the only ones who insist on using our permanent markers for Every. Single. Thing.

Using permanent markers for every single thing means that when you misspell something, you have to draw a giant star to cover it up:

And that's our first round of thank-you cards finished and mailed! If you've purchased something from the kids during their Girl Scout fall product sale, you can expect to receive a thank-you note, too! If you haven't purchased anything from them, but you long to support exciting adventures and girl-led experiences by buying nuts and candy, you can click through to the nuts and candy shop that Will created.

If you subscribe to magazines, you can renew your subscription through the magazine shop that Will created, and part of your subscription money goes to the troop.

Next month, our Girl Scout troop is going to spend the night at the Indiana Motor Speedway and ride our bikes around the track! For those of you following along on Girl Scout adventures, that's after we go to the Girl Scout national convention and before we spend the night at the City Museum in St. Louis. It'll probably be after we make shoeboxes for hurricane relief (if you make them when there's not a hurricane, then the non-profit can send them off right away after the next one) and certainly before the Christmas shoeboxes. It may be after our primitive camping adventure, depending on the late October weather, but who knows? The weather has been weird this year.

This is How She Trains Her Dog (and How Her Dog Trains Her)

We've had Luna for almost eleven months now, but she's really only been working on being trained for the past five or so, when the basic obedience course offered by the closest doggy daycare finally fit into our schedule. Seriously, it's not as if we could have gotten anything else done on a Saturday morning during the ballet year!

Matt and Will went through the basic obedience course with Luna once, and then were supposed to work with her one-on-one to cement the commands they'd covered before they enroll her for the next level.

And... they're still working on that.

Luna is probably around four years old now, and she came to us having had a litter and a bad case of heartworms. She's the sweetest dog that I've ever met, so clearly somebody treated her right, but equally clearly that never consisted of ever asking her to do anything. Ever. Which is so weird to me, because I've known plenty of people who are lazy dog owners, and their dogs will still shake hands or "beg" for a treat or something. Anything. Something stupid, probably, but something.

But our Luna came to us not even not knowing any commands, but not knowing how to play at all, and with seemingly no understanding that human language and gestures have meaning, or that she should look to humans for communication. The first thing that Matt and Will were taught was to hold a treat at their forehead to get Luna's attention, and then to give her the treat so that she learned to associate paying attention with a reward, and this step took FOREVER. Honestly, I think Luna still forgets, and Will still drills her on this sometimes.

In addition to the "watch" command, Will trains Luna daily on "sit," "down," "come," and "touch," which is the prerequisite to "heel." Luna can do those commands now, but not consistently. Still, it's better than she did for months upon months, when Will had to physically move Luna's body into position after every command.

I, personally, would have gotten sick of this after the first week, and Will has had her moments of frustration, but for the most part, she is more consistent and patient with her dog than I have ever seen her be before:

She finally watches!

Here's a good down, and Luna isn't jumping up immediately for a change, so it's a VERY good down!

The good down was probably mostly a fluke...



Will usually rewards Luna with bits of hot dog, but I think that's bad for her arteries, and so every now and then I talk her into making a batch of homemade, healthy dog treats. Luna really likes these honey dog treats, but these particular ones are the same no-bake, pumpkin and oat dog treats that my Girl Scout troop taught Brownies to make at a Pets Badge workshop last month, and we have tested them on MANY animals, and every single animal has adored them:

Luna loves them so much that when Will accidentally spills them, life kind of becomes chaos:



Back to work!

Will still puts a treat on her forehead to remind Luna to "watch."

She also has Luna "touch" to encourage her to go weird places, because Luna is scared to go weird places. She avoids our kitchen because she's scared of the slippery floor there, bless her heart.

This dog has given this kid so much more than we have given this dog. We've only given Luna food, shelter, walks, training, fun experiences, and unconditional love and affection. But she has given our older daughter gifts she wouldn't otherwise have. Learning comes easily to Will, so easily that she barely notices that it's happening most times. It's so easy for her to learn new things that it's also easy for her not to understand that learning isn't this easy for most people. I've seen many, many clever children (and adults!) who are disdainful, contemptuous of others who learn more slowly than they, annoyed by people who take a while to think, who ask questions about something that's already been covered, who need material repeated for them, who need to repeat the material over and over again. It's a disgusting state of mind, and I won't permit Will to voice it at another, but I can tell that she thinks it sometimes. Who wouldn't be tempted, when they see someone inexplicably struggling with something so EASY? It's easy to lose your compassion that way, to think that your quick learning makes you better, when really it's nothing to your credit--you were simply born that way. But if you think that it makes you better, then you think that those who can't duplicate your quick wit are worse than you, and perhaps they deserve their bad breaks, and you don't notice all the good breaks that you've been given just because you happen to be such a clever girl.

But then here comes this dog. You love her the most, and she loves you the most, and you'd do anything for her, and you know that she'd do just anything in her power to please you. But boy, is she a slow learner. You tell her the same things over and over and over again, and you know she wants to do what you say; you can see by her head tilt and her wriggling butt and the uncertain lifting of her front paw that she desperately wants to do what you say, but she just. Doesn't. Get it. You have to patiently demonstrate the same thing over and over again, watching her so eager, watching her not get it, and you get so frustrated, but how can you be mad at her? You can see how much she wants to do your thing. You can see that if willpower would make her learn the thing, she would have learned the thing long ago. It's clearly not her fault, because she's absolutely the best dog, but being the best dog in the world does not mean that she's the fastest learner. She may, in fact, be the slowest learner.

But you don't give up, because you love your dog so much (and also because your mother won't let you, because she secretly knows what is going to happen). And very, very, VERY slowly, what your mother secretly knows will happen does, indeed, start to happen. One day she points out to you that you used to have to push your dog's butt down to get her to sit every single time, over and over again, but now you only have to do it sometimes. And then hardly ever. You used to have to say, "Down," and then physically pull your dog's feet out from under her to lay her down, but now you only have to put the treat down there and she remembers. She IS learning. It IS happening. And whereas you take your own learning for granted, as if everyone can spell a word aloud once a day for four days and then have that spelling memorized, and can read a whole book an hour, every hour, you are absolutely thrilled at every very small advance that your dog makes in understanding. Every time she remembers to sit, you celebrate. You're more patient. You're learning to be more encouraging. You're becoming a better person every time that former shelter dog looks in your face, her ears up, and wills herself to learn for you.

That's of far more value than anything that we could possibly ever give to this dog of ours.

Sun and the Solar Eclipse Study: The Phases of the Moon

Here's what I've showed you of our Sun and the Solar Eclipse study so far:

• Solar Power
• A Field Trip to the Total Solar Eclipse!

If you're using the NASA Eclipse Activity Guide as a spine (and you should, even if there's not an eclipse near you--it makes an EXCELLENT spine for a study of the Solar System!), then this is Lesson 10: Waxing and Waning. Here is where you learn about the moon's orbit, the visible phases of the moon, and you preview how eclipses work, although you'll cover this in more detail in a future lesson.

The NASA Eclipse Activity Guide has a big build for the phases of the moon demo--foamboard, TWENTY balls and TWENTY skewers, etc.--but I'm going to tell you what you actually need:

1. lamp
2. human
3. ball that's around baseball/tennis ball-sized, painted half-black and half-white

The younger kid painted a glass Christmas ornament from my holiday crafting stash half black and half white, and when we were done with this demo I put it back in the stash. We can still paint it something cute for Christmas.

To demonstrate the phases of the moon, first set up your lamp near a wall, then put the kid several feet in front of it. You don't want it to blind her, and you want to help her remember that the distances are very vast here. Just make sure that it's warm and bright enough on her face that she can't lose track of it. The lamp is her sun.

She is the Earth.

You hold the moon, and you ALWAYS hold it so that the white side faces the wall with the lamp (don't think about facing the lamp exactly, or you'll end up tilting the moon's orbit and the demo won't work as well). You're going to orbit the kid, always with the white side of the moon facing that wall. As with the distance between the kid and the lamp, don't feel like you have to orbit the kid too closely--the closer the moon gets to her, in fact, the less she'll see the phases cleanly. Stand back a bit as you orbit.

You also need to remember that the moon's orbit is about 5 degrees off center, so the moon isn't going to go directly between the kid's face and the lamp--that would cause a solar eclipse, and we're not going to have one of those right now, except maybe to bring it up at the end.

The kid should stand still, but should turn in place so that she's always facing the moon. I like to start with the full moon. Hold the moon where it should be, make sure the kid has rotated so she's looking straight at it, and ask her what she can see--it should be the white circle of the full moon. Have her verbalize where her perspective is on earth looking at the moon, and where the sun is in relation to the earth and the moon. 

Walk the moon to a waxing quarter moon, make sure the kid is rotating with you, and have her observe the moon's phase, her perspective on the earth, and the sun in relation to the earth and the moon. Repeat this for every quarter until you're back at the beginning. 

There is no way to make moon phases any clearer.

I like the kids to hear the same information in different ways, the better to contextualize it and strengthen all those neural pathways, so we also watched two moon videos from one of my favorite YouTube channels, CrashCourse--

--and this simpler video on moon phases from BrainPOP:

For a craft/snack, the younger kid then made us a model of the phases of the moon out of Oreos, and it was delicious!

I had intended to add a one-month nightly moon observation to this, and it would have been amazing, but we just didn't keep up with it. An activity for another day, then!

Here are some more lunar activities that I'm saving for another day:

• giant printable moon (we actually did this a couple of years ago--I put it on the wall and invited the kids to doodle on it with Sharpies!)
• templates to make paper dice with the moon phases printed on
• phases of the moon flip book
• phases of the moon embroidery
• phases of the moon bunting

And here are some more of the reading resources that we used as daily assigned reading, family read-alouds, activity intros, or just to sit invitingly on our home shelves and tempt someone into exploring them:

• If You Decide to Go to the Moon: This picture book that walks you through a scientifically accurate voyage to the Moon in the second person. It's a good book to read before dramatic play or creative writing.
• Moonstruck: Poems about Our Moon: Choose one of the poems to spend time memorizing together over the course of a couple of weeks. You can also use it for reading and handwriting practice. Memory work is SO good for our brains!
• Seasons of the Moon: Folk Names and Lore of the Full Moon: Add some Social Studies to your science unit by reading moon lore of other cultures. 
• Moon: A Peek-Through Picture Book: Die-cut pages are such a clever way to illustrate the Moon's phases!
• Apollo 11 Moon Landing: An Interactive Space Exploration Adventure: This Choose Your Own Adventure-style book also incorporates history and science. 
• Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography: Use this book to introduce a guided or creative art project. 

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