The Diosa Dotada Endeavor

You’re a regular guy, driving home for lunch to your regular house in the ‘burbs in your regular company car.  You turn down your cul-de-sac in your regular new construction neighborhood and suddenly something looks decidedly irregular.  A large gaggle of school aged kids and a handful of mothers (one of which you think is your neighbor from two doors down) are gleefully jabbing pointy sticks into a huge mound of dirt on an empty lot that has yet to be built.  It’s noon.  On a Thursday.  In September.  What is going on here?

Your neighbor waves cheerfully and promptly goes back to coordinating the pointy-stick jabbing venture.  Oh yeah.  She mentioned something about homeschooling at the Labor Day block party……  So this is how homeschoolers spend their Thursdays.

Today was the first fun-filled day of my Ancient Scientists class.  And those kids jabbing stick in the ground were happily experiencing Prehistoric Man’s discovery and invention of tools.  A pointy stick is easier to jab into the ground than a flat stick.  Ta-da!  Pointy stick is a useful tool.    We also explored the discovery of music and musical instruments and the discovery of farming.  Next class we’ll be in the backyard instead, but I must confess it sure was just a little fun startling the neighbor today! 

Being what I like to call a “total body learner,” Athena loves to really emerse herself in studying a subject.  This often means she desires to engage all of her senses in the process.  She is truly what Sarah Ban Breathnach would call a “sensuist.”  So when we start discussing and reading about Ancient Egypt, she not only wants to walk like an Egyptian, but eat, dress, write and speak like one too.  We have enjoyed an Ancient Mesopotamian and Ancient Hebrew Feast Night so far and our Ancient Egyptian Feast Night is in the works for the next week or so.  I am planning on, at some point, creating a page here for “Feasting Like the Ancients” with all the menus from our feast nights for others to enjoy.  Artemis and Apollo’s favorite feature of feast night is the total lack of silverware and the sitting on the floor to eat in the name of historical accuracy.  They are sensuist learners in the making, I just know it.  Luckily, in order to satisfy these total emersion learning binges, we have a pretty impressive public library system loaded with great resources and homeschool friendly librarians I can pillage and plunder at will.  I managed to track down short audio courses in Egyptian Arabic, Eastern Arabic and Hebrew.  No luck with Sumerian though.  Even our library system has its limits, I guess.  This morning, on the way to a “Not-Back-To-School” party, she learned how to say she knows a little Arabic and that she is an American in Eastern Arabic.  I envy the ease with which young children can pick up foreign language pronounciation.  I also must say that I hated with a passion the traditional institutional methods of teaching foreign languages and never did very well in those classes, usually as a direct result of my refusal to copy my vocabulary words five times each and other drudgery like that.  I always felt like I probably could pick up languages fairly easily if they weren’t presented in such a tedious manner.  So I guess here is a prime opportunity for me to test that theory.  We have a long road trip coming up and Athena already asked me to be sure to pack up the language CDs for the drive.  I also discovered that they do indeed still make aqua colored eye shadow.  I very rarely ever wear make-up anymore and even when I do it is usually just a little foundation, a touch of mascara and a bit of lip gloss, so I was woefully unprepared to provide Athena with a semi-authentic Egyptian look.  A quick trip to the grocery store unearthed the required black eyeliner and aqua eye shadow and presto-chango, there stood Nefertiti/Hatshepsut (she changes her mind about which Queen she’s more fond of at the moment) in my living room.  I think we will be wallowing in Ancient Egypt for the rest of the month unless Athena tires of it before that.  I was not planning on experiencing the classical ed homeschooling rite of passage that is King Cluck, the chicken mummy, this go around, but she asked me yesterday what we could mummify and since the cat and her twin siblings are sort of out of the question, I guess I will not be escaping that project after all.  It will, however, have to wait until after my sister’s wedding next week.

Recently, the question of whether or not to carve out dedicated space for a classroom in the home of a homeschooling family has crossed my field of observation in multiple places at once.  This is most likely a result of the inevitable “Back to School” type topics that are floating through disscussion boards, email lists and homeschooling blogs this time of year.  Apparently, this topic makes the Back-to-School cut. 

Folks seem to come down on two basic sides of the debate, as well as falling somewhere in the middle.  Either people are really excited about the space they’ve designed for their homeschooling or people think that homeschooling is far too integrated into their daily lives to seperate it into a self contained space of its own.  I have been facinated by the elloquent explanations from both points of view. 

I am especially enjoying sifting through them since we recently bought a new house and kept the need for a dedicated homeschooling space close to the top of the list of “must haves” when hunting for our new abode. As a matter of fact, I already cracked the whip on poor Patris Maximus and he has managed to crank out one seven foot by five foot shelving unit along one wall (which I have, naturally, already filled to max capacity.) I have one wall left to paint and I will get the rest of our maps and whatnot back up. Patris Maximus will be lending a hand and mounting two large pieces of showerboard on that wall once it dries to use as dry erase boards and one of these days, he’ll get an indentical shelve built on the wall across from the first one.  We ended up converting the formal dining room of our new house into our classroom space. It is bright and sunny with hardwood floors and right off the kitchen for sink and stove access when needed.  I guess I come down somewhere in the middle of the discussion.  A dedicated space for our homeschooling feels lovely.  All our materials are easily within reach and well organized.  We have lots of wall space for maps and posters and our timeline.  We have a small television set on an old fashioned foot locker that the kids can work themselves to watch science, history, Spainsh and sign language videos any time they choose.  The material Athena is now capable of working on completely independently is easy for her to locate and settle down with whenever it suites her.  Artemis and Apollo even have their own shelf of puzzles and games to amuse themselves with when Athena and I are working together on a lesson.  I like this cheerful, cozy space where we are busily making memories of delightful learning adventures together.   I also like that half finished art projects can be left to rest where they are and returned to when inspiration once again comes to call without risking a nasty run-in with someone’s lunch.  And that science projects have an official spot to progress in without the risk of a well-meaning Patris Maxius mistaking them for trash before Athena has finished her observations.  Does this mean that all learning must take place in this room?  That no homeschooling occurs elsewhere in our home?  Uh. No.  Not even close.  Any project that requires a sink oven or stove, naturally takes place in the kitchen.  Now that we’ve entered the modern era and have cable for the first time in four and a half years, we’ve discovered the amazing capabilities of a DVR and at any given time there are a slew of programs stored on it about biology, dinosaurs, Ancient Egypt or Greece, and of course the latest episodes of Word Girl.  There is a facinating fungi we are observing spreading across our front landscaping and sidewalk chalk drawn hop scotch boards are our favorite method of practicing skip counting.  The computer is in the back bedroom we are calling the office for the time being and them, of course, there is the reading.  The reading that happens in every room of the house.  Even the bathrooms.

I am really happy and satisfied with the classroom space we’ve created for ourselves, but it in no way extricates learning from our daily lives.  If anything, it anchors it, gives it a cornerstone even.  A classroom, we are finding, is not a limiting factor for us whatsoever.  How about you?  What has your family’s experience been with a designated homeschool space?  Did it work for you?  Why or why not?  I would love to continue the discussion here, so feel free to leave a comment that shares your thoughts or experiences with this topic.

I recently shared a peek at how I constructed our world history timeline on a classical homeschooling listserv and it occured to me that it would be a great thing to share here, as well.  As I mentioned before, there is a burning passion for history growing on our hearth and a timeline is a fantastic way to fan the flames. 

 At first I was torn between stretching a timeline across every spare scrap of wall space I could rustle up and using the scroll method.  But then it occured to me that we could combine the two and get the best of both worlds.  I wanted Athena to be able to grasp the continuity of history that you can get from a mounted timeline, but we only have so much wall space.  I also wanted her to understand the vast amount of time that human beings were not a driving force in the Earth’s history and see how history from the human perspective has accelerated over time.  So, with a little handyman help from Patris Maximus, I created a timeline scroll that is mounted on the wall for safe keeping and reference purposes, but also removable for closer examination and addition without taking up every last inch of our home’s walls.  Here’s how we did it.

 We bought two rolls of heavy duty brown mailing paper, 30″ wide and 15 feet long each.  We also bought two 1″ diameter dowel rods that are 3 feet long.  I used clear packing tape to take the first 10-12″ or so of the first roll of paper and secure it to the first dowel rod.  then I rolled the paper around the rod until I reached the end of that roll.  I took about 3-4″ of the end of the first roll and the beginning of the second roll and overlapped them, fastening them together with the packing tape.  Then I rolled the second roll of paper around the first dowel rod until I reached the end of that roll and once again used about 10-12″ of paper to fasten the end of the second roll of paper to the second dowel rod.  I now had a scroll that was 30″ wide and about 28 feet long with about 3″ of dowel rod sticking out of the top and bottom at both ends. 

 Patris Maximus built upper and lower, left and right brackets for the dowel rods to slide in and out of with a sort of hook on them and mounted them on one stretch of wall in our classroom so that the timeline is displayed with about a 5 foot section open at a time and can be scrolled back and forth as needed.  The entire scroll can also easily be slid out of the brackets and spread out on the table to add material to it.  I will have to ask him to write out detailed instructions for the brackets at a later date as I honestly have not the foggiest clue how he built them. 

 I drew in five lines from the bottom of the page, moving upwards about 2″ between lines.  The firts line marks the eras (Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic.)  The second marks off the periods, the third the epochs, and the forth the ages.  The fifth line measures time itself starting at 15 billion years ago and moving forward all the way to 2015BCE (or AD, depending on who you ask.)  Again, I wanted to show the expanse of the Earth’s history, the relative amount of human history and the appearance of acceleration towards modern day.  But I also wanted to make it all fit.  Below is the scale I used to make all of this fit into a 28 foot timeline:

Section 1- 15 BYA (billion years ago) to 1 BYA: 1″=1 billion years

Section 2- 1 BYA to 100 MYA (million years ago): 2″=100 million years

Section 3- 100 MYA to 10 MYA: 2″=10 million years 

Section 4- 10 MYA to 1 MYA: 2″=1 million years

Section 5- 1 MYA to ~100,000BC: 2″=100,000 years

Section 6- ~100,000BC to 10,000BC: 2″=10,000 years

Section 7- 10,000BC to 3,000BC: 2″=1,000 years

(Sections 8-10 follow the general scale suggested at Paula’s Archives) 

Section 8- 3,000BC to 1500BCE/AD: 2″=100 years

Section 9- 1500 to 1740: 2″=20 years

Section 10- 1740 to 2015: 2″=5 years

We have just begun, this week, to add pictures to it, all located and downloaded off the web for free from a variety of sources.  I am hopeful that this will continue to be a useful and inspiring tool in our little homeschool for years to come and really look forward to watching it blossom with Athena, Apollo and Artemis over our next four years of history studies.

As Athena and I begin to establish an educational rhythm this summer, I find this schooling cycle evolving on its own in a very organic process.  Classical home education is becoming extremely popular.  A recent thread on a parenting discussion board revealed a higher number of classically rooted homeschooling families than I would have anticipated.  As such, there now exist more and more specializations within the broader philosophy.  A method encouraging the modeling of self-education by the parent and a considerable focus on “leadership education,” Thomas Jefferson Education, has developed a good sized following. I actually have every intention of getting my hands on the DeMille’s work some time soon, as my limited knowledge leads me to believe this might be a great path to take during the middle and high school years for us. Some families are exploring a classical method that focuses primarily on Latin and allows all other studies to branch out from there, aptly refered to as The Latin Centered Curriculum. Again, it is an intriguing approach, although I must admit this one does not spark my interest as much as TJEd. Over the past month, I find us developing a more particular, somewhat specialized approach also. We seem to be working from a History Centered Curriculum these days. All of our other studies seem to be flowing out of our history work.  This seems to be unfolding through a very natural and logical process.  As certain topics arise in our history work, they weave a path into further science exploration.  They produce stacks and stacks of fiction and non-fiction reading material.  They give way to a bottomless font of narration and copywork sources.  They produce facinating works of art.  And they even seem to ground our math lessons.  Discuss a word problem with puppies and lollipops and Athena seems totally disinterested.  Add and subtract trilobites, pikaias and mammoths and now we are talking. 

In a way, this makes the utmost sense.  History is THE story.  It is everything.  How we came to even have the concepts of mathematics or the discoveries of science are deeply rooted in the story of history.  As history unfolds and humankind discovers and explores our world, so to does my child.  History leads her where she wants to go and seems to give her the framework upon which to hang the treasures of her passion for knowledge.  So for now, we will continue with our recent successes and pursue our history studies as the cornerstone of our educational program.  History-Centered Curriculum, here we go! 

This week we begin our next cycle.  I’ve begun using the word cycle to describe the sections of our homeschooling calendar.  Since we school year round, taking a week or two off here and there, referring to the school year seemed incorrect to me.  So I’m going with cycle to describe how we do things.  Our first stretch of planning will take us through the next six weeks.  After that we’ll take a week off to relax, but at the same time do a really fun unit study of Lucy/early humans, to include seeing Lucy’s fossilized skeleton in the (not) flesh at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.  Since it is summertime after all, for the next six weeks, we are only doing language arts lite, math/logic & history.  After our Lucy unit study, we’ll add in science, Spanish and Latin at the beginning of the traditional school year.  Athena and I are both beyond excited.  She’s been pulling the new curriculum materials off the shelf and flipping through them in bubbly anticipation.  I adore bearing witness to this unbridled passion for exploring and learning.  It inspires me on an almost daily basis and makes it easier on the more challenging days of motherhood to keep things in focus.

One of the most fiery debates in the homeschool world, and perhaps the country at large, these days is the culture war of words being waged by the seemingly irreconcilably opposed camps of Creationism and Evolution. After reading about as much as I could get my hands on at the library on this topic, I was left with a frustrating sense of hopelessness about how to broach this controversial debate in our family’s homeschool program in a manor that would still convey our personal beliefs effectively, but also continue to foster a sense of respect and understanding for those with beliefs divergent from our own. I was also at a loss for decent resources to address the fact that we, personally, do not find spiritual truth and the science of evolution to be at odds with each other. Then a fellow homeschooling mother sent me to The Great Story website which discusses the compatibility of spirituality and science and even provides resources and activities for how to make this possible for the youngest of students. I am excited to utilize this resource and am now happily making plans for us to begin the Great Story Bead project next month in our history, science and spiritual studies. I wanted to be sure to pass on this quality resource to anyone else who may be looking to seek a peaceful middle ground in their own homeschooling adventures with this sometimes sticky subject.

As I type, our brand spankin’ new microscope is making its way to our happy home.  It took quite a while to decide on one.  Every step down this homeschooling path is a gigantic leap of learning for yours truly.  I now know much more about microscopes and how they are manufactured and marketed and sold than I ever thought I would.  When you begin looking for a mircoscope, you have to formulate a goal in your mind.  Do you want a scope that will take you all the way through elementary to high school biology or are you willing to upgrade later when the time comes?  Do you anticipate homeschooling overseas at any point?  Are your children really facinated by science?  Do you place a lot of emphasis on science or is it a more peripheral subject for your family?  These are all things to consider before you even dive into examining options.  If you want a basic microscope, plan on upgrading later, and aren’t planning on placing a great deal of emphasis on science, then you are going to be looking at an entirely different spectrum of microscopes than if you would like one scope to use for all grades and have a very science oriented curriculum plan.    So once you figure out where you fall, then you can start learning about basic features that are important to consider. 

The two most important factors I discovered are the issue of power and the mechanical stage option.  Some manufactures and suppliers will try to sell you on a 1000x microscope.  After much research, I discovered this is a total marketing ploy.  No one, not even professional microbiologist for the most part, needs a 1000x scope.  Most of the time, you cannot even get a 1000x scope to focus properly.  If you would like a scope that will last through high school and are planning on a decent emphasis on science, then a scope with the typical array of 4x, 10x and 40x objectives combined with a 10x eyepiece (giving you 40x, 100x and 400x magnifying power) will suit your every microscopic need through graduation.  When it comes to hunting for a mechanical stage, almost all retailers offer it as an add-on only, increasing the total cost of the scope.  What is the big deal about a mechanical stage anyway?  Well, without one, if you wish to move your specimen either horizontally or vertically, you must move your slide by hand.  This can be tricky as what you think is a tiny nudge can actually totally move your field of observation out of view depending on the magnification power you are viewing it with, resulting in the frustrating experience of shifting the slide back and forth over and over again until you get it right where you want it.  With a mechanical stage, you simply twist one of two knobs gently, while still viewing the slide through the eyepiece and the stage adjusts your field of observation gradually, by milimeters at a time.  Much, much easier. 

 We also decided that in this day and age and to make it a bit easier for Athena and I to view specimens together, we would look into adding a digital camera eye piece that you plug into your computer with a USB cable.  This allows you to both view and digitally photograph your specimen on your computer screen.  Technology is amazing sometimes!

 Well, after deciding what we wanted in a microscope, the best deal I could find was in fact through a homeschool supplier.  We ended up buying the Sonlight Ultra Variable Voltage Microscope. We bought the variable voltage version since we anticipate an overseas move in our near future and there was only a $10 price difference. Although we do not buy any curriculum from them, Sonlight’s microscope has everything we wanted in a scope, including a mechanical stage that came standard, for the best price. We purchased the microscope and the digital camera eyepiece for $313 and free shipping.

Next year at about this time, I will start joyfully hunting for the perfect telescope!

Take an ordinary deck of playing cards.  Decide what set of math facts you would like to work on with your child.  For ease of explanation, I will use the following set of addition facts:

0+5=5, 1+4=5, 2+3=5, 3+2=5, 4+1=5, 5+0=5

But this basic game can easily be played with any basic operation and any number of sets of facts.  When playing the “5 Game” remove all but the Ace, Queen and 2-5 cards.  Explain to the child that the Ace stands for the number 1 and the Queen for the number zero.  If you have a deck to spare, you can even write this directly on the cards to help the child remember.  Deal each player the same number of cards to begin with, adjusted depending on how many players and how large or smal a sum you are working with.  Three cards each to start would be good for this version of the game.  Turn over two cards face up to make two piles.  Place the rest of the cards face down to create a draw pile.  Determine who goes first.  The first player looks at the two numbers face up on the two piles.  Add them together to get the starting sum.  Then the first player looks at her own cards and determines if she can replace on of the starting numbers with one of her own cards to create the target sum (in this case: 5.)  In explanation, if the starting numbers are 2 and 4, the player could lay down a 3 (on top of the 4) or an Ace (on top of the 2) to create the target sum of 5.  If the player cannot create the target sum, they must draw a card from the draw pile.  If they can create the target sum, they do so and then may lay down an additional card of their choice on either pile to change the starting sum for the next player.  The first player to get rid of all their cards wins! 

 Again, this can be done to also work with subtraction, mulitplication or division as long as all players understand which operation and what final amount they are working with for the game.  The dealer must adjust how much of the deck is used depending on the math facts chosen for play.  When playing with younger children, manipulatives can be added if they are not yet moving into abstract thinking and need a touch of concretness to ground them.  Repeat joyfully and liberally with countless giggles until mysteriously the children have all their basic math facts memorized better than you do without tears or bloodshed!   

In honor of our shifting curriculum plans and Kindy Girl’s near completion of most of our Kindergarten work, I have decided to update everyone’s (except mine) blog names on both blogs.  Sooo…

By official decree:

Kindy Girl will hereafter be refered to as Athena, Goddess of Wisdom

The Master of Destruction will hereafter be refered to as Apollo, the Sun God (and twin sister of Artemis)

The Mistress of Destruction will hereafter be refered to as Artemis, Goddess of the Moon and the Hunt (and twin brother of Apollo)

 Big Dady will hereafter be refered to as Patris Maximus

 The Triad of Chaos will continue to retain their original group name when refered to as the awesome and powerful collective they continue to be.  Hopefully, future confusion will be minimal!