The Diosa Dotada Endeavor

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!

The is the motto of The Diosa Dotada Endeavor.  This month, anyway.  Every event that takes place these days must follow a strict, analytical procedure as dictated by Kindy Girl.  Identify the issue.  Observe the current state of affairs.  Formulate a hypothesis.  Test the hypothesis.  Observe the effects of the test.  If necessary, adjust the hypothesis and retest.  If not, drawn conclusions and make inferences.  We go through this process about everything these days.  Everything.  (My current obsession with designing an appropriate biology program for her is beginning to make more sense now isn’t it?)

Wake up.  Get dress.  Here comes the first scientific analysis of the day.  What to wear.  We (READ AS: an energized Kindy Girl with my bleary eyed behind dragging along at her avid insistance) observe the sky outside and feel the window pane.  We determine what we believe to be the likely weather pattern for the day, taking into account possible variations, and we select our attire based on those observations.  We almost always dress in some form of layers because a good scientist is prepared for unforseen shifts in her environment.  Next up, breakfast.  We often request a bowl of vanilla yogurt these days.  With fruit on the side.  Yesterday we observed that if we stir the cut up red strawberries into the yogurt, it will turn pink.  Today we formulate our new edible hypothesis.  If strawberries turn the yogurt pink,  perhaps blueberries will turn the yogurt blue.  Furthermore, if strawberries produce pink yogurt and blueberries produce blue yogurt, then there is a high probability that strawberries and blueberries together will produce purple yogurt.  We test this newly assembled multi-faceted theory.  We discover that blueberries by themselves actually turn the yogurt purple, but only after you smash them up well and adding the strawberries after that does not seem to make much difference.  Then we remember that we really do not like blueberries.  Especially smashed.  And certainly not smashed up in yogurt.  So we refuse to eat our breakfast.  And cheerfully ask for a bowl of cereal. 

These forrays into scientific thinking continue throughout the day.  There is a parenthood related joke somewhere in a movie I think, the punchline of which is long forgotten to me, that details a parent asking the child to occupy themselves for just a bit by building a better mouse trap.  Although Kindy Girl has not to my knowledge heard the joke, she is currently spending most of her day working to build a better ant trap just for her Crunchy Mama and Big Daddy.  We have ants in the apartment.  She has heard me complaining about them and about the noxious chemically-based and totally ineffectual ant traps Big Daddy has strewn about the place.  So she has taken it upon herself to design an ant trap made of orangic materials so as to satisfy Crunchy Mama’s natural tendencies, rid the apartment of ants for Big Daddy, and honor her often Buddhist-like nature by relocating them outside somewhere they can build a “happy ant home in their natural habitat” for themselves.  The first prototype was placed out on the patio last night before bed and monitored throughout the morning today.  No ants.  Kindy Girl decided this meant more research and insisted (politely) that her assigned research assistant (READ: me) finish that darn cup of coffee, put on some real clothes and drive her to the library for books about ants from the children’s section for her and the adult section for me because “sometimes they don’t put all the information [she needs] in the children’s books and [she needs me] to check the adult books too.”  The rest of the day has been research, research, research.  I expect the second prototype to emerge tomorrow.

After we see what color mango slices turn yogurt first though, of course. 

The Chicago Tribune is running an article about a young lady who has recently been accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Northwestern, Standford and University of Chicago and has been homeschooled since she was five years old. The homeschool listservs are all a twitter with her story. I am excited for her, really and truly. But stories like this also concern me and leave me with mixed feelings. I am glad to see non-Evangelical homeschooling get good press. The face of homeschooling in American is shifting. The homeschooling community is becoming more and more diverse by the second. Stories like this help highlight that fact. As Buffy the Vampire Slayer once chastised her mother, homeschooling is “not just for scary religious people anymore.” But I am not altogether satified with the image stories like this do place on that changing face for the general public. This bright young woman has been fortunate enough to be raised as the only child of decidedly well off parents. She has been exposed to experiences and materials most homeschoolers cannot even hope to provide their children with during their home education. She should not be seen as the new homeschooling norm. In all fairness, I realize fully that neither she, nor her parents, are asking to be seen in that manner, but the possibility does exist that as more stories like hers emerge in the media, she and others like her run the risk of becoming iconic figures in the homeschool subculture akin to the Colfax children. While I am thrilled that more and more high-caliber universities are welcoming, even seeking out, homeschoolers, (hopefully setting a good example for all American colleges) I am also concerned that the bar may inadvertently become set impossibly high for academically talented homeschoolers that never had access to anywhere near this family’s funds attempting to apply to colleges in the future. While her accomplishments are amazing, her passion for learning a testament to her parents’ commitment to her education and her obviously beautiful spirit enough to convince me that she most likely a totally delightful person, I cannot help but be slightly frustrated at the media for holding her up as some sort of homeschooling poster girl in whose image the rest of the families often making great financial sacrifices to home educate must strive to create their own children.

For all my rhetoric, there is one reason I have such a fiery passion for homeschooling that I rarely mention in most conversations on the topic.  I usually only share it with other homeschooling parents who express that they too harbor the same sweet secret.  As I continue to construct our 2008-09 biology curriculum from scratch, I am reveling with delight in the by-product.  By choosing to homeschool my children, I get the time and resources to remedy the numerous flaws of my own educational experience. 

The last time I studied biology was about fifteen years ago.  I cared more about choreographing my floor routine during varsity gymnastics practice or spending several evening hours yammering on the phone to or about my latest teen romance than actually paying attention to the scientific study of biology.  The situation was not helped any by my lackluster instructor whose Young Earth Creationist beliefs led him to skip whole chapters of the textbook and curriculum that he deemed violated his personal ethics.  And this was the Gifted and Talented class.  I skated through the course with a passing grade and barely any knowledge of the field.  Now, as I outline and plan our coming study of biology, I am learning heaps every single day I work on the project.  Before last week, I could not have, with an certainty, told you how many kingdoms of life there are on this planet.  Today, I could spend quite a bit of time explaining to you that some biologists feel they should be called ”kindoms” instead of “kingdoms” since modern taxonomy leads biologists to examine carefully the evolutionary genetic relationships between all life and classify accordingly.  I could also chat with you about the fact that some schools of thought have led and continue to lead biologists to differ as to the exact number of kin/kingdoms we should use, varying from only three to as many as seven.  (As a side note, after reviewing the data and arguments on all sides, I have decided that a five kingdom approach will suit us best for the level at which we will be working in the coming year.)  We could also now intelligently discuss the manner in which most botanists classify plants via respiration method, reproductive method and flowering capability or why the protists finally warranted their own seperate kingdom or what makes fungi classify as fungi and not plants or protists. 

As a child, teen and young adult, I always advertised myself as so very much not a math or science person.  As a (hopefully) more mature adult, I am beginning to awaken a passion for these subjects that no instructor ever sparked.  I have found a wonderful motivation in wanting to share the world with my children through homeschooling and I look forward to proving to myself that I can indeed be a math and science person.  If my current facination with biology is any indication, by the time I send my littlest ones off to college, I will have not only provided my children with a high-caliber education, but also filled in the many holes of my youthful educational experiences and perhaps even conquered physics and calculus just to prove to myself that I could indeed do it after all.   

Hello, my name is Obsessive Homeschooling Mom.  And I am a Curriculum Junkie.  As we work through the material on hand, I am always on the look out for the next step.  For months I have been reviewing sources for our next steps in science and history.  As we are planning to follow the general scope and sequence of a classical education, specifically a loose outline of The Well Trained Mind, our agenda for the coming year will include a focus on Ancient History (prehistory to the fall of Rome) and Life Science (biology, microbiology, zoology, protozoology, botany & mycology.)  So I have been hunting for materials that satisfy some specific criteria.  I want secular curriculum that is academic but still extremely enjoyable.  I want more than arts & crafts when it comes to hands-on projects.  I want a scientific, yet age appropriate, presentation of evolutionary content.  I want quality experiments based on the scientific method, but not cost or supply prohibitive to perform at home.  In short, I want something that does not yet exist (to my knowledge) as an inclusive curriculum.  I have found materials that come close, but nothing I am totally happy with yet.  So last week I decided to stop looking and start writing.  Why spend money on curriculum I find lacking?  Why not take all the effort I am putting into searching for a good fit and put it into designing the perfect fit instead?  I am now neck deep in my first real foray into the World of Do-ItYourself Curriculum and I have a confession to make…

I am in love with the process! 

It feeds my inner researcher with a gourmet spread.  It lifts my spirit to make fantastic discoveries and then allows my imagination to run wild with ways to use these discoveries to delight and educate Kindy Girl in the coming year.  It teaches me that there is great truth in the claim that almost all one needs to accomplish quality education is Internet access and a public library card.  I am on a gigantic treasure hunt and my coffers are overflowing.  The challenge in the next month or two is going to be cutting down the material to a workable one year program without trying to take on too much.  I have high hopes. 

By June or July at the lastest, I plan to have our Ancient History and Life Science programs ready.  I also hope to put together a pile of links, book recommendations and other resources to share here for anyone else who has caught the DIY curriculum bug and may be studying similar material to enjoy wallowing in at their leisure.  Until then, it’s once more into the fray!