Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Work Plans for the Week of January 19, 2016

I LOVE Monday holidays! You get that three-day weekend to look forward to the entire week before, then you get a three-day weekend, and THEN you get a short work week! It's like a bonus holiday!

And that's why I'm pretty stoked to be starting this week already at Tuesday. Last week's school week was a little hairy; the kids had been away from a regular school schedule for quite a while, and I'm definitely putting more work on their schedules now than I was in the last couple of weeks before that break. I know that it's an appropriate amount of work for them IF they focus, but wow, did they struggle with focus last week! We didn't actually get everything from last week's work plan finished until yesterday, so this week's goal is for sure to get all their daily work finished on the day that it is assigned. If nothing else, their Momma needs a homework-free weekend to recover!

Books of the Day this week include a few living picture books about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust (the older kid has a field trip coming up to hear from a Holocaust survivor, so I'm trying to prepare her for this), a couple of books on habitats and ecosystems (the younger kid is working on her Animal Habitats Girl Scout badge), a Cynthia Rylant novel for the younger kid and a Dolores Huerta biography for the older kid, and a couple of collections of comic strips that hopefully will expand the children's horizons beyond the VERY well-worn, Garfield, Foxtrot, and Calvin and Hobbes.

The younger kid's Project of the Week is to do more baking (or, rather, to do more decorating, as it's pretty clear that covering sweet treats with icing and candy is her real goal). The older kid's Project of the Week is to finish setting up her online Girl Scout cookie store (she can ship across the US! And take donations of Girl Scout cookies for US soldiers! Message me with your email address if you'd like her to add you to her invitation list!), and to explore more marketing opportunities for her cookies. She actually checked out a couple of business books from the library this weekend, and initiated a conversation with me about how she could "empower" the younger kid to sell more cookies--clearly she's also reading those books!

I may have mentioned last week that in these dark winter days, I'm feeling the need to add more sensory experiences to the children's environment, so last week I got out the kinetic sand and left it enticingly on the table:


I'm still vacuuming kinetic sand off the floor, however, so this week I'm simply setting out our Mason jar of homemade waxed yarn. Maybe I'll keep alternating a week of a messy sensory experience with a week of a non-messy one?

And here's the rest of our week!


TUESDAY: The older kid just has a little more fraction conversion work to do in her Math Mammoth before she can review and move on, while the younger kid will spend the week measuring length in her Math Mammoth. Usually, I like to spend the first lesson of the week with some hands-on math enrichment, but first I need the kids to get back into the habit of working well on their math curriculum without all the stalling and complaints and plain-old tantrums that I got last week, ugh.

I'm attempting to guide each kid through earning a Girl Scout badge each month--they're both WAY into earning Girl Scout badges, but still need some mentoring to help them finish badge work. This month, we're working on the Junior Animal Habitats badge and the Cadette Animal Helpers badge. For the Animal Helpers badge, we'll be watching the PBS Nature series that explores the evolution of the dog as a human companion, and for the Animal Habitats badge, the children will be making a to-do list of everything that they need to do to make an appropriate habitat for a pet dog.

Yes, Friends, this *may* be the Year of the Pet Dog!

The kids both loved the first lesson in the Your Kids: Cooking curriculum that we started last week. The Your Kids: Cooking website has a set of free extension recipes for this lesson, so the kids can choose some of them to create this week. We'll be eating blintzes and Monte Cristos for dinner all week, hopefully--yum!

Today, we have both our weekly homeschool group's playgroup, AND the older kid and I have our first fencing class! I didn't make room for it in our weekly work plans the way that I usually do, because taking Monday off means that the rest of our week's schedule needs to be somewhat strict, but I feel that the rest of our day is light enough that the children should still have plenty of free time.

Daily work this week includes a page of cursive, daily review of "No Man is an Island," with the goal of finishing its memorization this week, and daily chores. We've been busy enough that I deleted any "special" chores this week; I'd forgotten, when I wrote last week's work plans, that the kids are also spending a good hour every day selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. I just need to resign myself to the fact that our house will be made of chaos until cookie season is finished.

WEDNESDAY: I've decided to use Joy Hakim's History of Us as a spine for our American Revolution unit. It not only covers the American Revolution in excellent detail, but, by moving more quickly through the books that come immediately before and after the one on American Revolution, we'll also be able to put the war into historical context. So, for now, we're moving quickly through Making Thirteen Colonies, reading the first four chapters on this day, and then zooming in on the makeup of a colonial town. We won't be visiting Jamestown on our American Revolution road trip this summer, alas, as I don't think that we'll be going as far south as Virginia, but there's both an online game and a free downloadable paper model that should give the kids a good idea of what it, and a typical town of the era, looked like.

The younger kid's ballet starts up again on this evening--she's thrilled to get back on the dance floor! Mental note to myself: is her uniform clean? Surely not...

THURSDAY: Although we really are just studying this particular chapter of our science textbook in order to get the background information about atoms and molecules that the kids will need to understand the molecular structure of rocks and minerals, I'm going to devote one more week to the atoms and elements lesson. Last week, we studied atoms, and this week, we'll study the Periodic Table of Elements. I want the children to be able to read and decipher the table, so we'll be playing this free downloadable card game, with a couple of modifications, to help them become more familiar with it.

Instead of a STEM activity at home, on this afternoon I'll be giving the kids the run of our local hands-on museum. They can explore and learn, my friend and I can chit-chat--win and WIN!

I've been thinking for a while now that Will would LOVE to join our local chapter of Pony Club, but a kid can only have so many extracurriculars, you know? Nevertheless, this semester may finally be the semester, even if she has to drop Mandarin class for it, sigh. Either way, I'll at least send her to the planning meeting to suss it out.

FRIDAY: The older kid, at least, really loves our study of the 2016 presidential election. She is interested in all things government and politics, and has already expressed the desire to be a lawyer (Matt and I think that her real dream job is dictator to a small island nation, but you almost have to be born into that job). On this day, the kids will continue their reading to learn about what makes a politician liberal and conservative, and then they'll have to research each of the presidential candidates to discover which are which. They'll also have to point to primary source evidence--not just a third person's opinion!--to prove each evaluation.

I think that I have just about completed my lesson plans for our female reproductive system study! On this day, we'll be memorizing the anatomy of the female and female reproductive systems, both with diagrams that are also coloring pages, and by watching the Crash Course episodes on the female reproductive system and the male reproductive system. I previewed both videos, of course, and while there are a couple of visuals that are *maybe* a little bluer than I'd prefer, the information in these videos is by far the most thorough.

FYI: Every time that I say that we're reading something or watching something for our lesson, you can assume that there's also a lecture/discussion on that material. A discussion requires that the children engage with the material in a way that reading or watching doesn't, and a lecture, even if it's just me explaining the same concept in different words, will always inspire the kids to ask questions and become curious about things that they simply don't when only watching or reading.

Finally, on this day we'll be completing the second lesson in the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Program. I still don't totally know if I'll actually have the children write "novels," but this lesson requires a child to form opinions, backed up with textual evidence, about books that they've read, and that's a great skill to master!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Ballet, ice skating, chess club, shilling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. Playing in the snow, if the forecast is correct. Watching The Martian on DVD and eating pizza, if I have my way!

As for me, I'll spend this week organizing a LOT of Girl Scout stuff--it's a busy season for Girl Scouts!--completing a few writing assignments, working on a quilt, and seriously contemplating moving my work bench and circular saw indoors so that I can make some shelves. Is that crazy? All the sawdust!

Still.... shelves!!!!!!!

Saturday, January 16, 2016

Junior Ranger Field Trip: Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site

One of the interesting things about the drive to my hometown is that there are two completely different routes that you can take to get there (south, then west, or west, then south), and yet both routes take approximately the same time.

When we visited the Pink Palace Museum and the Little Rock Central High National Historic Site, we drove south, then west. When we visited the Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, we drove west, then south.

Here, then, at the junction of west and south, is where Grant lived for a time with his in-laws. 


But one of the interesting things about the in-laws?

They owned slaves.

That was actually the most interesting thing about the national historic site, as well, since the museum seems to have taken great care to document what they can about the lives of the enslaved African American workforce who lived and labored here. Unfortunately, a lot of it is speculation, as there of course wouldn't be much textual evidence of the personal lives of the enslaved people--


--but there were a few instances where the family made revelations that seem shocking to us, but must have been commonplace to them. The following letter, for instance, is both powerful and disturbing, as in it, a member of the family is recording the sale of teenagers and children; the one-year-old is, at least, being sold with her seventeen-year-old mother, but the six-year-old little girl who is also being sold is certainly not her daughter, nor the daughter of the eighteen-year-old being sold. As well, the seventeen-year-old is described as a "mulatress," which I explained to Will meant that her mother had been sexually abused by a white slave owner, probably one of the men in the family.


The kids weren't as interested in the museum portion of the historic site--
Syd is buying things for this room using 1850s currency values.

--although Will, of course, found the barn--

--and the horse stuff!


Matt was all, "Why are you taking my picture, Woman?"

He clearly needs a Ulysses S Grant coat of his own.
Just between you and me, it's because he's so pretty.

 Oh, and check this out--Ulysses S Grant's hair!

The Junior Ranger activities were pretty challenging here, which is awesome--I'm a little disappointed every time I see a word search or a maze in a Junior Ranger book, because really? You've got an entire national park full of information to encourage a child to explore, and instead you're going to have her sit here and do a maze?

Anyway, the activities here were great ones that required a lot of research and the use of environmental clues, although some of the information was presented during our tour, and therefore although we knew we'd heard it, the kids had a lot of trouble remembering the specific details. Such was the case with the last name of the enslaved man that Ulysses S Grant had freed. I knew that our tour guide had said it, but we couldn't remember it, and in the site's film, which we watched at the end of our visit, they only said his first name.

Will eventually had to leave that one answer blank when she presented her book to the Park Ranger. I was surprised that the Park Ranger gently chastised her for not having this answer, and told her that the man's last name could be found in the film. I chimed in with, "Hmmm... have you seen the film recently?" 

This same Park Ranger, as we were chatting a few minutes later, also informed me that homeschooled children are "less curious" than children in schools, because when she leads field trips, she claims that the children in homeschool groups ask fewer questions than the children in school groups.

I, of course, told her that homeschooled children are accustomed to using all kinds of research to get their questions answered, and are just as likely to browse the museum and read the informational signs as they are to simply blurt a question out to the nearest authority figure. I may have imparted this information a tad tartly, because the Park Ranger next shared with us the location of a nearby ice cream shop that's somewhat of a local secret, and by the time we'd driven there and bought ourselves some ice cream (they turn each cup upside-down when they pass it to you, to show off how thick their ice cream is!), I had mostly forgiven her.

Still... my children, less curious than other children. The very idea! 

Friday, January 15, 2016

Your Kids Cooking: French Toast

I'm not much of a cook.

Mind you, I *can* cook, or at least I *could* cook, if it was something that I devoted myself to learning, but frankly, I'm more of the "Didn't I just cook you dinner yesterday?" type of parent than the "homemade dinner that we eat all sitting around the table together every night" type.

I do, however, want the kids to learn how to cook, and to learn to enjoy cooking, and since they're probably picking up neither from watching me half-heartedly slog about the kitchen three nights a week (and calling Matt to grab salads and deli chicken from the grocery store on the way home from work the other four nights), I've decided that this semester, we're going to study Home Ec.

Our textbook for this unit is Your Kids: Cooking, a book that was given to me for free by a publicist. The kids used it for the first time this week to make French toast, and they actually ended up with French toast!

Here are some of the lessons that they we learned:

1. You've got to buy your ingredients ahead of time. Is this a thing that all adults do? I go to the grocery store every now and then and buy the things that I think might be used in making meals, but then each day, I sort of just scan the kitchen and figure out what I can make with what I already have. Like... sandwiches.

But with this book, there's a section that has the recipe in brief, and you're supposed to look at that, then look at the ingredients list, and then go buy what you need so that you can make this recipe in a few days. Huh. Who knew?

Oh, and not eat it before you make the recipe. We had to buy bacon twice, on account of I cooked it all the day after I bought it, and then was like, "Crap! That was our French toast bacon, not our bacon and egg sandwich bacon!"

2. You've got to get out everything that you need ahead of time, and it's got to be the right stuff. Is this another thing that all adults do? Will did not want to gather all of the supplies before they begin, probably because she's been infected with my lazy "Okay, 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla... Where's the teaspoon? Where's the vanilla? Shoot, are we out of vanilla? That's okay, because I can't find the teaspoon, either. I wonder if a tablespoon of peppermint extract will work?" (Hint: it will not).

Getting out all of the supplies, too, was a good way to emphasize to her that you do actually need what the recipe calls for. For instance, Will grabbed a mixing bowl for the batter, and was not pleased when I insisted that the recipe clearly calls for a flat-bottomed bowl. She's super stubborn, and although I try to give her the freedom to do what she wants most of the time, sometimes I simply have to say, "Hey. You are going to do this thing the way that I am telling you to do this thing, or I will make bad things happen in your life." This was one of those times.

Math also tends to be one of those times, as does dinner, when the reality that she's basically feral and also tends to grow almost an inch a month is exposed by her desire to pretty much just tip the plate up to her face and inhale rather than, you know, use her fork or, like, chew.

3. You've got to know what you're doing before you start. I'm still not totally sold on this one, but the DVD that accompanies the book has the kids watch the process for each step before completing that step on their own. So, they had to watch the proper way to add and mix all the ingredients to make the French toast batter before they can start adding ingredients, themselves. This was a little slow for Will, BUT it included some helpful cooking tips that they we may not have known ahead of time, such as how to whisk until something is completely mixed, and how to hold the spatula so you can flip the bread.

Her face is probably too close to the burner, but the book didn't say not to put your face right next to the burner, so I think it's fine.

The one thing that I think I will note in the recipe book for next time is the amount of butter that's called for to grease the pan. I don't remember off-hand how much it was, but it was, I think, too much for our smallish pan, and so the French toast came out a little greasy.

To add to this meal, Syd also made the smoothie recipe that's included in the French toast chapter, and I made bacon in the oven. It was an awesome lunch!
Yes, those are dirty dishes in the background. There will never not be dirty dishes in the background.
Well, I say "lunch," but somehow it was after 4:00 pm by the time we sat down to eat our feast. We may have to work on meal timing a little bit more...

There are several more bonus recipes that are free for this chapter (although you have to pay for the bonus recipes for the other chapters--bummer!), so I think that we'll spend our Home Ec lesson next week trying some of them out, but after that?

Macaroni and cheese!

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Homeschool Field Trip: The Pink Palace Museum in Memphis


When we have an all-day drive with the kids, we usually try to stop somewhere kid-friendly for a couple of hours at some point during the day. I'd rather arrive at my destination two hours behind schedule than keep two active kids trapped in car seats for 10+ hours of a day.

It's nice for the adults to stretch their legs and see some sights, too, of course!

We had a LOT of back-and-forth driving over the winter break, so I've got a couple more places to share with you, including this detour that we took to the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis. It's an ASTC Passport Program museum, just like our hometown museum, so being members of our hometown science museum means that we get free admission to this one!

Pro tip: Membership in an ASTC Passport Program museum is 1000% worth the membership fee. We visit Passport Program museums for free every single time we travel--not only is it incredible value for our money, then, but it's also educational, entertaining, and it sure as hell breaks up a long drive!

On this particular winter break trip, we spent a happy couple of hours exploring the Pink Palace. It wasn't as hands-on of a museum as Syd would prefer, but it did have some cool immersive exhibits to explore, as well as the usual informative displays:

I have never seen this before! It uses near-infrared light that doesn't fluoresce on the veins, so you can see them in the contrast! Those are my veins in that image! 

Syd is always willing to pretend to be attacked by animatronic dinosaurs!
 
There was an exhibit on microscopy that the adults found interesting, but it also included this microscope that's exactly like the one that Darwin used. We're currently listening to the Calpurnia Tate series in the car (and it's an AMAZING series--go read it!), so a Darwin-era microscope has excellent relevance!


Will, of course, loves museums even when they don't contain splashy, hands-on exhibits, and I'm pretty sure that she read every single sign and looked at every single display in the entire place. Here she is checking out bird skeletons!


hummingbird vs. emu
 
One of my favorite exhibits was the one on evolution. It includes fossil models that aren't behind a display case, so that you can actually see them up close from all angles, and it even puts many of them into context for you:

We did a human evolution unit early on in our homeschool days, and it's still one of my favorite subjects to continue to explore.

There was also a huge, fabulous FAQ schooling the citizens of Memphis on evolution:


And that's how one of my new fantasy projects is to create a religious-style tract on evolution, and then leave it under people's windshield wipers and pass it out in science museums.

Would I get the same horrified reactions from others that I gave to that horrible religious tract-wielding man at the Field Museum? Karma always prevails!

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Junior Ranger Field Trip: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site

We really did need to make the 11-hour drive from my hometown back to our home town in one day. And yet, the children were both writing an essay the next week, and one of the possible subjects for this essay is the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School...

On this 11-hour drive, we were driving right through Little Rock.

There is actually a National Historic Site, complete with visitor center and museum, for Little Rock Central High School.

And that National Historic Site has a Junior Ranger program.

Obviously, we went there.
My Master's in Library Science with an emphasis on Special Collections requires me to tell you that you really shouldn't write over the displays, but when the children have a booklet to fill out and no clipboard, I generally can't bring myself to enforce this.
 On the way to the site, we discussed the two main points of the essay prompt--the significance of the event, and how it inspires you--and in the museum, I took photos of almost every informational sign, which I've since printed out so that the children can use them as resources:

Since it was freezing outside and raining, we didn't hike around the outside of the school, and since we were on a schedule, we didn't take the guided tour of it, either. I am comforting myself with the fact that it's the events that took place at the school that are important, not the building or its neighborhood.

I still wish I'd taken that guided tour, though!

Nevertheless, the museum was excellent, immersed Will (Syd has less patience for museums, but wandered around mostly patiently while Will read every. Single. Sign), and offered a thorough explanation of the event, as well as the context to help one understand its historical and cultural significance.

You can see the high school in the background--it's still an active high school, and school was, of course, in session on this day.
 The kids did, indeed, earn their Junior Ranger badges--

--and are working on their essays this week. It's an interesting process, writing a research-based essay when most of the research was done in person; I'm encouraging the children to write in the first person, when necessary, and to use their experiences as evidence when relevant. I quickly realized, however, that they still need to look up all the same resources that they would have needed to look up anyway--the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site's website has the timeline facts and other historical details, all the little things that you need for an essay but that you of course didn't memorize from your visit.

I'm hoping, though, that the first-person experience will add depth to the children's writing, as I hope, and do feel confident, that it added depth to their understanding of US history, Civil Rights, politics, and ethics. Will, in particular, seems really interested in government and politics, and I'm eager to offer her the enrichment, whenever possible, that will give her an ever more nuanced understanding of these subjects.

And as a side-effect of her primary source research, she can now do a killer impersonation of a 1950s-era racist Southern politician. Seriously, Faubus, we can HEAR the entitled smugness in your voice!

Monday, January 11, 2016

Work Plans for the Week of January 11, 2016: Back to Work!

Well, I now know exactly one good way to find yourself excited about getting back to the regular schedule of a homeschool week.

Over our extra-long break, I did require the kids to work on their Math Mammoth regularly, and Will to continue memorizing her spelling words (she has a spelling bee this weekend!), and the kids managed to earn TWO new Junior Ranger badges (Syd chose to re-earn a third one!) and visit a new-to-us science and history museum. Nevertheless, I'm happy today to be back on a regular schedule.

Well, I *say* I'm happy, but Syd didn't wake up until 10:00, primarily because I kept them both up until 11:30 last night to watch the new Sherlock episode, so we'll see if I'm still happy when we're doing most of today's schoolwork tonight.

You'll notice that I reworked our work plans over the break. I had been giving out a second sheet just for the kids' chore list, but two sheets are easier to lose and more inefficient and wasteful than one sheet, so I figured out how to squeeze everything onto one page. Now the kids' daily chores are listed in their plans to check off along with their schoolwork--
This is what unloading the dishwasher looks like--they never *quite* put the dishes away where I want them to.
--and the space for special chores is at the bottom--I tend to handwrite in at least one of the chores on the day of, because I like to have the kids help with whatever I especially need help with that day. The chore that's already written in is usually something that's been nagging at me for a while. So, for instance, one of today's chores is written in as refilling the fish tank completely, because the sight of that 3/4 full fish tank has been bothering me, but I decided just this morning that I also cannot STAND having the Christmas decorations up for one more day, so I wrote that in this morning.

I also have been wanting, for a while now, to encourage the children to do more independent studying in projects of their choosing, so I've tentatively incorporated a Project of the Week for this semester. The idea is that over the weekend, the kids, with my help, each choose a project or area of study or activity that they'd like to work on independently over the week. I then have time set aside every day that week for work on that project. This first week, Syd decided that she wants to create three of the recipes from The Nerdy Nummies Cookbook, which I have checked out from the library. She and her dad bought the ingredients for all the recipes last night, and she'll make them this week, probably with adult help. Will's project is to research the perfect flight simulator computer game to buy with the money that her Uncle Chad gave her for Christmas, then to learn how to play it using the joystick that he also gave her--this is a handy way to work around the fact that she's grounded from all non-school screens until Friday, on account of she pitched the world's most ridiculous fit about modeling fraction division with Cuisenaire rods last Friday. We'll see how these projects go!

Books of the Week include a couple more biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr., a couple more books about World War 2, and a few random books that I thought the kids would like--Amelia Bedelia for Syd, horses for Will, etc.

And here's the rest of our week!

MONDAY: Syd is in another time unit in Math Mammoth, while Will is finishing up dividing fractions. I have been surprisingly disappointed with the calculating fraction lessons in Math Mammoth--I feel like I have had to extensively supplement every single one, including making my own lessons in Adobe InDesign that model the calculations in understandable ways. I put so much work into these that I may put them up on Teachers Pay Teachers, so stay tuned!

We do a lot of writing, but I thought that it might be nice to try a more guided unit, so I'm going to experiment with the NaNoWriMo's Young Writers program--unseasonably, of course, but who says that you only have to write your novels in November? Lesson 1, which we'll do today, covers the definition of a novel, asks the kids to describe the characteristics of some of their favorite novels based on this definition, and then has the kids create an ad for one of those favorite novels. I'm curious to see if my two will want to videotape or write our their ads.

We're also going to spend one week a month using the MENSA A Year of Living Poetically curriculum, primarily because I like that the vocabulary and comprehension components of each poem are included. I'll introduce the kids to the poem today, then give them the rest of the week to complete the packet and memorize the poem.

Other work on this day includes our volunteer gig at the local food pantry, studying the spelling lists from the Scripps 2015/2016 spelling bee study guide, and a page from each kid's cursive workbook. We've also got a snowy playdate with a friend at the park this afternoon, and there will 100% be the selling of some Girl Scout cookies at some point. My kids are serious about their cookie goals this year!

TUESDAY: I'll likely be combining geography and history quite a bit during our American Revolution unit study, so before we even begin the history component, I'm having the kids simply memorize the states that were once our 13 original colonies, along with their capitals and geographic locations. I think this will add valuable context to our history studies right from the beginning.

Finally, both children are old enough to compete in the many essay contests that rule our winters--mwa-ha-ha! Happily, one of the possible topics for this particular Black History Month essay contest is the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Can you guess what city we drove through to and from my hometown last week? Little Rock! Can you guess where one of the places that the kids earned a Junior Ranger badge is? The Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site! We discussed the questions posed by the essay promote both before and after our visit, and so I think they'll be well-prepared to write this essay.

We've got a sledding playdate today, and I wouldn't be surprised if our homeschool group's playgroup on this day also involves sledding!

WEDNESDAY: I had a little time over the break to do some Girl Scout badge research, and so I have a plan to do some badges together as a family, sneaking in yet more academic enrichment as we do so--don't tell! The first badge we're doing together is the Animal Habitats badge for Juniors and the Animal Helpers badge for Cadettes, combining them so that each project that the kids do will count for each badge. On this particular day, we'll be watching episodes from PBS' Nature series (to meet a requirement for the Animal Helpers badge that asks children to research animal/human interactions), and then filling out this animal habitat form for three different animals found in the series (to meet a requirement for the Animal Habitats badge that asks children to research animal habitats).

I am REALLY excited about our cooking lessons! I was given a free copy of Your Kids: Cooking to review, and on this day we start with lesson one, French toast. There's a DVD tutorial that kids can follow along, and extension recipes that kids can cook afterwards that build on the specific French toast skills. Frankly, this book is going to teach me how to cook, too!

Following my essay-writing plan, this is the day that the kids will each write the rough draft of their Little Rock Central High essays.

THURSDAY: Will wants to study rocks and minerals, so I found a 9th grade science textbook that we'll be using for this study. I chose this particular textbook because it begins with a chapter on atoms and elements, and then moves on to chapters on minerals, sedimentary, and igneous rocks. I'd been wanting to cover atoms and elements with the kids, so I'm happy that I don't have to wait for a unit on chemistry to do it. Some of the information in the textbook will be over Syd's head, particularly, but I can help her distill the most important facts while Will absorbs more of the material. As part of this chapter, we'll be making atom models for various elements using beads and wires (and perhaps also using them to explore isotopes and electron energy levels), and the chapter's experiment on isolating the iron from fortified cereal for our STEM lesson on this day. The kids will enjoy picking out some sugar cereal from the grocery store!

FRIDAY: I am VERY excited to study the 2016 election with the kids, especially as Will is super into politics and government. We'll be using Election 2016: A Guide for Young People as our spine, but with a LOT of supplementing. For instance, after reading about all the candidates on this day, I'll be having the kids research each candidate online, finding their photo and main stances, perhaps watching a campaign ad, then making an infographic about each one that will allow us to track their progress throughout the year.

We need to study health this semester, particularly women's health, and most particularly puberty, so on this day the kids will be making a kid-sized model of the human body, complete with organs, just so we know where everything goes.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Ice skating, a spelling bee for Will, and rock climbing for our Girl Scout troop! Also hot chocolate, I think. Maybe a Family Movie Night. Definitely a lot of reading on the couch. Brownies? Perhaps...

As for me, I'll be spending the week working on that health unit, making a couple of etsy orders, dyeing wooden beads for atomic models, doing TONS of Girl Scout cookie sales prep, and rethinking the bedroom nook where the children have their bunk bed. After all, Will needs a place to store her sword collection AND her dragon collection, don't you know?

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Last Christmas

This holiday season was long and wearisome, and it still doesn't feel over, as Pappa's funeral was just this morning. Funerals are good only in that you know that after them, you can start to figure out how to feel okay again. It's officially after the funeral, now, so tomorrow I will officially start to figure that out. Feel free to post helpful tips.

And for as much as the New Year's holiday was spent mourning Pappa's death and even the Christmas holiday was spent hospital-bedside--
On Christmas morning, Pappa naps as Syd plays with her brand new Ponies.

--I am requiring myself to remember that quite a lot of it was joyful, as well. We baked a truly astonishing number of Christmas cookies, and decorated some epic gingerbread houses:









We did our usual tour of the most elaborately decorated house in Arkansas, and the town park with a Christmas lights trail and a Christmas train that runs through it:


We have seen every single member of our family currently living in the state, I believe, and even a few other out-of-state family members. The kids' favorite member of our family, however?

This new puppy of my mother's.

We ate ice cream floats from an old-fashioned soda fountain and visited the national historic site again so that Syd could show off her 4th Grader National Parks Pass and earn their Junior Ranger badge for a second time:

Such nice little lions...
...until they're not!
And we did, of course, have a lovely Christmas day:
Time for Daddy to wake up! 
My sweet girl is always the most excited to see others open the gifts that she gives them.
And I love that I caught Will's excitement watching Syd open a gift of her own.
Will, herself, mostly received dragons.

 See? It was a nice Christmas.

At some point, I know, the grief will fade from these memories of this holiday, and I'll remember again the happiness and contentment that I also felt. It will be easier to think of the last days that I spent with Pappa, without feeling sad that those were my last days with him. I know, intellectually, that this will happen.

For now, however, I'll just say that I will be very, very glad to see tomorrow.