Treasure

I thought this day would never come.  We actually read the very last chapter of Story of the World.  I felt a little choked up; I won't be reading this book again until Daniel is Evie's age and Lula is Fiona's!  Evie and Shane will be slogging away on independent study the next time I read this book.  Today's topic was the Spanish Armada and the war between England and Spain.

Sifting for treasure

I had a little "hands on" activity ready to go... 

I love the look of intense concentration on Daniel's face

I tossed a handful of jewels in the sandbox for Daniel and Lula...

Freeplay: Daniel decides to sort the jewels by shape.  I was pleasantly surprised!

...and then we painted little treasure chests and filled them with fake jewels.

Lula was happy with a piece of paper

The girls played and played with the jewels, and I even heard rumors of a pirate stealing some of Evie's jewels!  Then the kids went down to the pond for a swim...

The Spanish Armada

Sir Francis Drake and Lord Howard of Effingham

...which led to a "hands on history" activity that I actually had to stop.  The English were bombarding the Spanish Armada with mud balls and the Spanish didn't like it. 

I'm still a little surprised we made it through the whole book.  I remember when I first created my excel spreadsheet with all the little details and activities I wanted to do.  Every few weeks, I would update my spreadsheet and check off the chapters we read and activities we finished.  And now...well, we're done with history until next September!

Teaching Shakespeare

As a public schooled gal myself, I wasn't exposed to Shakespeare until I was in high school.  But as a homeschooling mom, I get to expose my kids to all sorts of things!  (Note: the pictures don't have anything to do with the post)

When Mark made us turn off Pictionary on the Wii U, we played real Pictionary and made him play too!

We are reading Story of the World: The Middle Ages for history this year.  When we got to the chapter on Shakespeare, I read the bite-sized version of Macbeth with my best reading skills and my kids were hooked.  Shane sighed, "I wish I could have seen that!"  Guess what Shane? People perform Shakespeare's plays all over the world every single year!  And that started our journey...

Can't play video games? Draw pictures of playing video games!

First, I went to my online library catalog.  I found Shakespeare for children in picture books, graphic novels (AKA comic books), and even manga formats!  (Although one should preview any manga before handing it off to young children)  I requested popular Shakespeare-themed movies on DVD and Mark took it a step further and requested DVDs of live performances of Shakespeare plays.  It took me about four years to figure out that I didn't need an official list of books to go along with what we are studying, I just needed to check out everything the library has to offer and look for gems.  I love the library.

Photo Bomb!

The kids really enjoyed a beautifully illustrated book based on A Midsummer Night's Dream by Bruce Coville (even Ian listened in although he was supposed to be doing his own history work).  They laughed at Nick Bottom and gasped when I used the word "ass."  Ian was the first to chuckle, "Bottom.... ass..." which started the joyous journey into the enjoyment of Shakespeare's wordplay.  Ian is reading Tales From Shakespeare which is a prose version of the plays first published in 1807, so he is getting a great exposure to the story lines and characters.  He really enjoyed The Merchant of Venice and I don't even know what that is about!

Tutu high on that ladder!

Next, we watched a movie version of A Midsummer Night's Dream produced in 1935.  This was the only version our library had on DVD (I was looking for the one with Michelle Pfeiffer).  I took a chance on the old black n white, and this movie turned out to be an awesome addition to our study!  In 1935, there were no computer graphics, so we enjoyed the "trick photography" and other special effects.  Mickey Rooney, who was 15 years old at the time, played Puck and had the most obnoxious laugh; my kids delight in imitating it!  But the absolute best part for me was when Oberon spoke, "I know a place where the wild thyme blows..." and we all realized that we've heard that line before...like a million times just this winter...in a Baby Einstein movie.  The movie happens to be World of Words, but it used to be called Baby Shakespeare. Now it all makes sense!

I love squash!

I have to interrupt this monologue of Shakespeare educational experience to relate a Twin Firs Adventure.  While we were watching A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shane lost a tooth.  A molar.  In the bowl of popcorn he and Ian were sharing.  They had to eat that popcorn one kernel at a time until they found the tooth, about halfway down.  Then, Shane dropped it again!  They didn't find it until they reached the bottom of the bowl.  Luckily they found it before either one ate it!

I can sit!

So anyway, now we have a whole list of Shakespeare movies to watch, including a two-disc, four hour documentary and two less popular tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus.  We are planning a Shakespeare film festival this weekend, but I'm thinking it will last all summer long.  The only thing missing is a summer stock production of Shakespeare....I love how homeschooling has enriched my life as well as my children's. I hope they look back on this time of their education and remember how much fun we had.  And I hope they internalize that learning, and the enjoyment learning, is not confined to the time period between September and June, and that we don't learn because we need an A, but because this world is wonderful, exciting place with all sorts of things to discover...

...maybe not that well!

The End!

That's How We Roll

Today's title is courtesy Ian.  I was sorta complaining about the fact that I cook up a good breakfast (egg and sausage burritos), just to have everyone hungry again and needing to stop doing schoolwork to eat two hours later.  "That's how we roll, Mom!"  Indeed it is. The hard part is regaining that energy we had before the snack break.

Daniel colored a picture of "Nick-a-pic-our-us" disguised as Spiderman

How about a homeschool update? I haven't posted too much about how we are doing school lately, unless it is a fun activity like painting or bubble blowing... Remember how I dropped out of our public school program last summer?  And I had a great plan for Ian and the other kids?  Well, just after things started to settle down after Christmas, I realized that we had completely lost all motivation.  I was stuck in this terrible rut of having a crying baby and a homeschool method that required planning in advance.  I had no planning time, only crying time.  I needed some go-to-the-table-and-work-on-your-workbook materials.  Luckily for me, my same coordinator had an opening and still had my lesson plans I submitted last spring.  It was so easy to just slip right back into the program.  The kids are motivated to get their work done because they don't want to get an unsatisfactory review from the school.

In addition to going back to our old method of schooling (reading history out loud together, language arts workbooks and math independently, recess), I've added a new component: notebooking!  I really hate language arts workbooks and so do my kids.  It is such a fragmented way of learning, especially writing.  The workbook will teach, "This is an example of expository writing: a biography." Blank stares. "List people you could write a biography about." Groans "Rearrange these sentences in chronological order." Are we done yet?  With notebooking, I just printed off some blank biography note book pages from notebookingpages.com, read a chapter in Story of the World (today was Copernicus and Galileo), and got the kids writing...

Each kid writes at their own level.  Fiona wrote names, making sure to use capital letters, and one sentence that she dictated to me and then copied in her best handwriting.  Evie practiced writing dates correctly and capitalizing country names, and learned how to put information in books in her own words.  Shane wrote a list of interesting facts and then wrote a five sentence paragraph...a biography...about Copernicus.  Don't they all look so peaceful and studious? 

The truth behind the pictures is...it is so insanely loud around the table.  You don't see Lula and Daniel, but they are there.  Daniel almost always has some LOUD commentary or demand that I'm not listening to because I'm busy answering the LOUD questions from the other kids while Lula LOUDLY needs her shoes on or wants to color on someone's paper or wants the pencil someone else is writing with or wants to sit on my lap (Heidi is taking regular naps during our school morning now-yes, yes, yes!).  "Do I HAVE to keep writing?" "How many sentence do I have to write?" "How do you spell..." "What? I can't hear you! So-and-so is being too LOUD!" Then Mark comes out for his breakfast and praises us all for our awesome one room schoolhouse method and all of a sudden, everyone was hungry and needed apples and and all that awesome momentum gets lost... and so do the kids when they run off to play...So I just get on my computer and start blogging...

Standing With Stones

As I was browsing the DVDs at the library, I found Standing With Stones, a documentary detailing many of the megaliths in Great Britain and Ireland.  I checked it out, figuring it might be good filler for our history.  We are learning about the middle ages, but since most of what we learn takes place in Europe, I figured it wouldn't hurt to travel back to ancient times in this area of the world.

Shane immediately started taking notes and learning the names of the different stone structures: stone circles, henges, cairns, cists, etc.  He was busy writing down the locations of the different megalith sites, but the movie moved so fast we couldn't keep up!  I didn't know how long the movie was, so we kept watching and watching and watching....pretty soon my living room looked like a public school classroom when the teacher puts a movie on: half the students were sound asleep and the other half were fooling around quietly.  A phone call woke me up, and I had errands to run, so we packed up and left...

On our way to town, my kids had a great time pointing out large rocks that have been used for different purposes.  The Longbranch Improvement Club uses large rocks to outline their parking lot; this became the Longbranch Stone Row.  The cemetery was filled with dolmen.  The guy who lives at that one spot that gets icy at the top of the hill, he decorates the end of his driveway with cairns.  He happened to be building a new one, which was a major bonus for us sight-seers!

When we got home, one of my educated children demonstrated learning with her very own stone circle.  Whether or not it was made from pagans who danced on Sunday remains to be seen.  For anyone who was worried that we were only doing math and language arts this year, stop worrying!  There are so many awesome amazing things that just don't fit into normal textbooks and aren't on the radar of the normal lesson planner.  I love finding a random documentary and using it for "schoolwork."  I can't imagine sitting down with my lesson plans and thinking, "Hmm. Next spring, I definitely want to cover eschatology, so I better go and find our supplies..."  Nope. It's more like, "Next year is American History. I better go find my Jean Fritz books."

Painting China

We got a little behind in school work last week when we took our trip up north...so we spent this lovely rainy day...

Not the best day to leave your boots on the stairs!

...catching up on grading math books and art projects! 

Turtle-themed plate

The activity guide that goes with the history curriculum suggests making clay bowls with air dry clay and painting them with acrylic paints to look like Ming porcelain.  I instead purchased a set of ceramic dishes from the second-hand store and we painted them with porcelain paint.

Some used more paint than others *smile*

 I got "painter's" block right when we started, so I went for the minimalistic style.

Home, household, family, school of thought

The best part of the project was pulling out some of our Ming-style tea cups that are stashed away.

The dark blue set with the gold dragon was brought here from China by a sailor*.  The set belonged to Mark's great-grandmother and Grandad remembered drinking tea out of it when he was a little boy.  This house is located about a mile away from the epicenter of the 2000 earthquake and amazingly, none of the china in this cupboard even cracked.  I haven't decided if earthquakes or being located in my school room is more dangerous!

 *I am not positive on these details, so I may edit later:)

Cuneiform Cookies

Can you think of a better way to learn about the first writings?  (It says Cookies YUM!)

Bountiful Blessings

Fiona has a letter of the week.  This week, she is learning B.  She already knows B, but I'm using this as an opportunity to randomly show words that start with B and have a B sound in the middle.

Like SilverBow Farm.  We also happen to be learning about the first peoples and how nomads settled down in the Fertile Crescent to be farmers in history.

Today we were Blessed to share in the Bounty of SilverBow farm's corn crop.  I called it a field trip because we were to Be farmers for a day!

We went to this farm last year with the church's preschool play program to visit pumpkin patch (that was a lot of Ps!).  The lady who runs the farm was impressed with Ian last year and let him drive the quad!  He was pleased to help out again this year!  We picked corn:

 Lots and lots of corn!  And then we took it back to....

...the garage where we...

 ...shucked...

 ...blanched...

 ...cut the corn off the cob...

 ...and packed the corn into bags...

 ...meanwhile chowder was being made with ingredients fresh-picked from the garden and salmon pulled from the freezer labeled "Blue Moon King."  Her husband caught the salmon on the blue moon last month!  Have you ever heard of a tastier sounding soup?

 The kids were very helpful when we were picking and shucking, but boiling water, sharp knives, and kids don't mix too well.  They got busy...

...eating the raw corn!  Oh, what a heavenly sweet corn!  The corn wasn't our only blessing.  While we were cleaning up, we were told of another picking opportunity...

...Blueberries!  The Bushes have grown wild, so the kids and I Bushwhacked our way through (with Lula in the front-pack), trying to avoid Blackberries.  My smarty-pants kids said things like, "We were farmers, now we are going backwards and foraging wild berries!"

When we were finally tired (okay, when Daniel and Lula were tired) we packed up and came home.  Our grand total was twenty pounds of corn ready for the freezer and five gallon bags of blueberries.  All organic and for the price of our labor.  What an awesome experience!

Ancient Egyptian Mystery & First Week Complete!

After a week reading Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos, Ian is happy to announce we have our very own mystery to solve.  I usually read at night while I wait for Daniel to fall asleep next to me.  Last night, I was previewing Tales of Ancient Egypt for next week's literature assignments.  I clearly remember looking at the clock (10:00 PM, if I go to sleep now, I'll get eight hours of sleep), closing the book, stacking it with my other books, turning off my light (is Mark was ever going to get off his computer?), and snuggling under my blankets ...and the next thing I know Lula is crying in her crib and it is 1:00 AM.  I go to her room, pick her up, and turn around.

Tales of Ancient Egypt is sitting on the footstool of my rocking chair!  It is facing the chair, just like I had been sitting there and it set down before standing up.  I have no memory of moving it and I don't think I was sleep-walking...

And now our first week of school is over.  We've managed to catch up on everything that didn't get delivered on time.  Except science.  But science had habitats scheduled and if a Curious George-watching kid doesn't get what a habitat is, they have serious issues.  Some things I learned this week are:

• Daniel absolutely MUST have a nap after lunch
• I should NOT try to take advantage of a student finishing an assignment early to get a head start on the next subject.
• Reading out loud must wait until Daniel is napping (see 1 and 2)
• I really need to take that 10:00 break for my own sanity-but I need to avoid the computer at all costs.
• Putting a movie on at 11:00 will keep Daniel AND Fiona from interrupting. 
• Potty-training during the first week of school is a BAD IDEA 
• Afternoon activities during nap time is also a BAD IDEA
• When 50% of the children are having "issues," everyone needs to take a break

Now I'm off to enjoy some birthday present sewing time... 

Gold Rush

The year is 1849.  Kitty and her mate, Silver, have headed to California to get rich!  They stake their claim, naming their land Kitty's Claim, and the river, Silver Stream.

Soon, other hopefuls show up.  They sleep in tents, just downstream of Kitty's Claim.  

A mine is built and Vanilla finds the mother lode!  

As soon as the others find out, there is a mad dash for gold.

 Kitty comes to the rescue, throws claim jumpers and robbers in jail, keeps the meals organized at the inn, and prevents the stores from price gouging.    

You, too, can have fun while learning history.  I used the cardboard boxes that my orders have been coming in, plus a few from Costco, and the packing paper for the river.  I painted using powdered tempera.  Once upon a time, when I had only two toddlers, I purchased a set of tempera paint at the craft store.  I thought I was being so smart, buying the big bottles when they were on sale for $1.88!  I got one of each color.  And they are all dried up to a clump and are in the garbage can now.  Powder tempera is far superior, because you only mix as much as you need.  While the paint was wet, I sprinkled gold glitter inside the mine and on the river.  The kids loved picking them off for their gold pile.  I didn't spend much time on detail...but IJ said, "Wow!  This is great, Mom!" so I guess I did just fine

Homeschool Moment

IJ was worried this morning when he saw that you can no longer read the original Declaration of Independence.  He was relieved when I showed him the transcription and read it out loud to him.  What a great moment in homeschooling- witnessing the emotion that rises in the heart of a young, patriotic American.

The Revolution Continues

It was below freezing last night when M and I were asked to come outside to watch the play IJ wrote.  It was also pitch black outside!  So not only were we cold, we couldn't see.  We tried to reason with IJ, "We can't see.  Show us tomorrow when it's light."  He protested, "But it happened at night!"

 E, perched in the cherry tree (and those are not her eyes glowing)

Any guesses?
Here's one more hint:

The battle ended with:

A quick battle in the dark

S getting shot right away.  Since there were no more redcoats to shoot, we went inside where it was warm!

One of the greatest moments of the night was when IJ learned that not only did famous people fight in the revolution, the J in his name also fought.  JD was left for dead but survived and filed a claim for a spur, a coonskin cap, and his horse.  History is living within this child! S wanted to know if the guy we named his middle name after was also a warrior in the American Revolutionary War.  Well, Grandad isn't that old.  But he's pretty close!  He turns 80 years old today!

The American Revolution

Now this is what I call homeschooling!  This is my homeschool dream!  This week is American Revolution Week and IJ is really into it.  He built himself a flintlock musket and created this costume from an old blue velvet jacket that belonged to my mother.  The hat is from a pirate costume.

 S is modeling the British look with an old red velvet jacket that I used to wear to job interviews.  Along with a T-shirt that says "I didn't do it."

Did he kill his brother, the rebel, or not?

IJ has been reading about the American Revolution on the side because we have more books than you can shake a stick at.  S started reading The Magic Tree House book Revolutionary War on Wednesday and I read Can't You Make Them Behave, King George? out loud this morning.

This is when S finally figured out he was working for King George and he was not happy!  So he shot his brother.

Who shot him back...

Who shot him back again...

Who shot him back again!