free maps

Scott suddenly renewed his love affair with maps, so we tore the map pages out of an old telephone book and he taped them together to make his own atlas. He's spent the last hour happily finding area attractions from the list by looking up their coordinates, and all on his own.






This is the sort of real life, child initiated learning that unschoolers are famous for.

I mean here is my rambunctious barely 6 year old boy completely engaging himself in active learning with no prompting!

Okay I've wasted enough time, I need to get haunting. ~EH
.

Hands On Equations

The basic premise of the montessori math program is pretty much the montessori approach to everything...quality, aesthetically pleasing concrete materials and free exploration combined with very brief instruction and individualized progression with an interal control of error.



I am always excited to find materials that fufill these criteria, are interesting to my kids, and still remain affordable. It isn't always easy, what with the prices at most montessori shops, but sometimes you get really lucky and find something that flies in under the montessori radar, and fuflills all the critera but doesn't have the expensive label and price.



Hands On Equations is like that.



It is the perfect marrriage of abstract puzzle and concrete materials, of easy computation and difficult thinking. I love it, but more importantly, my Dodo loves it and is not only learning how to solve equations, but to really understand them.




The wheels are turning...

Hmm maybe this number will work?

No.

Hmm, how about this one instead?

It worked!

Yep, it checks!

I'm all for any schoolwork that can bring out this range of emotion.

Dinosaur Shrimp

Today we started getting the habitat ready for our triops eggs.

These pictures are horrendous, I must have had my camera on a funky setting, sorry.

As you might have guessed this means we have journeyed past the Cambrian explosion and are exploring the ancient mid-to-late Paleozoic seas...in other words we are only weeks away from DINOSAURS!!! I have so many resources, games, movies, tapes, stickers, cards, activities and books for dinos I really think interest will wane before we exhaust the materials. I figure we'll just explore as long as it's productive, and then move on no matter how much/little is left.

I have a tons of great stuff planned for early mammals,the ice ages, and hominids. Not to mention modern animals and classification! I figure we should be doing prehistory (scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on Science and scroll through that page if you have no clue what I'm talking about) at least until Spring. The we can ditch the (semi-) structured science and concentrate on relaxed, outdoor nature study. Or that's the plan, at least.

~EH.

Skeletons in the Closet

It's time to pull the skeletons out of the closet, literally.

Religious fundamentalists beware...I'm a hard-core Halloween geek. Yep, I'm that crazy neighborhood lady who "goes all out" on Halloween.

You might have seen me last night standing on a barstool staple-gunning shredded green cheescloth off the eaves of my house...all the eaves. Or maybe you happened by later and witnessed me spray painting a 6 foot haunted signpost I made from a broken floor lamp, or attatching vultures and realistic baby crows to any surface within my reach.


I'm not content with a pumpkin and a cutesy scarecrow, oh, no, not me! I transform the entire exterior of my home into a haunted house. I also make many of my own props, or at least customize the ones I buy, and develop scares and special effects to put into our garage/patio/courtyard walk-through. We had over a hundred trick-or-treaters last year and expect even more this year.



Why bother?



For nostalgia, mainly. To create memories for my children and the other neighborhood goblins. To do my part to keep our most zany, offbeat, and creative holiday alive and not sanitized into gathering sugar-free candy in cute store-bought costumes from the (uncostumed) proprieters at the shopping mall. And mostly because I flat out love it, it gives me a chance to unleash my creativity and abandon my perfectionism...afterall, most of my creations are meant to be seen in the dark! It is very liberating for me to slap things together and get such a tremendous response from people.



Our whole extended family gets in on it...either working as scarers, handing out candy and glow bracelets, or running the boiling duck pond or other kiddie games in the "tame" area.



I wasn't going to mention this on this blog, mainly because I know the odds are that if anyone is out there actually reading this, it is bound to be a fellow homeschooler, and demograhically speaking said homeschooler has a pretty good chance of being a zealot of some sort, but I decided not to edit my life.



If you don't like it you can go read one of the dozens of blogs that don't threaten your precarious beliefs. As for me and my blog, we'll say it like it is.



And, believe it or not, Halloween can be educational too.



My kids get to see me in action behind the scenes, being creative, using my hands, building, planning, designing, problem solving, and they get to collect all the candy that the other kids dropped in terror. They get to see an adult actually DO something, and make mistakes and later fix them.



My kids learned to read withe little coaching and prompting, pretty much just from watching and listening to me do it all the time. It was my hope that they learn to be creative in that same way...and I think it might be working!



Here is my little inventor Scote and his first homemade animated Halloween Prop....

Surrogate Parents

I came across this post, and it reminded me of why I really began homeschooling in the first place.

It wasn't really because the few public school teachers and administrators I'd had to deal with were incompetent cretins (although they were), or because I knew my kids weren't being appropriately challenged (although they weren't) or because I found the entire curriculum to be tedious, limited, and anti-intellectual (although I certainly did).

No, the real reason I made that drastic plunge was because the whole situation felt very, very wrong to me. Wrong in the same way as sending your 6 week old baby off to be mass-raised by a succession of disinterested strangers getting paid minimum wage. Wrong in the same way as sending 3 of your young children to daycare to be raised by others while you work in the same daycare caring for other people's kids because you "need" the money so you can afford satellite TV for your room-sized plasma. It is flat-out, skin-crawlingly bizzarre to me.

The school my Dodo went to for the first half of first grade locked all doors and covered all windows except near the office, which was policed by 6 (well-meaning but blindly obedient to the satatus quo) office ladies .

I was not even permitted to peek in the windows at my children! If I wanted to observe the teacher I needed a background check, a written request and 30 days notice! So much for seeing what "really" went on in there...so much for being able to discern if the teacher was competent or even nice!

I couldn't even pick her up. In fact, parents were NOT PERMITTED to pick their child up inside the building, we had to use the "drive-thru" loop. We never saw the teacher except for our 15 minute "conference".

The very thought that a mother would be interested enough in the 7 hours a day her 6 year old child spent being raised by 30 random "peers", made her "way too overprotective" or "smothering". It's not like I am talking about a teenager here, but a 6 year old child!

I think that eventually (high-school, most likely) my kids will blend back into the mainstream conveyer belt, but on their timeline, not a random one based on beaurocratic mandate,and until then it is as it should be, with the actual PARENTS doing the actual PARENTING.
~EH

Lizards, Rabbit-Trails, and Balance

We spent part of the afternoon on Friday clearing out our courtyard so I could start getting things set up for our (3rd Annual!) haunted house, and when we picked up the sand and water table to move it to the backyard we found this little guy.

Scote immediately rushed in the house to grab his nature bag and field guide, and kept screeching to himself, "Oh, I just can't wait to research this!" and "What kind of lizard do you think it is? Do you think he is a carnivore?!! I hope he is in my book." and the like.

He is finally at that stage of independant reading (3rd-ish, I'd say) where the whole world of information (or at least most of our home children's library) is opening up to him. He still needs help on some of the larger and more esoteric words, but by and large he can find the information he needs by himself, and it was really gratifying to see how excited he was about doing his own research!

Days like this almost convince me to unschool full-time, but ultimately I think the kids thrive better with at least a few morning hours of challenge and structure, and I've seen such immense progress in our structured/sequential subjects (memory work, maths, Latin, history) that I can't imagine abadoning them...or at least not completely.

I guess what I am trying for, ultimately, is everything in balance.

A few focused morning hours of structured rigor in the schoolroom, and afternoons full of nonsense and play and nature where we can just follow the intellectual rabbit trail wherever it might lead. I imagine that is what made a good classical education in the past, that balance...it's a sort of Alice in Wonderland approach to education, I guess. Reading How Doth the Little Crocodile is so much more entertaining after having read How Doth the Little Busy Bee, otherwise you never even get the poet's joke at all! I think kids need the best of both worlds, to each enrich the other.

~EH

Guess I'm "it"

Guess I got tagged, so here goes...

Five things in my freezer:

1. A jumbo box of generic eggos
2. Potato and cheese pierogies
3.Dino shaped chicken nuggets
4. A 10lb bag of store bought ice
5. Half a bag each of the following; baby lima beans, peas&carrots, and broccoli

Five things in my closet:
1. A set of plastic drawers containing playdough, clay and their related supplies
2. a pile of shoes I rarely wear
3. A small paperback copy of Catherine, Called Birdy that Scote hid from Dodo so she would "stop reading all the time" and play with him
4. A dusty packet on the top shelf containing ultra-scary pictures of me from USMC bootcamp ten years ago
5. Empty plastic hangers

Five things in my vehicle:
1. A huge, filthy bag of well-worn sand toys
2. Camping chairs for football practice/games
3. A mini bale of alfalfa hay for the bunnies I forgot to unload yestarday
4. An almost-finished audiobook of Alice in Wonderland
5. A reciept from Walmart a mile long

Five things in my purse:
1. A tumbleweed of old/useless reciepts
2. Movie stubs from Monster House
3. A scratched-up two month old pink motorola razor v3 (I ran it over in my van, and believe it or not the inside is pristine and it still works perfectly!)
4. Crayons
5. A pink blowpop



Five things in my wallet:
1. My library card
2. Dodo's library card
3. Scote's library card
4. Ugha's library card
5. A checkbook for "emergancies" (ie no debit/atm available)


If you read this, your are "IT"!

You might be a homeschooler if...

• You live in a one-house schoolroom.
  Your walls are covered with maps and timelines.
  You know what math manipulatives are.
  You have mold growing in your fridge…on purpose.
  Your preschooler can name all the planets, but doesn't know who the Rugrats are.
  You've mastered the fine art of vacuuming a floor without sucking up a Lego or K'nex piece.
  You're either an expert at doing the Lego dance - Oooch! Ouch! Yeow! - or else you've resorted to wearing shoes around the house.
  You know the recipes for homemade versions of Play-doh, finger paint, and paste.
  Your students have to clear the breakfast bowls off the table before sitting down to do their school work.
  Your house is messy, but your kids are happy.
  You know that reverse psychology really works.
  Your kids publish their own family newsletter.
  You shop for birthday presents at educational stores.
  All you want for Christmas is a Barnes & Noble gift certificate.
  You'd rather buy books than clothes.
  Your friends don't want to help you move because you have so many books.
  You turn a trip to the grocery store into a learning experience.
  You get nervous about what people will say when you take your kids to K-Mart in the middle of the day.
  You have a standard one-minute speech to give to store clerks, mother-in-laws, and school officials about why you homeschool.
  You are sick and tired of answering the question, "But what about socialization?"
  For your wedding anniversary, you decide to splurge and get a photocopier.
  Talking out loud to yourself is the same as having a parent/teacher conference.
  When you see a parking lot full of mini vans, you wonder if there's a homeschooling conference.
  You take your family vacation in September, when the beaches and theme parks are empty.
  You take a suitcase full of books along on your family vacation.
  You can never find your kitchen utensils because they're out in the sandbox.
  Your kitchen doubles as a science lab.
  You are on a first name basis with your local librarian and bookstore owner.
  The UPS driver delivers a box of Scholastic books to your doorstep once a month.
  You know the scientific names of dinosaurs from A to Z.
  You're willing to drop what you're doing at a moment's notice to go look something up in a dictionary or encyclopedia.
  You have ever vented for more than five minutes on the evils of standardized testing.
  You don't get fired for teaching your students about God.
  Some days you learn as much as your students.
  The more your kids learn, the less you seem to know.
  
  Found this at http://www.knowledgehouse.info/

Your English Skills:

Punctuation: 100% Spelling: 100% Vocabulary: 100% Grammar: 80%

Does Your English Cut the Mustard?

If a picture is worth 1,000 words...

...then here is my 4,ooo for today.

Chicken Run is at least 10 times her original size (she can no longer even fit into her tunnel!) and she is fully feathered!

Here is a timeline game I made, which we played today for the first time.

This is the sort of thing you would pay a hundred dollars for in a montessori shop! I paid about 20 dollars for the blue booklets (along with some yellow ones not pictured) and made all the other materials myself. I could have made the books as well, since they have the text in a free printable format online , but I bought cheap ink for my ink-guzzling epson CX6400 and now it won't print at all, anyway the ink cartridges for my model would run me about 55 bucks, so this was a bargain.

Here is a close-up of one of the cards. This one shows a trilobite, and some other ancient sea creatures.

Budding Paleontologists

We've come so far in our prehistory studies! As an introduction to fossils and paleontology I have lined up a series of really fun hands-on experiences. Today we started our day off with a discussion of excavation techniques and the scientific method while the kids "excavated" unknown skeletal remains (owl pellets, not exactly cambrian life, but I wanted something more realistic than the usual plaster-of-paris fossil experiences.) I have some of those lined up as well, but I wanted our introduction to be meaty (but I suppose "bony" would be more accurate!).

Chicken Run Update

She's almost fully feathered, as you can see, and about 5 times her original size!

We had to move her earlier this week because she figured out how to leap up and flap her wings to jump out of her box. You can see the red heat lamp in the background, which she won't need much longer, and some ramps and rocks we put in her cage for her to play with. We also made a tunnel out of two plastic cups duct-taped together and she seems to enjoy running through it several times a day.

She is very easy to feed. We just sprinkle crushed game bird meal (40 cents a pound at the feed store), very small universal bird seed mix, and millet sprays and she pecks at it on her own. We also saw her eat a small cockroach that was attracted by the heat lamp (yuck!) and small, live meal worms are her very favorite. It is very interesting to watch her hunt and peck (she is very accurate and can even consistantly select one color of seed out of many strewn on the floor of her box) and the growth and development from egg to almost-adult bird has been very fast paced and exciting!

Overall it has been a very fun and educational experience.

If you are interested, you can order a small incubator with instructions and 4 quail eggs here for less than 30 dollars.

~EH

Carlsbad Caverns Pictures

Above you can see the natural entrance to Carlsbad Caverns. The night before we watched hundreds of thousands of bats swirl out of this opening in the desert like a tornado!

In a series of S turns and steep ramps you descend 750 feet below the surface to see some of the most breathtaking geological formations imaginable lit with disney-quality lighting. You are permitted to take as many pictures as you want, but I found it nearly impossible to get a good shot underground, but no biggie since the bookstore has very affordable photos, postcards, and books.

You can see some examples of the pictures I wanted to take but couldn't get to come out Here.


Here's my (freshly 6 year-old) Scote. The blue folder behind his back is his junior ranger booklet. If you've never been to a National Park, the junior ranger program is a small workbook that you buy for a dollar, the kids do activities in the park and have rangers sign off on the different tours and programs they attend. Once they are complete you return them to be checked and the kids are fussed over, sworn in, and given iron-on badges and an announcement over the loudspeaker.


Here they are with their badges. They were so proud of being junior rangers they wanted to donate the rest of their spending money to help the park. I told them that any money we spend in the park helps the park, so it was okay to buy something they liked instead. They still put their loose change in a collection box, though.

It was a great trip!

~EH

The hatching of "Chicken Run", the quail

Ramps

Boy, I had no idea those blocks were so filthy until the flash went off! Guess what we'll be scrubbing today?

Field Trip

Well, the field trip today was supposed to be to the planetarium, only they are closed until September 1st, so last minute we went to the zoo instead. It didn't fit in with our prehistory plans, but it was fun anyhow.

We did manage to sneak some prehistory in there, though.

At one point they saw a faux rock wall inside the sea lion exhibit that had shells embedded and they started hopping around excitedly saying they found a giant piece of fossiliferous limestone, and later the kids spent their own money to buy some polished rocks from the machine.

It's funny how sometimes even without planning things that you are learning have a way of coming up no matter where you are. Not only did the geology manage to creep up on us, but Dodo had fun reading some of the scientific names in Latin. The ones with colors in their names she was able to understand, so that was really cool too.

Sorry the picture quality on these is so poor, I had to set it way low since like a big retard I forgot my memory card in the van!

NOTE: If you look at the picture above you can see how much Scote is growing to look like his father, the likeness is just astounding! You can see a picture of Ssgt Eccentric here for comparison. Please disregard his ridiculous hair...his unit is known as the "mohawks" so they all walk around looking like freaks over there. Maybe it is some sort of psychological warfare to psyche out the afghanis or something. It certainly scares the bejeezus out of me!

By far the coolest thing we saw all day was in the South American aviary... A mother bird laid about 8 eggs in the grass not even a foot in front of us! We could have reached out and touched her if we wanted, but more than likely she would have attacked us, or possibly freaked out and hurt her eggs in panic.

She hissed and reared up like an angry snake as it was.

It was really interesting watching her go through the process of laying, she bounced her rear end up and down in the exact same way as our (dearly departed) evil rabbit Veela did when she was birthing kittens. I might try this trick next time I spawn another Eccentric!

Quick Quiz

Which one is Scote the Goat, and which is the real goat? I'll give you a hint, the real one stinks. Or does the fake one? Oh well, I know one of them did, anyway.

It's Ugha's dream to ride a real "efellent", but this is as close as she's come so far.

FUN FACT

Did you know an elephant can fit on a blue whale's tongue?!

Just look at that sky, it looks painted on! And underneath is El Paso's favorite sea lion, Sunny.

The end of a long, hot day. I can't wait for fall when it goes down to 70 again!

Progressing through Pre-History

8

7
6
2
3
1
5
4
Okay, I posted these in correct order, but this is how it came up for some odd reason and I am too tired to fight with it!

It should have been posted in the numbered order, sorry. I didn't post all the pages, but just enough so you can get a good idea of what he's been up to. Dodo and Ugha usually join us for the read-aloud and the hands-on stuff, but I don't require narrations from them. Dodo has a prehistory journal too, since sometimes she wants to narrate or draw a picture about what we are learning.

The above are some of the pages in Scote's Prehistory Journal so far. Writing is still a struggle for him so he only has to write very short narrations. Sitting with him as he writes I am struck by how far my Dodo has come! I remember doing the exact same thing with her in kindergarten, but by the end of first grade she was writing half a page history narrations with no prompting, and now here she is a rising 3rd grader, and she fills pages! Her handwriting is doctor-esqe, but legible and at least not painful anymore.

The progression was so slow and steady I almost missed it, but my little Scote has brought it all back to me. I look forward to watching the same blossoming happen with him.

Everyone is really into the science, I am so glad I took the time to plan this out!

Rearranged the school room

The changes are subtle, but better, no? The main difference is that I took out the chair which was part of the living room and stuck into the schoolroom at a 45 degree angle, so I was able to straighten everything out instead of angling. I also moved the workbook shelf over where the chair used to be and put another shelf where it was for all the geology/geography stuff I've been making.

I was able to bring the book display lower so Ugha could reach it, and stacked our montessori puzzle maps on the paper storage shelves right next to the geography stuff.

I think it really opens the place up.

You can see the old arrangement here.

Another new game

I was at the dollar tree the other day and bought two 50-packs of colored thread, thinking they would be great for matching and sorting.
Then we were messing around with them and saw that they were just perfect for exploring gradiations of color.

After I took these pictures I realized exactly what they were...
THESE.

Duh.

Sometimes I swear it's like I reinvent the wheel from scratch. But anyway, two dollars trumps montessori prices any day.

~M