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