Learning about the Moon

I'm using the Real Science Odyssey Earth Science Level One with my daughter (originally I thought it would work for both kids, but it was too basic for my older son).

We are crawling through it pretty slowly, because I like to enrich the basic program with lots of extras: extra library books (it's a weakness of the curriculum that no books or resources are recommended, despite only very basic content in the program itself), extra documentaries, extra kits and experiences.




For those extras, I turn primarily to the library and my netflix account (free is good when homeschooling).  After that, I have found Home Science Tools to be a great company for supplying me with my science tools.

For the moon study, there is a lot of fun stuff for us:

Moon in My Room can be programed to light up at night corresponding to the phases of the moon. A fun twist to a nightlight (although, of course, there will be no light when there is a new moon).

The Space Exploration Kit is proving fun so far.  My kids love a good science kit with fun experiments and things to build.

And we got a telescope to look at the moon through.




Fun and learning all at once!

Weekly Book Post: Over-Dressed

We've been hearing the story of sweatshop labor and outsourcing in the clothing industry for a very long time now.  And it's not that this story isn't important - it's very very important but we've mostly stopped listening. Every now and then something shocking happens that makes us pay attention to it again, but then we quickly go back to the status quo.

I borrowed the book Over-Dressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion from the library because it was featured on The Non-Consumer Advocate, and because I have been mulling over ethical clothing choices since the latest Bangladesh factory tragedy.  I expected there would be talk about sweat shop labor, but the book covers more than that.

Cline covers the story of how we became addicted to fast fashion, how design and retail has become more generic, and what happens to all the clothing we discard (68 lbs of textiles per person go into the landfill in the US every year!), and what the environmental impact of manufacturing all that clothing is in the first place.

I found this book disturbing and compelling.  If you haven't even thought about how your cheap, fast, almost disposable clothing impacts the world, this will be eye-opening.  If you have been thinking about it, as I had been, this will add further breadth to the issue for you.  Overall, I think everyone who wears clothes should read at least part of this book.

(If you don't have time/inclination to read the book, there is also a good list of What We Can Do on the book's website.)

In My Kitchen Right Now

Homemade yogurt from milk we got from our next door neighbor's goats.  Sadly, it turns out I am the only one in the family who likes the taste of it, so I'm eating homemade yogurt with granola and homemade strawberry syrup for breakfast every day for a while, I guess.




Pears I harvested from a tree that was completely hidden by the blackberry bramble in the back field.  I worked hard to cut back blackberries, harvest the pears, and now I'm not sure what to do with them.  The kids don't like the taste of them as a raw snack .... Thinking we might make pear cider or maybe I'll make a pear crisp.

Time for More Indoors Activities

The fall weather is really starting to turn in our neck of the woods, with lots of downright stormy days and wet mushy ground even when the rain isn't falling.

It's hard on the kids, who were used to spending at least an hour a day outdoors playing with each other every day.  It's hard on me too, since now they and their noise and their mess are more under foot in the house.

Just time to adapt again, and get used to a more indoor life.




They are on the computers more, of course, but they are also playing more board games together. A friend loaned us a board game of Dungeons and Dragons, and that has been a huge hit.  The kids also spent almost three days well occupied by creating a card game together that seems to be half a sort of pokemon game (all the boys cards) and half a fairy warrior game (all the girls cards) but the two self-created decks interact with each other.  I think it was a masterpiece of cooperation.




It also calls for more "arts and crafts".  A recent quick stop in our local bookstore produced two good finds: the Klutz petal people kit and an "instructional comic" called Welcome to Your Awesome Robot. So we are living in a sea of little fragile fairies and bits and bobs of cardboard and duct tape in our house at the moment.

How do you adjust to more indoor time for your kids? Any good rainy day activities?

  

The Balancing Act: Homeschooling and Having Your Own Life Too

I've always known that I loved homeschooling - after all, I was homeschooled all the way through and I loved my own education and the lifestyle we had in my family.  But there is a twist when you know you love homeschooling, because most often that means that the mother would need to stay home and not have an outside career.

My mother balanced her need for income and her desire to homeschool us by running a home daycare. When we were little she could only take in a few kids, but by the time I was legally old enough to count as an assistant we were able to have 10 extra kids in our home all day long.  She spent 11 hour days supervising our schooling and all those babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, she did all the housework, and she took on lots of volunteer tasks for the community theater company that our entire family got heavily involved with.  She also continued to play the cello, which had been her pre-children passion.  She played for a community orchestra and in a string quartet.

Now, my mother has no regrets, other than this: she says she wishes she had taken more time for pursuing her own lifetime learning goals.  She wishes she had set herself more learning challenges and had homeschooled herself at the same time.

I am balancing my role as a homeschooling parent with a full-time job running the religious education program for a church, as well as with the housework, garden, animals, and all my crafty/homesteading experiments and hobbies.  And I am taking a cue from my mother's regret, and taking time to continue learning and reading for myself and not just for the kids.  It's a lot to balance, or I'm well-supported by the pillars of my life, depending on how you flip the organizational chart.  How do you balance your life?

One of the Things I Love About Homeschooling: Studying What We Want To

I absolutely adore how we are free as homeschoolers to tailor our studies to the kids' interests.  Some kids are going to find certain things more enthralling than others ... and that's totally fine in my opinion. Yes, we need some breadth to our knowledge base, but life gets a lot more interesting when we have some depth in places too.

We had started studying colonial and revolutionary history here (this year I take sabbatical at work and I plan on taking the kids to Boston for about a month - a great chance to see all this history on the ground!), and then I saw the hook for my boy: Ben Franklin.  Oh, how he loves inventors and inventions (and he's studying electricity in physics right now so that's a good tie-in!)  My daughter is interested in him too, but more for his stories, sayings, and charisma that still gets conveyed through his writing, all these years later.

So we will be stopping here, indefinitely, until we feel well and truly done with the subject.  On our own time.

If we were tied into a learning plan, a scope and sequence, or (ack!) pushed to study for a particular test, we wouldn't have time for these sidetracks.  But we aren't tied into any of that - we are learning how we please.

Just another thing I love about homeschooling.

A walk around my home and garden

Fall is definitely here, but we are still enjoying the outdoors.  My husband has been finishing up projects that have been on "the list" for a long time, such as the pergola here.  I'm ready for our northwest rain to start up again, but these crisp fall days are lovely while they last.