Day 4 - Burnt

Burrrrrrrrrrnt. Crazy, one-thousand percent burnt.

Trying not to freak out and over-generalize it. I've been awake since 4, and pretty much going non-stop. Plus, I haven't slept well for, like, a week, between first week jitters and loads of ideas that won't let my mind rest and Excedrin.

So, I'm going to be a cock-eyed optimist and say I'm not burnt because of Day 4 of homeschooling, but rather that I'm burnt because Day 4 of homeschooling comes on something like Day 7 of too much to do and not enough time or sleep.

Call me Polly-freaking-ana.

Typos count as warts.

That is all. :)

Day 2: Cooking, English, U.S. History, and Science

Cooking was just a fun hour of measuring stuff. Then I demonstrated just why dry measures are best for dry ingredients, and liquid measures for liquid. I showed them the measuring cup I prefer for sticky stuff like peanut butter and honey (and why),

"and then shoooop you push up the middle part and it comes out clean!" 

and I showed them why weight measurement is best for things like flour. Thankfully, when I had them each measure out a cup of flour, they each came out at slightly different weights, or that wouldn’t have been such a good demonstration.

Somehow or other, the question of what certain ingredients smell like came up, and I ended up having them whiff some molasses. HAHAHAHA they hated that. Then I explained where molasses comes from (it’s a by-product of the sugar refining process, in case you didn’t know), and they couldn’t believe it. I told them that a common baking substitute for brown sugar is just white sugar plus molasses. They couldn’t believe that either. So we determined that after the rest of our “classes” we’d do a taste test. Baking cookies would provide an excellent vehicle for both the test and practical application of their new measuring skills. SWEET. (Literally! Ha!) (Yes, I amuse myself.)

English was quiet, just the boys working in their workbooks while I cleaned up Cooking Class. Good stuff, though. Now I have a better idea of what they understand there.

For our first foray into U.S. History I took us over to the giant world map, and covered four main points: Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, the transfer of world dominance from Spain to England, and Jamestown. They seemed to get it. I hope history is more interesting for them in this story-like format than it was for me throughout my school years. I hated history; it was so dry and dense. It was the Lembas Bread of learning, and I was an unexcited Gollum trying to choke it down, though it burned as it went.

In other news, I’m a nerd.

Anyway, I hope I can make it more interesting for my boys, is my point.

As I had mentioned in an earlier post, I want to make sure the boys are well grounded in the scientific method before we begin any experimentation. So that was today’s science lesson: The Scientific Method. We’re going with the 6-step version (Question, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion, Communicate). We came up with some goofy sentences to help us remember the steps in the proper order, then realized our cookie taste test was an experiment in disguise! So we formalized it.

1.       Question - Do cookies made with brown sugar taste like cookies made with a substitute made of white sugar plus molasses?

2.       Research

a.       Molasses is basically what’s left over when cane sugar is refined into white sugar (a point in its favor).

b.   White sugar plus molasses is a common substitute for brown sugar in recipes (another point in its favor)

c.      Molasses does NOT smell anything like brown sugar (a point against).

d.   Molasses looks very much like "tentacle blood" (a point against, but duly noted by Josh for future use in a horror movie).

3.       Hypothesis

a.       The cookies will taste only slightly different.

b.      The cookies made with molasses will likely taste a little gross.

4.       Experiment

a.       Bake two batches of peanut butter cookies, with all ingredients identical except for the brown sugar/white sugar plus molasses.

b.      Blind taste test.

c.       Data

                                                              i.      The cookies really did taste very similar.

                                                            ii.      Josh noted a slightly saltier taste in Cookie “A,” which he determined to be the brown sugar cookie (it was not).

                                                          iii.      Ben noted a slightly more sugary taste in Cookie “A,” which he correctly identified as the molasses cookie.

                                                           iv.      I thought they tasted exactly alike.

                                                             v.      Joseph thought that when tasted side by side they tasted pretty much the same, although he slightly preferred Cookie “B” (the brown sugar cookie).

5.       Conclusion – If a difference is detectable at all, it’s a very slight one.

6.       Communication – Um, this is our report.

Also: COOKIES! Nomnomnom! Hooray for science!

I deem Day Two a success, since we had fun and learned and I was bizarrely relaxed throughout the day. I expected to be way more frazzled. I WAS exhausted by the end of the day, though. It was just as well Matt & I only had time for one episode of Eureka (we're working our way through Season 3)(because you care), because I'd have probably fallen asleep had we attempted a second.

First Day

Our first day of school was Wednesday August 24^th 2011. For better or worse, I decided to start off by sharing the same calendar as the local school district. It’s what one of my exemplar homeschooling families does, and it makes scheduling easier, especially when you’re dealing with families in the public school system. I decided to just go with what my pretty calendar says will be happening on Wednesdays, which meant P.E. first!

That worked out well, because my other exemplar homeschooler, my SIL Cindy, suggested having a “NOT Back to School” celebration. Said celebration, “school” photos, and P.E. could all be nicely taken care of by going to a park, so that’s what we did. Not our neighborhood park that butts right up against our elementary school, because AWKWARD, but one that the boys decided on, over in a different neighborhood.

Photos first!

Then we practiced catching and throwing with a volleyball. Our first P.E. unit is actually baseball (by popular demand), but I thought I’d start us off easy. Sports are not traditionally our family’s strong suit (we're NERDS). Then the boys just played for a good 15 minutes or so. I uploaded photos to Facebook while swinging, which I still love to do. They ran around and got sweaty and worked up their hearts and burned calories and they loved every second of it. Can I just tell you how much they have HATED regular P.E. at school? Pretty much without fail, it is their most hated subject. But now we can all get exercise and learn sports and LOVE it. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me!

Then we headed home for math time. Spectrum workbooks, if you’ll recall. We can already tell Ben’s way WAY beyond the usual 6^th grade standards, so we’ll have him just skip and jump through the current workbook as a review and move him along as fast as he wants. We got his STAR test results back a couple weeks ago. In math and science he got perfect scores. That’s where he shines.

Side note: Ben’s science GRADE did not shine at school last year. Ben is pretty solidly a left-brain kid; all analysis and number crunching. So when his science teacher put most of the grade weight on the kids’ science JOURNALS and how pretty they were, he almost frigging failed that subject. I think he ended up with a D on his report card. And then he aced the state-required standardized testing. Another point in homeschooling’s favor: no required and enforced homogenizing. I will help Ben improve his writing, but I will never require him to be as good at it as he is at math. It will never be his joy nor his strength, and public education hates that. /rant

FIRST DAY GOOF (yeah, I told you this blog would be warts and all): So here's the deal with my 9YO Josh. He's bright, every bit as bright as Ben, but is SO very right-brain. All creativity and stories and "Want to hear about the movie I'm going to make when I grow up?" So Joshua's language and reading grades have always been high. His math grades have always lagged a bit behind, but it's NOT because he's no good with math. He can totally do it, he just HATES to. It's horrible horrible grunt work for him, with no room for creativity, and that drive him nuts. He's a very active kid, too, so sitting still (yuck) PLUS crunching numbers (yuck) while his brain is trying to tell him a story equals DOUBLE YUCK.

So I was okay with the fact that his math workbook was the ONE book stuck on back order, because I thought it would be a great opportunity to do math in a fun way for him. His 3rd grade teacher, bless her heart, recognized his talents and limits and suggested I have him keep a ledger of some sort to give math more real-life relevance. I was all over that back when I was planning on starting us off with a Spy Unit ("and I'll have a store with spy gadgets and Josh will be in charge of shopping and then he'll have to figure out if 3 bottles of Invisible Spray at $12 a bottle is a better deal than blah blah blah" and that's why we're not doing a Spy Unit. Yet. Too much work for a n00b).

Then there I was on the first day of school with nothing brilliantly creative planned for Josh. "But!" I thought, "but I have little individual white boards! We can drill multiplication facts on his whiteboard because kids love writing on whiteboards and that will be fun!" 

It wasn't. Although now I know several kickin' hairstyles for the number 7. 

Then Church History (a brief overview of the time between Jesus’ life on earth and Joseph Smith’s first vision, with stops at Martin Luther and the establishment of religious freedom in America). That was fun. Oh, hey, if you don't know me and just stumbled on my blog somehow, my family is LDS.

Then lunch. And more running around outside for “lunch recess”. Guess how many times that happened voluntarily during the summer? Like, zero. Kids are so weird.

Then the last subject of the day was Spanish, and that was hysterically fun. We just looked up nouns in our little English/Spanish dictionary (and online), and labeled things in the house. Including the dogs. And our butts.

And that was our first day of school. The boys had a blast, and I had a blast, and it was all very encouraging. And I'm looking up some fun math websites for Josh till either his workbook comes or I can get my butt in gear and come up with some stuff of my own for him.

Gifts for Teacher

Joseph and Joshua made me First Day of School gifts, which touched my heart in a big way.

A special pen for the teacher from Joseph.

An awesomely creative card from Josh.



It reads:

Jingle bells, Jingle bells, Jingle all the way…

FOR

Math and science

And maybe art

Hip hip hip hooray!

The Office

In the course of the last few weeks of summer, I began to notice something disturbing. I was still getting letters from our elementary school about the upcoming school year. I thought I had taken care of having the boys' records removed, and there was a chance that these were just generic local mailings to everybody in the neighborhood, but I wanted to be sure.

This past Monday I plucked up my courage (did I mention the nightmares yet? No, I see I haven’t. I’ll get back to those later) and went over to the school. Walked into the office and announced my reason for being there, trying as hard as I could to look neither confrontational nor apologetic. I’ve volunteered at that school a LOT over the past two years, so I’m a pretty familiar face in the office, if not a familiar name. “Oh sure, come with me and we’ll go check to make sure,” said Office Lady, without any hints of surprise or dismay. Encouraging! So we went over to her desk and she had me repeat to her coworker (Office Lady 2) that I was there to make sure my boys were off their records because I’m going to homeschool them.

“Oh no, don’t do THAT!”

That wasn’t OL2. That was a voice from an adjoining office. And though the occupant of the office is not familiar to me, the voice was, so I looked up, and there was Joseph’s kindergarten teacher.

She’s probably the one person I spent the most time with as a volunteer. Well, it’s between her and the librarian. Anyway, we’ve been very chummy. I was surprised to hear her be that adamant – she knows me, and knows that I’m not a Slacker Mom or anything like that – and I think she was pretty surprised, too. She immediately apologized and declared it to be none of her business, and let me finish what I was there for.  But before I left, she expressed her hope that we would be back next year. “Well, we’ll see,” was all I could think of to say.

Getting the kids’ names off the school records (because there they indeed were) was a piece of cake. I was there a total of three minutes, tops. But I don’t think I’ll ever get that voice out of my head. Not that it discouraged me at all. No, it was just the first real voice of dissent I’ve heard so far, and that’ll probably stick with me.

Well, we’ll see.

Science Jar

So last week I made a Science Jar, and holy crap am I proud of this idea. Like, I’m-going-to-be-struck-by-lightning-as-I-type-this proud.

First, I guess I should explain how I’m going about dealing with all the different grade levels. For math and English, I bought Spectrum workbooks. The boys can work on those on their own, largely, and I can go around and help individually as needed. But then I figured science and history are two subjects that really, truly, don’t need to be separated by grade level. Yes, you can understand history on a deeper level as you get older; yes, you can do more with science as you get more math under your belt. But by and large, we can learn these things together. Especially since I’m hoping mainly to inspire interest, and send them into the world as adults who will seek knowledge on their own. And know how to do it. Without Google.

So I got to thinking about science as a subject, and trying to put together a curriculum, and it was very daunting. But then I thought about the history of science. Where does all our scientific knowledge come from? Dudes got curious about the world around them and started asking questions. Then they really poked and prodded at those questions till they came up with answers. That’s science, boiled down.

While I was going through that thought process, the boys would every once in a while ask me a totally normal question, like “Why don’t dogs and cats talk like humans do?” or “How does ______ work?” And then it came to me – those questions were my curriculum! If I gave the boys a solid grounding in The Scientific Method, then we could just spend our science time asking questions and gaining knowledge about the world around us in the same natural way that Real Scientists do. Newton and Archimedes and all the great scientists through time did NOT become great scientists by learning a bunch of regurgitated facts by rote. They saw something, it made them curious, and they pursued that thing that interested them and shared their knowledge with the world. That’s how we’ll pursue science in our home.

I found a jar in my kitchen awaiting a purpose in life, grabbed a bunch of $0.25 science magazines from the library bookstore, and got out the old jar of decoupaging glue. Man, I haven’t had a real excuse to be crafty like that in ages. It was SO fun. And here she is!

This is not a photography blog.

And the back view:

Couldn't leave out the shuttle. It's in my blood.

I leave it on top of a bookcase in our front hallway. There’s a pen inside and sticky notes next to it at all times. Anytime somebody has a question they can pop it in the jar, and we will slowly work our way through those questions this year.

Plus, we have lots of “50 dangerous things to try in your kitchen” –type books to fall back on when we need something pre-planned, and plenty of Bill Nye DVDs (thanks to my sister Debby), and a selection of lesson plans to go with some of those episodes (thanks to the library bookstore, my new best friend).

SCIENCE!

Check Out My OCD!

So here’s a glimpse at my current thoughts about scheduling.

I know it looks very conspiracy-theory-slash-OCD-slash-The-Shining. I also know that every homeschooler in America recommends NOT putting together a rigid schedule since it’s unrealistic. I know it’s unrealistic, but this is how my brain works. For comparison, here is my daily schedule for the summer.

I'm a fun Mom!

Did every day actually work out that way? Not even remotely! But at least I knew what things were supposed to happen, and I had time set aside to make it happen if I needed to. I’m the kind of person that needs the structure in place, even if it’s not adhered to rigidly. If it’s not in place to begin with, then mental chaos reigns supreme, nothing whatsoever gets done, and that’s the fast track to depression for me. My sticky note conspiracy theory style daily schedule works for me.

Also, pretty.

Now, so far that just covers school time and meals and scouts and my other job teaching private music lessons. And actually, that’s another way this schedule comes in handy. If I didn’t have this all laid out nice and visually for myself, I would accept more and more students till I drove myself insane. Now I know without a doubt I can take a maximum of two more music students on. That is my absolute limit. Which is a bummer, because I really love teaching and want to provide everyone I know with an inexpensive way for their kids to learn their instrument. But I just can’t do that. But I wouldn’t know that if I didn’t see it in black and white. And purple and orange and pink and green.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, I still need to figure out where in there I’m going to squeeze all the OTHER stuff I need to do on a regular basis. You know, budgeting and meal planning and grocery shopping and music lesson prep and school lesson prep and you know, someday I may even mop. Not someday SOON, mind you, but sometimes these things need to be done. Oh yeah, and “me” time. Which I suck at. Can watching Star Trek in the evenings with my hubby count for that? Because that time is sacrosanct, and way more relaxing to me than getting a manicure or whatever it is girls do. Yeah, I think I’m officially counting that as my “me” time.

Hi There

The name of this blog refers to two things: 1, I am the youngest of my siblings, and a girl, therefore forever a little sister, and 2, this cartoon.

For those with no patience for dumb cartoons, I’ll sum up: a cynical dude imagines the saddest character he can think of (to make others cry for his amusement), and creates “Li’l Brudder,” a one-legged dog whose catchphrase is “I can make it on my own!” His pathetic cuteness causes everyone to cry, but his hopeful resilience causes stupid people to seek him out for financial advice.

What I’m saying is, no matter how resiliently and cutely I flail about attempting to educate my children, you’d be stupid to seek me out for advice of any sort whatsoever. (But DANG am I cute.)

Though probably not as cute as Li'l Brudder.

Also, “schoolmarm” is a funny word.

No, I just feel compelled to attempt a chronicling of my homeschool experience (though I have no doubt this blog will have tumbleweeds blowing across it after a month or two). Not because there aren’t already homeschooling blogs out there – there are, approximately, a bajillion – but because I never really found one that I could relate to. Most blogs are created after a homeschooler’s been going for a while and feeling pretty confident. Advice blogs, idea blogs, that kind of thing. I’d like this to be the blog somebody can look at and go “oh, thank goodness I’m not the only one who tried that and messed it up!” “Is she chronicling about homeschooling without Comic Sans? OR animated GIFs? Is that allowed?”

I’d like parents to consider homeschooling without feeling like they’re outsiders looking in.

So, if you’re considering homeschooling and feeling like an outsider, I’ll let you peek through my window first. Then you can be all “Oh, if THAT idiot can do it, then so can I!”

You’re welcome, America.