Unanswerable Question

Choclo: Do bees think popcorn is plankton?

UPDATE: Maybe this question does have an answer! Just in case, I have conveniently listed all possible answers in the poll on the top right of the blog. If you have an impossible answer, leave it in the comments.

Science Astronomy

We were headed off into our Astronomy unit - our final unit of the year! But first we had to check on our crystallization experiments.

I had made up solutions of salt, sugar and epsom salts and had the kids drop them onto black paper. Alas, my paper wasn't cheap enough, so it didn't absorb the solution very well and the kids couldn't take home their papers that day. On the other hand, the crystals which eventually formed were larger and more perfect.

We looked at them with magnifying glasses.


The next experiment was with a salty solution. We divided it into two pots. One we boiled away the water causing the crystals to form quickly and rather haphazardly.

The other formed large square crystals as the water evaporated over the course of two weeks.



Lastly, I was trying for rock candy. I have never managed this well, so I tried the Joy of Cooking. I had always shunned that recipe because it asks you to boil the syrup til the hard crack stage which I had always thought would solidify like stone.

When I finally thought to check the progress, it had indeed set solid, so I did a second try with only boiling til the sugar dissolved. Unfortunately, it was less than a week so we got some crystallization, but nothing big or fancy.
Oh well! They had fun eating the crystals that did form and Oob licked up a lot of the syrup!

So we moved on to Astronomy.

I took the kids outside and had them move as much as they could and then be as still as they could.

Than I asked them if they were still moving. Trick question! The stillest thing on the planet is still spinning with the Earth at about 1000 mph!

And then we started talking about the Earth's orbit (about 67, 000 mph).

And then we talked about the Sun's orbit (486,000 mph) ... around the Milky Way! I must admit, everyone but the Zoomlians looked highly skeptical about this one.

Next we tried some orbiting. Here we have Choclo as the Sun with the other kids as the different planets (I'm glad they kicked out Pluto, I wouldn't have had enough kids!). I lined them up and then started them orbiting.

After a little while, I stopped them and asked what they had noticed. They had figured out that the closer planets make more orbits than the farther ones.

We talked a bit about what was in the solar system (sun, planets, dwarf planets, astroids, moons, comets, Kuiper belt) and what wasn't (constellations, black holes), then it was back to orbiting.

I had one kid as the sun, spinning in place and moving slowly, Klenda as the Earth orbiting the sun (I didn't have the nerve to have her spin) and Zorg as the moon, tidally locked, orbiting the Earth. This is hilarious to watch! I highly recommend it as a party game. They actually did really really well until the sun started moving too quickly!

That was it for this lesson, so the kids made up a game which was like tag except the person who was it was a black hole and all the other players were stellar objects (red giants, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, purple and yellow dwarfs (also known as a smart aleck).

I got my favorite compliment at the end of the lesson: "That's it? That was only 5 minutes!"

Star Wars Day!

Yes, it's May the fourth, as in, "May the fourth be with you!"

The kids have worked up some costumes (that's Klenda as a padawan and Leena as Princess Leia) and I have found some great printables and activities here:

Little printable 3D models and masks

Clone Wars crosswords, codes, word searches and more

Loads of games and info on the official site

Great list of resources including an internet scavenger hunt

We also got some books from the library:

Star Wars Complete Cross Sections

Clone Wars Visual Guide

and we already had
Lego Star Wars Visual Dictionary

I'm guessing we might watch the original movie as well as some of the Lego Star Wars You Tubes.

Here's our favorite:

Almost Brilliant

The Emperor: I'm teaching the kids in my class a Shakespeare play called Julius Caesar. Do you know anything about Julius Caesar?

(The Zoomlians answer with random Shakespeare quotations and names of plays.)

Leena: Bacon!

The Emperor (rather surprised): Well, yes, Leena, some people do think Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.

Leena: No, I was just punning on Hamlet. Get it, HAM-let, BACON?

To be fair they then came up with quite a bit about Julius Caesar, but still...

Navel Gazing

It's a seasonal thing. This time of year I always end up mulling over our homeschool philosophy. What's working? What isn't?

Part of that has to do with the fact that the kids are always growing and changing and need different things. This year there have been a number of other external prods.

In the fog of low thyroid, I made a foolish decision to go forward with something that, while good of itself (let's learn research skills by preparing presentations on different countries!), was not good for us (let's ditch US History!).

We have come to the reluctant view that the co-op we've been in for the last nine years is not going to work for us next year. It's actually a great amount of time for a co-op to be useful, but it's also hard to let go. :(

I realized I was (probably in the thyroid fog) drifting more into the "schoolish" side of things (let's get these boxes checked off) and doing less fun"isn't-the-world-amazing" stuff.

Mostly, I'm realizing that the way I'm called to home school is a gift. The way others are called to home school (or parent, or live) is God's gift to them, this is God's gift to me and I need to be faithful to that gift.

Ironically, I think about peer pressure for my kids, but I didn't realize that hanging out with other home schooling moms would be peer pressure for me! The way I've been called is more on the unschooling end of things, but my friends have been called to a more "schoolish" approach. Not that I intend to stop being friends, of course! I more feel that God's put me on notice to keep my eyes on my own page.

That means following the kids interests. It means doing as much hands on stuff as I can. It means holding steady on a few core subjects (Math and English). It means looking at each child and seeing what thy need to to take the next step. It means the time to strike is when the opportunity presents itself (by which I mean, when a kid's curiosity is raised, he will absorb and retain the most information the most quickly and easily). It means looking to my older kids to organize more of the fun and amazing stuff. It means following a trajectory towards healthy, happy, holy adulthood.

I do believe that God lets us know when we are off track, if we're willing to listen. He also lets us know when we are on track. A few days after I started making these adjustments, Oob squirmed onto my lap and asked me to write his name. Then Choclo's name. We snuggled and I wrote and he sounded out the names. A dozen names later, I started writing words...and he kept on sounding them out! When he was done, he told me, "Thank you, Mommy. Those were fun puzzles!"

Thank you, God, for reminding me why I home school.

I Would Pay $50

and probably more to have photos of each kid the first 5 times they walked into my room and said, "Look! I got dressed!"

Oob is going through this delightful stage.

The first day he was wearing two shirts, one as a kilt (with the neck around his waist) and the other as a hat.

The next time he was wearing a shirt as pants (legs through sleeves), and the top was convoluted in a way I had thought topologically impossible. How does he do that?

The time after that he had his shirt on upside down. Not backwards, upside down. The neck of the shirt was around his waist and he seemed bemused by the wide expanse of fabric flapping around his actual neck.

He's settling down now to merely inside out and backwards, although he's taken to rifling though his drawers to pick out his own stuff which adds much to each occasion.

Frog Beautiful

While we were at the Arboretum, I thought we'd check out the dogwood garden. It was in full glorious bloom: clouds of white and pink hovering about a lovely lawn edged by stately trees.

I think this is one of my favorite gardens. It has a classic elegance which reminds me of Jane Austen novels.

The kids, of course, see it as a runway.

At the end of the garden there is a lovely fountain that has the most beautiful...
Well, frogs.









This was the first year Choclo was able to catch a few for himself!


















While we were returning to the car, Oob had me sit down on a bench to "tink." When I asked him what we we should "tink" about, he told me, "Let's tink about how much God loves us."

So we both sat there and looked at all that beauty and the kids soaking it up til it shone out their eyes, and we thought about how much God loves us.

What a beautiful day!

Wordless Wednesday: Picnic

Happy Easter!

We went up and visited my folks in NJ.

Here are the kids in their Easter finery.











And here they are running around like crazy people near the lake behind the house.








And here I am, getting my third outrageously good hand (in a row) at Pigs Knuckles (Pinochle). Mumpy is so embarrassed, she's edged out of the picture (not really, a kid had the camera. Mumpy thought it was funny!).

I'm not sure I've ever won against my mom before, definitely not by that much, anyway, but we had a great time. Should I mention she had hurt her back and was on some powerful medication? Probably not.

Leena enjoyed playing the Dummy.

The kids built domino houses, which was very fun, although, eventually, Choclo decided an invisible person was blowing on his house and knocking it down. Ummmm. Actually he kept kicking the leg of the card table.

I wish I had gotten pictures of the egg hunts and the pinata.

Oh, well, we had a great time with lots of family memories and that's what counts!

The Dirt on the Garden

It's coming along nicely!

Here you can see our "bean tent" near the bottom of the hill and our tomatoes tucked safely in their wall o waters.

I've noticed that when I don't baby the transplants with these, I never get many tomatoes.


I haven't used them in a few years. In fact, I think they are over 10 years old and still going strong.


In Klenda's garden, her parrot tulips are blooming!

It never ceases to amaze me what strange plants the kids find when I ask them to pick out something.

Mxyl and Leena found these Pocketbook Plants.

Kinda odd.




Here are Choclo and Oob's gardens.

They're kind of at the front of the shrubbery.

Yes, I have a shrubbery. The Knights who Say Ni should have looked here.



Last Fall, I bought a big bag of pastel tulips and planted some in the cutting garden and some here and there.

So far, my favorite juxtaposition has been this one with the sky blue grape hyacinth.
I love this one, too, even if the lacy green backdrop is actually my kale plant going to seed...