Smrt Lernins

I didn’t die from pneumonia, so I was able to return to schooling this week! With the completion of this week, we’ve done 140 days of school, so only 40 days left to go to meet our required number of days for our first year of homeschooling.

While we wait for our next set of math books, we’re taking a brief math break and doing a language arts-intensive week or two. Captain Science completed chapters 5 & 6 in Caesar’s English 1. We went back and reviewed the sections on appositive and gerunds/ gerund phrases in Paragraph Town (lessons 4 and 5), then lesson 6 (on clear paragraph topics). He also continued working in Building Poems, learning about meter and feet. He read through his Shel Silverstein poetry books and identified exampls of iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. We also discussed different meters and clapped out the rhythm. I’m pretty sure he did some work in Practice Town, but I’m not the one who went over that work, as I wasn’t feeling great, so I’m not sure exactly which sentences he did! Finally, he read Wrinkle in Time for his literature and discussed it with my mother (since we were still over at her house for part of the week). He’s become interested in tesseracts, so we’re going to do some research on that.

We had co-op for the first time after a 2-weeks break. The game class is going to start playtesting a simple version of their food fight game next week. The Brain class students performed an “MRI” on an orange (with raisin and cranberry “tumors”) and made neurons from marshmallows and rope licorice, along w/ their written work. My writing students starting working on dialog vs. exposition, when to “show” and when to “tell,” and are supposed to spend this week writing 10-20 minutes a day and keeping a log of it, in order to develop the habit of regular writing.

Captain Science and Eclectic Girl worked on labs on friction at Patchfire’s house this week for physics. Captain Science had some trouble making sense of one part of the lab setup, but luckily, EG was able to make sense of it. They seem to alternate taking the lead on the physics labs now (or at least, on being the first one to figure out the lab setup), which is an improvement over the previous units, where Captain Science mostly let EG do the thinking. I’m glad he appreciates this smart young woman’s leadership qualities, but I don’t want him slacking off because of it.

The Tank had his “Green Patrick’s Day” party at school and Babypie is gearing up to turn one on the 27th! I’m beginning to prepare our work for next year, including projecting WAY ahead to the end of the year, when EG and Captain Science both start the middle ages and I guide them through an awesome unit study (hopefully EG will be able to be involved in this, *stern look at Patchfire*), where they’ll choose a favorite time period and do extensive research into it, developing a persona (yes, sorta of like in the SCA) and learning what their persona’s life would have been like — what sort of education would they have had? What mathematical and scientific beliefs were in that time period? What foods were eaten? What clothing was worn? What was the political status of their nation and the world? We’ll make clothing, taste the foods, and try our best to attend a local historical recreation event! Only have, you know, 9+ months until we can work on that.

We’ve been working our way through ancient history this year, as I think the idea of doing history in order on a four-year(-ish) cycle, as presented in The Well-Trained Mind, is a great one. As Captain Science has shown a great deal of interest in the mythology and dieties of these early cultures, I decided it would be fun to make a large project out of it, something to tie together the whole year. After all, the way a culture worships and the things they believe says a lot about that culture [moment for pointed silence whilst my readers consider what much of the beliefs and worship in our culture says about us -- hint: it ain't particularly flattering, from this secular homeschooler's perspective].

The idea for the Pantheon Project sprang from “oh crap, you mean we’ve finished Egypt and I haven’t quite gotten all my Greek materials yet? Uh…research the Egyptian gods this week!” Captain Science loved it! He read about the gods and wrote paragraphs about each of the ones he considered most important to the pantheon. He seemed so enthusiastic about the topic that I had him do the same for Greece and Rome. I started calling it the Pantheon Project and developing some longer-term goals with it.

As we move forward with ancient cultures of Asian, Africa, and the Americas, Captain Science will continue to compile information on the deities and religious practices. At the end of our school year, we’ll use all of this data to do a large comparative religions project, integrating art and writing into a giant Cage Match of the Gods card game.

No, really.

The thing Captain Science loves even more than weird ancient religions is inventing/designing card games with Officer Daddyman. What could possibly make a more awesome subject for a battle-style card game than various gods with strange powers and bizarre requirements for worship? Move over, Pokemon, because Poseidon, Osiris, and Kwan Yin are entering the arena! Instead of energy cards, I forsee cards like “burnt offering.” Instead of trainers, maybe priests and priestesses? The actual designing of the cards will likely take place over the summer. Captain Science and I will work on the information (review-style) and then I’ll turn it over to Officer Daddyman for game design. Should be fun times.

I wonder if any other homeschoolers would be interested in snagging a copy of this irreverent battle royale?

Google maps now lets you take a virtual walk through Stonehenge. Since tourists aren’t allowed to wander through the stones currently, this is a fun alternative way to get a close-up look at these stones.

Officer Daddyman is in police training all week and sleeping down at the training center (it’s about two hours from here), so I’m flying solo with the three kids. Not only that, but my first line of defense, Nana and Papa, are on a much-deserved anniversary trip to the beach. It’s my first week alone with the kids since we’ve started homeschooling, so I’m a little nervous!

The first day has gone smoothly thus far, with a little hangup over Captain Science’s use of the word “scandal” in his history assignment — the rule is “don’t use a word if you don’t know the meaning,” and he didn’t know the meaning. Even after looking up the definition, he didn’t understand what the big deal was about Julius Caesar’s “adulterous relationships with married women” — and I did not enlighten him! Roman history is colorful, to say the least. I’m hiding A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome from his, as I don’t want to explain about some of the methods of execution. Being, ehem, loved to death by a bull to recreate the conception of the minotaur before a live studio audience? I’ll skip that lesson and the subsequent therapy bills.

I managed to successfully get everyone schooled, run my errands, and am now trying to decide what to feed them, before heading over to feed Nana and Papa’s cats (and possibly hitting Target for an additional stocking hanger for our mantel — five people, five stockings, but only four hangers currently, you see). I’m trying not to feel too down about Daddyman being gone all week, our undecorated half-lit tree (stupid pre-lit trees with stupid shorts in their stupid wires), and the fact that there’s still so much work to be done on the house before the holidays and our post-holidays guests. Oy! Humbug.

I’m getting a little worried about splitting Rome in half with the holidays like we’ll be doing. Will Captain Science retain everything over a two week break? Will he retain anything? Will we have to redo what we’ve done? Maybe I should make some trivia cards and pretend it’s a game, but really it’ll be homeschooling. Like that cookbook where they hide the vegetables in the cupcakes so kids don’t know you’re feeding them something other than white flour and sugar. And seriously, what kind of dumb idea is that cookbook, anyway?

Digression, for the win. It’s only Monday, and already I’m cracking up!

I am developing a game plan for the week, and that game plan is “keep them as busy as possible.” We’re going to run errands, go to meetings, do anything we can to stay active. We are going to be on-the-go-schoolers this week, because I cannot be cooped up in this house with our snaggledy-lighted naked tree like some sort of shut-in, just because it’s too damn cold for the kids to go outside barefoot (which, yes, they whine about). I have outlawed whining this week and declared that any “didn’t get my way” crying fits will result in laps run or times out, depending on the age of the child (Babypie excluded). I shall broker no crap this week, thank you ever so much.

Off to stuff the children full of some semblance of dinner before Babypie’s nap is over, then loading them all run them around to sleep. At least tomorrow is the La Leche League meeting, so I don’t have to concoct any entertainment (or lunch). Maybe I’ll make Captain Science sit in, take notes, and call it a science lesson. Maybe I’ll just trot my children out as an example of either evidence of breastfeeding’s link to increased intelligence or a warning of how extended breastfeeding and babywearing can turn into a scary snowball, rolling downhill into full-blown homeschooling hippie crunchiness. We shall see.

I’m taking a slightly different tactic with the study of Ancient Rome than I did with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. While I’ve been happy with the summaries Captain Science has produced, I’d like to guide him towards exploring slightly more difficult concepts within his chapters, encouraging him to really delve into logic-stage learning. Towards that end, instead of a list of vocabulary words and a summary of Captain Science’s choosing, I will now give him a list of essential questions (probably between 1-3, depending on the length of the chapter) for each chapter. As he reads through the chapter, he should look for information pertaining to those questions, and write a paragraph to answer them. Questions may be along the lines of “Who was [such and such] and what important changes did he make in [place]?” or “If you were a slave in [ancient empire], describe what your day might be like.”

Here is my tentative lesson plan for Ancient Rome.

Ancient Rome Spreadsheet

Today is just one of those days. You know those days, right? The days where you find yourself leaning into the refrigerator, eating caramel ice cream topping out of a jar with a spoon, praying that your oldest child stops coughing and your middle child stops wailing so they don’t wake up the youngest, who has only just fallen precariously asleep for the first time all day, despite spending most of the night flailing and coughing? Now that we’re all on the same page about what kind of day it is, let’s pretend I never mentioned the caramel thing.

We have some kind of crud at the McLernins house. It’s an congested chest crud that is making everyone cough and be irritable. They’re coughing their brains right out, as can be evidenced by Captain Science’s inability to complete his Ancient Greece quiz/activity. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answers — he remembered things like perioikoi and hoplite just fine. Ancient Greece has been his favorite topic thus far and we discuss it all the time. He couldn’t figure out what to do with the scrambled letters once he’d answered all the questions. The act of unscrambling was just beyond his ken. Understand, that child has been doing word jumbles and the like since he was three or four, so this isn’t a new concept. He didn’t “get it” today, nor could he (after figuring out the middle word was probably “and”) think of a game he played that had “and” in the title. Finally, he managed to come up with “chutes and ladders,” which didn’t work, and with much coaching, wandered ’round to “hide and seek.” Even knowing something similar to “hide and seek” was what I was looking for, he still couldn’t unscramble “H-A-D-Y-R” into a Greek-related word. In a combination of frustration and pity, I finally just blurted out “hydra and seek,” and he laughed, because it is cheesily funny.

At that point, I decided it was time to fold ‘em and walk away, which was definitely the right call. I called a hiatus on any further learning and instead, am enforcing a nap time for all children, regardless of age. Of course, only the baby is complying (and only after a great deal of coaxing), and the other two are coughing, thrashing about, calling things out to each other, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. As long as they’re pretending to rest, however, and aren’t waking up they’re sister, I’ll play along and pretend I don’t hear them shuffling about up there.

I’ve finally gotten a shower and had a cup of coffee, so I call that a win. We can finish the rest of today’s work on Saturday when we have a better hand.

As a secular homeschooler, I have a deep fondness for DK Publishing. I wasn’t interested in purchasing a boxed history curriculum, even if one I felt was both adequately rigorous and completely secular were available to me. Instead, I chose to pick a main text for developing a timeline and use supporting texts and other resources (websites, field trips, fiction stories, mythology trivia cards, etc.) to supplement. The books from DK Publishing have largely filled that need.

Here are a few DK texts we’ve used so far this year:

History: The Definitive Visual Guide provides the spine for our history curriculum. This book uses secular dating (BCE/CE) and doesn’t couch history in terms of religious events. As the title suggests, this text is visually stunning, with full color pictures of settings, people, and artifacts. Each section starts with a timeline of important events. The chapters are fairly information-dense, which makes this book appropriate for strong readers of the logic stage and up. The book does leave some gaps in knowledge. Overall cultural accomplishments are well covered, but many important events and people receive too small a mention. For example, Ancient Greece, I couldn’t find a single reference to the Battle of Thermopylae. Make sure you read through each section and choose appropriate supplemental materials for the thin areas. On the whole, however, it’s a much deeper look into each time period than any other history book I considered for our spine — it beats the singularly nonsecular Kingfisher history hands-down and is better than the Usborne for an older student.

The Eyewitness series is one of our best sources of supplemental reading. Thus far, we’ve used Eyewitness: Mesopotamia, Eyewitness: Ancient Greece, and are beginning Eyewitness: Ancient Rome. These books provide detailed information about the arts, technologies, daily life, clothing, and other cultural aspects of each time period. They, too, have many wonderful illustrations with detailed captions and each has a pull out full-color poster with important terms, events, people, and other details. We like to put our posters up right by Captain Science’s workspace. They also come with clip-art CDs, which we haven’t used, but might in the future. I have to say, both Eyewitness: Mesopotamia and Eyewitness: Ancient Greece contained more information than I remember learning about either culture until at least high school, and possible college, in the case of Mesopotamia. The books are written for children around age 8+, so it’s easy for children to engage with the material, but it’s by no means dumbed-down or overly simplistic. The biggest down side of using these as a school text was that Captain Science would sneak off with them and read them straight through instead of waiting on each lesson.

Many of the sections in the Eyewitness books match up well topically with History: The Definitive Visual Guide. When we covered Alexander the Great, Captain Science read the sections in both books, which presented the information in two slightly different ways and presented a nicely rounded picture of this famous ruler. The sections on science and medicine in both books matched up nicely, too. I’m looking forward to seeing if Eyewitness: Ancient Rome and the chapters in History have the same degree of parity.

All in all, you can consider this post my love letter to DK Publishing, because I’ve been very pleased with everything I’ve purchased so far. Even better, because these aren’t books aren’t published specifically for homeschoolers, I’ve been able to find them in my local book stores and use coupons and my educator discounts on them! Nothing like inexpensive, secular, quality texts to make a history-loving homeschooler a happy mama!

In May of 2009, gay marriage was legalized in the state of Maine. On November 4th of this same year, a narrow (and I do mean narrow in multiple senses of the word) majority of Maine voters stripped gay citizens of their right to marry. 53% of Maine voters have decided that the love between two men or two women isn’t worthy of a legal union. They have decided that gay citizens are not deserving of the same right to marry their loved ones, to extend legal protection to their loved ones, to provide benefits to their loved ones. I’m sure all the God-fearing conservative voters of Maine are celebrating this as a huge victory. I personally think that God would be ashamed of them. I know I am.

My mother remembers when her school was integrated — prior to middle school, she had attended classes with white students only. I, on the other hand, grew up with a black best friend with whom I attended school from elementary school onward (and who is now my children’s godmother). When I was in high school, my gay friend pretended to be straight to stop bullying from fellow classmates. We faked a relationship so he could finish his senior year without harassment or threat of bodily harm from the rednecks in his classes, who stopped the bullying when they saw that he had a “girlfriend.” I had hoped and prayed that by the time my children entered school, that the brand of legal bigotry of my generation, anti-gay legislation, would be as much a thing of the past as the brand of legal bigotry of my mother’s time, racial segregation. I see now that this isn’t to be.

Laws banning gay marriage don’t have a direct impact on my life. I identify as heterosexual. My marriage to my husband is legal and recognized in all 50 states and in every country that recognizes a marriage that took place in the U.S. I have no reason to believe any of my three children will grow up gay, though I also have no reason to believe they’ll grow up straight. My issue with a ban on gay marriage isn’t that it’s keeping me or my children from marrying. My issue with a ban on gay marriage is that it is, in all ways, morally and ethically wrong.

The concept of a statewide ban on gay marriage flies in the face of our democratic values for several reasons. It places “states’ rights” (which, frankly, is a concept that seems to be whipped out almost exclusively to justify bigotry) ahead of both federal rights and individual rights. It devalues equality of individuals with the statement that all men are created equal unless those men want to marry other men. It deprives a portion of the citizenry of full and complete citizenship. It, in a large sense, says that to be gay is to be unAmerican, possibly even slightly less than human.

Perhaps this year, the Respect for Marriage Act will pass, providing at least some legal protection (though Federal only, and not nearly enough of that) and a modicum of rights to gays in this country. Perhaps within my children’s lifetime, the issue of gay marriage will become a non-issue, something that used to be a fight, but is now just another accepted cultural norm, just like the issue of interracial marriage is now a totally accepted cultural norrr…er,really, you guys? Really?!?!. I guess man’s inhumanity to man continues only vaguely abated, and this nation is still full of racist, homophobic asshole who try to couch their bigotry in Selectively-Bible-Thumping Think of the Children bullshit.

Why post about this in a homeschooling blog? Well, as a homeschooler, I can combat this sort of bigotry through education. As a secular homeschooler, I choose curricula carefully to ensure that no bigoted religious agenda makes its way into my school day. I can teach my children that who you love doesn’t make you less of a person, less of a citizen, less deserving of equal rights, or less deserving of love. We can have conversations about these gay marriage bans and why they’re wrong. I can integrate gay rights as part of our lessons on other civil rights. I can include homosexuality into our sexual education, not prescriptively (as some conservatives absurdly insist will happen in public schools if gay marriage is allowed), but as a normal variant of sexual identity, not something aberrant. I can disallow homophobic language and behavior from my family and in my home and make sure my children grow up knowing that whether they love men or women, they love and support they receive from me will be no different.

I can only hope that others in this country are doing the same and that this generation of young men and women will grow up to be better to their fellow man than my generation and our predecessors.

Because I only ever assume I’ll have one Halloween per child to dress them in any way I please (as Captain Science was very vocal about his costume choice by his second Halloween), I chose to dress Babypie as Rosie the Riveter this year, specifically trying to recreate the iconic poster. She’s going to be dressed in a polka dot bandana, denim overalls, something resembling a workshirt, and a little dirty smudge on her face, while I’m going as the background of her poster, wearing a yellow t-shirt with a blue speech bubble with white letters that say “We Can Do It!”

I had a dilly of a time getting the shirt ready. I bought the only yellow tee in my size at Target and two cans of spray fabric paint, which proved to be a bad choice, as the blue spray I used on the speech bubble wicked underneath the stencil, making a huge green blob, as the blue also proved to be far from opaque enough. There were tears and angry exclamations, but when the shirt dried, I appliqued a piece of blue fabric on over the green blob and made a passable speech bubble. I made a stencil for the words, tested the white spray, and managed to get it all over the table, thankfully sparing the shirt. Finally, I just painted the letters on by hand, which was a bit tedious, but doable.

While I was painting on these letters, I entered into a strange mental state, where I was suddenly really struck by the meaning behind them and what this represented. Rosie the Riveter is often used as an icon of feminism, because she represents the women who took on male-dominated trades during the war. Because of that, I think a lot of women (the conservative and/or religious homeschooling moms I see on the WTM forums, for example) might not give her a lot of credence, or perhaps they place more significance on the fact that after the war, Rosie returned to being a homemaker or other “acceptable” female trade. They may not think they can identify with Rosie. They may not think of themselves as being much like Rosie.

What can Rosie represent to all women? “We Can Do It!” Rosie says, baring a strong arm, dressed in her practical work clothes. We Can Do It! “It” for Rosie was stepping into a traditionally male job, working long, hard hours doing physical labor that she likely never expected to have to do. She likely didn’t grow up longing for assembly line work, a job as a welder, a chance to put a war ship together, but when she was called to do it, she went. She stepped outside her cultural constraints because it was necessary to do it. She put her own physical and possibly mental comfort on hold. She sacrificed, however temporarily, the things she wanted to do, preferred to do, or was simply used to doing, so that she could serve a tremendous social and economic needs, often doing so under brutal conditions with pay far below that of a man in the same job.

We Can Do It! “It” for each of us may be something different, a different sort of necessary, but difficult labor, a different kind of sacrifice, a different kind of service. “It” is anything we could choose to shirk, but don’t, any tremendous task that could overwhelm us, but doesn’t, every hardship that begs us to just surrender, but will not break us. We Can Do It! We can do it because we have to, because we know it is right, and when we do, we become a Rosie, too. We don’t have to bare our muscular arms to show the world that we’re Rosies. We do it through our actions every day.

Every woman can be a Rosie.
Every woman who has ever put the needs of her children before her own is a Rosie.
Every woman who has overcome a cultural norm for the sake of doing what’s right is a Rosie.
Every woman who has served a greater good, when not serving would be easier, is a Rosie.
Every woman who puts out a hand to help other women find strength is a Rosie.
Every woman who holds her head up high under duress and hardship is a Rosie.
Every woman whose work goes unappreciated, but who keeps on working anyway is a Rosie.
Every woman who reaches out to her sisters in her community is a Rosie.
Every woman who refuses to give up is a Rosie.
YOU are a Rosie.

You can be a Rosie in jeans, in a suit, in a uniform, in modest dress. You can be a Rosie with no children, with one child, with many children. You can be a Rosie working out of the home or in the home. You can be a Rosie if you are an atheist, a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist. You can embody the strength of Rosie without ever picking up a hammer. You can embody the strength of Rosie while you change a diaper, scrub a floor or fix a meal. You can be Rosie when you educate your children at home.

Rosie is a strong woman, who owns her choices, who sees an obstacle and works to over come it, who does what is necessary regardless of whether or not it’s easy. A Rosie commands respect, not through force or a loud shout for attention, but through tireless effort, pride in her work, and the strength to do the tasks that must be done. That’s not just a feminist ideal, but one that any woman, any person can reach for.

Be a Rosie. Be a woman who knows that She Can Do It!

I’m also a Helpful Mama, so you can feel free to print and use this stuff if you find it useful in any way.

Captain Science has finished Ancient Egypt, and because I’m always in search of a way to quiz him without really quizzing him, I made a venn diagram for him to sort out a list of people and places from Ancient Egypt into the Old/Middle and New Kingdoms. I uploaded it to Scribd. Check out my awesomeness!

Ancient Egypt Venn Diagram

This is the crossword puzzle I made to review the various Mesopotamian cultures. Much more fun than a fill-in-the-blank quiz, even though that’s essentially what it is.

Mesopotamia Crossword and Answer Key