Smrt Lernins

Today, for his World of Poetry assignment, Captain Science wrote this currently untitled sonnet:

The ground is falling, building crashing down
And houses fly like they have never flown.
A fire rages all throughout the town.
The city burned and everything we own.
The tower crashes, breaking the old clock
And waves of force are bringing down the house.
A sack of flour bursts upon a rock
And sleeping people afterwards are roused.
The blast so loud you hear it far away
And junk starts to pollute the city pond.
Debris is falling, blazes rage today
And force is snapping mighty metal bonds,
But finally the trembling terror ends
So everyone can fix the breaks and bends.

An refresher exercise in iambic and trochaic meters:

Seasons

A winter morning is a pretty sight
A snowman winking in the freezing cold
A newborn year is starting in the spring,
a garden growing full of healthy fruits
A summer noonday simmering bright and hot
A freezing pool is crowded cold and blue
The autumn time has leaves all red and bright
The benefit of seasons is the fun

[Unnamed Poem]

Evil rising on the horizon
Arrows whizzing through the air
Swords are clashing; heads are bashing
over something very rare.
This is chaos, causing slaughter
Death is spreading like a tear
He is lying. She went flying.
Whoa! Here it comes: A BEAR!

The last one’s ending caught me by surprise and made me laugh like crazy. “That’s the PUNCHLINE!” he said.

Captain Science just finished chapter 2 in World of Poetry. This is his end-of-chapter writing assignment:

Volcanic Storm

Mountain silently smoking,
Ground is starting to rumble.
Rats and pets act strangely,
Rocks are starting to tumble.
Blasting bombs of stone are falling,
Flashing lava freely flowing.
Dust is shrouding, ash is clouding.
Whoosh! The volcanoe’s slowing.

A Tiger’s Life
by Captain Science

Hunting Prey
Tiger lying on the ground,
He makes no mistakes…
Watching an unwary prey.
Very soon he’ll pounce.
Lying low, unnoticed there,
He will time it right.
Pounce! He strikes his sorry prey.
Very soon he’ll eat.

The Journey Back Home
As he crawls back to his den,
With his hunted prey,
He tiptoes, tiptoes on his paws, and
Thinks of the long day.
Daily work is done and gone
Memories fade away,
When he gets back to his home,
He will eat his prey.

The Long Night
As the bright moon rises high,
Storms are coming in.
Howling wind and stinging rain,
Battering the den.
Yet the tiger stays untouched,
Dry and not afraid.
Staying strong and trying hard,
a barricade he made.

I think the whole thing is great, but I love his meter in the final stanza! That’s my boy.

Just look at that MCT hotness!

Captain Science’s assignment from Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems today was to write a poem based on a photograph. He chose Steve McCurry’s famous photograph of the Afghan refugee girl, published in National Geographic.

The Afghan Girl Her eyes are like a rainbow, yet her clothes are very tattered, then her hair has several messy spots. Is she no more than ten? Her countenance is frightening, her visage looks concerned. Her memories are troubled times. There’s nothing she has earned.

Ten days, y’all. Ten more freaking days! I’m so excited, I could practically piddle on the rug.

This week, Captain Science went back and redid a few lessons from Paragraph Town using his other reading as the subject matter. He finished (finally, Mr. Dawdler!) reading Wind in the Door and Nordic Gods and Heroes. He completed several sentences in Practice Town.

Officer Daddyman and Captain Science worked together on some algebra word problems of Daddyman’s devising. Captain Science is greatly looking forward to starting Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, now that he has a little taste of that kind of math. Algebra was always my favorite mathematical subject, so I’m excited about it, too!

Captain Science has advanced to the next set of piano books and continues to show a natural talent for it. He’s working with 8th notes and runs, and is also doing a little jazz, which is fun to hear! Two hours a week is a lot of piano lesson, but I think the time investment is going to pay off in the long run.

Our co-op is about done. Brain class is over (and none too soon, as tempers have been flaring and the last class involved Eclectic Girl calling Captain Science a hoarder, and Captain Science calling Eclectic Girl a stealer, neither of which is true), game class will continue with no foreseeable end, and the short story class will only have one more meeting together. Along with writing, the students have learned about editing, submitting drafts to magazines and journals, and writing contests. I wish Captain Science had been willing to invest more time in working on his story, as I’m having a hard time getting a good full-length draft from him, but he’s not the only one in the class balking at it a bit. I think we’ll take a step back and let him work on it more over the summer.

Physics lab was pretty much the same-ol’, same-ol’. At least Captain Science and Eclectic Girl didn’t squabble, right?

Captain Science did a ton of poetry work this week, since we didn’t get much done in Building Poems last week. He covered limericks, creating his own stanzas, metaphor, simile, apostrophe, and personification this week, writing poems for each topic. The following are his personification and apostrophe poems, which he decided to combine together in this format:

Sun and Moon

I.
The sunlight shines upon the sea
his goal is to light everything.
While lighting up the other side
the moon illuminates the tides.
For many years they battled far,
but now they always share the earth.

II.
O, brightest sun, you hottest light
begins the day and stops the night.
Yet O great moon, your noble rays
shall make much beauty and end the day.
For many aeons you two have fought
but at this time you battle not.

I’m sure you can imagine how proud I am of him!

As we reach the end of our school year (10 days left after tomorrow), I no longer feel like I’m homeschooling so much as racing. Will we manage to finish the last of the curricula by the end of the school year, or will it dribble over into summer, throwing off the whole rhythm of everything? Each day is a race to finish another book, another subject, so that summer can be a clean start.

With each book Captain Science completed, I experience a deep sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. It’s not just about another check-marked box on a list (though it’s a little bit about that, as well), but about knowing that we’ve done a subject from beginning to end, that we’ve truly completed the first year of homeschooling (rather than just futzing around until we hit day 180). Making it to the end of the year with something still unfinished, unless it was specifically scheduled to be unfinished, would feel–perhaps unreasonably–like a small failure. I set goals and I want them completed.

Every day is a race. Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents, we manage to put to bed a couple of months ago, pulling it out for review and working on math concepts independently of curricula in the interim. Captain Science finally finished Paragraph Town last week, though he has gone back and redone a couple of lessons in that. Our brain class with Patchfire is completely. The only thing left in the writing class is making corrections to the drafts and mailing them off for submission. Game class has become more of a game club, without a need for an end-date.

Now, we’re chugging along with Building Poems, trying to wrap that up. Ideally, the only book that we will carry with us through the summer is Caesar’s English I, which I never intended us to finish by the end of the year. Far too many lessons for that, no matter how fast Captain Science seems to be zooming through it. This will keep the vocabulary fresh in his head for starting Latin (and Caesar’s English II) in the fall.

Ten days, five of which will not be managed by me, as I leave the boys in the capable hands of Officer Daddyman and the Nana, whilst I jet off to Chicago to doula for my best friend’s first birth. Five more academic days in which to wrap it all up and put it to bed for the school year. I don’t feel ready for this! This year has been such an adventure and a challenge.

Surely I’m not the only one with a deep seated need to have everything neatly wrapped up by the end of the year. How does it work for y’all? Do you leave curricula hanging to next school year? Not finish the school year until everything is finished? Do tell, do tell!

Patchfire writes about homeschoolers needing to hear a little bragging, too. I think that the best way to get that for Captain Science is by sharing his poety, which strikes me as quite mature for his age. I’m no poetry-naive yokel, either; My master’s thesis was a collection of poetry. I hope you’ll humor me in taking these opportunities to share the Captain’s works.

Here is Captain Science’s latest poem from Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems, a poem in the Rime Royal form (7 lines of iambic pentameter in an ababbcc rhyme scheme):

The Great Greek Heroes

The great Greek beasts and heroes long ago
Had much adventures many, many times
Like Jason and the Argonauts had rowed
The monsters fell to them; They were sublime,
And later on in one great different time,
Achilles was the greatest hero yet.
He fought great Hector and he won, you bet!

We’re going to work on not overusing “many” and “great,” but the kid managed to stick “Argonauts” and and “adventures” into iambic pentameter. Not only that, he correctly used some of his Caesar’s English vocabulary. Yes, he pretty much rocks.

Captain Science’s essay for today:

World War II

World War II stabbed terror into the hearts of thousands. Many lost a friend or loved one in this sword of death, and terrible, ruthless Germans crushed many souls in their hands. Planes swarmed the sky and brought whole cities to their knees, while tanks struck down any pathcrossers who bravely stood against them. Thousands of lives were devastated by the evil hands of Germany, but America won in the finish.