White flag

We're sending up a white flag and begging for healing prayers to be said for this sad little home bound family of sick and sleepy flu fighters! Hunter has not kept anything down since Friday night, and now Haven has joined him in a competition to see who can maintain the lowest body weight due to illness. Hunter's pants no longer stay up, poor little bag of bones. But my little Hannah Jane, with her champion immunity, is still going strong and, despite mom's lack of sleep and her brothers' lack of fluid intake, is eager to get on with more school work today.

In order to keep up with Hannah Jane's thirst for knowledge and the boys' need for ever changing linens, I drug the spare crib mattress into the school room and went on with life as usual. Well, we don't usually school in our bathrobes, but, hey! At least were doing it, right? Hunter is sitting at his desk eating teryaki chicken soup and sipping Gatorade, Haven is passed out on the crib mattress, and Hannah Jane is recounting the story of Romulus and Remus in her notebook.

For a moment I was distracted by an e-mail from a friend who has just returned from vacation and when I looked up, Hannah Jane had both of her ailing brothers temporarily perked up by a trip through our children's atlas. She was saying, "That's where Bereket is from. See right there? And his mom is from over here. And look, there is a zinc mine right there." First of all, I had no idea she had listened so closely this summer when our friend Bereket was explaining his heritage and the complications between Eritrea and Ethiopia. I had a little difficulty recalling the details myself, but there she was retelling it with great understanding of the situation for a six year old. Now that she can read with a degree of proficiency, she loves to look at the atlas and locate far off places that she feels a connection to. Like Yaya and Japan, the Taylors and Canada, Aina and Madagascar, and now Bereket with Eritrea.

So, with a little help from the healthy one among us, there is still lots of learning going on during this most sick day we have ever experienced.

Is your mouth dirtier than a goat's? A dog's?

Miss Hannah Jane has begun her experiment for the 2010 Cache Valley Home Schooler's Science Fair!!!! How exciting! We tossed around a few ideas, all involving growing bacteria for some reason, and decided upon swabbing 3 dogs, 3 goats, and 3 humans to see which species has the most bacteria filled mouth.

I had to hold myself back from insisting on what I felt would be cooler bacteria comparisons, and made sure that this was HER experiment and not mine. Everyone who has asked what we are doing has said, "Well, with Joe for a dad, that sounds just great!" Joe is, for those of you who don't know, a Molecular Biology PhD. This Innocent comment is driving me nuts because they might as well be saying, "We know that you are a science moron, and could never help Hannah Jane with such a great project." Ughh!!! Joe thinks it's hilarious!

Hannah Jane came up with the experiment herself, and with my help she researched what she needed to know and did it. I, of course, did the shopping and the boiling of the agar since she has no debit card and is not tall enough or coordinated enough to work the stove. But she has pretty much done the rest herself!

Last night she prepared her agar recipe and got the plates ready. Today she swabbed all of her subjects. Our friend Barb was kind enough to let us come over and dig around in her dogs' mouths and Steve was there to hold the dogs' mouths open while Hannah Jane did her business. So much fun. This afternoon we prepared our incubator, which seems a little like a fire hazard so I keep obsessively checking it every half hour to make sure it's not over heating, and drug the swabs over the agar plates.

Now we wait. If you want to know how the human mouth holds up to a barnyard animal and man's best friend, pop over to Bridgerland Community College on March 11th and check out the results for yourself. I'm sure there will be lots of cool stuff to check out!

Hannah Takes on the Sewing Machine!

Today was the day that Hannah Jane has desperately been awaiting. She got to use the sewing machine! Joe, if you're reading this, I assure you it was perfectly safe and no one actually stitches through their fingers anymore. Really. Well, maybe in sweat shops, but that's a totally different matter. This was voluntary and slow paced sewing! Trust me...OSHA would approve!

It all began last week when Hannah Jane and I took a mommy daughter date She really wanted to hang around the Valentines section and kept looking at things for the boys. I told her that I always like a hand made gift the best, and maybe she could make them something that would be more special than just another stuffed animal holding a heart.
Her reply was, "How can I make them something special when I can't even use the sewing machine?" Well, she had never asked to use it before and I did get a little thrill at the thought of it so I said, "Let's go pick out some fabric!" She decided to make a pillow for each of the boys to match their rooms and stitch their names on them. I talked her into just making an easy letter H on the machine and keeping it simple for her first try.

Well, as usual she blew me away. She was a little scared of the sound and kept depressing the pedal just enough to make the noise but not enough to make the needle go up and down. Once she relaxed, she just ripped right through the two pillows and finished them in no time flat. She stuffed them with our overabundance of Buffalo Snow and I did the ladder stitch to close off the last of the seam.She was so gosh darn proud of herself she could hardly sit still. "I'm a pro at this!" she proudly said. And I'd have to agree. Since I can pretty much only sew in straight lines, I think she's all caught up to her mom. I better learn some new skills so I can keep one step ahead!

Roman Mosaics for Valntines Day!

It's still Ancient Rome week 1 and we are really rolling in the craft department. When we hit a new civilization we usually try to live in it for a few hours a day, which means looking at and recreating their art, reading their great literature (when it is appropriate, AKA not Gilgamesh!!!!) eating the food, and sometimes wearing their clothes. Ancient Egypt was the last time we had this much fun going all out, because quite frankly not all civilizations are jazzy enough to get all dressed up for.

Rome has been full of craft project potential. Today we are making mosaics. We made some plaster and gem stone mosaics this summer after happening across a really wacky section of sidewalk near our favorite thrift store, Somebody's Attic, but that was all random and abstract. Nothing like the Roman art we are looking at. So Hannah Jane decided to make a mosaic photo album for her dad to keep in his man cave (the tiny room to which his deer antlers and hunting cot have been relegated) for his hunting photos. The boys wanted to make a mosaic as well, and I thought this a fine time to make some more valentines art for grandparents!

I sketched out the silhouette of a buck and some mountains and then cut up a thousand tiny shreds of paper in appropriate colors for the scene. For the boys I just sketched the outline of a heart on several pieces of blue paper and cut up some neon pink shreds.

Hannah Jane's shreds were teensy weensy, so I gave her a dental pick to use for picking them up and placing them on her scene. The boys didn't need a tool because their shreds were much bigger.

We smeared glue all over the area to be filled in and the kids got to work, quietly and intensely placing the pieces of color on their picture. They did a great job. I love the sudden calm that comes over the house when we are doing a fine motor craft project. Wish I had time to keep them crafting all day long. How blissful my existence would be!

Tomorrow Hannah Jane will finish and shellac her photo album to keep the paper shreds in place for the long haul. The boys' hearts will be stuffed into packets to be mailed all around the US for grandparents near and far. One will be held out for Ms. Joe, our favorite old lady at the old folks home.

Next week? Building a model of a Roman Villa, perhaps?

Ancient Roman Scrolls

We're planning to spend the next two weeks looking at ancient Rome. Thanks to my own education, I have a very fuzzy and uneasy feel for the difference between ancient Roman and ancient Greek culture. Well, I take that back...their cultures were vastly different and that's pretty easy to see, but their physical space seems to overlap somewhat, their mythology is crazy similar, and well, if you're going to have a ton of gods can't you go get some original ones? They are pretty much the same social club with new names. Am I right? So, I am hoping to clarify some things in my own mind as we study. Oh, and Coach Hamlet, if you ever read this, I am terribly sorry for not listening when you explained the difference!

Anyway, we found this fabulous book at the library that is all Roman crafts for kids. Today, because we were pressed for time between having new tires put on the van, a dentist appointment, and the oh, so fun girl's club (which was so great because it felt a little like a mom's club at the same time, so thank you, Nikki, for contributing to my mommy socialization), we started off with a nice simple project: Scroll making.

The kids had a ball with this one. Hannah Jane had just read that every copy of a book was hand written on a scroll in those days, and feeling the way she does about handwriting, she was baffled by this. So her scroll, of course, had to be a copy of a book. We decided that the paragraph about how all books were hand written on a scroll would be a pretty witty thing to write upon her scroll, and so it was.

Hunter, with no prompting, filled his scroll paper with H's and U's. This just thrilled me to the core because he resists learning to write his letters with all his might. But today it was his idea, and so he willy nilly filled up his paper with the two letters he has learned over the past couple of weeks. He even said, "I can't wait to show Daddy! He's going to be so proud!" But when Daddy got home and asked to see his scroll, Hunter, being the turkey that he is, said that he would only show it if Joe read him a book first. Then another book, and another. He never did show Joe the scroll.

Anyway, if you want to make one of your own, you can get the book or you can do it our way (which was much cheaper).

We got some foam sheets and some drinking straws a the dollar store, and we used copy paper and yarn that we already had at home. It will also help to have a hot glue gun on hand.

Start by halving the paper lengthwise so that you get a long skinny sheet. While your kid writes on their scroll paper, cut 2 small circles from the foam and cut a straw to a length that is slightly longer than the width of the paper. Or, if you have older students, you can let them do ALL of the cutting and designing. With the age of my kids, we do a very pre-cut, assembl only required sort of thing for projects like these.

Fold the top of the paper over the straw and glue it in place. Cut a slit in the center of each foam circle and push each end of the straw through the slits in the foam.

Push a loop of yarn through one of the slits in the opposite direction of the straw so that the yarn loop hangs from the opposite the paper. This is how you will remove the scroll from its sheath. Put a dab of hot glue where the straw meets with the circles and the yarn to make sure that they don't easily slip off.

Now take a new foam sheet and run a strip of hot glue along one edge and bend it around, gluing the opposite edge to the glued edge, forming a cylinder.

Now just roll your scroll paper around the star and slide the scroll into the sheath! Viola!

And of course you shouldn't be surprised when your younger students think it makes a better telescope or sword than a scroll!

Dead Laptop

This is goodbye. Well, for a little while. My laptop is trying to shut down as I type this. New laptop coming soon, but for now I'm going to have to live a technology free life until I can buy a new machine. Hopefully it won't be longer than a week or so. So keep checking in. I'll be back soon with a faster, more reliable machine. And I'll have lot's of fun stories and pictures built up just awaiing my internet return! So, if I know you personally, call me. Don't email. See ya soon!

Tie Dye Snowman

Today was the absolute best snow day ever. We got about a foot on top of the 8 or so inches of old snow, which made for perfect play time. Joe dug tunnels through the snow for the kids and the dog to get around the back yard, but of course, they all went off roading. That little pup was the funniest thing, She would disappear into the deep snow and then pop up a little farther down the yard. SO cute!
Well, I have always had this crazy dream of tie dying a snow man. You can't actually tie, of course, but I have wanted to use food coloring to make a tie dye looking snow man. This was my first ever attempt. It was not as easy as I had hoped. Getting that perfect swirl pattern was near impossible, so we just went a little wild. I took 4 disposable cups and filled them half way with water and then put four drops of food coloring in each. Then I took one of those Olive oil bottles with the drop nozzle and filled it with one color at a time.

The immediate effect was totally awesome! The colors were bright and cheery, even if not in a nice and tidy tie dye pattern. But the quickly got absorbed by the snow and thinned out to almost nothing. Hannah Jane had a ball whipping colored juice all over the snow man!

So I finally got to do one of those weird things that you always secretly dream of doing but never actually do, like taking a dip in a swimming pool full of jello. I'll likely never do that, but for today I have a crazy colored snowman in my backyard! That's enough for me!

Ancient Time Line

We have been taking a first look at ancient times: creation (or big bang...we talk about all of the theories and lightly discuss what Abdul Baha had to say on the topic) to the fall of the Western Roman Empire for roughly a year and a half. We are through 3 of 4 units, so I thought this would be a good time to look back and put all of the pieces together by constructing a time line before we move on any further.

This filler activity is also an indication that I didn't make it to the library this week to get our required reading materials, and am therefore productively marking time. In any event, it never hurts to take a look back since we don't follow the public school's cycle of chapter, test, chapter, test...

So I quickly Googled dates for all of the big events, dynasties, civilizations, and stories that we have studied up to this point. While I taped copy paper together and marked dates at reasonably accurate spaces, Hannah Jane got on Google images and copy/pasted pictures into a word file to print, cut out, and glue on the time line.
Hannah Jane decided to do this month's culture club presentation using a generic form of Power Point (Open Office Impress, for those of you who are interested in free shareware), so she just learned how to copy/paste images a couple of days ago. What a time saver that was for me to just have the 6 year old do it! And that way she got to choose what pictures she liked best to remind her of the events in ancient history.
For me, the hardest part of the time line was deciding what intervals to mark off. The earliest time is pretty empty, the later time is jam packed, and I thought it best to have the spacing consistent throughout to get the point across.
So our time line is certainly not balanced. But that's okay. If it's true that those Bible guys lived for hundreds of years each, that would explain the lack of excitement in the early days. Let's say you get one dynamic character maybe once every 5-10 generations and a lifespan is seven hundred years...well, you might be waiting a long time for someone fabulous to show up! Especially when you are starting with a world population of 2. And if you suppose that people were not actually living that long, well... we've discussed the whole oral tradition versus cold hard fact concept, so I won't be totally ruining her sense of time. I wonder if Abdul Baha had an opinion on ancient life spans?

Our time line is decked out with photographs of ruins, illustrations of big events, maps of locations of the bigger of the ancient civilizations, and a color coded line that demarcates the estimated times of each one's power. I'm not sure how accurate it all is since there are at least 20 different ideas on when the rise and fall of different civilizations took place and the dates of things like the Universal Flood, but the kids get the picture. Everything is in roughly chronological order and the general times of power are clearly laid out.

Anyway, we had fun with this. It took a few hours interrupted by a brother fight over wooden blocks and a snack break, but all's well that ends in learning. And this certainly was cooler than cramming for a unit test!