This week in immersive learning: Picnics Galore

Calliope exploring the dynamics of a water balloon 

This was a busy week for the local homeschooling community, as we 'kick-off' the academic year with not one, but TWO amazing "not-back-to-school" picnics.

I asked her to smile. (check out the boxes in the background-curriculum swap!)

The name sounds kinda satire-y, which is somewhat intentional...especially amongst the unschooling crowd.  We don't have formal summer vacations, since our educational philosophy becomes a sort of way of life for the family and there isn't really anything to take a break from (SIDE RANT: I also really like this aspect of our chosen path because it doesn't set up false expectation of guaranteed unlimited free time every summer before saddling them with real world jobs where you get two weeks off per year, if you're lucky), but it is still nice to recognize the rite of a new year beginning.  Fall also marks the time when we can resume group field trips and classes which often get put on hold during the time when public schools are out.  Many organizations don't offer school discounts during these times, and many homeschoolers choose to avoid popular destinations while the public school kids will be there - we can go anytime, but they can't, so let them have at it while they can and we'll take our turn when school is back in session - it reduces crowds for everyone involved.

Cadie climbs

Happy Hazel at play 

Classic!

Hazel takes Callie on an adventure!

Failed crowd shot.  too many people spread out to far to really get a good picture of how well attended these things were.

So anyway, these picnics were a great opportunity to reconnect with folks who we haven't seen in a while, to introduce new families, and chat about classes and events we may want to tackle during the coming year.  Everyone gathers in the playground with tons of food and curriculum materials to swap and share, and it is great fun.  We came away with a whole bunch of new books (oi, we have a book problem in our house - despite having given away a bunch at the picnics!), GLITTER (much to James' chagrin), paper for handwriting practice, anatomical models, puzzles, activity booklets, patterns, and even a couple new dresses for our ever-growing seven year old.  Oh - and tap shoes.

Obviously we had great fun exploring all of our new materials...and then I got to post this to Facebook: "The dark side to homeschooling: Scored some glitter at the not-back-to-school picnic & swap this afternoon, which Cadence quickly paired with her knowledge of her father's disdain for the stuff and the fact that we have been discussing pranks lately to devise her very own: She glitter bombed his workstation. Her attempt at a good and harmless prank would have been successful had she thought to move the keyboard first."

Last tax court softball game of the season!

Also this week, we received a lovely gift from my friend Tim, who, learning of the major sunburns we brought home with us from our trip to California, mailed us an Aloe plant.  The company that sent it included a second succulent as a bonus, but neither one was potted.  So, we got to get our hands dirty (literally!) creating a new home for our newest living members of the household.

Cleaning out the pot

Filling the pot 3/4 full of specially mixed soil

Finished happy(er) plants!

THANK YOU SOO MUCH! To Tim for the generous gift, and of course to all the wonderful families that make up our homeschooling community.  Some of the most giving folks you will ever meet-I am glad to be a part of it!

A typical conversation with my 22 month old...

Calliope (22 months):  Mama, I'm all ready for bed!
Me (her mother): No you're not, you still need to wash your hands, you have pretzel on your head, and you're naked except for some tap shoes.
Calli:  Let's see what baba thinks.
           (exits, tapping and clacking as she goes, shouting):
          Baba, I'm all ready for bed!

Calliope and Turtle

An Oceanic Kick-Off to 2nd Grade

Me & my three incredible kids wiggling our toes in the pacific.

Most kids in our area headed back to school this past week, following up Labor day with a return to home and routine.  As for us?  We kicked off our academic year in style, too, but we opted not to wait until after the holiday, and we traveled to the opposite coast to do it.  Welcome to second grade/pre-K, let's jump into some oceanography! (and then the Pacific Ocean itself.)

While visiting our friend Cat in Santa Barbara, she took us to a wharf not far from her home which featured, among other things, a little sea center.  It was tiny, but very informative, and perfect for our little clan.  It housed a mini-aquarium premised on the idea that all the creatures you could learn about in the center could be found by just exploring the waters below the wharf and along the adjacent beach.

The sharks we were able to touch

While I generally dislike petting zoo situations, I admit it was really amazing to see the kids begin to appreciate the sharks they were able to gently stroke on a much more real level - a step away from "agh! shark! dangerous!" and more toward it being a real, living being...and I learned for myself that stroked in one direction they feel quite smooth, but going in the opposite direction, it feels quite spiney. 

One of the coolest things we got to see during this trip was SHARK EGGS.  They were breeding these sharks in-house, and had the eggs on display as well.  It was really amazing to see the tiny sharks wriggling about in the eggs-and then seeing how the older fetuses were folded in on themselves, about ready to burst free.

Shark Eggs

There was tons of awesome stuff there - urchins, sea stars, giant snails, of course mussels...they had a wheel of fortune type deal to see if you as a fish would survive to (and through) adulthood. (spoiler:  the chances weren't good.)  And they had a (somewhat creepy) dolphin-a-la body worlds on display, with some innards moved out and it's infant partially in the womb...very interesting from an anatomically educational standpoint, but somewhat gruesome.

They also had a big, dark room with a bunch of black-lit jellyfish (and friends!) in it, which was, of course, beautiful.

Hazel gazes at some radiant creatures

But the most thrilling part of the trip for the kids was our visit to the hands-on oceanography center at the back of the building.  There, they had a big hole cut in the floor that was open to the sea below, and they had all sorts of equipment - and docents - on hand.  They explained to us how each test worked, and then guided us through performing several experiments ourselves.  We measured water clarity, pulled up crab traps, and collected water samples and samples of sediment from the ocean floor.

James helps Hazel see over the edge, down into the water below

Afterwards, we sifted through the sediment to see what it was made up of.  we found many shards of shells and a few creatures mixed in with the sand. Then, we took petri dishes with some of our findings over to a video microscope for closer inspection.

Hazel and Calliope sifting through a sediment sample

Cat looks at some live creatures on the large scope while Cadence and James check out some shell shards on the small one 

We also conducted a series of experiments on our water samples to check the Ph levels, the salinity of the water, and of course, temperature.

James assists Hazel pour water into the meter

The kids had great fun, and were very excited to get to use some real scientific equipment.  It was especially fun to take what we learned with us, and get to do some further exploration the next day, at the beach!  The kids were on the lookout for creatures - and other features - of the california coast habitat.  This photo has a picture of a pretty big sand crab if you look closely enough...they burrow super fast and snapping a pic was a bit of a challenge.  There were SO MANY (as the kids would exclaim) of the little tiny ones, but they darted away far too quickly...this guy was practically lumbering by comparison.

Sand crab in a bucket. if you look reeeeeaaaaally close, you may see at least one teensy one, too.

Hazel was not at all a fan of the kelp...her disdain for it reminded me of how much I used to despise the sensation of it wrapping around my ankles as a kid...Can't say I blame her for going out of her way to avoid it. She busied herself making sand castles and hunting for rocks that looked like seashells.

Hazel gathering materials for her creations 

Cadence was far less intimidated, and she and James ventured farther down the beach in search of tide pools among the rocks.  They kept getting distracted when she would try to dowse him with her bucket, though.

Run!

I am hoping that all the fun exploration we did this week will set the pace for an academic year full of the same.  We hit the ground running this week, and kept it up despite traveling home and the jet lag, attending a class about bats at a nearby nature center where we got to see some wild bats and talk about their importance to our ecosystem (among other things).  Here we go, 2nd grade, we're pleased to meet ya.

A year of learning

Publishing this, unedited and as is, two and a half years after it was written...clearly a vastly unfinished piece, and yet, somehow, manages to find the perfect non-ending.

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Grieving sucks.  It takes away so much of your energy and motivation that it can make just making it through a day under normal circumstances exorbitantly difficult.  Knowing this, and knowing that it will take a very long time to get through the initial flood of it, I knew that I was going to have to prioritize where I would spend the precious little energy I did have, and make allowances for myself to let go of tasks that I would normally find mandatory.  The choice was pretty easy; my priority was the kids, and making sure they were getting the love, support - and education - that they need and deserve.  Unfortunately, the biggest thing that ended up falling by the wayside was the paperwork aspect of it - namely, the documentation of the work that we were doing.  I had hoped - and thought it hugely important - to document the experiences and discussions we engaged in as they happened by adding (ideally: daily; but 'realistically': weekly) entries into a portfolio.  To that end I did take digital photographs throughout (most) days, weeks, months -and now the full school year, but until now I have not managed to get myself to sit down and write any of it out.

Unfortunately this means that this portfolio document will be pathetically incomplete.  As I sit down now to try to compile all of the information I can about the amazing journey these kids and I have undertaken this year, I am aware that I am going to have to pick and choose what to put to the page in order to give as much of an idea of scope as I can while still paying attention to some of the finer, pertinent, details.

So here goes:

Our homeschooling year kicked off in a hard way, with our first official day of homeschooling coinciding (horribly) with the sudden and rapid decline in my mother's health.  (In fact she was rushed to the ER on Cadie's last day of public school.) Mom lived with us at the time, and the freedom to care for her was one of the many factors that contributed to our decision to homeschool in the first place; but we had thought we were still weeks to months away from the end.  It ended up being mere days; and thus homeschooling for us has been inextricably tied up with love, grief, and healing...and of course along with that comes mental health.

Throughout the year we have talked a lot about the various ways our brains and bodies work, with an obvious emphasis on emotions and what mental health means, and how we can work towards mental health in the same way that we work towards physical health.  We have talked a lot about how much we use our bodies and what we eat effects the way we feel, and how easy or difficult it can be to keep ourselves balanced depending on how well we are taking care of our bodies.  Our family is no stranger to depression, as every adult member of our extended family on both sides has suffered from some version of it, ourselves included (James takes medication daily as a tool to help him manage his OCD, I have suffered from clinical depression since I was a quite young and several years ago received a diagnosis of PTSD on top of that).  After meeting a new friend here who at the age of seven suffers from severe Bipolar disorder, we expanded the discussion to talking about how certain mental disorders can make it more difficult for certain individuals to manage their own emotions and their reactions to the surrounding environment.  We talked a lot about finding ways to look at our own actions to see where an overblown reaction may have roots in reality, and where it is ok to acknowledge that this is not the fault of any one person, but that we can assess the situation to find ways to make the sufferer as comfortable and safe as possible to help them come back to a place where the problem can be addressed - and that sometimes there isn't a specific problem that needs addressing, but that the person may still need space to come back to 'reality'.  As the year wore on, it became increasingly clear that Hazel suffers from some form of extreme anxiety, and we began taking her for weekly appointments with a psychologist (whom she simply adores).  Hazel describes her therapist as a "doctor who helps you make your bad dreams go away," and while perhaps not a completely comprehensive description of what a psychologist can do, I found it to be a wonderful way to distill the usefulness of talk and play therapy - especially at a developmentally appropriate level. (She's four.)

Cadence has been -perhaps unsurprisingly - very receptive to all of the information about how to handle the hard feelings that she encounters - both from within herself, and from friends and family around her.  She draws remarkably perceptive parallels between moments of hardships in her friend and her sister in ways that allow her to expand her inherent empathy and arms her with the ability to maintain her own sense of self, and not get caught up in the fear and rage that sometimes arises during play sessions.  She has become adept at recognizing when she can make a change to help someone 'come back downstairs' (as Dr. Dan Siegel would say) after flipping their lid, and when it is ok for her to step away and wait until the storm has passed - and that stepping aside did not make her a bad person.

Anyway, back to the beginning:

Mom's health suddenly became the focus of our household, but we didn't let that deter us from our mission.  Mom came home from the hospital with a daily barrage of medications - pills, supplements, elixirs, you name it - and of course they all had to be taken at specific times in specific doses, alone or together...And so we set about learning about charts.  Cadence undertook the admittedly formidable task of creating a chart that would help us to keep track of which meds mom needed to take, when, and whether there were any requirements like restrictions on .....................................................................................................................................................................................................................fcc(terror of the disco werewolves)

Tiny memories

I can't find my journals.

The shelf where I believed I kept them is brimming with books - story books, and precious bindings full of hand-wrought emotion and oft gut-wrenching life, but it is not mine.  They all belong to my mother.  Or at least, they once did.  I open a page and a read a tiny bit, and I put it back away.  I crack another, flip through, and am glad her pain is over.  And I miss her.

In the end, I leave the journals for another day, and strategically place some of the books my mother kept on a different shelf where I know Cadence will find them.  I want her to discover them, and to lose herself in those worlds, perhaps find herself along the way, but I don't want to meddle with the mystery by telling her to pick them up.  She and her sisters may never know of the late nights that I spend carefully strewing their environment with little bits of magic to discover, and that is how it should be.  I want to foster in them the joy of discovery, and in these secret nights, I am merely leaving wonders for them to discover.

And I wonder what silent seeds my mother planted for me that I will never know about.

And in a tiny moment, I know I was loved.

Reading List

Cadence has become what can only be called a 'voracious' reader.  Below is a partial list of the books she has devoured since October, separated them into three categories: Books she has read once, books she has read twice, and books she has read three or more times.

Books she has read once:
Henry and Ribsy
Ramona Quimby Age 8
On the banks of Plum Creek
Henry and the Paper Route
Ramona the Brave
Little House on the Prairie
Little house in the Big Woods
Dumpling days
Ramona Forever
Matilda
Kirsten Saves the day
Addy's Surprise
Meet Addy
Samantha Learns a Lesson
Samantha's Surprise
Happy Birthday, Samantha!
Changes for Samantha
Samantha Saves The Day
Meet Samantha
Meet Molly
Molly's Surprise
Happy Birthday Molly
Meet Kirsten
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Henry Huggins
The American Girls Theater: plays about Kirsten, Samantha, & Molly for you & your friends to perform
The House at the End of the Lane
The Boxcar Children: The Mystery of the Missing Cat

Books she has read twice:
The Boxcar Children: The Mystery at the Dog Show
The Boxcar Children: Mike's Mystery
The Boxcar Children: The Mystery in Washington, DC
The Boxcar Children: Blue Bay Mystery
The Boxcar Children: The Mystery in the Snow

Books she has read 3 or more times:
Just Grace
Little Women (illustrated classics version)
Anne of Green Gables (illustrated classics version)
Ava the Sunset fairy
Zara the Starlight fairy
Anna the Moonbeam fairy
The Boxcar Children
The Boxcar Children: The Deserted Library Mystery
The Boxcar Children: The Castle Mystery
The Boxcar Children: Surprise Island


This only includes chapter books, since we would otherwise have to include our entire, extensive, library of children's books, Audobon guides, and pretty much any reading material in the house that is physically within her reach. And even then, we are pretty sure we are forgetting some that should be on this list.

The importance of Peace

I am spending some time cleaning out my drafts folder today, and I found this little gem from about two years ago.  I had intended this to be an introduction to a piece about finding inner peace amongst outer chaos, but I only managed to get about half a sentence beyond what is below.  The original post as I had conceived of it related to the trials of our first move to the DC area amidst the end of my third pregnancy and my mom's continuing struggle with cancer, which is obviously no longer particularly relevant, but I did want to share the image and this little snippet anyhow.  I hope that Cadence still feels that she has the freedom and ability to do this, and that her sisters will grow up with the same power.

Believe it or not, this was a candid moment caught by Cadence's teachers during class earlier this year.  I've cropped the other kids out for privacy reasons, but in the full image it's clear that this was not a group exercise - Cadence just decided to take some time in all on her own.