Jamestown Settlement

Today we made our second trek to Jamestown Settlement on our Homeschool Days tickets. The first time, C and e hung out together while E and I spent hours at the Indian village. E had time to quietly study what he was seeing and ponder the answers to his questions. This time it was just me, and e had picked up a whole lot of facts about the fort with C that she wanted to share with her brother who didn't make it to the fort last time.....leaving no space for pondering. But still I saw E pick out small things to study: the locks on doors, the shoes the colonists wore, the armor, the wooden pegs and square-head nails. Meanwhile e noticed other things: the style of hat the colonist was knitting, the texture of the red curtains on the governor's bed, the frog hiding in the pile of wood. She was quick to answer any question, even answering one that stumped a group of older children: What star can be seen in both hemispheres and only during the day?

Powhatan dwelling. E marveled over the woven mats and strong construction.

Bone needles, thread made of tendon!

Big, heavy canoes in progress.

Fish net. The man took so much time explaining to E how to weave a fish net, a basket, and rope.

One of the locks in the fort.

 

My treasure-hunting girl found ACORNS! Very exciting.

And I found leaves turning!! It may still be 86 degrees during the day, but fall is coming....

 

Blessings

This is how today started:

Our neighbor has had a pile of boards in their front yard all summer. I finally asked what they plan to build, and guess what?! They told us they were building nothing- did we need the boards for anything? An amazing, wonderful blessing!

You see, a vital component to a third grade education is building a structure large enough to crawl inside, as a nine-year-old is in he process of building his or her own sense of self separate from parents, friends, and family. We had been telling E that he would build his once we got to Virginia. But now in Virginia, we are under a super-tight budget in order to afford gymnastics. Uniforms, meets, hotels, fees, training, oh my! And then e's gymnastics. So no money for wood.

Until our neighbor offered us this huge pile of boards! Answer to prayer. Now to haul it over to a safe spot until E decides on the blueprint to follow. We are so excited!

So Much to Learn!

I came home from e's gymnastics last night to E's excited "MOM! MOM! Look what I did!" Apparently C had exclaimed over the gas mileage of a motorcycle and asked E if he knew how far it could travel on 3 gallons at 53 mpg. E took the challenge and ran with it, then asked C for more and more multiplication problems. He had a whole page of long multiplication to show me. Which got e going- "Give me some problems, daddy!" She ended up finding 6 ways to make ten and 4 ways to make 8.

e's story a few days ago took the prince to a lady's house. The lady tells the prince that she once went on a journey, also. This is a pre-written story; I had nothing to do with this! But e was thrilled, thinking that this lady is (fictional) e, all grown up, as (fictional) e went on a journey last year and had blond hair, so she added in Cerwydwin, (fictional) e's guinea pig guide. He's eating a pepper in her picture.

I've had plenty of kitchen help!

Bouncing Banana the garden spider disappeared from E's window for a few days, then reappeared much thinner. Here's why! TWO egg cases!

"We have strawberries." Or at least they look like strawberries, growing wild under our porch. Teeny tiny ones.

E's weather journal in progress. I love his depiction of clouds! Interesting note- He always drew the sun as a spiral until last January, when he discovered that my cousin loves to draw as well and draws suns like this. Now all his suns are triangular. :)

 

Old Rhythm

The children have been pushing for a bit of school rhythm, with the start of daddy's school cycle to inspire us. So today we started the good ol' rhythm we had way back when in Alaska. Breakfast, chores, out for a walk/bike, then inside to record observations in our weather journals. 78 degrees (at 8am) and humid. Grass is wet with dew. What was it like in Fairbanks at this time last year? 36 degrees and frosty. Golden leaves everywhere. Which kind of sounds nice.... Then on to main lesson.

I read Hiawatha to E while he copied my drawing. Notice he changed the format, but didn't complain one bit about writing two sentences AND copied capitals and periods correctly. I love seeing him grow.

e's story moved forward, up a mountain and through a mysterious door. The prince found his second heart-sound, eeeee.

With both children, I taught the vowels as the keys of knowledge given by the wise enchantress after a long journey to locate the consonants in natural form. Which worked fine. Christopherus, however, teaches them as heart-sounds. I didn't 'get it'...why would that make them memorable? The prince hears a good story and says "Ohhhh." He feels quiet. The prince feels scared, says "Eeee!" Yet bravely opens the door anyway. I watched e closely at these points in the story, and NOW I get it. She owns those vowel sounds. She knew them before, but now she FEELS them. Waldorf at work. Never fails to amaze me.

Cookies! Who doesn't love a little homemade snack? I found the recipe here. Best part was seeing E, after a fruitless search for a 1/2 cup, decide to use two 1/4 cups. I never taught him that.

 

Then lunch, quiet time, and now they are watching Wild Kratts before going outside to play. e is excited to show her coaches tonight that she can do three back walkovers in a row.

 

I don't know how long this rhythm will work. Historically a week or two max before the kids again choose total freedom. I am going to enjoy the consistency while it lasts. :) We go back and forth all year as needed... an extended version of breathing in and breathing out.

 

Happy Tuesday!

Wickiups and Golden Geese

Another installment in e's main lesson book. The golden goose, the juggling jester, and O.

E has been very into learning about the people of the woodlands. He built a lean-to sort of wickiup, one that would have been used as a very temporary shelter during a hunt. As he stood back and admired it, he suddenly started jumping around. "Mom! It's camouflage! They would also have been hidden from sight in one of these!" On Sunday I took him to see Jamestown Settlement. He and I spent 2 hours in the Powhatan Indian village, and I could tell it spoke to him. Pictures to come. It was a beautiful morning!

 

Today we did nothing but a nutritionist appointment. Well, we got the bathrooms clean and did laundry, ate meals, and e learned to do a back walkover. There was some learning in there, I'm sure. :)

 

Who I Am

Since having babies, my friendships have been built mostly on the common ground of motherhood. Maybe baby wearing, breast feeding, gentle parenting, healthy eating, food allergies, homeschooling, Waldorf, or crafting brought us together. Maybe it's that we were both teachers once upon a time, and struggling to apply (or not apply) that to our own littles. Maybe we met through a friend, or in a Facebook group. But however we met, on whatever level we connected, chances are good that I don't know a whole lot more about you beyond the here and now, the ever-present motherhood or education issues of daily life. Maybe I know bits and pieces of who you were before, or about your siblings or parents or former job. But I don't know you. As in how you would react to a given situation outside of parenting.

 

Parenting is so all-consuming. It provides all the conversation, all the commonality we need. Right? Or maybe not. The very few friends I have from childhood and early teaching years, I can say exactly where they stand on most issues. I know how they react to things. I know some of the challenges they faced- I was even there for some of them. I knew them first, before they had children. For my mommy friends, it is hard to get past the here and now, usually because the children are always right there, listening, or could be at any moment. Not the right environment for baring one's soul, is it?

 

I hadn't given that a whole lot of thought until recently. It doesn't matter to me if my friends are Christian, Jew, Pagan, Wiccan, Atheist, Buddhist, or Mormon. It's none of my business who you voted for, if you are married, divorced, single, or partnered, or if your baby was born into a marriage or not. It isnt up to me to decide if you should vaccinate your children or eat vegan, vegetarian, paleo, gluten free, or anything else. We all have our own path to follow. And I kind of assumed that my friends felt similarly.... Or at least I thought I knew which friends didn't.

 

Until the whole gay marriage thing. I had no idea I had so many friends who felt so compelled to throw stones. As in not just opposing gay marriage, but also rejecting the people involved. Which makes me so sad. These are people. Real people, living their lives in the best way they know how, just like the rest of us. Maybe you have sheltered yourself and your children so completely that you have forgotten that they are just that.

 

Thus I'd like to put it out there that I am in total support of people living their lives as they see fit, provided it isn't hurting anyone. Live and let live. The Bible says to love everyone, to not throw stones, and to remove the plank from your own eye before worrying about anyone else's supposed speck. If you don't want to hear me say that, well... you have to do what you have to do- I'm probably not your ideal friend, in real life or on Facebook.

 

I have a cousin who got married yesterday to the love of her life, someone who has stuck with her through thick and thin, someone who is caring for our elderly grandpa and raising their teenage son. I am so thankful that they all have each other, and that finally it can be recognized legally.

 

Sooo.... What about my kids? Are they scarred for life, or thinking maybe they want to be gay just because they know about it? Well, I have a sweet friend who patiently answered all the questions regarding her same-sex marriage E came up with over the course of a month or so before we moved. Even the ones about babies and sperm donors. A week or so ago, when I told the children that my cousin was getting married, E told me that he had come to the conclusion that love conquers all.

 

Love conquers all. Now THAT is a lesson I want my children to remember.

 

Water!

Guinea is still the ever-hungry piggy we know and love! We put down towel and fleece paths around the kitchen and nook so that her feet don't slide and stress her leg more, and she makes ample use of them in her never-ending attempts to get more food from us.

It is a beautiful day today, not too hot, nice breeze... So we hauled out some water tubs and tubing. The children experimented with draining one tub to the next, flinging water tubes, blowing water out, making bubbles, etc while I worked on removing dead branches from a hydrangea bush that hadn't been cared for in quite a while.

Our next task is building a wickiup. Not a big, curved one, as we have no trees in our yard, but more like a lean-to against the fence. An experiment to see if we can indeed make a shelter from branches that will shed rain. Because we have branches, and pine needles, and leaves, and it was a common temporary shelter by Native Americans. So why not? It will be small, but we will make it work!

 

e drew the characters into her main lesson book. It wasn't okay for them to remain on separate paper, or be glued in. She wanted them permanently in their place.

 

E hasn't chosen his main lesson books yet. No word on how soon he'll feel something is important enough for that.

 

How different these two children of mine are, and how easily their preferences are accepted as the norm without a class of 30 surrounding them. I love homeschooling!