Statistically, homeschool families are more involved in politics then the general public. I now have some theories as to why: They're not used to being bullied, so they put their necks out there thinking that people will not try and take a swipe at it. They are not being fed a constant stream of social garbage about how things should be, and think that they can actually make a difference by trying something different.
I'm glad this little site isn't popular, because I need to vent.
For the past two weeks, I have been consumed in the veritable nastiness of small town politics. BLAHH! I am SOOOO done with it all. Last week I didn't get any school done. Yah, that's right, NONE. OH shoot me. How did I get this to take over my life?
I gave a questionnaire to our local candidates who were running for mayor and council and posted answers to the questions on a website. Things got nasty. very nasty. They thought candidates that were running were behind it all and that I was their puppet. No, it was just me and a few of my girlfriends wanting transparency and accountability. Of course, by the time I found out the main reason we were being BULLIED (even though they all said I was the bully in this mess) we had all been harassed so much we didn't want to put any of our names on the "about us page."
Uggh. It was a mess. A great big emotional mess that got blown out of proportion, and now people that I've really liked and admired seem to hate me. I feel beat. Like slipping quietly out of town forever is a great option.
Once, someone even tried to void my validity by saying homeschoolers don't know what's going on in their community. GRIZZLY BEAR HOMESCHOOL MOM DEFENDING HER LIFE CHOICES FREAKS OUT NOW! uuuuuuhhhhhggggghhh. I'm so tired of it all. At least the elections are over. I wonder if people will calm down now. Small towns don't seem to forgive and forget though.
I have had some people really stick up for me and show their love for me big time though. I don't know how it all equals out in the end. I still don't want to go to church. I of course DO GO to church, I just don't WANT to.
I'll have to try to smooth things out face to face in some cases. Like Thomas S. Monson says "Never let a problem to be solve be more important then a person to be loved."
Anyway, before all this happened, I was doing homeschool quite well, but I was being crazy social. I literally had about 150-200 people in and out of my house in about two weeks. Parties, school clubs, friends, and (gasp) political meetings.
That and not having a camera squashed my geography for the past few weeks. I never realized how much I need a camera for school, but I really do. I'm waiting for a cheque to come in before I get another one. I'm about out of patience.
Science has been going pretty good. One week we learned about constellations. We made some constellations by poking holes in a box that also had a hole for your eye to peek into.
We learned the greek myths behinds many of them, and they made up their own myths to their own constellations. One kid was really impressive and gave a run down of the entire Greek mythology history.
We aslo made a 3D model of a constellation to talk about how it looks flat in the sky, but it's actually not.
Another week we learned about the sun. We talked about the laws of motion and gravity, and orbits. The one experiment I really had wanted to work, where you map sun spots, didn't work. We couldn't see any sunspots on our projection of the sun. If any of you out there have ever mapped sun spots, tell me the secret. Here's a photo my husband took that day, and I really can't remember what experiment we were doing at this point, but it's a cute photo of my group anyway:
Another week we learned about the inner planets. I think my favourite experiment that week was finding out if "Mars dust" had living things in it. Beforehand, I put sand and salt into one jar, and sand and yeast into another. At the beginning of class we put sugar water in each jar and when we got around to talking about Mars and how scientists were determining if there was life on Mars, it was easy to see which "Mars dust" had life in it.
We also had a field trip. A really nice guy in my ward is an amateur astronomer. He let us look through his awesome telescope and he knew what to look at. He also had this really cool laser pointer thing that helped all of us know which stars he was pointing at. I think all the boys loved it.
Gymnastics, art, robotics/programming and piano all seem to be going good as well. I am so overly impressed with little town Cardston's AMAZING gymnastics!
And reading, writing, and arithmetic is plugging along. Maxwell is starting all his times tables. He knows how to figure out all the times tables from 1 to ten, but he still uses addition instead of knowing it immediately (5x5=10+10+5=25 instead of just knowing that 5x5 is 25.)
I'm hoping life will resemble normality this coming week. I'm done with excitement.
