The Regency Zombie

We are having some fun with history this year. Yes there has been more video watching than other years....and I will continue to watch more. (Oliver! is definitely on my list as well as Young Victoria.) but we are still doing lots of reading and activities.

We finished off our French revolutions unit by studying about Napoleon. We even read an abridged version of "War and Peace." But only Daniel was interested in making a Napoleon hat. 

Then we moved on to the Industrial Revolution. Of course, the main invention that kicked it off, is the steam engine (it's pretty weird that the steam engine is still where we get most our energy even today...you would think that with all our information and technology, we would find other main stream ways, but no, basically it's all just the steam engine...until Tesla's solar roofs get more popular I guess.) ANYWAY we set off to make our own steam boats. This took ALL DAY and shouldn't have taken all day, and by the end, I was very sick of the project, but behold our steam boats:

Then we learned about steam trains. I know it's silly, but I'm quite proud of Utah and promontory point because I'm from Utah, and that's about the only time Utah gets mentioned in history. For our activity I bought them cars that ran on train tracks. Trust me, after such a huge involved activity as the steam boats, this was the best.

We also learned about child labour. Then for our activity, we did my favourite activity ever: watching NEWSIES! It's based off of a true story, and is basically the best musical to come out of the 90s so it's delightful to have an excuse to have a mandatory watching every four years.

I believe in my boys being exposed to "girlish" literature. After all, Maxwell has listened to Anne of Green Gables' audiobook a dozen times, so of course I was going to insist that they learn about Jane Austin, and I read to them a condensed version of Pride and Prejudice. I told them it was THE most influential romantic book of all time.

Then we watched mini documentaries about Austin. Of course one of them said that Jane Austin's books had been made into many movie adaptations, and then showed movie covers or clips of some movies, and they included that ZOMBIE pride and Prejudice in the list. My boy's eyes got big and they were so excited.

Okay people I have FIVE BOYS. Boys who never have nightmares. (Except when I let my 5 year old watch the first half of Lord of the Rings, but I was only having them watch LOTR because we were going to New Zealand and potentially to the set of LOTR, so I wanted them to be familiar with it.) If ZOMBIES were going to get my boys excited about Jane Austin, what is a mom to do?

Insist on them watching the Kiera Knightly version first, and THEN let them watch the Zombie one, of course.

So they patiently watched the Kiera Knightly version, and then, while carving pumpkins for Halloween (our pumpkins had frozen and were going to rot if we waited until halloween to carve them,) they watched  Pride Prejudice and Zombies. Can I just say PLOT HOLES?! What a silly movie!

I guess this went well with the season. My boys are so excited for halloween and are randomly dressing up all the time and making their own costumes.

The next thing we learned about was the telegraph and Morse code. Hyrum was really cute and made a Scratch program that would convert alphabetic words into Morse code. 

We also made a telegraph type contraption and we had the boys try and make Morse code words.

And then we learned about the Camera. My UV paper hadn't arrived, so we didn't do an activity for this one. Also, we learned about Florence Nightingale, but I'm not done with her, so I'll probably mention it again in my next post.

Moving on to Science.

One week we learned about invertebrates that are NOT arthropods. Featuring Molluscs, annelid worms, and coelenterates. KIDS LOVE WORMS! What can I say? if you want giggles and squeals and a successful science day, just bring out some worms! 

We even dissected worms. 

We also talked about shells, and pearls, and octopi, and we even had the kids EAT snails! The kids thought this was super strange (my French friends did not come, needless to say.) And it was a case of daring and nerves and crazy bravery.

Our next science was learning about invertebrates that ARE arthropods. Featuring insects, spiders, and crustaceans. 

I had asked the kids to start an insect collection two weeks earlier, and I'm glad I did because we had snow for our science day, Some of my kids dutifully put some insects in their freezer or jars and we delighted to show them off. We had an experiment where we had pipe cleaners and pompoms represent insects and they went to "flowers" with glitter "pollen" and we watched as the "pollen" got mixed together. GLITTER WAS EVERYWHERE! 

With the littles, we had a lot more activities involving insects including getting all the stages of butterflies:

But for the older we did dissections of crawdads as well. It was interesting to see teeth inside their stomach! who knew!

And as for other things we've done with other homeschoolers, we went on this AWESOME field trip to the corn maze. I was a little worried at one point though. William had run off and I just stood there to the entrance to the corn maze, not knowing where William was, and thinking "this is a mom's worst nightmare!!!" But then I found him, and he hadn't even entered the maze yet, so we were all good.

Thankfully, group things have slowly become more common, including church. FINALLY! but only once a month for one hour.

And we even were able to have Thanksgiving. Maxwell was super proud of his pies.

CORE SUBJECTS:

Well, math has been going forward rather seamlessly as usual. I guess I should have examples, but I don't have any photos at the moment, and I'm too lazy to go down stairs to get photos. I will next post. I promise.

For English, I'm still having William do All About Reading, which lately I'm a little frustrated with, because they are teaching the units "ang" "ing" etc pretty early, and we've had to majorly slow down to make sure he knows these. 

They still have some fun things, like "fishing" for words and word flip books.

Abraham has started Logic of English and although I was initially impressed, I am now getting annoyed. They have TONS of phonemic awareness, which is awesome. They also have....I'm not sure what to call it, but it uses the same techniques that Foundations in sounds uses by having the child understand where their tongue and mouth is doing, and to recognize whether a sound is voiced or unvoiced.

The point where I'm frustrated, is because for every letter, they are requiring the child to already know MULTIPLE sounds for each letter. They need to know that "A" says the sounds of "apple," "all," and "ate." This is ridiculous. I don't think any severely dyslexic could do this! Abraham isn't as severe as some of his brothers, so I'm just going with it, and seeing if it works. The "flexing" of sounds that belong to the same symbol is one of THE HARDEST things dyslexics have to do. It's painful for them. Well, we'll see if this works!

I'm having Hyrum doing IEW and it's going fairly smoothly as well, but very boring. I also have him doing Fix It! grammar and Word Wasp spelling.

For Daniel, I'm just having him do story promos, and I'm liking that much better. I think when Heather does her "write into Winter" I'm going to have Hyrum do that instead.

Daniel was so funny. He still has letter reversals because of dyslexia and he wrote a paragraph about a goose that was scared of a girl, and at the end, I thought the girl said "DIE!" But he had meant to say "Bye!" We had a good laugh over that.

Daniel also has kept a bit of a diary. It's sooo cute. I think I need to include it here to make sure it is persevered for all eternity. 

PS In a couple of weeks we are getting a dog that is a husky with one blue eye and one brown eye, which is perfect because that's from a children's book my kids have loved forever! 

Sink Me! They Seek him Everywhere!

 If you don't know the reference of the title of my post, you had a monstrous intolerable childhood, and you missed out on the best movie ever: The Scarlet Pimpernel (Jane Seymour version of course.) We watched it again this week as our activity for learning about the reign of terror, ----but I'm getting ahead of myself.

For our school, the first thing we learned about in this year's social studies was The Enlightenment!!! 

(We are just following the same Modern History schedule I did four years ago.) https://lindyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2016/08/modern-history-outline-for-2016-17-year.html

And the first person we studied for the Enlightenment was Isaac Newton. We did experiments for his three laws of motion as our activity.

And then we learned about John Locke. We watched a few videos about him because he was so important to history. One video I liked so much I added it to our daily devotional.

Then we moved along to learn about Marie Antionette. Honestly, I just feel bad for that girl. Society made her, then society killed her. (It reminds me of Britany Spears.)  My kids were SO EXCITED to realize that they could make cake from scratch by themselves. They've insisted on making cake twice since we first did it.

And THEN we learned about the Reign of Terror. It was the first time that I realized that Robespierre was actually "against the death penalty" and thought he was following the ideals of liberty from the enlightenment. SERIOUSLY? This is why we can never elect someone who's main motivation is hatred. Regardless of their "beliefs."

For science, we started our club. We've had them outside for the first few lessons. This year, we are learning Biology. 

For our first club we learned about what actually qualifies something as living. We also talked about Natural Selection. One of the highlights was looking through my telescope at some pond scum where we were able to actually see some moving single celled organisms!!!

Our second lesson was about cells. We made a couple of cell models, including one out of CANDY. Always a hit.

See the DNA/sprinkles inside our Oreo/nucleus? Classic.

We also talked about osmosis, and I had made a "naked egg" from vinegar, and took it out to show the little class (I have two classes, one for littles and one for bigger kids) how big it was, and it exploded on me! I guess I hadn't left it in vinegar long enough!

The next lesson we learned about classification, bacteria, and fungus. For classification, we took a million shoes and created our own taxonomy to decided how to map every shoe. (This is actually something I did in middle school, and I've never forgot it.)

For our main bacteria activity, I had them take a queue tip and try to find some bacteria in my house, and put it in a petrie dish. I'm not sure if it worked, but they had so much fun hunting for nasties!

Also, we ate active yogurt, as you can see.  For fungus we looked at mould and mushrooms and yeast. It's weird to think that mould spores are already on all our food long before they mould!!! 

 And as for the standard subjects, I have slowly but surely gained steam in accomplishing everything I need to with math and English.

It makes it a little easier to not have to worry about Maxwell. Well I still worry, but I'm really not in charge. 

Abraham did all his games with All About Reading that were super fun, and we have now started on his Logic of English.  We'll see how that goes!!!

And for Daniel I found this super awesome book called "Canadian Story Starters" to help in his writing. When Daniel is done with Rightstart Math, I'll get him started on IEW, and I think he will be done with this writing prompt book about the same time.

For Hyrum, he's been doing pretty good with IEW. I find that kids don't love it, but it works. Also, I just read about how to properly teach writing for my college class, and IEW ticks all the boxes.

It's honestly so much easier now that Hyrum and Daniel are reading fluently. My two dyslexic are reading for fun and writing without help.

It was funny last week. Maxwell is not the only teenager going to virtual school this COVID season. The internet went out in Leavitt, and a gang of teenagers rushed to my house to connect to my Wifi to do their school.

And they aren't the only ones who are doing online school, I AM!! It's been quite the learning experience, and I feel like I'm going super slow compared to my super sonic husband, but I've been learning and stretching, and although I wish I had a real-live-proffesor, it's good so far. I'm totally old-school though and I bring out pens and notebooks and flashcards. I guess I'm really not a millennial after all LOL!

 I also have been reading for our Cardston reading group. It's been so wonderful, but lately it's been a big item on my checklist of all the stuff I need to do. Here's one of my favourite paragraphs from our last book "Rest Play Grow" my Nacnamara. SUCH a good book! To me, this paragraph means we can't be frustrated with how are children are (specifically-for me-learning challenges) and to delight in who they really are.

As for AWESOME field trips, we went to Royal Tyrell Dinosaur museum. IT WAS FREE! What? only one weekend a year is free and we randomly go the right weekend? And then the city's swimming pool/slide was free too. 

I couldn't help think back to our night at the museum last year, when social life was a bit more simple.

And it was Orange Shirt day on the 30th, so we talked about the tragedy of the Native Residential Schools.

And we went on a few outings to enjoy the last of nice days before the weather turns. Including to Waterton and their fire-marked forests.