ACDC and Robber-barons

 History-

We learned about Edison. I love how his teacher said he was stupid. There is such power in that story for anyone who has been told that they are not good enough. It also inspires me to be a mom like Edison's mom.

A lot of people say that he was dyslexic, but after studying him, the fact that he would read from a young age everything he got his hands on, made his own library as a child, and wrote his own newspaper that he sold at age 12, yeah, not sure about that, but regardless, his ability to prove doubters wrong is inspiring.

We tried to make our own lightbulb as our activity, but we couldn't get it to work. If I remember right, we were able to get it to work four years ago. I'm not sure what happened. At one point we were using power too strong, and the filament would just break with a flash, but at other times nothing would happen. Oh well, it shows how hard it was to get a working lightbulb, right?

The next person we studied was Tesla. Now HE could have been dyslexic (but it is more likely that he had Aspergers.) Such a fascinating guy. Wonder what would have happened if he had been a good business man and had PR skills. I think this world would have been very different.

We talked a lot about the rivalry between Edison and Tesla. I tried not to be too partial to either, and my boys started taking sides. 

For our activity, they played with a plasma ball. This one hasn't actually died or broken yet, which is a new thing for us. They usually die so fast. This one even fell and is still ticking. I think it's Discovery brand.

We watched "Current Wars" to go along with our ACDC unit.

We did talk a bit more about inventors, but then we moved on.

We talked about immigration. We talked a lot about Ellis Island, and it was perfect, because Chelsea served her mission there and was able to give a lot of insight about what happened there. I'm excited to take my kids there someday (not that I have anything planned...COVID blah....) We have the cutest book about Ellis Island:

We made Lady Liberty crowns as our activity. 

Such a controversial topic, that I'm glad I'm the one teaching my kids about immigration.

Then we talked about the infamous Robber-barons. Yes I call them robber-barons instead of "captains of industry." Maybe that's because I'm super frustrated with the modern "robber-barons" of information ie Google, Twitter, and Facebook. We talked about them too.

We talked mostly about Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, and Carnegie. We read the part in History of the World about stocks and Carnegie, which I love. I love how Susan Wise Bauer has the ability to write in such a way that it makes things interesting and engaging for kids. 

For our activity we played Monopoly, but I didn't take any pictures when we actually played, so here's a picture after the fact:

Science!

Soooo sad. We are stopping science club at least until the new year because of the stinker COVID19. I really hope we will be able to commence again soon, but I am honestly not very hopeful. Not until we can start going outside again will this spike go down (I HOPE I'm wrong.)

I wish we could at least do our last club about animal classes (mammals) but we just couldn't.

We had a lesson on reptiles. We didn't have any dissection for reptiles, but I had students bring in REAL LIVE reptiles for show and tell. That was super fun, and the older class brought a turtle that kept pooping all over!

I think this is the turtle from the younger class, he's 35 years old!

We had fun little activities such as putting snake "tongues" on our noses so we could "smell," and putting balloon lizard "tales" on ourselves that we tried to take off....yeah it was a crazy game I made up, but I think they loved it.

I also knew I wanted those sticky hand flinger things to pretend to be lizards' tongues, but they weren't at the dollar store. I knew were I had seen them in town. I took a ton of quarters and went to the dentist's office and asked if I could buy their prizes! I remembered they had the sticky hands as a prize in a gum-ball machine. I felt really awkward, but I got my sticky hands!

Then we talked about birds.  We looked at different kind of feathers and talked about warmblooded animals and we looked at a real nest and other things, and then we dissected owl pellets!!!

One of my favourite activities. It's like a treasure hunt.

This is my friend, Amy, who's been helping me lately. I REALLY appreciate it. She even brought extra owl pellets from her back yard! My owl pellets were from Amazon cost $70 bucks! And even then I wasn't going to have enough for everyone. But with Amy's we did! THANK YOU!

I love how excited the Youngers were when they found a skull or jawbone. The olders were a little grossed out (I just need to brake them in more I guess, silly kids) but most got into it, and look at this cool bird foot one of my science kids found in their pellets:

And now we will wait--and wait--until we do mammals. I guess we could do it virtually, but honestly, you could just watch youtube videos instead. It's about being together in person, seeing things and touching things! I'm bummed.

 As for core subjects, here's a little writing by Daniel that was inspired by write into winter:

And some write into winter by William:

Umm, yeah, I guess I didn't take too many core subject photos this week.

However, here's a video of William doing his math. The way he makes up a story to help himself understand long subtraction cracks me up:

Moving on-

Abraham, always the artist, gets my phone or iPad, which is always locked, and takes a photo (which you can do when locked) and then that opens up the ability to edit the photo. This all means that he found a way to do art on my phone any time he wants without permission and I'm always finding new creations such as these:

Don't you love the sparkle in the little boy's eyes?

Abraham also encourages me to do random activities. He saw this fruit train in a random book that I didn't know we even had and begged me to create it. 

And then Hyrum gave Abraham a lesson on how to do iMovie. This was Hyrum's example:

Hyrum is always having fun making movies:

And as for holidays, we were able to meet with the Thulin extended family over zoom. I sometimes love technology. I saw more people than if I had been there in person in a normal year! We ended up talking for hours. It was so good.

But, to be honest, I never wait for US Thanksgiving to decorate for Christmas. I don't even wait for Dustin's birthday either. One fun thing we've done this year is to help our local Youth Centre with stockings for teenagers. 

We made an assembly line to fill all the stockings, which is perfect since we are going to learn about Henry Ford soon.

And lastly, with new restrictions, we had our mom's night via zoom. Not as good, but still something. I love my mom friends!!!

Writing and Halloween

 Okay, so here I go again (do you realize that I've kept this blog thing up for a REALLY long time?)

So history-we did end up learning more about Florence Nightingale. I love that woman! While teaching about her, I realized I don't have a specific time to teach about Marie Curry, and that bugs. I'm not sure what to do, because I'm so behind anyway.

Well, anyway we did bring out doctor kits to celebrate her.

We learned about Queen Victoria. One of my FAVOURITE shows of all time is Young Victoria, so of course we had to watch it. And we also made decoupage boxes as our activity.

Then of course Charles Dickens. He is the epitome of Industrial Revolution life. As our activity, we tried to make Victorian silhouette art. We really did. But it didn't work out at all. So then we just watched "Oliver!"  There was a really meaningful moment for me while watching the film. In the middle, when Bill Sikes hits Nancy, my boys were really disturbed, and one of them said "a husband wouldn't actually hit his wife. Right?"

How blessed am I? 

So we also learned about the Impressionists. I kind of feel that I've failed my kids at some level. I can't remember not knowing who Van Gogh, Monet, or Renoir were. I've always known. I lived in a house that taught me, and then I went on to be a Art Historian, and I don't even teach my children. I talk about it once every four years? Yeah, not very effective.

Oh well. We painted Van Gogh art as our activity.

We also learned about Alexander Graham Bell. I always feel a little uncomfortable about him because I know how the deaf community feels about him. It's a good opportunity to talk about how everyone is trying their best, but that doesn't mean they make good choices, and at times can hurt people.

As our activity they got walkie-talkies. BIG hit!

I was quite lazy this week, and I only did WW1. I'm not to that point in history's timeline, I know, but it was Remembrance Day, so I jumped ahead so we could talk about it on 11/11 11am. We always focus on that Christmas when the soldiers stopped fighting and realized that they were all people. War is so stupid. Horrible and stupid.

As our activity we made poppies.

Do you like Daniel's poppy costume?

For science, we kept on learning the different classes of animals.

First we learned about fish. We made a "swim bladder," did a couple harmless experiments on real fish, and dissected a fish...which was not harmless.

The next week we learned about Amphibians. We tried to jump as far as frogs can jump, we had a pollywog handout, and we dissected a frog. Do Canadians call them pollywogs, or is it just my English mother that drilled that into me?

For art, all the kids did Halloween art. I thought it was super cute:

And also for art that was NOT made by Janet, Abraham made this drawing of what he wanted his costume to look like and then he made it! all by himself! LOVE IT!

He was so cute when we went trick or treating. He would put the candy through the Jack-o-lantern holes.

And Maxwell out did himself again this year and made a Starwars Death Star. He programmed an Arduino to light up a bunch of LEDs and shoot off a laser to sink up with the Death Star firing.   

And I had fun too. We almost weren't able to go trick or treating this year because of COVID, and I've never felt so blessed to go!

CORE SUBJECTS:

Abraham: In math he's moving right along. He was so ahead, we took it easy this week. He's been learning his days of the week and months of year and recently has been doing the commutative property.

He's also been learning about place value and how they relate to each other.

Sorry it's sideways. I didn't bother to fix it, but hey, I promised math, and I'm delivering math!

He's also continuing with his Handwriting without Tears grade one book.

And he's plugging along with Logic of English. I must say, they do a TON of phonemic awareness, and Abraham is remembering all the different sounds each letter they've taught has, so far so good.

William: Will just did him math's 1/4 year test. He couldn't do one: The one that asked how to say "5 minutes before the hour." ALL my boys HATED this concept. I didn't push it, and he got the rest done well.

He also finished reviewing his times tables for the year. We went out on a date to celebrate.

For writing, we've been doing "Write Into Winter." His entrees are hilarious. One says "In 50 years, I will be 58. I will probably have a wife. There will be crazy new inventions. hopefully I will have gone to Legoland more times." LOL!! and another says "A funny story from when I was young. A mirror fell on me and part of the mirror cut my head and made a wound. Then they put a bandaid on me. Then I grabbed my poopy diaper and put it on my head and my parents freaked out."

And he's continued with All About Reading and is at the stage where he is doing compound words. He is getting sick of AAR because they have him read so many books, and it is so hard for him. I'm not done with the program yet. We are going to keep on trudging through for now. Besides, I've already bought the next level!!

Daniel: He has been learning about ratios, cross multiplication, and similar triangles. He had the assignment to go outside and measure his shadows compared to tall objects shadows. He also found out how tall our trailer is by looking at the top of the roof through a mirror on the ground.

And for something more concrete as an example, Daniel was also learning about factorials. Here's his work with some triangle factorials:

There's an awesome book about factorials that I acquired some how, which teaches it in a fun way:

He's been doing write into winter as well. Here's his "What will it be like in 50 years."...uum I can't find it right now. Sorry.

Hyrum: For math, he's been going over the order of operations:

And he's done with all the greatest common factor, and Least Common Multiple things. 

And for English, he's continued with his grammar:

Also, he's begun writing a murder mystery party for writing. He's super excited about it, but keeps changing everything about it, so we'll see where this goes.

And as for MY WRITING (yes, I'm writing a book about my mom's life) it was crazy incredible. I went on a writer's retreat with some of my Cardston Writer friends, and we were only supposed to be gone one night, but then we got snowed in! And then we spent three nights!

But I don't regret it one bit! It was one of the most spiritual and insightful weekends of my life, and I will never forget it!! I feel so grateful for all those who came and all the help and companionship there. 

Crazy thing is, as I was writing about difficult things about my mom's childhood, I got facebook messages, and it was from my cousin once removed's partner who has been doing family history about my mom's dad and found SO much! He found newspaper clippings about him and his first wife, and his christening. It's been incredible!!!

I know I'm barely coherent on this blog, but I think a lot more about what I write in this book of mine, and it's better. I promise.

And in closing, yes we already got that dog, and it's name is Zoey, and things are going better than I hoped with her.