Civil Rights and a lot of Hospital Visits

 A lot of hospital visits? Yes, yes there were.

My kidneys were hurting, and I took a "home remedy" for kidney stones. But then I got sick---can't get out of bed sick--Dustin finally made me go to the doctor who said it was a kidney infection, so I took lots of antibiotics. I was too sick to go to the zoo with my family, which was a huge bummer.

I'm so grateful they were able to go. The zoo allowed a certain number of people to come at timed intervals, and there were other homeschool family friends that came at the same time as my family! What a lovely breath of adventure in this cooped up crazy time.

I thought I was getting better but then Daniel broke his arm when he was riding his scooter in dirt and flipped. He needed surgery to make sure it healed properly. That meant we went to the Cardston hospital and spent the evening there, then the next day we went to Lethbridge and spent the day AND night there. They put in two pins to hold the wrist in place.

But wait! There's more! THEN my kidneys started to REALLY hurt, and holy cow I needed to go to the hospital. I spent the evening in Cardston where they gave me pain killers (hallelujah.) And then the next day I spent ALL day at Lethbridge waiting and was sent home, and then the next day we spent ALL day waiting and then got an operation for kidney stones and got home at 2 am.

Sooooo homeschool suffered. Big time.

Home life has suffered too. The kids have gotten even MORE screen time. In fact, when I started to get sick again, there was a little cheer from my crew because they knew it would be Minecraft, not school for the next few days. The stinkers.

THANKFULLY I have an amazing friend, Jandy Berry, who made Daniel's birthday fun. Before he broke his arm, he had his birthday, which was a couple of days apart from Kieren Berry's birthday. Jandy had a "travelling birthday party" for our boys. 

Since only 10 people could be together, and all our friends are part of large families, she made mini parties that she did at each house of our friends! Isn't she sweet?!? I was way too sick to handle a birthday.

Thankfully this was before our Nazi government changed the laws to be five people outside. I'm getting so sick of this. The evidence doesn't support what they are doing. It's so crazy.

My kids did do some things without me. Like this little TV thing they made.

And Maxwell did his school (I'll have a separate post for that, since I need a proof of learning for his school.)

By the way John, if you're reading this, because of crazy sickness, I'm not going to do my usual checklist post. I'm sure you'll get enough proof in other ways. 

Speaking of, I was originally going to call this post "end of an era." I still might make a separate post. Maybe I will make an extra post....so look for that post to see what I'm talking about.

Anyway. so let's move on to the "civil rights" part of this post.

First, we just talked about segregation in general. We talked about the Jim Crow laws and the injustice of it all. There are so many beautiful children books about the civil rights movement, and I own a few.

There's also a ton of kid friendly brain pop, ted-ed and other videos that we watched.

For our activity we watched a movie, the Help. We watched a lot of movies for our activities this month....hey, I was sick and there are some good movies about this so...no judgement. 

Then we specifically talked about Rosa Parks. I had forgotten how involved in the Civil Rights movement she was long before she didn't move on the bus. As our activity, we watched Hidden Figures. I'm sure I had a lot more to say about all this, but it's been a fuzzy month in my head, so yeah.

Which is such a perfect film because we also learned about the space race. SOOO INSPIRATIONAL!!! I cry when I watch this Nasa video:

We spent hours and hours on this subject. I just love it so much. As our activity, we watched First Man:

Then we spent a day specifically on Martin Luther King Jr. I read a Barton Stand Alone book as part of this, called "Legacy." It really shows how directly tied to slavery the civil rights movement was. We watched his actual speech.

As our activity we made a big poster about what we dream for in the future. One of my kids did this drawing to represent space travel, but no guns/war for their dream for the future. 

Then we spent some time on Ruby Bridges, but we didn't do an activity for her.

Then we moved on from the Civil Rights movement and back to the Cold War. We talked about nuclear power plants and Chernobyl. No activity.

We then talked about Vietnam and the hippies. We started a book called "The Land I Lost." which is about how damaging the war was to the average Vietnamese person. I'll tell you if it is any good.

It's so fascinating to me how different the Vietnam war was compared to the Korean War. They seem like they should have been similar. If you ask any South Korean, they will tell you they are happy to NOT be part of North Korea, but every Vietnamese seems happy to be united to their north. Every situation is different.

As our activity, we made tie dye shirts. This was a very involved activity that I had all the supplies for, but I procrastinated it because I was not very ambitious this month.

So now let's move on to talking about Science.

We've only had two classes. 

First, we did a class about eyes. We had lots of fun learning about lenses and rods and cones and all the amazingness that goes along with eyes.

It was kind of crazy. The butcher that gave me cow eyes, gave me eyes of a BLIND cow. How random is that?! And when we dissected the eyes, we found that the lens had never developed! Which is a shame, because that is the most interesting part of an eye to look at.

We did have prepared specimen eyes, but they were so old and chemically that the lenses were yellowed.

And this is showing how lenses turn everything upside down:

Not sure if you can see, but this is a projection of the window.

A week later I found these AWESOME glasses that make you see everything upside-down. I loved them so much I couldn't resist buying them, and they are truly scientific since we are actually seeing the world upside-down. Hehehe. Too bad I found them after the class.

Then my next class was about mammals. I jumped to this, even though I hadn't finish learning about the body completely (I want to do the rest of the senses) because of this crazy province's decision to close school for at least two weeks because of COVID.

I knew I wanted to dissect the pig fetus before the shut down (they gave us a few days before the shutdown to prepare.) 

I was at the hospital when the shutdown announcement was made, and the nurse next to me was upset. She said (and she was in the paediatrics) that there had never been a child sent to that hospital BECAUSE of COVID. There had been children at the hospital who had COVID, but they were there for things like broken bones or something else.

But let's shut down schools. 

Anyway--

So mammals-it was a good time where I thought I didn't have enough content to fill the time, but then ended up going overtime.

Dissecting the pig was really awesome. Especially since we had already learned about each system of the body, and here we were seeing them all work together. 

LINDY FROM THE FUTURE: do the systems of the body before doing the the classifications of animals. It will make the dissections of the classifications so much better.

Here's some viewer-discretion-is-advised photos of our dissections:

That last one has the brain exposed. For the Youngers, when I tried to get at the brain, it smooshed out, but Kieren and Daniel were patient and careful, and opened it up. So that was interesting.

And now for the the core subjects...umm...I only have one photo. It's of Abraham doing long addition. Impressive? Yes.

And to be fare, I did just do a post about "write into spring" which had English examples.

And in other news, Mothers Day happened, and my kids wrote me messages.

And it was May the Fourth be with you day, and we watched StarWars and had a waffle bar as a celebration.

Write Into Spring

 Umm...yeah. It's been a month since I've posted on this blog, but it's been a month of my being sick....don't worry....it's NOT the lovely corona. It's kidney infections and kidney stones. Having actually dissected kidneys recently and taught about kidneys recently, that made all the mental vision processes of everything very clear to me, which made it better or worse, I don't know. I had surgery yesterday, so now all should be good. 

But guess what? I'm not even going to do one of my regular posts right now either. I'm just making a post to put all the stuff from "Write In Spring" somewhere.

"Write into Spring" is a writing challenge Westwind Alt does. I was really planning on having my kids do more. I really was....but HAVE YOU EVER HAD KIDNEY STONES? It's worse than labour.

Anyway. Ahem. 

BUT my kids DID do some things before that drama.

Hyrum just did one-the rap about your animal:

Yo! This is a song about ZOEY.

She likes to eat MAUI. 

That’s kinda CREEPY. 

She also is HAIRY.

She sheds so much that it’s kinda ANNOYING.

She sheds ALL DAY AND ALL YEAR…HELP ME.

It’s a CATASTROPHE.

No it’s actually a PROBLEM.

I really need some help!

Like now it’s a big big PROBLEM and NOT only that, but she’s really SLOBBERY which means.

I’m going to die now!

Daniel just did one, ummm not sure which prompt this is and I'm too lazy to figure out-how's that for a great homeschool mom?:

And then William did three.

Here's he monster with labels:

Here's his favourite food grocery list:

Here's his "fable."

Then Abraham did four.

Here's his monster with labels:

Here's his incredible labelled playground with emotions you would feel.

Here's his rocket ship. I realize he was supposed to do an explanation about it, but we just never got there.

That last one is from the cockpit. 

And then here's his city that's labeled. But honestly, he got really into this one, so I couldn't label it. I video recorded him instead, and he has A LOT to say about it!!!