It has been busy, crazy, sad, worrying, but oh so wonderful this month as we've come home to Canada.
I actually did get quite a bit of teaching squished into this summer. But we were busy. We finally got the house listed to sell. Behold:
I know you want to buy it now, but good news! You can!!!
I was even able to do a little science (honestly, without a club it is so hard to get the mojo up enough to do science. I feel bad we didn't do all of the physics I wanted to.)
We learned about Newton's laws of motion. We played tug of war and other fun things to show how motion works.
We also learned about centripetal force. We did a lot of spinning for this! Spinning pennies inside balloons and spinning cups of water. The inertia broke through the bottom of the cup in this photo!
But we knew it couldn't all be school. We needed to get away and have some fun before we left. We decided to go to Pele island and go camping. It was just what we all needed. Nothing but white sand, a bon fire, and playing the Ukulele.
One of the hardest things about leaving was leaving the school that I teach at. It's been such an education for me to teach them, and I hope I made a difference for them.
We at least went out with a bang. It was independence week when we left, so we were there for Children's Day. I helped quite a bit with it, including making a banner for them, but the best part of it all was Hyrum and Daniel dressing up like clowns and giving all the kids balloon swords and hats.
They even threw me a going away celebration and gave Daniel and I tons of leis and cards. I will miss them so much, and I am so grateful for such an amazing privilege to teach in this incredible school.
Thankfully, THANKFULLY this amazing family from Utah moved in a couple of weeks before we left. I can not begin to explain what a blessing it is that they moved in as we moved out. I felt like I wasn't abandoning everything. The husband is a paediatrician, and the wife is a teacher. If all goes well, this little school will become a school for an American-based ESL program that is organized all over the world. Wouldn't that be incredible!?!
That family even took our dog Tanna and gave her a good home.
Leaving our animals was a really hard part of leaving Vanuatu. I never thought I would say that. Rudy has be our guard dog. She was our peace of mind and our friend. I wouldn't want to live in Vanuatu without her.
Elsa was the best cat in the world. I love that cat, and I never love cats.
She didn't bother Denise who's normally allergic to cats, she lets the kids abuse her without retaliation, and she ALWAYS goes in her litter box, and she didn't hurt our nice furniture.
Of course we have friends that we will miss more than our animals. Specifically our neighbours, those who have helped the Salmon kids, Branch members, Mayline, the Masos, and most of all the Gaydens. I don't think I would have stayed sane without them. We really needed them.
But obviously, those that we are missing the most are those that I feel like are my family. My little Tahitian family is on my mind and in my heart constantly. There are so many worries and doubts, but most of all a desire for true happiness for them.
The branch put on a get together as we left, and Lacil had her daughter make us these cute outfits. I will miss my Vanuatu life, but we will be back!
We realized that the cheapest way home was a layover in New Zealand, but if you can have two hours, why not two DAYS? Yep, we stopped in NewZealand for a little hello.
I decided that we needed to go to Rotorua for our day there, and we spent the first half of the day at Whakarewarewa a Maori village on top of an active geothermal zone!!! They actually cook their food with the thermal heat, and have bathing spas, and there's geysers right outside their front doors. It was crazy! Crazy and amazing!
They also performed a haka and poi ball dance for us. I wish you could have been there Danette! (If you still read my blogs that is)
We then asked the boys an important question: Would they want to go to the movie set of The Lord of The Rings, or go down a mountain Luge ride. We only had time and money for one.
They chose the Luge.
Going on that Luge ride was very nostalgic for me. When I went to New Zealand as a teenager, I remember that exact Luge ride. It was really trippy for me to realize that I was on the other side of the world AGAIN but this time with a family of seven all enjoying the same thing I did when I was 17.
I was a little sad we didn't go to the LOTR movie set. I even made them all watch the first half of the first movie. (Maxwell has seen all the Hobbit ones...I think.) But after that, Abraham had nightmares and that was the first time any of my kids have had nightmares from movies, so LOTR was done. However, we did drive past the place where the Hobbiton Farm was and we played the movie soundtrack in our van, and it was almost as good as paying $500 bucks to see the round doors in those hills.
When we got to North America, we landed in LA and stayed in California. It saved us a ton of money, but also, we had our nephew's wedding to go to!!
We had come a couple days early, and my old friend Tom Barlow was an excellent host and let us stay with him. We went to science centres, had reunions with family, and I had my nails done with the bride to be.
I love the Okanagan Science Pass we have. Get's us in everywhere. My boys were especially drawn to the Legos since they haven't been able to play with them for a year. The museum let you display your creations.
WALMART people! We went to Walmart. We are not in Vanuatu any more! Crazy. We also already started buying things on Amazon. We're back!!!
How fun to see everyone for the wedding. I sure love Dailin. He was one of the first little people I ever taught homeschool to, and he will always be that little boy in my heart.
Then it was off to Arizona. That was so special. I was so happy to see Dustin's brother's family. My boys were too. I actually love AZ in the summer. I know that sounds weird, but there's AC and then the swimming pools are all so warm, and it's hot even after the sun goes down, which is kind of magical.
Hyrum is old enough to go to the temple and we did a bit of family history work in Vanuatu, and the temple he chose to go to was the Gilbert temple specifically because he wanted to go with his Arizona cousins. Ahhh...
Then we spent one day in St. George Utah visiting Nate and his family:
And then we saw my MOM AND DAD. Oh how I love them. They took my kids to the store and told them to pick out a present as a late birthday/Christmas present from them and that of course delighted my boys.
And then we also went to the Curiosity museum. My boys took amazing rocks from St George to the Rock exchange at this museum, and the lady working there said she had never had kids who knew more about the rocks they brought then my kids, specifically Maxwell who had basically written an essay about gypsum.
When we got back to Cardston our house was perfectly clean and the table was set, dinner was ready, candy was hidden throughout the house, everything was so welcoming and perfect thanks to the Smiths. What a blessing they are.
And soon, it was William's birthday:
And we were overwhelmed with seeing all our wonderful friends and family (seriously, Hyrum had a hard transition, he was way too excited to handle all of his emotions!)
We got some end-of the-year history in. We talked about the American Civil War. We brought out cotton as we discussed the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision. I was so happy to let Daniel make actual yarn from real cotton balls, because when we were reading a book about Mr Luther King Jr earlier in the year, he had so many questions about how that was possible.
By the way, it's supper hard to get just cotton out of a cotton ball plant.
We also learned quite a bit about Abraham Lincoln and Clara Barton. Abraham is soooo dang cute as Abraham Lincoln !!! "I'm Abraham Lincoln. I'm not lying!" AHAHAHHahhahaha
And for whatever reason they made these "ninja turtle" stress balls as I was teaching them one day...HUGE mess.
And we talked about Sherman's march, and how devastated the South was, and a bit about the reconstruction of the South. We even made out own Southern city that we destroyed....yeah, that sounds weird.
My kids have been doing their own kind of crafts too. like Daniel who insisted on making Lego jello molds.
And Hyrum's had fun making movies:
One of the great thins about the timing of our homecoming was that Maxwell and Hyrum were able to go to Lyber Retreat. This is a highlight of the year for Maxwell. I was so happy that they had that chance. In our journeys we listened to "Secret Garden" and "Little Britches" in preparation.
They also had to read an essay that was about not seeing your self as a victim and not having any excuses to get what you want. It was good, but it had this in it "“One of the epidemics of our time is the fad of “learning disabilities.” If a child is labeled with some disorder, then everyone – the teacher, the parent and even the child – is absolved of personal responsibility.”
That was sooooo not okay with me, and I wrote a long letter to the camp telling them what I thought about that. They were really sweet and said they were already going to debate that with the kids about what was right and what wasn't in the article.
One of my favourite times of year is when we get done with our Rightstart math books for the year. Technically, William and Daniel are the only ones "done."
Maxwell is running a little "behind" of what I want for him, but honestly he is way ahead of where he should be anyway. He's doing this factoring polynomial stuff that's starting to get too hard for me! and I loved math and got 100s in college. But he needs to get through this book soon, or my chi will be out of whack. After this book, I'm thinking that before we delve into another Video Text unit, I'll go through the ACT math and see if he's ready for the ACT test. Because honestly, if he can do ACT math well then as far as I'm concerned, he's done. He can do the rest in college. (Probably in my living room online...but with college credit.)
Hyrum isn't technically done either. He started really late in this Level G book (which is the longest book ever) because the book was in Vanuatu and we were still in Canada, and I was going to push him really hard for a week or so to get to an arbitrary stopping point, and then I thought "WHY?" and it was so liberating to just say we were done where we were at. Besides, he's a year ahead of grade five anyway.
Another wonderful thing to be done with is "Checklists." But I'll talk about that at the end of this post, because that's not as exciting.
Now it's "summer." But it's not summer here, and I don't feel any obligation to let my kids off the school wagon. (This summer I do want ME time though. I plan on at least starting a book this summer about my mom's life. It's gonna be awesome folks.) Besides, we haven't done all the science clubs I usually do so I can't stop that. We haven't done all the social studies I've wanted to do either, and now that math and checklists are out of the way, Barton is in high gear.
Hyrum and Daniel are practically full fledged readers now. That glorious experience you dream about happened recently of finding Hyrum with a novel he had picked up on his own. He sat for hours pouring over the pages, giggling every fifteen minutes at the magic he was finding on the pages of his book. Yep a dyslexic Mom's dream come true.
Daniel's not quite at that point, but he's getting close:
Even William will have a reading summer. I miss some of the amazing things about Barton, but I'm loving the simplicity of Toe by Toe too (sometimes Toe by Toe drives me nuts though, like introducing words like "garden" out of no where. How the freak is he supposed to tackle a multi-syllable word with an "ar" sound?!?) We've been reading it all over our beach and house, which is either good or bad for his MASSIVE ADHD issues, I'm not sure.
We have done very little of MY science lately. We did do a club on pressure. We learned about air pressure and water pressure and how pressure relates to mass and surface area, and we brought out an air powered rocket (that got wrecked within 24 hrs surprise surprise.) We crushed cans and did the egg-in-a-bottle thing. We had fun.
And as for social studies, one of the coolest things we've done lately, is I finally got around to finishing Daniel's founding fathers video. He had worked on this earlier in the year. It had taken a long time when I was having him do it, and I realized I just would never actually have him do it. So I took over. He did a bit of the photoshop, and even less of the iMovie, but he did do some, so hey, that's pretty awesome.
And as far as living in another culture goes, we did some awesome stuff. Here's a cool photo of me with the Vanuatu symbol because---hey it's cool:
That guy is on all of Vanuatu's important crests.
Anyways, we had a stake wide cultural night, and our branch was in charge of sharing the culture of the Torba province. I have actually seen their dance because that's the water dance they do at my favourite restaurant, the Havana Resort. Of course, we weren't going to have water for our presentation, and the girls are the only ones who water dance anyway, so we just did Torba dances without water.
I'll be honest, I wasn't in a good place emotionally during the practice sessions of this program. I was super annoyed because I would go to drop off my kids, and no one would be there, so I would wait forever.... like an hour....seriously.... and then no one would come, and then I would go into the village and they would say that the people across town were supposed to be coming, and the bus situation wasn't working, so I realized this was all on me. If I wasn't the bus, this wouldn't happen. So for the next two weeks I was driving all over the island every other day picking up people and finding people and everyone seemed so nonchalant and when I would pick up people I had to wait like a half an hour for them to get in my truck, and I was just homesick for Canada anyways and PEOPLE! JUST GET IN THE TRUCK!
But I repented of my bad attitude the night of the cultural presentation, because it turned out FREAKING AWESOME! It's an experience my kids will never forget. The costumes were the best.
I'll upload a video soon so you can really get a feel. My boys were the only white kids in the whole night's festivities....I think they're the only white kids in the Stake....more like the whole Mission. Seriously.
Another amazing thing to be involved in recently was "kindy day." It was this Vanuatu get together of all the kindergarteners where they shared their talents. I was asked a couple of weeks before this if I could accompany the orphan school (where I volunteer) while they sang a song that Sister Roundy, a humanitarian missionary here, had made up for them. It was just the song "Rose rose rose rose will I ever see thee wed." song but with different words.
I said yes, thinking that this was a classic English folk song, so of course I would find some kind of accompaniment, but NO. This was a classic A CAPELLA round. So beyond a melody line, there was nothing. Also, I realized she thought I had some easily transportable piano, which I don't.
She had initially mentioned the ukulele, and so I figured that I would learn the ukulele, make up the accompaniment, and pull it off. Yes I was crazy to think I could pull that off, but not too crazy because I DID IT!
Yep. I'm awesome.
I've gotten pretty excited about ukuleles and have started teaching it to my kids for school.
Abraham and William came with me because they're kindergarten age, and it was ABRAHAM"S BIRTHDAY! I kept on saying the whole thing was a big birthday party for him, and he soaked it all up. It was perfect.
We also sang the "Days of the Week" song I had taught them. Most other kindies sang songs about Jesus.
That week had been the week of Birthdays. There were FOUR birthdays in a week! Two in our foster family with us, and Hyrum's and Abraham's.
We had a ton of kids over for Hyrum's. Here they are playing the skittles game:
As far as other things related to education, my kids have all loved colouring lately. They all ask me to print out pictures and then colour away. William is trying to make a dragon book with all the dragons he's coloured. He's drawing parts of his own too.
And the other day Maxwell made a tree house. Yep, he's pretty amazing that way.
So, now let's talk about those "Checklists" that I finally got done. I'm not going to include them in my "yearbooks" but I just did three massive checklist posts that checked off every single stink'n thing Alberta wants my kids to know.
Well here's a little secret: I DON'T CARE WHAT ALBERTA THINKS!
I mean, I DO care in the fact that I want them to like homeschoolers, and I DO care about Westwind alternate and those who work there, and I DO like a little guidance as to where a typical grade should have accomplished, and I DO care about fulfilling my part of an arrangement, but I NEVER look at the Alberta curriculum to guide what I do as a teacher.
By the way I AM THE TEACHER. Alberta doesn't recognize that because of how it's organized in the system I signed up for, but honestly: give me a break. I am the freaking teacher.
I may glance at the checklist out of curiosity over the year, but I trust my curriculums that I have picked after years of experience and knowledge of my kids and what they really need, and then in the LAST MONTH I get out the checklists, figure out how it all matches up, and then go about filling in any gaps.
Because Westwind hasn't figured out the three year cycle that they PROMISED me they would do for science and social studies yet (if anyone from Westwind is reading this.....hint, hint) I don't cover what they actually want me to cover in those areas very much (yeah, all my AWESOME science clubs and social studies activities don't count if it's not about the random "Freshwater and Saltwater systems" unit Maxwell needs to randomly know.)
So this year we relied heavily on Brainpop for those subjects. Brainpop is awesome because I just make a list of movies that each child needs to watch and then they choose how they wanted to show learning outcomes. They could do a quiz, make an outline, or even make a movie.
Some movies were super cute, but I can't figure out how to send them to youtube (I don't think Brainpop wants me to,) so here's just a screen shot of one of Hyrum's:
And the outlines are pretty awesome too. Here's one of Daniel's:
Most of the time, however, they would just do a quiz because that was quick and easy, but that was their choice.
One thing about doing checklists this year made me realize how awesome IEW writing and grammar are. It was super easy to find everything Westwind needed for Maxwell's language arts. Totally doing it for all my kids.
For Hyrum and Daniel, Barton and my creative writing dictation that we've done this year has left them wanting in the Language arts department, so we had to supplement quite a bit, but I think it was really good for them.
WE ARE GETTING SOOOOO CLOSE TO BEING DONE WITH BARTON!!!! Because I'm done with math and checklists, Barton has been kicked into a higher gear. Maybe they'll be done by the end of summer for Hyrum and Christmas for Daniel, and then perhaps I will be done with Barton forever?
With Maxwell (and I'm finding this is true with Hyrum and Daniel) once I'm done with book 6, they are effective readers. I got book 7, but I just watched the instructional videos with Maxwell instead of having him go through the program because he get the concepts, but all the spelling practice I've found to be fruitless anyway. I've had to do other things besides Barton for Maxwell's spelling.
That way Maxwell got through book 7 in a few hours instead of a few months.
Who knows. If Toe by Toe works for William, then I might do a bit of Barton book five with William because it's just too excellent at teaching suffixes, and I doubt Word Wasp (Toe by Toe's writing companion) will do those justice.
Here's one (of many) brainstorm exercises Hyrum did for Westwind:
And here's one by Daniel:
Here's lists of books Maxwell read this year:
Hunger Games Trilogy
Gregor the Overlander Series
The Swiss Family Robinson
The Heroes of Olympus Series
Warriors Series
Saints Standard of Truth
The Lonesome Gods
Laddie a true blue Story
Little Britches Series
Beyonders Series
Summer of the Monkeys
White Fang
The Call of the WIld
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Little Women
and a whole bunch of Minecraft junk books not worth mentioning.
Also a bunch more, I can't keep up with everything he reads, honestly.
Here's lists of books Hyrum and Daniel read this year:
Beauty by Robin McKinley
Benotripia’s Amulet Chase
A Lion to Guard US
The last unicorn
Brothers Grimm
Call it Courage
The American Twins of the revolution
Witch of black bird pond
Christmas Carrol
Canadian Flyer: Hurry Freedom
Canadian Flyer: Lost in The Snow
Canadian Flyer: Crazy for Gold
Canadian Flyer: Pioneer Kids
Revolutionary war on Wednesday
Vikings at sunrise
Sweetgrass
Kaya American Girl Series
Fablehaven
Fablehaven: Rise of the Evening Star
BFG
Hyrum and Daniel wrote some things that I want records of, so here they are:
The BFG Summary
By Hyrum McKay
The BFG is a fascinating story. It starts with a girl named Sophie. She’s a normal girl, but an orphan, I don’t know what happened with her parents, but what I do know it that one night people kept telling her that when the clock strikes twelve it’s the bewitching hour, but she was looking out her window at three. She saw a giant shadow. The shadow saw her, and she ran under her blankets. Slowly but surely the giant hand got her.
That’s how the book begins. That shadow turns out to be the Big Friendly Giant. BFG for short. You see, the BFG didn’t want Sophie to escape, because she had seen him, and giants were a secret.
He started running faster than lightning. Even though she was still in the bag, she could feel the speed. They arrived in Giant Country and the BFG put her on his table in his cave. The cave had a huge boulder to keep the other giants out. They were twice his size.
The main problem is that the giants went every night at witching hour around the world. Like to Scotland, Cardston, and Vanuatu. They did not eat snozzcumbers like the BFG. Snozzcumbers are the only thing that the BFG ate. They were really gross and disgusting. The Giants ate people instead. They needed to go all around the world so they could eat different people and not get noticed.
The BFG went all around the world so he could send dreams to children and adults. He would also catch nightmares and not let them come to you. That’s why nightmares are rare: Without the BFG they would all get to us.
Later on in the story, the Giants started figuring out that there was a “human bean” in giant country. Actually they mean a human being. Anyways, Sophie was trying to figure out a way to stop the giants from eating people. She thought if she could go to the queen of England, they would get help.
She was right. The way they convinced the queen to help them was by having the BFG mix some dreams together about Sophie, the BFG, and the Giants and sending it to the queen right before she woke up.
The English army collected the giants and put them in a pit so deep that even if they stood on top of each other, they couldn’t get out. They fed them snozzcumbers to eat, and creates a snozzcumber farm for them to eat snozzcumbers forever.
That’s really it, except to say that BFG got to eat some delicious food that was not snozzcumbers, and never ate snozzcumbers again.
The End
Programming
By Hyrum McKay
Computer Programming is what I want to do when I grow up. It’s awesome. There’s lots you can do with it. It’s the instructions for technology. Without it, machines would be nothing.
What can programming do? It can make games, websites, texting, and even cartoons. Robots have programs to tell them what to do. It makes them intelligent and helps them think of what’s next. You can find programming in electronics. Programmers often need to work with artists. A lot of what you see on a screen is art come to life through programming.
Programming can mean codes and numbers that create what you see on your screen. It is commands and problem solving, just like a calculator.
Computers don’t really speak English, There are hundreds of computer languages. The most popular are C++, PASCAL, Logo, Java Script, and Python.
Programming is made up of codes. Coding is done in an algorithm which is step by step instructions. A tiny set of codes is called a function. Instead of writing out the entire function each time you want to use it, you can just say to do the function. Lots of people use loops, which is a repeating program. You can get programs to be problem solvers with conditional statements. The program can make decisions based on what they see, or what gets typed or touched.
Coding needs to be really really specific. Even master programmers bump into the same thing: a bug. Mostly bugs are a something they forgot to write or something they wrote wrong in the program. Other times, it’s a virus. You have to find different ways of doing things to get rid of these bugs.
Right now I am learning programming with Scratch. It’s a web sight that doesn’t use a language. Instead, it uses building blocks that act like functions. It’s a good step to becoming a programmer.
Summary of Fablehaven: Rise of the Evening Star
By Daniel McKay
The book “Fablehaven: Rise of the Evening Star” is a magical awesome story. It’s the second book in the Fablehaven series. I thought the adventure was amazing.
Seth and Kendra Sorrenson are brother and sister. Their grandma and grandpa are caretakers at Fablehaven. Fablehaven is a preserve for magical creatures. It’s really big and goes on for miles. They live in one of the houses that’s protected from uninvited things.
Fablehaven is supposed to be secret with a special artifact, but a group called the Evening Star is evil and has found out about Fablehaven and are trying to get the artifact. Vanessa is a narcoblix, which is like a vampire, and is working for the Evening Star. The Sorrensons need to get the artifact before Vanessa.
Vanessa controls people in their sleep when she bites them. She takes over the house, but Kendra and Seth escape. They go to a cottage on the preserve, but they have to go back to the house to get the key to the artifact. They can never sleep. They have to shrink themselves to get into the house through the brownie’s world. Once they are inside the house, they use a magical glove that helps them be invisible. They steal the key and run.
To get the artifact, they must to go through a cursed grove that has a revenant that scares you so bad that you can't move and makes you into a brain dead albino. They have a potion pouch and Seth drinks the brave potion so he can defeat the revenant. Seth has to take out a wooden nail from the neck of the revenant that gave the revenant all his power.
When Seth takes out the nail, all the albinos turned back to normal. There was an albino named Warren, and when he turned back, he helps Kendra find the artifact in the inverted tower in the middle of the grove. Seth can't come because he has been injured by the revenant.
The key turns into a spear, and there are a few doors. Each door has a winding staircase, but they are fake, and if they went on them they would fall. They find a secret door which they go through. There is a real staircase but some steps were still fake.
They go through lots traps and tests until they go into this room that has a drop off. They have to use little sticks to help them control their gravity in the room. They float down the drop off and find a cat.
They need to defeat this cat nine times, and every time they kill it, it gets bigger and more powerful. Vanessa teams up to kill it because it’s too powerful. For the last cat Tanu and Coulter, friends of their grandparents, come to help kill the cat.
When they kill the cat, there is a cat teapot that has golden dust that can heal anything. They heal everybody with the dust.
The Sphinx, who everyone thinks is the leader fo the Knights of the Dawn, an organization of the good guys, is waiting for them. He takes the artifact. He puts Vanessa into a special prison called the quiet box that can only hold one prisoner. The Sphinx takes the old disguised prisoner, that used to be in the quiet box, with him.
Vanessa is mad, and she writes Kendra a secret message about how the Sphinx is actually a bad guy.
The ending of the Rise of the Evening Star made me want to read more. I think the author did that on purpose. This question about the Sphinx is epic and I need to know more. What is Kendra going to do? What’s going to happen with the Sphinx? Will they trust Vanessa’s writing? I can’t wait to find out.
There were a couple more writing things I had them do too, but that's is for now!
