Blood, Guts, and a Cold War Rant

 Okay-first science:

We did the nervous system. That week we had nothing to dissect. I will never forget four years ago when we had a brain! Since we didn't have a real brain, we made "brain hats." I found them HERE. They took a bit longer to make than I thought, and we had already done some things to test out memory, reflexes, and reaction times, so the littles didn't get their hats done.

The next week, we talked about the digestive system. The butchers said that there was NO way that we would want a stomach, intestines, or gallbladder. In fact, he said he had a gallbladder explode on him before.....yeah, Ill pass. But we DID get a HUGE liver and a pancreas. 

We cut up the liver and put it in hydrogen peroxide to show how the liver transforms the hydrogen peroxide in your body into oxygen and water. It worked really well.

We also talked about how long your digestive system is. We used a hose to mark it all off. (Thus this post being called "Blood GUTS and a Cold War rant.)

We included teeth as part of the digestive system (instead of bones) and talked about how to keep good care of them. As part of this, I gave them all "disclosing tablets." Only my kids took them during class, and it was a big hit.

Next week we talked about the excretory system and skin. They both excrete liquids, so they go together, right?

We dissected a kidney. Honestly, the more I learn about the body, the more I appreciate it.

We also did a lot of skin things. Specifically about sweat.

An now onto Social Studies:

We are on a unit of the Cold War. We started out talking about Stalin. We read "Breaking Stalin's Nose." It was a really good book. It's a satire, so I had to really be clear to the kids what a satire was, so they wouldn't thin Stalin and the Soviet Pioneers were so wonderful like the book says they are (to show how horrible it was.)

We then talked about the iron curtain. As per tradition, we had a reenactment of the Chocolate Pilot as our activity. I always cry when I read the children's book about this.

We also watched "Night Crossing" about the true story of people who made a hot air balloon to escape East Germany. 

One thing that I added this time around was the youtube videos of Elder Uchtdorf, and the children's book by him. I just love him.

But Stalin...Stalin was so gross. 

Then we learned about the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Chinese Cultural Revolution." Umm......AAAAAHHHHH. Oh man, the more I study about this, the more I'm scared and saddened and and a whole bunch of other emotions. 

We've been reading an INCREDIBLE book called "Red Scarf Girl." Oh man people! If everyone read this book, the world would be a better place. READ!!!! PLEASE!!!! 

It is the true story about a young girl in China during the cultural revolution. She starts out by saying "Family is dear, but dearer still is Chairman Moa." And then you see her world crumble around her until the veil is lifted, and Moa and his regime is exposed for the disaster it is. 

We're not done with the book yet, but you don't need to get to the end before you're freaked out of your mind by what went on and how easily it could happen again.

So so disgusting.

We learned about the take over of Tibet. I couldn't help myself, I had them watch "7 Years in Tibet" but I skipped the first hour of the movie Hahaha. I remember thinking that this was the longest movie when I was a teenager, but I still loved it, and it turns out that it was only two hours long! 

The story of how the Great Dalai Lama and his people were exiled is so important to teach my kids. As our activity we made mandalas with sand. 

RANT TIME:

Okay, so in the last post I said it was "ridiculous" that major children's education video collections didn't include anything about the Zionist conference? Welllllll now I don't feel like things are "ridiculous" I am TICKED and feel like things are DANGEROUS because these video collections don't have ANYTHING about Stalin or Mao!!!!!!! Can you imagine?

TedEd does have a video about Lenin, and both BrainPOP and TedEd have one about Che Guevara, and for BOTH of them they say "This is why they're GOOD and this is why they're BAD." Fine, great, that helps critical thinking. But nothing about Stalin and Mao?!?!

Can you imagine if we erased Hitler from the history books? How would THAT be a good thing? 

As I pondered on this, I was aware of Stalin as I was educated, but NOT Mao. In fact, I don't think I truly knew anything about him really, until as an adult, I did a google search for largest massacre and his name was a the top of all the lists. (Obviously surpassing Hitler by a huge margin.) Then I went into a very depressing rabbit hole finding out why.

Fast forward to today, and if you type in "largest massacre" you WON'T fined Mao on the list at all!!! Nor Stalin. At least in my experience (I know the Google algorithm is different for everyone,) you'll find a list where an 200,000 massacre KILLING COMMUNISTS in Indonesia shows up at the top of the lists.

Nothing of Stalin's Katyn Massacre, or Stalin's 800,000 executions, 1.7 MILLION deaths in the Gulag, the 800,000 deaths because of exile, and the 6.5 MILLION deaths that were caused by the Soviet's preventable "famine." 

NOTHING of Mao's "famine" that was CAUSED by him by killing birds, planting seeds way too deep and close together, forcing everyone to do communal farms, and consolidating all the food and then distributing it back out. 30-60 MILLION were murdered by starvation this way!!! Should we just pretend this didn't happen????

Should we NOT talk about the ONE MILLION Tibetans who were slaughtered?!?

Or how about Mao's Cultural Revolution where between 500,000 thousand to 20 MILLION were killed. Why the huge disparity in numbers? BECAUSE IT WAS ALL A STATE SECRET!!! No freedom of press. No records. No trials. 

Now they're estimating that it was 2 million. We'll never know.

So let's not talk about this. Let's not THINK about this. Let's not teach the children this.

This information should be repressed and forgotten. And instead, let's do a "Great Leap" ....oh....sorry.....that's a typo. I meant a "Great Reset" in our society today. 

Okay, just look at these two videos. The first is of my Province's Premier. (That is equivalent to a State's Governor.) The second is done by the Prime Minister of Canada. 

Honestly.

These are primary source videos of my government leaders, folks. This is not some kooky thing.

Yep.

Okay, so I have to say, the there was a youtube channel that DID cover Stalin and Mao in a child-friendly-educational way. That was "The Infographics Show." So if anyone is actually reading this and wanting to teach their kids about Stalin and Mao....that would be a good place to look. 

Okay. Rant over. I'm just ticked and scared.

So then we learned about McCarthyism. What a different world than China and Russia!!! I have always thought of how incredibly horrible an unjust McCarthyism was, and DON'T WORRY I still feel that way, but the PERSPECTIVE! Compared to what Stalin and Mao were doing, McCarthyism was a playful slap on the wrist.

What's more, IT WAS SEEN FOR WHAT IT WAS AND DISMANTLED!!!

THAT didn't happen in Stalin and Mao's life time!!!

AND every school child is thoroughly taught about the evils of McCarthyism. Deliberately and completely taught about its evils.

I realize this is not my usual post. I'm literarily yelling at you, but I just can't help it....and it's about to get worse:

So then we learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis and we built a lego submarine as our activity:

While learning about the Cuban missile crisis, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. Most Canadians know about the conspiracy theory that Justin Trudeau (Canada's Prime Minister) could be Fidel Castro's son.  I know I know I know. Kooky kooky kooky. But, when you read THIS article and then read this primary source: 

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/41523862/

Ok you begin to wonder. I wasn't teaching my kids all this, but it DID make me curious enough to rent Margaret Trudeau's autobiography "Changing My Mind."

GAAAAHH!

So I found some interesting things that backed up the "conspiracy theory" such as when she talked about Fidel Castro: "I was immediately mesmerized by what I saw:...physically very attractive" pg 142. Then Castro told her that while he forced himself to look at the sun every day to make his eyes stronger, "Do you know what I find harder?" he asked. "That is to look into the blue of your eyes." pg 144. And she did confirm that she was in the Caribbean during the time when Justin was conceived. pg 63. Do I think this theory is plausible? Well, it's not impossible.

BUT even MORE crazy was Margaret Trudeau's blatant love for communist and marxist ideals. 

On being in Cuba: "So long steeped in the staid, conservative political world of Ottawa, I was soon engulfed in memories of my hippie days. If this is revolution, I thought, then bring it on. Once convinced that CUBA COULD DO NO WRONG, I found my enthusiasm confirmed everywhere I went." pg 143

"My education was now taking place continuously both inside and outside the classroom. On the faculty, there were Marxists and Maoists, Liberals and Trotskyites...and we talked and talked and talked....that year changed me." pg 22

I thought reading her own words would help me understand her, but it honestly made me just more wary of our Prime Minister. Although she wasn't around for much of his youth (she was in the US being a photographer and other things) her influence was not of a political opinion that encouraged individual freedoms, yet she THOUGHT it did. Which is the most dangerous way of thinking.

ANYWAY

And then we finished out our submersion of the Cold War with talking about the Korean War (we'll still do the space race, Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall but not for awhile.)

FINALLY something that even the mainstream media cannot deny. 

I so desperately wanted them to listen to the Ted talks about refugees from North Korea, but they are not intellectually ready for that. I tried. 

But there ARE lots of kid friendly videos about this. So, that's something. Also The History of US has some excellent kid friendly reading on it as well.

No activity.

And then we changed over to fun, nonemotional topics:

Popculture

So fun, but so necessary. Everything changed in our society post WW2, so that everything revolves around pop culture. It influences everything in our lives. We had to focus on it. We bought some McDonalds as our activity.

Then we talked about preservatives, and we had a very long, very involved activity. Or should I say, LINDY had a very long, very involved activity.

I made a homemade Happy Meal. We are going to put it away for a month, and come back and see which is worse: The McDonald's Happy Meal, or the Homemade one. 

I did this 8 years ago, and it was really fascinating:

http://lindyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2013/05/mcdonalds-before-and-after-and-lots-of.html

But MAN it takes forever to make a homemade happy meal! I never make bread, and that takes HOURS, and THEN I almost BURT them when was toasting the insides but Dustin just shaved off the burnt crust and it tasted just fine. And then cooking everything else. Blah, no wonder we just go to McDonalds. 

I'm worried that my fries won't look gross in a month because this year I fried them. We'll see!

Then we talked about plastic.....ummm not very thoroughly......at all. The proliferation of plastic is such an important part of history. Uhhhh....maybe I'll talk about it more. Maybe.

Now for extra curricular:

Maxwell has started a business! He's making Dog houses. He taught himself how to use the software to run our CNC machine and he has used the CNC machine to cut out the pieces of the houses and then he paints them and puts them together. Start to finish all by himself.  He's already sold one, and his aunty volunteered for him to put them in their very successful furniture store!! So happy for him

We love our dogs! But our puppies are getting placed in their new homes this week.

And we signed our family up for Mark Rober's engineering course which their dad is helping them do (I'm not involved and it feels great.)

And they're still doing their Blackmore zoom classes. This is a "magical" drink Daniel did:

And there were tow holidays. St Patrick's day where the Leprechauns came to their traps:

And Easter when we watched Conference:

Now for English and Math:

Maxwell-He's doing a new Novel-studies class where they read novels, have zoom discussions and then do essays about them. I feel horrible because I realized too late that the zooms are at the same time as his seminary-we've asked them to record them, so we'll see if that works.

He's also doing an ALEKS math review to get him ready to pass the ALEKS exam which will let him skip  some college classes of math. I HOPE it works, but if worse comes to worse, he just takes the beginning college math course.

Hyrum- swimming right along. Here's an example of his math lately:

Daniel-he's getting used to his new way of school. He's doing great with VideoText:

And IEW writing

And William is doing great with Rightstart Math

And AAR is going great. So far I feel like it's not too fast, but he's already doing "silent "E" which Barton takes FOREVER to do. He's able to do it because they drill and drill the DIFFERENT sounds of the vowels, which is also something that Barton doesn't do. AAR and AAS don't do enough writing, so he dictates and then copies:

And Abraham is doing Awesome in Rightstart. He's only 6 folks, but look at his math:

And Logic of English is going pretty fast. Faster than AAR I think, but Abraham is getting it so far, so that's good. Although, when spelling I leave the "igh" phonogram card out on the table. Maybe that's not good of me. I don't know. Barton doesn't cover the "igh" unit in books 1-7 that I'm aware of, so this is crazy that Abraham's learning it right now.

And there you go!!! My school blog. My very long winded school blog!

Lungs, Hearts and WW2

 It has been a month since I last posted-sorry John-, but it has been an incredible month for science!

I have a friend whose dad is a butcher, and he's been so good to me in the past, and he got me the tongue, esophagus/trachea, lungs and heart (all still connected) of a cow! Seriously, it was awesome!

When I got it, I was a bit worried. It was in this bloody see through garbage bag, and it just seemed pretty gruesome, but I was undaunted, and brought it to school.

We learned quite a bit about lungs from doing experiments that didn't include the cow lungs, including proving that our air is mostly carbon dioxide when it comes out by putting out a candle with CO2, showing them a homemade lung model, and seeing how much air your lungs can hold by blowing into a jar filled with water. 

And then came out the lungs (that was still connected to the heart and tubes) it was so big when straightened out, that it took up most of the sled I brought to contain it!

We watched this awesome youtube video to help us dissect it:

I think my favourite moment was when Heather Burton came in and the look on her face was not of disgust, but of absolute love of learning. She wanted to know everything. 

I certainly learned a lot. It's one of my favourite dissections I've ever done. I was amazed at how easy it was to see the different air and blood pipes and how those pipes became smaller and smaller until they interchanged oxygen with one another. Also, I didn't realize that your trachea is made up of cartilage hoops all the way, down to make sure your air passageways stay open.

Then the next science class we did was about the heart. I had prepared hearts to dissect, but then I had the heart that was connected to the lungs that I kept. HOLY COW there was a huge difference between the fresh heart and the prepared heart (get it? Holy cow?-moving on.)

We used "We the Curious" Youtube again, and we saw the heart strings, the different chambers and everything.

The red one I'm holding is the fresh specimen, and the brownish grey one is the prepared. It was so hard and smelly. It makes me only want to use fresh specimens from now on. It's a whole lot cheaper too! (Free from my friend!)

We had so many activities to do about the circulatory system, that each club (I have a younger and an older) didn't get to all of them. I had these "blood type" tests, and I had never used them before, and so I thought you just pricked yourself and then sent it in the mail to get tested, so I thought that wasn't interesting enough for the Youngers, so I waited until the Olders came, but then I realized that you could find out your blood type IMMEDIATELY! Cool? Yes.

I only had five tests (one for each of my kids) but I decided that I would do it with anyone willing to get impaled by me. (I'm glad that their parents are my friends because I forgot to ask permission!) and it was so cool to see how the blood reacted differently with the different chemicals on the paper. 

The three non-McKays were all O+ and the McKays were all A-, and I'm so grateful that we had at least two different kinds of blood types! We looked at their blood under the microscope. It isn't red under the microscope, it's clear!

And this week we learned about muscles. I wasn't prepared as much as I should have been. I had them watch a few extra Brainpops this week while I finished up my tendon-hands. But they were worth it, they were pretty fun:

 You can't tell in this photo because for the Olders I ran out of coloured string and used fishing line instead, but there's tendons running down every finger. The rest of them were better than this one, but I forgot to take a photo during science club.

We also did a few activities to feel and be aware of our own muscles.

Yep! Pretty cool science month.

As for history, we finished up learning about WW2.

We obviously talked about the holocaust. What a depressing but necessary subject. We read the book "Number the Stars" as part of this and also watched the 1950s Anne Frank movie. 

I'm such a baby with this subject. I get so easily depressed. I watched "Jo Jo Rabbit" on a plane headed to Argentina (I think) and ugly cried in front of everyone. 

I was headed to Calgary with Maxwell for a Dr appointment, and I thought to myself "I want something uplifting to listen to, I'm sick of the holocaust," so I turned on "Mans Search For Meaning" by Victor Frankel (obviously I've never read it before) and it started out  "Part 1: Experiences in a Concentration Camp." NOOOO but of course I didn't turn it off, so we listen to all the horrors and never really got to the inspirational part.

As our activity we made Stars of David.

Then we learned about Einstein (I always try and teach about him when learning about the Holocaust because he was a jew in Germany.) But we had no activity.

We talked about the shift in culture that happened because of the war and how women were now working and all their sons and husbands were dying, and as our activity we made star window flags. (I guess this was just a USA thing. I couldn't find any Canadian examples.)

And we learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I try to show both sides of the story=how absolutely devastating and sad and disgusting it was, AND how the Japanese almost STILL didn't surrender even after the bombs, so the war might have gone on for years without the bombs.

As our activity, we made floating lanterns with old pictures of Japanese people on them. When the cutey came up from downstairs and asked what we were doing, little Abraham said "We're remembering all the people who died." Whew! at least my messages get through sometimes!

Of course, all the rivers and lakes were frozen stiff, so we put the lanterns in our bathtub.

Now that the WW2 was over, it was time to learn about the Zionist conference. I know I probably mentioned this four years ago, but I'm so annoyed this never gets taught!!!

I majored in art history and minored in history, and was NEVER properly taught about the Zionist conference. I knew Israel was a jewish country, and I knew there was a lot of hate, but I didn't really know anything.

I actually never learned about it until I read "the Chosen" in a book club as an adult.

For social studies, (and science) I always embellish my lessons with BrainPOP and TedEd and children's books. They almost alway have something about the topic, but for Israel/Zionist/Jew rebuilding post war? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So ridiculous. It's so important. I KNOW it's controversial, but that's WHY children need to hear both sides! 

At least Story of The World has three awesome pages about it.

As our activity, we made Israel flags.

Then, according to my history schedule, for some strange reason I chose NOW -in this post ww2 unit- to talk about vaccines. Not sure why. 

We talked mostly about Jenner and smallpox, but of course that leads to polio and others. There were SO MANY videos on BrainPop and TedEd and children books about vaccines!!! 

Obviously I talked about the COVID vaccine as well and how it's a completely different vaccine than anything that's ever been made. I MAY have shared my serious concerns....but that was after praising past vaccines...this is a tricky time in history.

As our activity, those that weren't up to date on their vaccines got them (obviously not the COVID one since that's illegal for children still- since they are still in the testing stage of this science experiment.)

And lastly we've learned about penicillin- again, tons of BrainPop and TedEd. I was really lazy about this, and I'll be honest that I had movies teach my kids, did a very brief Q&A to make sure they understood and then didn't do an activity. Do I know I was lame? Yes. Do I regret that? Yes. Will I teach this better next week? Nope.

And now for the core subjects:

Abraham is DONE with Logic of English A! He's done pretty good, but I HATE how they teach all the vowel sounds at one time instead of starting out with the short sound.

William has learned LONG MULTIPLICATION! He is 8 folks. Yep. 

And something he did cute the other day in All About Spelling, I made the word "mat" and asked him to change it to "met" and he just turned the "a" upside-down and said "See? It looks like an "e." Can we say dyslexia for the win?

Daniel has FINISHED RIGHTSTART MATH!!! Here's a couple of pages from his final test:

Now he's started doing VideoText, IEW writing, Fix It and is growing up.

Hyrum is continuing with all his stuff, but I got him the Graphic Novel of Wings of Fire the other day, and he ate it up, so I got him three more, and he ate up those as well. It's hard to get Hyrum excited about books, so this was very encouraging.

And MAXWELL!!! Maxwell has been doing great!

He's finished with his YALE course that he got a certificate in

He's been LOVING his photoshop class, which he finished today.

And he's on week 5 of this 6 week Essay writing course that my friend Savannah is teaching and then he's starting a literature Essay course through her:

https://www.classicsallowed.org

AND....drumroll please....

He got into BYUI concurrent enrolment!!!!

My little boy is now officially a college boy!!!

And in other news, I finally got Hyrum tested for Audio Processing Disorder. He apparently doesn't have it at all and passed the test with flying colours. They say you can grow out of it, and I suspect that's what happened, because I swear that's part of why he struggled so much when he was younger.

Also, there was the world-wide primary virtual conference, and from then on, Abraham can't get enough of drawing people praying:

He insisted on giving me a tutorial.

Also, our Cardston virtual classes have continued, and this is an elephant Daniel made out of pancakes for one:

And now that the weather's warming up, the boys are helping dad finish the tiny house RV:

And finally, I had to include this photo of my writing group. I LOVE THESE WOMEN!!! I feel so inspired by them!

I have actually finished 9 chapters in my book about my mom! I'm not sure if I've said this here, but I'm taking a break from my Educational Psychology classes to concentrate on my book. 

By the way, I got an B and A+ on my two classes and I am SO ticked off at that B because it was one of the worst classes in how it was put together that I can imagine, and I swear it was impossible to get an A.