Temple Trip to Hawaii! and WWII

You know, it's pretty awesome how many times things seem to fall into serendipity in my homeschool. Last week, one of the coolest ever happened.

We were starting to learn about the start of WWII. (This happens only once every four years folks.) and of course, one of the main events at the start of WWII was what?

PEARL HARBOUR!!!! Oh yeah! Up close and personal learning at it's finest!

So let me digress a bit to fill in all the gaps that led to this perfect homeschool moment.

As far as history goes, we learned about Gandhi. We watched the movie while making our own clothes. White pants (they chose pants over shirts.) Maxwell insisted that his had pockets because he hates pants without pockets, and I thought "uhhhh....you want to actually wear these after today?"

We also took ocean water from our backyard and boiled the salt out of it.

Then we switched gears and learned about the depression. I LOVE the movie Kit Kittredge!! I haven't read the books, but Maxwell did! We read other books. Story of the World and History of US was included. Love those read-out-loud friendly books!

We had a hobo symbol walk. Hyrum went along with me and wrote all the symbols, and the rest of us followed later to decipher the messages. Again, this was a little awkward to do if your neighbors catch you writing cryptic messages in front of their house (which they always do!)

Abraham was even excited and would yell "GOOD GARBAGE!!!" whenever he saw the dead fish symbol.

The depression leads nicely into WWII. Especially since Germany's depression sort of caused Hitler.  I had my boys watch

Because believe it or not, Ducktales is the BEST way to teach inflation to children! The episode Land of Tra La La and And the Episode Dough Ray Me are pure Economics 101. But good luck trying to find a copy! They are not on the DVDs Disney sells! 

We learned all about WWII, and I didn't actually like teaching it. It's too sad. I still need to teach specifically about the atomic bomb. Blah.

We talked about Albert Einstein. We talked about how he was jewish and had to flee Hitler.

I've been thinking a lot about refugees this past week. With Trump and everything, this world is so crazy. I don't think we need to be like Sweden (the US would have to have over 5 million refugees a year to have the population ratio equivalent to Sweden) but I don't think shrinking the very little amount of refugees the US lets in is an answer.

In every book we read it seemed jews moved to America after the war. I remember doing a college paper reading from primary sources on how a boat that came to NY carrying 900 refugee jews during WWII was sent back to europe. 1/4 of them died in concentration camps.

Of course, I believe our main efforts should be in helping people where they stand in their own countries by encouraging their own passions. That's what Dustin's been doing for the past couple of weeks in Africa.

I'm not very productive when he's gone.

In fact, I have so much to do that I've been procrastinating, including MOVING to VANUATU.  I've really got to stop writing this and work on my sister's photos ;) so let's be quick with this:

Math: Maxwell has been doing tons of tessellation work. At first I was wondering why we were spending so much time on it, but they pointed out that they are used in so many different jobs, and hey, even Dustin uses it in his games.

Hyrum has learned how to find areas.

And Daniel is moving right along too.

We also did science. We learned about the digestion system. Including your teeth. We had tablets that showed their plaque.

And we learned about birds (because I couldn't take the bird stuff with us to Vanuatu) and we dissected owl pellets. The twins were so disgusted that we were looking through throw up of fur for bones, but Gracie was in heaven!  Haha!

We are going to miss the Salas and Schafers. They are awesome. Including rock selling and birthdays.

As far as english, Amalie has been our tutor, and I haven't gotten a photo, but she was a LIFE SAVER!!! I'm sure going to miss her!

And William was interested in letter writing, and is now ready for handwriting without tears, but I don't want to deal with that in Vanuatu, so it will have to wait.

And that brings us back to Hawaii.  Maxwell found 51!!!! names to take to the temple (we weren't able to do them all...obviously.) This was such an amazing experience. A one on one adventure with our oldest awesome son.

I sure love this little man of ours!

BTW Maxwell went on his first scout camp this week!! and he had to plan his own meals and make them himself, and he chose SUSHI!!! hahahahha