TINDERBOX

Socialization in schools?

Posted on January 25, 2012 by tinderbox

Everyone, thanks for your comments on my last post about socialization. It’s clear that I’m not the only one for whom this subject hits a nerve.

Charlotte made a comment about the flip side of this issue – socialization in schools. I normally try not to pontificate about schools (albeit with imperfect success), because I realize that I just don’t know. So I’m going to promote Charlotte’s comment to the main page, and hope that some other parents whose kids go to school chime in as well. She wrote:

I don’t always feel like they’re getting so much socialization there, but institutionalization. So much of the day is spent teaching kids to function in a large institution with many other kids, mostly for crowd control purposes. I understand why they have to do it, but watching them march silently in their lines (using the lines in the floor as tracks) all over the school several times a day just breaks my heart. Watching them have silent lunch for the last 10 minutes of their 25 minute lunch “hour” (and MUCH less for the kids who have to wait in line) makes me seethe. To me, and maybe I’m having a bit of “grass is greener” moments, it makes far more sense to organize social activities and moments of institutionalization (like sitting still in church) in a more natural environment. School is the only time in our lives when we really have to live like that.

Yes, this is one of the things that concerns me when I think about school. When I say that we homeschool partly for religious reasons, I mean that I worry that an intense focus on conformity and obedience doesn’t honor children’s inherent human worth and dignity. Some parent bloggers who have influenced my thoughts about this are Fed Up Mom at Coalition for Kid-Friendly Schools (especially her posts about the fad of “Whole Brain Teaching”) and Chris at A Blog About School.

My kids are normally pretty well-behaved, but I can’t imagine how my dreamy, thoughtful introvert would hold up in a classroom that required this level of constant knee-jerk call-and-response conformity.

Again, though: we’re not school users and never have been at the grade school level. I’d appreciate comments from people who are, and from homeschoolers whose kids have direct school experience.

Posted in philosophy and politics | 41 Comments

WE ALREADY KNOW: A rant about socialization.

Posted on January 24, 2012 by tinderbox

It started, ironically enough, with a Facebook post in which I mentioned that we’ve enrolled Colin in nursery school for next year. A lengthy discussion about the merits of nursery school followed. Then came this gem, from an acquaintance:

I think the main value of nursery school/preschool/kinder is socialization. It’s one of the most important life skills. Something that pure home schooling lacks without intentional and regular play groups. I’m just sayin…

Okay, hold up.

“Pure homeschooling” is not defined by an absence of contact with people outside the family. I doubt that any homeschooler in the history of the movement has defined “pure homeschooling” this way. This is a definition that exists only in the minds of people who oppose homeschooling or know nothing about it. (Overlapping groups, obviously.)

“I know that many homeschooling families organize social opportunities for their kids, but…” No. You need to substitute “the overwhelming majority of” for “many” in that sentence, and then end the sentence at the comma. Stop lecturing homeschoolers about the importance of socialization. WE ALREADY KNOW. It has not escaped us that humans are social animals who use social skills to live in a society. That insight is not original to you. Honest.

Stop expressing relief that the homeschooled children you meet have friends. Stop praising homeschooling parents for taking their kids to activities. These factors do not make a homeschooling family exceptional. These people are not bucking the norm; among homeschoolers, they are normal.

While you’re at it, stop privileging forms of “socialization” which look most like the public school paradigm. In my limited experience, I’ve found that people are most reassured when they hear that a homeschooled kid participates in group academic classes, team sports, or Scouting: settings in which a large group of same-age children perform activities under the direction of an adult. (Liberals are also more reassured by secular activities, which is why, in my circles, when I list Alex’s activities RE is well down the list.)

There’s nothing wrong with these types of settings, of course. Alex has been in all of them since beginning homeschooling, if you count ballet as a sport. But age-stratified large-group activities are not the sine qua non of socialization. Children’s social development is also supported in age-integrated settings within families, neighborhoods, and communities. It’s supported when families socialize with each other as whole families, as well as when children roam about the playground in a semi-supervised pack. And children’s social development is supported in intergenerational settings which are not primarily about children, such as churches, volunteer organizations, and (hi Charlotte!) historical re-enactment groups.

Let’s come back to Colin for a moment. Yes, he gained valuable social experience in his RE class when he and a couple of age peers worked together to make a huge block tower. That’s the kind of “socialization” opportunity most people can easily identify, and the kind that nursery school will support. But Colin also gains valuable social experience when we hang out with another homeschooling family and he tags along after Alex and the other older children while the mother and I chat. Right now, his age-stratified-peer-group experience is limited to RE once a week, yet he has a string of kids he is eager to invite to his third birthday party ranging from 1.5-year-olds to a 10-year-old. It’s a different paradigm for socialization, not an inferior one.

As I said to the Facebook commenter, I don’t even disagree that the primary benefits of nursery school are social, rather than academic. What I find ridiculous is the idea that Colin would lack “one of the most important life skills” if he didn’t go. For the vast majority of human history, it was not the norm for three- and four-year-old children to be sent off to spend their time in age-segregated groups. The nursery school movement began in the 19th century, but it’s only been in the last 40 or 50 years that preschool has been the cultural norm for American children, and worldwide it is still uncommon. Yet, oddly enough, generations upon generations of children have grown up and taken their places in society without notable “socialization” problems. It’s silly to claim that proper social development depends on something which only a tiny, tiny fraction of the human race has ever experienced.

In fact there are multiple pathways for children to learn how to be in the world socially. School is only one of them.

Are there some isolated homeschoolers? Of course there are. There are people who homeschool because the family is isolated: they live in the remote Alaskan wilderness or on a sheep station far out in the Australian bush, or they have complex medical needs which make contact with the public risky. And there are a small number of families who homeschool as part of a larger family pathology of suspiciousness, hostility, and isolation. But these families are not the homeschooling norm – much less the “pure homeschooling” ideal. Worry about them, sure – especially the latter group. But don’t use them to define homeschooling as a worry.

Posted in philosophy and politics | 13 Comments

Heroes of History book club.

Posted on January 22, 2012 by tinderbox

Longtime readers of Tinderbox might remember that last summer I ran a Magic Tree House book club at the Baltimore Homeschool Community Center. We had a fantastic group of kids in that club, and I knew as soon as we finished it that I wanted to put something similar together with, hopefully, most of the same kids.

One problem I grappled with was the huge variation in reading abilities for this early elementary age group. We ranged from pre-readers to kids who were reading on a middle school level. It was hard to think of a book club theme that would span that kind of range. Then I hit on biographies. Biographies are written at all difficulty points, from leveled readers to lengthy chapter books. Kids could each read a biography at their level about the same person, and then we could join together for discussion. And so the Heroes of History book club was born.

Alex got to pick the first subject. She chose Clara Barton, the Civil War battlefield nurse who went on to found the American Red Cross. Clara Barton appears in the Magic Tree House book Civil War on Sunday, so I hoped she would help dedicated Magic Tree House readers cross over to a history/biography club.

Four kids came to the first meeting. (I have hopes that the club will grow.) We began by talking about what makes a person a hero. One of the kids impressed me by pointing out that someone we might think of as a villain could be seen as a hero by people on his own side. We made a list of characteristics we might expect a hero to have.

Then we dove in to Clara Barton’s story. We set the scene by talking very briefly about who fought in the Civil War, and why. We also talked a bit about how people thought of women at the time, so that they would understand how shocking and unusual Barton was.

Then: what was it like on a battlefield, after the battle?

I turned out the lights and turned a battery-powered camping lantern on the “dim” setting. Two boys pretended to be shot and fell to the ground. Then, together, we imagined what came next: the mud, the cold, the hunger and thirst, the continued danger, the hours of waiting. The absence of medevac helicopters and trauma surgeons. Clara Barton took up battlefield nursing because she watched soldiers die as they waited to be taken to a hospital after the Battle of Bull Run.

As the boys lay on the ground in the dark, Alex and I came around to them, splinted “broken limbs,” fed them, gave them water, and bandaged them up. We talked about the bullets that sometimes flew around her as she worked and tried to imagine whether we could have been brave enough to go with her. We discussed the fact that she helped soldiers on both sides, even though she was a strong supporter of the Union cause. Was that the right thing to do? The kids did an excellent job of sharing their differing opinions. We finished up by talking about the founding of the American Red Cross and Clara Barton’s contributions to disaster relief.

It was a great session. The kids seemed really engaged, and I appreciated their thoughtful comments. By the end of the hour, the other kids had their own hero choices all picked out. Next time we’ll be discussing Julius Caesar, so you can see that we’re going to have quite a range of characters!

Posted in BHCC | 3 Comments

Alexium, and other news from our week.

Posted on January 21, 2012 by tinderbox

I was so proud of myself for posting almost every day last week – getting back into the swing of blogging! Then Michael and I figured out how to watch the second season of Sherlock, and that sucked up every free moment we had in the evenings. We’re done now, so maybe next week posting will pick up.

Education continues even when I’m not posting about it. This week in Story of the World 2: Medieval Times we learned a bit about the early history of Japan and Korea, which was a good excuse for Alex and me to do a little origami.

In chemistry, Michael taught the kids about the parts of an atom, and they constructed models of the first ten out of marshmallows. I can’t imagine why there isn’t a picture of that, but there isn’t. Michael got an early warning that Alex and her friend B aren’t going to let us get away with much; he mentioned casually that electrons “want to be in pairs,” and B immediately demanded to know how he could possibly say that electrons wanted anything, given that they aren’t alive. Way to go, B, for resisting the tendency to anthropomorphize in science. And way to go, Michael, for being able to rebound from that with a sound explanation that worked for seven-year-olds.

In other chemistry news, Alex found out that if you are an eminent enough scientist it is possible that an element will be named after you. She is now hoping that her favorite element, ununoctium (#118), will someday be named Alexium.

We had the first session of our brand new Heroes of History book club at BHCC this week, but that one deserves its own post. Maybe tomorrow.

Finally, also this week, I got my first derogatory comment about socialization! That one might get its own post too.

Posted in art, chemistry (RSO) | 6 Comments

Introduction to atoms.

Posted on January 12, 2012 by tinderbox

Today was my first turn with RSO Chemistry. (We’ll be alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays, because both Michael and I really want to teach it.) As before, Alex’s friend B joined us for the lesson.

Last week the kids learned a bit about the definition of chemistry and messed around with some physical and chemical tests. This week we jumped right in to the subject of atoms. Have you ever met a kid who was not crazy impressed by the idea that everything in the universe is made of atoms? I still remember my brother wowing me with that information when I was little. Alex and B really enjoyed identifying things around us that were made of atoms.

I brought up the Greek philosopher Democritus, who was the first to hypothesize that everything is made up of tiny particles called atoms. We discussed the idea that in Democritus’ time there was no way to prove whether or not he was right. He made two other hypotheses as well: that atoms are constantly in motion, and that they bind together.

B waved his hand and said, “Atoms are in motion, see? My hand is moving.” I put a pair of scissors on the table and asked if the atoms in the scissors were moving. Hilariously, both kids’ immediate response was to pick up the scissors and wave them around. So when the scissors are lying on the table, are the atoms in them moving? They were skeptical.

What if we kept an eye on a particular group of atoms? That’s hard to do in a pair of scissors, but easier to do if you drop food coloring into still water. We could watch the blue-colored molecules to see how they disperse. To make it more interesting, we used three temperatures of water: very cold, room temperature, and recently boiled.

B suggested that we use blue food coloring for the cold water and red for the hot water, so we took a quick side excursion into the concept of a controlled experiment: everything the same but the temperature of the water.

Everyone does this experiment at some point, right? So you know how it goes. The warmer the water, the quicker the blue-colored atoms dispersed and the more uniform the color became. The kids really enjoyed taking lots of temperature measurements and coloring their impressions of how the water looked at different points in the experiment. In retrospect, I should have put more emphasis on gently laying the color drops on the surface of the water, because they went in with some momentum.

Our next experiment had to do with the size of atoms. The text of the curriculum gives various examples involving large numbers; for example, the kids traced a short dash with their pencils and then learned that they had left 40 million carbon atoms behind. But it’s hard for kids (or probably, anyone) to really wrap their minds around what such extreme numbers mean. So we did a really cool experiment instead.

I walked the kids through the idea that when you smell something, it means that atoms from whatever it is have entered your nose. I opened up a container of ground cloves and we pictured what was happening as we smelled it. Then I asked if atoms from the cloves are small enough to travel through something that looks solid to us. They didn’t know.

We took out some balloons and inspected them carefully for holes with a magnifying glass. We didn’t find any. The kids smelled the balloons and agreed that they smelled like rubber. Then they left the room while I introduced scented substances into some of the balloons: vanilla, peppermint extract, ground cloves, and “liquid smoke.” We had one air-only balloon and one with water to serve as controls. I blew up all the balloons and had the kids investigate whether they could smell the scents. I was impressed with how strongly the scents came through the latex balloons.

Both kids got totally engaged in this lab and had a lot of fun with it. They definitely seemed to understand the take-home message, which I quote from Alex’s completed lab sheet: “Atoms are so tiny, they can slip right through something that looks solid.”

Posted in chemistry (RSO), experiments, science | 7 Comments

History planning, and travels in ancient China

Posted on January 12, 2012 by tinderbox

We made a big change at the New Year. Instead of using Five in a Row as the core of our curriculum, we’ll be doing a FIAR book once every five weeks. I’m still trying to figure out how the other four weeks will look. Chemistry, obviously; one of the main reasons for this decision was that Alex really wanted to start a more systematic study of science. Once a week, we’re spending most of the morning on chemistry.

The other thing we’re planning to expand is history. When we were doing FIAR, we kept history projects to a minimum. Mostly we read the Story of the World chapter and Alex gave a narration. We also did “history weeks” when we threw ourselves wholeheartedly into a culture, doing a lot of extra projects, in the middle of our studies of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

I don’t think I could keep up with those intensive history weeks as a constant pace, even if there were enough resources available to spend a whole week doing multidisciplinary projects on, say, Charlemagne. So we’re striving for a middle course. I’ve planned out more projects and activities than we would’ve done last year, but we’re still skipping the ones that seem like too much crafty effort for not enough return.

Mindful that we’ve cut out our literature-based curriculum, I’m trying to add in more supplemental literature to history. Reading myths really enhanced our study of ancient history, and now that we’ve moved on to Story of the World Vol. 2: The Middle Ages, we have a huge range of legends, folk tales, and classic literature available to us. King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Thousand and One Nights, Norse mythology, Shakespeare! We almost have more great reading ahead of us than we know what to do with.

This week we’ve been studying China during the Sui and Tang Dynasties, and today we read a truly excellent book, Long Is a Dragon: Chinese Writing for Children. It shows how Chinese characters developed from representational pictograms, and then gives examples of how characters change and combine to express new meanings. For example, when the character for tree is repeated twice, it means forest. The character for volcano combines fire and mountain. Listen is the character for ear superimposed on door. Alex and I were both captivated.

After we read the book, I handed it over to her and let her copy any characters that interested her using a brush and thinned-down black paint. Here she is attempting to write the numbers from 1 to 12:

And here she is ambitiously trying to copy complicated good-luck wishes onto red paper. (Red is associated with good fortune in China.)

Posted in policy & planning, sotw vol. 2, stuff we're reading | 7 Comments

A spelling tangle.

Posted on January 11, 2012 by tinderbox

For the last week or so, Alex has been working on spelling words that end with consonant-le: uncle, table, maple, and so forth. She started out well enough, dividing the words into syllables and learning to put a silent e on the end so that the second syllable has a vowel.

Then we hit C-le words in which you have to double the consonant, and Alex hit a brick wall.

It all has to do with the distinction between open and closed syllables. Did you learn this as a child? I didn’t. Apparently, when a syllable has a single vowel that is “closed in” by a consonant at the end, the vowel sound is usually short. When a syllable has a single vowel that is not “closed in” by a consonant, the vowel sound is usually long. This rule is why robing and robbing are pronounced differently: ro-bing (o not closed in, long vowel) vs. rob-bing (o closed in, short vowel).

Alex’s spelling curriculum has had her identifying open and closed syllables since early in the first level of the program. So now I taught her that in words like little and paddle you have to double the middle consonant so that the first syllable of the word will be closed: lit-tle, pad-dle. If you didn’t double the t in little, it would have a long i sound (li-tle) and rhyme with title.

Supremely logical, right? Alex dived right in and started doubling consonants like a pro. Except that she seems to have come away with the idea that WHENEVER you know that -le is coming, you should double the consonant before. She was writing words like needdle and marbble.

She tried a list of words and made a bunch of mistakes. I re-explained. She tried some sentence dictation and made a bunch of mistakes. I re-explained again. She re-tried some of the words and made the same mistakes. When she spelled needle with two d‘s for the third time in one twenty-minute lesson, I stopped her.

“You’re really confused about when to double the consonant, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, let’s go back over it one more time.” I knew that the poor kid would scream if I brought out the same ten consonant-le words she had been struggling with again and again.

“…Okay, Alex, what do you know about tweetle beetles?”

A tiny revival. “When tweetle beetles fight, it’s called a tweetle beetle battle.”

“Right.” I made beetle and battle on the whiteboard with magnetic tiles. We divided them into syllables. We saw that battle needs an extra t to make the a say its short sound. We saw that beetle doesn’t want to make a short e sound at all, so there’s nothing for an extra t to do.

Mercifully, my phone chimed just then to say that our twenty minutes were up. But we’ll jump back in tomorrow with a tweetle beetle puddle battle. If need be, we’ll take it all the way to:

When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles, and the bottle’s on a poodle, and the poodle’s eating noodles…they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle.

If she can master the spelling of that, I think we stop school for the day and have ice cream.

This isn’t easy right now, but I do appreciate that she’s being given logical reasoning tools for figuring out things I learned through brute memorization. And I value that with homeschooling we don’t have to sweep on to the next concept while she’s still confused. We can just park here until she gets it figured out.

Posted in language arts | 14 Comments

How we do nature study.

Posted on January 10, 2012 by tinderbox

This morning a woodpecker showed up at our bird feeder. Alex knew what it was at once; she’d seen it come to the fence one time before and had combed her field guide until she was sure of the identification. Its black and white feathers were very striking. We watched it hanging awkwardly off the bottom of the feeder, curving its body to eat.

“Can we do nature study today, and study woodpeckers?” Alex asked.

Totally.

(Poor kid, she was so proud of this drawing and then she set it down where I was cooking and it got greasy.)

We do nature study about twice a month, and this is how it’s been every time. We are completely non-systematic about it. Some natural object catches Alex’s interest – last time it was cattails – and out come our best powers of observation along with the Handbook of Nature Study. This book was written a hundred years ago by Anna Botsford Comstock, the first female faculty member at Cornell and the woman whom my childhood Girl Scout camp was named after. It’s illustrated only by small black-and-white photographs and drawings, but that matters surprisingly little. The text is amazing. Comstock had a real genius for narrative description. Her personality also shines through in the pages:

If the teacher says, “I have a pink hepatica. Can anyone find me a blue one?” the children, who naturally like grownup words, will soon be calling these flowers hepaticas. But if the teacher says, “These flowers are called hepaticas. Now please everyone remember the name. Write it in your books as I write it on the blackboard, and in half an hour I shall ask you what it is,” the pupils naturally look upon the exercise as a word lesson and its real significance is lost. This sort of nature-study is dust and ashes and there has been too much of it.

The Handbook has a bit of a cult following among homeschoolers. There’s an extremely popular blog which creates a lesson structure around the book, but we just use it as Comstock recommended. She prescribes short lessons, 10 to 30 minutes, focused on whichever nature topic is “nearest to hand” and is interesting to the child. (“Often the teacher insists upon flowers as the lesson subject, when toads or snakes would prove the key to the door of the child’s interest.”) The book provides comprehensive descriptions and explanations of the structures, life cycles, and behaviors of various living things, but those are only supposed to be for the teacher. For the children, there are long sets of questions designed to encourage observation and deduction. For example:

How does the downy woodpecker climb a tree trunk? How does it descend? How do its actions differ from those of the nuthatch? How does the arrangement of the woodpecker’s toes help it in climbing a tree trunk? How does the downy use its tail to assist it in climbing? What is the shape of the tail and how is it adapted to assist?

Sometimes I ask some of Comstock’s questions to guide Alex’s observations, and sometimes she makes observations and I ask follow-up questions to help her interpret what she’s seeing and thinking about. Nature study the Comstock way is very Socratic. When we studied cattails, she got very excited about the idea of planting cattail seeds in our yard. Instead of telling her they couldn’t grow here, I asked her to list all the places she had ever seen cattails, and all the places she had never seen them. What do the places where cattails grow have in common? As we observe and discuss, I sprinkle in a few bits of interesting information from the text. Then Alex draws a picture or diagram of some kind, and dictates a caption. I help the caption along sometimes by making suggestions about which topics she might like to include.

Strangely, although Alex often complains about other narrations, she has always been happy to give one for nature study. Here is today’s:

We saw a downy woodpecker at our feeder. We knew it was a downy woodpecker, not a hairy woodpecker, because it was small and had a short beak. It used its feet and tail to fasten itself to the bottom of our feeder, and then curved its body up to eat the seeds. They usually eat bugs or grubs, so we don’t know why it was at the feeder. Maybe because of my worm collection.

Edited to add: You can view the Handbook of Nature Study online here for free. It’s a terrible scan, but it’s worth a look. For actual use, I recommend the paperback book linked above.

Posted in narration, nature study | 5 Comments

Experimenting with a friend.

Posted on January 4, 2012 by michael

Because Alex is so desperate to study chemistry, we’ve started working through Real Science Odyssey’s Chemistry Level 1. We thought it would be a lot more fun to have a friend along for the labwork, so Alex’s friend B will be joining us once a week. He gets fun science experiments, we get to enjoy his company. Win all around.

Tuesday was our first time doing a couple of labs. B was dropped off, and Alex and B were eager to get started. I got them at the kitchen table with their lab sheets, and began the reading. It quickly became obvious that both kids had some of the basic pieces of information already, but they didn’t really have a frame to put the facts into. “Chemicals are all around us; everything is made of chemicals.” “You mean elements, right?” “No, chemicals. Is water an element, or air, or plastic?” “Oh. Still, they’ve got elements in them.” “Yes, but elements are just the building blocks, and chemicals, in the form of molecules, are what makes up matter.”

I set them to looking around the kitchen for chemicals, and they seemed to be having a little conceptual difficulty. “Look! Here’s some wood!” “Here’s cloth!” I told them that these things were made up of chemicals, and that I was looking for something a little more basic, like “sugar”, or “water”, or “soap”. I asked them if there were any dangerous chemicals, and they both looked a little mystified. Surely parents wouldn’t let something dangerous be around the house?

I showed them the cleaning products under the sink, and we talked about how things like bleach and cleaning solutions can be bad for you. I showed them a regular AA-cell battery, and told them that there was acid inside the battery, and if they ever found a battery that was leaking and looked all rusty, then they shouldn’t touch it. They seemed a little thoughtful, and when they got to the “dangerous chemicals” section on their lab sheets, they both filled in “bleach”. Alex’s first answer was “the sun”, because if you look at it for too long it can hurt your eyes, but she soon decided that was a little too broad, and went with “acid”.

We studied the ingredient list on a box of cheese crackers, and both kids were surprised to see so many things added to the crackers. I told them about how chemical names are carefully designed to tell chemists information about substances — there’s a difference between sulfate and sulfite, for instance. I gave a nod to the earlier mention of elements, which seemed to make B feel a little better.

We moved on to the next lab, which was about telling substances apart with physical and chemical tests. The substances we were working with were confectioner’s sugar, baking soda, and baby powder. Alex was very proud of knowing that baby powder was actually “talc, the softest mineral”, but she didn’t seem to know what that might mean. I let them poke around in the materials, and get a little more familiar with them, and then asked them to describe what they looked like. They looked at me like I was deranged, since they were all white powders. I poured out some table sugar and asked them if that was the same, and a little light started to come on. When I asked them to rub each one between their fingers and describe what that felt like, they really started getting into it. Baby powder felt like feathers, baking soda like sand. I asked them to smell, and the baby powder smelled like flowers.

I brought out three glasses with some water in each, and we added some of each substance. The talc floated, the sugar dissolved, and the baking soda sank. I asked them to write this down on their lab sheets — B was fine about it, but Alex was on fire to keep on with trying new things. This turned out to be a theme for the whole lab; B would write things down, while Alex would want to push on. They might actually make a good pair for labwork, but I want them each to have some basic skills and understand why they are supposed to write things down at every step, instead of relying on filling it in later.

We cleaned out the glasses, and moved on to adding food coloring to see what happened. The kids enjoyed watching the water turn blue, but it wasn’t a big thrill. Then we cleaned out the glasses again, and used vinegar. Things got a little different then, as the baking soda started to fizz dramatically.

We then cleaned out the glasses again, and switched to olive oil. The results were very different from what happened with the water and the vinegar. The talc had been a dependable “float on top” option throughout, but it turned out to not float on the oil. Nothing dissolved in it, either, even if we stirred and stirred! When we added some food coloring, it was interesting to watch the layers of separation, but Alex and B were surprised to not see general mixing. We added oil, water, and food coloring, and saw what happened. The sugar dissolved in the water, and got a broadly dispersed green color, and the kids were falling all over themselves to add some vinegar.

The results were interesting — when you pour vinegar into an oil and water mixture, it only reacts when it works its way down through the oil, and we got big bubbling globs as a result. The sugar mostly dissolved, and the talc was just a gunky mess. I gave in and let the kids mix everything together, and they got a weakly fizzing greenish mixture, which seemed to excite them.

At this point, we all realized that Alex had stopped recording her results some time ago. B offered to let her use his results, but I made her write it out from memory, which didn’t go well. When we were done, I showed them how oil and water mixed into a layered result, which met with a resounding “meh”. B suggested adding soap to that mixture to see what happened, so we did, and I set it aside while we had lunch.

During lunch, we talked a little about how a chemist might approach identifying some random unidentified white powder. They seemed to get the more obvious answers, like “talc floats on water!” or “baking soda fizzes when you add vinegar!”, but the concept of starting with the physical examination seemed to not sink in too deeply. I talked a little about how safety is important when you’re dealing with things that you haven’t identified, although I took care not to blow it up too much.

After lunch, they went off to play until B’s mother came to pick him up. In retrospect, I wish I’d done a dry run of the experiment so I would have realized how much time would be spent washing glasses; had I known that, I’d have had more glasses ready, and kept the flow going. It’s easy to lose their attention if you have to break the flow of things, and when they’re coming up with odds and ends to see how they fit in, and indulging their curiosity, you need to stay on top of everything. Otherwise, I think a good time was had by all, and I look forward to Chem Lab with our friend B again sometime soon!

Posted in chemistry (RSO), experiments, science | 1 Comment

Alex likes chemistry a little.

Posted on January 2, 2012 by tinderbox

I’m home sick today, which means that we slogged through school this morning and then I went to bed when our nanny arrived. I staggered out a while later to heat up some soup and found Alex in tears.

“What’s wrong?”

She had DK Eyewitness: Chemistry open on the coffee table, along with a primary-ruled writing pad on which she had written When coppr sulfate AND in careful print.

“I was trying to write a narration about this, and Grace wouldn’t write it down for me! It has a lot of hard words I can’t write yet!”

Grace said calmly, “I offered to spell the words for you, or you can write a line and I can write a line…”

“Do you have any idea how long it took for me to write just one line?” Alex stormed.

I knelt down to look. “When copper sulfate and sulfur are added to water, the copper sulfate dissolves and the sulfur floats on top? Oh, that is cool.”

“I wanted to have it all done to surprise you when you came out.”

Well, you don’t undermine your childcare provider right in front of her by overruling her reasonable decisions. Fortunately, inspiration struck.

“Hey, do you know that you can do something similar with salt and flour? If you mix them together and put them in water, the salt will dissolve and the flour will sink to the bottom.”

“Really?!” She raced to the kitchen. Grace followed her and started digging through the pantry. I heard her explaining the concept of saturation as she and Alex discussed how much salt they should use.

When I came back out of my room hours later, Grace and the kids had gone to the science museum, leaving on the kitchen table a murky container of salt solution over flour sediment.

Tucked behind the kitchen curtains, in a tiny hideout furnished with a storage bin and a view of the patio, were two half-eaten Ritz crackers and DK Eyewitness: Chemistry.

I love this kid so much. I love her passion. I love that she was burning to write me a chemistry narration. And my heart aches for her perfectionism and for the way her brain outraces her fine motor skills. Someday she’ll be able to write everything she’s thinking, and someday she’ll have the emotional maturity to handle frustration with a little more patience. Until then, we’re helping her along as best we can. And I’m testing out Dragon Dictation for her on my iPad.

Posted in experiments, science | 3 Comments

Math games.

Posted on December 16, 2011 by tinderbox

I’m always jealous of homeschoolers whose kids are close enough in age to share subjects and activities. Colin enjoys tagging along with some of Alex’s lessons, such as Five in a Row stories, art projects, music, and nature study, but the four-year gap between them is hard to bridge in any meaningful way.

So today, when Alex requested a balance scale game, I was glad to be able to make up a game that would let them both practice skills at their own levels. I told Colin how to fill his side of the balance, and he had to count and match colors to do it correctly. Then Alex had to fill her side according to certain rules I gave her. In this picture, she’s matching 30g on Colin’s side with a combination of “reds wearing purple hats” (5g + 1g). She didn’t seem to notice that she was doing that horrible bugbear division.

This was an on-the-fly invention, but I think the game has potential. If I plan in advance, I can add some rounds with a logic component for Alex: “Balance Colin’s side with exactly seven weights.” I could also use number cards to help Colin start matching numerals to quantities.

I love our math curriculum, MEP, but following its rhythm has gotten me out of the habit of finding or inventing new math games to play. We used to do that all the time. I have a bunch of math enrichment resources like Games for Math and Number Jugglers on my shelf – it’s just a matter of knowing what’s in them so I can pull out the right game at the right time. Maybe I’ll study them over Christmas break.

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Making natural dyes.

Posted on December 7, 2011 by tinderbox

In A New Coat for Anna, Anna and her mother color the wool yarn for her coat with a dye they make from lingonberries. To finish up our study of the book, we decided to try some natural dyeing projects of our own. Our instructions came from a great book called Berry Smudges and Leaf Prints. It turned out to be a multi-day project; Michael and Alex started the dyes yesterday, and Alex and I finished them and dyed some string this morning.

Lingonberries are not easy to find in Maryland unless you go to Ikea. However, cranberries make an excellent substitute. Michael and Alex simmered them for quite some time over low heat, and then let them rest in the fridge overnight.

They also saved the remnants of a pot of coffee, to make a brown dye. In the morning, we strained the cranberries and added a little vinegar to each dye. Observant Alex noted that they now smelled like Easter egg dye.

We heated the dyes back to a simmer and added some lengths of plain cotton butcher’s string. After about half an hour, both samples had picked up some lovely color.

The color faded quite a bit when we rinsed off the excess dye, but the string that was in the cranberry dye has retained a lovely dark pink shade. The coffee dye is a more disappointing light tan. It was just leftover coffee from a drinking pot; if we do this again, I’d want to brew it extra strong and then boil it down to concentrate the color a bit more.

This was a really enjoyable activity, and surprisingly easy. I’d love to get the natural dyes book again in summer and experiment at greater length with different substances and dyeing methods.

Posted in experiments, five in a row, science | Tagged a new coat for anna | 2 Comments

Quarterly report.

Posted on December 6, 2011 by tinderbox

It’s December, so that means it’s time to post a quarterly progress report! We took a few weeks off to pack and move, so this quarter has felt pretty short.

Language Arts: After spending much of the summer reading comic strips and easy series books, Alex is back to reading books which demand a little more from her. I picked out a few books I wanted her to read and “hand sold” them to her with a casual recommendation rather than an assignment. That seemed to break her out of her series rut. She continues to love American Girl books, Secrets of Droon, and A to Z Mysteries, and that’s totally fine – I just don’t want them to be all she reads.

Her spelling and writing have taken off remarkably this quarter. It’s typical to slow down as you move through the All About Spelling series, but Alex actually sped up as we neared the end of Level 2. The spelling concepts are just clicking for her. We’ve been working on things like R-controlled vowels, jobs done by silent E other than just making the preceding vowel long, and when to use oi vs. oy and aw vs. au. She is easily handling dictation sentences like “I do not love to give Colin paste and glue” and “Her child found a red flower down in the cave.” We started Level 3 this week.

Alex now produces quite a bit of writing on her own. It’s still all in block capitals if I’m not there to enforce using sentence case. Her latest thing is pretending to be a public school kid writing reports – she did one about dinosaurs and one about ancient Greece, and then asked me to be the teacher calling for volunteers to read their reports. She’s written a pretty good poem and some beginnings to stories, and she uses lots of written material in her pretend play. (It was quite a shock to pick up a post-it note in her bedroom and find that it was a ransom demand.)

She has completely lost her previous unwillingness to write words she can’t spell. In her “dinosaur report” she even took a stab at words like Mezozoic, Cretaceous, and Jurassic. I think that through her spelling lessons she became comfortable with the approach of spelling a word by first segmenting it into sounds. Using that strategy in levelled spelling lessons where it always produced the right answer led to willingness to try it when it might not give the right answer. Yay for crumbling perfectionism.

Math: At the last quarterly review we had just started MEP 2b, and we are still in 2b now. I think it’s possible that we’ve hit the leading edge of Alex’s current math capabilities. She’s working on her times tables now; she’s got a pretty good handle on 1-5, 10, and 11, and is working on mastering the upper numbers. The conceptual understanding is there, but the brute memorization aspect is coming along more slowly. She’s often figuring rather than remembering. That’s fine, and maybe even desirable, but it does make math more work for her. Lessons are sometimes grueling these days – I’m hoping that she starts having more fun when we wrap up the tables and go on to more enjoyable topics like fractions and three-digit work. I am also waiting impatiently for Beast Academy.

Five in a Row: We studied six books this quarter for Five in a Row. As I wrote recently, we’ve really been feeling as if it’s time to move on from FIAR. So as I look back on the work we’ve done this quarter, I’m interested to see that we’ve done some great studies. I think one of the ways that FIAR really shines is the way it encourages you to focus on topics which would not normally be included in an academic course of study, such as exploring textiles in A New Coat for Anna or learning about the parts of a car in Mr. Gumpy’s Motorcar. So there will be a bit of a sense of loss when we move on. It’s clearly not that the curriculum has been failing us. I just think Alex is ready for the next phase of her education.

History: We finished Story of the World, Vol. 1: Ancient Times this quarter with a study of Rome, and have begun Volume 2: The Middle Ages. Right now we’re still in the darkest part of the Dark Ages, immediately after the fall of Rome, but I’m looking forward to an extended study of knights and castles and so forth. I think Alex will be particularly pleased that SOTW 2 brings us some highly notable historical women. We’ve already met Boadicea and the Byzantine Empress Theodora, and coming up we’ll have Eleanor of Acquitaine, Joan of Arc, Queen Nzinga, and of course Queen Elizabeth I. Alex is very Girl Power focused these days (she broke Michael’s heart by refusing to let him read The Hobbit to her when she learned that there were no female characters), and SOTW 1 had little to offer her in that regard.

Latin: Latin’s been the last subject to rebound from our moving hiatus. We had originally set a pace that would have had us finishing up Song School Latin this month, and instead we have quite a few lessons to go. The kids do still really enjoy it, and they’re retaining the material well. I’ve mentioned before that Song School doesn’t teach any verb conjugations – just the first person singular form of a few verbs. The kids learned their amo amas amat from a YouTube video, and this quarter Alex made the magical discovery that she could apply that conjugation to other verbs. So, for example, Song School Latin taught her that do means “I give,” and she realized that she could expand that to do das dat damus datis dant. She was very excited, and for a while I was racking my brains to meet her constant demand for new first-conjugation verbs she could learn.

Nature Study: Our move in October took us out of the dense city center and into a residential neighborhood (still inside the city limits) where we occasionally see foxes and deer wandering the streets. We’re also now a five-minute drive from a beautiful arboretum. Unsurprisingly, our new setting has awakened a strong interest in nature study for the whole family. Alex and Colin spend a lot of time grubbing around in the yard. They’ve watched a garter snake and found one of its shed skins, discovered an abandoned bird’s nest, and learned to identify many of the birds that come to our feeder. Even Colin can point out a male and female cardinal and a black-capped chickadee. Alex can also identify male vs. female sparrows, house finches, tufted titmice, mourning doves, and dark-eyed juncoes. Both kids are learning to observe and make predictions about bird behavior around the feeder.

Okay, re-reading this, I take back what I said at the beginning about this quarter being short. Clearly Alex has made a ton of progress this fall. I’m looking forward to seeing how the changes we’re planning to make this spring will play out!

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Small validations.

Posted on December 3, 2011 by tinderbox

Sometimes when I’m trying to prod Alex through a math question while she stares dreamily out the window, or when we’re rushing through school so I can leave for work, I wonder what the heck we’re doing.

But then there are the little validations, three of which were helpfully piled up in one day yesterday:

(1) I was reading The New Yorker at breakfast. There was a pixelated black-and-white picture, intended to look like a blowup of an old newspaper photo. Alex looked over my shoulder. “Why is that lady done in pointillism?”

(2) It was history time. We were reading about the Golden Age of India during the Gupta dynasty of the 4th-6th centuries. I described how peaceful and rich India was, how advances were made in art, literature, and medicine. “And then what do you think happened next?” Alex replied instantly: “Barbarians came.” Heh. Yes. I guess the key themes of ancient history are sinking in.

(3) “When I read the book you left me, I was so inspired!” She went on to lecture us all about silkworms.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Fibers and textiles.

Posted on December 1, 2011 by tinderbox

Today, when we read A New Coat for Anna we focused on the coat itself. Anna watches the progress of her coat from sheep’s backs to the tailor’s window. I asked Alex to think of as many substances as possible that could be made into clothing, and where those substances came from. This turned out to be a challenge. Ultimately, the list we made together looked like this:

wool – from sheep
leather – from animal skin
hair – rabbit or alpaca
fur – from animals
cotton – grows from a plant
silk – pupae of silkworm
linen – comes from a plant called flax
nylon, polyester – artificial fibers invented by scientists

Oddly enough, Alex supplied the word “pupae” on her own but didn’t know that “leather” was the term for processed animal skins. She’s a weird kid.

We read a book called How a Shirt Grew in the Field, which explains the long and arduous process by which flax seeds become an embroidered shirt. I had never considered the process before, and I found myself amazed that anyone ever figured out how to do it. There was another book I checked out called Unraveling Fibers, which we didn’t get to today but which, now that I’ve looked at it, I wish we had read. It’s a beautifully illustrated, clear, and interesting introduction to where different kinds of fibers come from and how they’re processed. Maybe I can give it to Alex to read tomorrow.

We took a brief field trip to my closet to feel different kinds of fabric: wool, cashmere, silk, a nylon jacket, knitted vs. woven cotton. Then I brought out a recent gift from Gran and let Alex try a little weaving of her own. This was a very exciting project, which she finished before bedtime even though we had two different sets of visitors.

Incidentally, the pattern she’s weaving here was very carefully chosen. It represents the Avatar cycle in Avatar: The Last Airbender – red for fire, yellow for air, blue for water, green (and then white, when the green ran out) for earth. I told you she was a weird kid.

Posted in art, five in a row, science | Tagged a new coat for anna | 1 Comment

State of the Colin.

Posted on November 30, 2011 by tinderbox

I’m really struck these days by how much Colin has left babyhood behind. He would deny it – he loves to pretend to be my baby kitty or my koala joey and snuggle up in my arms. But look at him!

He’s showing a lot more interest in preschool-type activities. We got him a subscription to National Geographic Little Kids magazine because he loves baby animals, but to my surprise he’s much more attracted by the puzzles and games than the animal stories. He does the activities over and over.

It’s a shame that we’re going to be leaving Five in a Row just as Colin is getting more out of tagging along. I doubt he’ll get as much out of the history and science we’re replacing FIAR with, so I’m starting to think more seriously about what I can do that’s just for him. He responds with so much enthusiasm when I do come up with a special preschool activity. Or a scaled-down one, like the lacing buttons that come out when Alex is doing her sewing.

Today I printed out some of these pattern block mats (the black-and-white version) for him to try. We did the first couple together, and then he went on to do more and more on his own – a grand total of eight. He loved it so much. Do you think there’s any chance that he’ll want to do them when Alex is doing school? (That was a joke. Of course he won’t.)

I am really not made to be a preschool teacher, and I would like to send him to nursery school. I’m hoping that we can set that up for the fall; he would love it, and he’s clearly ready. In the meantime, it is fun to watch the little developmental leaps. Exhausting, but fun.

Posted in toddler world | 1 Comment

A New Coat for Anna.

Posted on November 28, 2011 by tinderbox

Counting down our last few books of “regular” Five in a Row, this week we’re studying A New Coat for Anna, by Harriet Ziefert. Somewhere in post-WWII Europe, Anna has been squeezing into an outgrown and threadbare coat for far too long, but the shops are still empty and her family has no money. Her mother embarks on a year-long project of trading a few last valuables for wool, spinning, weaving, and tailoring, to make a beautiful new coat for Anna. At the end of the book, Anna, her mother, and the tradespeople who helped make the coat gather together for “the best Christmas they had had in a long time.”

This morning, we read the book and studied the first few pictures, which show a bombed-out city and boarded-up shops. We talked about some of the reasons why people and countries may be poor after a war, and why there may not be goods available to buy. Alex suggested that coats and other goods had all been sent to soldiers. (Last year, when we studied All Those Secrets of the World, my parents shared their World War II memories with her, which were mostly about shortages and rationing.) She also understood that the farmer and the tailor might have been fighting rather than working at their jobs. We looked again at the picture of the bombed-out city and considered whether it would easy or hard to make and sell things there, and talked about how difficult it might be to get goods to market if there is fighting nearby.

Trying to narrow down where the book takes place, I commented that we knew it didn’t take place in America because American cities weren’t bombed. After the war, most Americans were well-fed and well-off. What could they do about poverty in Europe? We read two excellent books about that: Boxes for Katje and One Thousand Tracings: Healing the Wounds of World War II. These are very similar books, each based on a true story about postwar aid organized by the author’s family. In Boxes for Katje, a little girl in Indiana sends a care package to a little girl in a Dutch village through the Children’s Aid Society, and eventually the American child’s town adopts the Dutch child’s village. In One Thousand Tracings, a young girl’s parents organize a massive drive to send shoes to impoverished Europeans who each send tracings of their feet.

The first people helped in One Thousand Tracings are a German family, which startled Alex. She asked me whether everyone was friends again when the war ended. I told her that some people stayed very angry at the Germans because of things they had done during the war, and others felt compassion for how poor the German people were. The idea definitely seemed to set some wheels turning in her head.

I reminded her that there are wars being fought today, and other parts of the world where people are poor and starving even if no war is going on. I asked if she would like to send things to help, and barely got the sentence out of my mouth before she went tearing off to look for bars of soap and other things she wanted to send. With some difficulty, I stopped her until we had a chance to find out what is needed and how it should be sent. After a little research, I decided to go with the United Methodist Committee on Relief – particularly after a phone call to their headquarters confirmed that there isn’t an evangelistic component to their distribution of disaster relief kits. (In contrast to, for example, Operation Christmas Child.) I’ve printed out some of the UMCOR relief kit instructions so that Alex can choose what she’d like to donate.

NB: I’m aware of the problems with donating goods overseas, the greatest of which is that it undermines local economies. We’d never do this as a primary means of charitable giving, but I think that for young children there is sound educational benefit in donating something tangible. Heifer International is another great way of helping younger children join in international aid efforts. I’m choosing the UMCOR program instead to have a more direct link to Boxes for Katje.

Posted in five in a row, social studies | Tagged a new coat for anna | 8 Comments

Re-figuring things.

Posted on November 23, 2011 by tinderbox

We moved more than a month ago, and yet we still don’t seem to have our groove back. School is getting done, but I feel as if I’m scrambling to catch up. We’re plugging through our skill subjects (math, writing, spelling) daily, but sometimes that’s all we can manage. Even favorite subjects like nature study and history aren’t getting squeezed in reliably, and I’m not finding that I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for planning. (Or blogging, as you may have noticed. I haven’t posted in so long that my sister called to see if I was all right.)

It’s time to make some changes.

For a while now, I’ve been feeling done with Five in a Row. I still completely love the FIAR model, but lately I’ve been itching to try something different. It may be that after 47 FIAR and FIAR-style books, we’re simply ready for a change, or it may be that we’ve used up all the books I couldn’t wait to study and have moved on to ones that don’t excite me as much. It may be that Alex is maturing and is ready for more sustained depth. I don’t know exactly what it is – I just know that I’ve felt ready to move on.

We do have FIAR Volume 4, which is a set of more in-depth,two-week picture book studies aimed at children aged 7-8. My original plan had been to start Vol. 4 after Christmas, mixing in some of the remaining one-week FIAR books we hadn’t gotten to yet, and to let that carry us through the summer of 2012. Recently, though, that plan hasn’t had much appeal.

This past weekend, while we were traveling for a family wedding, I read through Vol. 4, picked out lessons, mentally sketched out some field trips, and found myself getting excited about FIAR again. There are some great lessons in that book. We’d be studying deserts, cowboys, trains, snow, birds, sailing, haiku, Australia. It would be more in-depth and open-ended. We were back on track!

Until dinner tonight, when Alex begged and pleaded to study chemistry. She’s been asking for a while, actually, and complaining with some justification that Five in a Row doesn’t have enough science. Chemistry, in particular, has somehow really captured her imagination.

If we’re not homeschooling so that Alex can follow her intellectual passions, then why are we homeschooling?

So I junked my plans. All my plans, even the ones for fall of 2012, when I planned to start earth and space science. Instead, we’ll be starting R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey – Chemistry in January. Alex is tremendously excited.

But we can’t do an intensive lab science, history, math, spelling, writing, Latin, and a more in-depth and research-inclusive Five in a Row. Not to mention the nature study and religious education we’re trying to fit in, or, you know, some amount of time and attention focused on Colin. There simply isn’t enough time. (Maybe if I were home full time, but that isn’t going to happen.) At least, we can’t do it all at once.

Our new current plan is that beginning in January we’ll study history and science for a three-week block and then take a week or two to focus on a FIAR Vol. 4 book. We’ll keep that cycle that until we feel ready to drop FIAR, which may be in the spring or may be a year from now.

I confess that it’s hard for me to be this flexible. It feels wrong somehow to not complete all of Five in a Row – especially because it is such a great curriculum which has been rewarding for all of us. Then I remind myself that we’re homeschooling, not out of an allegiance to a particular curriculum or approach, but out of a desire to give Alex the education that’s right for her. And right now… that means a change.

Posted in five in a row, policy & planning, science | 7 Comments

Grandfather’s Journey, and tough questions.

Posted on November 8, 2011 by tinderbox

Our book this week is the 1994 Caldecott winner, Grandfather’s Journey, by Allen Say. This is a very unusual picture book, spare and subtle and controlled, with delicate, formally composed illustrations. The storyline follows Say’s grandfather from Japan to America, where he explores the country and falls in love with California. Nostalgia for the scenes of his youth brings him home to Japan; World War II prevents him from ever returning to America. It’s a book about being connected to two cultures and fully at home in neither.

Say continues to explore the same themes of ambivalence and mixed cultural identity in other books about his family; Tea with Milk and Tree of Cranes are two we’re also reading this week. These books are all very beautiful and very strange; they’re so emotionally complicated that they don’t “feel” like children’s books, but they have very much drawn Alex in. They are perfect examples of how picture books are still relevant and valuable to a child who is capable of reading at an advanced level.

Yesterday we read the book and traced Grandfather’s journey on the map, finding Japan, crossing the Pacific Ocean to California, and then breaking out the U.S. map to match the pictures of his American tour to their likely locations (painted rock pillars in the Southwest, endless rippling wheat fields in Kansas). We talked a bit about the war that prevented Grandfather from returning to visit California. The text never specifies that the war in question is World War II, so although Alex remembered that the U.S. fought Japan in that war she didn’t connect it with the story until I explained. We spoke, just a bit, about how the war began with the attack on Pearl Harbor. At greater length, we discussed how it might have felt to love two countries which were at war with each other, and Grandfather’s allegiance might have been viewed by both sides. She was puzzled to hear that the U.S. and Japan are now friends and allies.

Alex is full of questions about World War II. We talked about it most of the way through dinner tonight. She wanted to know what made Japan angry at the U.S., what connected Japan and Germany, how Russia was involved, what happened, why things changed after the war. We answered her questions as best as we could, given that there are huge aspects of the war that we are simply unwilling to discuss with a six-year-old.

I don’t suppose there are any picture-book histories of World War II that don’t address the Holocaust, Stalin, Bataan, Hiroshima…? Of course there aren’t.

There are picture books about the internment of Japanese-Americans. I have Baseball Saved Us, although I haven’t brought it out. I couldn’t bring myself to get So Far from the Sea from the library. I did tell Alex, in the context of Grandfather’s Journey, that Japanese-Americans were badly treated because people worried that just because of their ancestry they would be loyal to Japan. That’s probably enough for a six-year-old.

I am grateful that we won’t be studying World War II in a systematic way until we reach Story of the World Vol. 4 somewhere around the fourth grade, but I do like that Five in a Row gives us small tastes of big issues now, through the accessible medium of picture books.

Posted in five in a row, social studies | Tagged grandfather's journey | 5 Comments

Climbing Maryland mountains.

Posted on November 5, 2011 by tinderbox

Okay, so “climbing a Kansas mountain” was metaphorical. We still thought it would be a good idea to climb a Maryland mountain this week. “The thing that makes a mountain is a high, quiet view,” the boy’s father says, and we sure got that.

We were in Patapsco Valley State Park. It was a great trail for a novice: we started at the top of a ridge, skirted some cliffs, followed a steep winding trail down the ridge, and ended up at a dam on the Patapsco River half a mile later. Round trip 1.2 miles, but with a real sense of accomplishment.

Posted in excursions, field trips, five in a row | Tagged climbing kansas mountains | 3 Comments