Weekly Wrap-Up.....Monkeying Around

Hooray, after four weeks, we are finished with our three week unit on South America, Brazil, and rain forests. Why did it take three weeks instead of four? Because, in true Mrs. Random fashion, we took a lot of extra field trips, outings, and mini-vacations to get out and about while the weather was nice.

Here are our "curriculum" highlights

Monkeys Please

Toa of Boy loves monkeys, so a monkey craft had to be a part of any rainforest study.

We followed these directions to make this awesome monkey climbing up a tree to get to some bananas. We didn't have the green craft foam that the directions called for, but we used green construction paper instead and achieved the same result. (I did have to help Toa roll the leaf sheet up tight enough to fit into the top of the tree trunk, and I helped him fold the leaves down so that they didn't rip in the process of being turned downward.)

We also found some directions online to make cute origami monkeys, one is a simple monkey face, and the other isn't really origami, just paper around a toilet paper tube. I'd post some pictures of our finished product, but the finished products became part of a monkey game and aren't quite in photo-perfect condition anymore.

Chinchilla

This one wasn't planned. We were at the Museum Center in the Nature's Trading Post, and they happened to have a pet chinchilla. We were the only family there, so we got a lot of interaction time with the chinchilla and the museum volunteer.  I know that our local pet store often has a chinchilla, and if I had realized how soft they were, I would have asked the worker to take one out so we could touch it. Definitely worth a short field trip as part of a South American study. (Chinchilla fur is considered the softest in the world and have the highest fur density of any land mammal---more than 20,000 hairs per square cm.)

Magic School Bus

Oh, to have the field trip power of the Friz! This started as just a read aloud to Toa of Boy, but soon there was a Sweetling on the couch with us. I really loved this Magic School Bus book. It reviewed everything Toa of Boy has been learning about in science...pollination, layers of the rain forest, eco-web thingies (yeah, its 3am when I'm typing this. Eco web thingies is as technical as your going to get. I'm not coming back to edit this later. I'll just wait for Sweetling to read it and post a comment as 'Super S' with the correction.)

List of Good Intentions

Somehow we never got around to all the cool hands-on projects we had planned. See our list of other stuff to see why. But, for those readers who might be tooling for ideas for studying South America and/or the rain forest, here are the lesson plans that never got actuated.

• flower dissections to find the petals, stamen, pistels, anthers, style, ovule, sepal.
• pollen under the microscope
• macrame/ yarn hangings
• Brazilian dancers out of pipe cleaners
• a small terrarium
• making petit fours (it was in a "Cooking the South American Way" recipe book
• making chocolate truffles (was in the Brazil section of "A Trip around the World" under a different name)
• take our sketch book to the Krohn Conservatory to draw rain forest trees and plants

Marble Math

Nothing to do with South America, but I'm proud of myself for coming up with this, so I'm sharing it. Toa of Boy is doing multiplication and division with two's and three's. (Yeah, its not factors of two's and three's....and saying products of two's and three's makes it sound like he's just multiplying those two numbers together. It's 3am here, remember? You all know I'm talking about his two times table and his three times table.)

On this particular day, my mama, who lives with us, was off work. Also on this particular day, by 11am, I hadn't gotten a shower yet and was still in my pjs. (That might be because we all slept in and then had a VeggieTale marathon of new Veggie videos brought home from the library the night before. Maybe that had happened in my house. Maybe.)

So, being the responsible adult which I obviously am, at the end of our Veggie Marathon, I sent the kids off to get dressed and get their morning list done, while I hoped in the shower. I got out of the shower and heard that Toa of Boy had talked Mama into playing a game of Aggravation with him. I knew this because I heard the marbles rolling around in the box  and Mama saying, "Ok, we can start this, but when Mommy is ready for you to do school, we'll have to pause the game so you can do school."

In a stroke of brilliance, I yelled from the bathroom, "Wait, are you about to play aggravation? Don't start yet!" (See, it was a stroke of brilliance.) Following that profound statement, I came running out, wet and towel wrapped, to fetch two different dice from my dice bag.

Still towel-wrapped, I went into the kitchen and plopped a three-sided die (its just a normal six-sided dice, but with the numbers 1-3 each appearing twice) and a twelve-sided die on the aggravation board. (You can buy dice with unusual number of faces in specialty game stores--stores that carry all sorts of different board games, card games, strategy games, and role-playing games. We got ours at Sci-Fi City at Northgate Mall. Yada Quest on Hamilton Ave also has these sort of dice. You can buy them in a set of seven to nine different dice for about $9 a set, or, some stores have them in big jars sorted by number of sides for about 80 cents per dice. Since I get them out for math and school and then, um, lose them, the second option is the cheaper route to go. For 80 cents a pop, its a great math resource.)

Here were the new rules with the strange new dice.

1. On their turn, each player rolled both dice, and then multiplied the number to find how many spaces they could move. OR, if the product of the two dice was more than ten, they could choose to get a marble out on the path instead of moving.
2. When they rounded the last corner before they reached home, they could choose to divide the numbers to find their movement IF the two numbers were evenly divisible.
3. As usual, you had to get a marble home on an exact roll, and you couldn't split your movement between two or more marbles.
4. As usual, if you couldn't move any marble the number of spaces indicated by your dice roll, you were stuck, and the play passed to the next person.
5. As usual, the first player with all 4 marbles home, won.
6. A variation of the game would be to roll the two dice and let one dice be your movement, and let the other dice indicate the number you have to count by on your move. This makes it more feasible to practice five times, six times, seven times, etc. Otherwise each player would be flying aroud the board (So if you rolled a four and a six....you could chose to move four spaces, counting by six--6, 12, 18, 24--or you could chose to move six spaces counting by four--4,8,12,16, 20, 24.) In this variation, you would have to set a different condition for getting out. (Maybe you could get out when both dice showed the same number OR when one of the two dice showed a 10.)

Toa of Boy and Mama loved it and thought they should play Aggravation that way all the time. Of course, next time they play I'll put out a four-sided dice and a ten-sided dice and say you can get out on a roll of ten on one die, or when the product of the two dice is more than twenty. Mommy loved it, cause I got to check math off our to-do list that day AND I got to finish drying me, drying my hair, and getting dressed at a more leisurely pace.

Other Things We Did (or why we didn't get other hands-on projects done for this unit)

• visited the Santa Maria and the Ohio State House (and COSI)
• held some pine cone races and was reminded that often its the little momments in life which are truly important, not the 'big plans' we had
• took a mini-vacation to Hocking Hills State Park and survived the Rim Trail

And now, dear friends, it is 4am. The cold meds have kicked in and I can breathe again. Even though I want to include some pics in this post, I shall come back to that perhaps tomorrow night. (Which is really tonight, since its technically already today and not at all tomorrow.) For now, I shall say good night to the tissue box and head to bed.

To read what other homeschoolers did this week, check out Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers (or, this week, See Jamie Blog is the place to be).

Field Trip Friday: Hocking Hills

Once again, I break the rules. I'm a rebel that way.

This wasn't a field trip. This was a mini-vacation. But, it's an awesome area, and its my blog, and I think Mrs Prater will forgive me.

We left late on Friday morning for a weekend trip to Hocking Hills. We made a stop at church, because the Jedi needed to do some work on a church computer, and I needed to check the food pantry and pack up some more bags to be given out. On our way out of town, we stopped and grabbed two large pizzas from LaRosa's. (The pizza, by the way, made it to Toa of Boy's top three favorite things about the weekend.)

We ate pizza in the van, turning the middle seats around and putting in the little table in the back. We got to Hocking County around three and got checked into our cabin. There were two cabins at this location, run by a family on their own land. They were reached by a long gravel drive through the woods, and each cabin had a separate pull-off to park the car. The cabins themselves were then reached by a separate foot path, and were very secluded, nestled into a thickly wooded hillside. (Demonstrated in my sadly overexposed photos.)

We stayed in the second of the two cabins, which had two bedrooms, a large central living area, and a covered back deck, complete with hot tub, which jutted out onto the forest slope.

One of the bedrooms had two double beds, and one had a double bed and a set of bunk beds, which the kids gleefully claimed. (The beds in the cabin were on Sweetling's list of top three favorite things from the weekend.) After getting checked in and unpacked, we headed out to the trails, hoping to beat the weekend crowd.

We went to Old Man's Cave first, knowing from tips and from past experience that this place can get pretty crowded. Luckily, it was after four by the time we got there, and most people were beginning to leave to head to dinner. Because the summer has been so very dry, none of the falls were going.

We started our hike at the Upper Falls.... (all my photos are overexposed. I'm so upset about this. I had the camera on its default 'landscape' setting for the most part, and it just let in way too much light. Rather than whine about it before each picture, I'm just getting my whining out of the way now.)

And followed the trail down the gorge. Not only was it so dry no water was spilling over any of the falls, but it was so dry the wide stream/small river which runs through this gorge was practically non-existent, having been reduced to a few small pools here and there.

On the plus side, that meant that the kids had full access to small caves and recesses in the rock face which in the spring are unreachable, unless you want to go wading in cold knee deep water. Great fun was had climbing in and exploring all these little caves.

In fact, great fun was had climbing in general.

Though, we were careful to keep our climbing to just the large boulders on the path, and not any of the oh-so-tempting climbs off the path. On our way down the trail there was a photographer who does a lot of work in the park and he was saying that the park has really gotten strict about maintaining a no-tolerance policy for off-path climbing. He said the park will issue a $200 dollar fine if a ranger catches you climbing somewhere off the trail. He also said that since they have instituted that policy, they are down to "just" one fatality every year or every two years. But the Jedi and I were quick to hear the word "fatality" and impress on Toa of Boy how important it was to stay with us and not go off running, and climbing, and jumping.

 We hiked back out of the gorge through Old Man's Cave (which for some reason, I don't have any pictures of at all, overexposed or not). The Cave itself is a large recess carved in the face of the sandstone cliff. It is some 250 feet long and around 50 feet high. To me, the most striking part about it is how abrupt the transition is from green and gold forest with dark rock walls to this large, other-worldly place of sand and tan rocks where nothing at all grows.

From Old Man's Cave, we hopped in the van and drove to Rock House. By now, it was nearing dusk. Which meant that we had the trail nearly to ourselves. It also meant that we had little light for photos and the entire of the Rock House, which is rather dark even in the middle of the day, was very, very dark, and hard to see where one was walking. Nevertheless, Rock House made it to Toa's top three favorite things about the weekend. Once again, he loved crawling up into the recesses in the back wall of the rock. We talked about how native peoples used to inhabit this large cave, and he picked out the recess which would be his bedroom if we lived in the cave. The trail on the way back goes on top of the cliff which holds the cave. The Jedi was commenting on how invisible that huge cave is as soon as the trail makes one little turn around the bend. Coming towards the cave from either side of the cliff, you'd never know such a large feature was there.

(And now I'm cheating, because of the light, we didn't snap many pictures of the rock house this visit, so I'm putting up one of my favorite pictures looking out of the "window" of the rock house which I took during a visit in 2004. Go ahead and tell me that it's under-exposed. I double-dog dare you to).

We hiked back to our car in the fading light, hit Wal-mart for milk and other perishibles, and got back to our cabin after 8. We made a quick dinner of cheddarwursts, then bundled up and headed outside with the telescope.

Visible in the sky that night were supposed to be Jupiter and a comet. The Jedi focused the telescope on the craters of the moon, which was pretty cool.....and then we set about trying to figure out which of the thousands of bright objects in the sky might be Jupiter. I thought we might be in trouble when Sweetling and I couldn't even find the Dippers and Polaris. But, the Jedi has picked up Saturn and its rings from our back patio in the middle of city glare AND he talked me through pointing out stars, constellations and planets over the phone when I was at an AHG campout with a bunch of little girls and I didn't even know which direction was which,  so I had confidence in his ability to eventually work everything out.

Sweetling and I stared at the Milky Way, which she had never really seen before, and we found a little cluster of faint stars near the horizon. Frankly, I was pretty overwhelmed by the sheer number of stars. Even the few constellations that I'm occasionally able to recognize, like Cassiopeia, looked  entirely different because of all the little stars, invisible near Cincinnati, which were shining through and around the constellations. Eventually, the 40 degree night tried the children's patience, and we headed for the hot tub instead. (The hot tub was number three on Toa of Boy's list of favorites.)

On Saturday, the Jedi was judging in a BBQ festival in nearby Nelsonville. We popped on-line from one of the two netbooks we had brought (really roughing it we were), to check out activities for the kids and I to do while the Jedi was at the festival. I was hoping for a Junior Ranger Badge from one of the State Parks, or some educational program at one of the parks, but our internet connection was really slow and spotty (see I told you we were roughing it.) After a little while of searching, we didn't find anything nearby that was appealing, plus, it was still pretty chilly out. The kids opted instead to hang out at the cabin, play card games, eat pizza, and watch a movie for the first part of the day.

After the Jedi was finished at the contest, it was late afternoon. We grabbed smoothies from McDonalds and headed out for another hike. This time, we headed to Conkle's Hollow. The temperatures had warmed considerably during the afternoon. It was still a little cool, but certainly not cold like the morning had been. The scenery was beautiful. (Scenery being another item on Sweetling's 'top three' list.)

When we arrived, there was a historic camp set up in a field near the parking lot, so we spent some time wandering around that, watching a demonstration on how writing quills were made, and chatting with the re-enacters (who said they woke up this morning, in their little cloth tents, to a frost covered field.)

Once again, we hit the trail late in the day, as everyone else was leaving to go to dinner. At the entrance to the hollow, there was a trail map, which we skipped, and then two signs at a fork in the trail. The gorge trail went strait ahead. It runs down the center of the gorge and is 0.5 miles, and the Jedi and I have walked it on previous visits. To our right was a large, large flight of wooden stairs, which, the sign told us, was the rim trail. The rim trail was 2.5 miles long, and we had never hiked it before. Since this would be our only hike of the day, we opted for the longer path.

On the way up, we passed a couple of warning signs, which we had Toa read aloud, all about not becoming a fatality. The signs said that the trail ran near the rim, and that the path could be very uneven, so please exercise caution. Check. Can do.

Now understand, the Jedi and I have traveled to Hocking Hills on several occasions. We've hiked along Cantwell Cliffs and taken the rim trail along the edge of the Rock House cliff, so we were pretty confident we knew what to expect from a rim trail. The other rim trails are about ten to fifteen feet or so from the actual edge, and give lovely glimpses into the valleys below from a safe distance away on a wide smooth path.

The rim trail at Conkle's Hollow was meant for mountain goats. Any living creature who is not a mountain goat has no business being on that rim trail. At 200 to 270 feet above the canyon floor, for large stretches of its length, this rim trail was two or three feet of rock, tree roots, and crevices RIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF. Got that? RIGHT AT THE EDGE. The Jedi walked in front of Sweetling, reaching behind him to hold onto her hand. I kept a death grip on Toa of Boy's wrist and marched him in front of me. Oh, and did I mention the rock would often have step ups and step downs of one to two feet? The Jedi would cross these, help Sweetling down, walk her a few feet away, double back and help Toa down, walk him over to Sweetling, and then come back and help me down. Cause, one misstep? One trip? One lost of balance? Game over. We crawled along that cliff edge like ants.

Why didn't we turn back? Because at first we thought, surely its just this one little patch that's like this.  Since the path was zigging and zagging to follow the uneven edge of the canyon, we couldn't really see much of it at once. At first we thought, it would get back to being a sane trail after this one little scary stretch. When we reached the first outcropping, I thought the danger was over, and we paused for a photo op. The top of the outcropping was a large, open space with a few spindly evergreens of some sort, and the view was breathtaking. We sat down, I snapped some photos, and we traveled on.

We left the outcropping, and the path went back to its mountain goat self, but I thought, it's just because we are on the other side of the out cropping. I don't know when it occurred to us that no, no, this death trap really is the trail, and this is really how it is....but at that point the thought was, surely this scary portion will end soon, and we'd be better off going forward than going back over all that dangerous stretch again.

Did I mention that Sweetling and the Jedi are both terrified of heights?

At points, we stepped over crevices in the trail just a foot or so wide, but looking down which one could see the tops of the trees in the valley far below.

And always, we'd reach little sections where the trail would widen some, and we'd think, ah, we're finished with this. Here's one of those points. A scenic overlook, which I at least thought was towards the end of the fatal portion of the rim trail. See those two black sandstone cliff faces? At the time we paused to snap this photo, we had no idea that the trail would wind around both those out croppings.....we hit the one on the right on the east rim of the trail....and the one on the left on the west end of the trail.

You will also notice the deep shadows that both those cliffs are in. That's because the sun is very low in the western sky. Remember how there was a trail marker with the distance of the trail at the beginning of the trail? We hike fairly regularly, regularly enough to know how long a trail of a given length might take us. But, we hadn't counted on the crawling pace this particular trail would reduce us too.

We reached a point, at long last, where the trail left the sheer cliff face and meandered back into the forest a bit. The five to ten feet of buffer between us and the cliff seemed like fathoms after what we had just hiked. And then, mercifully, we reached a set of wooden steps going down. Now, I knew we hadn't traveled back towards the entrance to the gorge yet, but when we reached the stairs, I thought we were done with the rim section of the trail. We all bounded down the stairs with great relief. And we followed the trail past little hollows.....

.....and then we got to a trail map. The map was conveniently located at, you guessed it, the halfway point of the trail. And, it clearly depicted that the west rim trail was in fact, just like the east rim trail. I checked out the 150 feet of dried up waterfall ledges, seriously contemplating whether we could pick our way down that. The Jedi and I discussed backtracking, because it looked like the eastern rim edge was slightly, ever so slightly, shorter than the western rim. But in the end, I just couldn't drag the kids back over the eastern rim again, and I was still clinging foolishly to the thought that the rest of the trail couldn't possibly be like what we just went over.

However, I was really worried about the fast fading light. Away from the rim, deep in the evergreen forest, the daylight was quickly disappearing. The thought of taking another rim trail in the dusk was terrifying. I remembered how blindly we had felt our way along inside of Rock House, and doing that 200 feet up was not a pleasant thought. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have opted for the eastern rim in hopes that it would catch more of the last light of the day than the western rim would in the shadows of the great pines.

But, we went on. I think the Jedi didn't want to face the eastern rim trail any more than I did. And in the end, I am so glad that we did. The western rim was actually the pleasant hike we had been anticipating. It had a couple of tricky spots, but nothing like the terror of the eastern rim. We walked through a section of autumn trees, all aglow with the indirect light of sunset. Toa named it the "Golden Garden". We found large caves invisible from the valley far below. We made the hike of the rim and out of the forest in plenty of time before it got dangerously dark.

In fact, the western rim hike was so successful, that at the bottom of the trail, the Jedi suggested we do the .5 gorge valley hike we had passed over before. The kids, however, were done with hiking and were ready for dinner. So we headed back to the cabin and I worked on dinner while the Jedi and the kids went out to the hot tub. (The cabin's range didn't boil water, only heated it, and the cabin didn't have a stove, so I did dinner in sections in the small microwave oven, then kept things warm on the range top. It wasn't that bad, cause the Jedi had brought home lots of leftovers from his bbq judging earlier, so other than cooking a side dish of noodles, I was just heating things up.)

 After dinner, we had a family game night. (Family time together was the third item on Sweetling's favorites list.)  On Sunday morning, we grabbed breakfast at the cabin, packed up, and headed home.

My three favorite things about the weekend were--

• Time with the Jedi.
• Stargazing on Friday night
• The Rim Trail. (yes, I know that doesn't make much sense, but since when have you started expecting logic from me? After we were all down, and safe, I really appreciated the beauty of the trail, the adventure of the trail, and the teamwork we needed to move everyone safely along the trail.)

Check out more adventures on Field Trip Fridays.

Pine Cone Races

Last weekend was a series of mini-lessons.

Friday afternoon, I had the kids pack up their sketch books and art supplies, and we headed out for an afternoon of outdoor art. I had remembered this beautiful little spot in Mt. Airy Forest. The Jedi and I used to go to the Arboriteam there on occasion and walk around the pond or sit and watch the ducks. I remembered it fondly, and in my mind, it was a lovely place of green tranquility. I had this idea of sitting and sketching with my kids and giggling at the ducks and geese.

Now, I'll grant the long hot dry summer was not conductive to any landscaping, but even so, all three of us were significantly underwhelmed when we arrived. No ducks. No flowers, no plants other than the collection of evergreens, one lonely willow, and a few tall, dry grasses rustling in the wind. We went down and watch a few fish swim through the billows of pond scum, and had just turned round to head back to the van. On the way back up the path, Sweetling discovered "fluffiness" at the tops of the tall ornamental grass. Both children put down their art bags and water bottles to run their hands along the tufts of soft seeds. We talked a little about air born seeds (which means Mommy talked and hoped some of the words actually registered somewhere in Toa's awareness). Somehow on the way back up to the van, Toa's water bottle went rolling back down the path at least twice.

Sweetling and I were joking about this, when someone, I don't remember who, noted that the many pinecones laying around also would roll down the path. Which, of course, led to pine cone races. So, no art happened, but the three of us knelt along a brick path releasing pinecones and watching them roll.

Lesson number one: Sometimes you just have to drop your plans and have pinecone races.

At sometime during that day, Toa of Boy draped a blanket across the corner formed by the sofa and the armchair, creating a little tent in the corner. Also in that corner is a four-shelf wooden bookcase, so the total floor space in his little lair is maybe three square feet. Maybe. Toa set a book on end to make a door across the six or so inches of space between the bottom front edge of the couch and the bottom front edge of the chair. And voila, one fort for a little boy. From inside this little space comes his little voice. "Mommy," he asks, "can I sleep in my fort tonight?"

I peeked into his fort to see my son curled into a fetal position on the little bit of floor space he had. "No," I said sensibly, "there's not enough room for you to sleep in there?"

"Why not?"

We had this discussion about how sleeping in that little space would be really uncomfortable and would make his neck and his back sore, and so forth. Really, I just didn't want to be up and down all night when Toa found it difficult to sleep in his fort.

When the Jedi got home, he got a chuckle out of Toa's fort. I told him that the boy had wanted to sleep in it, but that I had, sensibly, said no.

"Why not?" asked the Jedi.

"Cause he won't be comfortable."

"Well, if he decides he isn't comfortable, he can take his pillow and go back to his bed."

So, it was decided to let Toa sleep in his fort if he wanted to, to Toa's great delight. When bedtime came around, Toa dragged his pillow and his snuggle friends to the fort. The pillow just barely fit in the floor space of the fort, and therefore became his matress. A throw cushion became his pillow, and he took my penguin blanket to sleep under. He moved the two hamster cages to his room, cause no one can sleep in the same room as the hamsters. And we took pictures, which are still on the camera. And then, we talked about what he should do in the middle of the night if he changed his mind. First, he would have to go to his room and bring the hamsters back into the living room. Then he could take his pillow and his snuggle friends and go back to his bed. And he could do all that all by himself.

We said prayers and tucked him in, as such, and that was that.

The next morning, I woke up, the hamsters were back in the living room, and Toa was sleeping on the couch. Later I learned that he had indeed decided his fort was too small to sleep in comfortably. He woke up sometime in the night, took his pillow back to his bedroom, brought his hamsters back to the living room, and went back  to bed. He woke up again in the early morning, discovered that no one else was awake, and fell back asleep on the couch. And all without waking anyone else up. I told him I was very proud of him for handling all that on his own.

Lesson Number Two: Sometimes you have to say yes to ideas you know won't work.

On Saturday, we decided to head out to a Sunflower Festival. The morning had been pretty overcast with patches of sunshine, and the day even more cloudy after lunch. But, I really wanted to do a family activity, so the Jedi humored me and in the van we got. Raindrops starting hitting the windshield before we had gotten as far as the interstate. So we pulled into the parking lot behind the library to discuss our options.

After a few minutes of tossing ideas around and not reaching anything resembling a consensus, the Jedi announced that he had an idea. We went to a Sci-Fi City, a game store in a local mall, and picked out a new game to play together. On the way back home, we stopped at The Goody Shop for soft serve ice cream. And we spent the evening playing Munchkin Impossible.

Lesson Number Three: The Jedi is a wonderful husband and devoted father. Yes, I know that isn't quite a lesson, but it's the truth. He took my rained out Sunflower Festival and made it into a fun family time all the same.

Later that evening, the Jedi was transfering old movies into a format that our media center computer would play. He called me in to watch one of them. A six year old Sweetling had built a fort out of several blankets and several TV trays. On the video, she was giving a tour of her fort, which she called a "Kidmo Clubhouse," and the attached dog house for her stuffed Clifford. It was so precious. At one point on the video I heard myself say something to the effect of "Ok, do you have anything else to say?" And I panicked, thinking I was about to bring this precious moment to a close for no good reason. I glanced at the video play clock, and it showed five minutes.

Five minutes, and it seemed like I was in danger of rushing this precious little girl off camera so that I could get back to whatever it was I had been doing....something mundane and ordinary and ever so forgetable, no doubt. My heart just sunk as I was watching. I was appalled at myself for rushing my little girl through something she was so proud of and was so meaningful to her. Fortunately, she talked right over my little cue, and the video continued for a little while, until she reached a point where she was ready to conclude.

But, it made me wonder how many times do I miss seeing what is truly important because I'm too busy with things that aren't that significant in the long run?

Lesson Number Four: Kidmo Clubhouses are much more important than my daily to-do lists.

On Sunday morning, there is a group of women that congregate at some small tables in a back 'lobby' area of our church. None of us are involved in a Sunday school class this quarter, so we decided to start our own little group study. The Songwriter keeps calling it "Slacker Sunday School," because we opted for something that was light and would allow us to socialize a little with passerby. I put forward (and sort of pushed through) the notion of a Devotional Journaling group. And since I was the one pushing for Devotional Journaling, I sort of got the task of leading the group by default.

This past Sunday, we discussed Phillipians 4:4-13. We discussed what it meant to present requests "with thanksgiving" and how we can "learn to be content." One of the women shared that she has really been learning to live in the moment, instead of focussing her attention of the next 'event' that is on the horizon. We discussed how to really appreciate and focus on our present blessings, especially the ones we are likely to overlook or take for granted in the business of our lives.

Lesson Number Five: Approach each day with thanksgiving, focus on the moment, enjoy your daily life.

 

Field Trip Friday: The Santa Maria

  In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue....

Five hundred years later, the city of Columbus, Ohio opened the most historically accurate replica of Columbus' flagship in the world. The Santa Maria. This ship floats anchored on the Scioto River in downtown Columbus, Ohio.

My first impression upon seeing that ship was that it couldn't possibly  be to scale. Surely, surely, Columbus and his crew hadn't set off across the Atlantic to an unknown destination in a perilous journey of unknown length in a little wooden ship so tiny. But yes, yes, they had. The ship is exactly to scale.

Here is Sweetling standing on the dock near the ship for a better understanding of just how small this ship was. The Nina and the Pinta were even smaller.

We met up with several families from our co-op, and we took a guided tour of the ship together. Coincidentally, there were about 40 people in our group, and there were 40 men on the Santa Maria during Columbus' voyage. It gave an idea of how little personal space each sailor had. Here are just a few of us crowded on the deck (and most of our group were young children.) The large wooden column on the right is the ship's main mast. The canvas tarp overhead wouldn't have been there in Columbus' day of course, but is there for the comfort of tours and too keep rain out of the main hold (which would have been sealed shut during Columbus' journey, but is kept open for tours on the replica.

Interestingly enough, the hold was not used for anything except the storage of supplies. I always assumed that part of the hold was the crew's quarters. Not so. The main doors of the hold were shut and sealed with tar, and access to the supplies below was made through two tiny square hatches in the steerage (the area underneath the quarterdeck.) Twelve-year old cabin boys were sent down into the pitch-dark, rat and cockroach infested hold to retrieve whatever supplies were required that day. They felt their way along, counting the 'ribs' on the side of the ship to get to the general location of the supply and then feeling inside barrels and crates to identify the contents. Fun job. (The main doors were opened when a large barrel of water or other large object was needed brought up, then the doors were sealed shut again.)

If you're wondering where the sailors slept if not in the hold, the answer is, wherever they could find a bit of deckspace. The main deck of the ship had two somewhat sheltered areas underneath the foredeck and underneath the quarterdeck. You can see a little into one of those spaces in the photo above. No one had a bed on the ship, except for Christopher Columbus, who had a cabin he shared with 8-10 other men (ship's officiers and representatives of the crown) and the owner of the ship, who had a small cot in the ship's steerage.

The steerage is the area underneath the quarterdeck, in the stern of the ship. It contained the ship's cannons, the large wench for raising and lowering the anchor....

....and the ship's tiller. 


And on the edges all that, were poor tired sailors trying to catch a little sleep. Work was always being done on the ship, and there were sailors on duty 24/7, so sleep was snatched whenever one wasn't on shift. For those of you thinking that sailors slept in hammocks (which was me), hammocks were discovered in the new world during one of Columbus' voyages, and weren't put into regular use on ships till sometime after that.

I didn't bother taking pictures of the hold, since it was so small and crowded down there. Nor did I get a picture of the bow of the main deck, under the foredeck, though I wish I would have now. I can't imagine why I didn't. I did snap a picture of the ship's kitchen. Again, in my head I had the notion of a small, cosy little galley. Nope. Here it is.

The kitchen is just a small grill set up on the main deck. It could only be used in good weather on relatively calm seas. Other than that it was just cold hardtack. There was a sample of saltpork hanging underneath the foredeck. It was a unidentifiable twisted, black thing. We learned that the black was mold, and that when you cut off the mold, the meat underneath was "edible". Yum. Of course, you had to soak the meat for a day or two before it could be chewed and eaten. Double yum.

From the main deck are ladders going up to the foredeck, on the bow of the ship, and the quarterdeck, on the stern of the ship.

The quarter deck had the ropes and pulleys to control the main sail (which weighs in at 1,000 lbs when it's dry), as well as what we generally think of as the ships "rigging", the net like ladders which run up to the crow's nest. (Or at least, that's what I think of, landlubber that I am.)

The rigging attaches to the outside side of the ship, just beyond the railing of the quarter deck. I won't even tell you what the bit of rope Toa is playing with was used for. But it's called the "bitter end" if you want to look it up. (But I'll warn you, it has to do with how the sailors went to the 'bathroom' and there wasn't any toilett paper on the ship.) Had we known what it was used for, even though this particular bit of rope was never used that way, even Toa would have been grossed out enough to leave it alone. Even grosser, yes, it gets grosser, was that there was only one of these bitter end bits of rope kept on ship, so everyone got to share.

The quarter deck also had a door to the Columbus's (and the officiers') cabin, which contained his maps, a desk, his navigational tools, and his journals. Columbus kept two journals, one with a greatly reduced set of numbers to represent the distance traveled, which is what he told the crew, and a secret log book in which he recorded the actual distance traveled. (He was afraid of a mutiny if the crew knew how far from Spain they really were.) And of course, the cabin held the only true bed on the ship, though "bed" is a rather loose use of the term. Columbus' bed was just a wooden box with a straw pallet on top. Here's a group of kids perched on the "bed".

The weather was beautiful and the tour of the ship was fascinating, though the thing both children took away from this experience, when I asked them about it separately at a later time, was that they never would have wanted to be a sailor.

So, this is not a photo of a pirate queen in another life.

While we were in Columbus, we took a free tour of the state captial building. Highlights, according to the children were...

...the map room with a huge floor map of Ohio by counties,

....the domed rotunda ceiling

......and, Toa's pick, the golden eagle in the State senate chambers.












(Sweetling liked being able to cast a vote on the issue of the day in the museum, but we don't have a photo of that.)

Mommy liked that a representative from our State senatorial district came down to talk to the kids about how the legislature functions. I liked seeing the Senate chambers...

the chandeliers in which were recreated based on reporters sketches of the original room during a ball attended by President Lincoln and his wife.










In general, I really loved the attention to historical detail that went into a recent renovation of the state house. Throughout the original state house, all the lighting fixtures had a small 'key' on them to represent the gas knobs that were turned to release the fuel in the original gas lighting fixtures. Shortly after the turn of the century, the State courthouse was built next door, furbished with the brand new electrical lights. This building was later 'annexed' to the statehouse, and in the renovation, period style "Edison" lamps were reinstalled.

And of course, no trip to Columbus would be complete without a visit to COSI.

We were away from home twelve and a half hours all told, but it was a great day!

What about you? Have any field trips to share? Want to read where others have gone? Hop on over to Field Trip Friday and join in the fun :)

Weekly Wrap-Up: O Canada!

Confession time, we actually finished up our unit on Canada last week BUT my small group at church was doing a media fast, so no blog for me. (This week, we started on South America and Brazil, but I like posting 'unit wrap ups' instead of 'weekly wrap ups'.)

Here were some of our favorite projects and activities.

Xylem and Phloem and Celery, Oh My!

This was an great demonstration of xylem in plants. We each took a fresh stalk of celery with leaves, and broke two inches off the bottom of the stalk, pulling the ragged strands away with the broken stalk. Those long stringy things in celery are actually the xylem. Did you know that? With our fingernails, we pulled out the rest of the xylem strings from the back side of the celery stalk. We took a second stalk, and carefully cut two inches off the bottom. We labeled glasses (with xylem and no xylem and the initial of our names) and put the celery stalks in the appropriate glass with a couple inches of water. After two days, I thought the experiment was a dud. But in another couple of days, there was a big difference in the celery stalks. (I don't have an after photo, cause a few years from now, do I really want a photo of a couple stalks of wilted celery sitting around on my hard drive?)

And, in case you are wondering what in the world celery has to do with Canada, we had been talking about Canada's vast forests and the anatomy of a tree. We were learning about the layers in the trunk of a tree....bark, phloem, xylem.

Northern Lights

Cause what would a study of Canada be without learning about the Northern Lights? After reading about what causes them, we looked at pictures (courtesy of google image again). The kids drew their own northern lights on dark blue construction paper using my set of oil pastels. (We practiced some different blending techniques on scrap paper first.)


Owls in the Family

My Father's World recommends a different set of books as a read aloud, but I got one, and found it dry. So, we've been reading other chapter books aloud. (Sweetling, of course, doesn't need read to, but I've really enjoyed having my girl snuggle up beside me for a story time again.)

Our read-aloud for the Canada study is Owls in the Family, by Farley Mowat, and is based on the author's own experiences growing up in Saskatoon, Sashkatchewan, surrounded by the prairies and the sloughs. The author, as a boy of about ten, and his best friend adopt two orphaned owls, who create a bit a havoc in the home, but eventually become part of the family. And Sweetling, if you are reading this, that doesn't really count as a spoiler, does it?

Blueberry Bake

No pictures of this one, but we made a blueberry bake, that was a little like a cobbler. Sadly, I went with the recipe in our A Trip Around the World booklet for a "Canadian Blueberry Bake", and I think it was a little tart. Should have gone with a good old fashioned southern cobbler.

Crayfish

This one has nothing to do with Canada. We went for a nature walk along the shore of the Miami River. We've been to this particular park, Heritage Park, before, and its a great place to explore. This time, the weather has been so dry, we could literally walk out on the river bed. We saw tons, tons of crayfish among the rocks in the shallow water. Did you know these little guys swim backward when spooked? They shoot backward through the water in a flash. It was pretty surprising the first time something flew past my foot as we were wading. We spent a happy afternoon watching the crayfish crawl around.

See that concrete ramp in the background? That's a canoe and kayak ramp. It usually goes down to the water. See the expanse of rocks between the camera and the ramp? That's the dried up river bed.

This blurry bit of nothing was my attempt at photographing a crayfish. Do you see a crayfish? I don't. But he was there when I snapped the photo.

All in all, a happy afternoon was spent wading in the shallow river water by a rock bank watching all our new crayfish friends. (No, we didn't catch them or pick them up. My sense of adventure does not extend quite that far.)









Check out what others have done this week on Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.