She blinded me with SCIENCE!

Last week was a busy one. Monday's destructive storm led us to discuss and research rainbows. This was the storm rolling in about three hours before it pummeled my car with hail.

Here comes...The Nothing.

I wanted to post pics of the hundreds of dents in my car but I can't seem to get the lighting right. Insurance is going to cover it once we can afford the deductible. Until then, my car will look like it was attacked by toddler-sized vikings wielding tiny war hammers.

We spent a lot of time playing our favorite board game Monopoly Junior (great for learning math and reading). It's true that my goal is to unschool but I still tend to think of our activities in terms of what curriculum subjects they cover. It feels like a weakness sometimes, but it takes time to unlearn the public school system's definition of education. Kylie still has the option to choose what she wants to learn for the day. She always wants to "play school", so that's what we do. Obviously, it's nowhere near the rigid structure of an actual classroom. If she loses interest in something I ask her if she wants to do something else. Sometimes she refocuses on what we are doing, other times she chooses a different activity. Sometimes she chooses to torment Molly.

I see your Siamese and raise you $20.

We even had a third player this week. Of course I tend to question my sanity when I find myself playing childrens' board games with plastic toys Polyethylene-Americans.

Quinn? It's your turn. What are you looking at?

Back in September I setup the telescope to take a gander at Jupiter since it was so close (only 398 million miles). Kylie was stoked about the whole thing. She wanted to look at the moon too of course. With Jupiter and three of it's moons clearly visible in the eyepiece, I let her take a look. Her response was unexpected. She pulled away quickly with a look of fear on her face, "I don't want to look at it anymore." I asked her what was wrong, but she said that she just didn't like it. It seemed to give her a case of the heebie jeebies. I guess the transition from seeing a point of light in the sky to seeing a planet with three moons around it was too much for her. The moon was a big hit though. She wants to look at it all the time now.

Our exploration with the telescope led to more questions about space. She's beginning to learn the order of the planets, and yes I included Pluto. I grew up in a 9-planet solar system and I don't recall boarding a spacecraft and traveling to another star system since then.

Every time she walks up to my desk she picks up our handheld GPS (used for geocaching) and starts tinkering with it, so I finally started to explain satellites to her. This video was very helpful in an entertaining B-movie kinda way. This one however was "boring", but I recommend it because it just looks cool to have it up on your monitor when someone walks into the room. Finally, we had a brief lesson demonstrating how small we really are compared to other stars. She's still trying to wrap her head around the fact that our sun is a star, but she'll get it.

Friday was another Creature Teachers for Tots day. This time the theme was Australia. We saw a Brush-tailed Kangaroo named Cricket, a Sugar Glider, a Blue-Tongue Lizard and a Parrotlet named Blueberry. She also brought two Pacas (again from South America) because she likes them so much. Blueberry was my favorite. Parrotlets are basically miniature parrots that can learn to talk and everything. They're about the size of a small parakeet. The strap around Kylie's neck has a pouch at the end of it containing a sugar glider.

I can kill you with my brain. -Blueberry

The other animals would not cooperate for photos, so I didn't get any good ones. Cricket kept fleeing in terror, slamming herself into chairs and walls so they had to put her back in her carrier (poor thing). The sugar glider would not look at the camera and seemed hell-bent on escaping. I tried desperately to get a shot of the lizard's blue tongue, but no luck. The kids still loved the guinea pigs the most.

A split second before Blueberry attempted to remove my hand.

We finished the week with learning about volcanoes at church on Saturday and a Greek Festival on Sunday. The sermon wasn't about volcanoes. Kylie just decided that she wanted to learn "more science" while we waited in the coffee bar. "Something underwater" she said. I thought undersea volcanoes might be cool, which led to better videos featuring Mount St. Helens.

The Greek Festival was a bit disappointing. It seemed like your basic church picnic. But it's ok. I got to try "flaming cheese" and re-visited lamb (which was much better when I was a kid for some reason). I guess Greek food just isn't for me.

Retrospect - Week 3

Week 3 can best be described as a complete meltdown. It wasn't a meltdown for Kylie. It was more of a meltdown for me. The activities for week 3 focused on "life on a farm" and "the definition of family". These topics seem simple enough, but the fact that once again I couldn't find any of the recommended books available anywhere finally took its toll on me. Additionally, the limited number of stores that I searched for toy farm animals either had very high priced toys ($3 each) or none at all. I think between my wife and myself, we checked WalMart, Target, Walgreens and Toys 'R' Us. Not a huge list of places, but we have limited time to shop. We couldn’t even find the alternate choice of farm animal stickers. The toy part is my fault, I just wasn't prepared, but the rigidity of the curriculum is becoming a huge problem.

So basically, we did a whole lot of nothing. The meltdown got progressively worse as my own school work piled up and I began my daily exercise routine again. In a nutshell, I really need to focus on time and resource management. I was going to give week 3 another go this week, but our weekend proved to be far too busy for me to prepare properly…again. I need a new plan of attack. I'm glad that this whole thing is a "dry run" to prepare for the real thing. I know that there aren't any perfect rules for when homeschooling should begin. I've just been gauging it on when Kylie would normally begin public school which would be this Fall. My hope is that she would actually be classified as first-grade level when she would normally be starting kindergarten. It's not really a homeschool way to look at it, but it's a big paradigm shift that I am still adjusting to and learning about.

Part of my developing a revised plan has been reviewing homeschooling methods. Since I seem to have fallen into the "school at home" approach more than I wanted to, I have been reading about the other end of the spectrum, "unschooling". What I've read so far seems extreme to me. I don't think it's all bad, but some of it just feels risky. I understand that there are various degrees of unschooling, but some of the more extreme approaches border on neglect in my opinion. Letting your kids choose to play video games and watch TV all day simply because that's what they are into at the moment doesn't seem like education at all. But before any of the great unschoolers out there rip my head of for being ignorant or close-minded, I will admit that some of what I read is very insightful. Allowing a child to choose subjects that they want to learn and sometimes even how they want to learn it makes a lot of sense to me. Kids (all humans actually) are more likely to retain what they learn when they learn it on their own terms. I just think that because we live in a society that primarily consists of products of the public school system, developing some of those same skills along a similar timeline is important in order for the child to relate to his/her peers. Perhaps I will change my mind if we make some friends in the homeschool/unschool community so that we don't feel so isolated. People really do treat you like you are crazy when you tell them that your kid won't be attending a formal school.

Anyway, the primary purpose of this post is to remind you and myself that there will be setbacks and that we can overcome them. I'm not giving up. I'm just finding my way. Kylie is having a blast, so that keeps me going. For the rest of this week we will focus on trips to the library, the park and planning our geocaching…which reminds me. I ordered a handheld GPS unit so that we can start geocaching. If you aren't familiar with it, I think of it as mini-treasure hunting. There is an entire site dedicated to it. Basically, geocachers hide various sized containers in locations all over the world. The GPS coordinates are then provided, and other geocachers use the coordinates to hunt for the containers. Each container has some kind of "treasure" inside. Once you find it, you can take the treasure, sign the visitor log (if there is one) and then leave a new treasure for the next person. The cool part is that these caches are everywhere. I did a search using my zip code and nearly 2500 results popped up. At first I thought we would only do this while on the road with mom, but with that many results, we can go geocaching any time we want. You can learn more at dadlabs.com or geocaching.com.

I will also work on the new lesson plans for next week. It will most likely be a more eclectic approach.