Yesterday, I felt the kids & I REALLY needed a break from the books. We're wrapping up our 7th week of school, and we can't usually make it more than 6 weeks without losing motivation and needing a break. (That's part of the reason I start in late July/early August - so we have freedom to take breaks fairly often and can still finish in mid-May.) Since we haven't had a break other than Labor Day, I decided to do a field trip day and take a hike. Living in Colorado, I reasoned, it makes no sense to sit indoors all the time and not enjoy the beauty all around us. We ended up at a creek not far from us. While there, we enjoyed seeing a couple of beaver dams (but no beavers around - the dams are old), a man-made dam with water flowing through the sluice gate, and a woolly bear caterpillar. We don't see woolly bears around here very often - this may be the 2nd I've seen since living in Colorado for 12 years - so it was cool to explain to the kids how we used to predict our winters by the woolly bears we saw when I was a kid growing up in Maryland.

Then today, my son & I took the dog out for a walk, and she found us another very cool item:

I think the snake must have finished shedding its skin not long before we found it because the dog kept reacting like it was a live animal. And it wasn't totally dried out. So we brought it home, did a little internet research on why and how snakes shed their skins, and put the skin in a jar to preserve. Gotta love how great learning opportunities show up on the days when we're taking a break from school!

DON'T PANIC! (Immortal words from The Hitchhiker's Guid to the Galaxy)

My daughter didn't have an unhappy pool experience ... quite the opposite, really.

We were swimming at our local rec center the other day, and the head lifeguard asked if she'd be willing to play a victim for a potential lifeguard who was interviewing for a job. She got to pretend to be a victim of all kinds of water emergencies: broken neck, floating on her belly, down at the bottom of the pool, and one or two others.

After all of her rescues, as the new lifeguard did the swim test portion of his interview, I spent a few minutes talking with the head lifeguard, and she commented that my kids were really good swimmers.

That was a shock, but I realized it was true!

See, back in February, I started taking the kids over to the pool a couple of times a week. They hadn't been in swim lessons for 4 or 5 years, but as a former swim team member myself, I felt I could teach them some basic swim skills. Amazingly, with just a few minutes of instruction out of one to two hours of playing in the pool, they started learning skills like treading water. Both have progressed from fear of deep water to happily jumping into the deep end and trying to reach the bottom. Neither could swim more than 6-8 feet back then - and my son can swim a full lap (2 lenghts of the pool) without stopping!

Three months ago, if my daughter were in the deep end of the pool, I would have been certain she would need a real-life rescue. It amazes me to think of how far she has come - how far they both have come - from children who would never leave water where they could stand up to children who really enjoy swimming and need only basic instruction in specific strokes to be proficient swimmers.

I have been struggling to teach my son multiplication since September. Every curriculum I have used (and I'm on my 3rd math curriculum in 4 years) teaches multiplication based on skip-counting. For him, this method just doesn't seem to help him actually master and memorize the multiplication facts. After months, he still can't do multiplication by 3's or 5's without having to think through the skip counts. We have barely touched 4's and not even started some of the more complex multiplication like 6's, 7's and 8's.

Realizing that this approach wasn't working - and that he doesn't have any patience with manipulatives either - I searched online yesterday for "teaching multiplication facts" and ran across Timez Attack. I had heard of it in the past through one of the homeschooling Yahoo! groups I'm part of, so I thought it might work and went ahead and downloaded the free version. Little did I realize how much it would help him because it engages learning with something he loves - an adventure video game. In the course of playing one level yesterday, he easily memorized the 2x multiplication facts. Now, I realize the 2's are one of the easiest groups of multiplication facts to master because it's just a matter of doubling a number (using simple addition). But this morning I quizzed him on some of the facts, and he was able to answer from memory - not by doubling the number in his head. So I'm willing to let him play his way to learning multiplication facts. And, to be honest, it's really nice for me that he is working on this independently!

We have been learning about Russia in the past week, and today we learned about Faberge eggs. Then we did a little art project where we painted our own eggs (on paper, not actual eggs). And I had the kids name their eggs.

My son's eggs:

Dead Man Egg

Gate of Confusion Egg

Road of Chaos (not exactly an egg, though)

My daughter's eggs:

Noisy Puppy Egg

Magnificent Falls Egg

And I did an egg, too, titled September Egg:

On Saturday morning, we glanced out the sliding glass door to see a rather large bird sitting on the ice in the middle of the lake behind our house. After getting out the binoculars, we could tell it was some kind of raptor with its kill on the middle of the lake. It looked something like an eagle, and since we've seen a bald eagle on the lake in the past, we suspected this might be a young one. A quick search for pictures on the internet confirmed our suspicions. Here are some pictures we took:

The juvenile bald eagle taking off after eating:

An adult (probably mom or dad who showed up a moment later:

After my husband set up his telescope so we could see even better, I took this one of the juvenile who came back for lunch. At this point we could tell that the kill was a goose. (It's not exactly gross, but this picture isn't for the faint of heart either!)

Yesterday was "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day." Since my kids spend all day with me at my "job," they got to go to work with Daddy. He works for an aerospace company, and the company set up some cool interactive science/engineering displays, including a liquid nitrogen demo. We had planned for the kids to spend an hour or so with Dad and then go to lunch together before heading home and letting him get back to work.

However, after lunch he invited us to go in the office with him, and he showed us around. We peeked in a couple of clean rooms and watched people building instruments destined for space (including one that will carry a set of small instruments he designed). We walked by the machine shop and saw how they make (metal) parts for the spacecraft and instruments. We headed over to a vacuum test chamber and talked with a guy about its purpose, and then we watched him get suited up to go inside (it's a clean room area, too, so he had to put on the whilte "bunny suit"). And we were invited into the test/measurement lab and watched how some of those machines work - one (some kind of magnifier) was set up with a penny so that it magnified the image of the Lincoln Monument and we could see Lincoln in the picture.

We all loved the opportunity to see science at work! Whether or not my kids end up in the same career field as their Dad, they have seen that he has a really cool job. And we're planning to go back in the winter when we can watch them build the satellite system he's working on now!

Yesterday I had my son evaluated in order to meet our state's legal requirements for ensuring he's making "adequate educational progress." We do have the option of using a nationally standardized test, but with his vision problems, I think that would have been a nightmare choice for him! We met with the evaluator at a nearby library and spent about 45 minutes talking about our school and what he enjoys. I told my husband later that it really felt like we simply jumped through a hoop! However, I'm glad that the experience was easy for my son and that we don't need to worry about it again for another 2 years (at which point I'll have 2 children requiring evaluations).

I really appreciated that the lady I found to do the evaluation really understands families like ours. She homeschooled her own daughter (who had been diagnosed with ADD) and used an unschooling approach. While we don't entirely "unschool," I encourage a lot of creative play during our days - and I'm learning to encourage more science "experimentation," too! I value my daughter's piano practice as much as her reading skills and my son's baseball as much as his math. I want them to build skills for life, and while the academic learning is important, so are character training and cooking and chores.

So while we jump through the hoops our state requires, we continue with what we believe the Lord wants us to accomplish. I don't mind the accountability to make sure we are educating our children. But I'm also thankful for the freedom and flexibility we have at the same time!

I just finished my son's exercises with him, and what a different attitude he had today! I think I caught him at the right moment, and it might have also helped that I let him listen to his MP3 player while we did it. And I did the exercises in a different order.

Thanks so much for the encouraging comments and prayers yesterday. I expect that helped, too!

I actually do have a reward/consequence system in place for my kids. So the "discipline" he experienced yesterday was losing his reward. Sometimes the carrot works, and sometimes losing the carrot makes a bigger impact!

So cried my son for about 5 minutes after being disciplined this afternoon for refusing to cooperate with his exercises. I understand. It's not fun. It's just a bunch of boring exercises with his eyes that he has to do for 15 minutes a day in order to improve his eye muscle coordination and eventually enable him to do things like read a real book. (Right now he has major tracking problems - in addition to other visual weaknesses - to the point where his doctor said that when he looks at a page of words they probably just scramble all over the place to him.)

I have repeated to him that if he does his exercises every day, then he'll be able to finish vision therapy much more quickly. But for him it's another way to challenge mom's authority. He cooperated brilliantly with the eye doctor in a 45-minute appointment on Monday. He has since been extremely resistant to cooperating at home with me. I expected it - he has a way of resisting any change to his normal schedule anyway - but I had hoped for better.

Obviously logic is not going to win this battle; it's going to require persistence on my part. I'm tired from constantly battling my children for control, but I'm not about to give in. Because I know that if they win these fights, in the end they lose.

After last week's blog postings about my desire to encourage creativity in my children (here and here), I decided this week to allow a bit of freedom for child-directed, unschooling-type activities in addition to our curriculum-focused time.

This week, they have made weapons out of toilet paper & paper towel rolls (an axe & a spear), set up battles between army guys & transformers, used the outside of our staircase to practice rock-climbing, and made their own salt dough and various cut-out items from it. And yesterday they were doing "science experiments." Their version of "science" is particularly messy because it involves mixing up all kinds of things into weird concoctions. My daughter made "fake ice cream" which was mostly a wet flour dough with chocolate mixed into it. (It did look like slightly melted ice cream.) My son made some kind of mixture of water with salt and I don't know what else in it (it looked like flat root beer) and decided to test whether it would freeze. (Now I keep finding the freezer door not fully closed.)

Even though it kind of drives me crazy, I keep reminding myself of the value of their experimenting and exploring. It is building their creativity! And yesterday, both kids told me they wanted to be scientists when they grow up. (I always felt that the value of teaching science to really young kids was less in learning specific things and more in engaging their curiosity about the world God made. Who knew they'd get that interested in science, though?) Whether or not that desire to be scientists continues, I know that my allowing them freedom to make a mess in my kitchen has sparked an interest that I don't think any number of structured lessons had done yet.

And mopping the floor isn't really all that much work after all, is it?

Since posting the video on my last entry about schools killing creativity, I've been thinking a lot about fostering creativity in my kids. And I'm thinking of it in context of a note a friend recently sent our homeschool group about 7 different types of intelligence.

To begin with, I don't equate creativity with the Arts. It's a mistake to think that we are only creative when we are writing, dancing, drawing, or making music. In fact, I believe it is even possible to be an un-creative artist - it's possible to be technically good but not really creative. If you watch American Idol, you can easily see what I'm talking about - creativity is what sets apart the truly brilliant musicians from the simply talented singers. But creativity can come out in many areas of life. My husband is an aerospace engineer, and he needs to be creative in finding solutions to design problems all the time. His creativity is what makes him a brilliant and highly valued engineer in his field.

Sir Ken Robinson said he believes schools should be teaching creativity as an essential skill, equal in importance to reading, math & science. I agree. (Unfortunately, most American schools are teaching test-taking as the skill of primary importance today, but that's another post altogether.) So how do we foster creativity in our children? I don't claim to have the answers, but I do have a few thoughts that have been rumbling around in my head for the last few days.

Part of the answer is allowing our children to be who God made them to be. This is where the dominant intelligence fits in. Here's what my friend shared with me:

The Seven Types of Intelligence

 Psychologist Howard Gardner has identified the following distinct types of intelligence in his Multiple Intelligences Theory ("MI Theory") in the book "Frames of Mind." They are listed here with respect to gifted / talented children.

1. Linguistic

Children with this kind of intelligence enjoy writing, reading, telling stories or doing crossword puzzles.

2. Logical-Mathematical

Children with lots of logical intelligence are interested in patterns, categories and relationships. They are drawn to arithmetic problems, strategy games and experiments.

3. Bodily-Kinesthetic

These kids process knowledge through bodily sensations. They are often athletic, dancers or good at crafts such as sewing or woodworking.

4. Spatial

These children think in images and pictures. They may be fascinated with mazes or jigsaw puzzles, or spend free time drawing, building with Leggos or daydreaming.

5. Musical

Musical children are always singing or drumming to themselves. They are usually quite aware of sounds others may miss. These kids are often discriminating listeners.

6. Interpersonal

Children who are leaders among their peers, who are good at communicating and who seem to understand others' feelings and motives possess interpersonal intelligence.

7. Intrapersonal

These children may be shy. They are very aware of their own feelings and are self-motivated.

When I first read this list, I immediately recognized both of my children: one has the "musical" intelligence and the other has the "interpersonal" intelligence. If I can figure out how to engage and encourage them in those areas, I believe it will give them the freedom to be creative.

Another part of the answer to fostering creativity is limiting "media" input (computer, video games, TV, DVDs, etc.). This is kind of a tough one in my family because my kids appreciate their afternoon "down" time where they can watch a movie. We have instituted limits on computer time, and I have noticed that when the computer and TV are off, my children have a great time in creative free play. They go outside and dig in the garden or make a zoo with all their stuffed animals or set the Playmobil pirates at war against the knights. But they need free time in order to be able to play like that.

The thing I'm struggling most with, particularly with my son, is how to encourage him to express his creativity in other areas (besides play). And maybe I need to start with that interpersonal intelligence strength of his. It's a really different way to approach his life training, and it's going to take some creativity on my part as well! But I'm trusting that as I pray and seek wisdom, the Lord will teach me and show me what I need for him.

What about you? Have you found ways to foster creativity in your homeschooling? Please share your thoughts!

I just finished watching this TED Talk video from Sir Ken Robinson called "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" It's incredibly thought-provoking. As homeschoolers, we have so much flexibility to teach to our children's individual intelligences and so much opportunity to foster their creativity. Yet I wonder if we (myself included here) don't get too caught up in the world's goals of education that we end up squelching creativity. Set aside some time to watch this video (it's about 20 minutes), and then leave me your thoughts.

My children talked me into buying them the Kid Pix software they've been using in a computer class they're taking on Fridays. It's a drawing/painting program with a lot of versatility. I like this software a lot, but I can see it turning into just another thing to play with on the computer. I bought it primarily for "educational" purposes, so I want to set up some specific projects for them to accomplish. (Maybe even with a due date - now that would be a new educational experience for us, but one we need to begin to incorporate sooner or later!)

So I was wondering if anyone else has used Kid Pix and found project ideas. Anyone?

I took my son into the doctor this afternoon. It wasn't so much that he had been running a fever for 2 days straight or that his sore throat was so bad that I had to force him to consume liquids (gatorade, jell-o, hot cocoa, anything he was willing to get in) so he didn't become dehydrated. No, it was little tiny bruise-like marks on his arms and legs that made me wonder if there might not be something unusual going on in his body.

We walked into the doctor's office in a sudden blast of snow. As we headed toward the front door, I thanked God for all the good things that He had done today. See, I woke up with a headache (the one I went to bed with last night decided it wasn't going to be slept off), and I decided that instead of just hoping to "make it through" this day (this week, really), I would look for what God had for me in the midst of my tough time. And He had a lot! The energy for all of us to get some work done - even if sporadically, the opportunity to have some great time helping my daughter make a quilt, an appointment at a time when hubby could meet us at the doctor's office to take my daughter home, even us being able to arrive a little bit early. I know there was much more, but it's not sticking in my head right now.

We learned that J has neither strep nor the flu but some freaky virus that has been going around.  The doctor couldn't make much of the bruising - it didn't look like anything serious, but it could be an indication of a low platelet count in his blood. We're going to keep an eye on it and see if any more bruises pop up in the next few days (after all, bruises on an active boy's body aren't unusual, but he hasn't been very active lately, so unexplained bruising would be cause for concern now). If we need it, we have an order for a blood count.

I got my still-feverish boy back out to the car, brushed an inch and a half of snow off the car, and headed for home. The roads were packed at 6 pm, and when I realized I was nearly out of gas, I decided to turn back to a gas station - then I decided to take a somewhat less-traveled road home.

The less-traveled route was a great road for a while. We were making good time at about 25-30 mph with not too much other traffic on the road. We came to a very curvy part of the road, and I took the first curve really slowly. I was just talking to my son about how we needed to be really careful not to slide off the road like all those other cars just ahead on the next curve ... when I hit the same patch of ice and slid off the road. Right into a Volvo's rear light. Ouch! By the time the other driver and I had finished exchanging info, another car had slid off right behind me ... and another behind him ... and another. And a sherriff's deputy who arrived to help stop other cars from adding to the mess pulled forward a bit and slid off the road. Then another car slid into his truck!

Here's how icy that road was: a plow/sand truck came to spread sand on the road. He went forward ... backward ... and on his third pass HE slid off the road! (Almost into another car, too!) I credit God's grace that as many people were out of their cars next to that icy road, not one of us was hurt.

Through it all, God took good care of us. I had a full tank of gas, so no problem just keeping the car and heater running for me & my son. I managed to call AAA, and the tow truck arrived about 30 minutes later - at the perfect time right when the deputy had gotten all but my car and the one in front of me out. The tow truck (that I didn't have to pay for) pulled me out in 2 or 3 minutes, and I was on my way on a freshly sanded road. My son was so patient through this whole thing. And we even had food in the car! In fact, my kids' penchant for leaving their things in the car came in handy - I didn't have a hat, but when I wanted to get out of the car (in the frigid cold) and find out what was going on, I had one of my daughter's blankets to put over my head. So I can even trust Him that we're not going to have to foot a large bill for damage to the Volvo either.

On Tuesday I wrote about a Science experiment my kids came up with on their own. After my son's paper towel without salt dried more quickly than the one with salt (which was not what any of us expected), I asked why he thought it turned out that way. He said he probably hadn't put the same amount of water on both, so we re-started the experiment, carefully putting the 2 Tablespoons of water on each paper towel and a generous amount of salt on one. We also re-started my daughter's experiment making sure to use the same amount of water on all the paper towels and the same amount of sugar and salt.

In the end, both experiments proved that salt made the paper towels dry more slowly. Sugar also slowed the drying, but not as much as salt. It actually makes sense now that I think about it since the sugar and salt would have absorbed water, slowing the evaporation.

And here's other "science" stuff from this week:

On Tuesday afternoon, my friend brought her son over to play while we chatted. After a while, we heard an unbelievable crash coming from the steps. I guess they were experimenting with gravity! They loaded a bunch of Hot Wheels cars on a Rubbermaid tub lid and slid it down the stairs. I was just thankful they weren't trying to slide down the stairs themselves on the lid! Believe it or not, I let them do this a couple more times (and they added more stuff every time) So here's what happens when a bunch of cars, Legos, beads and other assorted little toys hits the stair landing:

(Actually, the kids were very responsible and started cleaning up before I got my camera - it was much more of an explosion than this appears to be!)

And yesterday morning, we had a cool nature moment. My son was looking out the window and asked me to come look at a bird he saw sitting on the edge of the ice. "Is that a Bald Eagle?" I quickly found Dad's binoculars and confirmed that it was a Bald Eagle sitting (very much alone) on the ice in the middle of the lake. (None of the gulls or gees that usually hang out there were anywhere near that eagle!) We watched for a while and snapped a few pictures before we saw him fly away. (Unfortunately I couldn't get the shot before he flew behind a neighbor's house - but watching him fly was amazing!)

See him on the edge of that ice? Here's a cropped close-up. Too bad my camera couldn't zoom in further.

To get the context of the "Sewer Moment," you need to check out my friend Valerie's blog about Sewer Fishing. I think most homeschool kids come up with crazy ideas that we moms don't like -- but we let them do it anyway because we know they're actually learning something or being creative or gaining some benefit from that gross or messy thing...

It's not germs but general messes that really get to me. After lunch today I went to put my towels in the dryer and walked back into the kitchen to see my kids with an assortment of Tupperware plates, paper towels and water (which was beginning to get spilled on the table).

"What are you doing?!" I asked.

"A Science experiment," they told me ever so calmly, continuing to arrange paper towels on the plates in some way I just couldn't comprehend. All I could think of was the science experiment we started this week with a few seeds on paper towels on 2 plates - one with water and one dry - to determine whether seeds need water to grow. At this point, I was trying not to flip out while having flashbacks to one of their earlier "science experiments" that involved mixing all kinds of stuff together for no apparent reason and at the same time wondering where they might have gotten more seeds or what's going on. So I asked again, "What are you doing?"

Silly me, I should have known I'd get the same answer. So instead I rephrased the question. "Why?" No, that question didn't work. By that point, I was right in there with them wiping water off the table before it could drip onto the wood floor while trying to get my sleepy brain to find the right question. "What exactly are you trying to do?" I finally managed to ask.

Well, they had an idea to do an experiment to see whether wet paper towels would dry more quickly with salt added. Actually, that's a great idea for an experiment! Each child set up their own experiment, and my daughter had the idea to compare sugar to salt to no additives. And looking back, I have to say they really did set it up with as little mess as possible, even bringing a cup full of water to the table to pour on the paper towels instead of carrying drippy messes across the kitchen floor. In the end, I'm glad they're engaging their curiosity - and I have to just control that instinctive reaction to avoid any messes at all costs!

I took the kids to the eye doctor last week. They had exams 2 years ago, and everything seemed fine, but they were due for exams (especially since they don't get vision screening in school). Right at the beginning of the exam, my daughter was having trouble seeing some of the letters, and I could tell they expected her to be able to see them. Turns out that she has smaller than normal pupils which makes her far-sighted. Since she has had a hard time with learning to read, the doctor recommended reading glasses. So maybe her inablity to clearly see the letters on the page is why "car" looks like "can," and she gets easily frustrated with reading.

My son, on the other hand, did learn to read really well by the time he was about 7 1/2. It just "clicked" for him, and he was able to read long words that he never could have decoded with the phonics he had learned. But I've been surprised he has never moved on to chapter books. I forced him through one Magic Treehouse book, and he really enjoyed reading it (and made a lot of progress in his ability to read full pages). There are other similar books that he has checked out from the library, but he always chooses to read picture books with only one or two sentences on a page. So we learned in the course of his eye exam that he has a very hard time with "converging" his eyes. The doctor has recommended he see a pediatric developmental optometrist for an evaluation and to get some exercises to help. Perhaps he'll be able to enjoy reading even more once his eye muscles learn to work better!

I'm hoping that getting both kids help with their eyes will make reading less of a chore for them and that they'll learn to love reading as much as their dad and I do!

After a break of almost 3 weeks, I hardly knew what to expect with starting up school again today. In the past after breaks, I have usually had to put up with several days of arguing about "Do we have to do school?" "Can we have an easy day?" "I don't want to do school." and on and on.

So I prayed a lot over the weekend - not so much that the kids wouldn't argue as that I wouldn't respond with impatience or anger regardless of how much they argued or tried to bait me.

And God gave me a day with very little arguing - Praise Him! Isn't it amazing how He works in our kids' hearts when we have our hearts right with him?!

This morning we read Luke 17:11-19 (the story of ten lepers healed, but only one returned to thank Jesus). We talked about the importance of thanking God for all the good things He has given us. This is our list of things we're thankful for:

Friends

Family

Adoption

Computers

Our Home

Safety

The Police (not the band)

The Bible

The Army protecting our contry (all the military, really, but in my daughter's mind it's "the armies)

A Good Car

Daddy

Toys

Homeschooling

Today we made "hand and shoe turkeys." The instructions were in our curriculum, and it didn't make a lot of sense to read, but they turned out really cute! You start by tracing a child's shoes on brown construction paper and glue them together with heels overlapping and the toes kind of fanned out to make the turkey's body. Add 10 hands in 5 different colors, eyes, a beak, a wattle and legs, and you have a fun, cute turkey!

Of course my daughter needed to add some extra glitz!