week-ing, a school report

With meet season in full swing and BC back at home things around the farm have been a bit hectic.

First, there are the meet weeks. They tend to shorten the school week (for either travel or competition) and increase the amount of farm & house work needed to be done in a shorter amount of time.

Second, Utah is finally having a good winter. Or we all moved to Alaska... either way there is a ton of snow removal work to be done.  Driving errands are plotted out with military exactness. The skiing is amazingly distracting! The mood rests somewhere between snowed in at the Overlook Hotel and Christmas at Hogwarts.

For BC's part he always adds an exciting twist to life.  This time he has brought home boxes (and boxes) of treasure.  Old coins, strange rings, glasses, crystal laden chandeliers, metal work, lamps, door knockers, whatever he found worth saving from the old mansion in DC he was remodeling.

It's kind of like being in a never ending episode of Antiques Road Show without the grand cash values and the guest don't take their shit home...

If you remember I have spent months, literally months clearing clutter from our house. You might see how perplexing the dusty boxes stacked in all the corners are to me.

Then there was the death of my computer and the period of social-media-rest that followed. Amen. And the dawning of the era of new, unsteady, loveless relationship with my new lap top.

Through all that school has been thriving.

What? Yeah, I was surprised too.

This time of year I usually write up a post titled something like "what about school?" Trying to explain how we are holding on by either doing the bare bones or by altering the whole system to make it fit in the current season. Not this time. School is rocking!

So what are we doing different?

For starters, this year we began schooling at night.

This might sound crazy especially considering Beach gets out of gym at 8PM 4 days a week! But with a little tweak to the family charter clause about "not eating dinner in front of the TV", we can watch history and/or science documentaries at night.  Our favorite current media resources; American Experience, BBC, Frontline, NOVA, Nature, PBS, Radio Lab (NPR), & This American Life (NPR).

On the nights we don't have something educational in mind we read or play math games.

Part of what makes this work is that Beach is willing to stay up later (& sleep in a little longer to make up for it). We have never enforced a bedtime for her. We have left it up to her and she has always chosen to retire early. 

Last year she barely made it through eating dinner on a gym night. A game of UNO or an hour long documentary on the space program would have been impossible.

The other factor making this work is her knowledge base is getting so wide it makes it easy to find topics that engage her.  Yes, even history.

With night school in full swing it takes the pressure off during the day. We meet in the morning (8:00 am) and read together.  Spend 20-30 minutes doing math. Mid morning (10:00) we might work on art or photo editing, tackle a science topic, or do a few pages in the testing book (Complete Curriculum). 

If Beach is busy in her room I might pop in and read to her while she cleans (she loves cleaning her room, it helps her relax).

After making and sitting for a hot lunch together we spend about an hour listening to stories from either Creepy Pasta collections or NPR programs: The Moth, This American Life.

I use this time to pick up the house and get ready for work. Beach to draw/paint, eat a late afternoon snack, and eventually prepare for gym.

Another change working for us is the major decluttering of the house and school.  It has made all the difference!  We have just what we need when we need it.  Loosing all those extra books and projects honestly feels like I turned off a radio that has been loudly blaring away for years!  I never realized how much pressure and distraction the long list of what we should be doing next was for me.

The final key to our success under the fire of meet season & the past holidays is Beach's growing independence with her own studies. Not only can she do more on her own she wants to. And I have acquired a new nickname: Controlling Hands.

She has also found a few new mature passions; photography and autism.  A few weeks ago Beach began researching ways she might find a career working with children who have autism.  It shifted our science studies away from hard sciences and into the softer sciences.

So what about school? School is rocking. Right now it looks & feels like I always dreamed it would. Woven into the fabric of our lives, effortless and engaging. That is how it is until the weather changes....

now reading: Ghosts (a graphic novel)

The Door In The Wall

stem, drinking straw roller coaster

types of fractures, human anatomy

Welcome to fracture clinic. 

We took a small "break" from the anatomy text book to learn a few of the different types of fractures. 

The compound fracture is my favorite- to see not to have. 

anatomy lab, outside the book

Two fun and simple anatomy projects: 

Egg Carton and Drink Straw Spinal Column

 

And an Articulate Hand. 

The hand is a paper cutout.  

The structures are made from drinking straws, thin string, and wooden beads.  

the in school rhythm

We spent Monday cleaning, more sorting/donating, and playing games. No school. Tuesday, we started our school morning early (7AM) watching The Myth of the Minotaur. Followed by anatomy and creative writing. In fact we worked in "school" most of the day. But then on Wednesday, BC took off the morning so we could go hiking as a family. Enjoy the early fall colors and little did we know it when we set off, catch the first snowflakes of the season. 

Thursday (today) it was back to the books...    

Body Systems #1 Anatomy 

(I couldn't find my human paper forms so we used a Snoopy stencil instead)

We finally have our Math workbooks! 

One for Math Theory the other for practice and problem solving. So she did a few pages in both books to get the feel of it. (Hope it's a good fit!)

More reading in our World History book with a few rounds of hangman in between subjects. I like to use words from the day's lessons. Beach likes to use the longest, hardest words she can find!

Around noon I left Beach to work on her own reading and the art projects she is working on using old (I mean really old like 1973!) book illustrations. After lunch we listened to a set of Creepy Pasta stories off YouTube. Then it was off to gym.  

 Tomorrow gym starts a half hour earlier than it does Mon-Thurs. It shortens the day a tiny bit. We don't have anything too big planned. We might hook up with a friend for an art play-date mid morning. Or it might be a good day to do a read-a-thon in the park or even just hang around in the yard.

I'd say it's been a pretty perfect school week. 

human anatomy: DNA and GENES

When I told BC I had to walk down to 7/11 to get gummy bears for science he mused, "Of course you do, that makes total sense." But it does make sense.  Gummies are a perfect way to explore a few beginning principles of genetics. 

  

Gummy Bear Genetics Activity:

Start by drawing a 3 generation pedigree diagram (grandparents, parents, and children). Each gummy bear will represent a single chromosome. Since chromosomes come in pairs each family member needs 2 bears. 

The different colors of bears represent the variations of genes within chromosomes: traits.

{Remeber: It goes Cell>Nucleus>Chromosomes. And Chromosomes are made up of tight coils of DNA. Genes are short sections of DNA that give instructions to each cell to do different things.}

Using the gummy bear chromosomes create different combinations of the color traits passing through the Family. See how many different genetic outcomes you can create using 3 different colors. Try it with more. Hello, added math fun!  

Set up genetic problems to solve by filling in only some of the pairs of chromosomes and have the other person fill in the rest to solve the chart. 

Or fill in the only the children (progeny) and ask: 

Is this possible, if not why not, and if so how- show it?  

You can make this activity as easy or as complex as you would like. One way to increase the difficulty is to add more traits. To do this add multiple colors to each chromosome by cutting the bears in half and mix-matching the colors (ie red bear head on a yellow bear butt).

Another way would be to add more generations and additional colors traits with each new coupling as unrelated people bring new genetics into the family.

Even further advanced, adding gene superiority (and following the rules of). Such as making "red-head-ed-ness" in gummy bears is dominant to "yellow-head-ed-ness" or "green-butt-ed-ness" is dominant to "clear-butt-ed-ness" and solve for expressions of dominant and recessive traits.       

Anyway you want to play it, tons of sweet (horrible pun, right?!) science fun!

human anatomy: THE CELL

 The second lesson in the human anatomy book (after surface anatomy & planes) was CELLS...

 ...which was a review so I figured we needed a fun way to cover the material.

Shrinky Dinks to the rescue! 

 I really don't know what it is about Shrinky Dinks- they are just so cool!!!

I love coupling art with science! Plus Beach had a blast doing something that normal would have pretty dull. I'm pretty sure there are more projects like this one in our near future. 

busy, busy, busy

Just like everyone else that we know we've been busy. As a family over the previous 2 weeks, we spent a ton of hours Fall Cleaning and organizing the house. It ended in a yard sale this weekend followed by a huge haul of leftovers carted off to a local thrift store.  

That's BC reading from Hollow City among the yard sale clutter. 

Speaking of BC. He's been busy in the wood shop crafting a pair of custom reclaimed wood coffee tables and a cutting board. All three items are up for sale (ksl classifieds) if you are interested.

Beach has busy creating too. She entered the school year with a project already due: Utah State Fair Photo Entries. It's meant taking a few trips to the local photography store for printing and matting. Here is a preview of 2 of them. She turns them into the photography judges at the end of this week.

There's been lots of family time too. Visits from the Kids with Baby J. Baby's mom LOVES the horse. And more meeting of cousins for the first time. 

This is my mom sitting with one of her childhood friends at a family dinner my parents held over the weekend.

The start of school was good. It feels really great to be back in school <3 Minus the long nearly unfruitful hunt for shrinky-dink paper which of course turned up at a store right under our noses! With the photo entries all ready to turn in we can start planning the next big project. 

 Beach and Sophie got a chance to go to Lagoon on Saturday! 

(Kat, thank you so much for making this possible for them.)

 Closer to the home and to the heart we have been dealing with a dog that is at the tail end of his life. We have had Moses (a full-bred standard poodle) since he was 8 months old. Adopted him from a local shelter after his first home gave him up for being too wild. At 14 years old, his back legs are failing, his sight and hearing are gone, and he walks around seemingly confused most of the time...sigh. 

I spent most of this weekend between the yard sale, late night driving ninjas home from Lagoon, popping in on the Millcreek Farmer's market for corn, and Sunday dinner at my parent's, sleeping. Yep, all this fun and busy and back-to-school kids at the gym using my phone to call home sick last week:c I am a little under the weather myself. I am hoping the next 2 weeks are less busy.