Still sick

Still sick today so had a very quiet day. Nothing new to report. Just resting.

I just listened to my NPR interview. You have to know I would rather throw up than hear my own voice on the radio. I was so sure I botched it..I finally just gritted my teeth and played it. I was pleasantly surprised. It's not bad. I am sure those of you that know me well, will pick up on a wobbly voice a few times, but all in all it okay. I am happy it's over and very thrilled at the exposure.

Sick Day and Tornados

Musa and Loretta both down with a bad cold. Musa has been in bed all day. Retta is up and down, but still feeling poorly. No school for a few days.

Hurricane Jeanne (now a tropical depression) finally made it's way to Maryland. It must have been a monster when it hit Florida because it still packed a wallop when it blew through here today. We were under a tornado warning (or a tomato warning as Retta calls it)  from noon untill 9 pm tonight. Sometimes the sky would turn black as night. At one point my driveway looked like a river. There were two tornados that were spotted, but all quite far away from our house. I am glad this one is behind us.

 

 

Volcanoes

We have been having fun today monitoring the Mt. St. Helen's activity. We found some great information on the King 5 web page. The geology world must be all a buzz about this one. Amy said she felt one of the quakes last night. We found lots of great volcano sites and have been having fun learning about them.

This was one of those days that the planned lessons got put on hold and we decided to learn about volcanos all day. I love the flexibility that homeschooling gives a family.

Retta is feeling ill with a cold. Tomorrow Tropical Storm Jeanne  will be here so we will be in all day.

Tent Caterpillars Answer

We got an answer from the University about our caterpillar question. They said we were right, they are tent caterpillars. Yay, for our great bug identification techniques!! They explained they are called, fall tent caterpillars, and they breed twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. They said they are really quite harmless to the trees. The only explanation they could give for their "dance" behavior was that they were signaling each other of danger. Whenever we got closer, or they heard our voices (felt vibrations) they would signal each other. We are going to go out and experiment with that a little.

Loretta's Big Day

I got a call last night from my good friend Jen, who asked if Retta could go with her and her children to see Sesame Street Live in Baltimore. Her 8 year old daughter Rachael did not want to go so we swapped kids for the day. Retta's best friend is Mary (Jen's 3 year old), and Rachael and Musa are good friends.

This was Loretta first day away from Mama, unless with big sisters or Daddy. I was a little concerned but she really wanted to go. She had to get up a 6 am and get ready and as you can see in the picture she was soo excited. She was so happy she got to pack a lunch.

They got home about 3 pm--a big day---and she was so happy. She was in her P.J's voluntarily and asleep by 6 pm.

Musa and Rachael and I had a great day. It was great having a girl around to converse with. Jen's three girls remind me alot of Amy, Shirah and Anna when they were young.

We don't normally have school on Friday's, so this worked out well. A good day for all! Actually, I think Jen drew the short straw. Three little ones in a car to Baltimore and sitting through a Sesame Street Concert... I owe her one!!! 

Magic Wands and Hopscotch

Okay, this will be brief because I have been fighting a huge headache and it has now turned into a full fledged migraine. I am headed to bed.

The day started with grand expectations of doing a bunch of "formal" school, but instead I ended up in a two hour conversation with Carla (my sister) and "school" went on the back burner. It was a much needed and welcomed conversation, and I am glad we took the time to have it!!! I will consider it part of MY ongoing education.:)

 Musa did a spelling test and felt very successful he got them all right. He even spelled evaporation right!!! Then we said to heck with it and ended the half-baked attempt at "school."  We decided to make magic wands. It was great fun. Loretta went to the other room with hers and in all seriousness tried to turn the remote control into a pickle. I heard her say "shazam" and then "abra cadabra" and then "oolie googlie", and then she appeared back in the craft room with her head down and a sad face. "Mommy it doesn't work"  Poor baby, thought it was real. At last check she was still trying to find the right magic word. I further proved it doesn't work when I said a few choice words and waved my magic wand over the children and said the would have no further brother/sister conflicts. I guess I am also searching for the right magic word.

Then we headed outside for a long game of hopscotch math.

We checked Retta's crystal growing experiment and lo and behold she did manage to grow some beautiful crystals. She is very excited.

I am off to bed to put my headache to rest.  

Music and caterpillars

I always seem to be making my entries a day late so I am gonna try to make two today and get caught up.

We had music again yesterday and Musa is loving it. He really enjoys the teacher. He is constantly practicing his songs. He has been muttering the "lamb of David" for two days and it is now stuck in my head. For those of you that know my spiritual background and beliefs you can imagine how funny that is. Musa says the obsessive gene that has been passed onto him has helped him memorize songs. Too funny.

Retta on the other hand is a statue durnig music. She absolutely cannot move. She stands next to Musa and stares straight ahead. She told me she gets too hot. She wants to try again next week but if it still appears so agonizing for her I will have he stop. She loves to sing and dance at home, but this seems a little much for her.

On a different note Musa found some huge web like things covering some branches on one of the trees in our driveway. Upon closer inspection, it sort of hard to see because it is high, they appeared to be "tents" made by the classic tent caterpillars. There were hundreds of little catterpillars crawling all over the tents. The really odd thing was, we noticed that every couple minutes the caterpilars would all stop, lift up thier heads, (or butts, hard to tell the difference) and simultaneously shake them back and forth, as if in a dance. It was fascinating. We went on line and read up on tent caterpillars but no where did it mention this behavior. So we wrote to the U of Maryland and asked the entomologists, if they could provide any additional info. Haven't heard anything yet. Will update when I hear.

Stomach Aches and Peace

Today is United Nations International Day of Peace. We celebrated by reading some stories and poems out of the Big Book of Peace. Musa remembered back on the anti-war protest he went to last year in D.C. and the candle lighting vigil that we held the other night. He asked if he could write a letter to the President and tell him to stop the war. We will work on that tomorrow.

We spent the entire weekend canning apples, rasberries and peaches. We made applesauce, apple pie filling, peaches and froze some rasberries. We also made some slightly sweetened chunky applesauce stuff to spoon over oatmeal. Musa says he can't wait for the first day of snow so he can warm up with a bowl of oatmeal.

We bought a apple peeler/corer at the farm store and the kids had a blast peeling apples. It is truly a wonderful toy. It makes peeling apples so much fun that I think we ate to many! Too many apples, rasberries and peaches makes for achy tummies. I can't remember the last time I had a stomach ache from eating to much fruit. This of course lead to a discussion about digestion and why some foods cause this. Musa quickly figured out that all those little seeds in rasberries are fiber. Enough said, yesterday was just a quiet day as we a recouperated from our fiber overdose.

Musa has been working a little on his glue project. He made the cover for his report. I don't think he has decided what else he will do. Loretta made a little book about fish, birds, spiders and flowers. I asked he if she wanted to send it to someone and she said, "No, I am keeping this one for myself it is so pretty."

Where does you food come from?

We did a spur of the moment trip to our favorite U-Pick farm in Virginia on Friday. Anna was here visiting for a few days so we had her along which was great fun. We picked red rasberries, and I bought peaches and apples. I canned the peaches today and am making applesauce and apple pie filling and will can it tomorrow.

I think it is so important for kids to see first hand where their food comes from.  Musa has been quite interested in the idea of preserving food and the different methods used before refrigeration.

We watched a National Geo. documentary tonight about Lewis and Clark and Musa was fascinated. He becomes very upset that we took this country away from the Native Americans. It is hard to explain. I don't understand it myself. How can a nation celebrate it's beginning when it was taken unjustly. Seems like we good Americans just can't stop taking what isn't ours.

Music, Music

We decided to join the homechool chorus this year and today was our first meeting. We meet at a fire station up in Dunkirk. It is about an hour drive for me, but well worth the effort. Tracey (the teacher) seems to be very good with the kids. Musa really liked her. She is energetic and positive. She also teaches many different intruments. Musa is taking recorder lessons with her for the first 45 minutes and then both the kids do the choir. There are 50 kids. The will be working on two productions, one for Christmas and one in the spring.

The Christmas pagent is quite Christian, but after a deep sigh and help from my dear friend Kristin, I decided I can also use this as part of our religions/social studies. We got a good chuckle out of it.

The play requires costumes of camels, lions and donkeys, so should be fun. It will be held in early December.

Other than that it has been a routine day. Anna is coming to spend a few days with us and Retta is soooo happy. She even cleaned her room so they can play dolls! I miss her and look forward to some great chats.

 

Not Back to School Pirate Cruise

This is a late entry for August 30th, 2004

A group of area homeschool friends decided that we should have a "not back to school celebration" for this day, as this is the day the public schools go back to school. I organized this Pirate Cruise out of Anapolis.

When we arrived on the dock the kids were dressed in pirate costumes and painted and tatooed. The  Captain of the boat arrived and taught the kids some pirate language which mostly was a lot of grunts and growls. Then the did a secret 2 block walk to the ship, keeping a close eye out for enemies. Once a board the ship, the adventure began. They read treasure maps and directed the Captain to a sunken treasure, which they managed to hoist into the boat and were delighted when they discovered it  was full off gold coins. They fought off enemy pirates (there was a young man standing on a rowboot dressed in pirate garb, that the kids got to fire water guns at and eventually were successful in knocking him off his boat and into the bay) and they also drank (root) beer.

The best part for me is I got to sit in the back of my boat and do nothing. It was a great time for all and a great way to kick off the new homeschool year.  As usual it gave me the opportunity to turn it into a lesson plan and we learned a lot about pirates. I didn't realize that Blackbeard actually used to weave hemp into his hair and light it on fire to make his head smoke which added to the fear factor. There were also several famous women pirates. Most of the pirates were closely connected to the Kings and Queens of the time and would give up percentages of their stolen goods in turn for freedom of prosecution. Ahhh, good old government corruption.

Campfire and Storytelling

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary, and since my husband forgot (that is another whole journal entry-this is two years in a row he has forgotten) I decided to celebrate with the kids.  We drove down to Historic St. Mary's City--this a is large archaeology site in Southern Maryland of a colonial village and they have rebuit most of the town to it's original form. It is a working farm, as you walk through they have people in costume conducting their daily routines, it really gives you the sense what life was like.

Last night, to kick off their Indian festival days, the had a large campfire with a Native American Storyteller.  It was very up close and personal, probably only 50 or so people. They had the trail to the campfire all lit with paper bag lanterns and mosquito torches, it was beautiful.

The Storyteller, Dovie Thomason Sickles, an Kiowa-Apache Lakota Person, http://www.ulali.com/frames/merchandise/dovie/dovie.htm- was fabulous. She ended the night with two very scary ghost stories, which thrilled the kids.  Retta almost crawled back inside of me.  It made the dark, lantern lit, trail back to the car very cool and scary.

We spent the ride home giving each other Native American names. Musa was laughing so hard he almost wet his pants.  Some of the highlights: For Mom, She Who Eats Ice Cream and Has Fat Butt; One Who Yells Loud--For Musa: He Who Fears His Own Closet: He Who Speaks Softly and Farts Loudly, Loretta sat in the backseat screaming with laughter and shouting, "One Who Is A Butthead Bob."

Can you tell that we seems to have a fart, butt, sort of theme going on this week. It seems to come in waves. (sigh)

Candlelight Vigil

We hosted an EMERGENCY CANDLELIGHT VIGIL to mark the 1,000 + American soldiers that have died in Iraq. It was promoted by the WIN WITHOUT WAR and MOVEON.ORG organization. There were thousands of vigils being held across the US at 8 pm tonight. It was a great experience for the kids, from the sign making, to the questions and answers about our government, our right to protest and assemble.  We downloaded all the names from the CNN website of the dead, and decided to read the names as everyone stood in silence. Of course, there were to many names to read in a 30 minute period, but it still brought it closer to home. We had 16 people show up, all people we didn't know which is pretty amazing for Southern Maryland. The most moving thing was the fact that there were about 6 children under the age of 11. We gave them permission to play nearby with the flashlights as we assumed they would be bored. The all played for less than 5 minutes and then all came over and took candles and stood in silence. Musa held a sign near the road for the cars to se that read, "1000 DEAD HOW MANY MORE?" When we arrived home Musa went and laid down in his bed. I called to him to come and take a shower and he didn't answer. I went to his room and he was lying on his bed. He said, "Mom, I am just trying to get this all in my head. 1000 that is a lot of death."  Then we talked about the fact that the 1000 we were honoring were only the Americans. What about the Iraqi's, the British ect..and then he said, "What about the wounded soldiers?" I agreed it was hard to get into one's head.

We all agreed it felt good, and long overdue to do this as a family. It wasn't about politics tonight, it wasn't about what camp your in, it was a memorial. There should be more.

Maryland Science Center

We took advantage yesterday of a FREE day for homeschoolers at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore. It was great fun. Musa's friend Reid rode with us and we met the rest of the Arnold family there. We started in the Newton Room and the kids had a blast. Then onto the Dinosaur Room where Loretta was in heaven practicing her archaeologist skills. I thought she was going to faint she was so excited. Musa and Reid loved the "tornado maker" in the weather room. The Human Body area was lots of fun and created many giggles with the fart, vommit, and burp sound maker. We ended the day in the Kids Room. Loretta joyous being able to pour water in the water room and Musa happily played in the submarine nearby. Mom sat and rested her feet on the bench!! Musa said his favorite was the Newton Room and of course the Bed of Nails.

The long 2 hour ride home was exciting to say the least. As the remenants of Hurricane Frances blew through our area it created numerous tornadoes. Every fifteen minutes or so the emergency message would come on the radio with another warning from around the area. I just prayed I wouldn't have to take cover in a ditch!! We made it home safe and sound.

Loretta fell asleep last night watching a National Geographic documentary about the oldest city ever uncovered by archaeologist's in Peru. She kept sitting up saying, "Oh, Man, that is waht I want to do when I grow up.

The Study of Water

We are studying water and different states of matter.  Musa certainly has grasped the concepts.  In Retta's world water comes from the faucet.

They were each given a ice cube in a bag and had to figure out the fastest way to melt it without using fire or the stove or microwave. Musa ran outside hoping it was warmer outside. Loretta immediately sat down on hers and then Musa figured out he could stick it in his armpit.  We now have the melted water in a glass on the window sill to observe how long it takes it to change into a gas and disappear.

This followed with seemingly endless laughter about cold armpits and butts, which quickly moved to, "water smells like stinky armpits and butts now." Water was no longer tasteless, or odorless!!! Several more outbursts of laughter.

We also filled a large plastic container with boiling water and placed the lid on, to create a "cloud" and observe the "rain".  Attention was quickly diverted to the melting plastic as the water melted it. (lots more laughter) Oh well, it was all about different states of matter, so I guess the experiment wasn't a total loss.

We are preparing for tomorrow's journey to the Science Center in Baltimore. They are having free Homeschool Days. Pretty groovy.