LaPaz Home Learning

It’s that time again.

We are once again surrounded by boxes, tape and bubble wrap as we shove everything we own into boxes in preparation for a major move.

This time: back to the beautiful Appalachian mountains of western NC. We leave at the end of the month and after a week or so of travel should be happily settled in to new digs in early June.

Why? Lots of reasons, but mostly to be nearer to family. In these hard economic times none of us can travel as much as we had hoped to and visits with extended family and college kids have grown way too infrequent.  It is a long, expensive trip to come and go from this faraway island, and as much as we love Alaska, we love our family more. So there it is.

We are pretty excited and looking forward to this next adventure. Or, we will be once this unpleasant packing stage is over with. But we have become pros at this and so far this move is one of our smoothest yet. Let’s hope it continues to be so!

Here’s to moving on!

With an unprecedented streak of good weather, it has been a glorious week here in Sitka. It’s been warm (relatively) and sunny and our spirits have been lifted tremendously. Couple that with the joy of Easter and you’ve got a recipe for a happy, happy attitude.

Seeing these beauties popping up all over has helped, too.

And inspired a little nature-study:

(new word of the week: corm)

Superboy takes to the woods for another Andy Goldsworthy inspired piece in the making:

We’ve been waiting forever for a sunny day to spray-paint these doll-house window frames:

And Superboy is really “getting into”  his car restoration project.

Hehe.

Funny how all it takes is a few sunny days to chase the blues away and get us feeling motivated again. We know it won’t last so we are drinking it up while we can!

How’s the weather treating you lately?

Imagine being 16 years old, hanging out at the beach with friends, nearly dark, and stumbling upon a gruesome sight. The sight of bare bones, washed ashore. The sight of arms strangely unattached to any body, of hands (are they hands???) tied together with tightly knotted nylon cord:

Imagine thinking that these bones look just enough like… a human???? that  you think maybe someone who knows for sure should see this. What would you do? Well, you do the right thing, of course.

First you take a picture. Then you call your parents. Then you call the police.

And you have a nifty science lesson that practically fell into your lap.

Now we know what thse bones are.

Do you?

Give us your best guesses!

So much going on lately! Mainly, we’ve been on vacation. We took a whirlwind tour of our beautiful state and had a great time visiting old favorites and seeing new sights. I promise to post pics of that soon, but for now, some schoolishness.

Superboy has been delving into Irish history lately, learning about the potato famine, the Irish war(s) for independence, the civil war, the Easter rising, bloody Sunday and more. We watched an excellent movie called The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and read excerpts from the book, Black Potatoes: the Story of the Great Irish Famine (which is surprisingly readable). We tried to watch the movie Michael Collins, but the Netflix disk we received was too scratched up. Oh, well.

And for art, just for kicks, we chose a decidedly Irish-themed still life.

Now, when we do a still life we typically plop something in the middle of the table, all sit around and draw with whatever medium we feel like trying. (This time it was charcoal.)  This round-the-table arrangement means that each of us is drawing from a different perspective, which yields a neat result when viewed as a group, I think. Better than ending up with 3 identical pics, anyway.

JBug’s effort:

Superboy’s:

Mine:

This was our first time using charcoal and I think they turned out pretty well. The downside is that now I am craving corned beef and cabbage for dinner! We have also decided that we enjoy this type of drawing together and need to do it more often, so hopefully I’ll have some more art to share soon!

Until next time!

Last week we learned about Andy Goldsworthy and fell in love with his beautiful, nature-centric artwork. We watched the movie Rivers and Tides (streamed from Netflix), and checked out several books of his photographed artwork. So inspired, we decided that on the first sunny day, we would go out and create some nature art ourselves. So, of course, it rained freezing rain, hailed, snowed, and was otherwise totally unpleasant for 6 days straight.

Finally, today we got our chance. A gorgeous, sunny day at last! Off to the shore!

We spent some time gathering materials: rocks, sticks and shells.

And arranging them in different ways

working hard,

creating masterpieces, large…

and small…

and photographing them from different angles…

and we stayed just long enough to watch one of our pieces approached by the inevitable…

suffer a sea change

and slowly succumb.

All in all a wonderful day!

We can’t wait to do it again!

Is everyone else as ready for winter to be over as we are? I’ll tell you, being an outdoors kind of gal, this time of year is always hard on me. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the changing of the seasons, and look forward to a bit of snowy goodness and indoor coziness each year. But at this point I always feel I have been cooped up long enough and am ready for sunshine, blue skies, a little less icy slush on the ground and a little more green grass beneath my feet. Know what I mean?

But, as usual, we are making the best of it as we can.

Superboy is working on physics. Here he is with his hydraulic crane,one of the many projects to be  made from this kit.

I have to give props to Thames and Kosmos. Not only are all of their kits exceptionally well thought out, their customer service is great, too. Our kit arrived with an important part broken. I called them up and they sent a replacement part the same day.

JBug is painting her dollhouse–it’s a big project and she has been working on it for weeks. We are all ready for it to be done so we can take back our art room for other things. Just a little bit more to go now…

Of course there has been plenty of reading going on. (Note Superboy looking more like Clark Kent Boy for Nerd Day at the local high school where he takes his Spanish class.)

His reading list has been hit and miss this year. Hits: Henry V, Canturbury Tales, and Feed (so far). Misses: Frankenstein (too boring) and Count of Monte Cristo (Which, at 1200 pages, was just too intimidating. He never finished. Need to get the abridged version.) This is all fine by me. He definitely has developed his own tastes in literature at this point and as long as he gets exposure to many types, I am happy to let him decide whether to finish a book or not. Nothing kills a love of reading more than being force-fed. I offer, he bites, chews, and decides for himself if he wants to swallow.I allow him this freedom because I know that when he does choose to swallow, he digests it well. I was delighted that he spontaneously came to me to discuss the similarities between Henry V’s battle at Agincourt and Leonidas’ Thermopylae, a comparison I would never have thought to make. He also shared a few of the many delightful turns of phrase in Henry’s “We happy few…” speech. That Shakespeare. What a banquet!  And I am so happy my son can appreciate him so well. So I keep offering, trusting, and waiting to see what clicks.

JBug’s reading is coming along wonderfully. I couldn’t be more pleased. Some of her favorites lately: There’s an Owl in the Shower, by Jean Craighead George, Fantastic Mr Fox, by Roald Dahl, The Golden Goose, by Dick King-Smith (a favorite author we keep going back to), and of course more Magic Tree House and Tin-Tin books than I can keep her supplied with.

I wish I could say her math skills were progressing as well. Oh, well, we do what we can, right? I mean, she is progressing, but her dyslexia just makes every step so painfully slow. I took a leap and finally introduced her to multiplication this week. So far so good.

She started by using the Montessori multiplication board, but was able to quickly move past that into more abstract, less fiddly methods. Her favorite is using dot paper to look at the shapes formed by the different multiplication problems. She quickly grasped the concept of  the commutative property (4X6=6X4, etc) by comparing their similar shapes (same shape, just turned 90 degrees), and the concept of “squares” became visually obvious as well. We will keep at it a little bit at a time and I have confidence she will be able to learn what she needs when she needs it.(Slow and steady wins the race. At least, that what Aesop said, right?)

And me? Well I have been reading up a storm lately–just trying to keep from going nuts with cabin fever. At new years I challenged myself to 52 books in 52 weeks and I am well ahead of the game at 22 or 23 now. Lots of hits and misses for me, too. If you want to read my reviews, visit me at Goodreads.

And that’s all I have for now. I am going back to reading and dreaming of spring. Have a good one!

JBug has been studying Europe this semester and it has been a lot of fun.She just finished up learning about France, so I guided her through a little art project where she could show off some of the things she learned about: Notre Dame, the Eiffel tower, and the river Seine.

To learn about Europe we have been watching a very enjoyable series of travel videos we got from Netflix called Passport to Europe. We watch them together and JBug writes down anything she finds interesting in her geography notebook. Then we head to the computer to find images to add. So far it has been a great success and she looks forward to our little video “travels” together.

Speaking of geography notebooks, I don’t think I have shared pics of hers here yet.

Nothing fancy, simply one of those black and white composition books with half-lined pages, top blank for illustrations. I find this a very handy format for lots of things. Here is the cover which she decorated herself with some scrapbooking paper and pics from National Geographic mags:

and here are some sample pages.  Some notes on England:

From last semester’s “Me on the Map” study:

Her geography notebook is a really handy catch-all for a lot of interesting things. She has notes and souvenirs from places she has visited, landforms she is learning, all kinds of good stuff. It is filling up fast!

And that is all for today, so I will say goodbye. Or should I say “au revoir!”

We had some fun learning about Andy Warhol and Pop Art last week and took the opportunity to do a fun project inspired by Warhol’s colorful portraits and prints of famous folks.

I’m not sure from where the inspiration for this project came, most likely several sources since it is a fairly common type of project to do. The idea is fairly simple. Take a picture of yourself, print it multiple times, and manipulate each image in a unique way. Here are the kids’ results:

As you can see, a couple of the images are manipulated by the computer, pre-printing, and the rest are done by hand. I think it made a great combination of styles, especially since each of the kids added their own special twist to their work.

Pretty cool, eh? I’d definitely encourage you to give it a try as it was a lot of fun for the kids to manipulate their own self-portraits. I think it was one of their favorite projects yet.

And stay tuned for yet another Pop Art project inspired by this iconic Warhol image:

And still on a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a gypsy’s ribbon looping the purple moor,
The highwayman comes riding–
Riding–riding–
The highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

(That’s an excerpt from one of my very favorite “spooky” poems, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. We read poetry every friday and this is one of this past friday’s selections.)

We don’t do unit-studies any more. Not that we think they are bad or wrong, it’s just that we have sort of grown away from that way of doing things.

But we do sometimes do “themes” and one of the more fun themes to do is a spooky theme for Halloween. It is one of our favorite themes and we look forward to it every year. So some (but not all ) of our work will revolve around this theme the month of October.

I’ve already written about Superboy and I reading Frankenstein as this month’s literature selection.  Also on theme, his computer graphics project (on Blender) is a zombie head. Very creepy indeed.

Art will be pumpkin carving, sugar skulls, and other dia de los muertos-inspired projects. And maybe this spooky-looking tree project.

And poetry? That’s where the real fun is this month.

Just think of all the spooky goodness out there! Why, Poe alone provides enough frightful fodder to last a month or more!  The real trouble comes in trying to choose from amongst all of the many delightfully devilish poems out there. They are always such fun to read aloud in your most spookified voice. But, much as we’d love to, we just cant read them all. So, here are our selections of spooky poetry for the month of october:

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

The Raven by E A Poe (of course)

Annabel Lee by EA Poe

The Haunted Oak by Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Hag by Robert Herrick

The Night Wind by Eugene Field (This is a fun one)

(And I am sure we will come up with some more when we hit the library this weekend.)

Tell me, what are your favorite spooky poems to set the Halloween mood?

Here is just a little update to let folks know we are still alive and kicking.

Lets see. First thing is that the little boys have gone back again to live with their mommy, which is a very good thing, but which always  leaves us here feeling a bit disjointed. I keep thinking there is something I am supposed to be doing… something I am forgetting…. But no. It’s just that life is so much more quiet now. We are still adjusting to the slower pace.

(our local wildlife)
Books.

We have time for those now!

Superboy and I are both reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and had a funny “What in the world???” moment when we were discussing chapter one and our stories did not match up at all. It was a puzzle until we realized that he and I were reading two different editions and that Shelley had made a significant change in the storyline between the two editions. For a while we each thought the other had gone a little mad!

JBug and I just finished Edith Nesbitt’s Book of Dragons (free on Kindle). What a great read-aloud! It is a collection of eight tales, all containing dragons but each very different and unusual. I read it to her one chapter per day and she couldn’t wait for the next story. To tell the truth, neither could I!

And now the time has come for JBug to experience Redwall, which all of my children have loved at one time or another. So far JBug is following suit. Only problem is reading that book always makes me hungry! Perhaps a Redwall feast is in order? We already have the perfect cookbook!

(JBug’s blobby-birds. directions here)
As for independent reading for JBug, she has plowed through a dozen or so Magic Tree house books, plus  Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and now has discovered the library’s stash of Asterix and Tin Tin comics. She’s had her nose buried in one or the other all week. Can I just say how much  I LOVE that she is finally actually reading for pleasure? So nice to see her pulling books off the shelf that I honestly wondered if she would ever read. But she is!  I caught her browsing through our old copy of A Child’s History of the World just yesterday. Warms my heart remembering how our older daughter Emily would read that book over and over and over. Now Emily is in college and JBug is reading that same beloved book, 15 years later. *sigh*

(JBug working on her geography journal. More on that later)

As for me, I have been doing some light reading myself. I finished The Help (LOVED IT!) and now am on to Gunn’s Golden Rules by Tim Gunn. That plus re-reading Frankenstein and Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Feels good to finally see my TBR pile shrinking a bit instead of ever growing. Plus I finally caved in to peer pressure and started watching Dr Who (beginning with season 5). So far I like it but don’t love it. Maybe the love will come, it certainly is quirky enough to suit me.

In addition to Frankenstein, Superboy is reading the new Brian Selznick novel Wonder Struck. Hope he finishes soon because I want to read that one myself.

Oh, and he got himself a pony. I think I know how project days will be spent from now on.

And that is it for now. Hope things are well for everyone else.