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Spooky poetry for Halloween

lapazfarm — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 20:46:21 +0000

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?

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What’s that boy up to now?

lapazfarm — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 03:10:40 +0000

I am glad to report that our move back into unschooling for Superboy was exactly the right move. He is once again enthusiastically pursuing projects of his own choosing, and impressing me daily with his capabilities.

Anyone who has ever wondered what unschooling a teen looks like, here is one version. These are his subjects, totally his choice:

1. Spanish–taking a class at the local high school. He has had only one class meeting so far, and is very much enjoying it. His teacher is enthusiastic and welcoming to homeschoolers, he has several friends in the class, and I think he will do just fine.

2. Photography: This is an art form he has enjoyed as a hobby for awhile, but now wants to learn much more in depth. He got a sweet new camera for his 16th birthday:

So now he has no excuses!

He is using the assignments at Outdoor Photographer as his weekly assignments, and he is knocking them out beautifully, meanwhile building his portfolio. Here are his first two pieces:

This is for the assignment “abstract” :

And this for the challenge “summer flowers”:

All he needs now is Photoshop so he can learn to edit his images like a pro. We are currently saving up for that investment.

3. Graphic design–he wants to learn more about this art form/career option, so when I stumbled upon this book:

I knew it would be perfect for him. He snatched it up and is tackling the challenges with vigor. Challenge 1 had him design a logo for himself, which he did, and applied it to a business card and letterhead. I think he did a great job. It is purple and artsy and very much HIM.

4. Computer Animation: I had no clue how to help him with this, so we did a little searching and stumbled upon some open source ( free!) computer 3-D graphics and animation software called Blender. We downloaded it and Superboy has been watching some excellent YouTube tutorials in order to learn how to use it. Pretty amazing stuff!

5. Literature: As long as he is reading something worthy, we are good and I won’t interfere with his reading choices. Right now he is reading Waiting For Snow in Havana, the memoir of an “Operation Pedro Pan” Cuban exile. Definitely worthy. I’m reading it next!

6. Calculus: Superboy and I will be learning this one together using the Teaching Company DVD set titled “Calculus Made Clear.” Lets hope the title is accurate! My old brain hasn’t tackled higher math in a while! But I am taking this opportunity to learn something I never got around to and am looking forward to it. We start this next week. Wish us luck!

7. Physics: Superboy is reading his way through the Flying Circus of Physics and picking out projects from Make magazine to gain himself a physics credit. I personally can’t wait to see what contraptions he comes up with! His first choice: a Wimshurst Spark Generator. Talk about ambitious! Yikes!

And that is about it! I have a few tricks up my sleeve I am going to entice him with after giving him time to get a bit more settled into his routine. But for now, all is well with the boy!

Tell me, how are your teens enjoying their new school year?

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Slipping in, all quiet and ninja-like

lapazfarm — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 05:04:28 +0000

In a bit of a contrast to our public school friends and family, who are all aflutter with back-to-school hoopla, JBug and I will be slipping quietly into the year by spending the first few days with just a few fun projects. Because we are all ninja like that.

The first thing she will be doing is to spend some time decorating her notebooks, composition books, and clipboards, etc to personalize and jazz them up a bit. Who likes a plain-jane clipboard, anyway? Exactly. Plus, it’s an excellent excuse to break out the art supplies on day one. (As if we needed an excuse.)

The other thing will be kicking off her geography studies with a fun project based on the book Me On the Map by Joan Sweeny. She might be making a little circle book like the one on this site: Finally in First, or she might just do the drawings in her geography notebook, to start that off with a bang. The rest of the notebook will be filled with drawings/clippings/maps, etc of geography goodness using the book Geography from A to Z as a reference, along with pics from Nat Geo magazines, the internets, and our travels. Should be fun and relevant, considering our various wanderings. (Can you name 2 archipelagos upon which we have lived??? How about the 5 major biomes we’ve called home???)

I have a few other awesome new resources I want to share with you guys, plus I want to tell you all about the fabulous stuff Superboy is getting into, but I’ll save that for another time. When you least expect it.

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The good, the bad, and the unschooled

lapazfarm — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 08:12:07 +0000

Planning for JBug may be an exercise in perspective…

But planning for Superboy is an exercise in letting go.

THE GOOD

Superboy has been unschooled, for the most part, since I pulled him from school in the third grade. Sure we’ve done some awesome unit-studies, some cool notebooking, but it’s all been super-fun, child-led, and completely positive. Superboy, with his obsessions and passions has been a posterboy for unschooling, as far as I am concerned.

THE BAD

Then last year came along .

Superboy turned 15 and suddenly got angsty. (You know. Like a teenager?)

And I got antsy. Instead of taking it in stride, keeping my perspective, I let my confidence in unschooling slip. And instead of making the effort to find a way to make things better within the framework that had been so successful for him up until then, I panicked and I threw it all away and replaced it with something new and foreign to him.

Thus began our Super-Structured Year.

And while this was a GREAT thing for JBug, it was not such a great thing for Superboy.

Don’t get me wrong, he learned a LOT this past year and it was far from all negative. But I have noticed a change in his attitude toward learning that I do not like one little bit. Mainly that he has bought into the belief that he is no longer in charge of his own learning. That somebody just needs to tell him what to do and he will do it. That school is something he needs to just get through so he can move on to the good stuff.

(can you feel my heart breaking just a little bit?)

THE UNSCHOOLED

So what am I going to do about this?

I have 2 more years with this boy until college or the Coast Guard or WHATEVER takes him away from me and I aim to make the most of them.

How?

By making the least of me.

Time for me to back off and let him find himself again.

Time to step back into my supporting role and encourage him to become the star of his own show, once again.

Time to let go of my plans, my goals, my dreams and help him find out what his are.

Time to, in a word, unschool.

Where, exactly will this all lead us? I have no idea. But I can tell you, knowing Superboy, it is bound to be interesting at least.

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The beauty of it

lapazfarm — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:04:45 +0000

Planning school for JBug is an exercise in perspective.

As a parent it is sometimes hard for me to admit that my children have weaknesses. I mean, in my heart they are all perfect, right?
But as JBug’s teacher…well…lets just say that those weaknesses make themselves all too obvious. She struggles to read, math is a mystery of epic proportions, logic eludes her, and spelling? Don’t ask.
And these weaknesses cannot just be ignored or I do her no favors, educationally. I need to recognize and address them.
BUT
I cannot let weaknesses define her, or my relationship to her. I can’t and I won’t. I cannot hyper-focus on her weaknesses or I run the risk of letting them color everything we do, every interaction, at every turn. And no one wants to have their faults constantly laid bare, a continuous reminder of just exactly how they don’t quite measure up. I know I wouldn’t.

Because she also has strengths and gifts and a thousand things about her that are right and good and perfect, and it would be a shame to miss them because I can only see what “needs fixing”.

So, in thinking about JBug’s education, I need to plan a course of study that respects her for what she is: a beautiful person, with abundant gifts, and a sacred purpose as yet hidden from us.

I need to see her as God sees her, as my mother’s heart sees her, in all her loveliness and strength and THAT…

That is the starting point from which all planning should flow.

Not from weakness, but from beauty and strength.

And just how does one plan with beauty and strength as a starting point?

First off, by creating a list of strengths and letting them be the scaffolding upon which everything else is built.

For JBug, her strengths are her love of nature and a good story, her artistic ability and quirky way of looking at things, her big, generous heart, and her practical nature.

So her curriculum will be built around those things. Those good, beautiful, things that make JBug strong.

JBug loves nature so there will be nature study daily: reading stories, drawing, exploring, observing. Happily, it is a strength the two of us share.

JBug loves a good story so we will read lots of stories: Stories of history, Shakespeare, dragons and fairy-tales to be sure, but also stories of math, grammar, and science. (And through those stories I’ve no doubt so much will be learned.)

JBug is artistic, so she will have opportunities to study great artists, imitate their works, and express her own unique view of the world on a daily basis.

JBug is generous and loving and wants very badly to know and serve God, so we will read stories of the saints and draw our inspiration from their example. And the Bible will become a dear friend.

JBug is practical and wants to DO things so we will cook, we will craft, and we will build things that are of use to us.

And through it all, by focusing on her strengths, gradually her weaknesses, which really are so small in the long run, become even smaller.

Until eventually, without us even noticing, they quietly disappear.

And that’s the beauty of it.

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Yellow snow…

lapazfarm — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:44:25 +0000

and red, and blue, and green, and purple as well!

JackJack had a lot of fun with this little color-mixing activity I set up for him. A bowl of snow, a snowflake-themed muffin mold, and some food coloring and he was busy spooning and droppering and mixing colors for quite some time! (hint: just as much color-mixing fun can be had with just a big bowl of snow and food coloring. The muffin mold was just a bit of added interest).

We re-froze the results and took them outside to see the colors in the sunlight. So pretty!

Meanwhile…

The mad scientist has been making some colors of his own. Joy of Chemistry is going very well so far. He is also working his way through Historical Tales:Rome and starting a reading of Julius Caesar this week. He will be comparing the Shakespeare play with the Plutarch version of Caesar’s life. Should be interesting.

Here’s JBug doing her world landmarks work. She reads the name and then matches the landmark photo to the proper continent on the map.It’s quite challenging for a beginning reader to read the names of some of these things, like Mount Kilimanjaro, the Taj Mahal, and Sagrada Familia. What a mouthful! I am working on making this work self-checking by affixing color-coded stickers (to match the continent map colors) to the back of each card. Just need to get around to it (lazy me!)

Math manipulatives are in play a lot around here lately. JBug’s been working with the fraction circles, counting money, and the stamp game. We’ve also been playing some Yahtzee, which is quite the challenge for JBug, though she beat me soundly!

JackJack has been using the hundred chain and arrows, the hundred board, and working on place value with the golden beads amongst other things. So fun to re-visit with him all of the great Montessori works I enjoyed with JBug a few years ago.

But mainly around here it has been…

lots and lots of sledding! Conditions have been perfect this week for some super-fast sled races. Having a long, treacherous, frozen driveway can have its advantages! (I’m just glad we have 4-wheel-drive vehicles!)

On that note, I hope everyone is keeping warm. We have had it pretty good compared to many who have been without gas or electric here in New Mexico. We’ve just had a few frozen pipes to deal with (the worst of which is the laundry drain, so we’ve been unable to do laundry for awhile.) but many places have been so much worse off. On the plus side plumbers, heating technicians, snow plowmen, and electricians are getting a lot of work lately! Bad weather is good news for them!

That’s all for now!

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Welcome to the jungle

lapazfarm — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:07:38 +0000

JBug’s latest famous artist was Henri Rousseau. What a lot of fun he is to study! We found a really great book about him at our library:

JBug really enjoyed this one with it’s gorgeous, richly-colored pictures! (fyi there are a couple of pictures that you may want to avoid for more sensitive kids: a nude, and one with dead bodies from a war).

Then it was project time:

(I try to have all supplies for a project gathered over the weekend beforehand–down to the paper, pencils, scissors, *everything*– and put them on our school shelves so they will be ready to go when we need them. This helps tremendously in actually DOING the projects we set out to do.)

First she painted a background of dark vines and fruit trees (idea from the book Usborne Art Treasury) using the Rousseau book for inspiration:

Once the background was done we left off the Usborne book plans and took off on a path of our own, which is when her picture started getting wilder! She wanted to add a jungle animal so she looked at the fabulous art book Zoology by Joelle Jolivet, for more inspiration and chose a gorgeous lion to imitate:

Again with the Rousseau book to make some plants for the foreground:

Which was cut out…

And it was all glued together to make a colorful, layered, Rousseau~esque jungle scene!

Welcome to the jungle! Enter if you dare!

Next week: John James Audubon! One of my personal favorites! Can’t wait!

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Just checking in

lapazfarm — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 05:42:04 +0000

I can’t believe we are finishing our tenth week of the school year! Wow! Time is flying by! I think it must be because things are going soooooo smoothly that the days just sort of flow on by, one after the other in a happy little chain. Which also must explain why I haven’t been posting. I just haven’t really thought about it, you know?

Do I have anything schoolish to report? Let’s see…

Superboy is doing a bang-up job on all of his reading assignments. He is particularly enjoying his nature study read, Wicked Plants, and is always sharing the deadly little tidbits he learns. Weeds that kill. Plants that maim. Good stuff. (Though we may never feel safe in our yard again. Yikes!)

And it really warms my heart to hear him literally laughing out loud while reading the exploits of Richard Halliburton’s Glorious Adventure in Greece and to have him exclaim “Mom! I want to swim the Hellespont!” or “Mom! I want to climb an erupting volcano!” (Okay. I’m a little less thrilled about that last one). The point is, he is enjoying the book and it is inspiring him to think about life as a grand adventure, which is a good thing in a young man I believe.

We are also doing a writing workshop together to bump up his essay writing skills a notch or two. I couldn’t find just the right thing in a book or online, so I am just doing it my way. It’s working very satisfactorily for us both. We are using his weekly history essays as fodder for lessons and in the end he will be writing an essay on his latest obsession: Steampunk (which I find delightfully quirky). Best thing–he gave me a big ol’ library list of steampunk-approved literature he wants to read for “research,” including anything by Jules Verne or HG Wells. (Can you tell I am secretly grinning like an idiot inside? Or maybe not so secretly?)

And JBug? Things couldn’t be better.

Her reading level is improving by leaps and bounds this year. We are officially done with the boring phonics readers and moving on to real books! Woohoo! (amazing what a little *consistency* can do. Who knew?) In response I have been sifting through all of our easier books, tossing the twaddle and keeping only worthy living books for her to read. You know, I’ve discovered that there exist enough well-written books at her level that I do not have to resort to handing her boring “I Can Read!” books or cartoon-themed crap just because it’s there. It’s just a matter of making the effort and seeking out those pearls from amongst the swine. One of those pearls we’ve uncovered is Tales From Far and Near / Tales of Long Ago: History Stories of Other Lands [2 books in 1] JBug LOVES reading from this book and it is full of well-written stories from history that really capture her imagination. She began the year having to break a story up into three or four sessions to get through it, but now her reading has improved to such an extent that she can read an entire story in one sitting! I am super proud and so is she!

One thing that is NOT working for us is English for the Thoughtful Child. It’s a fine book, but it just isn’t for us. The scripted nature of it rubs me the wrong way and it seems like the concepts presented were always either too simple or too hard–never just right. So I have dropped it and will just address grammar/mechanics concepts within her regular copywork. Makes my life that much simpler.

Everything else is going exceptionally well for her. She is loving Gombrich’s Little History of the World. Loving her nature study selections. Loving Art. Loving homeschooling!

And you know what?

I am too!

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Chemistry with a kick

lapazfarm — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 20:33:58 +0000

A couple of weeks ago Superboy’s project for Caveman Chemistry was to make mead. Since this is a long-term project, I thought I’d share a little bit of the process so far.

Mead is an ancient wine made not from grape juice, but honey. The first step was to make what is called the “wort,” a mixture of lots of honey, water, and a bit of tea, which adds extra nutrients for the yeast.

Then the yeast is added to warm water to “proof” it. Once it forms a good head of foam…

the yeast is added to the wort and mixed thoroughly. After a brief aerobic phase while the yeast grows and multiplies, a flexible vapor lock seals the bottle and it is set in a warm place so the yeast can do its thing. At night he places it on our water heater between the warm pipes. During the day it sits in a sunny window:

Yep. It’s working!

Every day Superboy releases the built-up CO2 and re-seals the bottle. He also had to do some trouble-shooting as the balloon-cap junction was not sealing properly. He solved it with some plumber’s Goop and a hose clamp.

So, now we wait and see… hopefully we will have an excellent bottle of mead by …who knows how long??

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Tweak week

lapazfarm — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:03:49 +0000

It happens, doesn’t it? Even the best laid plans, after a few weeks of *actual implementation* inevitably have some rough spots that need smoothing.

It is week 5 for us and luckily this year things are going so well that Superboy’s schedule needs no changing at all and only minor adjustments are needed to JBug’s weekly routine. Things like moving Bible story to Friday, switching Earth science to Thursday, and adding in a little more geography to complement her fabulous history studies. Little tweaks like that. Nothing major. No changes in books or subjects or anything of consequence, really. These little tweaks are just because after 4 weeks of sticking to the original schedule I noticed a few little hiccups, like having two coloring pages in one day is a little too much (JBug is a bit of a perfectionist and coloring pages can take her an inordinate amount of time). I noticed that Thursdays were on the light side and Fridays were a bit too heavy (we like to be done by lunch time on fridays). And she just can’t seem to get enough of history.

So today I made up a new, slightly altered (and beautifully color-coded) weekly schedule, which no one but me really pays attention to anyway, printed it up and stuck it up on the wall over top of the old one. I figure we will stick to this one for the next 4 weeks or so and see if it offers any improvement on the old. Then I may or may not feel the need to tweak again. But by then we will pretty much have one quarter of the school year complete and I should know for sure what works and what doesn’t, and how to best streamline the whole endeavor. At least that’s the hope.

How about you? How are your plans going? Any tweaking going on in your neck of the woods?

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