10 weeks!

Spring break is over.  It flew by far too quickly. I feel like we only did a couple of the things from the giant list of possibilities I generated on the first day of spring break! 

Although in reality our accomplishments for the week included:  

• An afternoon wandering downtown Portland with Auntie~taking in the Farmer's Market, animals in the lobby of the history museum, the sculptures in courtyard of the Art Museum, a streetcar ride and Powell's. 
• Two gymnastics meets. 
• Two gymnastics practices (four hours each!). 
• An orchestra rehearsal. 
• An afternoon of ice skating. 
• A new frozen yogurt shop. 
• Dinner with Nana.
• Two nights when friends stayed at our house.
• One night Kayla was at a friend's house.
• One day Owen spent at a friend's house.
• An afternoon at Grandma's house.
• A youth group sleepover.
• An afternoon of" booking"-Borders, the library and the Book Bin.
• Sleeping in.
• Watching Back to the Future.
• Bananagrams.
• Ear infection/antibiotics
• Hanging out doing nothing!
• A rained out attempt to frisbee golf.
• Church

Doesn't look like doing nothing when I see it like that. I've been informed that maybe my expectations are sometimes a little high.

So many books, so little time!

And I find myself in a similar situation with school.  There are about 10 weeks left in the school year. Kayla has begun laughing at me as I wail about how much there is that she hasn't learned yet and how we'll never be able to fit it all in.  The truth is that we have done a lot and are on track to finish quite a few of our books~Latin, Grammar, Vocabulary, reading list, Spanish, Logic and (shhh, don't tell Kayla, but I found out that lots of homeschoolers who use our Algebra book give their students credit for Algebra I and II when they finish it and we are near the halfway point so even though we won't finish the book I can still feel like we got in a year of Algebra!)   Because we aren't using set curricula, science and history could wander on forever.  (Although we are in the middle of a World War II project, which I'm pretty sure is more modern history than I ever had in school~including  AP History! So that seems like a success too)

But there is sooooo much more we could do!  Both academically~Oh no! She hasn't written a research paper! We didn't study Geography! Music History! Home Ec, etc~and enrichment: museums, plays, birdwatching...the list of fabulous things we thought we might do this year takes up several pages.  

So my goal for the next ten weeks is to accept the fact that I can't teach her everything~as she keeps reminding me she does have four years of high school and another four or more of college to meet that impossible goal.  To find a balance between pushing to finish the books and showing her some new and exciting things that she'll want to continue learning about for the rest of her life.  And to enjoy what may be the last ten weeks we get to spent starting our mornings out together with pajamas and books (high school decisions looming on the horizon!)

So she spent a couple hours this afternoon helping our friend teach an elementary art class. 
And on Friday we'll be seeing a ballet interpretation of Anne Frank.
There are ten more weeks of fun adventures coming up.
And then summer vacation just might find us dragging Owen and Justin along to work on the lists of things we thought we could do and ran out of time to complete~both during spring break and school!

Patty

Art

           Hi! Sorry I haven't updated the blog lately, I have been pretty busy. One of the things I did last week was that I headed to the art museum. My mom and I spent about three hours there wandering in circles. The featured exhibit is art by Chris Jordan, who is an amazing artist! But I couldn't help but wonder what is art? I asked some of my friends and got a lot of completely different answers. One said that it is pretty man made stuff, another that it is in the eye of the beholder, the third that it was an expression, and lastly that it was something you couldn't define, but you know it when you see it. All of these answers cover some of the things that I think are art, but none of them like they are the perfect answer. I would love to know what you think "art" is! Feel free to leave a comment, or send me a message! I would love to get a lot of answers!

Love,    K. M. B.

Graupel Day!

I woke up the morning of February 24, hoping for a snow day, but to my dismay despite approx. 1" of snow, there was still school. So I continued on like any other day (except for the constant snow distractions, involving, LOOK!!! IT IS SNOWING AGAIN!!! Oh wait, it stopped...) Then at about noonish something started to fall from the sky again! I glanced outside and realized that it was hail, or so it appeared. Going outside to investigate further I found that it was not hail, but looked like styrofoam pieces. I collected a bowl full and brought it inside to look at more closely. I looked it up Wikipedia and found this: 

 
Graupel (also called soft hail or snow pellets) refers to  a 2–5 mm ball of rime; the snowflake acts as a nucleus of condensation in this process. The term graupel is the German word for this meteorological phenomenon.^[2] Graupel is sometimes referred to as small hail, although the World Meteorological Organization defines small hail as snow pellets encapsulated by ice, a precipitation halfway between graupel and hail.

I am happy to report that at the moment it is once again snowing! Weather alert: There may be slight Graupeling starting at 1:00!

<3 ME!!!

Comments Please!

Hi! I just heard from a reliable source that it is hard to comment on our posts. We played around with the settings and want to know if it is better? If you could post a comment that would be great!  Love, Me!!!

Puppet Science!

After several months of grumpiness and confusion in the science department we finally came to the realization at some point in December that there is still plenty of time ahead to a) end up with a teacher who makes physics fun, exciting and understandable or b) hate physics.  But that there was no reason for us continue on miserably just because some book suggested physics as their eighth grade science step :) We could choose to switch over to the science that Kayla is actually excited about!  Which would be pretty much anything related to animals...so we ordered a book about Mammals and continued watching backyard birds and reading National Geographic articles and watching Nature and Wild! and Oregon Field Guide and even pulled out my old Biology 101 textbook and I now have a much happier scientist on my hands!  (I expected the Biology textbook to go by the wayside quickly, but she is still enthusiastically outlining~full blown Roman Numeral style which she absolutely resisted doing with the history I thought she should try it with earlier in the year~and writing down new vocabulary and reading it. Although she just shakes her head and sighs when I tell her how much she would probably be reading in a night in a college class.)



Sirenians



Cetaceans

Rodentia



Lagomorpha



Insectivora

Last weekend she volunteered to help me man my paper bag puppet table at the community college family fun day and decided to turn it into a science project. So we had a sample puppet to represent every order of mammals: 



Artiodactyla



 



Monotremata









Perissodactyla







Pinnipedia





Chiroptera





Carnivore





Marsupial





Primate



Proboscidea

I'm Back!!!

Hi everybody! Sorry it has been so long since my last post, I have been very busy. I recently switched my science classes from Physics (yuck) to Biology! It has been much more interesting, and even though I am only in the 2nd chapter I am already glad that I have been learning Greek and Latin. All those roots come in handy when I am trying to figure out what all the new vocab words mean. I also started memorizing Collossians, I know the first 6 verses pretty well so far, but it has been really cool because we have a Bible written in Greek, so I can kind of translate it into English. We just finished studying the Civil War in history, and right now are studying how different countries tried to gain independence. In math I am learning how to graph equations (very confusing) and how to write equations using two points on a graph. I have two different logic books I have been using lately. One that teaches the rules of logic, the other discusses common logic mistakes. Right now I am reading a book called the Scarlet Pimpernel  which is about the aristocrats. I am still very interested in birds, and would love to get any cool bird pictures you might have! I have been receiving lots of postcards thanks to postcrossings.com, which is a website where you get to send and receive postcards from all over the world.
Love, Kayla B. <3

Field Trips!

We have had several opportunities to visit museums lately and definitely have it on our list of things to do more often in the rest of the year!

Thanksgiving weekend we took advantage of free admission weekend and took along Owen and cousin Geni and visited both the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and U of O Museum of Natural History.  The kids were interested for longer than they (and we) thought they might be, although Kayla still didn't feel like she got quite enough time and is looking forward to going back alone.  (Although we agreed it might be better to study a little bit more about the artists and exhibits before returning as it was very exciting to see postcards books in the gift store of some of the artists we had studied and thought it would be even better to have that reaction to some full sized works of art :)

We were busy trying to be respectful and quiet and didn't take any inside pictures, but here are the three museum goers in the courtyard of the art museum.

They then ran off all of that quiet inside energy by chasing squirrels around campus!

The following weekend found us with a couple hours to wander around Bend. After enjoying the Christmas parade and the snow (and watching enough of the Civil War game to feel like we knew what the outcome would be!) we decided to check out the Deschutes Historical Museum.  It's is an old school building with each classroom dedicated to a different part of local history (Native American, Logging, School Room, Medical, Clothing, etc).   Kayla especially enjoyed the school room and reading some of the eighth grade graduation requirements! I think she might have a chance in the grammar section, but some of the others would find us pretty lost!

Next week we are hoping to get a chance to head to The Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University.