Thanksgiving and Giving Thanks

So yesterday was Thanksgiving.  The kids were out of school all week, so I asked them to clean out their closets, which was, in a twisted sort of way, meant to make them grateful for what they have.  And it worked, because they got rid of a few things, some of which had LONG overstayed their welcome, and told me that now all the stuff they have in their closets is stuff they love.  This makes me happy, and it makes them happy, and now I feel like the things I'm getting them for Christmas will have places to live.

On Wednesday Oz brought them up to see Mama at work in the office, so I took them around a little bit and then they hung out in the waiting room until it was time to go home.  (Work is good, still circus-ish, but next week we're training one more new person and then we should be actually fully staffed, and that is a wonderful feeling.  I won't be in the main office on Monday because the girl at the satellite office had a family emergency and is dealing with that, so I'm covering for her, but it should be an easy day.  I digress.)  Then Oz and I changed clothes, took the kids over to my brothers-in-law's (how on EARTH does one make that plural possessive??  Because two of them live there, and they are my brothers-in-law, but should it be brothers-in-laws'???  My brain just exploded) apartment where the kids spent the night with both of the guys as well as my mother-in-law.  It was a crowded place, but they had a great evening/night, and Oz and I went for dinner and then met up with a friend and her new hubby down at a bar where we drank beer and ate sweet potato fries and played darts until my contacts were about to either fall out or adhere themselves to my corneas from sheer fatigue.

We got home safely, took showers, and crashed, but then Oz and I both got up around 5:30 to start the meat for Thanksgiving.  He took charge of the brisket on the grill - I had put on the dry rub on Tuesday evening, so it'd been soaking up the flavor for about 36 hours - and I handled the giant leg of pork that was going in the oven.  I used this recipe, and OH MY WORD it was the bomb dot com.  We threw the meat in their respective cooking places and went back to bed for another 45-50 minutes… and then we adjusted the heat and did it again.  Around 7:30 or so we both actually decided it was time to get up for good, so Oz started the coffee and we began the process of cleaning the house for our guests while letting the parade play in the background.  For the record, I never thought I'd prefer Matt Lauer and Al Roker as hosts, but they would've been preferable to the folks on CBS.  That was painful.

By 10:30 the house was mostly ready, which was good because my mom showed up about that time and I know I wouldn't have been able to do much cleaning after that... besides anything else, my mom never arrives without looking like she's moving in, and this time was no exception.  She had a box of fabric scraps for Boo, a box of needlework books and shirts for me to browse through, as well as a pie and the non-liquored-up version of something called Apple Pie Moonshine.  We added the booze shortly after she got here, and it is just as delicious as the web site promises.  Dangerous stuff.

My kids and in-laws arrived not too long after my mother, and from there on out, it was Party Time.  There were people cooking, people talking and laughing, and just everything Thanksgiving should've been.  One thing that was different for us this year was that I had sent out an open invitation via Facebook for anyone who needed/wanted a place to come and celebrate Thanksgiving with friends, and I had a couple of folks take me up on the offer.  I was so glad they came, and I hope - I think - they had a good time.  We all stuffed ourselves to the point of pure indigestion, I do know that!!

A few people left early, but most of the family and a few friends hung around into the early evening hours.  My mom got to play with a baby, and my kids were good with the older ones, so there were no incidents that I'm aware of.  My husband and his brothers wandered down to the fire pit for a while and had some bro time, and I just enjoyed talking with everyone and catching up.  It doesn't happen often enough.

In addition to all that, I scored a beautiful ring.  When my grandmother had moved into an assisted living facility a few years ago, she had handed me the ring that had belonged to her when she married my grandfather.  The stone was amazingly beautiful, but the setting was dated and far too large for my finger.  Oz and I had briefly discussed getting the stone re-set at some point in the future, but that date had never been determined.  When he and I were struggling with our relationship issues earlier this year, I figured it would never happen.  Then he and I had our come-to-Jesus, honest-to-goodness, heart-to-heart about everything, and we turned a corner.  A month or so ago, I told him I would wear a ring again if he A) got the stone put into a ring that was MINE and mine alone and B) took me on a few successful dates and re-proposed to me.

Oz and I had discussed rings off and on since then - I'd sent him pictures I'd found on Pinterest or Etsy of custom rings that I liked, and he'd found a local jeweler who does custom work, and I'd even gone in and met the guy and had my ring size determined (5 1/4, in case you're curious, which is an odd size) - but I did NOT know that the ring design had been both finalized and finished, and I certainly did not know that Oz had picked it up.

So when he re-proposed to me in front of almost all his family and mine… well, what else could I do?

I said yes.

I'm thankful for my family (and friends!) each and every day.  They make my world wonderful.  Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving, if you're in the USA, and if you live elsewhere in the world, that you have a great weekend!

Homemade History, Week 11

Trying this a different way this week... lemme know your thoughts.

Topic:  Bronze Age Europe

Reading Options:  Usborne World History Encyclopedia pp. 120-123, Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World pp. 102-107, Kingfisher History Encyclopedia pp. 12-13

Hands-On Learning Options:  Map of Ancient Europe from Map Trek, Stonehenge mystery pages from, research European mythology (Celtic, Norse, Saxon, Slavic, etc.)

Definitions/Critical Thinking Questions:  Neolithic, brooch, palisade, bronze/Why do you think Stonehenge was built?  Do you think it should be preserved?

Electronic Learning Options:  BBC for Kids Anglo-Saxons page, Celtic Europe video, for instance.  There are also lots of hour-long documentaries including this one about the facts behind the fiction of Lord of the Rings.  This is one of my favorite parts of history, so I could go on for days.  I'll stop here.

Next week:  Egypt - The Middle Kingdom, mythology

Homemade History, Week 10

No pictures today; they simply didn't happen this week.  Not that we did a lot of things that were photogenic.  This will also be short.  My back is spasming, and sitting hurts.

Week 10 Topic:  Crete - Minoans and Mycenaeans

Monday:  Reading, notes, timeline.  Our timeline died the ugly death this week after the whiteboard jumped off the wall and attempted to maul Doodlebug, so I broke down and simply ordered a book of completed timelines from Amazon rather than trying to redo our own.  So from now on, we'll simply be finding the people we're studying on the timeline vs. creating our own.  I'm okay with that.  Reading options were:  Story of the World Ch. 18 and the first half of Ch. 19, Usborne World History Encyclopedia pp. 126-127, Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World pp. 64-67, and Kingfisher History Encyclopedia pp. 16-17.

Tuesday:  Map Trek map of early Greece (the kids recently finished reading various versions of the Iliad and were delighted to learn where Troy was, and I pointed out Ithaca for good measure since they'll be reading simplified versions of the Odyssey soon) and they picked topics for their next history papers.  Doodlebug chose Cretan crafting and architecture; Boo chose Japanese mythology.

Wednesday:  I let the kids make a book of the ancient Greek gods.  It was one of the projects in the Ancient Greece book that I have an e-copy of.  They enjoyed that.  We also watched some videos, specifically this one on Knossos and this one on the Mycenaeans.  We also watched several bull jumping videos; their favorite was this one.

Thursday:  Definitions (from History Pockets - agora, chiton, column, and myth) and critical thinking questions - 1) Would you have preferred to live with the Minoans or the Mycenaeans?  Why?  2) Would you have wanted to be a bull jumper?

Friday:  For their project, I asked them to make a labyrinth.  I gave them the choice of using Legos and other 'real' materials or just drawing a maze, and they both opted to just use graph paper and draw their mazes.  It was a good challenge for both of them, and they enjoyed it.  I was surprised how much they got out of it; the amount of time they spent on it gave them an appreciation for how long it would have taken for Daedalus (or whoever) to design a labyrinth, let alone construct one.

Next week:  Bronze Age Europe - henges, palisades, farming methods

Homemade History, Week 9

History was sort of History Lite this week because of the other projects we had going, but the kids requested and therefore we still did a sort of history study.  I'll put in all the stuff that could be used in case you want to do a full week, but we didn't do it all.  No way, Jose.

Week 9 Topic:  Indus Valley Civilizations, Hindu

Monday:  Reading, summary, timeline - Story of the World (Chs. 9 and 30), Life in the Ancient Indus River Valley (pp. 1-15), Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World (pp. 52-57), Kingfisher History Encyclopedia (pp. 14-15, 33), and Usborne World History Encyclopedia (pp. 118-119, 174) were all given options.  The kids poked through some of the choices, and I requested a book from the library on Hinduism for each of them.

Tuesday:  Map Trek map of ancient India and discussion of Hindu gods.  We didn't get around to the discussion, but we did the map.  Score one for geography.

Wednesday:  Definitions (plateau, plain, citadel, caste) and critical thinking questions:  What do you think happened to the people who lived in Mohenjo-Daro?  What do you think of a caste system?  Can you think of anything that's good about it?  Anything bad?  (Doodlebug couldn't think of a single good thing about it unless you were in the upper castes.  He was quite indignant.  We just answered these orally this week.)

Thursday:  We didn't do anything on Thursday since we were out of the house for most of the day, but the plan had been to watch some videos on the ancient Indus Valley peoples like this one on an ancient Aryan settlement or a Crash Course video on the Indus Valley civilizations (note: no mention of scoodily-pooping in this one).  Or maybe let them poke around on the BBC site about Hinduism or a similar BBC Kids site on the Indus Valley.

Friday:  I had planned to let the kids make rangoli again - giant rangoli on giant pieces of concrete in the driveway and/or on giant pieces of paper that we could save and hang up for Diwali, but the weather didn't cooperate.  Hard to make sand art on wet concrete.  The kids, however, decided that they weren't to be denied, so they chose to make candles.  They initially wanted to make their own little terra-cotta pinch pots and fill those, but when Boo started poking around in her craft supplies, she realized she had a soy candle-making kit and they decided that would probably be safer and easier.  I agreed.

They want to place these out on Diwali (November 3) and maybe make some rangoli between now and then as an art project.  I'm not about to argue.

Next week (well, OK, this week... I'm behind, I know):  Crete - Minoans, Mycenaeans.  

Homemade History, Week 8

The kids turned in their papers this week.  I thought they did well, and I may post those separately.  Or not.  I haven't decided yet.  For week 9, even though it's primarily an interest-led week, the kids will still be doing history and math and a couple other electives.  So I'll be back next weekend with yet another installment.

Week 8 Topic: Phoenicians and Sea Peoples

Monday:  Reading and timeline.  Reading options came from Story of the World (Ch. 15), Kingfisher History Encyclopedia (pp. 28-29), Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World (pp. 88-91), and/or the Usborne World History Encyclopedia (pp. 144-145).  Boo was fascinated with the idea of city-states and alliances between the cities.

Tuesday:  We filled in the Phoenicia's Trading Empire map from Map Trek and they started typing up their papers.

Wednesday:  Videos!  We watched a bunch:  One on glassblowing (we also searched for Phoenician glass images so they could see some of the stuff the Phoenicians actually produced), one on the Phoenician Ship Expedition, and one on extracting dye.  There's another video out there, called Quest for the Phoenicians, that is available in parts on Youtube or for legitimate sale in the National Geographic Store, that we caught the preview for.  I may check it out another time, because both kids really, really like the Phoenician peoples.

Thursday:  Definitions (city-state, colony, obelisk, alphabet) and Doodlebug's critical thinking questions (What were some advantages and disadvantages of having cooperating city-states vs. a unified country?  Which of the Phoenician's inventions [alphabet, dye methods, glassblowing, shipbuilding, colonization, etc.] is the most significant to us today?  Why do you think that?)

Friday:  I was going to suggest that the kids help me make pita bread, but they had other (and better!) ideas.  Doodlebug decided he wanted me to find him a map of Mediterranean currents and winds so that he could work out different sailing routes that the Phoenicians would have used to get to their colonies.

Boo decided she wanted to see if she could build her own boat.

Both kids ran into different problems with their projects - Boo had originally wanted to make a curved boat and Doodlebug wanted to figure out one route that would work for all seasons - but they both overcame their frustrations and were happy with their final results... even if the boat didn't float for more than a few seconds before sinking catastrophically.

Next week:  The Indus Valley, Mohenjo-Daro, Hindu beliefs

Homemade History, Week 7

Just as we get into the really interesting stuff, it's time for a break.  It's Labor Day week here in the ol' US of A, and I don't do four-day weeks.  I find them unproductive.  So instead, we just take the entire week off.  Since we've been going hard for seven weeks, it's time.  This first block is one of the longest continuous stretches of school we'll have all year.

Week 7 Topic:  Egypt's Old Kingdom + mastabas, pyramids, mummies

Monday:  Reading and notes.  The kids picked two of the following choices:  Story of the World chapters 2 and 4, Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World pages 28-31, Usborne World History Encyclopedia pages 114-117, or Life in Ancient Egypt pages 4-9, 20-22, and 26-27.

Tuesday:  The kids finished their reading, and we noted any necessary revisions to their nine weeks' papers.  They'll finish revising the paper and type them up in weeks 8 and 9, and hopefully I'll be allowed to post their work here.  Doodlebug especially has surprised me - he decided to write his paper entirely from second-person perspective.  It's an odd choice, but I think it works.

Wednesday:  We filled in a map of Ancient Egypt, complete with the locations of pyramids, ancient cities along the Nile, and the general geography in and around Egypt like the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Sahara.

Thursday:  Definitions (hieroglyphics, pyramid, pharaoh, and papyrus - Doodlebug was fascinated with the method of making papyrus) and critical thinking questions:  How did geography affect the lives of ancient Egyptians?  What were some of the problems that Pharaoh may have faced?  That second question is to get him thinking about the problems all rulers face, but he doesn't know that yet.

Friday:  On Friday the kids played a game called Mummy Maker on the BBC Kids web site.  Then they wanted to make their own cartouches.  We discussed the function of a true cartouche, and then I told the kids that if they wanted to make their own, they had a choice.  I could look up some close hieroglyphic representations of their names and they could make Egyptian cartouches or they could make their own indecipherable cartouches based on their interests and things that are important to them.  Of course, being Generation 2.0 children, they wanted their own custom images.  Doodlebug made his out of clay; Boo made hers from paper.  Both are designed to be hung from strings like necklaces so they could, theoretically, wear their cartouches everywhere.

I have to say, you can see the differences between them just by looking at the images!

I also gave them options of making scented oil - basil, rosemary, garlic - or virtually touring the inside of the Great Pyramid.  These are definitely other project/video options to consider.

Week 8 Topic (when we return):  Phoenicians and "Sea People"

Homemade History, Week 5

This is our last week of traveling around the world at what seems like warp time/speed.  In week 6, we're headed back to Mesopotamia.  Still, this week was fun!  We watched several videos, sketched maps, and even built our own version of a calendar in the round.

Week 5 Topic:  Ancient America - Mesoamerica, Olmecs and Maya

Monday:  Reading and notes.  M2 read the Story of the World (chapter 26) and Usborne World History (pp. 178-181); M1 read the Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World (pp. 130-137) and the Usborne pages as well.

Tuesday:  The kids worked on their papers.  M1 felt especially prepared for this week's lesson due to the studying he'd already been doing on the Olmecs, so I let him share some of his findings with M1 and me.  He liked that.  

Wednesday:  We put together a map on Wednesday.  We started by using a blank black-line map of the Americas, both north and south.  Using the following maps, we drew a rough map of SOME of the ancient tribes in the Americas:

Eastern North America

Southwestern North America

Mesoamerica

We also talked a bit about the fact that there were tribes in what is now Canada, South America, etc. but that they simply aren't discussed very often and that we aren't going to cover them in this class... and I made sure the kids were aware that not all of these tribes overlapped, either.  It's hard to pick and choose, ya know? 

I also gave M2 his questions on Wednesday:  

1.  Would you have preferred living with the Olmecs or the Maya? (The Olmecs won his vote.)

2.  Both of these peoples played ball games.  If you were going to invent a ball game, what would you call it?  What would some of the rules be?  (M1 really liked this question and came up with a sort of hand ball/lacrosse game that I thought would be quite interesting.)  

Thursday:  We started with definitions (temple, sacrifice, fortification, peninsula) and moved from there to videos.  We didn't watch all of this video on the Olmecs, but we did watch some of it; we also watched this video on Mayan math.

Friday:  Friday project!  First, we watched this short video about the basics of the Mayan calendar.  I explained to the kids that the Maya didn't have weeks - only years, months, and days, as well as longer epochs on the (not shown in the video) Long Count calendar.  This confused the heck out of M2, so we set out to make our own mostly-Mayan-based calendar in the round.  Wikipedia to the rescue! Soon after (and I apologize for the poor photography) we constructed our own calendar in the round.  The kids loved finding their birthdays in rough Mayan equivalent.  Some other activities that we considered were resurrecting the atlatl idea, drinking spiced hot chocolate, and playing around with Mayan math/numbers (which M1 had done in the past).

Next week:  The Fertile Crescent/Mesopotamia, Sumerians, Akkadians

Reading

This is in no way related to homeschooling.  I felt I should clarify that right now in case someone gets all excited that I might be talking about kids and reading in the same post, because I'm not going to do that, unless you want to discuss the book Dither Farm, because it was like OMG MY FAV'RIT BOOK EVAR when I was about M1's age, and I just found out it's available as an e-book and I had to download it and re-read it and, yes, it is just as good now as it was then, which I think is saying something because how many times have you gone back and re-read books you loved as a child and thought to yourself, "Just what in the sam-hell was I smokin'?!?"

Seriously.  Dither Farm.
Fun for kids of all ages.

And that, my friends, was a run-on sentence.

Moving on.

No, wait.  Before moving on, I should warn you: the rest of this post is link-heavy.  Click at your own risk.  Preferably right-click so you can open the links in a new tab and keep reading and exploring at the same time.  Rabbit holes can be dangerous, especially when there are books involved.

Now we're really moving on.

Really.

--

Having polished off Dither Farm as well as the library books I'd checked out (specifically Isaac's Storm [nonfiction] and When Christ and His Saints Slept [historical fiction]) and a nonfiction book on the Carolingians that I felt the sudden urge to revisit, I'm actually down to only two books that I'm currently reading.

This is the smallest number of books in my Goodreads 'Currently Reading' section that I've had in months.  I have a long list of books I want to read, but at the same time, I find that the majority at the top of the list are books in a series - Christian Cameron's 'Tyrant' series (these haven't been released as hard copy in the United States, so Kindle is my only option), for example, and the rest of Sharon Kay Penman's trilogy on Henry II.  Some books that I want to read - Fingal O'Reilley, Irish Doctor and the third book in the Discovery of Witches trilogy - aren't out yet; the latter doesn't even have a publishing date.  Also, as you probably noticed, most these books are also historical fiction.  That is my favorite genre, but still... I want to branch out.  This week I'm reading Craig Ferguson's book Between the Bridge and the River and Sir Walter Scott's Rob Roy and have requested The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (warning: site has sound) from the library.

What are your favorite reads right now?  Any suggestions?  And if you're on Goodreads, add me as a friend and I'll go peruse your reading lists!

Homemade History, Week 4

This week was an odd week for us, mostly because we decided not to do school on Friday and the kids had decided to squeeze any potential Friday work into the previous four days.  So I have a few things that we didn't do this week that we could have done in the extra day.  I'll put them in here, just in case you're interested.

Week 4 Topic:  Ancient Americas - Folsom, Clovis, Anasazi, Hopewells

Monday:  Reading and notes, as usual, from the Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World (pp. 124-129) and the Usborne World History Encyclopedia (pp. 176-177).

Tuesday:  I let the kids read their books for their papers and take notes.  They also did this on Thursday, and they're pretty close to being done with note-taking, at least from the library books.  Both kids also have a bunch of questions that the books didn't answer that they want to research on the Internet.  That'll probably show up on the schedule in the next week or two.  After they got done taking a few notes, we watched some movies.  The PBS videos that weren't working a couple of weeks ago actually are available now, and we watched probably five or six of the clips, and the kids want to sit down and watch some of the full episodes another day.

Wednesday:  Definitions (adobe, atlatl, culture, and population) and critical thinking questions for M1:  "Would you prefer to live in an adobe home or an Inuit igloo?" (He prefers a warm climate to a cold one.) and "What do you think it was like to hunt mammoth and other megafauna?"  (The videos we'd watched on Tuesday colored his answer significantly.)

Thursday:  This was our final day of work for this week.  I'd checked out a video on the mound builder cultures from the library, and we watched it.  It was about 30 minutes long, and while I thought it was fairly dry, the kids were upset when it ended.  So I guess they got something out of it.  They also added to their notes, as I mentioned.

Friday:  OK, we didn't do this stuff, but what I had planned to do was to take some of M1's arrows and try to use them as small throwing spears to see how difficult it was to hit a target.  I also wanted to hunt down some videos or web sites about how archaeologists know where to dig for sites relating to prehistory.  I still might do these at some point.

Next week:  The Ancient Americas - Mesoamerica and the Olmecs