European History & Culture Sampler: An Epic Homeschool Field Trip

After talking about it for several years, last fall we finally followed through on one of our parenting goals: international travel with Caitlyn at an age when she’d be old enough to understand and appreciate what she would see and experience but young enough that she’s not too cool to hang around with her parents.   It’s a big world out there (and we only managed to see a small portion of it this time) and getting to see some of it firsthand is good for building empathy, experiencing diversity, and appreciating your own privileges.  It’s harder to “other” people …

Recent Field Trip Revue

A few years ago, I stopped keeping up with the blog, especially when it came to writing up all the various homeschool outings. Now that I’m trying to resume writing on a more regular basis, the backlog of happenings is so enormous it’s tempting to say never mind. But here’s a tossed salad of recent outings in an attempt to get back on ye olde bloggin’ horse. (Yes, metaphor mixing is a specialty around here.) Our triad of science students followed up a lesson on bacteria, fungus and the role of both in the Great Cycle of Resources with a …

Kids Art Week Wrapup

It took us more than the prescribed week, but Caitlyn and I did finish Carla Sonheim’s Kids Art Week video lesson series. Here’s a sampling of my favorites of our results: I painted this cross-eyed owl in the style of Jean Dubuffet. The process used salt as a resist with the watercolor, something I’d read about yet never tried (not really surprising since the amount of watercolor I do is pretty much zero). I really like the resulting texture! The black is an acrylic over the watercolor, something I doubt I would have thought to do on my own (mixing …

Kids Art Week, Day 1

Caitlyn and I are following along with Carla Sonheim‘s 2016 installment of Kids Art Week. Five days of free how-to art project posts with each project inspired by the work of a famous artist. Caitlyn’s a good artist already, having produced some nicely drawn dragons last December. I like the idea of making more art myself, but I find myself frequently stymied by the blank page. One would think I’d have some clue how to handle that since I write a fair bit. Maybe it’s that I can call the writing “journaling” and string together free-association thoughts until there’s something …

Taffy Pulling, Because Science!

It started with an idle comment. It ended up a many-houred end-of-school-year sugar-coated event. This goopy stuff is homemade salt water taffy. An exploration of sugar, chemistry, and the relative strength of various arms. I gave the kids (Caitlyn and some homeschool friends) a short lecture about atomic structure, molecular bonds, solutions (and why it’s not a reaction), and what it means to be supersaturated. I’m never really sure how these little talks land with the kids; Caitlyn always says very positive things but the others are often so quiet I’m not at all certain anything sticks. I’ve decided to …

May’s report

It’s official: individual detailed reports of what I’ve been doing are completely beyond my capacity at the moment. So, here’s the overview of what we did in May: We joined some friends at LUCO‘s Chamber Music Cabaret. There was a piccolo trio, and Caitlyn got pulled from the audience to read raffle ticket winning numbers. Caitlyn and I joined some of our homeschool friends for another field trip to a farm. This time we drove across the mountains to Little Wing Farm where we spent the day touring the orchards and generally traipsing around. Caitlyn has been having a digression …