Caitlyn, education, field trips, homeschooling

Recent Field Trip Revue

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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 …

community, current events

Probably not an Intended Consequence

We live in a very mixed neighborhood.  Approximately half of the homes here are market-rate, home-owner occupied; the others are subsidized public housing.  This neighborhood is mixed-everything: income, age, religion, ethnicity. Many of my neighbors are immigrants.  Community events can have up to seven translators (all talking at once).  Talking a walk in the early evening is a marvelous olfactory experience, with dinners from many places all under construction at once.  Current events are sometimes very personal around here. In the wake of  Travel Ban 1.0, some of our community members drafted a letter to our immigrant neighbors.  “We know …

Art

Sporadic Art Things

 

As expected, I’m really bad at keeping up with my daily art assignment. Sometimes I get bogged down in the never ending to-do list. Sometimes the prompt doesn’t spark much inspiration or enthusiasm. But even if it sometimes takes me a while, so far I’ve come up with something for every prompt. My prompt this morning was to create a variation on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Folks over in the Facebook groups for the class posted photos of their poems with drawn or painted bees. I decided to let my version just be about the words, and I enjoyed just …

Caitlyn, current events

Part of the Resistance

I could call it homeschooling, but it feels way more important than that. We’ve always tried to be open and up front with Caitlyn about political issues. We’ve talked voting, been to a campaign office, watched debates and news clips, discussed issues, gone to caucuses. The urgency has gone up a lot in the last week, and so now we’re participating in 10 Actions in 100 Days. Caitlyn has written her first postcards to her congresspeople. (Yes, we’ve rounded her age.) I’m sick that it’s come to this, but I’m proud of my girl. I’m doing what I can to …

Art

Building Backgrounds

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    It’s not quite a portrait of Wasabi, but it might be.  He’s large and grey, and he sits on windowsills and watches the world go by, kind of like this cat. This was lesson #8 from my year-long online art class, and the focus was on the technique for the background.  A couple of the projects so far have focused on the background, something I haven’t really given a whole lot of thought to in this context.  The lessons have been about the technique, with tiny mentions of things we might do on top of them.  It’s interesting …

Art, Introspection

Without a plan

 

  The prompt for this lesson was a quote on creativity from Alan Alda (an actor known for M*A*S*H).  I’ve extracted just the part that feels most personally important: the “not quite knowing what you are doing.”  I’m so accustomed to having a plan, to knowing where I am going, how I’m getting there, what I need for the journey – literally and figuratively, acting from a place of confidence.  But it’s been clear to me for more than a year now that I need to do something new, and I’ve been totally stymied.  I don’t have a sure-fire plan …