Some Revolutionary trips!

We're just finishing up our first year of TruthQuest History (AHYS 1) and I have to say that it has been a resounding success. We've gone from the early explorers through the Revolution and have met fascinating spies, heroes, traitors, generals - it's been great.

And now, since it is spring and we live in NY, we are finally getting outside!! On Friday, we joined several families in a trip to the Old Stone Fort, a church-turned-fort that saw a little action in the Revolutionary War.

Yes, that's the actual cannon ball hole - from 1780! Pretty amazing.

There were several other buildings on the grounds, one of them a one-room schoolhouse where the kids each had their own little slate to write their lessons.

Over the weekend, we visited the Oriskany battlefield, site of the bloodiest battle of the Revolution. There is a monument with names of the dead and many signs giving a play-by-play of the battle. Please excuse the iPod photo - we forgot our camera again.

One sign reads: "British and Indians here ambushed the Tryon County Militia as they were marching to the relief of Fort Stanwix (Rome.) General Nicholas Herkimer, though wounded, rallied his forces and directed the fighting until the enemy fled. Defeated at Oriskany and unable to force the surrender of Fort Stanwix, the British retreated to Canada. These reverses, with their defeat at Saratoga, thwarted Burgoyne's plan to divide the colonies by conquering New York." Herkimer later died at his home following an unskilled amputation of his leg. We are actually scheduled to go to his home for another field trip in two weeks!

I'll keep you posted!

Mrs. Katz and the Passover

Last week, we learned all about Passover with a sweet Five in a Row book, Mrs. Katz and Tush. In the book, an elderly Jewish lady is befriended by a neighbor family and eventually adopted as their "Bubee." She tells the boy the story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt as they share the Passover Seder together.

We covered many of the FIAR lessons, including:

• "Love your neighbor as yourself." - we memorized Luke 10:27 and used it as copywork and cursive practice.
• We read the story of the Exodus and made really cute (I know that just seems wrong, but they really are cute) little books of the 10 plagues that I found at Homeschoolshare.com
• A yeast experiment - mix yeast and sugar in a bottle of warm water and put a balloon over the top. That worked so well that we had to secure our balloon with electrical tape.
• We talked about patterns, tried drawing our own and looked at these National Geographic patterns in nature.
• We learned all about Passover with The Matzah That Papa Brought Home.
• We learned about Warsaw, Poland during WWII and why Mrs. Katz left in The Cats in Krasinski Square.
• We learned quite a few yiddish words, ate bagels and attempted to polka. :)

I like to have a picture of the books to show you. However, Amazon apparently no longer supports just the picture of the books without the purchase information. I am not trying to sell anything here. Of course, I'm not against anyone using these links, because I will get a commission, but that isn't my reason for putting them there.

What we've been up to

Tapping our 2 (yes, two) maple trees. The buds are just starting to open so the season is over, but we had enough sap to make almost 2 quarts of maple syrup and we shared some sap with another homeschool family who had fun making their own syrup too!

Little Man has been a heart-making machine. He strings the pony beads onto pipe cleaners and I twist them together for him.

Classifying animals. I believe the cars, being metal quadrupeds, are in their own category.

Reading about the Revolution! We're all learning so much! Did you ever hear of Sybil Ludington? I know I never did. She was a 16 year old Paul Revere and, apparently, has just had a movie made about her daring ride. We're enjoying TruthQuest History so much that we will probably just continue it all summer.

Learning to read!! Yes, Little Man is putting his letter sounds together and reading 3-letter words! He's enjoyed playing games on Starfall and this week, we'll be getting out the beloved Bob Books.

Learning about Passover - but that will have to wait for another post.

Z-Man doing his math in his pj's. Life is good.

Good Reads

We do quite a bit of reading in our homeschool. We read books all together in the morning - FIAR, science, history, biographies, books on whatever we happen to be studying. Then, in the afternoon, while Little Man takes a short quiet time, Z-Man and I read more advanced books (or "books without pictures" according to LM) from our TruthQuest History guide. Z-Man usually has something he's reading on his own as well.

In my planning notebook, I keep a list of all the books we read throughout the year. Recently, I came across Goodreads.com, a more high-tech version that I can keep online, complete with pictures of each book. There are many other features that we haven't used yet, such as to-be-read lists and even an option to email interested friends and family each time you finish a book.

Z-Man has his own account, but I sign in and enter the books for him because they advertise books on the main page and also show what others are reading. There have been a couple of times that there were some inappropriate images there. Once you get into your own list, though, there are no ads or other images and he can scroll through all the pictures of the books he's read, rate them with one to five stars and even write a review. I think he was kind of surprised to see how much we've covered this year.

Now if I could just get to my own reading...

Summer, maybe?

Little Man is the octopus

Little Man is The Octopus. Remember Paul the oracle octopus that accurately predicted the World Cup soccer games last summer? Here is Little Man filling out his NCAA basketball tournament bracket.

The octopus worked very diligently on this for about half an hour. Since the lines were a little too small for him to write the whole team name, he wrote the first two letters of his picks. As of 8:45 Saturday evening, the octopus has picked completely accurately for three out of the four regions. The rest of us have not been so successful. I suppose more than one psychic invertebrate mollusk per family is too much to hope for.

In case you're wondering, our five year old says Duke is going all the way.

Simple Machines

As part of our Iditarod-inspired arctic study, we read the FIAR book Very Last First Time, about an Inuit girl who is finally old enough to gather mussels under the sea ice at low tide - all by herself. Little Man was nervous when she wandered too far and the tide started coming in, but it turned out alright.

There are so many great lessons in this book:

• crisis thinking and what to do in an emergency
• tides
• Inuit culture
• maturity and having to wait for things
• handling fear
• inuksuks
• and simple machines.

At the end of our time with this book, we did a mini-unit on simple machines. We used the book, Experiments with Simple Machines, which had some fun and very simple activities using mostly things we had around the house.

We also watched a Bill Nye video on simple machines and found an online game here.

And finally did some experimenting with Little Man's gear set.

The Sub

Mark stood in as substitute teacher yesterday and today while I battled the stomach flu.

He and the boys read about the liberty bell, King Solomon's temple and did a Mark Kistler art lesson. They also learned all about March Madness and filled out their brackets for the NCAA tournament. Right now, they're getting a propane tank so we can start boiling our sap to make maple syrup. (We have two trees.)

He's such a fun sub that I'm worried they'll be disappointed that I'm feeling better!

But I am very, very grateful.