Eagleridge Update

I thought I should give you an update on what has happened at our homeschool enrichment program, Eagleridge. On Wednesday, we officially started our third week back to Eagleridge and on Monday, we will officially end it.

We will start with my first class, music. In music we talked about body language. Over the past weeks we had been talking about communication. The first week we talked about slit drums, and the second week we talked about talking drums. One of the things we did was take a white sheet and put a light behind it so we could use body language to say something. It was fun, but the thing I was supposed to show was quick and tiny and to do it, I had to shuffle across the floor really fast on my knees, and I got a bad rug burn.

In my second class, P.E., my P.E. teacher worked us to death (not literally.) For our introduction, we played "Home Base." For our fitness, we did "Race Track Fitness." That's where we died. We had to run around the gym, and then come back to our cone to do push-ups or sit-ups or something like that. I went around the gym about 16 times and it's a big gym. Then we had to jump rope for the rest of the class. At the end, we got to play cage ball though.

In science we looked at samples of human skeleton muscle, cardiac muscle, smooth muscle, and blood on microscopes. Just before music extras, one of my friends asked me if I would take her to the bathroom. At our new campus, we have to take a buddy to the bathroom and the bathrooms are only unlocked between classes and at recess. We missed 10 minutes of class because something like 15 kids were in there. We missed getting singing solos, but since we wanted solos, too, the teacher made them duets.

After a lunch of mini corn dogs, applesauce, and chocolate milk, and recess, my class and I went to art class. In art we started working on our calligraphy poems. We got the poems from last week's composition work of diamontes. This week in composition we're working on cinquains. Here are a few I wrote:

Autumn

Colorful- Leaves

chills, crunching, rustling

Beautifully colorful around me

Fall

Eating

Delicious- Food

munching, chewing, crunching

Defeating my agonizing hunger

Devouring

Music

Graceful- Notes

playing, listening, affecting

Telling me a story

Songs

In computers we reviewed the tools in Word. Then I went home. Now my work is officially done.

Poetry Is Music

We have had a pretty busy summer this year, and we haven't had very much time for blogging. We started the summer with a camping trip on the beach with my best friend and his sister. Rebecca and I also went on a camping trip with our grandparents and cousins.We've also done a whole bunch of other activities this summer. One of these activities was a concert at which Natalie Merchant was promoting her new album Leave Your Sleep. I really liked this concert because all of the songs were poems set to music, and we have been doing poetry in my homeschool composition class and at home. It is very interesting how this form of songs works, and because it is very interesting how she used certain instruments for certain parts of the songs.

The songs on this album were of a collection of poems either by children, for children, or of children and turned into music. Some of the poetry that she used was The Dancing Bear by Albert Bigelow Paine, Bleezer's Ice-Cream by Jack Prelutsky, and The Sleepy Giant by Charles E. Carryl. All of the songs came with a short biography about the poets. There were some bad reviews about the concert that we read before we went. People were complaining that the concert was more like a poetry lecture as opposed to a concert. However, I found these people she talked about very interesting. One of the most interesting was Albert Bigelow Paine, who was a close friend of Mark Twain, and he eventually wrote his biography.

I really like how Natalie Merchant turned these poems into music because poetry is meant to sound like music. Music is essentially made up of rhythm and sound, and poetry is exactly the same. Just last week, we were doing limericks in my homeschool composition class, and Mrs. Pittman was talking to us about how rhythm is part of poetry by the way things are accented. The week before that, we were doing haikus which all have the same rhythm made up of the same number of syllables per line: 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and then 5 syllables again. Shakespeare's poetry and stories are good examples of using rhythm in poetry because they were all written in iambic pentameter. Iambic Pentameter is a form of rhythm which alternates using 5 stressed and unstressed syllables per line. These forms of poetry are only three examples of the many ways that rhythm turns poetry into music.

It was also very interesting which instruments she used for the album. At the concert there was a clarinet, a bass clarinet, a saxophone, a violin, a cello, a double bass, a tuba, two guitars, drums, and a keyboard. Some of these instruments she only used in certain parts of the songs. For example, in the song, The Peppery Man, whenever she said "The Peppery Man," one of the guitarists would echo it in an unnaturally low voice while the double bass player played three or four notes on the tuba making it sound hilarious. I know this sounds confusing, but all of the people on the stage were able to play multiple instruments and some sang back up. It was also really funny what was said by Natalie in between songs. During the beginning of the second song, the speakers started making a weird static sound which they called, "The dragonfly in the Dodge Theater air-conditioning system." 

I am also impressed by this album because it took her only six and a half years to turn all 26 poems into songs. I hope this post explains what we have been doing this summer, and that poetry is music. I can't wait until Natalie Merchant's next concert here.

Highlights of My Summer

Over the summer recently, I've been busy. Between studying comets, to watching the tide pools, to going back to our homeschool enrichment program, we haven't had much time for blogging.  So now, I'm going to give you the complete overview of everything that has happened since my last post, er, sort of.

We're going to start by going in chronological order which means first you'll learn about our trip to the beach.  Back in July, I went on a seven-day camping trip with my family, my friend Brenna, and her brother Devin. On the second day, we went to go play at the beach. We had learned  most of what we knew about riptides from our first camp out at the beach last year. Actually, I had been to the beach before, but I only learned about riptides last year. I had learned that riptides are waves that go at an angle to pull you out to sea and the only way to escape it was to swim sideways. We learned on this camp out though that you can tell where riptides will happen by how dark and choppy the water is. On another day we went to go see the tide pools. Devin found a crab and caught it. We also saw a crab eating. It was funny because the crab was shoveling food into it's mouth. We also saw some sea anemone, mussels, and many other creatures. On the last day, one of my mom's old friends came over to our campsite for dinner. She video taped a video of us pretending to be caught in a tsunami. We do a different video every year of one of the dangers of the ocean to scare Devin and Brenna's parents. It's quite enjoyable.

On the 11th of August, I started going back to my homeschool enrichment program, Eagleridge. We have moved the school to a new campus, so it's going to take some getting used to. On the next day, August 12th, was the Perseid meteor shower. At nine pm at night we went into the front yard with our folding chairs to watch the shower. Earlier that day we had played a game of "five questions." "Five questions" is a game my mom came up with to help us learn. To play, she comes up with a subject and writes down five questions about it. Our part is to answer the questions. The subject this time was the Perseid meteor shower and our five questions were:

• When is the Perseid meteor shower?

• Will we be able to see the shower from here in Arizona?

• What causes a meteor shower?

• How often can we see the shower?

• Why is it called Perseid?

We printed off some papers, read, and surfed the web to come up with these answers to the questions:

• The Perseid meteor shower is on the night of August 12th.

• Arizona is the best place to see the shower because we'll be hitting it head on.

• A meteor shower is caused when Earth enters a cloud of debris left behind every time a comet nears the sun. The Perseid Shower is caused by the comet Swift-Tuttle.

• The Perseid Shower occurs every mid-August.

• The shower is called Perseid because the meteors seem to radiate out of the constellation, Perseus.

The few meteors we saw were fascinating. We didn't see many though because we couldn't see the constellation, Perseus. We couldn't see the Perseus constellation because there are too many street lights in our neighborhood. In fact, one time a person crashed into a street light by our house and part of the pole came crashing into our house, but that's a whole different story.

Gifted Education

I want to scream so therefore I will blog. The phone rang this morning at 8:02AM while we were sleeping in after a late night of sitting in lawn chairs in our front yard watching the Perseid meteor shower. The viewing coming after a week of immersing ourselves in meteors, comets, and all things astronomy. I didn't recognize the phone number so I wandered out to listen to the answering machine located in the kitchen. It was the school district wanting to know if Rebecca would be joining them this year in their "ELP." ELP stands for "Extended Learning Program," and from their own website, the program, "is designed to challenge intellectually and academically gifted students." One of my first questions is why these programs are always being disguised in covert acronyms: MGM - "Mentally Gifted Minors" (that's from WAY back in my elementary school days), GATE - "Gifted and Talented Education," and TAG - "Talented and Gifted Education." I'm sure there are more. I do believe it is the first step in the weed-out process by making the acronym so confusing that the ordinary parent cannot figure out what it is.

I mean no offense to the nice teacher calling to inquire about Rebecca, but the message itself made me laugh when she said, "We're practically on the other side of the world from you," in relation to where the school is located: distance to the school = 22 miles, distance to my work = 38 miles, distance to Mike's work = 29 miles, distance to the pediatrician = 27 miles, etc. Seeing a pattern? If 22 miles away is, "the other side of the world," then I would like to know how this program plans to broaden my child's scope of the world? So I looked again at the handout they sent home with Rebecca on the first day back to her homeschool enrichment program. The program meets once per week, all day, and some sample sessions are: "Snap It" - take pictures using iPhoto complemented with creative writing (CHECK: Does making her own vacation DVD this summer using iDVD count? How about writing and publishing her own posts for this blog?) "Fold It Up" - learn about Japanese art and origami. (CHECK: I think she earned a girl scout badge for origami because I remember the two of us one day making oodles of origami creatures to take to a meeting. How about our recent trip to the Phoenix Art Museum and checking out the Asian Art display? Her haiku notebooks she keeps?) "Flying High" - the principles of flight and designing a structure that will survive launch into orbit. (CHECK: Challenger Space Camp? The rocket she built and launched with her dad, the cub scout leader?) I'm sure these activities would be great if she wasn't ALREADY doing them! If she needed a break from the boring classroom where she was already way ahead of the rest of the class, then I would sign her up. However, here's where I want to make another case for homeschooling: I designed the curriculum with my child's individual needs already in mind!

New day and I'm still trying to figure out if I'm challenging my "gifted" child. I've decided to analyze what we're doing for signs of "gifted." Here is a true sample window into my world this morning:

• Around 8:30AM wandered out to find Rebecca on the couch reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. She's excited about reading this book because she wants to partake in a book club with her friends, and this is the book they're reading. "Did you eat breakfast?" I say. "Yes, I had Nutella on toast, watermelon, and milk," she says.
• I make tea, and check to see if I'm up on Facebook Scrabble (a.k.a. "Mommy's teacher lounge.")
• Patrick wanders out and pours himself a bowl of Raisin Bran and a glass of orange juice. He sits at the table and starts reading his 933-page Philip Pullman novel that he selected for himself at Half Price Books earlier in the week. I laugh at parents struggling to find "A.R." (Accelerated Reader) books from the school's list when this process is so easy, and I want to brag for a minute: they both had near-perfect reading comprehension scores on their standardized tests without ever taking a single "A.R. comprehension test."
• Everybody's done with breakfast, and we decide it's time to start math. We spend nearly an hour on the following problem from Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra by Stanley F. Schmidt, Ph.D.: "Snow stopped breathing (he is an army sergeant that has kidnapped Fred, our main character through the math book, who is a five-year-old college math professor), and the nurse indicated to the doctor that there may be something wrong. The doctor concurred and ordered that Snow be given some medicine. What he said to the nurse was, '30 cc of 25% cough medicine,' figuring that if Snow would cough, he'd have to start breathing again. The nurse ran to the cabinet and found two bottles. One of them was too weak. It only contained 20% of the cough medicine by volume. The other bottle was too strong. It was 35% of the cough medicine by volume. The nurse had to mix the two together to get 30 cc of 25% medicine. (A "cc" is a cubic centimeter. That's about the volume of a small sugar cube.) How much of each were used?" This math question led us to pull out a bottle of Robitussin, a bottle of Axe (we didn't have another cough medicine), and a medicine syringe, as we did a physical demonstration of what was being asked. They made legends, devised an equation, added the values, discussed the hypothetical possibility of whether or not this medicine would solve Snow's medical issue, and they argued like all good 10 and 12-year-old siblings do. In the end, they solved the problem.
• After math, they went to work on writing blog posts for Our Homeschool Mystery since we have a loose goal of one blog post per month, and they haven't done one for August yet. While they write, I write too, as I am doing right now. I can't think of a better way to motivate them to write, then for them to watch me do it, as well.

As part of my research for this topic, I have been looking into what a true "gifted curriculum" entails to see if my morning fits the bill. I've written before about the feelings of self-doubt that homeschooling parents face from time to time. I think when anyone does something slightly different from the norm, there are always those times when you ask yourself, "Am I doing the right thing?" There's a lot less to think about when you're in the middle of the herd of sheep, following along, instead of going solo on a new path. So I went to the National Association of Gifted Children website, and clicked on "publications" which led me to their quarterly magazine: Parenting for High Potential. I'm sure this is a fine publication, but I can't get past the title. My question is: high potential for what? High potential to learn? A gifted child with a learning disability doesn't have any higher potential to learn than a non-gifted child. High potential for success? How do we measure success? High potential for happiness? Does having a "gifted education" make you any happier in life? Does being "gifted" make you any happier in life? One of the most prolific books I have ever read was Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I'm not going to go too in-depth into this book other than to say: read it! He has many specific case examples of how getting along with others, empathy, and self-discipline have more to do with our futures than IQ.

I asked Rebecca if she wanted to go to the gifted school because ultimately we have a democratic household. Her response: "I would miss my friends." I said: "But maybe you could make new friends?" Her response: "The kids in that class are all nerdy boys, one annoying girl, and one sassy girl." Well, that sounds fun! After her first day back to her two-day-per-week enrichment program, the first thing she wanted to tell me when I picked her up was how she led the class around to all their rotating classrooms because she had "memorized the map" and knew where everything was (they are at a new campus.) This was the most fun part of her day. She enjoys being the leader. She likes it when her peers ask for her help with things. Why would I want to put her in a class where she is no longer the leader? When she gets in the "real world," will she not be with all walks of life -- followers and leaders? So . . . for all those people that criticize homeschooling for segregating children, I say to you: school segregates children! Homeschooling allows kids to learn at the pace and level appropriate for each child, and they can then make friends the way the rest of us do: through common interests, clubs, groups, church, sports, and shared social time together.
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Back to School

I am a spectator at this sport. I merely watch seemingly normal people lose their minds for one week every year as children return to school. Today was the first day back to my kids' homeschool enrichment program (a.k.a. "school two days per week") so we did pull out a backpack, throw some pencils and paper in it, grab a water bottle, and attend "Meet the Teacher" yesterday, but that pretty much covered it. They do have to change classes all day and find their classrooms, buy lunch in the cafeteria, and follow rules, but that's about it. They left the house dressed like they looked yesterday. They felt the same way about life as they did yesterday. Life is as it was yesterday -- before . . . (insert dramatic music here) . . . "BACK TO SCHOOL!"

My husband and I made the mistake of going to Walmart last night to look for a pool cover for our above-ground pool (a.k.a. "the ongoing chemistry set.") You would think that finding pool supplies in August in Arizona would be easy, but first you have to make your way through the entry maze of school supplies that occupy the first five aisles of the store and also a bin conveniently located at each register. I ended up deciding that I would take this opportunity to look for my special four-color ball-point pen since nurses must sign orders in red and chart in black, and who wants to carry two pens? I never did find my special pens, but after a while, I gave up looking because of the zombies standing in each aisle blankly staring at school supplies lists. Seriously? You don't already have these items at home, or you haven't picked them up already? They appeared in the stores two months ago!

When I got home, I decided to research what is being requested of kids these days on these school supplies lists. It's been four years since my kids attended regular school, and the last time I remember buying school supplies, we showed up to back-to-school night with two bags full of tissues and Ziplock baggies because that's what the teacher wanted, and I wanted to get in good with her early on. She was holding the key to my child's future so if she needed tissues, I would provide. As it turns out, tissues and baggies are still on most of the school supplies lists for school districts whose lists I found on the internet. I like to think that the key to a good education starts with a high quality sandwich bag. The rest of the items on these lists were common sense. I had to look up what a Duo-Tang was -- that teacher has got to be a forward-thinker as that term for folder is now passé. I saw several lists which specifically asked for "an old white sock." Do you know what this is for? It's for wiping the dry-erase board because only "an old white sock" will do. I can see myself specifically buying white socks just for that purpose.

On the topic of other clothing needs, I learn from Seventeen magazine that the hot back-to-school fashion trend for 2010 is leggings, boots, and oversize shirts which makes perfect sense when the forecast high today is 107°. I really don't understand why kids need new clothing to go back to school. What did they wear yesterday? Were they walking around in their underwear? The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells me that 77.5% of kids ages 6-17 years have a working mother. This leads me to believe that the majority of these children were in some sort of supervised childcare over the summer while their parents were working. Did they attend naked? Can they not wear the daycare clothes to school? I looked up the dress code for one of my local schools, and I was so impressed by this PDF, that I feel the need to put a link here: http://www.mpsaz.org/brinton/faqs/files/dress_code_1-22-2010.pdf. Really, they've thought of everything complete with photo graphics! This is an elementary school! I particularly like the part prohibiting the body piercings and tattoos, and I don't think they mean the Cracker Jack variety. Okay, so maybe the back-to-school clothes craze is for uniforms. Well, the National Center for Education Statistics tells me that for 2007-08 (their most recent statistic), only 18% of public schools require uniforms, and the percentage raises only slightly when you factor in all schools, public and private. So I don't think the average $600 per American family going towards back to school items is being spent on uniforms. The Back-to-School shopping craze was invented by retailers, and it remains the second biggest money-making time of the year for them, second only to Christmas. Here's where one must realize that education in America is already married to big business. Case in point, Monday's first day back-to-school lunch menu in my district included pizza and "Elf Grahams." Hmmm . . . I wonder who the "Elf" is??? Keebler? Do you know of any other cracker elf? We couldn't just say "crackers" on the menu?

Thankfully, we have Oprah to sort this out for us with a slide-show on how to "Beat the Back-to-School Blues" http://www.theonion.com/articles/back-to-school,16852/#1 Whoops! That's The Onion, but doesn't it look like the same slide-show!? Here's Oprah's: http://www.oprah.com/relationships/How-to-Ease-Back-into-the-School-Year/7#slide! Back-to-School is the most important thing going on in the world right now. That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it! We're not over-exaggerating or anything here . . .