Julius Caesar, Loch Ness Monsters, Olympics, and Komodo Dragons

Wow, it's been almost a month since I've blogged! In January, we began reading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. We are using the "No Fear" version by Sparknotes. On one side of the page is Shakespeare's version in iambic pentameter which gives it a sing-song quality. On the other side is a more modern translation that is easier to understand. We were laughing at Act One, Scene One where they translated Flavius's words to, "Get out of here! Go home you lazy men!" I wouldn't have guessed that Shakespeare would write something like that. We also saw the play, and we're going to see the movie, or at least everyone else is. I have no intentions on seeing the bloody, tragic Julius Caesar again, not that I didn't like it. I also wrote a paper on Mark Antony's speech. I will share it with you as soon as possible.



I have been doing a lot of writing recently even though I haven't let you see it yet. I wrote a story called "My Night with the Loch Ness Monster" for my "Fantasy Fiction" class at Eagleridge. It's about a girl who finds a Loch Ness Monster egg and helps get the baby monster back into the loch it came from. I also wrote an article on Dian Fossey in my Composition class, also at Eagleridge. The next article we'll be doing in my Composition class is one on "The White House Gang," Teddy Roosevelt's children. The latest thing I did in my "Fantasy Fiction" class was write a summary on the book The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith. I'm also writing two stories right now. One is unnamed, but the other one is so far called "Terri Cooper." This blog is also one of my at-home writing projects. I want to share all of them with you. I will let you see them..... once I'm done with them.


While we have been doing all this writing, we have also been learning about the world around us. Since the earthquake in Haiti to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, our month has been filled with world geography. We even have our world thinking day celebration in Girl Scouts coming up! How do we get our answers to our questions? Well, one of the books we have been using is The Handy Geography Answer Book. It gave us answers to questions like: what is the fertility rate (average children per women) in Haiti? 4.7. What is the fertility rate in the U.S.? 2.1. What languages do they speak in Haiti? French and Creole. What about in the U.S.? English and Spanish. We can even look up populations and laugh at 4.7 of a person being born. Because of the Olympics, we looked up a lot more places than just Haiti and the U.S. We looked up just about every country that participated in the Olympics. We also decided, because we're learning about the world, to start learning German. I love it. I've been teaching it to my best friend and now we speak German(or Deutsch, pronounced doy-tch) very loudly in the car. My mom has lots of German books and just got a clearance ($2) German phrases and expressions calendar with a phrase for every day. I don't know what's more fun: teaching the phrases to my best friend Brenna, learning the phrases myself, or saying them with Brenna.

On Friday, February 19th, we went to the Phoenix Zoo to draw animals with a homeschooling art class. Even though we used only one type of pencil, we bought three different types: B, 2B, and 4B. Our teacher, Ms. Brown, sold us our special sketchbooks and gum erasers last year when we took a class with her. Some of the tips she gave us were to: look for basic shapes in the animals body, squint your eyes to see details better, look for the outline of the animal, and instead of looking at your paper, look at the animal and let your brain take control and focus on what the animal really looks like instead of what it's supposed to look like. We drew giraffes, zebras, ducks, komodo dragons, and elephants. Brenna went too. It was so much fun drawing pictures and laughing at our horrible imitations of these more realistic looking animals. It was truly a unique experience.

An Ordinary School Day

One of the advantages to homeschooling is that there is no set time you need to finish it, but you can go at your own pace. We usually start math around 10-10:30, and end around noon. We then have lunch, and begin work on writing. We then end around 1:00 and move on to another activity like geography, science, or history. We do this selected subject until about 2:00 and then move on to practicing our instruments. While Rebecca's practicing piano, I'm practicing clarinet or guitar, and when I'm practicing piano, Rebecca's practicing flute. This lasts until about 3:00 when we consider our self done and then have free time for the rest of the day. Rebecca usually spends that time writing books and short stories, while I usually spend my time reading or playing on the computer.

Although this is what an ordinary day of homeschooling is like, we almost always have some sort of Shakespeare play or science center homeschool class at least once a month. Most of the science center classes revolved around physics, like the Cat-A-Pult class where you were literally flinging a rubber cat trying to hit a target using a makeshift catapult, but there was a chemistry class, a robotics class, and a scientific method class. Along with all these classes, at home, I also made an illustrated, wall sized, periodic table, and recently, I built a guitar fuzz distortion pedal with my dad. I would say that the science activities I'm doing at home now are much more fun and advanced than when I was in school. When I was in second grade, I made a science fair project for the school science fair on how icicles are made. I enjoyed this, but the only other student participant was a fifth-grader who had done a project on how if you run a magnet over sand, little black particles will appear. After about three minutes of walking around the "science fair" we left the display board there and came back for it later.