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.

The Case of Our Flawed Super Market

Earlier this week, we watched a movie called Food, Inc. This movie is a documentary about where your food really comes from. One of the problems it addresses is animal abuse. Before I saw this movie I had no idea that people are feeding cows corn instead of grass. Nor did I know that it was bad for them, but it turns out incorrect feeding is one of the causes of more than 73,000 cases of e. coli deaths per year. These mass farming facilities changed the way cows are fed just so that the cow gets fatter quicker and the company saves a few bucks. Another problem involving animal abuse is what the companies are doing to the chickens. Because companies like Tyson want their chickens to grow faster, they genetically modify the chickens. This action causes many of the chickens to grow so fast that their bones cannot keep up and many of them can't even walk. The chickens also suffer organ failure from this rapid growth. To add on to their sad life, the chickens are being grown in chicken houses so crammed with chickens there has to be an elevated board in the middle to get around.

However, you may be thinking why are the farmers treating them this way. When a chicken farmer is employed, they raise the chickens the way the company wants them to and they have to submit to their demands or have their contract terminated. This means that this company can say that in order to work for me, you have to have this certain piece of equipment. This might not seem like a problem, but the company does not pay for the special equipment forcing the farmer to go to the bank, get a loan, and then buy the equipment out of the farmer's own account. So chicken farmers are just modified versions of slaves. Another problem with our food system is crop farmers being sued for reusing seeds which have a patent on them, such as Monsanto's genetically modified, pesticide-resistant seeds. Sometimes these seeds spread unknowingly, but Monsanto has seed police looking for them.

Some things I learned from the website www.foodincmovie.com to help change these problems include: buying organic or sustainable foods with little or no pesticides, buying from your local farmers market, reading labels to find out where your food comes from, supporting the passage of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus and menu boards, and demanding job protections for farm workers and food processors ensuring fair wages and other protections.

Creepy Coincidence

Earlier this month, we saw the play Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. The play was exactly the same as the original version except this version takes place in America after the Civil War. The costumes and set design were made to look like America during the Civil War of 1861-1865. The director of the play made these changes to help better understand how these wars do more damage than good. Before we saw the play, my mom printed off a study packet from Southwest Shakespeare Co.. The study packet contained a lot of interesting information about the play, including a section about the similarities between Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln. It turns out that both of them were assassinated by men whose first names started with J and last names started with B: Junius Brutus and John Wilkes Booth. Both of these assassins had a conspiracy of 8 men helping them. Also, both Caesar and Lincoln were assassinated when they were 56 years old, both men were Republicans in a country that did not like the thought of being ruled by a king, both were killed in theaters (Lincoln in Ford's theater and Caesar in Pompey's theater), both were assassinated after a civil war, and both had premonitions of their deaths. I think it was a good play, although I don't think the guy who played Cassius was ever told to say it not spray it.;)

My Life in the PJ Club

If you read "Checklist to Start Homeschooling: First I Shall.....", you know I said I would tell you why PJs are very important on our list to start homeschooling.

We didn't start out that we wore our PJs all day, it became a habit later on. We would wake up in the morning and think What's the point in getting dressed? We're going to stay home all day. Nobody's visiting us. You know what, I'm just going to stay in my PJs all day. So, like we said we would, we stayed in our PJs all day and we kept doing that 'til it eventually became a habit.

How did we come up with the name "The PJ Club"? Well, one day we were doing homeschool when I noticed we were all still in our PJs. I told my mom and she said "Yah, it's like a PJ club around here." I thought about that. If this was a PJ club, we're going to need lots of PJs. So I added them to our important list. That's one great thing about homeschoolers, they can stay in the comfort of their home and pajamas as long as they want. Or just until it's time to head to the grocery store.

P.S. The only main reason we get out of our PJs is if we are going somewhere. You may also find we do not answer the door on homeschooling days because we are still in our PJs. :)

The Math Book

Our homeschooling math curriculum is no ordinary math book, it's a story. Yes, we have broken every law in the universe saying the only way to teach is sitting a student in front of a boring textbook until brain death occurs, but we have been learning out of a book series about a five year old college math professor for three years and so far no SWAT team has tried to blow down our door. This book is called, Life of Fred. In the first book, Life of Fred: Fractions by Stanley F. Schmidt, Fred (the five year old math professor) is walking to his first class of the day when he sees a student heading to class on a bike. Fred then notices how much faster he could get to the math classroom if he owned a bike (Fred is only three feet tall and walks slowly) plus he could wear a cool helmet. So Fred finds an ad in the college newspaper and goes to buy a bike were the owner changes the price to the exact amount Fred has in his account (overcharging him for the bike), and then has it shipped to his office. Once back at his office, he finds the package and remembers that his scissors have rounded tips. Instead, he tries to use an 18" knife he bought for his friend Alexander's birthday. He   drops the knife on his foot, his friend Betty takes him to the hospital, Alexander meets them, and the trio go out for pizza. There, Fred gets a job, lights fire to the place, sits on the roof of a car going through a car wash to clean all the soot off of him, finds there was a marshmallow in his pocket, wipes the gooey mess on a random cat, (this cat then ends up brushing up against a little girl and gets stuck to her leg) and finally remembers his bike. At home, he picks the tape off the box and finds that it was filled with junk. Not even parts of a bike. After a trip to the corner for some crying, he finds a forty-button remote, and decides to build a robot.

Every chapter has a "your turn to play" which is a set of math questions about the chapter. After every 4-6 chapters there is "The Bridge," which is ten questions about the past six chapters. After 32 chapters (One book) you come to "The Final Bridge," with questions about every thing you learned. Before we found this book, I    was using an ordinary school math book and would work from 10AM-6:30PM trying to do a single 40 problem page until my mom found a math book series that was just like a book. I found it a lot easier to stay on task when I realized that instead of 40 problems on decimals or 40 division problems, it was ten or so word problems that use all different types of math. Flipping through it, I noticed that instead of just showing you wordless "examples" of one way to do it, it actually told you how to do the problem, and "The Easy Way" to finish it. I tried it out and found that instead of eight hours a day it was taking me less than one. We are currently at the third book (beginning algebra) and have set deadlines for each book so we can finish them before I start going to high-school. Thanks Stan!

Checklist to Start Homeschooling: First I Shall......

Well, there are many things to do before you actually start doing the schooling part of homeschooling. For some people it's buying the supplies or becoming an official homeschooler, getting a place to do the homeschooling, or, like us, pulling the kids out of school. I don't quite remember which came first for us, being pulled out of school or becoming an official homeschooler. For us, I think, they happened at the same time. It's quite simple to become a homeschooler. All you have to do is print out a form, sign it, then turn it in to the county courthouse. So we did just that. Yay! We're now official homeschoolers! Now we need to get our supplies. I was thinking we would take a long trip to one of those cool teacher supply stores that are jam-packed with stickers, (yay!) but we don't only use teacher supply stores. Instead, my mom decided to buy off the internet. Sure, now we don't have to go to a jam-packed (with people) store but I didn't get my stickers. Did my mom get everything we needed off the internet? Of course not! You can't get everything off the internet! We get a good amount of the stuff we need from places like Wal-Mart at back to school time (including my stickers.) "But what did you need?" you're probably thinking. Here's a list to answer that question, if you asked it:                                                                                         

Math books - Life of Fred by Stanley F. Schmidt, PhD                                                 

Writing books- Writing Strands by Dave Marks

Science books- McWizKid Science by Larry D. McClellan

History books and movie- What Your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Grader needs to know and various movies and TV shows from the History Channel

Play tickets- for various plays at various theaters                                                       
                                                                                                                               

Homeschooling classes- at various places                                                                 

Notebooks- one of my personal favorites

Journals- another of my personal favorites

Folders- to hold our many reports and subjects

Pencils- another favorite

Glue sticks- to glue things together of course
                                                                                                                                
Tape- to tape things together                                                                                     

Paper- pretty essential

Colored paper- a colored version of paper

Colored pencils- our colored pencils are erasable and come from Crayola

Crayons- not erasable, but still from Crayola

Computers- I'm pretty sure mine's not from Crayola (I'm on Frankenstein, Patrick's on Lydonstein - we all have our own computers that my dad put together)
                                                                                                                                
Markers- not erasable, but washable..... from Crayola                                             

Printers- they have nothing to do with Crayola

Rulers- from various places, maybe even some from Crayola!!!

Good books- from the book store...... not Crayola

Printable learning materials- from our computer to, oh, I don't know, our printer (not Crayola, or at least I don't think)

Helpful computer games- now tell me, where would you find helpful computer games?
                                                                                                                                
Stickers :)- yet another personal favorite

and most importantly,
Pajamas (I'll explain in "My Life in the PJ Club")- um, the type I like.

Once you have all these things you are ready to become a homeschooler, sort of.





                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                   











                                                                                                                                

Eagleridge: What is It?

Mondays and Wednesdays are not the same old wake up at ten and take your time through math, writing, and music.


On Wednesdays, we wake up at 7:00, get dressed, have breakfast, and then head to Eagleridge via my best friend Devin's mom. Eagleridge is pretty much just a school for homeschoolers. It's all the ordinary classes (except math) just without homework, and you can choose which days you go. Once we get there at 8:30 AM, Rebecca goes off to some class I don't know of and I go to Physical Education. There, we usually do fitness then move on to the lesson (the sport were working on) and then move on to Science. Every month we work on a different type of science. This month we've been working on the physics of flight. My next class is Student Council. This year I ran for treasurer, lost, found an organization for our Christmas toy drive, was home sick the day we decided on a different organization, seconded the motion to make cards to sell for a fundraiser, tried to make a motion to do crazy hair day again this year, failed unanimously,and my idea for the school dance was the chosen. After that, my next class is Yearbook. In there, we are currently making houses on Google Sketch Up because there is not much else to do, but all we did was made pages for the yearbook. (I made the student council page.) Next, we have lunch. After 30 minutes of recess, we have Composition, Computers, and finally, Art. School ends at 3:30 PM on Wednesdays.


On Mondays, I wake up at 6:30 AM, get dressed, and then again get picked up by Devin's mom. The day starts at 8:00 AM with Medieval History were we are currently writing business letters to the teacher about applying to NASA to go back in time to retrieve lost history. My next class is Compass Learning Math which is an online math program. Next, I have Chess Club where we learn strategies and play chess. After Chess Club, I have Sports Math in which we are currently doing fantasy football. Next I have lunch. After lunch, I have Pre-Algebra. In here it is a lot like school just made easier by the best teacher in the world. Next, I have Physical Education which is just like on Wednesdays. After that I have Microsoft Office in which we do different projects using Microsoft Office. Finally, I play clarinet in Band, my last class of the day. School ends at 4:30 PM on Mondays.


One of the most frequently asked questions is if I miss anything from when I used to be in school. My answer to that is Eagleridge has all the stuff that I might miss from school!