The Journey of Stuff

Since my mom is getting out of the girl scout business, we spent last Thursday with all the girl scout families cleaning out and moving all the girl scout stuff out of our garage. My mom decided that since it was also Earth Day on Thursday, April 22nd, we could also show them a short documentary called The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. It is about where our stuff comes from, what happens when we throw it away, how it is affecting the environment, and how we are on a dangerous path which is using up all our resources. If you haven't seen this film, and you also have a lot of stuff, you can  watch it free on the Internet at : http://www.storyofstuff.com/. We also have her new book, The Story of Stuff, which includes all her research on the subject for 10 years.

The first problem with our ways of making stuff, is the fact that we are running out of natural resources to make the stuff with. Almost one third of the worlds natural resources have already been consumed and thrown away. I would really like to know how long it will take to consume the rest of the world's resources at this rate. It is obvious that our way of making stuff needs to stop. It is even more vital that we stop putting so many chemicals in our stuff.

Some products have been known to have up to one hundred thousand synthetic chemicals in them of which none have been tested with other chemicals we use in day to day life. Pillows, some blankets, and mattresses are good examples of this. They are doused in B.F.Rs (Brominated Flame Retardants), otherwise known as a Neurotoxin, otherwise know as a toxin that kills brain cells. A pleasant thing to rest your head on for eight to ten hours a night! Adding chemicals to products also ruins the environment. Although a lot of the chemicals leave the factories in the form of products, even more chemicals leave as pollution. The United States alone admits to releasing more than 4,000,000,000 lbs. of pollution each year.

The next part of the journey of stuff, is actually buying the stuff. This is often no problem for the average American as they buy stuff all the time, but who said we were really buying the stuff. Part of the documentary was about how we don't really pay for the stuff we buy. One day she was walking to work and wanted to listen to the radio so she went to Radio Shack and bought a radio, for five dollars. As she listened to it, she began to wonder how the radio could cost her five dollars. She learned that the metals were likely mined in South Africa, The Plutonium was drilled in Iraq, the plastics were probably made in China, and the whole thing was probably put together by some fifteen year old in Mexico. Either way, it made me think that I can't even get a bus ticket that would take me to the next city with five dollars let alone across several countries! I wonder how they have enough money to pay the workers.

The final problem with the journey of stuff is how we are getting rid of it. Corporations have long ago mastered the art of scamming customers. Two of their most useful ones are planned obsolescence, and perceived obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is when the corporations try to make an object break, become archaic, or useless as fast as they can. The sad part is, it works. Ninety-nine percent of all the stuff we throw away was purchased less than six weeks ago. Perceived obsolescence is when the corporation tries to convince you to throw away perfectly good stuff by making it look out of fashion. In other words both planned and perceived obsolescence means "designed for the dump." After the corporations have convinced you to throw away an item, it is then dragged out to the curb where it spends the night with all the other junk awaiting its fate. Our unfortunate can of garbage is then taken to a landfill that is just a big hole in the ground. The junk then gets either buried in the landfill, or burned in an incinerator and then buried in the landfill. Although both methods are extremely dangerous to the environment because of the possibility of any water in the landfill becoming leachate (an extremely toxic material made as water trapped in the landfill is blended into the toxic chemicals) and flowing into ground water supplies and poisoning them. Incinerating trash before burial is even more dangerous to the environment. Do you remember all those toxic chemicals that were in all that stuff that was just thrown out: the Neurotoxins and the B.F.Rs in the pillows, mattresses, and blankets? Well, they were just incinerated and the chemicals were changed into the super toxin called Dioxin (deadliest toxin known to science) under the high heat. So just throwing away stuff is not as simple as it seems.

In her new book about the story of stuff, an example of one of the things she does for school presentations is she takes a soda can, places it on the table, and asks the students, "What is it?" If the can is on the table, they say, "It is a soda can." Next, she throws the soda can in the trash can and asks the students, "What is it now?" If the same can is now in the trash can, they say, "It is trash."  She pulls it out...it's a can. She puts it back in...its trash. So trash isn't the condition of an object, it is whether or not it is in the trash can. Another way of explaining this theory is that what one person thinks is trash, may not be considered trash by another person. Also in her book, she talks about being in Bangladesh and seeing an old shampoo bottle she threw in the trash later the next day pulled out of the trash and with the addition of wheels it was now a child's toy car. When my mom looks in my room, all she sees is "trash." My favorite Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows poster = trash to her. My dad's slightly battered acoustic guitar = goodwill item or garage sale item or dumpster contents. Plans for a hydraulic engine system that I plan to earn a million dollars with = fire place food. Kirby pinata I made out of paper mache = art box, garage or any other place on earth (or not) where she will never have to look at it again. These are only a few examples. If I were to list all of the stuff she has an urge to give away, throw away, or light fire to, I would have to start a whole other blog.

However, this blog is about what our family is doing in our homeschool "mystery." So what we are doing this month is trying to figure out how we can stop environmental problems. We also went to Earth Day at the Chandler Environmental Education Center and International Migratory Bird Day at the Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area. I think it would be nice if people would celebrate Earth Day past April 22nd.

A Bad Week for Homeschooling PR

My uphill battle to educate the world about homeschooling has just become steeper this week due to our lovely media. In case you missed the Good Morning America piece on Monday, April 19th, and then their follow up piece on Tuesday, April 20th, here's a story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that includes video footage from both days on one page: http://blogs.ajc.com/momania/2010/04/23/should-we-be-unschooling-our-kids/. The firestorm of articles and blog posts has continued all week to the point where I am now being labeled a "child abuser" because I homeschool my kids! Thank you to The Huffington Post for again providing another perspective on a mainstream media topic with Lee Stranahan's article "Unschooling: How Good Morning America Got It All Wrong" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-stranahan/unschooling-how-igood-mor_b_543880.html. Things are going to get even worse for homeschoolers with the new E! show Pretty Wild which features the antics of three "homeschooled" girls and their many problems. I feel I must watch to see what our "poster children" are up to! I recently saw a list of 10 celebrities that homeschool their children: http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/04/10-celebs-who-homeschool-their-kids/, and I'm not sure how I feel about my company!

So where does that leave our family? Like most homeschoolers, we attempt to resist any labels about how we homeschool since we take from a variety of different philosophies (as I've mentioned in previous blog posts.)  However, I really feel the need to defend the unschooling movement right now because it seems so wrongly portrayed. In 2008, I had the good fortune to hear Sandra Dodd speak at a conference. Here is a link to her website: http://www.sandradodd.com/unschooling. For me, she was really the first one to put into words the many thoughts I already had about education. I really recommend her book, Sandra Dodd's Big Book of Unschooling. She has great ideas about homeschooling, but equally great ideas about how to be a loving parent.

From Sandra Dodd, I moved onto learning about John Holt (1923-1985), a former teacher who is often referred to as the "father of the unschooling movement." He wrote many books on the subject over the years, including publishing a homeschooling newsletter for 24 years, Growing Without Schooling. His book, Teach Your Own, is pretty much the homeschooling bible. These are just a few references about unschooling, and I personally feel that if you have kids, you are "teaching" them
so you may be interested in these books regardless of whether or not you're a homeschooling family. HOWEVER, if you are commenting about unschooling (and I'm talking to you George Stephanopoulos) then PLEASE do your research and find out what the basic principles are first. Really, who can argue with this concept: "We learn from everyday life experiences, and we learn what we learn when we need to learn it." It's really that simple. Think of times in your own life when this has proved true. There are endless examples. My friend homeschooled her son his entire life -- no formal schooling at all -- he is now 15 and at a public high school earning an A in his algebra class -- no prior formal math instruction -- and he's being recommended by his algebra teacher to go to math competitions representing his school. There's even talk of his wanting to become a math teacher in the future. So yes, it is true that homeschoolers can move in and out of the school system without difficulty. If you have ever voiced some sort of doubt about whether a homeschooled kid can go to college later on or hold down a job as an adult, I urge you to look at the evidence supporting these kids and open your minds to homeschooling.

Leif Ericson and The Great Golden Age

Think back to your family history. A long time ago, did one of your ancestors live in a different country? Or maybe a whole other continent? If so, how did you get here? This is a question that's been running on from generation to generation. Now we have the answer thanks to the explorers: people who dedicate themselves to finding the answer and discovering new places, finding new civilizations and food, and making a new, livable place for people out of their over-crowded cities.

Many people have heard of explorers. I know I learned about my first explorer in Kindergarten. It was Christopher Columbus. However, we're going farther back, to the time of the Vikings. In fact, the explorer we'll be focusing on was a Viking. His name was Leif Ericson, son of Eric the Red.

I had never heard about Leif Ericson until I got into this class at Eagleridge called The Golden Age of Exploration. In this class, we play games and do group projects to help us learn about the explorers. The project I am working on presently is were you create a report on one of the early explorers. We were told to make a group of two so I grouped up with my friend Katie who I did my last project with, mapping out were Ferdinand Magellan and his crew would stop to get food and what food they got there. We chose to learn about Leif Ericson. Since the class is only an hour long, and we were going nowhere from reading a book, we agreed to search our facts at home and combine our facts together the next time we met.

Over the past few days, I have collected lots of facts on Leif Ericson. I took my collected facts and turned them into a four-paged fact paper. Some of the things I've learned are:

• Leif Ericson was a Norse explorer thought to be the first to land in North America
• He was born around 970 C.E. in Iceland, son of Eric the Red
• Leif's mother, Thjodhild, had three sons, Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein, and a daughter, Freydis
• The main sources of Icelandic legends are the Saga of Eric the Red and the Saga of Greenlanders
• Leif Ericson died in about 1020 C.E.
  

I also learned many other things, but then this blog would become a book if I added them all and I don't want sore fingers. This is one of the great things about homeschooling is that if you find an interesting subject, you have plenty of time to research it. If you would like to learn more about Leif Ericson go to: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Leif_Ericson
I got all my facts on Leif Ericson on this website.

Happy April Fools' Day

Click on the article below for The Onion on school-homing:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/increasing-number-of-parents-opting-to-have-childr,17159/

The Mystery Behind Our Homeschool Mystery

You may be wondering how we go about writing all these blog entries. It's not all that easy. Everyone has different difficulties in life, and I often struggle with writer's block. Recently, it took me four hours to get a single paragraph on the page of my AIMS writing practice test, and I am more than certain that I don't have more than four hours to finish it.

So back to the question of how do we do it. We always start with prewriting and brainstorming ideas for our topics. Once we have six or seven topic ideas, we sit down at the dining room table and discuss what we came up with for topics and how they would work. After we have narrowed down the ideas to about two or three, we do a quick cluster graph to get specific ideas about what we want to write about. Next, we draw an outline about what's going to be in each paragraph and how we're going to write it. Finally, I sit down at the computer and actually write it. If an outline was written, then this should cause the writer almost no problems because he or she pretty much already wrote it.

As I wrote in paragraph one, I often struggle with writer's block. Along with this problem, I also have trouble keeping my writing organized, and Rebecca also admits she suffers from that flaw, too. However, this isn't her biggest flaw. Her biggest "flaw" is her love to write. Her latest idea at our little writer's workshop was the "Camp-outs and Camp-ins" idea. Instead of my mom's suggestion for her to write about the latest camp-outs and sleep-overs, she wanted to write about "all the camp-outs" in her life! Current camp-out and sleep-over toll estimate: 2,000,362. Another example of this "flaw" happened when she received a writing assignment to write a short story about The Water Horse by Dick King Smith and began writing My Night With the Loch Ness Monster which according to her was supposed to become a 24 chapter book until my mom told her to end this copy and write the book when it wasn't due in two days.                                                                                                                          

So now you know how we go about writing our blog entries, but if you do get stumped writing your own blog or whatever it is you need to write, we found two books to be extremely useful quick references and guides. The first is Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty which is possibly the world's most useful grammar quick reference ever made. She starts by writing the grammar rule, and then moves onto explanations of why you use the rule. She then shows you how the rule would make no sense the wrong way, and then writes a sentence using the rule with her characters Aardvark the aardvark and Squiggly the snail. We were lucky enough to go to one of her book signings late last year where we learned that she started her writing career by doing podcasts in her closet because her clothes blocked out background noise and the small space amplified her voice (one of the questions I remember best at the signing was if she got a tax deduction for her clothes because they supported her business.) While we were there we also bought her latest book The Grammar Devotional and got it signed by her. We then bought the book The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier by Bonnie Trenga who was invited as an up and coming local author. We also got her book signed. Another good writing book we found was Writing Smart Junior by C. L. Brantley which is a book about three characters named Bridget, Babette, and Barnaby going on an adventure with their fat cat Beauregaurd to save the lost art of writing. It also happens to be where we got the outline idea for our writing process.

So as you can see there is no longer much mystery behind how we go about writing these blog entries since I just told you exactly how we do it. I hope this will help you!

Camp-outs and Camp-ins

There are many ways to learn through every day life. You can learn from cooking, cleaning, camping, traveling, eating, playing, and just plain living.You also learn from making mistakes. My family likes traveling and camping so you can guess that it's one of our main sources of learning.

It's quite easy to learn from traveling and camp-outs because it exposes you to different things. While you're there, ask your parents if you can visit a local museum or visitor center or search the web before leaving. I remember when my family and I went camping in Oregon, and we visited the whale watching center in Depoe Bay and learned about whales and whale migration. Camping is also a great way to learn about nature. When I was four years old, I went to Lyman Lake with my family, collected leaves in a journal, and later tried to figure out what type of tree it came from. Now, I write in my journal or draw what I see while we're camping. It's great to write about my travels so I can remember them without a camera. The writing is also part of my schooling so I can learn correct punctuation, spelling, and grammar. I love camp-outs because of the learning.

One of the other things I learn on camp-outs is outdoor skills. Back in October of 2009, I went on a beach camp-out with my friends and family. I learned fire safety, how to escape from a riptide, how the tides follow the moon which determines high tide and low tide, and how shark attacks are very rare. Since we were camping in California, we also learned about the animals in that area. I also go on camp-outs with my girl scout troop. One of the first camp-outs I've been on with my girl scout troop was when we went to Lost Dutchman State Park were we learned that if you're camping during a lighting storm you should go inside a car because it has rubber tires, to always hike with a buddy, and how to put up a tent. On another camp-out with girl scouts we went horse camping. There we learned all about a horse's body, how to take care of a horse, and how to ride a horse. I also find myself very lucky when it's time to ride the horses. It started back when my girl scout troop went to ride horses for a badge workshop. I got to ride the best out of three horses, Callie. It happened again at horse camp when I was supposed to ride Sassy Gassy (who, by the way, I'm deathly afraid of) but she turned out to have a hurt hoof so I got switched over to Daisy, who I found to be the best horse on the ranch. None of this would have happened if I hadn't camped in the great outdoors.

You can learn a lot from camp-ins, too. Now you're probably wondering what a camp-in is. Sometimes it means to stay in a hotel, but in our case, it's sleepovers, slumber parties, etc. Most camp-ins teach you about what no to do. Sometimes they include eating too much sugar before bed and feeling sick the next morning, running around the house and hurting yourself, and staying up late then being crabby the next morning. The most important thing I've learned is that you should not eat more than five pieces of chocolate before bed and zero before breakfast, but don't get me wrong, I love camp-ins. All your friends coming over to play games and eat candy, it's so much fun, and you learn stuff, too!

As you can see, I have learned a lot from my camp-outs and camp-ins. It is very sad that the Arizona State Parks are closing due to budget problems. Many of these campgrounds that I have visited will be closing or have closed already. To learn more, go to http://www.azstateparks.com/.

How I Was Taught to Ski by Beaverman

By now I think I may have already mentioned this to anyone actually reading this blog, but last week I was taught to cross country ski by a beaver. Or a man. Or a Beaverman. I'm not sure.

It was an unexpected twist to the snow adventure that my son and I took last week. It all started after my "unsocialized" homeschooled son worked at the church rummage sale all day without his parents around: one was working and the other one was peddling Girl Scout cookies. My son was picked up on the front porch at 5:00AM, and he did not return home until 3:00PM that afternoon so he had plenty of time to check out the merchandise. He was assigned as a "floater" at the sale, relieving the other youth for their breaks, but found the "Sporting Goods and Hardware" section to be in particular need of help. Apparently, he spotted a snowboard being sold for the whopping price of $5. Having been taught from an early age never to pass up a bargain, he bought the snowboard, brought the thing home, and for every day afterwards was snowboarding in the living room. This is what happens when you are brought up as a desert rat. This is also what happens after Shaun White sweeps the Winter Olympics just weeks before the snowboard is spotted, and you are a homeschooled kid who has just spent the last month using the Olympics as the basis for geography, history, and science lessons. (I'm adding another link here for a good science site.) This is the second time we have used the Olympics in our homeschooling adventure; the first time was the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I was recently "organizing" homeschool stuff (ha ha, the task that never ends) and came across the 50+ page "Educational Kit" that I printed off during the Beijing Olympics (x 2 kids = 1 printer cartridge), and I'm just so thankful that we didn't get knee-deep in the Chinese "fuwa" mascots again because that was a lot of ink! Remember them? They looked like little Pokemon, but they were a fish, a flame, a panda, a bird, and an antelope. All color ink, by the way. So this year's Olympic studies concentrated in the online.

Anyway, time had come to take the kid to the snow so we decided to try cross-country skiing, but we brought the snowboard along. The thinking here was that if we got really good at cross-country, then we could take on the half-pipe later in the day. We are nothing if not optimists. The other thing at work here was the fact that the one and only time I went skiing, when I was just about the same age as my son, I ended up riding the ski lift downhill after a little mishap where I failed to get off at the top. I'm still recovering from the humiliation of arriving alone back at the embarkation spot with my skiing companion laughing his way down the hill. I will try downhill skiing again when I get good enough to ski to the top.

So we arrived at the Flagstaff Nordic Center all set for a day of "easy" cross-country skiing, and I encountered yet another skiing obstacle: I couldn't get the ski on. There were seven of us enrolled in the beginning class, and they all got their skis on prior to the instructor's arrival at the meeting spot. So when the instructor walked out there, all six of them were there (my own son had already disowned me), but I was about 20 feet away at the ski put-on place frantically trying to shove right boot into right ski to no avail. Here's where I first encountered Beaverman. I had heard stories about the infamous half-man, half-beaver Scottish hobo, but I hardly expected to find him in the Coconino National Forest teaching ski lessons (although stranger things have happened to me.) I'm sure it was him. When I master adding photos to the blog, I will post a picture of him, but he was most certainly my cross-country ski instructor, taking time out of his busy day munching wood to get me skiing. Thankfully, Beaverman also got my ski on.

But my troubles did not stop there. As it turns out, Beaverman quickly identified that I had not yet mastered walking. So while my six other classmates were already far ahead, Beaverman removed my skis, and instructed me to "walk around for awhile" until I got the feel of it. I have a long history of sitting in the back of the class, never asking questions, figuring stuff out for myself, etc. so I was really happy to have all this extra attention! It was so great to have come all this way to walk around in the snow! I think Beaverman sensed there was some hostility because after my walking demonstration he said, "Here, come give me a hug, you're doing great! What do you do for a living?" I said, "I'm an emergency nurse." To which he said, "Oh, well there are no lives to save here today, we're just having a good time." Hmph.

Things did get better, and as soon as I got my skis back on, I pretty much ditched Beaverman. At the end of the class, my son and I did a loop trail, on skis, and it was really fun. So I'm recommending cross-country skiing. Thumbs up. We also stopped at Montezuma Castle, and we're still pondering how it is that Montezuma Castle and Notre Dame Cathedral were built the same year. It's mind boggling. Here are some photos to compare: