Story of the World, Volume 1 timeline

We're done reading volume 1 of Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of the World. It was the second time we read it, and this time through we made a timeline of the most important events and people. It took me over a year to make the yarn, cardboard, and paper framework. Crafty, I'm not. But my kids don't seem to care. Here's a picture of how our ancient world timeline turned out:

Every time my children go downstairs, this is over their heads.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the red dragon in the lower right...that is actually Alexander the Great riding his horse Bucephalus. Dd8 is currently obsessed with dragons.

Sixteen

My experience is that little children very much want to belong to their parents. From the time they start crawling, there is an invisible rubber band connecting them to their mother or father, and when it gets stretched too far, they go looking for the missing parent. As they get older, they understand that their parents can be gone for a while and then come back. But they still tend to prefer being with parents to not.

Around age eight or so, most children have started to spend more time doing their own thing. For my children, this typically means reading, playing outdoors away from the patio door, drawing, or making an art store (so that I can pay them real money for artwork they made with craft supplies that I bought...children are such hopeful entrepreneurs).

Then adolescence hits, and they start being able to reason as well as adults, even though their executive function and impulse control are still developing. 

I remember an occasion when the judge I clerked for interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl in his chambers during a custody dispute. He explained to her that he was the ultimate decision maker, but that due to her age he was willing to hear her input on which parent she should live with and why. No, she wasn't an adult, and he made that clear; however, he also accepted that she was close to adulthood and deserved to be treated accordingly. In the end, he decided to have her live primarily with the parent that she wanted to live with.

When I was fourteen, my mother signed me up for a college class one summer and bought me a city bus pass. Then she basically turned me loose to study and go around town on my own for two months. When I was nearly seventeen, she let me go to college full-time. Yes, the university was only three miles away from her house, but I lived in on-campus housing. Both of those experiences promoted my ability to function in the adult world, and I'm grateful for the appropriate levels of freedom she granted me as a teenager.

While doing yard work recently, I was sad to overhear a neighbor boy matter-of-factly tell a visitor how he was allowed to bike on just a few of the streets in the immediate vicinity. It sounded like he never leaves our neighborhood on his own, not even to just grab a slushee at a convenience store. I believe the boy is fifteen or sixteen years old. His homeschooling parents subscribe to a very "protective" (i.e., isolating) way of bringing up their children. Don't the parents realize that part of their job is to prepare their children to be adults? No matter what they do, their children will age. Whether the children mature into adults capable of doing their own shopping and independent living seems to be at risk. 

Sixteen year old people are able to drive and/or marry in much of the world, so it disturbs me to see this neighbor boy being restricted as though he were a much younger child. I've never seen any sign of criminal or bad behavior in him that would justify the near imprisonment he lives in. 

ITBS results

Dd10's Iowa Test of Basic Skills results are back. Her composite score was 96th percentile. It's about what one would expect for a bright child who has never tested as "gifted."

Her math computation subsection--the lowest--was 50% (i.e., about half of fifth-graders do better than she did at basic arithmetic); it's the only section she didn't finish, which wasn't surprising due to her longstanding mental block on math facts. She knows her math facts, but she doesn't know them quickly, so under pressure it's easy to make mistakes.

All of her other subsection scores were middle or high range, so I'm pleased. The test results appear to accurately reflect her abilities and knowledge as observed by me during homeschool time. Now to deliver those results to our school district's homeschool office, and we're done with testing her until 7th grade. :)

Footie pajama fix

When a person has five children of the same gender in a row, "passing clothes down" is an integral part of the parental job of providing sufficient clothing. Especially when it comes to the babies and toddlers, who really don't care what they're wearing unless they're on a dress-up-like-a-princess kick.

Footy pajamas are a popular item in our home, but they always wear out first on the bottom of the feet. Then the little toes stick through, making the children uncomfortable. I came up with a fairly quick way to get another couple of years out of footy pajamas when that happens. Here is how:

See the hole at the toes? Not fun to wear.

Turn the pajama foot inside out and place over base a piece of cloth that covers it entirely. 

Pin the cloth to the bottom of the pajama foot.

Sew it on. It doesn't have to look great because it'll be inside the footy.

Trim off excess fabric.

Turn right-side out and trim up anything that needs it. Done!

Nearing the School Year's End

In 1.5 months the children's charter school, which they attend part-time, will let out for the summer. That is usually about when we also end our school year. Our main accomplishments for the school year thus far are as follows:

As a family, we are nearly done reading Volume 1 of the The Story of the World; Attila the Hun just died of a nosebleed. In about a month, we will be done with the biology videos, worksheets, and webpages I searched out to make up a life science course for the older two girls. My husband is taking the older children out on bike rides now that the weather is warming up.

Dd10 has made good progress in beginning Latin, understanding German in comic books (Asterix and Obelisk in German), playing a song or two on the piano and trumpet, memorizing the Goethe poem "Der Erlkönig," making key word outlines of paragraphs and fleshing them out again, memorizing math facts and learning to manipulate fractions, typing, basic logic, and reading the Bible (she finished the New Testament and is now reading the Old Testament...that should keep her busy for a few years...). She is only halfway through her Math 5 book, so she will get to work on that all summer. We did her standardized testing a week ago and are waiting on the results.

Dd8 is ahead in math by half a year, reads chapter books about dragons for long periods of time, and has legible--if unlovely--print and cursive skills. She finished reading the Book of Mormon. She doesn't really like to do copywork--English or German--but a little bit each day is making a difference. She can play a tremolo on our Filipino banduria, an instrument similar to the mandolin.

Dd5 is doing beginning phonics. She can read some words on her own but is not yet "a reader."

Our primary schoolwork goals for the rest of the year are as follows:

• Finish biology
• Finish history and make the timeline for the past year's history look good
• Get as much math done as possible
• Help dd5 become "a reader"
• Enjoy spring!

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This post is part of the 471st Carnival of Homeschooling posted at http://everybedofroses.blogspot.com/2015/05/carnival-of-homeschooling-for-may-472.html.

Pot Protest

Here in Colorado, a majority of the voting populace has approved a little libertarian experiment: legal marijuana for recreational use.

I hate it.

I drive my children to school and pass a billboard showing a lovely birthday cake and marijuana leaves and reminding everyone that they must be 21 years old in order to partake. Talk about setting up a "forbidden fruit" scenario. My husband saw another billboard that showed a pretty outdoor scene, but it wasn't clear what the ad was about; once he got closer, he could read that it was a reminder that only private, not public, use of marijuana is allowed.

Today in the thrift store aisle, an employee loudly complained to another co-worker about how a female in his life doesn't appreciate him smoking "the janga" and argued that pot is no worse than tobacco.

My children read billboards and go to the thrift store with me. They see all the green "plus" signs for the medical marijuana dispensaries, sometimes with sign wavers dancing in front to draw in customers (there can't possibly be enough people getting non-recreational health benefits from pot for so many dispensaries to stay in business). Children, including mine, are very impressionable, and this legalization experiment is bad for them. It normalizes the use of an herb that does terrible things to adolescents while making it extraordinarily easy to obtain.

A new book, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults, has a sobering (to those who aren't high, at least) chapter on marijuana, which discusses how THC concentrations in pot have more than doubled since the 1980s. Here are some quotes from that chapter:

THC disrupts the development of neural pathways. In an adolescent brain that is still laying down white matter and wiring itself together, such disruptions are far more harmful than if they were taking place in an adult brain....

In the past five years, several studies have shown that verbal IQ especially is decreased in people who have smoked daily starting before age seventeen, compared with people who smoked at a later age....

One of the largest studies followed tens of thousands of young Swedish soldiers for more than a decade. The heaviest users--that is, those who said they had used marijuana more than fifty times--were six times as likely to develop schizophrenia as those who had never smoked pot....

Another little-known fact is that levels of two abrasive compounds in marijuana smoke, tar and carbon monoxide, are three to five times greater in cannabis consumers than tobacco users. Smoking five marijuana cigarettes is equal to smoking a full pack of tobacco cigarettes, according to the American Lung Association. Marijuana smoke, which users inhale and try to hold in their lungs for as long as possible, also contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than cigarette smoke contains....

Teenagers are especially vulnerable to the drug because they are at a critical stage in the development of two of the most sophisticated parts of their brains--the frontal and prefrontal cortext--and these are precisely the parts most affected by marijuana.

Despite the research showing the harm done by marijuana, users of it refuse to accept that there could be anything wrong with their beloved plants. The fact that a few seizure-prone children are helped by marijuana oil doesn't make all the other documented problems go away. Perhaps they've never met someone with schizophrenia, but I have a close family member suffering from it (probably unconnected with drugs), which means all her family--especially her children--suffers, too; it's easy for me to despise a "recreational" substance that increases the number of schizophrenics in this world. There's nothing fun about a mother who is unable to care for herself or her family properly due to that particular mental illness.

Pot advocates remind me of the vociferous defenders of pit bulls that show up in website comment sections whenever a little old lady has been mauled to death yet again. (Interestingly, the only marijuana grower I know of has a pit bull. I wonder how large the overlap in the population of pit bull owners and marijuana fanatics is.)

It's discouraging to see how many adults are so enamored of their weed that they would flood communities with it despite the proven risks to young people. If your state has a movement to legalize pot, fight it now until the backers give up and move to a state that has already lost that fight. It's probably too late for Colorado, but you don't have to follow in our miss-steps.