Flooding

We live in El Paso County, Colorado, and we have had horrible wildfires for the past two years in this area because of drought conditions. Now we are experiencing a heavy "monsoon" pattern, and two people have died due to flooding in the past couple of weeks. Tonight we're facing flash flood warnings all over the region. We think we are safe in our neighborhood, but we haven't lived here very long. It's going to be a long night for our emergency service workers. We need water, but not all at once!

New old piano

We moved and left our old spinet in the prior residence, so we've been without a piano for almost a year now. I found a free piano on craigslist, and some friends helped us move it into our house six days ago. It is a Bremen console and was neglected and unused for twelve years before we received it. We think it's around sixty years old.

First, I took all the wood panels off the front of it so that I could access the dusty areas. I cleaned out the entire interior (including under all the keys) with a vacuum cleaner. Then I roughened up a damper on a string that was buzzing, glued a broken hammer shaft together (a drinking straw made that an easy fix), and started fixing (sanding, inserting and gluing felt, etc.) a couple of keys that were sticking.

After I'd had the piano for a couple of days, I realized that one of the keys was making an audible, annoying click. I researched for hours on the internet to get ideas as to what could be causing it. I ended up removing the action (the main part that holds all the hammers and dampers and thousands of other parts that allow the piano to have the sound and abilities it does) three times and replacing a couple of felt and leather pieces, but nothing worked. It was so frustrating! And besides dealing with this obsession, I started up our normal homeschool schedule last week. Housework suffered quite a bit.

One funny thing about searching for answers to this question was how often Bing's "safe search" settings kept me from viewing search results. It turns out that piano parts have some names that can set off protections: hammer butt felt, catcher buckskin, capstan screw, jack, etc. For each note, there are at least 57 parts that can go wrong.

What seems to be working now to fix the problem notes (more than one key ended up clicking) is alcohol and Vaseline on the hammer butt buckskin for each offender. These small, hard-to-access leather pieces are very old and hard, and the alcohol and petroleum jelly are a cheap way of softening them. So far I've spent three dollars at the dollar store for supplies during this piano restoration project (emery boards, petroleum jelly, and little brushes) and a few dollars on food at Del Taco so that I could take a couple of their drinking straws home without feeling like a sponge; everything else we already had at home (yes, I had piano tuning felt and leather scraps lying around in cupboards).

The project isn't done yet, but the end is in sight. Then we get to find out if the piano can hold a tune. If it can't, then at least I learned a lot about pianos....

Update: Vaseline did NOT do the job for the worst offenders. I think I have a loose catcher shank causing the click on at least one of the notes. It wiggled right out, so I am sanding it now and will reglue it.

The difference between rate and quantity

One of the strengths of science-based medicine is that it can look at large numbers and learn from trends. I find myself frequently frustrated in conversations about vaccines and homebirth by the inability of many to recognize that no matter how many people they know who have had an adverse reaction to a vaccine or had a poor outcome at a hospital birth, they don't have a good handle on the relative safety of forgoing vaccines or choosing homebirth unless they look at the overall rates of negative events.

Rates are what should be looked at when deciding risk. Certain diseases used to kill a high percentage of people, especially children; now that we've mostly gotten rid of those diseases in the developed world, it's understandable to also want to eliminate the risk posed by vaccines (which is real, though quite small). But if you forgo a vaccine, you merely exchange one risk--that of vaccine side effects--for another--that of getting the disease. Which risk is greater? That's the real question, and it calls for an individual answer by each family. If a person is always going to be hanging out in the developed world with people who are never carriers of a communicable disease, than they don't really need vaccines. I want to see the wider world and take my children with me, but I don't expect everyone to make the same choices I do. Homeschoolers tend to interact less with the general public, and given their specific situations, the risk of vaccination to some families might outweigh that of contracting the disease. They should realize, though, that all it takes is one child in their circle of like-minded friends to have been infected at a potluck by a dish prepared by a recent traveler carrying polio, and an outbreak could happen with very sad results. On the subject of homebirth, I already discussed in a prior post that evidence out of Oregon and Colorado shows that homebirth as presently practiced in those states increases the rate of neonatal fetal demise by at least 2-3 times, so I won't discuss it more here.

Many in the homeschool community embrace holistic/alternative/complementary medicine. It's no surprise; we are people used to bucking authority. The placebo effect is real and well-documented, and I don't doubt that some people find real benefit in utilizing CAM (complementary and alternative medicine). In general, alternative medicine does no harm as long as it doesn't lead people to turn away from needed medical measures that would serve them even better than a placebo. Too many, though, who dispense anti-medical-establishment advice spread false information to bolster the alternative medicine they embrace. I have seen a promoter of essential oils claim on their website that the tetanus vaccine does no good if given after a puncture wound, conveying a completely wrong description of how tetanus attacks. What if someone believes that, doesn't get the tetanus shot for an injured child, and the child ends up with tetanus? That's risking an 11% fatality rate from a mostly preventable illness.

Today (the reason for this post) I saw someone on Facebook tell several other homeschoolers that the chicken pox vaccine causes more fatalities than chicken pox. I pointed out that a hundred people a year used to die from chicken pox and asked whether there are more fatalities than that from the chicken pox vaccine, and she had no answer to it. (I did my own brief search and found no reported fatalities from the chicken pox vaccine.) She instead linked to an unsubstantiated anti-vaccine article by an author of CAM books, and then the FB conversation turned into "the CDC is government so it is untrustworthy, some doctors told me I'm doing the right thing, we are open to education and enlightenment but let's stop talking about this now before feelings get hurt, etc." Whose feelings? Theirs? I ask for proof, and they give me answers that sound like conspiracy theories. If they feel good about avoiding vaccines for their children, that is their choice. I can understand it without agreeing or making the same choice myself. But they shouldn't spread false information to feel even more confident about the different risks that they have chosen.

Americans need better education in math and statistics, be it delivered in or out of a school building. While I'm wishing, perhaps a little more epidemiology, too.

Indonesia Week

Last week was our last week of "summer break", so we studied our last country: Indonesia. We watched videos on the internet and from the library about Indonesia, I cooked some chicken coconut curry with yellow rice one night, and the girls had some library books about Indonesia to read. Otherwise, we didn't do much due to health issues.

The whole family learned so much focusing on one country/state per week during this summer break. Getting to try food from different parts of the world was great fun and stretched my cooking skills. We plan to do this again next summer!

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part seventeen)

Back to Dorothy Sayers and her essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning". The next segment I'll cover is the following paragraph:

It is difficult to say at what age, precisely, we should pass from the first to the second part of the Trivium. Generally speaking, the answer is: so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to pertness and interminable argument. For as, in the first part, the master faculties are Observation and Memory, so, in the second, the master faculty is the Discursive Reason. In the first, the exercise to which the rest of the material was, as it were, keyed, was the Latin grammar; in the second, the key- exercise will be Formal Logic. It is here that our curriculum shows its first sharp divergence from modern standards. The disrepute into which Formal Logic has fallen is entirely unjustified; and its neglect is the root cause of nearly all those disquieting symptoms which we have noted in the modern intellectual constitution. Logic has been discredited, partly because we have come to suppose that we are conditioned almost entirely by the intuitive and the unconscious. There is no time to argue whether this is true; I will simply observe that to neglect the proper training of the reason is the best possible way to make it true. Another cause for the disfavor into which Logic has fallen is the belief that it is entirely based upon universal assumptions that are either unprovable or tautological. This is not true. Not all universal propositions are of this kind. But even if they were, it would make no difference, since every syllogism whose major premise is in the form "All A is B" can be recast in hypothetical form. Logic is the art of arguing correctly: "If A, then B." The method is not invalidated by the hypothetical nature of A. Indeed, the practical utility of Formal Logic today lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference.

Until recently, I was wondering how I would know that my oldest child was beginning to transition from the "Poll-Parrot" stage to the "Pert" stage, which would let me know that I needed to start transitioning my Trivium-influenced instruction of her from Grammar to Dialectic. She seemed quite rooted and content in the Grammar stage, and it seemed that it might be another year or more before I had anything to say on the subject of the second year of the Trivium, that is, the Dialectic.

Then a few weeks ago, dd8 started showing an ability to analyze that she had previously lacked. On an embarrassing topic, of course. She looked up from her DK Big Book of Knowledge page on human reproduction and said, "Mommy, I know why males have to be bigger than females. It's so that they can...", and her childish guess at the mechanics of human intercourse followed. I responded with one of those honest-answers-to-her-question-without-telling-her-more-than-she-needs-to-know-at-her-age and then deflected her to a discussion of nonhuman mammalian intercourse for my own nerves' sake. So sue me for being a cowardly procrastinator. Deflection is a valuable tool, and she is only eight years old. Can she just apply her new-found analytical abilities to doing her laundry properly now?

As for the pertness, that's starting to show up, too. Last week, when I told her to set plates on the table for a meal, she asked "How many?" I responded, "One for each person." She then got a little smart-alecky look on her face and asked, "One for each person in the family or one for each person in all of [our city]?" The Besserwisserchen*.

I have some logic workbooks, and I plan to cover formal logic with her. But I will wait until she is fully ready for the Dialectic stage. We still have lots to cover while she is in the last part of the Grammar stage.

*German for a little smartypants.

Back to School

I wrote up the girls' school schedules last night and posted them on the bookcase with the school books. Then I sorted the school books and put them into slots depending on which child will be using them this year. I'm almost ready for Monday.

There is a used curriculum sale (free for vendors and buyers!) in my area tomorrow where I hope to pick up some more materials in the subjects of Colorado History, Art History, Printing practice (i.e., copywork), English (having a variety of reading textbooks on hand is helpful), and Music (song collections for children). It would be great if I could also pick up an activity book for volume 4 of Story of the World. I don't really need more in most of these subjects, but it would make my life easier and keep me off the computer quite as much if I could locate a few good finds.

England Week & Germany Week

The last two weeks were dedicated to learning about England and then Germany. However, both countries got neglected due to visits by relatives, a very large family reunion, and illness. We did watch a lot of Paddington Bear videos during England Week. Last week we watched several German cartoons on YouTube (there are some lovely Grimm fairy tales on this channel), and on Friday we finally got out of the house and made it to a German bakery for German chocolate and baked goods (I am simply not brave enough to cook with lye, which is necessary to make real pretzels).

Jackie Chan Adventures

During our China Week, I let the children watch a season of Jackie Chan Adventures on Netflix. They love the show, and so I've been letting them watch the rest of the series. The little girl, Jade, always wants to go on adventures with Jackie Chan, her uncle, but he usually says, "No, Jade, you have to go to school/read your school book/do schoolwork/etc." She answers back, "But isn't it better to have this real experience and learn from it?" I agree with Jade wholeheartedly. :) Except for the getting-herself-into-dangerous-situations and general-disobedience-despite-dealing-with-ruthless-enemies, I applaud her fictional character's ability to sneak herself into real-life learning experiences.

Third Grade Testing Results

I finally retrieved the test results for dd8; she took the CogAt/ITBS as a third grader a few months ago. The results: she excels at science and problem solving, still hates basic math operations and so struggles to do them quickly, and has a solid foundation in basic language arts skills. Oh, and she doesn't listen very well (...like we needed a test to tell us that...why listen to her parents when she has more interesting things going on inside her head?).

No matter how many times I point out that she'll be hindered in her scientific pursuits by her poor calculation skills, she still finds math facts boring and oppressive and doesn't want to apply herself to learning them. In the two weeks left before formal school starts, I'm going to find a video game that she loves and that will firmly fix basic arithmetic facts in her head! I need a game with the Kratt brothers or cute baby sloths or wild felines; she doesn't care about fairy tale scenes or space invaders. Anyone know of a game that would fit the bill for us?

Update: My husband has a work-provided iPad that he often brings home at night, so I downloaded some free apps for her to use in this never-ending quest to not hate math facts. She has to play them for at least an hour a day for the next two weeks. Poor child, I know.

Not already!!

My children's charter school sent out an email today inviting us to sign up for beginning-of-the-school-year parent-teacher conferences. Crazy. We still have nearly three weeks of our summer plans, thank you. But we'll squeeze in the conferences as we did accept the obligation.

Minnesota Week

Because it's important to learn about our own country, too, we dedicated one week this summer to learning about Minnesota. The choice was easy: my husband's parents live there, and they came to visit us this past week. We ate tater tot hotdish (casserole) and bars (cookies baked in, not on, a pan) but didn't try to make lefse, seeing as we lack an enormous griddle and other specialized equipment. We watched How to Talk Minnesotan on YouTube and laughed at ourselves saying "you bet" and "whatever". We got Swedish meatballs at IKEA in honor of the Scandinavian settlers of Minnesota. But we didn't do much serious intellectual work. We were pretty much on vacation from schoolwork. Uff da!

Back in the Classroom?

I know teachers are just humans, and I think there are many great public school teachers. I don't link to this article to criticize all teachers but rather because I dislike how the school district resolved it: this teacher should not be interacting with high school students again so soon. There is no reason to think he won't engage in the same behavior on the sly again. And yet some still wonder why many parents don't feel they can trust the public school system with their children....

Australia Week

What a great country to study! Australia has such unique wildlife and so much material accessible to us because it is in English! Here are some of the things we did to celebrate "Australia Week":

• Check out and read/view library books and DVDs (about aborigines, British convicts, Great Barrier Reef, etc.)
• Netflix: The Rescuers Down Under, The Man From Snowy River, Strictly Ballroom, Wild Kratts episodes about kangaroos and Tasmanian devils
• Food: Pavlova, Vegemite, oatmeal cookies, meat pie, carrot/cheese/raisin salad, fish & chips, Lamingtons 
• Dress up as marsupials 
• Culture: Have a playdate with an Australian friend, who showed us a kangaroo skin and bullwhip and shared a late morning "tea" of Australian-style sandwiches (creamed corn/baked beans and cheese inside!) and lemon cordial (I used this recipe as the basis and substituted citric acid for tartaric acid)
• Craft: Aboriginal dot art
• Music: Listen to Australian aboriginal musica and folk songs, make a didgeridoo with PVC pipe and decorate it with permanent marker
• Computer resources - http://www.abc.net.au/abcforkids

Pavlova

We've been learning about Australia this week. I tried two times to make a pavlova meringue. The first time it came out much too flat. But the second time I used a recipe that had been altered to work at a high altitude, and we were all very pleased with the result! Here's a picture:

Now imagine that rosy beauty filled with whipped topping and covered with fresh berries, and that's what we had for dessert last night. Multiculturalism can be very tasty!

Russia Week

We finished "Russia Week" on Saturday. Here are some of the things we did to learn about Russia:

• Library books and DVDs about/set in Russia
• Netflix: The Hunt for Red October, Peter and the Wolf (animated short film), Space Dogs, Michel Strogoff (cartoon), Man v. Wild (2.08, 2.09), Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, Fiddler on the Roof
• Color Russia map and country flag
• Do Highlights puzzle book about Russia
• Crafts: Matryoshka paper dolls (from this website - http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/russian_dolls.htm), flower garland headbands (finally found a use for my wedding bouquet!)
• Sport: Ballet (we have a DVD that shows a short ballet lesson geared toward small children)
• Food: Lox/cream cheese on bagels, pelmeni (I cheated and used frozen pirogis), cabbage and pickled beet salad, Polish chocolate (similar to Russian), rassolnik (barley-potato-pickle-broth soup), jello with sour cream in it, berry juice blends, rich Russian cake (the buttercream frosting had a pound of butter in it!)
• Music: Listened to many Russian folk songs

It was a great week! Since the U.S. Independence Day fell during Russia Week, we made red-white-and-blue flower garlands and watched The Hunt for Red October; I was struck with how different a world we live in now that the Cold War is over and Lithuania (home of the Red October's defecting submarine captain) is an independent country.

Paper Matryoshka dolls

Here's the finished product from the craft found at the link in the previous post:

Matryoshka dolls

Much as I would love to make actual matryoshka dolls, I don't have a lathe or woodworking skills. So for a Russia Week craft, we're doing this cute paper doll matryoshka craft I found online: http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/russian_dolls.htm

If my children's efforts turn out well, I'll post a picture later.

Philippines Week

Mabuhay! Last week we learned about the Philippines. Among other things, we did the following:

• Use lots of library books and DVDs (they know me well at the library this summer)
• Music: Listen to music from the Philippines on Grooveshark
• Food: Buy/prepare Filipino food from Asian market, including champorado, lumpia, halo-halo, and pancit
• Culture: Invite a Filipina friend over to talk about her life as a child in the Philippines, dance the tinikling (done with bamboo poles)
• Craft: Make pastillas de leche, do some weaving (square loom like this)
• Color flag and map of the Philippines
• Sport: Swimming lessons

Russian Food Ideas?

Next week is "Russia Week", and it's been hot. I don't want to bake or make soups. What to feed my children that is Russian....

I am planning to make blinis with cream cheese and smoked salmon atop. (Knowing my children, I won't even waste money on caviar!) I've got apricot jam and pickled vegetable jars to crack open, although I know my children won't be too interested in the beets. I know they'll eat eggs, cucumbers, bread, cheese, tomatoes, potatoes, and pirogi, so I guess that's what we'll be eating for most of the next week. I hope I can find some berries on sale somewhere. For herbs, time to use up the cilantro in the fridge and find some dill weed instead. And for drinks, vodka is totally out, but I bet my children will enjoy some sweetened, iced herbal tea.

Any suggestions from readers as to what to eat that is typically Russian on a hot summer's day? (In a house with no AC running?)

China Week

Last week our topic of study was China. While it's impossible to cover such a large country fully in just a week, our children are pretty young, so we think the following activities gave them a decent overview of China:

• Numerous library books and DVDs about China (both fiction and nonfiction)
• Netflix resources: Wild China, Kung Fu Panda sequels, Jackie Chan Adventures (the last was set in the US, but still contains much related to Chinese culture)
• Find all animals at our local zoo that live in China (there turned out to be only a few)
• Food: Eat with chopsticks; shop at an Asian market (live fish!); cook dimsum, egg rolls, and noodles; and drink milk substitutes (almond, rice, and coconut milks)
• Culture: Host two Chinese women for a day (one was a specialist in ancient Chinese calligraphy and taught our children a lot about Chinese characters)
• Craft: Make a Chinese gong, make paper, and make (and try to fly) kites
• Religion: Learn about Tibetan Buddhism from a family friend, who led us in a short guided meditation and helped me cook "Buddha's Delight"
• Computer: Chinese fables on starfall.com

We had a great time and ate well. I have a lot of leftover Chinese food this week, but since we're studying the Philippines, which has a large Chinese population, it won't go to waste!

Ecuador Week

In case you were wondering about the two most recent posts, we were just learning about Ecuador last week. Llamas hail from the Andes, part of which runs through Ecuador, and Panama hats are from Ecuador, despite the misleading name.

Here's a summary of what we did during our Ecuador Week:

• Read/watch library books and DVDs about Ecuador
• Find a llama (surprisingly easy to locate in Colorado nowadays)
• Culture: Invite an Ecuadorian-American couple over for dinner (I made seco de pollo and cured my own red onions in salt and lime juice for the salad!)
• Food: Cook empanadas de pina, arroz colorado, and arroz con leche (this website is a great resource for Ecuadorean cooking)
• Craft: Braiding hair, learn about Panama hats, make little figures out of migajon clay (white bread and glue) and paint them
• Sport: Soccer with cousins
• Music: Sing anthems of Ecuador and Guayaquil, make and play an antara flute
• Religion: Tour the interior of a Catholic church
• Netflix: Man vs. Wild (2.05), Voices of the Andes

Llama

I saw this handsome fellow today.

Homemade Panama Hat

Dd6 came up with this a few minutes ago. It does provide shade!

Canada Week

This summer we're doing little formal schoolwork. What we're doing instead is learning all about a different country or U.S. state each week. Last week we learned about Canada. Here is a list of what we did to learn about Canada:

• Read/watch miscellaneous library books and DVDs about Canada
• Read aloud of an easy adaptation of Anne of Green Gables
• Go to the zoo and identify animals that live in Canada
• Color the Canadian flag and a map of Canada (easy to find these on the internet)
• Food: maple syrup, butter tarts, apple juice, currants, poutine 
• Culture: Invite a Canadian-American friend over and have her share a little about Canada with us
• Watch some shows that take place in Canada (Dudley Do Right, Red Green Show)
• "Reverse curling" on the garage floor (freeze disk of ice with a pipe cleaner handle in it, and use chalk to draw the skip)
• Go camping in the U.S. Rockies (they are fairly similar to Canadian Rockies as to vegetation, appearance, and wildlife)
• Craft: Make cheese curds for poutine (I ended up doing this one alone, my kids having shown no interest in it)
• Computer: free time to play on websites Poisson Rouge and UpToTen since they are bilingual French/English sites
• Listen to Inuit music, Canadian folk music, and Great Big Sea (a Canadian folk-rock band know for sea shanties) (Grooveshark was a good resource for finding much of this music)

Paper

Earlier today: "Mom, we need more white paper. There's none left in the drawer. Or in the printer tray."

Tonight from the three-year-old as I try to sort paper and throw away (after photographing!) my children's creations and recycle their used paper with blank sides into the printer tray: "Mommy, don't throw any of my artwork away!"

How did people raise children before the invention of inexpensive paper?

And why did the three-year-old take a nap? It's past ten o'clock and she insists she's not tired yet. I am.