This time the younger class got the good teacher. She still has problems with watching the time though and always ends up spending too much time on the lecture portion and having to run through the activity. E got to touch another snake this week during the lecture.
The fun activity today was going through those cool "staff only" doors. This time around we got to see the zoo keepers preparing all the food for the animals. We got to see them cutting up fish and meat for some of the carnivores, and veggies for some of the herbivores. Both age groups got to see this at different points.
They also got to go into the basement and check out what was in the freezers. Yes, we got to see lots of different bags filled with different sized frozen mice. It was really cool. I'm so glad I'm a chaperone and I get to do this too.
The younger kids got to prepare the food for the bison and deer. They had big garbage cans full of food (the dry stuff like they have in the candy machines to buy to feed in the petting zoo) and the kids had to measure the food into buckets for breakfast the next day. They had to weigh the food to precise amounts, since they are very strict with the amounts the animals eat. R says the older kids did the same thing for the farm animals. He loves getting to hang out with the two boys he's gotten to be friends with in this and the White Memorial class.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Final Beardsley Zoo class till the spring
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
About divorce
Today E asked a couple of interesting questions. First he wanted to know what a half brother is. Evidently R had gotten that one wrong.
He also wanted to know what happens when people get divorced. After explaining how forms are filled out to submit to the government, etc., I got "Oh. I thought people dressed up in their fancy wedding clothes again, and slapped each other all over to take back all their kisses."
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Our passports...
have arrived in only 10 days! I simply cannot believe that 10 days ago, on Saturday, November 3rd, we sat in the post office getting all our paperwork in order, and here we are 10 days later with our passports in hand. I guess the government is all caught up now!
The whole world is ours...
A Pirate Show
A homeschooling family here in CT organized a show at a local library; a pirate who performs Cajun, Zydeco and New Orleans music for kids. He was supposed to have performed from 1:00 till 3:00, but the show went from about 1:15 till 2:15. He would've been a lot better if parents got in free. Fifteen dollars to see this guy was simply not worth it. He is the kind of guy that the libraries should pay for and invite the neighborhood kids to see him for free.
The boys had fun though. But when I asked R, he admitted that the show wouldn't have been if we hadn't run into some old friends there.
A few weeks ago we watched National Geographic: Blackbeard - Terror at Sea
Anyhow, when the homeschool show pirate asked the kids if it would be fun to be a pirate mine said "no". E still loves a good game of pretend pirate, and playing with his pirate action figures, so I had to chuckle when I heard the response. I guess he can appreciate "pretending" to be a pirate vs. "being" a pirate.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
I quit my job
I'm copying this over from my other blog. I originally posted it on the other one since it is more about me than info about our unschooling family, but then I decided it's really one and the same. Plus, I know some people only read this one and would miss out. So here it is; I quit my job...
I've been freelancing for a woman for a several months now. She actually sent me home with a mac so I could work when she needs me to. It's been really wonderful to make some extra money for us, and I really do like what I do.
Recently though, my client discovered she has breast cancer. So she started farming out her work, so that she can have the next few weeks unencumbered. She gave me two jobs to work on. One for a local Chamber of Commerce, and another for a car dealership which does a weekly newspaper ad. I knew the next couple of weeks would be very full and somewhat stressful, but I felt I owed it to my client to be there for her. Plus, to be honest, all those billable hours would be really nice.
Well after several days of working on the Chamber of Commerce thing, my client added up the hours and decided it would be best to give the job back to them. Apparently even paying me at less than what she was billing, she would lose money. It was a combination of reasons, really. The customer made many changes which had not been included in the original quote, and passing the thing on further down the line meant communication was being lost; kind of like the telephone game. So I spent four hours on something before I was told that it needed to be completely redesigned, at which time I spent another four hours redesigning it. If my client had not been ill and distracted, I'm sure the information would have been passed on correctly the first time around, but that was not the case, and I spent a lot of time doing work which was wrong. So in the end she (rightly) decided it was best to give the job back to the agency and let them deal with it.
Then we have the car thing. These folks are completely unprofessional. I'm not going into the details of the whole thing, but the bottom line is they were supposed to have had the ad all approved so I could upload it to the newspaper by noon on Thursday, and Friday at 5:30 is when I was finally able to upload it.
So I told my client that I would not be able cover the car ad for her until she returned to working full time. It would make me a slave to the house on Thursdays and Fridays and wasn't fair to the boys. So Saturday morning she came and took her computer back so she could give it to someone who could cover for her.
My feelings are so mixed. Bottom line is that I made a choice to stay home and raise my children, and homeschool them, and to expect them to entertain themselves two days a week for the next several was not fair. Not to mention that we would have to cancel plans already made for those days.
I also feel frustrated that my client left feeling that I took way longer to do the work than she would have. I know this would not be the case had she been her normal self - instructions would not have been missed, and I certainly would not have had to spend the enormous amount of time I had to gathering all the files together from all the different places she had it stored. I only hope that when she is herself again that she is able to see that I am still valuable to her, and that the time I spent on all her work is justified. "If you always do your best, there is no way you can judge yourself." Man, this book rocks. It is my life preserver.
There is also a piece of me which feels proud on a couple of levels. First, I have my priorities straight. Second, I feel that car dealership and the agency who represented them really were unprofessional. I refuse to work with people who don't respect me, especially after I explained my circumstances to make sure they were okay with my time limitations.
Finally though, I am dealing with the whole money thing. It doesn't seem fair that society judges people on their worth according to their monetary worth. And that that viewpoint is so prevalent that it has rubbed off on me, even though consciously I know I what I contribute to my family is worth more than some extra money. If I could just get my husband on board with that...
Monday, October 22, 2007
We love E
Yesterday we were on the way home from a Halloween party, when two streets away from home E started flipping out because he bit into one of those glow necklace things, and it broke in his mouth. R said the inside of his mouth was glowing. E was really stressed.
I sped up to about 45 down our 25 mph street and raced into the house to call poison control. Seems it's a frequent question, and we shouldn't worry about it. I had already directed E into the bathroom to rinse out his mouth with water, and luckily he hadn't swallowed any of it, so other than some "slight burning and a glowing mouth" we shouldn't be alarmed.
"I almost died!" E took quite a while to settle. And then we discussed the fact that this is the second time that he has fiddled one of those darn things into breaking. B took out his stress by starting to yell at E about it until I whisked the poor kid away.
After I got E into his pajamas, I found R sitting out on the driveway.
"Come here R."
"What?"
"Was all of that upsetting to you? Do you need a hug?"
"I thought E was going to die!"
We had an interesting conversation about what would've happened if poison control had said to call an ambulance, and I assured R that they would have pumped E's stomach in time. I pointed out to him that he did an excellent job of staying calm and not adding to E's stress in the back seat of the car; that it is a great thing to be a person who can keep his head clear while an emergency is occurring, and wait till it's all done to cry. He beamed at me through his tears.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Beardsley Zoo Classes
"I don't want to go, it's not as good as the nature class at White Memorial".
"Well E was afraid to go without me, so I'm a chaperone now, and I can't just not show up."
"OOOOooohhhhh."
"Wow look, these are all my friends from the White Memorial class."No, I'm not the only one who is willing to travel to classes across the entire state. This stuff is so worth travelling for and our state is so darn small anyway!
R went off with the bigger kids and I got to chaperone the first through third graders. Unfortunately, this time around the educators switched classes, and E got the boring guy R complained about last time. It took a remarkably shorter time than I expected for E to look like this:
Just a little positive reinforcement that we have made the right decision to keep our boys at home. The guy had no clue. If I only had E in a class I'd ask the female teacher to stick with the little kids, but then poor R would be bored. I guess we can hope they switch back and forth. It was especially tough for the little kids (one boy who obviously homeschools because he is a kinesthetic learner, and was driving the poor kid next to him crazy, especially) because the zoo educators weren't as organized as they could have been, and had the kids sitting and doing nothing as long as maybe school kids are used to in school, but was torture for homeschoolers. I do have to say that E might actually be able to go un-drugged in school, because although he learns very little while he is sitting still, at least he doesn't bother anybody either!The "lecture" portion of the class did include some hands on with feathers, and a tiger's jaw. And of course, a real live python which E insisted I take a picture of to send to Grandma.
The best part of the class though, the part that makes it worth it to drive 40 minutes for, is the out of the class-room and into the zoo part. The "Hands-on project" part. This month the younger kids made raw meat sandwiches 
which were wrapped up in vines. Then the zoo educators/keepers held the wolves in a holding area, while the kids ran free in their roaming area and placed the sandwiches around for them to enjoy.
After that, they brought the kids out of the wolves' roaming area and into the human viewing area. Then when the kids were all in place and had a great view, they let the wolves out to enjoy the sandwiches (excuse the crappy arrow, I was in a rush).
E was so incredibly excited to see one of the nine wolves (7 of which, E loves to remind us, were born this past May - the month he was born) pull one of his sandwiches off the rock he placed it on, and another pull out the one he hid under the log.
This was great stuff. E had a phenomenal time, and R told us about the pvc piping they sanded, glued together, and stuffed with food for the otter enrichment "hands-on project" the bigger kids did.We are so blessed to be able to educate our kids this way.
Posts
