Literature List for 7th/9th

My kids love books, but they approach them in very different ways.

 Typical random pile-o-books at the Sparklee household

Super enjoys fiction, especially stories with animals as characters.  Her early independent reading started with Thornton Burgess animal stories, Bill Wallace books and the Akimbo series by Alexander McCall Smith.  Later she blazed through the Warriors and Seekers series and even started writing her own animal adventure stories.

At the moment she is reading the Wildwood series, which is penned by Colin Meloy, the lead singer of the Decemberists.  How cool is that?  She really enjoys this series--sometimes I have to insist that she stop reading and go to bed!  

Dude is more of a just-the-facts-ma'am reader.  While he will happily listen to me read fiction for hours (and in fact is always the first to suggest a family read-aloud session) when he picks up a book on his own, it's going to be nonfiction.  

 One of Dude's favorites

Dude has always preferred nonfiction to fiction, and these days he prefers to get his information from electronic sources.  He's a wellspring of facts that you didn't even know you didn't know, mostly from YouTube channels like Vsauce, Minutephysics, and Mental Floss.

Finishing these to wrap up last year's WWII Unit Study

I'm thrilled that he loves collecting arcane knowledge, and I know videos can be very educational but...

There is something about really getting into a book--a real, paper-and-ink book--that just can't be replaced by any technology.

And I believe there is immense value in reading fiction, too.  Not just any fiction, but fiction that deals with big themes, fiction that makes you think, fiction that teaches important lessons about life.

I think it's reasonable for a 7th grader to read at least a novel a month, and that's the goal I'm setting for Dude.  He'll be keeping an independent reading journal for his own choices and doing a variety of projects based on the books I assign to him.

One of our many packed bookshelves

There's no shortage of great YA literature.  The hard part is choosing what to read and when.  So here is our tentative book list for the 2014-15 school year:

Fiction

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle

Chomp by Carl Hiaasen 

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Animal Farm by George Orwell

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

 Requested by the kids because they loved Chains

The last three books on the list are part of Oak Meadow's 9th grade Intro to Literature and Composition curriculum.  We are using Oak Meadow for the base of Super's high school English, with some supplemental reading and writing projects.

 This is a new one for me, highly recommended by Dad

Dude will read from the same book list, with the possible addition of the Artemis Fowl series for his independent reading.

As always, we will open our school day with a poem, but this year I won't be choosing all the poems.  I want the kids to take turns choosing their own favorites to share.  

 Trying to overcome my "fear" of poetry

I've always loved poetry but I'm also a little intimidated by it, so I've chosen some fun and approachable sources for this year's poetry reading.

Poetry

all the small poems and fourteen more by Valerie Worth

Pug and Other Animal Poems by Valerie Worth

Poetry Speaks: Who I Am edited by Elise Paschen

Dog Songs by Mary Oliver

Ubiquitous by Joyce Sidman

The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear 

 Valerie Worth and Mary Oliver, accessible and not a bit scary

We'll read nonfiction related to Super's Thinkwell Biology I course and whatever history topic the kids decide to jump into.  (We're about halfway through Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, but we're reading it in small doses because the kids find it so sad.)  I'll also save interesting news and opinion pieces from a variety of sources, and I just subscribed to Cicada and Dig so hopefully the kids will find those interesting as well. 

I'm sure we will add to and edit our reading lists as we discover great new literature during the year.  We are looking forward to lots of great reading!

  

Big Picture, Small Picture

If you slow down...

...and stop and look...

...and really pay attention...

...you never know...

 

...what you might see. 

:-)

Gearing Up for High School (And by the way, we're still here...)

What?!  A new Karmamatopoeia post?  I know, crazy, right?  

We're still here, still homeschooling, and I still need to be three people to do it all as well as I'd like, but I'm determined to get back to my long-neglected blog.  I've missed the regular journaling, I've missed having a record of our school activities, and I've really, really missed keeping up with all my blog buddies! 

 Summer daisies in full bloom

I'm setting an intention here.  (That's a new thing I'm working on--setting intentions.)  Watch for more posts and we'll see how well it goes, but my intention is to revive this blog and post, oh, let's say once a week.

So here's our super-quick update.  2013 was rough.  I will be honest.  Life was stressful, work was intense and home was very neglected.  It was enough to drive a person who struggles mightily with perfectionist tendencies over the edge (not that I know anyone like that.)

 Nature hike discovery: dragonfly emerging from nymph stage

So we're starting the 2014 school year "behind schedule."  And also ahead of schedule.  We didn't finish our math curriculum, we only read half of our book list, etc.  But the kiddos also learned very important lessons about independent learning, being responsible for themselves, and picking up the slack when Mom and Dad are overwhelmed.  Good life lessons.  

We can always catch up in academics.  Or not--the world won't end if we don't finish that book list!

Feeding lorikeets at the zoo

Daughter Super will officially start 9th grade soon, and son Dude is technically in 7th but he's all over the map academically and will likely do much of Super's 9th grade curriculum with her.  

The kids have always preferred to school together, even though their styles are very different.  Girl wants silence, boy wants music.  Girl hyperfocuses and hates distractions, boy jumps up every few minutes and walks around humming and thinking (yet somehow always manages to complete his work before I'm ready for the next thing.)  

I can't convince them to do different things at different times or to do their work in different rooms--they absolutely insist on sitting together and working together even while driving each other crazy!  

Home-grown mint makes delightful mint lemonade

I'm spending the next few days finalizing our official high school plans.  Most of it is in my head but not on paper, virtual or otherwise, and I really like to see things written down, even if it's constantly getting revised.  I'm a planner.  Plans make me feel secure.  I'm working on the other half of that equation, which is being flexible and letting go of plans when life intervenes.  

 Independence day celebration with friends, food, and fireworks

We'll start school soon, maybe even this week if the kids' social schedule will allow a couple of days of "book work" as we call it.  Dude has been pestering me to get started--he tells me he's had a nice, long break with plenty of swimming, playing video games, and watching stupid videos on YouTube, and is ready to get back to academics.  That's my boy!

Hope you are all having a great summer (or winter, for you southern hemisphere homeschoolers.)  I can't wait to visit your blogs and catch up with your latest adventures!

  

A New Journey

Yeah, it's been a while.  And I've been missing this blog and all my blog buddies terribly! 

Do you even want to hear my excuses or shall we just move on to the new plans?  :-)

Oh, OK, here's the first excuse.  I lost my camera.  Happily it has been found, but for several weeks I wasn't able to take pictures of our daily work.  And without loading the photos every evening, I wasn't prompted to post about our activities.

The second excuse is that our adoption did not go as smoothly as we'd hoped.  I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here; I'll just say that November and December were hard months for our family.

Third and final excuse: I have recently become a working mom.  Well, sort of.  I'm spending several days each week helping out at our family business, and it has thrown our entire schedule out of whack.

Not that I wasn't sympathetic to working moms before, because I was.  But now I really get it.  My hat is off to those of you who work full-time, because just going in part-time has been overwhelming for me!

My kids are old enough to do a lot of their schoolwork independently, but I still feel like academics have suffered here at the Super-Awesome School this winter.  Besides, I really miss doing school with them every day.

And we are all eating way too many frozen dinners and dinners out.  (The waitress at our favorite local Mexican restaurant doesn't even take our order anymore, she just smiles, waves, and tells the cook we're there.)

So why all the upheaval in the Sparklee family?

Because it will be worth it!

In the coming months, we are transforming our family business (a small hotel) into a natural history-themed resort, complete with art galleries, science exhibits, classes for kids and adults, a spa, the coolest pool you've ever seen, and a restaurant that serves fresh, local food.  It's an exciting project that has captured the imagination of our entire family.

Researching and developing our business plan has been an amazing opportunity for our kids!  They are now on a first-name basis with some of the leading scientists in the country.  They've enjoyed behind-the-scenes tours of multiple museums.  They have sifted through style boards, choosing their favorites from among the carpet and wallpaper samples.  They have worked with professional artists, brainstorming ideas for everything from logos to pool design.  

They have sat through some very, very boring meetings as well.  Because any big idea worth pursuing takes a lot of planning and coordinating, budgeting and compromising.  

So even as I say academics are suffering, I'm not too broken up about it.  We're perpetually behind in math, just barely keeping up with history and science, and grammar and German went out the window some time ago.  But they are getting an amazing education as they watch an idea go from "wouldn't it be cool" to "let's make it happen."

I still plan to dedicate this blog to our daily homeschool activities, especially our unit studies and hands-on projects.  But I'll be starting a new blog as well, so I can journal about the new business.

Can't wait to share our new journey with you all!

Summer to Fall

Our backyard "mystery tree" in August

September

First dusting of snow, September

October

After a huge windstorm, October

Today, October 20, with a front moving in

It's hard to believe it's the same tree.  It has changed so much in only three months!

Our Week in Pictures

Also known as the lazy mom's guide to homeschool blogging...

 What we're reading.

 

Vocabulary Bingo.   

 A few more things for our Time Capsule.

Measurements, and three things that represent you.

  Nature, knowledge, and creativity.

 And pugs in the sun.

A reference I made for the kids using bookmarks from abcteach.

 Practicing multiples...

...and playing integer games.

 

 Korean food!

 

 Cereal and sign language.

No matter how busy we are...

 

...there's always time to be a smart-aleck!

Hope you had a great week, too!

Our Cell Unit Study So Far...

We began our unit study on cells by watching this amazing video.  If you haven't seen The Inner Life of the Cell before, it really will blow your mind.  (The one below has music but there is a version with narration.  We plan to watch it later, once we're more familiar with some of the vocabulary.)

Then we quickly reviewed a book we read last year: Enjoy Your Cells by Fran Balkwill.  (This is a GREAT series, but for some reason the books are getting harder to find!)  Looking through the book one more time refreshed our memories so we could do a KWL chart together.

After we jotted down what we already knew, we wrote down what we wanted to learn about cells.  Our questions were:

What is the largest cell in our bodies?

What is the smallest cell?

What do the different organelles do and how do they do it?

What is the cell membrane made of?

How do cells move?

What the heck is a motor protein? (That big crazy structure in the video above.)

What do microtubules do?

How do cells reproduce? 

We got out the cell models that we made just before the summer break and referred to the organelles as we read this article from The National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Then we watched a couple of BrainPop movies about cells.

We read the first four chapters of Powerful Plant Cells by Rebecca L. Johnson and completed a plant cell labeling sheet from Enchanted Learning.

Super remembered seeing something about a dancing plant, so we searched for it and finally found information about the Desmodium gyrans.

We found three YouTube videos showing the plant moving.  This one is probably the best.

We ended the first day of our study with this fun video.  We have the Here Comes Science DVD-CD and we absolutely love it!

If the neighbors didn't already think we're crazy, I'm sure they do now.  Come on, everybody!  Sing along!  Photosynthesis!  AAAA-AAAAH!

Our August Tree Study

We spent this week's Outdoor Hour studying a tree in our backyard.  When we first moved here 11 years ago, we actually considered removing this tree.  It was so scrawny and sickly, we didn't think it would make it through the first winter.

I'm so glad we kept it!  It's a wonderful shade tree now, and a lovely place to sit.  We have never known what type of tree it is...so we decided to find out!

 

The leaves are dark green, simple, and toothed.  They alternate on the twig and have small veins coming out of a central vein.  The tree makes fluffy yellow-green catkins in the spring, and these long "fruits" in fall. 

The bark is rough and papery.  This made me wonder if the tree was in the birch family, but our tree book only listed "white birch," and the trunk is definitely not white.  This photo isn't the best (standing under a shade tree on an overcast day) but the trunk is reddish-gold with some black spots.

We were surprised to see that our tree already has a few yellow leaves.  Our nighttime temps haven't been cool enough to change the leaves...I suspect the yellow ones are just an anomaly.

 We also observed some strange-looking leaves.  We pulled them off for further inspection.  We couldn't find any insects on these leaves, so we don't know what caused the bumps and discoloring.

We did find insects other places, however.  Hi, little guy!

This mosquito hawk was so well-camoflaged, it actually startled me!

We brought some leaves and bark inside to look at them under the microscope.  The bark was sparkly, bumpy and whitish under magnification.  The leaves were interesting--under 10X they were shiny and we could just make out the cell walls.  Under 20X we could see individual cell walls!

The kids did leaf rubbings but weren't happy with how they turned out, so they glued leaves and bark to their notebook pages.  Then we visited the Arbor Day Foundation and tried to identify our tree.  Based on all the identifiers, we have a water birch (red birch.)  

I'm not convinced...our tree is very tall and according to Wikipedia, the red birch is a "shrub or small tree."   Also, our tree doesn't match any of the red birch photos that I found. 

Oh, well, we'll just have to keep trying to identify our "mystery tree."  In the meantime, the rose bush next to it is getting ready for a fall bloom.  Dude fashioned a flower press from two heavy books and pressed a rose for his nature notebook.

We'll revisit our tree in September and see how it has changed. Hope you are finding time to enjoy nature, too!