American Revolution

I love history. I love to read about it, talk about it and watch movies about it. It's always been my favorite school subject. Casia shares this loves, so it's no wonder that she and I get carried away when we delve into historical topics. So I've been trying to limit the scope that we cover for each given time period, but I'll admit it, this is tough for me. I feel there is always more that we could cover; we could always go deeper. Fortunately, Jacob's there to rein me in. So I'm trying to breakdown America history into manageable segments and keep to a limited time table. This last unit we spent about three weeks on the French and Indian War followed by about five weeks on the Revolutionary War.

To learn about the French and Indian War and why it is so important in American history, Casia and I watched a video called "The War That Made America", produced by PBS. She also read a book called The French and Indian War by Christopher Collier. I like to assign reading for Language Arts to correspond to other subjects we are studying and I found a copy of Calico Captive by Elizabeth George Spears in our local library. It's based on a true story of a girl captured by Native Americans. Casia also read a Dear America book, Standing in the Light by Mary Pope Osborne which was also a story about an Indian captive. Casia enjoyed the topic so much that when I gave her a writing assignment to compose a short story, she chose to make hers about a girl that was taken by Indians and then decided to stay with them instead of returning with the English.

We then moved on to the Revolutionary War. I got a little overboard on my trip to the library and brought home about two dozen books. She didn't end of reading them all, but I like to give her choices; let her select what interests her most. I've listed the books and movies that she read and watched below. Casia learned about the early unrest in the colonies and how and why the French & Indian War had such an impact on the relationship between Britain and the colonies. We covered the acts passed by the British to tax the colonists; how they worked and why they angered the colonists. She also learned that about the process, and how long and drawn out it was, for the colonists to finally declare independence and win the war. Casia read several books about the major battles in the war and she learned about many of the Founding Fathers.

Next up, we'll be learning about the framing of the constitution, the structure of our government and the development of a fledgling country.

Revolutionary War Books:

The Revolutionary War by Brendan January

American Revolution by Mary Pope Osborne

American Revolution by Stuart Murray

The Story of the Boston Tea Party by R. Conrad Stein

Sybil Ludington's Midnight Ride by Marsha Amstel

The Story of Lexington and Concord by R. Conrad Stein

The Story of the Barbary Pirates by R. Conrad Stein

The Story of Valley Forge by R. Conrad Stein

Yorktown by Michael Weber

Great Women of the American Revolution by Michael Burgan
The Signers by Dennis Brindell Fradin
George Washington by Cheryl Harness

George Washington, Spymaster by Thomas B. Allen
Who Was Benjamin Franklin by Dennis Brindell Fradin

Who Was Thomas Jefferson by Dennis Brindell Fradin 

Patrick Henry by 

Paul Revere's Ride [Poem] by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Riddle of Penncroft Farm [Historical Fiction] by Dorothea Jensen

Movies on the Revolutioary War:

LaFayette: The Lost Hero

John Adams (HBO production): parts of it anyway, some didn't seem appropriate for a 10 year-old
The Revolution (History Channel) 

Vocab Fun and Games

I mentioned last month that I've added a vocabulary builder into our Language Arts curriculum. It's been a huge hit with Casia. I'm using a workbook called Vocabulary from Classical Roots by Norma Fifer and Nancy Flowers. It breaks the lessons up into groups of related Greek and Latin roots. For instance, the first couple of lessons deal with the roots that involve numbers. It includes some words with the Greek root 'monos' meaning 'one': monologue, monopoly, and monarch. It also includes words with the Latin root 'unus' which also means 'one': unilateral and unanimous. It continues to add words with the roots 'duo', 'bi', 'tri', 'tres', 'quartus', 'decem' and 'centum'. It seems very well organized and the lessons seem to be sticking. Casia has been finding her newly learned roots in other words she encounters as well.

In addition to the workbook, Casia is also making use of some online resources. She has often used dictionary.com  and thesaurus.com while on the computer to look up words as she works on writing assignments. But recently, Casia has become interested in learning the 'Word of the Day'. A few weeks ago, she also discovered the site's 'Word Dynamo'. She uses it to make lists of her new vocabulary words. With these lists, the site provides her with some games to play to help her learn their meanings. It's free, fun and educational; can't beat that!

Violin

When Casia was four-years old, she came home from school with a backpack full of handouts. They had information on scouts, soccer and violin lessons, among other things, if you were looking for extracurricular activities for your child. Casia, being only a Kindergartner, wasn't really ready for any of these, or so I thought. So I crumpled the papers up and threw them in the recycling bin. That's when Casia looked up from her snack and told me that she wanted to take violin lessons. I explained that instrument lessons are for older kids. And she responded by telling me that the flyer I recycled said the violin lessons were for kids in K-3. She continued to insist that she really, really wanted lessons and has always wanted to play the violin. At this point a little memory bubble pops up above my head and I see Casia, age three, working tirelessly on constructing a violin out of the cardboard from a cereal box and some knitting yarn. Once completed, she attempted to play it and got inconsolably upset when she realized it didn't sound like a real violin.

Maybe she really had been wanting this for awhile (a year being quite a large portion of a four year-old's life). Or maybe it was a passing fancy brought on by reading the flyer (one down side to an early reader; another is it limits your ability to keep a secret by spelling the surprise to your spouse). Either way, I didn't think she'd be prepared for the amount of work learning to play an instrument entails. Not to mention, and not intending to insult my darling daughter, but she seemed to severely lack intonation even while singing simple children's songs. I thought that this was likely to cost me a lot of money and frustration and in the end it would be too much for her and she would give up, leaving a bad taste in her mouth for future musical pursuits. I dismissed the idea of allowing her to play and told her that she can play when she is older.

Casia is not easily defeated, however. It is both a positive quality that I admire in her and a negative quality that drives me nuts! She would not let the issue of the violin drop. After about a week, she started to wear me down. I rethought some of my previous objections, namely that I would invest hundreds of dollars and she would lose interest. It was clearly not as passing a whim as I'd first thought. My second objection was that due to her young age, she would not be doing this independently. I would be required to attend classes as well as remind her and oversee the practices. Sure, it may sound fun to her now, but after a few weeks, still unable to play a song, will she want to be pulled away from a craft project to pick up the violin?

In the end, I caved and I don't regret it at all. It turned out to be a great decision because for the last five and a half years, it has given her a chance to work at something that doesn't come easily to her. It has required perseverance, dedication and a lot of practice; attributes we struggle to instill in her academically because so much comes easily to Casia.

Even in music, she has some natural talents. She learned to read music in one day. She memorizes songs very quickly. Her ability to understand rhythms, even very complicated rhythms is very impressive (and probably due to her strong math skills). She also has a knack for knowing what all the other ensemble members are supposed to be playing and she never loses her place.

But Casia has two areas in particular that do not come easily to her. The first is her intonation. She has always struggled with playing in tune. Early on, it was clear that she didn't even notice when she was out of tune. It has taken many years, but her ear is finally developing and she is now able to recognize when she doesn't quite hit the note right on; she can even usually adjust it to the correct pitch. This has been her biggest struggle. Secondly, she isn't adroit in physical activities. I would qualify Casia's gross and fine motor skills as adequate. She doesn't take instruction well on physical tasks. From teaching her to tie her shoes to Jacob teaching her to throw a ball, Casia often resists instructions on how to hold and move her body. This has been another difficulty she has had to overcome to play well. There are so many physical components to playing the violin. She has to hold the violin properly, have her hand in the correct position and her fingers need to hit the finger board in precise movements. In addition, she has to maintain a proper bow hold and learn various ways of moving the bow to achieve specific effects. These two aspects have been the hardest for Casia to learn. She is making slow but good progress and I attribute this to Casia's continued hard work and the inspirational teaching of her new instructor.

When we started our homeschooling group a little over a year ago, one of the course offerings that attracted me to the organization was that it had both private violin instruction and ensembles. Casia's teacher for the past year has been perfect for her. Her expectations are high enough that she continues to challenge Casia but she is also very patient as well. She never tells Casia she is too young to learn a new skill and she will try different methods if Casia is having difficulty catching on to the new technique. She encourages Casia and continually stretches and molds her. In addition, Casia has matured, both because she is older and because she has reached a certain level of play and she is desirous of learning to play beautifully, not just play from the book. Sometimes I look back on decisions I've made and wonder, "What was I thinking?" This is not one of those decisions. Every time I hear her practice and watch her hard at work on a new song; whenever I'm in her lessons and I see her determination when her instructor shows her a new skill; and each time I attend a concert and see her grow in confidence and musical ability, I am grateful that I decided to listen to my daughter's insistence that she was ready for this challenge. 

Motivation

I have been severely lacking in motivation in keeping up my blog. It is partly because I feel really pressed for time during the day and am not mentally cognizant after about 6pm. It may also have to due with the length since my last entry and the waning entries leading up to the end of the year. It's sort of like a friend that you keep saying you should call, but then the more time passes, the more awkward it feels to get back in touch. But I've learned from experience that I feel better after I make the initiative, so I'm jumping back into my blog, hoping to revive some of the same sentiment.

There have been some changes, but mostly we're operating in the same behind-schedule, hectic method that I fall into by October. Casia's finished biology and she recently started learning some physics. This was Casia and Jacob's idea. I put my vote in for Earth science but lost. So I bought an easy to understanding basic Newtonian physics book by Karl F. Kuhn called Basic Physics: A Self-Teaching Guide and a physics lab experiment book. So far its going well; even I am able to understand it and Casia is really enjoying physics. 

Casia also finished up algebra and has moved on to geometry. Geometry has always been a favorite of hers, so she is far more enthusiastic than she was while doing to algebra; enthusiasm on her part always makes my job so much easier and more enjoyable. 

She hasn't been doing much computer science lately, but we've added in two new topics of study. In the first, Casia is learning about the election process by following the news and watching the debates with me. It's only the primaries, but I figure it will take until November to really explain our presidential election process.

The other new element is that we're dedicating a day of language arts each week to vocabulary building. I bought Vocabulary from Classical Roots from my homeschooling group for $1. Casia is also keeping a list of new words from her readings that she wants to learn. She came across 'immolate' earlier this week and when I told her it meant 'destruction by fire' she replied, "Cool! I'd been looking for a word like that!" It turns out she plays this Disney video game on the Wii with some friends and when they fall into a pit of fire, she can now say in her most evil cackle, "You've been immolated!"

End of the Year

One of the big differences of homeschooling from from the traditional kind is that the calendar is so much more flexible. With two moves in one year, Casia hasn't held to the traditional school year and so we picked up in September in subjects she hadn't completed the previous school year. Now that the calendar year is approaching its end, I thought it would be good to finish up her current courses in math and science and start something new in January. The rest of the topics we'll just continue as planned.

Casia's nearing the end of her Algebra course and Biology as well. I decided that it would be good to finish these up before our break for two reasons. We'll be switching gears to Geometry in math and physical sciences and I need time to plan (I'll get almost a week over break) and she can have a sense of completion on topics that she started almost a year and a half ago, as well as giving her something new to look forward to when we resume school next year. 

In math, it means she has to spend almost double the time each day to get in the extra work, but's she's willingly doing it because she loves geometry and can't wait to move on to that. In science, we've completed all the lessons I'd planned, but I realized that Casia wasn't retaining the science vocabulary, so she's going back and reviewing the whole course for a cumulative final. 

Casia was not a happy camper when I first explained that I was going to test her on everything she'd learned this past year and a half in science. Admittedly, it would have been better had she known going into the course, but it didn't occur to me that she'd forget so much and it would be necessary. Usually her memory is exceptional, but apparently, science terms don't make the same impact on her as say, Magic: The Gathering cards or Doctor Who episodes. I noticed that in Spanish she isn't picking up the vocabulary as quickly as I'd expected either. Since I know she is so much smarter than I am, and these tend to be easy for me, I figured they be a piece of cake for her, but it's definitely not her strong suit. It's always good to identify weaknesses as well as strengths!

I explained to her that if she studies the terms again for the final, it will make it that much stronger a connection in her brain and she's not as likely to forget them in the future. It's her first time having to really study, which, considering she's in middle school, is a good experience in itself. I know it took until college before I really had to work hard on learning (*cough* organic chemistry *cough*). I am glad I get to provide that experience to Casia at an age where the stakes are lower and the shock won't be as severe. 

Collections

Casia is the type of person who likes to collect. She received two Carebears when she was about two years old and for the next few years, her goal was to collect them all; she came close. She was given a Webkinz a couple years later and the same obsession overtook her. If she has the first in a book series that she likes, she wants the whole set, even after she no longer reads that series (i.e. The Magic Treehouse). 

Usually this is a frustrating characteristic for a parent. I have to constantly curtail her collecting to avoid hording. It's always a struggle because she becomes emotionally attached to things. And they can be ridiculous things to want to save. She once kept the plastic shrink wrap from an Easter egg for more than two years (the egg had long since been eaten). When I throw out old craft projects that are broken she gets upset. Casia has been brought to tears when she outgrows clothes and they have to be donated.

I hate clutter myself, because I find it visually distracting and mostly, because I hate to dust. The less things there are the quicker the dusting goes. So between us, there are many battles about the state of her bedroom and the contents of her closet (which, although it it technically a 'walk-in', you can never actually walk in it.) I have to admit that in the last year, she has gotten better at discarding old things or giving away items she no longer uses. She is still upset when it's time to remove old clothing from her closet to make way for the new, but she accepts it begrudgingly.

Now every once in awhile, this obsession of hers actual makes my life easier. For instance, we are currently studying Colonial America and she found this series of books in the library, the America the Beautiful state books. They are not actually 'colonial' books, but the first half of each book gives the history of that state complete with the natives peoples, early settlers and all sorts of other cool and interesting details. We checked the Pennsylvania and New Jersey out of the library because I wanted her to to get the feel for the colonies other than Virginia and Massachusetts; colonies on which we'd already spent a lot of time. She likes them so much, she now wants to read all thirteen books from the states that were the original colonies. I told her she could skip the ones that we'd already covered, but she wants to read ALL of them. She is even talking about reading all fifty of them as she learns about them entering into the union. I had thought she'd balk at having to read so many similar books, but I wasn't counting on her need to complete a set. Having started, she is diligently working her way through the collection. It's always good to be reminded that even negative personality traits can have their plus sides.

Instant Messaging

Casia now has a laptop and it's wonderful for the whole family not to have to share computers. Now, I can be doing prep work while Casia works independently on a writing assignment or her math. In order to allow me to quickly send her links, I decided to create a second skype account that is used strictly for Casia to communicate to me or her dad in instant messages. Mostly it's very helpful, particularly since her work space is the loft area upstairs and our office is in the front of the house downstairs. Not that I'm opposed to running up the stairs a few extra times a day (that activity actually forms the basis of my daily workout), but the time it saves for quick questions that don't need me in person has made it a valuable tool.

On the flip side, it's also becoming a toy for Casia. We're not gadget people here. No smart phones, iPads or kindles in this house. My cell phone doesn't even have text messaging. Casia's living in a technological vacuum and we're clearly behind the times. So for Casia, instant messaging is a pretty cool new way to communicate... as evidenced by the fact that she sends a constant barrage of messages to me whenever she is on her computer. 

Seeing as how this is all new to her, I'm hoping that soon it will loose that novelty appeal. Until then, I am trying to be patient. A few of her messages have made me laugh out loud. They are almost always accompanied by a graphic face.  Some have been sweet little messages telling me she loves me. Others have have been nagging me to tell me time's up with the assignment (an assignment she's clearly not working on since she's typing to me) and just recently, when I told her to get back to work, she sent me an angry face icon. I was NOT amused. I reminded her that I can take away the skype messaging just as easily as I set it up. She quickly deleted it and came down to apologize and said she meant it to be funny. So there was a lesson in there after all. She learned that the written word doesn't always communicate humor as effectively as face-to-face, since tone is often lost. Happily, it's reading time, so she's curled up by the fireplace with a nice big book and I can finish my blog entry in relative quiet.

Questions

I never tire of seeing glimpses into Casia's thought processes. Yesterday, she was reviewing mitotic cell division and came to me with a question. She wanted to know what happens to the parent cell, in a single celled organism, when it divides its DNA in half during replication and then, through the stages, splits into daughter cells. I thought she was confused about the process, so I started to review the various stages and she stopped me. She explained that she understands how the process works, she wants to know what happens to the original cell. Does it cease to exist? Is it dead? Are there now two of them? Just half of it? Wow! Well, that was an unexpected questions and it led to an interesting discussion, one more philosophical that biological in nature.

Then this morning, Casia was given a new problem in algebra that she hadn't seen. Previously, we had covered multiplying polynomials and she had that down. Today, a question popped up about factoring a quadratic equation (x² + 7x + 10 = 0). I was prepared to have to break it down for her and explain how to figure out what two two-term polynomials could be multiplied together to get the three term polynomial. Again, she stopped me in the middle and told me she's got it. Skeptical, I asked her to show me what she has to do. She said it's obvious; the first term is a square, so the first term of each of the factor polynomials will be the square root of that term, or x. And if in the first polynomial we call the second term 'a' and in the second polynomial we call the second term 'b', then a + b must equal the coefficient of the second term, or 7,  and 'a' x 'b' will equal the coefficient of the third, or 10. She proceeded to quickly do the math and find the answer.Yup, she got it and on her first introduction with no instruction. Sometimes she makes my job so easy. But it leads me to a more important question....

If my nine year-old can figure out algebra on her own and contemplate the demise of the parent cell in its quest to replicate itself, why can't she figure out that if she wears a skort and a short sleeve t-shirt when it is only 40 degrees out she will be cold?