What's worse than having the government demolish your house?

Answer? NOT having the government demolish your house. 

One month before Will was born, I opened the Sunday paper to find a picture of our neighborhood on the front page with the headline "In the Bullseye". Turns out, the city planned on putting a freeway through our house. It was shocking. It was disturbing. But, it could have been worse. I felt quite sorry for the family kiddy corner from us. They were getting a front row seat to the incoming interchange. 

After neighborhood pressure, the city caved and took the plans back to the drawing board. No one was losing their house!  Yeah!  Except...

Now we are the sorry losers with the front row seat. The margin between the road and our back property line is as narrow as is legal. Literally, it will be a kid's stone throw away. 

So, today the construction process began. A bobcat appeared on the rise at the back of our yard and started clearing the land. On the upside, that gulley is prime breeding ground for yucky beetles that swarm twice a year, not to mention snakes and other nasties. It will be nice to have that cleared out. 

We will see what the future holds for our home value. This road project is shockingly poorly thought through. I'm not sure they've thought enough about what it is going to do to the northern part of the city. This morning, I read all the roads in this section that will now have interchanges or overpasses. Do we really want a freeway through quiet little picturesque neighborhoods. Well, I suppose what's done is done. 

Hold on to Your Livestock, Folks!

We were listening to a rendition on YouTube of Carol of the Bells and one of the singers looked like he was trying not to laugh. Emily said, "Maybe because of the line 'throw cows away'."  Haha! I love that and totally remember hearing lyrics incorrectly as a child. 

Fly Little Hummingbird

Luck O' the Irish

I'm not sure how lucky we've been this week, but learning about Ireland has been a lot of fun.

I'm exhausted! Running a household, catching up on laundry (our washer and dryer both died in the last month), taking care of six kids and their mischief, and setting up a homeschool is seeming like a lot today. A lot of good stuff, but a lot all the same. I am slowly but surely pulling together all of the stuff I want for our school and finding a place to put it where it won't take over our living room.

This week, the kids loved learning about Celtic mythology, and built a sidhe (pronounced "shee") house. Sidhes are fairies.

I made color tablets, sound bottles, and scent bottles for our sensorial station, which is now in a corner in the kitchen. 

I got the idea for this light table from my friend Arianne. I've been wanting to do it for years and finally did. Here is her blog post about it. 

We didn't finish this week's quilting block, but everything is cut out. Now we just have to sew it all together. 

Ireland was fun. It is so rich in culture. It's definitely on my real life bucket list. 

What is Education?

For obvious reasons, I have been thinking a lot about what a quality education entails. But what is education in general? I need to figure that out before I can know the definition of a quality education. 

I'm beginning to believe that the keys to education in the early years are, first, to create a learning-rich environment (how on earth do you do that effectively without a dedicated schoolroom?), and second, to teach kids hard work, responsibility, and diligence. The application of those keys, I'm still working on. Is rote-memorization evil or is it a good way to exercise the brain and take advantage of this time when they memorize so easily?  How much sitting down to do structured writing or math or reading is good?  Where is the balance?

I think in a lot of ways education is easier in the later years of childhood and in adolescence. The whole "train up a child" thing combined with their developmental readiness for independent book-type study. 

This trial run with Mary has been good and I'm learning a lot. But it will be SO wonderful to not be trying to occupy both educational spheres. We are so ready to spit ourselves out of the public education system. 

So, what do you all think about education?  What makes a good education?  How should we be teaching our younger elementary-aged children?

O, Canada

After taking most of December off, we were able to regroup and revamp our homeschool. I used almost a whole ream of card stock printing stuff off, gathered sensorial materials, reworked our school day, and thought A LOT.  

I saw these pan work charts at a friend's house and thought they would be perfect. They are color coded by subject and the kids choose what they want to do and move it over to the "done" column. It gives them a sense of accomplishment and helps me stay on top of things. I have a couple of very concrete, list-oriented children that love them.  It reduces anxiety by bringing schoolwork into the finite while still allowing them the freedom to choose what they want to do and when.  At their old Montessori school, the teachers would give them "work plans". Joe said these were "work pans". Haha. 

I decided to introduce an adventure to act as our curriculum's backbone. We are going around the world in 80 days. Each week we are going to focus on a different country. We talk about weather, geography, the people and their culture, folk stories, music, and anything else we can think of. Mary loves looking at google earth and this was a natural step forward. 

We are also going to make a quilting square, as a geometry tie-in, for each country we visit. 

This week we went to Canada. The (too small) maple leaf square is our square for this week. We sewed that today. It has been a lovely stay in Nova Scotia but we are off to the next stop!

Technology

Will, picking up a calculator: I need to call some people. 

Me: Honey, that's a calculator, not a phone. 

Will: I need to calc some people, mom. 

Planning

Will said this tonight in our family prayer: Please bless us to have a good Christmas in a way way way way way way way way way long time from now.