Field Trip! Anniston

Wow, I really did a great job planning this trip!  hahahaha.

We wanted to renew our membership, so I sent out word we were going.  3 other families joined us, so it was a fun day for hanging out.  AFTER we actually arrived, that is.  I got up, loaded us all up in the van and headed for South Cumberland.  I was on the other side of Guntersville before I realized what I was doing. Gah.

ALLLL the way back down to Gadsden, I pulled in at Taco Bell.  We'd had breakfast, but Ben in particular was showing signs of low blood sugar.  I pried him off of Elan, who had (horrors) misused a word, and poked a quesarito down his gullet.

We arrived in time to glom some grapes off the early birds who had opted to picnic ahead of the museum tour.  So it all worked out.

We bought our membership (still only $42!) and went through the museum, walked around the grounds, got yelled at (very rudely) for having a soccer ball out.  Next to our own cars-the only cars in the lot!  Grrrr

We opted to head out to Noccalula Falls since it was on everyone's route back home and they have a nice big playground.  We played a while, looked at the falls and then got a popsicle and Elan headed home with his own family.  We'd had him for 6 nights!  :)

Unrelated to the museum, it's Cap, Libra and Willow, Chandler's gerbils!

This used to scare Jake silly.  We had to hide his head until we were past it.

Ben thinks gar look like they told a bad joke.

Real!

Awkward taxidermy.

Smug baby!

Perpetual stalker

Warthogs are just...bizarre.

"When I was a young wart hog!
When he was a young wart hoooooooog!"

Look at those stabby trotters!

This was the favorite display for years.  Tiny antelope.  Then one day, Chan or Ben discovered the middle dik dik has NO NOSE and they zoomed past it ever since.

Found out what Murphy Jones is!

Ben, I am this close to shoving you in the pond to feed the koi!

A+ PHOTO!

Horned owls have the best WTF faces

Team slapping/coordination games.  What could possibly go wrong?

We LOVE witch hats!

The statue of Noccalula is very tall.  As a child, this, combined with the Apache Chief on cartoons led me to believe Native people were abnormally tall, some on command.

Ben lost his sunglasses.  He figured out a way to deal with the horror of being outside in the daylight.

One L Lama, he's a priest, Two L llama, he's a beast.

Katy set up a tour of the alpaca farm over in Hampton Cove (there were 8 llamas as well) for Thursday.

There were around 100 alpacas, which was quite the sight to see.  I was amazed at how different all their faces looked, though I still don't think I would be able to keep up with 100 different names.

We walked around looking at them a while, then went into the yard area near her house and she showed the clipping process for shearing one.  All of  the animals are fiber animals and she uses the hair to make yarn and other items.  She teaches fiber classes and sells a small variety of items in her gift shop.  All I could think was how much never ending work it must be to care for that many 6 foot tall creatures-never mind the whole shearing, spinning, dyeing, weaving, teaching, selling aspect.  The kids set out their feed buckets before we left and we got to see them all close up again.

Wednesday night, the neighbors decided (after nearly 2 solid weeks of no rain) to burn down a few outbuildings and piles of trash.  They set 3 HUGE fires and then appear to have gone off for dinner or something, leaving a single kid in charge. Glad there is a paved road between us.

Speaking of neighbors, there is a family in Judy's house now.  Not sure if they are renting or bought it, we get told nothing.  They do scream at one another out in the yard, smoke non-stop, have several dogs (and no fence), like to spin out and make the gravel fly and go back and forth past our house instead of using their end of the road.  Also, they have company around the clock when they are home and 2 a.m. is just as good a time to scream in the yard and drive by really fast as any other time of day.  So, yay for neighbors.

Murphy Jones is healing up.  The theory is that he will eventually get some hair and we will know what he looks like.  Right now, he looks like a 20 pound scabby dust mop.  I can not believe people can neglect a dog to the point that he's an open sore from ears to toes.  He had over 100 ticks on his tiny body.  :(  

On to the farm:

After the tour, nearly everyone headed to Katy's to hang out.  I sent Jake and Chan home with  her and Ben and I, Kurt and Emma and Melanie and her Ben all loaded up to head out for an overnight backpacking trip.

July 24

http://sandradodd.com/learnnothingday/

We miserably fail this unschooling holiday every year, yea!  

2.5 years

away from graduating my first child. 

We went over some things yesterday, I was trying to get a feel for where he is mentally and also academically.  Khan Academy has helped about a billion percent.  I know 100% is max, but it does not seem like enough.  I am REALLY not good with math.  Matt had said he would take over in high school, but he has not made a single effort to help.  I am SO glad to have Khan, Jake is zipping right on through Algebra.  He said last night he was going to go back 3 lessons and watch them again before bed because the new video had a concept that threw him and he wanted a review.  *sigh*  I am SO happy to hear him say things like that.  Sunday night, he came in with a math problem written out and wanted me to check it.  : )  I have tried to stay out of the way and only provide support, but it's HARD coming from my background as teacher's kid to just abandon the system and forge ahead, nudging my children out in front and not really knowing how it will all turn out.

Jake's gotten into the science part of Khan as well.  The other day he explained how heart attacks worked when I was wondering what an infarction was.  We are going to pull out the GED test Thursday for him to take, he did well last year-maybe could have passed it other than the writing.  We have been working on that a little via e-mails.  He sends me essays and such, I flesh them out and show him what they are looking for.  I know he'd like to get his GED sooner rather than later.  Then there's the SAT...I swear, for an unschooled kid, there sure are a lot of tests to get into college.

I know we still have time, that 18 is not The End, that he can take more time or he can change his mind and go a different route.  Compared to where he was at 2.5 years ago-the difference is vast.  Still, there are moments when I panic, when I know that I don't KNOW how it will turn out, that I have essentially bucked the system that was no good for *me* and in doing so, have gambled my children.  I am reliant on each kid to pull their own weight and follow their own interests and fill in the blanks with knowledge and experience of their own choosing, some I help with, most they go about independently-more so now that they are a little older.

I always start down this road to panic, or just to worry, and about the second bend, I am rewarded with some definitive proof that they really ARE learning, that they are picking up the basics and immersing themselves in interests that are nothing I would have chosen for them.  That's the point, I think.  That they make their own choices all of their lives, that they don't wait for someone to tell them-they go and make their own decisions.  I just hope the biggest decision in their lives-the one I made for them-the decision to unschool-was a good one.

Learning and Education

I have been voraciously reading Peter Gray's articles over at psychology today dot com since about 5 this morning.  That man has some insight, which is kind of rare in someone who has had so much education.

He talks about this concept, Trustful Parenting, which has been around in one form or another since...always.  The most vocal group of late are the attached parenting folks.  I admit, when I first read about attached parenting, I was put off by the amount of TIME it involved.  I did not want to be with my kids that much simply because I could not fathom being with my own parents that much.  Of course, I also seriously questioned my homeschooled cousin-who had built his first car, a 69 Mustang, from a wreck and a book by himself and drove it back and forth from Alabama to the university in Florida he attended on full scholarship.  Not about homeschooling so much as HOW did he learn to drive without taking driver's ed?  I mean, without that form signed by a teacher, did you really KNOW anything about it?  I needed grade point average proof.  I needed that for many years.

I knew, growing up with a teacher for a mother, that it was a big game.  Yes, there are involved teachers, but they have SO many hoops that after a few years, it's hard to find one that stands out or that has all that energy for the extras.  Or...a place FOR the extras in the 'teaching the test' school system.  Talking to teachers locally, it seems they work up the test until April, then spend May watching movies.  One mom told me she took her kids out to homeschool because when they went to the video store for family movie night, they could not find a dvd her kids had not already watched at school.

Another pulled her son out in October of his kindergarten year because at the open house, the teacher stressed the fun stations around the room and the reality was, the 5-year-olds sat at their desks all day working on penmanship and reading.  And often lost their 15 minutes of recess due to someone talking or fidgeting.  She said after 3 months in school, her son had not even opened his box of crayons.  Play and creation have no place in the No Child Left Behind system.

What IS getting left behind?  With all the emphasis on grade levels, test scores, numbers and performance-where is the individual?  The CHILD?