Category Archives: unschooling

unschooling

Gavin’s birthday

We had a lovely family party for Gavin last week, a nice day at home on his actual birthday playing games (like TimeLine!) and relaxing and a party with friends at Willard Bay this weekend.

He wanted to swim and especially, to try the floating inflatable playground with his friends, so that’s what we did. It was a beautiful day and the water was warm. The kids and some adults enjoyed the playground and then we all chatted in the shade or played in the water until the beautiful sunset came, and then the mosquitoes arrived so we left.

There was a huge slide the kids enjoyed, a swing, a trampoline and various other structures all joined together floating out in the water. They had to swim out so here are a bunch of the kids jumping in to go out to play!

 

Here they are playing on the playground.

We got chocolate, vanilla and lemon cupcakes and we brought a sundried tomato, artichoke heart, basil pesto pasta salad to share and it was well appreciated.

Gavin was so thrilled to just get to spend time with friends and it was fun for family to get to see the crew together. I wish I had gotten a picture of him and one of his friends out floating for hours in the middle of the lake together in the late afternoon for hours but I was too busy paddle boarding. My mom, Meara and Chris got some kayaking and paddle boarding in too. So fun!

He’s fourteen now! It’s shocking (to me) and totally expected at the same time. He still loves Lego, and builds the neatest unique spaceships and other things regularly. He loves Zelda: Breath of the Wild on his new switch game system that he saved up for all on his own this summer. He loves board and card games and cannot get enough, especially anything “futuristic” or “space themed”. He tries to meet friends online as often as possible to play MineCraft or RoBlox with them.  When they can get together in person they swim or chat or fight with boffer weapons. His favorite color is blue violet, favorite food is lasagna, favorite flower is lavendar, favorite animal is owl. He reads like mad and is currently inhaling a series he started on his birthday called Space Runners. He’s an amazing, wonderful person and I am so grateful to get to spend a lot of time with him, learning together and enjoying life together, appreciating each other.

 

Such good memories to look back on and so much fun and discovery yet to come for him and for us with him! What a journey!

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unschooling

a trip for only two of us

Chris and I were lucky enough to be able to spend a few days in Southern Utah, just the two of us.  My parents invited the kids over for those days which I heard was fun for all of them. We are so grateful that they all like each other enough to be able to enjoy it! Thank you so much for the precious gift, Mom and Dad!

We went down to a cabin near Moab and explored Canyonlands, Moab area and got a permit to hike into the Fiery Furnace in Arches.

We saw some petroglyphs and pictographs, an old cowboy camp and an old Native American grain storage structure.

We saw flowers, lizards and sheer rock walls.

 

We explored red rock furnaces and arches and reflecting pools and we enjoyed celebrating 17 years of marriage. I am incredibly lucky to have so much love, fun and partnership in my life with Chris.

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unschooling

coming and goings

We’ve been reading and gardening and watching birds. In the past few weeks in the yard we’ve spotted hummingbirds, bullocks orioles, ruby crowned kinglets, robins, lazuli buntings, finches, hawks, chickadees, wood peckers and blue gray gnat catchers.

We went to the trampoline park with friends and Lilah made it across the slack line.

We celebrated May Day with friends. Lilah and I made flower crowns.

We’ve been playing games like Hero Realms, 5 Minute Dungeon, Power Grid at home.

We’ve spent Sunday’s with my parents chatting and playing games. So enjoyable to spend time with family.

We went out to some springs in the Tooele desert looking for a ghost town but the road was being dozed so we stopped at the springs instead.

Lilah’s been doing some drawing and practicing French. Gavin’s been practicing German and Manga drawing.

We’ve begun a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for the kids and their friends (and some of us parents too!) at our place. It’s a big project but really fun and so good to see them all enjoying it together. Chris is running the game and has been putting a lot of effort into that planning and preparation with enthusiasm which I appreciate so much! We’ve met twice and the kids have so much fun. They defeated a giant and acquired weapons in this latest session which was a huge excitement!

Lilah started a cross stitch project- her first. It’s going to be a butterfly. She’s enjoying it so far.

We had a lovely Mothers’ Day celebrating with family. Lilah wrote me a poem and Gavin made me magical potions. I also got a picture of the three of us!

Gavin’s been mowing my parents’ lawn for them this season. This is his first go at the grass. He’s been very happy to help and to earn some money. Currently he’s saving for a Nintendo Switch game system to play Legends of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

We are planning some rock hounding trips in the near future, when it’s less rainy.

It’s raining again today, like so many days lately. The kids are playing a made up game where Gavin is creating a character (like in a computer game) with Lilah listing the choices available and explaining how they work.

Gavin: “What are the available iris colors for eyes?”

Lilah: “Pretty much anything you can imagine.”

Gavin: “Okay, how about blue violet with green to contrast? Then I select “next”.”

Lilah: “So, next is body composition, like body shape and size.”

When they finished with this part they started telling a story with Lilah speaking for the world and Gavin speaking for the character he just created!

Lilah: “He tosses the collar that was around his neck for you to look at.”

Gavin: “I look at it.”

Lilah: “It’s one of those collars that’s made you know in the red maze to keep shape shifters from shape shifting.”

Gavin: “Or looks like that?”

Lilah: “No it is and then he turns into a bird, flies over to you, lands next to you and shape shifts back.”

Gavin: “I throw it down, I place it down in a spot where the dragon wouldn’t see, search for any more children.”

Lilah: “Uh, you see the girl again and another boy.”

Gavin: “Where’s the boy?”

Lilah: “The boy is climbing on the dragons back.”

Gavin: “Oh, then I….”

 

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unschooling

Snow Canyon

We camped in Snow Canyon this past week. It showed us an array of Southern Utah spring weather while we were there from chilly and rainy to windy to warm and sunny and finally, hot and sunny!

We did a bunch of hiking as well as some just sitting and enjoying.

We saw many lizards, bats who came out at dusk and flitted around looking for insects, a canyon tree frog, a tiny scorpion who’d been sheltering underneath our tent and who we found as we were packing up, tadpoles in pools, tent caterpillars roving around their netted homes in bushes and trees, mountain bighorn sheep, deer and we heard an owl our last night there.

 

The rock formations there are beautiful, large and sloping and white, coral, pink, red sandstone. There is some black volcanic rock there from an old volcano as well. It is a fun place to explore and near so many other great places too, like Zion and Coral Pink Sand Dunes. We played in the sand dunes for a bit one evening and enjoyed the orange sand.

There are petroglyphs nearby from Anasazi people who lived in the area long ago. They’ve found many artifacts and remnants of houses and other ancient spaces made by the Anasazi there too though the one we passed by wasn’t much to look at since it was an underground space and has been buried by years of sand and weather.

We admired many wildflowers and blooming shrubs and trees, beautiful in the rain with tiny jeweled drops perched on their leaves and petals and in the sun, glowing.

 

Now we are home and enjoying spring in our yard, opening our windows, picking flowers, reveling in the sunshine.

 

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unschooling

lately

We’ve been baking

and making

and hanging out with friends.

We’ve seen lots of baby farm animals

and planted some vegetables inside.

We’ve been working on new fuzzy ear and tail sets to wear with friends during cat and wolf “real life” play. (The kids often choose to create scenarios where they explore games or settings or characters in story telling and acting and they call this “real life MineCraft”, “real life Lord of the Rings” etc.)

We’ve gone to see some performances at local theatres.

The kids have been building a medieval MineCraft world to use with their friends.

We’ve been reading

and taking a new kite out for a flight.

We’ve been visiting grandparents

and going to the library.

We’ve been going to a an art installation gallery with family.

It’s been good.

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ghost town

It’s felt a bit springy here and I had a hankering for adventures so we left to discover a ghost town we’d never visited before: Silver City. It was a mining town, as are most ghost towns in these states around us.

It’s closer to home than many others and there are no intact buildings but so many fascinating walls and foundations left! The smelter is huge! There were several areas with pools of water and one underground room that we could just peer into that had water about 4 feet deep.

We found crucible bits (used for melting glass and metal in) and lots of bricks, core samples, and other odds and ends.

We found a new friend. It’s some kind of horned lizard but I’m not sure which variety. It was quite willing to let us stroke it’s back and hold it and even had to be nudged to leave my palm after we were finished admiring it.

Afterward we drove up the canyon a bit to see if there was more to explore and it looked quite promising so we will be back soon.

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unschooling

A whole lot of Holi

We celebrated the Indian holiday Holi with friends in the middle of the week at a park and then again this weekend at the Hindu temple nearby with thousands of people. Both were so much fun!

In preparation for the day with friends we tried making our own color powder and while it was interesting is was so time consuming I don’t know that we’ll try it again. It took hours to dry and then it wasn’t as colorful as we had hoped. Traditionally during Holi, a spring holiday, you throw colored powder at friends and family until everyone is very brightly colored. When you throw color at someone, it is seen as an act of love and blessing. It also symbolizes a victory of good over evil. The kids loved running around and getting messy and coloring each other.

Before the color throwing, the kids roamed the park, climbing trees and fighting with foam swords Gavin brought.

Gavin also got out his Magic The Gathering board game and happily played that with his friends for an hour or so.

There were a couple of huge hawks building nest right above us and we watched them fly overhead and bring sticks back to finish off their huge nest.

We also tried some Indian dessert recipes at home and made laddoo with chickpea flour, grain halwa with oat flour and carrot halwa. They were all quite delicious!

At the big temple, they had yummy Indian food to eat and music and dancing and a huge color throw on the hour each hour where so many people throw simultaneously that it creates a rainbow cloud for a few seconds. We try to go every year because we enjoy it so much. Lilah was thrilled that her favorite dessert, the halwa, was mango flavored this year!

 

We went home rainbow-colored and happy, twice.

 

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steam punk project

Gavin and his friends love the steam punk aesthetic. Steam punk is a genre of science fiction or science fantasy that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. It is also a style of design and fashion that combines historical elements with anachronistic technological features inspired by science fiction. The latter is what we’re talking about here.

So, Gavin’s friends’ birthday was coming and he wanted to make something special so we brainstormed and came up with the idea of transforming a toy dart gun into a steampunk toy dart gun. We looked up some approaches and went shopping. This is what he chose to work with:

 

We also picked up a couple at the thrift shop to make sure we didn’t run into trouble with just one to work with. Next he sanded them all over to look more used.

We also spent time at the local thrift shop looking for additions to accessorize with. We came home with a toy with plastic crystals and a small sewing machine which the kids took apart for pieces.

Then we spray painted the dart guns black.

After that he rubbed on metallic paints in different areas to make the surfaces look like old metal.

 

Then we added some bits and pieces from the sewing machine and some other items we scavenged to add to the effect.

All three turned out pretty great but especially the one he added to and gave to his friend.

 

Lilah also made a special something for the birthday friend whose favorite animal is a fox. I didn’t get a picture of the cute critter before it was taken to it’s new home but the felted fox is already on top of our friend’s dresser in a place of honor! She’s got plans to work on more soon so I’ll be sure to capture pictures of those.

I love supporting these two in their creative endeavors!

 

 

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Florida

We took a little over a week to explore part of Florida.

It’s cold at home and much warmer there which was a nice reprieve. The kids had never been to Florida and Chris was traveling to Sri Lanka for a work retreat. It is so incredibly hard to be left behind when he travels internationally because I love traveling and have always wanted to travel more of the world and have had not any opportunity to do so in twenty years. It’s also hard because I also become a single parent for that time and have to be on duty 24/7 with all the needs of the kids and household. I’m lucky to be in a relationship where we are partners and do our best to share the load for most things so it’s a big deal when he’s away. And to be completely open, being a “stay at home mom” is hard. So hard! I love it and want to do it and am so lucky to be able to choose to but there is no validation, respect, appreciation, recognition for all the things you do, or all the progress you make or the things you really try hard at or excel at. It feels so lonely and so unseen and so endless. There’s no time off or work hours or bonuses or kudos. I miss when I had people who “saw” what I did and how well (or not) I did it. There’s a tiny bit of that from other moms and friends, family and my partner but it’s simply not the same. And our culture has no other value system for accomplishments, time spent, effort that what is there in school or work. Anyway, that’s a whole other post about my personal experience with the isolation of being a full time parent and home educator, how difficult it is and how I struggle and make do.

So, to keep myself from going mad, we went to Florida while Chris was away. He made it easier on me by getting us a great place to stay and flying out with us to get us settled in. We stayed in Cape Coral which we learned is the burrowing owl capitol of the world! Whoa! Gavin’s face lit up when I told him that. We looked around but had no luck but it so happened the Burrowing Owl festival was going on while we were there. Of course we had to go. The festival itself was fun, sort of like a fair. They had some rescued owls of different types and a butterfly pavilion.

Here are some pictures Gavin took of the owls at the festival:

 

Gavin says they’re an albino pygmy owl, a great horned owl and a barred owl.

But they also had a bus tour to see burrowing owls! We signed up and went with twenty other much older folks to see owls. We learned that in Cape Coral, they mark burrows. So, just like that, our owl spotting opened up! We stopped at several burrows and some were occupied, some weren’t and some the owls were inside and not visible as it was warm and the middle of the day. We learned that CC owls are the only ones who dig their burrows as the sand is soft enough there. In other places they use other animals’ old burrows. They were pretty cute little owls! There was usually one out guarding the entry to the burrow though at one burrow we saw both. After our tour we took our own tours and found many owls including a pair only two houses down from where we were staying! Wow! They are nearly invisible so without some serious location help or the markers they put around each we likely never would have spotted any even though there were thousands of active owl burrows in Cape Coral.

We went to the beach and the beach and the beach. Fort Myers beach was warm and shallow and the kids had a lot of fun paddling around there.

Sanibel Island was beautiful and there were lots of shells to discover but it was quite crowded and hard to find parking.

Lovers Key was amazingly gorgeous though we got attacked by tiny biting insects at dusk. If you go, do not stay till dusk and do not stop at the washing station! We spotted osprey nests and enjoyed the beautiful white sand and turquoise water. Here’s our picnic spot:

And here some shots from the beach:

We headed to the Everglades twice. Once we walked and once we biked the paths. There were so many birds and fish and turtles and alligators! We saw tiny baby alligators hanging around their moms and big ones submerged so they looked like rocks in the canals and big ones sunning themselves on the side of the path. We saw blue herons and white herons and night herons and ibis and spoonbills and wood storks and anhingas and hawks and tiny diving herons. We spotted a pair of nesting anhingas with babies. It was beautiful. The kids loved biking there and it was fun to yell, “Stop, there’s an alligator!”

 

We headed to Manasota Key to look for sharks teeth. We found so many! It was really fun figuring out how and where to look for them and then picking them up. We found tiny ones and pretty good sized ones and some were black, some were golden brown and black and some were almost bluish or orangish tinted in places. It was also an excellent place for shelling! Lilah loved looking at the shells for treasures. Gavin spent several hours looking for all the butterfly clam shells he could find in different colors. He theorized that they are different colors in different places. We even spotted some butterfly clams alive in the sand and we watched them bury themselves back up after getting washed off by the waves.

Here’s Gavin searching for butterfly clamshells:

And hunting for sharks teeth:

We admired the patterns of the coral on this big hunk:

Here’s some of our haul of treasures from the beaches:

Lilah learned the names of a bunch of shells we’d never encountered before.

We passed a bunch of mini golf places while driving so that was on Gavin’s wish list. He chose a pirate themed place and we went there one afternoon and enjoyed the course. They had an old smugglers ship turned into a hole which was pretty neat. They even had alligators we could feed. So, of course we did! We put the kibble between pins on a fishing pole and lowered it down and the alligators caught it and ate it. It was fascinating to watch. They looked like they didn’t even notice but then suddenly would jump and catch the food. They hung onto the end of the string for a while after catching the food too. I wondered how many golf balls they’ve eaten. No pictures were taken of the feeding because there was too much fencing in the way to get a decent shot.

I did a lot of yoga to stretch, strengthen and relax my body and mind. It helped ease my intense feelings a bit and felt good.

There were lots of little lizards living by our place, running up the trees and in the trash cans and on the windows. They were fun to watch. One evening we spotted a bunny grazing at the side of our place in the evening. The kids enjoyed watching it munching and then bounding away.

It was really fun to be in very different climates and biomes than we usually enjoy at home. It was fun for me to remember trips to Florida to visit my grandparents a long time ago.

While driving around lately we’ve listened to Hellen Keller’s autobiography: The Story Of My Life,  Changeling by Molly Harper, The Hazelwood by Melissa Albert. Now we are listening again to Children of Blood and Bone  by Tomi Adeyemi in preparation for the second book coming soon.

Lilah is already talking about our next trip to Florida! I’m not sure we’ll go again soon as there are so many other places to explore but it was a good week.

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sword casting

We signed the kids up for a sword casting class a few months back. It was so popular we had to be quick to get in but are so glad we did.

It was amazing!

The teacher travels around with his equipment and teaches groups and he has quite a wealth of knowledge to share about metals, casting, history.

The kids each chose a sword from many different shapes. Lilah sanded her wooded sword. They used sand casting to create a mold for the metal. Each kid started with a special wooden box that comes apart multiple ways. They fill it with sand mixed with bentonite clay and a tiny bit of water, pat it down.

 

Then they put the wooden sword in and push it down with a flat piece of wood.

Next they sprinkle powder on top to stop the next layer of sand from sticking to the first.

Then they fill up the next half of the box, tamp it down really firmly, and put the lid on. They use a tube shaped tool to create a channel in the sand for the metal to get into the mold.

 

Next they unlatch the box, open it in half and carefully take out the wooden sword. That was a bit scary because all that holds the sand in place (to shape the all-important sword shape!) is your packing skills and the texture of the sand! Then they carefully put it back together and it’s ready for casting!

He used aluminum for the swords because it’s less expensive and lighter weight than other options. He heated it in a small foundry with propane and then poured it into each vertical box mold.

It cooled in about five minutes, then he opened them and took out the metal swords.

After that it was time to shake out the sand so it could be reused. I was interested in the difference in the sand that had touched aluminum.

Next they were ground, smoothing them a bit and removing extra ends from the pour channel.

Last thing was to wrap a piece of leather around the hilt.

The kids were thrilled and learned so much and it was so great he had them do most of the process themselves.

Things I found interesting:

Aluminum doesn’t occur as an ore naturally. The only time it does is when lightning strikes it in rock form and heats it. Because of this it was discovered much later than many other metals. Unlike many other metals, it just looks brown in its rock form. Napoleon had a set of silverware made of lightning formed aluminum that he let his favored visitors use. If you weren’t favored, you had to use gold utensils.

The criss knife is a traditional ceremonial dagger, originally from Indonesia.

The Egyptian kopesh is a curved, notched sword, used to hook and pull shields down and away from opponents so that you can reach them. They based the design of the Assyrian weapon that looks much similar but slightly smoother, which had defeated them while they used straight swords.

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