Home Learning: Episode 6

I’m not even sure what to say about home learning at this point. I mostly let her get on with it and am pretty lenient about when she starts and ends, as long as she gets the work done that the teacher is requiring.

I haven’t taught the child a lick of sewing and the bread I tried to make yesterday was edible, but just barely, because I forgot the second addition of yeast. (The munchkin asked for Italian bread.)

I help when she needs it but encourage her to try on her own. She tends to ask questions she knows the answer to –

“Mom, what is 34 minus 6?”

“I don’t know, what IS 34 minus 6?”

Silence.

“Oh, it’s 28.”

“Yes.”

Even when she is working on something independently, she likes to work in the same room I’m in AND talk out loud through it. That makes it very hard for me to concentrate. But it’s also fantastic to watch her sometimes. She just got off the couch, got down on her knees and proceeded to pull herself across the floor using her hands, just to get a pencil from her little table. I don’t care about the knees of her pants, it was funny, and what adult does something like that? It’s a way of looking at the world, uncurbed by propriety and the judgmental world, that we could all use a little bit of in our heads.

Today I went through the packets her teachers sent home initially and found a bunch of the things she never did before the online schoolwork started. She finished her online work for the day so I told her I want her to do some reading after lunch, then focus on some kind of art project. I also set her to work with a pumpkin recipe magazine we got last fall and told her to find a recipe we could make because I have a can of pumpkin on the shelf. And her father took her for a walk after he got done with work.

I am trying to do my own work and provide meals three times a day for the denizens of our house. Trying not to get too distracted by social media. Drinking bad coffee that has hid in the back of the cupboard. Getting to sleep late then waking in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep, and getting up later than I would like. (Thank goodness for no commute!)

I related a great deal to this article that a friend posted, from Today’s Parent, Why is no one talking about how unsustainablethis is for working parents?

We will get through this and school will go back to being what it was, I believe. In the meantime, we do the best we can. We're watching our veggie seeds grow every day.

Book Review: A Bad Day for Sunshine by Darynda Jones

A Bad Day for Sunshine

by Darynda Jones

I’ve been a long-time fan of the Charley Davidson urban fantasy series by Darynda Jones. Sadly, it has come to a close, so I was very excited to learn she was releasing a new series, based around a Sheriff named Sunshine Vicram. The first book is A Bad Day for Sunshine.

Jones returns to the stomping ground she knows best for the setting, New Mexico, with coffee and Tex-Mex food to make us salivate, as well as gorgeous love interests for our heroine.

Sunshine has won an election she never even entered, to become sheriff of Del Sol, New Mexico. She knows her mother and father had something to do with it, but she can’t get anyone to tell her exactly how they managed it.

But Sunshine has accepted the outcome of the election and returned to Del Sol for the soul purpose of finding out who abducted her and held her for ransom when she was seventeen. She doesn’t remember much of what transpired at all, has no idea who kidnapped her, or how she became pregnant during that time. And her daughter, Auri, doesn’t know that she is the product of a probable rape.

The beginning of this story is strangely humorous and lighthearted for the darkness of the subject matter. It seemed incongruous at times, but is more spread out as the story goes on. More immediate and dire events unfold as one teen girl and one young man go missing, though we are unsure what their connection is for some time.

It is a very fast-paced book with all of the distant angst for a seemingly unavailable love interest that we are used to in Jones’ books. It's a very contemporary book in that there is no beating around the bush about the fact that a single woman in her early thirties would find certain men sexually attractive. 

Sunshine is also very matter-of-fact with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Auri, about her expectation that her daughter not engage in any such pursuits.

On thing that I really loved in this book is Auri’s voice. Her intelligence and humor, her infatuation with a boy in her new school, are deeply relatable to anyone who remembers their teen years. The interplay between mom and daughter is sweet and delightful.

Sunshine's love interest is very attractive, though I felt the plot wore a little thin where he was concerned, because he makes assumptions about her motives and she ignores things that he does, that so clearly signal a vested interest. It seems clear that this will be a series and I hope any twists in the plot will rise above and surprise me.

The plot is twisty and fast-paced enough to keep things interesting, but the tone is light enough to keep the dark events from becoming too dark. I read this one in two days and intend to go back and read it again now. I would give it a solid 4.5 out of 5.

Home Learning: Episode Five

Well, I don’t know about you all but it has been a frustrating week here.

A seemingly simple assignment, read the science text and answer the questions, required help every five minutes. I know she CAN do this on her own. It has taken WAY longer than I think it should and I keep biting my tongue.

Mostly we’re getting math, ELA, science, reading and writing from her teacher. I’m trying to add in some art, music, and exercise.

It’s weird having school at home for the kids, I’m sure. Home has always been the place to relax for her, but now she is being faced with different expectations. And I don’t know if I’m being reasonable in my level of expectations.

Sometimes she’ll do an assignment, “I’m done!” I look at it and say, “No, you’re not. That doesn’t answer the question, or only half answers it.”

I try to think back to what I was like in 4th grade and I don’t remember, barely an impression. I can’t even remember what 4th graders were like when I was substitute teaching.

This morning I was just trying to break up her assignments for the week so that she would be able to work on a couple every day and be done by Friday night and have the weekend off. But looking at that much work laid out gave her a bit of anxiety. She’s not used to seeing it all that way.

Yes, she made me cry today. But she’s an empathetic little bug so that made her cry too.

I’d like to be able to focus on teaching her, but I’ve got my own work to do. It’s not an easy balance. So, I’m researching resources for working with kids at home. Anyone have something to add?

https://www.parents.com/parenting/work/life-balance/how-to-master-being-a-work-at-home-mom/

https://www.fastcompany.com/90478087/got-kids-try-these-tips-for-working-from-home-while-theyre-with-you

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kids-mental-health-coronavirus_l_5e81fb57c5b66149226b540e?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIjU4Me-Pgj5nmJDS2Vyli8PKmLaPdKBR53SJa1Sa-ImI5KdImxqUAHhKa5lJ62o-8k-lmBA8tHQT4zddaXCrxr4nhTeMw_R2ojX3-Q_OJ1FFGTnBW5RGoGCEprLzP14oy7IbsHUfDWK1W9mhcu-fxq4QCAzSWAA7mAWwiz8Hqwr

Book Review: The Turn by Kim Harrison

The Turn

by Kim Harrison

I loved The Hollows series by Kim Harrison, an urban fantasy set in a future where the population of humans was damaged by a plague and the Inderlanders (pixies, fae, witches, vampires, werewolves, etc.) have come out of the closet in order to keep society running. However, it’s not always an easy mixing of groups.

This is a fantastic prequel to The Hollows series, pulling in fast-paced action with patriarchal office politics of the sixties, paranormal characters, and genetic engineering.

Felecia Eloytrisk, Trisk for short, is an elf. We are introduced to her as she is graduating from college as a geneticist and hoping to get a job with an Elven run facility. Unfortunately, this is the sixties and the good old boys network is alive and well, even in Elven society.

Trisk’s chief nemesis, Trenton Kalamack, has bullied her all through school because she is a dark elf instead of one of the fair-haired elven elite. Then he picks a fight at the college job fair. Of course, Trisk is blamed and runs out of time to execute a contract for employment.

A lot of favorite characters show up here, like a teen musician, Takata, with his crazy drummer driving a beat up van as they try to get away from the plague restrictions.

Trisk goes to work for a human lab where they’ve been working on a virus to use in biological warfare that will make humans sick enough for U.S. forces to take over a building or area without having to actually kill people. Trisk is under a directive from the Elven enclave to make sure the virus won’t affect Inderlanders.

Meanwhile, she is also developing a tomato that will revolutionize crops worldwide, and also a virus to help introduce needed modifications to elves that will allow them to procreate again reliably.

Trenton is working on the same problem from a different angle and he is a self-righteous, entitled sob. He's sent to double check Trisk’s work and ends up causing serious problems.

There’s intrigue and male/female politics at play here but I think the author keeps characters from becoming too one dimensional.

Plus, there’s a pixie, and she’s fantastic! A great ride!

Adventures in Home Learning: Episode 4

4/15/2020

The age old war continues between this is a teachable moment and but I just want to get it done.

I’ve been pleased to find the munchkin reading more. She’s discovered anime and fallen in love with the graphic novels. It’s not my thing but I prefer it to her watching videos all the time.

Last week was kind of petering out on the work front. She’d reached the end of the packet her teacher had sent home at the beginning of things. Of course, last week was supposed to be Easter vacation but I didn’t want her to just sink into her videos so I kept her doing her routine each day – a little math, a little reading, some exercise, some piano, etc. She ended up drawing llamas.

Over the weekend I tried to get into the Easter spirit of things. We made a coconut flour cake on Saturday together and colored Easter eggs. I got her started, having her measure out the vinegar and food dye then quizzing her on what color combinations make what colors, then let her go at it with the eggs. 

Then we made homemade individual pizzas, always a favorite in our house, and let her pick a movie – The Greatest Showman.

Sunday was Easter and it was pretty simple here in our house. I set up a Zoom meeting and sent invitations so my mother and siblings could all sit down to dinner together. It worked out pretty well, there was only a little bit of, “What? I can’t hear you.” It seems the microphone on my computer only picks up when you’re right in front of it.

I took Monday off, mostly, and spent some time with the munchkin. She taught me to play “Wizard Chess” and I taught her to play Jax. We also made chocolate chip scones together. (Personally I thought they were lacking something, maybe vanilla.)

We started Google classroom today. It’s an interesting conundrum when you have a little one. They read something. Did you understand it? “Yes.” But did she really? It went pretty well, though. There were several “I can’t figure it out,” moments with Math but she really could, when she took the time.

After spending the morning on that, she was ready to settle back into her videos but I had her get a little activity in then, a bit later, she got up and was dancing around to music and singing along. I was ecstatic with that. Movement and singing? Heck yeah!

Here’s hoping the novelty of the Google classroom doesn’t wear off too soon.

Book Review: The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

The Dark is Rising

by Susan Cooper

I honestly can’t remember when I first read this book, it was probably either something I picked out of the school library as a child OR something that a family I babysat for in high school was reading at bedtime. Either way, it quickly became one of my favorites and I have read it MANY times over the years. I had been just waiting for the chance to read it to my own daughter, but I try not to force the books I want to read on her, so I had to wait, and wait . . . and wait.

Finally, she picked it out of the options. As we read, I realized that it is a bit different from the books that we are used to reading together. It’s a very literary book. The plotting is good and the descriptions rich and full, but the exposition can get just a tiny bit tedious when you are used to more action.

I still love it though.

Will Stanton is the seventh son of a seventh son and lives in a big old farmhouse with his large family in a little English village. On his eleventh birthday, Will learns that he is the last of the Old Ones, born to hold back the Dark from taking over the world.

It’s a lovely story, full of family, village friends, and mythology from Arthurian and Celtic legend.

It all starts on Midwinter’s Eve, when Will goes out to take care of the rabbits, but they recoil from his touch. His dogs seem skittish around him too, and the radio goes berserk every time he gets near it. He and his brother James take a cart to get some hay from Farmer Dawson and the rooks are spooked too. There’s a tramp wandering around, and Farmer Dawson refers to him as The Walker. The farmer also gives Will something for good luck, a curious iron ornament of a circle quartered by a cross, and tells him to put it on his belt like an extra buckle.

So begins a tremendous journey that takes Will Stanton, The Sign Seeker, on the adventure of a lifetime, right in his own backyard, awakening him to the magical nature of the people around him and the stories of the legends that are part of his world.

The Dark is Rising was published in 1973 and I think you’ll see quickly how other legends influenced it, and how it influenced future fantasy.

I highly recommend it if you have any love at all for the fantasy genre.

Adventures in Home Learning: Episode 3

This week has been marked by a lesson in why cakes without sugar don’t rise as high and aren’t really edible. Also, how to make papier mache paste and create our own Easter egg decorations from what we have. (And a little bit of if we do it wrong the first time, we need to go back and do it again.)

I can’t say we’ve made much progress in buckling down and pretending we’re having school at home. We’re not. Every day I have to kick her off her device in the morning but she does it fairly willingly. She writes down a list of things she’s going to do and then starts doing them. My husband or I check them, and she’s done with them by lunch time.

Last week we started the process of making papier mache eggs for Easter decorations. We had water balloons and Minecraft balloons left over in the cupboard and some newspapers in the backroom. We made a recipe of paper mache paste up from https://artlessonsforkids.me/2011/04/24/papier-mache-greek-vases-in-grade-seven/ and had to let it cool. I decided to try using fabric instead of newspaper on at least one egg. It turned out pretty good!

It was an interesting process. For some reason I actually remembered my elementary school art teacher demonstrating how you wipe the excess paste off the newspaper before applying it and I shared that tip with the munchkin. As usual, she came up with her own way of doing it – using her fingers to apply some paste to the balloon then put the strip of paper on.

She chose to do one big balloon while I did two little ones with either fabric or newspaper strips. I figured it would take 1 to 3 days for the forms to dry completely so we could paint. I hung them up by threading a needle and passing it through the tail of the balloon that stuck out to create a loop that I could hook over a clothes hanger.

The big one turned out much better than my little ones. I liked the fabric, but the little silver one made me think dragons egg more than chicken egg so I decorated it with glitter glue for a jeweled egg look. The munchkin is still adding layers of paint to hers but she says she is going for a yellow egg with purple polka dots.

Today we were experimenting with making chocolate cake with brown rice flour and it was going really well, until we forgot the sugar component. Turns out cake without sugar is really flat and salty. The munchkin said it “tastes like a barbecue gone wrong.” We talked about why, cleaned everything up and started over. 

The plants are doing well, we’ve got tiny flower seedlings, leggy spinach and radishes, with the carrots being slow starters, but the onions never did sprout.

We’ve just finished reading The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper at bedtime and I highly recommend it. I’ll be putting a review up on Friday. It’s an old Newberry Award winner about a boy who lives in England on a farm with his family but finds out on his eleventh birthday that he is the last of the “Old Ones,” come to stop the dark from rising. It’s one of my favorite books and I’ve read it many times over. I was so glad to finally share it with Sammy, though she hasn’t taken to it quite the way she did The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. But, she says she wants to read the next book in the series, The Greenwitch. I’m looking forward to it myself.

Book Review: The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni

by Helene Wecker

This is a literary fantasy novel of the very highest caliber.

The Golem is created by a man at the request of another.

The man who created the golem was once a promising Rabbianic student but then, “Yehudah Schaalman awoke to darkness and the certain knowledge that he was somehow damned.”

The man who purchased the Golem’s life brings her to America, waking her on the ship over, but he is ill. He dies and she is left to fend for herself.

She sees the Statue of Liberty for the first time – “ . . . those on deck were waving and shouting at her with jubilation, crying even as they smiled. This, too, the Golem thought, was a constructed woman. Whatever she meant to the others, she was loved and respected for it. For the first time since Rotfeld’s death, the Golem felt something like hope.”

That is, until a wise man sees her and realizes what she is. He takes her in and helps her cope with her own existence. The golem hears and feels people’s thoughts and desires, it is overwhelming at times. The Rabbi tells her -

“A man might desire something for a moment, while a larger part of him rejects it. You’ll need to learn to judge people by their actions, not their thoughts.”

The golem knows what she is.

She looked back down to her fingertips. Nails, teeth, hair: none of these features were made of clay.

“I hope,” she said, watching her own mouth move, “that no one was harmed in my making.”

The Rabbi’s response is one of my favorite lines in the book -

The Rabbi smiled sadly. “So do I. But what’s done is done, and you are not to be blamed for your own creation, whatever the circumstances.”

The Jinni is very old and his existence has been whimsical, spying on travelers near the desert where he grew up in Syria, building his own invisible palace in the desert of glass and gold. But there is a huge lapse of time when he does not know what happened, he simply wakes when a metal smith in New York City breaks the words binding him into a tea kettle that came from Syria by rubbing out some words. The metal smith kindly helps him find his footing, gives him a home and employment. The Jinni is still bound by a metal cuff on his wrist, to keep him from doing any magic.

This story brings the Golem and Jinni together in a version of New York City very long ago. Their lives before they meet and during the time they know each other are beautifully wrought.

The descriptions are detailed and the story is thought provoking. It goes into the back story of each character quite deeply.

I cannot emphasize enough how beautifully constructed and told this story is. This is one of those stories that you wish you could wipe from your mind in order to have the pleasure of discovering it all over again. It deserves far more than five stars. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Adventures in Home Learning: Episode 2

Hi Folks – 

Well, the seeds are taking off, but the novelty of “home learning” has worn off for the munchkin. We were watching a science experiment video from my library and she was fascinated! Until Miss Abby started explaining the science behind it. Munchkin turned away, saying, “I don’t wanna know the science, I just want to have fun!”

I admit I’m struggling a bit with this one. She’s still making her list in the morning, but when she is done with the tasks on it, she wants to be done for the day. Should I let her have the rest of the time free because she has finished her work, or should I insist that this means there is time to learn something else and she cannot watch videos? 

Frankly, I don’t have time to chase her around insisting she LEARN. And I can’t ask her to help me when I have to focus on things I need to do for work. I feel like everything is run, run, run, between doing what I need to for work and doing what we need to keep her occupied and learning. 

I think there has to be some balance between there being a normal school day and no learning at all, because things are not normal, and that’s stressful on a little kid.

One of the few things the munchkin asked for since this whole thing started was a McDonald’s Shamrock shake, so we went to McDonald's drive through. I was all set to pour it into a different cup to hand her, but they aren't doing shakes. Disappointed little girl. I offered a homemade one, but she said it wouldn’t be the same. Then we went to the local farm store for dairy staples, and I wouldn’t let her go in with me like she usually does. Things are different.

The munchkin seemed to be handling it all well, but then one night she started talking about the railing upstairs making her nervous because it wasn’t safe. I’m getting the sense of some displaced fears here. The virus is too near and scary so instead she is talking about the railing. Then she half woke as I was leaving her room and was very upset because she said she couldn’t talk. I assured her she was talking and I could hear her. That seemed to help, but twenty minutes later she was wide awake and in my bedroom.

Things I have learned about my child by being home more – we got a piano in the house last fall and she can already play simple tunes. I had no idea! I also learned she loves dragons crossed with a nine-tail fox. (And we learned that the nine-tail fox is a Kitsune in Japanese mythology.)

So my plan is still to ease into things. We’ll continue this week with what we’re doing, adding some different tasks. Then next week I’m going to add a bit more to her daily schedule – a paragraph journal entry every day, and something else she can do on her own. I’m hoping the rain will ease and we can get out a bit more.

Happy home learning!