"The Sooner State"

After studying the state of Utah, we moved directly into doing a week on the great state of Oklahoma. It worked out nicely because my parents came into town for a few days and I was able to recruit my mother to do a large part of the teaching. She spent several days teaching the kids all about Oklahoma history. Although she touched on the dust bowl and other significant events and peoples, the bulk of her lesson was on the Native Americans history. She discussed the history of the Indians, how they were moved into Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears and resided there until the great Oklahoma Land Runs. She taught them about the five civilized tribes, (the kids couldn't stop laughing over the Chick-I Saw Indians!) and about the Indians daily life (Spencer became obsessed with bow and arrows and Indian Quivers after this discussion). She also brought all sorts of props to show and give the kids i.e. the Oklahoma flag, a dream catcher to hand downstairs in their rooms, some Indian figurines, and real Indian jewelry from a friend of hers who is a true Indian Princess. Here she is at the table teaching away:



The kids loved talking all about Indian culture and lifestyles. They were saddened by the stories of the government mistreating the Indians, and shocked when they got to the part of the lesson on the Land Runs. How could the government break its promise to the Indians and give their lands away? It was a powerful teaching moment for the kids, and one that gave us an opportunity to talk about the Book of Mormon prophesies about the Indians.

Although the kids were upset by the fact that the government decided to give away the Indians' land via the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, I knew our Oklahoma Unit wouldn't be complete without a Land Run re-enactment. Growing up in Oklahoma, our elementary schools always held a Land Run day, so I knew just how to proceed. Our first task; however, was to round up some settlers in search of free land so we wouldn't have to "run" all by ourselves. With so many wonderful friends, that didn't prove to be much of a challenge.

Our next order of business was to host a few activities to make preparations throughout the week of our land-run. First the kids came over to decorate small flags that they would attach to their stakes. Next we had them over to make stick horses to ride during the big event.



And then, finally the actual Land Run Day arrived. The kids all dressed up and brought their stakes and stick horses. (As you can see in the photo, we even saved our covered wagon for the great event.) We made them all stand outside behind a long red ribbon and wait for the cap-gun fire to set off in search of their land. Our whole back-yard was staked off and the kids were instructed to find their piece of earth and place their stake next to the large stake marking their territory. It was absolutely adorable to see these kids get so into the Run, and it brought back so many fond memories of my own childhood in Oklahoma. Here are a few pictures of the kids on the big day:









Just as the kids were lining up, several of the neighbors came outside to see what all the excitement was about. A few people walking by also stopped to watch us as all the commotion broke out. I don't know if they thought we were having a birthday party, or what, but it was quite comical to end up with an audience for our Oklahoma Land Run Day. I should have gone over and explained it all to them, but I didn't want to miss out on watching the kiddo stake out their claims.

Once everyone got some land, then it was time for some good-old Oklahoma cuisine. We prepared BBQ Brisket in honor of the Oklahoma beef, we had chips and cowboy caviar, corn and watermelon, and a delicious peanut dessert made with real Oklahoma wheat and peanuts. Here are our two little love-birds eating their dinner over on their land.



Following the land run, we all settled in for a movie night to watch, well, the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Oklahoma of course! The kids and I had been listening to the music all week and it seemed appropriate to cap off our weeks events with the classic film. After all, "We know we belong to the land. And the land we belong to is grand! And when we say Yeeow! Ayipioeeay! We're only sayin' you're doin' fine, Oklahoma! Oklahoma O.K.!"

"The Beehive State"

After completing our Safety Kids Unit, I decided it was time to come back to Geography again and begin our Individual States Unit. Originally I wanted to go through all of the fifty states. I bought several "50 states" fact books, a 50 states coloring book, a 50 states cook book, one of those quarter collecting boards, a state sticker map, and laminated maps for the kids to mark as we traveled to various states. With all of our supplies in place, I then went about picking the order of the states we would study. Since we kicked off our states week the week of July 24th, we decided to commence by studying the wonderful state of Utah.

We began by covering the Indian and pioneer heritage that Utah has. While we spent some time on the Ute Indians, most of our history lesson centered around the Mormon pioneers. In fact, we started our discussion with Joseph Smith, the prophet of the restoration, and worked our way all the way through until the saints entered the Salt Lake Valley and Brigham Young declared: This is the right place! The kids knew most of this information already, but it was a wonderful chance to review that heritage that belongs as much to us as it does the state of Utah. As part of this history review, we again created a poster board of us at church history sites, this time in the form of a chronological time line. After living on the east coast for a year, we are lucky to have visited almost every church history site there is including: Sharon Vermont--birthplace of Joseph Smith, Palmyra, Harmony Pennsylvania--Joseph and Emma's first home and restoration of the priesthood, Fayette New York--organization of the church, Kirtland, Ohio, Liberty, Independence, and Nauvoo. Here is a shot of our poster board time line.



As you can see, it stops after showing pictures of us in Nauvoo. We didn't end the poster board there; however, since we will soon have more to add. In September our family is going to make a trip back to Nauvoo, and then follow the Mormon trail all the way into the Salt Lake Valley. We will camp our way across the country from Nauvoo, to Winter Quarters, to Martin's Cove, and on through Immigration Canyon. Someday we want to make the trek in covered wagons, but this is the best we can do for now.

In honor of the pioneer trek, we not only planned our own trek for our family vacation, but decided that we needed to have a "symbollic trek" that actually correlated with our weeks of study and with the 24th of July. So, after a few days of reading and reading and reading Mormon history, we decided to make some Mormon history of our own. Dad and the kids worked hard to construct the frame for a covered wagon, and I sewed the canvas cover.



Then we got to the near impossible task of actually loading our wagon. Our journey would only be for one night--July 23rd to July 24th, but since our wagon was somewhat smaller than those the pioneers used, I figure it was actually pretty comparable. And what a nightmare it was to try and pack it. We managed our tent, one pillow, a sheet and blanket, all of our food and cookware for dinner and breakfast the following morning, our pajamas, and our scriptures. It took quite some time to get it all sorted out, to decide what absolutely had to come and what we could leave, and to prepare to make our trek. All in all, I think I appreciated the exercise the most, and truly felt the pangs of leaving things behind. I wasn't the only one who got into it though. As I gathered our food together, the kids stood by the window and pleaded with me to hurry because "the mobs were coming". Then, when we were finally loaded, our wagon threatening to burst, I think a tear escaped Maddi's little eyes. We really felt like we were leaving our home, never to return. Here's a shot of our littlest pioneer child standing next to the loaded wagon.




With one last farewell, we began our trek around and around and around the block.





The kids were dressed in pioneer attire, and you can only imagine the looks we drew as we "walked and walked and walked." This again gave me new found appreciation for the pioneers. I only went around the blocks a few times, with the kids doing most of the work of pulling the wagon, but even with that little amount of walking I felt sore and tired from carrying the baby, and unbelievably hot! I was glad when we finally came back to our back yard and decided to camp for the night.



And camp we did, but not without making a true pioneer dinner first--or at least our idea of a pioneer dinner: fresh trout we had caught ourselves, blueberries, homemade wheat bread we had made the day before--complete with hand churned butter, (this had been part of our pioneer children chores and lifestyle lesson) and some zucchini from our garden. All of it was carefully cooked over the fire, and it was so tasty. After dinner, we settled onto the hard ground inside of our tent, and went quickly to sleep.

That night, in the middle of the night, we had another true pioneer experience. We awoke with a start to a terrible storm that blew in with a vengeance. It came from out of nowhere, and gave us all quite a fright. I hurried in with the baby, and by the time I got back outside the wind had picked up something fierce. Nick was carrying stuff up to the house, and the screaming children took a tumble as the wind rolled the tent. There was no time to rescue the kids though, the first order of business was to get the fire extinguished before we started the whole cornfield on fire. We had left the coals in the fire pit when we went off to bed (not smart!) and when the wind picked up it sent them ablaze. The flames reached well over ten feet, and would have burnt everything in sight if the rain hadn't appeared only seconds later. But appear it did, and it poured. We ran around like crazy trying to get the kids and supplies inside. I was convinced we were going to die, overcome by the elements. Actually, I was sure we were all being picked up by a massive tornado! It was so frightening! But after much fear and craziness, we all soon found ourselves safe and dry and warm inside the walls of our home--a place the pioneers never would have had the luxury of fleeing to in such a storm. It was another powerful lesson, and one we talked a lot about the next morning over our skillet cornbread and blueberries and cream. It was our own little Mormon history indeed, and we capped it off with a big Pioneer Day celebration. We invited all of the members in the neighborhood--a total of 13 families--over for a BBQ that night and requested that everyone bring either family recipes or "Traditional Utah food". As a result, we had a smattering of jellos, including green jello (no carrots though), some funeral potatoes , and other comically Mormon cuisine. We visited and ate and then roasted marshmallows and had a firework show. It was a meaningful way for us to study and commemorate the true pioneer heroes that had entered the Salt Lake Valley on that very day so many year before.

While talking about and recreating Utah history was a fabulous start to our Utah week, it was not the end of our Utah Unit. With the history in place, we were then free to discuss all sorts of things about Utah from it's nickname of "the Beehive State" (We actually paused here and spent a few days talking about bees, studying how they make honey, dissecting flowers and learning about pollination, etc. This was the perfect way to get some science overlap. And bees are more amazing than you know. Sometime you should ask Nick to demonstrate a bee waggle dance and explain it's significance. You'll be down right amazed!), to the Transcontinental railroad (we'll visit Promontory Point on our Utah trip as well), to discussing the capitol, state flower, tree, bird, etc, and to reading about how Utah residents eat twice as much candy as any other state--a fact that our states cookbook attributed to Mormons' candy-making activities within their homes every Monday night! Ha! The kids loved delving into all sorts of topics; however, I think their favorite part of these discussions was the day they received a package from their grandparents out in Utah. This package contained all sorts of Utah items including: a real piece of honeycomb, lye soap, pioneer money, a golden spike, rocks from the Rocky Mountains, glass from some Utah ghost towns, and of course, some Salt Water Taffy from the Great Salt Lake! The kids, as you can see in this photo, just loved getting the educational and exciting present!



Thanks Grandma and Grandpa Hoskins! And thanks be to God for protecting those righteous men and women who sacrificed so much to cross the plains and eventually gained religious freedom in the land of Deseret. We love our pioneer heritage and our religious and family ties to the wonderful state of Utah!

We're the Safety Kids

After completing full Science Units on worms, frogs, and eagles, as well as our three-week Geography Unit on the United States of America, it was finally time for our first Special Unit Class. And our topic for this special unit: Safety.

In brief, our safety unit looked like this:

Day 1
Personal safety lessons. We used the Brite Music Safety Kids CD to talk about stranger danger, personal space, using the buddy system, etc. That night for family home evening we also talked about safety--spiritual safety. We made safety signs to hang all over our house and remind us to be safe.



Day 2 and 3
Personal information packets. I found an awesome web-site that allows you to make tracing sheets out of any text that you choose. Using this website, I put together tracing packets to help the kids learn to write their full names--first, middle, and last, their full address, and their phone number.

Day 4
Calling 911. After going over all of their personal information, we talked this day about when, why, and how to make emergency phone calls. When Nick got home from work we used our cell phones to practice making emergency calls. I put scenarios in a dish and the kids would pull them out, have Nick read them to him, and then call 911 on his phone. After the kids dialed Nick would clear the number and call me. Then I would pretend to be the rescue dispatcher asking what was wrong and having the kids give me their information over the phone. The kids were actually pretty nervous while we were doing this, acting like they were really in trouble of one kind of another. As a result, I think i t was a really beneficial exercise.

Day 5
Fire Safety. We talked about all the ins and outs of fire safety. We talked about playing with fire, fire hazards in our home, and went over and over and over again Stop, Drop, and Roll.

Day 6
Fire Station field trip. We were very lucky to get a private tour of the local fire station with a few of our close friends. We actually went on their equipment checking day too, so the kids got an up close and personal look at all of the firefighters trucks and tools. They loved it. That night for family home evening we again tied it into our safety unit setting our family meeting place, checking our smoke detectors, and running fire drills with mock fires in different locations in our house. One really important part of this for us was teaching the kids how to get out of their windows. It made me realize how lucky we are each and every day that we live free of a fire in our home. I wish we could have somehow found someone who had lost their home in a fire that we could have talked to and given help to. I think that would have been a nice way to cap off the unit.

Here are some of our Fire Station Field Trip Photos:

Bald Eagles

For our final week of our USA unit, we pulled in our science curriculum and talked about the rose, the oak tree, and the bald eagle, with most of our time and efforts placed on the eagle. First we focused on the history of the bald eagle--how it became our national bird, (instead of the wild turkey as Ben Franklin proposed) and how it was saved from the DDT poisoning and brought back from near extinction. Then we simply turned our lessons over to studying the actual bird--how and where they live, what they eat, how they fly, etc. As part of our unit we took two excellent field trips. First, we went over to the Zollman Zoo, a small local zoo that is only a few miles from our home. They have two bald eagles as well as a golden eagle. Our main purpose for going; however, was the life size replica of an eagle's nest that sits at the entrance to the park. We studied what the nest was made out of, measured it with Spencer's tool set tape measure, and examined the eggs inside of it.



Our second field trip was a little more extravagant. This time, we drove almost an hour to the little town of Wabasha, Mn. The National Eagle Center is located in Wabasha right on a fork in the Mississippi River where tons of eagles congregate in the Wintertime. The Eagle Center has all sorts of eagle information and activities, they have an eagle presentation where you get to feed the eagles lunch, and you can get your photo made with one of their eagles.




(We all look pretty stellar in this picture since we went straight to the Eagle Center after camping!)

This field trip capped off our eagle week as well as our USA Unit.

Note: When giving the eagle quiz at the end of the unit, it's cute to pretend the kids are little eagles and give them gold-"fishies" for every question they get right.
Also, this is a good time to list and talk about other "Birds of Prey" as they are all very similar in nature.

National Treasure Bingo

With our "Flag Week" complete, we then moved into a discussion of several of the other national symbols and national monuments. In our studies we looked at the history, building, and current location of: The White House, The Washington Monument, the Capitol Building, Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, The Statue of Liberty, and Mount Rushmore. (We also covered the national bird, flower and tree, but since this was a place our science and geography units overlapped, I'll cover those in another post.) The kids loved this unit, especially since we were fortunate enough to be able to visit a number of these sights within the last year. In fact, as we talked about these places, we decided it would be fun to make a poster with pictures of us from when we visited these places. I think that not only helped the kids see what they looked like in real life, but also helped them to remember their visits there and add extra meaning to our unit. Here is a photo of our National Symbols Poster Board:



The only place that we didn't a have a photo for was Mount Rushmore, and since we are going there in a few weeks, we left a spot on our poster so we can add a picture once we're home.

After reviewing all of these fun historical symbols/monuments, we concluded our second week of our USA unit with one of my more clever home schooling activities. (or at least I thought so.) I got online and searched clip art pictures of all of the national symbols. Then I printed out multiple copies of each picture and let the kids make a bingo card out of the images. After a few rounds of original bingo to be sure the kids recognized each picture, then we played my new, improved version of bingo. Instead of having someone call out the items on the card, I simply slipped in our National Treasure DVD and the kids played National Treasure Bingo as they watched. (I already watched it before hand so I knew all of our places and symbols were represented on the movie.) The kids loved it. And they did great. I thought they might forget about the bingo cards after getting too engrossed in the move, but they didn't. They noticed every building, monument, and even each time there was an American Flag. After watching the movie they also wanted to learn about a few things they saw that we didn't cover in our unit--like the National Seal, and the people and symbols on our dollars and coins. It was so exciting to see them showing so much interest in learning. It makes the stress of home-schooling seem so worth it.

The Tadpoles Tale

As one of our science units this year, we decided that we wanted to talk about the life cycle of frogs. As a little girl, I remember finding tadpoles in a puddle at my Dad's hospital in Silver City, New Mexico. We rescued the tadpoles and took them home to raise. We put them in a mini swimming pool in our back yard, and raised them until we had a hundred tiny little frogs jumping around. This was such a memorable experience for me, I knew I had to re-create it with my own children.

So, in the beginning of June, we went on a great tadpole hunt. We rode our bikes around for almost two hours looking in every puddle and creek and riverbed we could find. At the end of the two hours, we were tired, hot, and had no tadpoles to show for all of our searching. We were so discouraged. The kids wanted to keep looking, but Nick and I decided we had better head for home since it looked like it was going to rain. Then, much to our surprise, we found a hundred tadpoles in a drainage puddle only a few blocks from our house. We took our bikes home, and loaded back into our car with all of our tadpole catching equipment. (A net and a few containers.) Then we proceeded to catch about seventy-five of the black, slippery, wiggly little creatures. Here we are hard at work.




The girls were quick to dive into the mud puddle; however, Spencer decided he didn't want to catch any of the tadpoles because his fingers would get dirty! I don't know if he was really adverse to getting dirty, or if he was simply afraid of the tadpoles, but in the end he did decide to join in the fun.




After arriving home, we placed the tadpoles in an old Styrofoam cooler, and set about doing a little research on how to keep them safe, happy, and healthy. We learned that we needed to keep them in natural water--no tap water, we needed to make sure they got some sun and some shade, and we needed to feed them regularly. And what do you feed a tadpole you might ask?

This:



Pond scum and boiled lettuce. And it's very important to feed them too, otherwise they might eat each other. (Learning about their food was also a great time to learn about algae in the water. We put a drop or two of our pond water on a microscope slide and watched all of the paramecium swimming around. The kids thought it was amazing that the tadpoles could feast on something so tiny!)

Everyday for a week we fed the tadpoles and moved them around in the sunlight. Eventually they got big enough that we had to move them out of the cooler and put them into a mini swimming pool. We were sure to get more pond water for the transfer, and this time we put in rocks for the froglets to rest on as they grew up. With their new home and some space to spread out, the tadpoles seemed to shoot out legs overnight. In fact, we thought we would be able to do our official unit on frogs after our National Symbols Unit. As it turned out, however, we had to take a week off of National Symbols to study about frogs and have a frog-freeing expedition. To say the kids loved raising tadpoles would be a massive understatement! They had so much fun, and were so sad the day we had to let our frogs go, that I think we will be raising frogs again next year too. And maybe every year after that.

Here are some pictures of the day we had our frog-freeing expedition.



Emma loved to "check-on" our tadpoles more than anyone else. And by "check-on" I mean poke, scatter, and hold the little guys! She especially loved it when they turned into froglets and could hop out of her hand.







Out of the seventy-five tadpoles that we originally caught, we had 31 to free on our frog-freeing expedition. I'm guessing some had already jumped out of our swimming pool, and the rest were still too little to free so we simply let them continue to grow up and hop out when they were ready. (We did have two little tadpoles pass onto the other side. One that Emma dropped in the grass that we simply could not find--she was so devastated she had killed one, and one that we found dead in the water. Since it wasn't being eaten by the other tadpoles, we assume that they had enough to eat and none of the others were exposed to a cruel and cannibalistic death.) Here are the 31 lucky little froggies! And they truly are lucky. As we read in some of our books, most tadpoles don't make it to become frogs. They are eaten by fish, bugs, etc. or lose their water source and dry out.



And here are my sad children saying good-bye to their baby frogs.

"Flag Week"

After going over some general American history items over the week end, we officially started our USA unit on Monday June 14th--Flag Day. Of course this lent itself to talking about our country's beautiful waving emblem--Old Glory. First we studied the history of the flag by dabbling in a little Revolutionary War History. However, our discussion of the war was brief, and then we mostly focused on the making of the flag and how the flag has changed over time. We also covered what the parts of the flag--stars, stripes, and colors represent. In order to bring the colonial flag to life, we decided we would take on quite the project-sew our very own! First we had to do a little research on the rules of making flags, learn flag etiquette, and of course figure out the dimensions, etc. The trickiest part of course was making the stars. One of our books, however, was very helpful in this respect. It talked about how the original flag that General George Washington brought to Betsy Ross had six-point stars on it. Betsy Ross was an accomplished seamstress; however, and knew a secret way to make perfect five-point stars. She showed Washington how to fold a piece of cloth so that only one cut was required to make perfect five point stars every time. Thus, Washington agreed to switch to the five-point star represented on the flag today. Luckily for us, after explaining all of this, the book also showed us how to make the one cut stars. Here are the kids practicing making five-point stars on paper.



We strung these stars over our windows for a festive look.



And here are the kids working so hard on our very own cloth flag. I let them do most of the work too, from cutting the strips, sewing them together, and ironing on the cloth stars we later cut out.





It took us almost all week to make our flag, but you can bet they will never forget what the colonial flag looked like, or what it represented. Here they are holding our finished product.



In addition to talking about flag history and sewing our own flag, we also used this week to talk about the pledge and to work on learning some of our patriotic songs. The kids mastered You're a Grand Old Flag, America the Beautiful, God Bless America, and even The National Anthem. (They didn't care much for My Country 'Tis of Thee). Actually, I think they loved The National Anthem the most. We read the story of Francis Scott Key and went through the words one at a time with our little dictionary. (It is amazing how quickly kids really do learn new words too. I asked Maddi a few weeks after this when we were reading Tuck Everlasting one night if she knew what "dawn" meant. She thought for a minute, and then said, "Oh, of course, it means early in the morning." "How did you know that?" I questioned. "From The National Anthem of course, Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light." That was a reaffirming moment in time!) By the end of our discussion, I was telling them through my tears about the excitement Key felt as he looked through the fog and was relieved to see our flag was still there. What a moment that must have been for him. And how strong the spirit was in our little home school as I could bear testimony to the kids about God's hand in preserving this great nation! It was an awesome experience, and one that made me so grateful for our decision to home school! It's like I told my mother recently, my kids will take for granted much of their gospel learning. It may never occur to them that other kids don't know how God worked to preserve this country and to guide and inspire the founding fathers. It may never occur to them that other children don't automatically know the origins of the Native Americans, and so many other things. What a blessing the restored gospel and all of it's light and wisdom are! And how grateful I am to have been sustained by God thus far in our homeschooling experience so that I can teach my own children real truth as they learn of this incredible county! I do have such a testimony of the Greatness of this Country. I know God led righteous men and women here to seek religious freedom. I know the soldiers were aided by a heavenly presence in winning our countries freedom and the God truly did inspire the founding fathers to write a god-fearing, near perfect constitution for this country. One that would allow for the religious fervor that paved the way for the gospel to be restored in its fullness through the prophet Joseph Smith. A lot has happened since that restoration, but I believe that most people in this country still worship God Almighty, and I am saddened that one day this will cease to be true. I am afraid that day is coming too quickly, especially with recent legislation in this country to greatly weaken our constitution. What a sad and scary day when our constitution, in fulfillment of prophecy, will hang by a thread. And what a joy it will be when Christ Himself comes to reign again and establishes a perfect government upon the Earth. When will that be, I wonder. Hopefully sooner rather than later.