L is for Lemon

Annabeth is so excited to see this finally sprout. We planted the seeds several weeks ago.

Weekly Report -- May 15

Latin

Thalia has moved ahead of me in Latin Alive, but I still have the weekend to catch up. We're both enjoying this program so far (first 5 chapters). It has more zip than Henle -- we get to use verbs! Woohoo! It has more oomph than Latin for Children. Of course, so far it's mostly been review for Thalia, so that adds to its charm. We're looking forward to the DVD release at the end of this month.

In the meantime, Annabeth continues to work steadily in Latin for Children, having reached chapter 10. Sometimes she is peeved by some of the grammar concepts (like, what would possess anyone to come up with a language that has declensions?), but we have soldiered through.

Math

I may die from math. So. Boring.

Actually, Annabeth is in sort of a fun spot in RightStart D, in the midst of patterns.

Other than that I try not to dwell on it too much.

Moving on ...

Language Arts

Thalia continued work in Classical Writing Homer, using the Face That Launched 1,000 Ships as a model, which was coincidentally also the Latin reading for this week. I thought it would be cool for her to try doing her rewrite in Latin, but she seemed to think that wasn't a good idea.

I am so impressed with her grasp of grammar when she works on this stuff. She gives all of the credit to Analytical Grammar.

She's up to doing 5 steps of the 6 step shuffle. She suffers mightily with it, though. Well, except the 5th step, which is making a passage more verbose. We all seem to have a talent for going on and on and on about nothing in particular, and it comes in handy on that 5th step.

Annabeth has been doing copywork and dictation from a botany book we're reading together, The Living World of Plants by Gerbert Grohmann. The book is written for 5th graders in Waldorf schools, and the writing, translated from the original German, has some passages worthy of copywork.

Today she decided to paint a picture to illustrate Steiner's verse about The Secret of Nature:





Behold the plant!
It is the butterfly bound fast to the earth.
Behold the butterfly!
It is the plant set free by the universe.




The flower is growing along the edge of a stream, in case you were wondering about that blue stripe.

If you happen to look through a copy of Donna Simmons Christopherus Unit Studies: Botany you'll see a similar picture done in crayon by an older student.

Annabeth has also been participating in the discussion Thalia and I have been having as Thalia begins her botany unit. So far the discussion have been pretty general -- what is botany, why are plants important, what are some careers in botany. Thalia will be working on her Plants Interest Patch while we do this unit.

History

Supposedly we're studying Greece via Famous Men of Greece right now, but I think we all know that mostly we discuss Percy Jackson. The Percy-mania should peak during the next week, when Rick Riordan visits, and then Thalia and Annabeth attend a Camp Half-blood mini-session at a library branch. In the meantime, whenever the FMoG book mentions the Oracle I picture her as having green light in her eyes and mist billowing around.

Actually, whenever FMoG mentions any of the gods and goddesses I'm mostly annoyed because they give the Roman names (yoohoo, it's supposed to be a book about Greece, not Rome), so I have to translate them all on the fly while reading aloud or else suffer the consequences.

Other Read Alouds

Speaking of read alouds, we're also currently reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and also Little Pilgrim's Progress.

More Books We're Using for Botany, Parent Version

First, let me relate the traumatic news that I can't find my copy of Salisbury and Ross's Plant Physiology. I know it was around for years and years because it was my favorite college textbook. But, alas, I can't find it now. (I did find some really surprising books and magazines while looking for it, though, but that's another story.) I remember throwing out my notes for Hort 217 when we moved from Ohio to here, figuring I hadn't used them for about 20 years, and was unlikely to develop a sudden urgent need for them. Maybe I tossed other plant/college related material at the same time.

Anyway, I keep finding more and more plant-related things on our shelves. For example, the other day I realized that we have a copy of Donna Simmons Botany Unit Study. I really enjoy Donna Simmon's books. She explains Waldorf concepts in a way that I can grasp. The Botany Main Lesson is typically taught in 5th grade in Waldorf curriculum, and neither of our kids are actually in fifth, but I'm still finding this a useful booklet. I like her ideas for lessons, although I'll adapt them mightily for our own uses. And I LOVE her bibliography (possibly because I already own the majority of the books, ahem ... great minds think alike and all of that). It's a small unit study -- only 32 pages -- and seems sort of expensive for the size, but I can use much of the information in it to organize my thoughts.

Since Thalia has decided to study Botany also, I got a copy of Kym Wright's Botany Adventure. This is such a different product than the Donna Simmons unit study. Where Donna gently nudges you in a direction (although you can just pick it up and go practically seat-of-the-pants, she expects you to make it your own), Kym Wright gives you a fairly precise map of how to teach a middle school/high school level unit on botany. Wowza. We're talking microscope slides of onion tips (sheesh, I remember those from the ancient days of studying this stuff myself), we're talking vocabulary like "stomata", "guard cells", and "mesophyll". Not a lot of writing assignments that I've noticed so far, but oodles of lab activities. Also, lots of little boxes to check off as you complete each days work, which is something Thalia really, really likes. It will be interesting to see how we feel about this as we move through it. We will not be using the suggested ABeka biology text, by the way. I wonder if it would be helpful to keep track of what books we liked using with it and what books we didn't, for the sake of other homeschoolers contemplating using this unit study.

This Week in Science

AnnaBeth and Rick have planted several trees this week -- 2 bare rooted evergreens from the Conservation Service, a couple of birch from Lowes, a redbud that they transplanted from one place to another in our backyard, and an althea that they transplanted.

There have been a variety of encounters with roots, what with all of the digging around and planting. So it seemed an appropriate time to read the book What Do Roots Do? by Kathleen Kudlinski. Nice illustrations and straight forward text gave us a chance to talk about the things she'd seen in the ground and attached to the plants.

I thought a great follow up would be to re-pot the pothos in the kitchen -- it's root bound and needs a new home. And we could take some cuttings while we were at it, which would be fun.

But instead, AnnaBeth produced a pinecone:



which she laid out on paper, watching the scales open and various stuff come out. Cool! I suggested she either take some photos or else make some drawings. Suddenly, our study of plants careened in a new direction -- conifers! I pulled out our copy of Keepers of Life by Caduto and Bruchac, and flipped to the section on conifers. We read and chatted, pondering sequoias, the 2-year development cycle of pine cones, and Fibonacci numbers. I think we're going to read some more books about sequoias once I can find some.

AnnaBeth has also spent time reading our copy of Garden Wizardry for Kids, which is a fun, fun book of information about common plants as well as simple projects and experiments.

In the meantime, Thalia has asked to also learn about Botany. She's finished up her latest Prentice-Hall Science Explorer, and has asked that we not use those again (no offense to anyone who likes them, but they seemed too elementary to her at this point -- she's ready for something with more oomph). We had planned on heading a different direction for her science, but she's been looking over what AnnaBeth has been doing and thought this would be a good time to learn more about this plants. Her study will be more disciplined -- I plan to actually figure out a logical sequence of study rather than flitting from seeds to roots to conifers.

We've wrapped up the week by watching a Bill Nye DVD on plants -- perfect for a rainy day.

Planting Trees

Today in Science

The "farm" as of this morning:



Various beans, some vining up knitting needles (I got out a set of Susan Bates needles to knit a gauge swatch the other night, and the tip of one was bent at about a 45 degree angle, so I figured it was best used as a plant stake). AnnaBeth measures them every day and records her observations.

Lemon seeds that still haven't done anything observable.

Flower sprouts that started this whole thing.

Also, leftover poinsettias. A couple of evergreen seedlings from the conservation department, casually stuck in an old plastic container until we get around to planting them. An aloe plant that doesn't have anywhere else to go. AnnaBeth's plant observation notebook and a maple samara that we're thinking about planting are also on the table.

Today we decided to add an avocado to our seed-growing extravaganza:



This page has nice pictures on how to plant one in a glass, but I was disappointed that it said nothing, absolutely nothing, about the need to pinch back the seedling.

"Why do you need to pinch back the seedling?"

"I'm so glad you asked that. It has to do with apical dominance, and I've been waiting for the moment to explain apical dominance to you."

I grab a nearby ink pen to use as a makeshift prop, using the tip of the pen as the growing tip. I carefully avoid words such as "meristem" or "auxin", using instead phrases like "tip" and "growy-stuff hormones".

AnnaBeth's eyes start to glaze over.

I switch to recalling how we always pinched back the coleus (back when we could grow coleus, which was back in Ohio -- the deer here are mighty fond of coleus, it seems). Remember that? How it made the plant more bushy? And if we didn't do it the plant would grow straight up without dividing ... ?


AnnaBeth's eyes still seem slightly glazed.

Finally, during a pause she comments, "Okay, Mom, you've had your moment. You got to talk about apical dominance. Now could you get me the SoilMoist?"

You know, I was reading the other day that Charlotte Mason advocated using the correct terms for all of this stuff (cotyledon, plumule, radical, sepal, and surely she meant to include phrases like apical dominance, don't you think?). I thought I was getting the hang of using the correct nomenclature without spouting out too much of a barrage. But maybe not.

At least I didn't try to hand out worksheets on it.

But, OH! BRAINSTORM! A vocabulary list in her notebook! That way it could count as language arts, too, and be fashionably cross-curricular.

Some resources for studying seeds with young children

A cool book we read is A Seed Is Sleepy by Dianna Hutts Aston. Great illustrations, gentle text. Not a scientific treatise, but a chance to awaken interest in the diversity of the seed world.

Last night I was feeling guilt pains over my lack of worksheets about seeds. Options:

1. Make my own.
2. Find something on Enchanted Learning (and they do have some nice ones there).
3. Look for some cool Montessori-type stuff instead.

And the winner is -- seed nomenclature cards from Montessori for Everyone.



Really, you could make these yourself easily. But since I was already wishing I'd thought of this a week ago, I chose to order the PDF. The file arrived within the hour, I printed them on cardstock (if I were expecting heavy use I'd also laminate them). AnnaBeth spent some time matching things up. We didn't exactly do a 3-part lessons (surely you don't expect us to be Montessori purists here -- and anyway, this stuff is actually for the 3-6 year old classroom).

My long-range plan is to re-visit these, mixing them in with, say, parts of the stem or parts of the leaf -- in other words, becoming more difficult. Also, she'll draw and label a seed.

I found this in one of my Montessori catalogues last night. You know what? I have gobs of glass jars around here. I also have carrot and radish seeds. All I'm lacking is a way to shield the roots from light (I think the kit comes with black paper you use as a light shield). But guess what -- I have loads of black felt; I considered sewing velcro on to wrap it around the jars, but may go lower tech with duct tape. We'll just have to figure out how close to the side to plant the seeds.

This Week in Science

A few weeks ago AnnaBeth's Brownie troops planted seeds in pots. I instantly forgot what type of seeds they were -- some sort of flower. I have a mental block about doing plant-related projects with large groups of children, since they typically involve decorating clay pots that then get ruined when you try to water the plants therein, but this project used plain pots, so it was okay. But I still sort of blocked out all memory of what happened.

And the tiny little seeds sprouted, and we duly separated them into more pots, cutting off some that were too crowded. We discussed briefly why we cut them off instead of ripping them apart, and why we are so gentle with our transplanting and untangling of the seedlings (root hairs).

During all of this AnnaBeth commented that she'd really like to study plants next. And just like that, we dumped our study of the human body, and turned to botany.

We discovered several seeds in the kitchen cabinet:


Clockwise -- mung beans, white beans, kidney beans, wheat berries, and red lentils. We have more choices than this. but this seemed like a good start.

We soaked them in water overnight:




The skins of the kidney beans started getting wrinkly right away. I asked AnnaBeth to speculate on why that would happen.


The next day we split them open, and looked over the parts:



It probably would've been clever to make a sketch of the beans and label the parts. Too bad I didn't think of it at the time. Years from now she'll be able to claim I never told her those were cotyledons and explained the difference between monocots and dicots; really, though, it happened, but we don't have the worksheet to prove it.


We also put a bunch of mung beans in a jar, and a bunch of lentils in another jar, and sprouted them to eat. The mung beans were great, and AnnaBeth even ate some of them (if you know AnnaBeth you realize just how amazing that is):



The lentils didn't do so well. Some sprouted, some didn't, and overall they smelled off. We pitched them.

We've also started the popular "stick kidney beans in a jar up next to the side of it and watch them sprout" experiment, and planted some lemon seeds from a lemon we were cutting up.

Much, much more to come. There's about a zillion things you can do with plants in the spring. AnnaBeth keeps commenting how FUN this is, so much more fun than the human body. I pointed out that one problem with studying the human body is that you can't just cut it open and poke around, so it's a little more limited for fun hands-on projects at the elementary age.

Way back when Thalia was about 6 years old she and I studied plants. At the time the concept of "studying plants" gave me visions of fun worksheets about the Krebs cycle, or explaining red/far red light with little drawings of vibrating photons. Fortunately for Thalia I reigned in tendency to think that my young child needed to have a college level understanding of botany. (I see other people doing this to their kids, too, and realize that we really dodged a bullet there in our homeschooling.) So don't expect that sort of thing out of this unit. We'll be doing lots of hands on work with plants.