Oakland Zoo Visit

A spontaneous visit to the Oakland Zoo with some of our homeschool friends. We met this delightful turtle, and saw for the first time actual hyenas! Our daughter has been studying and admiring hyenas for a while, and I'd been promising her we'd visit this zoo in Oakland where we'd see some.

We also heard the lion roar.

Book Club: Five Children and It

The first book of our homeschool book club this September was Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit. We've read so many excellent books this past year, and this one wasn't one of my favorites, or my daughter's. But for each book club we have a project, based on the book. Some of the kids make dioramas of certain scenes, others make games based on a books' themes, and once one of the girls wrote an entire rap, which she performed, called The Rap of Nimh. It was so good.

My daughter made a model in clay of the "it" in the book, the sand-fairy. It was an ugly little thing, but the sand fairy was not meant to be pretty. He was grumpy, reluctant and scowling.

Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo

We really enjoyed our visit to the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo when we were passing through on a layover from Finland to the U.S. There are dozens of outdoor sculptures around the museum, and a guide to them made for children to find them--it was quite a game to find them all, especially the Gormley sculpture attached to the side of the building. We learned about sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, Udo Rondinone, Paul Kelly, and even Damien Hirst, whose sliced up cows were not particularly appreciated by the art lover pictured here. We talked about all the art we saw--we spent hours there--and what they could mean, what the artist could be trying to tell us, what we saw in them ourselves. A perfect day of art.As

Big Tables

I love big tables, much needed for homeschooling. In this picture you can see our workbooks, handwriting practice, my Roberto Bolaño and I Ching, storyboards for a proposed vampire movie starring child vampires, drawings inspired by our latest reading about London evacuees from WWII, and a diagram of the parts of a mushroom.

If you can have a table that doesn't need to be cleared off, and projects can go on for days, even better! Right now we have a painting project that has gone on daily for five days in a row. That was one of the things I immediately appreciated about homeschooling: if you got into something you could keep working on it for days without having to clean up in between! 

Visiting the Peruskoulu in Helsinki

Our daughter's friend Kerttu invited her to join her for a day in the Finnish elementary school she attended, so she went. School only lasted half a day, for about 4 hours, had lots of breaks to go outside and play and involved a lot of art projects, such as finger-weaving. The teacher was friendly and welcoming.

Finnish schools don't have iPads, or smart boards or anything our 'advanced' schools in the US have--and yet they are famous for being the best-ranked schools in the world. This classroom could have been set up in the 1960s: not a computer in sight!

String figures

There has been a mania for string figures recently, with the kids mastering Jacob's Ladder, Cat's Cradle, the Witch's Broom, and even the dynamic Walk the Dog. You can learn most of them by using YouTube videos.

There is also a book about String Figures by Harry Smith, the guy who created the amazing, weird, and wonderful Anthology of American Folk Music and who served as Shaman-In-Residence at the Naropa Institute.