Memorial Day Repentance FHE

We had a Memorial Day Family Home Evening tonight. I told my family that we needed to repent for being so lax regarding this day. We've allowed ourselves to slide a little on the slippery slope of current American UNconsciousness, taking certain holidays for granted as nothing more than 3-day weekends and excuses to party. 

After a hymn and prayer I talked with my family about the purpose of holidays, the roots of that word being holy days. These are days meant to be reverenced and full of purpose. Not that we can't celebrate or enjoy, but that we need to spend some time in sincere reverent reflection. I talked about how I've always been good with religious holidays, and I've tried over the years to give more meaning to the 4th of July and Veterans Day. I explained how as a child I never cared for Memorial Day and visiting cemeteries, especially since my birthday falls on Memorial Day every now and then, and as a kid I always thought that was the pits. But I never really understood any higher purpose to Memorial Day. So when I became an adult I sort of shunned the day and didn't pay real attention to its meaning. 

Until now.

I have always been very sensitive to and appreciative of the price of freedom. I think about it a lot more than just once a year. But now I want to be sure that we mark Memorial Day for what it is and let it sober us and remind us and keep us ever humble, grateful, and vigilant. We certainly don't want to be like the people in the following video, who make me sad and concerned at the ignorance of the population:

If you don't know what Memorial Day really is, here is a little history we watched tonight.

I also wanted them to understand the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Though they've been there, they were very young so it didn't mean much to them and they don't remember it.

And I shared my favorite tribute video.

Sincere and respectful gratitude to those who gave their all. We must not forget.

Washed Away! Erosion #5 - Language Arts

Any and every unit is filled with possibilities for Language Arts. Weathering and Erosion was no exception.

Our read aloud book was Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. Prior to the book we watched some of Ken Burns's PBS documentary on the Dust Bowl and discussed the causes and effects of it all so we were familiar with that time and place before reading the book. 

The book is actually written as a free verse prose poem, but we didn't see that because we listened to it on CD. I liked that it was written from the perspective of a child, and it sounded like it. While it covers all the important and unique facets of life in the Dust Bowl, I found the story compelling, heartbreaking, and finally redemptive. It isn't for young children, though. 

Writing assignments included the following:

     *"Super 'Agent' of Erosion" is a creative writing assignment wherein students create a super agent who stops erosion and/or a villain who erodes. This is a great way to fire up kids' imaginations and writing skills while helping them solidify what they're learning about erosion.

     *After playing "The Rock Hopping Game", each child chose two famous weathered rocks to write a research report on.

     *We read a few Native American legends explaining the formation of places like the Grand Canyon and Devil's Tower and then the kids chose a place to write their own creative legend about.

Washed Away! Erosion #4 - Music & Art

This unit is the perfect time to get acquainted with Felix Mendelssohn's concert overture The Hebrides, also known as Fingal's Cave.  This piece was inspired by Mendelssohn's tour of the Scottish Hebrides archipelago and Fingal's Cave on the island of Staffa; he immediately had the motif for this musical tone poem in his head when he saw it and penned it on a postcard he sent to his sister. We first watched the following musical video of the entire piece and then the kids learned a shorter, simpler piano solo of Fingal's Cave.

Music was also incorporated into the unit with the song  "One Smooth Stone".

For art I wanted to do something unique and relevant. I decided we'd create pictures of weathering and erosion with an agent of weathering and erosion--sand! I found inexpensive colored sand and we got to creating. (I opened the bags of sand and put them in muffin tins for ease of access as well as cleanup.)

It's best to use card stock as your base. With a pencil, draw your weathered landform or landscape. Apply glue with a Q-tip, one section at a time.

Fold a large piece of paper in half and place under your art piece to reduce waste as well as mess. Apply sand to your glue-covered section a pinch at a time until covered, then shake excess off onto folded paper.

Return unused excess sand to its "bank" by letting it slide down the crease of the paper into its cup. (This is a great way to apply glitter to projects as well.)

Keep at it bit by bit. 

 Here is my first finished piece.

Washed Away! Erosion #3 - Scripture & Character

"And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook,

and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in a scrip; 

and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine."

I chose the subject of the scripture/character portion of our unit because of a song I dearly love which was written for a musical production* of the story of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17). As David chooses his five smooth stones for use in smiting Goliath, he ponders about and vows to be a smooth stone himself in God's hands.

One Smooth Stone*

One smooth stone is all I need

To fly straight and true, and not lose speed

If the edges are rough it'l go its own way

I need one smooth stone today

The task is great, the odds are small

But the righteous aren't always the big and the tall

With God on my side, I am never alone

All I need is one smooth stone

We all have our wills, and we all have our plans

But God gives us more than we understand

If we're willing to go

Through the storms He commands

And be one smooth stone in His hands

One smooth stone will be plenty today

But at times the wind changes and stones go astray

God has many prepared but he calls just a few

So I'll find more than one stone, too

One smooth stone is what I'll be

So the Lord can do what He wants with me

I'll prepare myself to be worthy to stand

And be one smooth stone in His hands

This song, as well as the entire soundtrack, is awesome; I wish there were a way to share it in its musical entirety here. 

So, my kids have watched the video and listened to the soundtrack many times, but I wanted to really focus on this particular song and the purpose and analogy in a smooth stone.  We read the scriptural account, listened to the song (and kids used it for copywork), studied the historical context of slings and stones as well as the science behind it, and discussed what it all meant and why and how to apply it to our personal lives.

The other specific character lesson was discussing a quote from Buddha and creating personal beautiful posters with it for reminders. Here is one of them.

*"One Smooth Stone" is one of many wonderful songs written by Aaron Edson.  David and Goliath is one of many great musical adaptations of scripture stories from Liken the Scriptures.

Washed Away! Erosion #2 - Caves

Caves. Are. Cool.

Not only are caves awesome to explore and find wonder in, they're also awesome to learn about from the point of view of geological processes.

For starters we needed to see and use cave ingredients--by dissolving real limestone with acid. We started out by dripping the acid drop by drop, but then one of my sons wanted some more dramatic results. (Don't worry about his fingers, though. Our acid of choice was vinegar.)

Knowing that limestone and acid are the key ingredients to cave formation, we then made our own caves using modeling clay, sugar cubes, and water. You start out with a solid "rock" made of different "minerals" and then the sugar/limestone is eroded inside the clay/other rock and a cavity is formed.

After the initial demonstration each child made a new "cave" in whatever shape and form they wanted. One of them made the kind of cave that is hidden from the eye and would have to be discovered, but if you paid attention to the waterfall coming out the side of the mountain you might guess at what was inside.

We also did an experiment with Epsom salt to create stalactites and stalagmites.

Washed Away! Erosion #1 - Experiments

The next unit in our geology studies was Weathering & Erosion. We did a ton of things with this so, rather than one massively long post, I'm going to break it into sections according to subject and activity within the unit. This post will be photos of most of the hands-on experimenting we did.

The first experiment was on weathering. We filled a glass jar with warm water, put a lid on it, sealed it in a zipper bag (for safety), wrapped it in newspaper, and put it in the freezer for a few days. We actually had to do this FOUR times because the first three I was using a canning jar and as the water expanded it just popped the lid off. We could see that the water had expanded, but it wouldn't crack the jar because for some reason the lid could come off and give way to the ice. The last time I used an empty pickle jar with a different type lid and it worked like a charm.

Half the fun of learning about erosion is, well, eroding stuff. A pan full of dirt and rocks and leaves allows kids to see what a channel of water can do, and also allows them to try to manipulate the results with strategic rock placing; covering a mound of mud with leaves shows them how helpful vegetation is in preventing erosion.

When someone flooded his pan and the water ran over, we got to see first hand the deposition of soil elsewhere after it has been eroded from its original place.

Then, when the "regular" experimenting was over, the kids got even more creative... and enjoyed getting their hands dirty.

Even the clean up was fun!

This next experiment compared the erosive powers of water, wind and ice.

We demonstrated how waterfalls form.

And plunge pools.

We made mini glaciers and took them to a hill at a park. This would have worked much better had it been a warmer day, but we adapted. We still saw the carving power of ice as well as a little of the movement and deposition of glaciers.

We then took them home and created a "mountain" to finish watching them melt and move and deposit. Each mini glacier melted and reacted to gravity a little differently from the others.

We also used a rock tumbler to polish stones, and did some cave experiments (another post).

Happy Mother's Day to Me

Happy Mother's Day to me! Not because I'm anything great, but because I get to live my days with some pretty great people. If it weren't for my husband and children, I wouldn't be a mother, and being a mother is the greatest thing I've ever done or ever will do or be. I could never be all I am meant to be, or have any true, lasting happiness without them.

Happy Mother's Day to me--because being a mother makes me happy!

Mommy's Gonna Fly!

If you cannot relate to this Family Circus you either a) don't have children or b) have your priorities mixed up. 

A mother with a house full of children, who is seeing to their needs and who has many things to do in a day, cannot keep an immaculate house at all times--unless she cares more about a clean house than happy children, or housecleaning is the only hobby she has. I have always like the following quote:

"A clean house is a sign of a misspent life."

That doesn't mean there aren't days I'm not mortified at the state of the house when someone drops in. Once upon a time, in a different house, someone came to the front door and before leaving said, "Well, you can tell this is a homeschooling house." WHAT DID THAT MEAN?  I'll tell you what that meant:  it meant that I made sure that the next house I bought had a very different floor plan, with little to be seen from the front door! 

Messy House Rule #1:  No one ever drops in when the house is clean. I know there is a man in Washington who doesn't believe I ever clean house, because he always stopped by on the worst days. I would sigh and say, "You should have come by yesterday." 

Messy House Rule #2:  Household appliances break down only when the house is already in a state of disaster. A washer/dryer will only break when you are already swamped with laundry because you had a really busy week and you were about to catch up when...kerplunk. The dishwasher only dies when you have cooked up a storm and have no clean dishes left and they're all over the counter. 

One winter we got socked in with a snowstorm over a weekend and we'd just enjoyed playing games and watching movies and snacking, etc. We'd enjoyed being a little lazy and planned to restore order on Monday morning. It snowed and snowed Sunday evening and the house felt colder and colder and we realized that something was wrong with our boiler and we had no heat. We all slept downstairs by the wood stove that night and called our plumber the next morning. As I was outside to shovel two feet of snow out of the driveway with my husband and kids, the plumber showed up and went to work. I pushed another shovel full of snow and then shrieked, remembering the pantyhose sitting next to my laptop that I'd taken off after church when I checked my email. The plumber would walk by that, among many other things out and about from our lazy weekend, and I was horrified. I sheepishly said something to him when he was finished, apologizing for the mess. He laughed and told me that in his line of work he's seen some real messy houses and that mine has never been the worst he's seen. He further reassured me, saying, "I have kids, too, and you just can't live your life and have a clean house all the time." Whew!

I remember arriving at a Relief Society presidency meeting at the secretary's home and asking her young son where their bathroom was because my little guy needed to go. This probably five-year-old little boy said, very seriously, "Oh, you need to use my mom's bathroom. She wants the other one to stay clean for five minutes." I still laugh about that because I know exactly what went down in that house before we all began to arrive:  Mom cleaned the bathroom because the ladies were coming over and then she instructed her children to only use her personal bathroom because (she said in exasperation and exaggeration) she wanted the other one "to stay clean for five minutes" as any use by her children would undue what she'd just done.

I love how literal kids are. It makes life interesting--and it should make parents think before speaking.

Happy Mother's Day to all you moms who just can't seem to get it all done. It's okay! Let me close by sharing poem I memorized as a teenager, the message of which I believe with my whole heart.

Excuse This House

Some houses try to hide the fact

That children shelter there.

Ours boasts of it quite openly,

The signs are every where.

For smears are on the windows,

Little smudges on the doors;

I should apologize I guess

For toys strewn on the floor.

But I sat down with the children

And we played and laughed and read,

And if the doorbell doesn't shine,

Their eyes will shine instead.

For when at times I'm forced to

Choose the one job or the other,

I want to be a housewife . . .

But first I'll be a mother.