When my girls were little one day they spotted these kits at the craft store:


I hate craft foam, and we normally avoided synthetic materials in general, but I was feeling indulgent that day, so we brought them home. As we started to assemble them, I thought it was wrong that the prince had a sword and the princess didn't, so I cut a sword for each princess out of extra foam. My middle child was delighted for her princess to have a sword, but the oldest said, "No thanks, my princess doesn't need a sword." This prompted the following conversation:

Me: What if your princess gets attacked by a dragon?
Her: The prince will save her.
Me: What if the prince isn't around? She needs a sword in case she has to fight the dragon herself.
Her (shocked): But if she fights the dragon her dress might get ruined!
Me (sarcastic): If she gets EATEN by a dragon her dress will definitely get ruined.

She was unconvinced, however, by my flawless logic, and despite my best efforts, has continued to prefer the swooning princess archetype. Until she read this book:

The main character, Aethelflaed, impressed her so much she's dressed up as Aethelflaed for Halloween two years running. In a beautiful, flowing red and gold dress with a sword hanging at her side, a golden circlet on her head, she's the picture of this Celtic warrior queen. And Aethelflaed is exactly the kind of role model I love for my daughters. As daughter of King Alfred the Great, and fiancee (at age 14 or so) to Earl of the neighboring kingdom, Aethelflaed had a blinking neon target hanging on her back. Instead of living her days in fear of kidnapping or worse, and trusting in others to protect her, she takes matters into her own hands, insisting her guard, Red, teach her how to defend herself.

This training comes in handy when her travelling party is attacked on the way to her wedding. I won't give away the details, but suffice to say that the reader, who has come to love Aetheflaed like a sister by this point, is glad that her life doesn't depend solely on the skills of those who are sworn to protect her.

Aethelflaed grew up to become "the greatest heroine in Old English military history". This book only shows us a year of her childhood, and leaves us wanting more. Author Rebecca Tingle so skillfully weaves all the elements of Aethelflaed's live together, making what could be an intimidating character into a very human one. As a side note, after I read the book I discovered that Rebecca Tingle got her masters at Brigham Young University, where I spent some formative years. Later she studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, where she discovered the fragmented accounts of Aethelflaed's life that inspired this book. She started writing the book at Oxford, but finished it over the next few years while also marrying and starting a family. Given the stereotypes that abound about LDS women, I love to see a woman successfully combine her academic passion with her divine roles as wife and mother. Right now homeschooling and daily survival take all my energy, (I'm no Melissa Wiley or Alice Gunther) but I know this phase of life won't last forever and someday I'll create a masterpiece, too.

P.S. In writing this post I discovered that she's written a new book about Aelfwynn, Aethelflaed's daughter. I think I know what my oldest is going to be for Halloween this year.

We're blessed with a good friend at church who's a science teacher. He knows we homeschool, and he's always sharing interesting learning opportunities with us. On the Fourth of July he came over and did Diet Coke and Menthos experiments with the kids, and another time he brought over all the ingredients for making homemade icecream with the "kick-the-can" method. Once he even went on a walk with us around our property and shared his extensive knowledge of the local flora and fauna. I'm so grateful he's taken on this casual mentor role with our family.

Last week he called to let us know that the International Space Station would be visible in our evening sky. It passes this way often, but conditions have to be just right for it to be viewable. If its full daylight its brightness gets swallowed up by the brightness of the sky. But it has no light of its own, so if it's completely dark you can't see it either. It has to be dusk, dark enough to spot it in the sky, but the sun still near enough to reflect off it. It looks like a bright star shooting across the sky:

To find out when you can view it in your area go to this page on the Family Education website.

If you want to follow up afterwards by learning a little more about the space station here are some good places to start:

-The European Space Agency's website has a page just for kids. There's a lot of good stuff here. We learned which countries are involved with the space station. That prompted a little talk about international co-operation (that's an oxymoron right?) We also learned that parts of it were launched in 1998, the year one of my children was born, so that gave us an immediate reference point for its age. When it's completed it will be about the size of a football field, hard to grasp when it was such a tiny dot in the sky.

-NASA has some info about what my kids were most interested in- how and what the astronauts eat This page had a little info. The kids thought it was freaky that salt and pepper have to be in liquid form. Can you imagine the misery that would ensue in zero gravity if someone shook some pepper all over their food? (Maybe not, if you've never accidentally pepper sprayed yourself, not that I HAVE, of course) This page also had some cool videos and pictures. Here's a picture of their dinner trays, everything has to be velcroed down:


-Also from NASA, on this page, is a really detailed and interesting account of what they eat at "Cafe ISS" by American astronaut Ed Lu. The kids favorite part of his story was where he talked about eating trail-mix goldfish style, floating through the air and gobbling it up piece by piece.

I admit, we've read Paddle-to-the-Sea before, twice even. Once when Eldest was doing Ambleside Year Two, and once with Middle. We've thoroughly enjoyed it, but all the while I was dying to do more with it, as well as the rest of the Holling books. Well, that time has finally come. As a starting point, I got Beautiful Feet's Geography Through Literature Study Guide, and the accompanying maps. Then, after a vain search online for notebooking pages, I made some myself. I'm rather pleased with how they turned out, and how I was able to tailor them to fit with our other areas of study. I managed to tie in nature study, zoology, grammar, math, and creative writing. Of course, I've only completed pages for the first two lessons, but our first lesson today was successful enough to encourage me to keep it up.

First we talked about, and drew, sign of spring in Nipigon Country, as noted in the text. Then we talked about signs of spring where we live, which is a very different animal. No melting of the snow pack here, for example.

After that we watched some Youtube videos of Canadian Geese while the kids colored in a picture of one. Since we were discussing the principles of lift, thrust, and drag as it relates to the flight of birds yesterday in our zoology text, we took a little Youtube detour at that point to watch a video on how birds fly. As they finished coloring, I read to them a little more about the geese's habits, etc., and they wrote down a few of them.

Then we worked on a little sheet I had made up with the seven different animals mentioned in the first three chapters. I had pictures of the animals, their common names, and taxonomy. We used process of elimination to figure out which taxonomy matched which animal. Middle, an avid fan of the "Sisters Grimm" series, could hardly contain herself when she recognized Canis lupus as the Gray Wolf.

We voted to skip the planned experiment on ballast so Dad can participate with us in doing that tonight.

I expected much resistance to the grammar page, I asked them to pick out a proper noun, common noun, action verb, and pronoun from the text then make up their own story using those words. They hate putting pencil to paper, but got so caught up in creating their stories they forgot to complain. Eldest even put hers into comic strip format.

We finished off with a few math problems, and a discussion on what kind of person the boy who made Paddle-to-the-Sea must have been. A good time was had by all, and I finally feel like we're really getting involved with Holling's story, instead of skimming over it.

P.S. I found this great website that has full page text and illustrations of this beautiful book available for free online, as well as a 30 minute movie that was made to go with it. The movie differs from the book in many details, but has its own good points.

Chapter 1- The Graceful Imposter

Believe it or not, out here in the desert we see more hummingbirds hanging around than I've seen anywhere else I've lived. It's probably the wide open spaces. Once I even saw a hummingbird just sitting in a tree in our backyard. I've NEVER seen a hummingbird at rest, it's amazing how small it looks with it's wings folded against it's side. But around the time the monsoon season got underway, we started seeing them more frequently, hovering around our desert willows and birds of paradise. Really small hummingbirds, a little odd looking....


I never caught them on camera, the above photograph was 'borrowed' from the web, but after awhile we realized what we were seeing weren't hummingbirds, but the hummingbird moth:

It's hard to tell from the above photo, but these are good sized moths, with wingspans up to 5". And suddenly, they were everywhere! You notice a moth that size when it buzzes your head, or accidentally flies into your house and starts beating against the windows to get out. Our cats had a field day, we found more than one set of wings sans body on the floor of our garage. Then , without our really noticing, they quietly receded.

Chapter 2: Guilty by Association

As the monsoon season progressed, our little desert homestead blossomed. The normally brown rocky turf gave way to a tangle of green. So it was on the relatively blank slate of our gravel driveway that I first noticed a bright yellow caterpillar with a horn on the end just like the hornworms that had attacked my tomatoes. In fact they looked exactly like hornworms except for their color.

I'm normally pretty lasseiz faire about the flora and fauna around here, we don't cultivate a lawn and we let the desert pretty much go through whatever cycles it's going to go through, but I've seen hornworms strip a tomato plant down to nubs, and I had gone to SO much trouble and expense this spring to put in a garden, my first reaction to these little yellow cousins was panic. I told my girls I'd pay them 25 cents for each worm they picked off the ground and put in a bucket:

An hour later, they'd each earned $10 and it was clear this was a losing war. The driveway was crawling with them and they hung on every bush like Christmas decorations:

As it turned out, they mostly left my garden alone, if you don't count the sunflowers. The native vegetation wasn't so lucky. It seemed as if these caterpillars were specially comissioned to take down every green blade and leaf the monsoon season had brought us. It eventually got to the point where even the main road running through our neighborhood took on a yellowish hue and a creepy crawly texture. The local newspaper ran a story about it, apparently it's been about 20 years since these little guys turned out in such force. Wasps and bees are their natural predators in the larval stage, and we had such a dry spring there weren't many wasps and bees around to keep them in check.

Chapter 3: It All Comes Together

As you've probably already guessed, there is a connection between those graceful hovering moths and the caterpillar inundation. We figured out pretty early on that these little yellow guys were the progeny of the White Lined Sphinx Moth, Hyles lineata. After a couple of weeks their numbers quickly lessened, and when we did see one it was no longer munching or crawling, but turning around and around in a little circular hole in the ground. I had hoped to see thousands of little cocoons hanging from our bushes, but these guys burrow in the ground. And yesterday I spotted one of those big moths on our front porch. I wonder whether the eggs this generation of moths lays will lie dormant until the next time conditions are right, or if they'll hatch again in a couple of weeks? I always thought the natural world operated on regular cycles, but so far this has been a "make hay while the sun shines" sort of process. A live, reproduce, die, and do it all over again as fast as we can kind of thing. And it just rained again today, so weather conditions seem favorable. Time will tell.

(Thanks to Barb, who wrote a post a couple of days ago on her excellent blog The Handbook of Nature Study, about the Hummingbird Moth. I can't wait to get out my copy of the handbook and learn even more about these interesting creatures.)

Ever since we moved out here in the middle of the desert, it's been my goal to at least be able to identify all the things we find on our property, plant, animal, etc. I've learned a few things here and there, but I needed a good reason to focus on that task, and involve the kids. I found out about the 100 Species Challenge on Melissa Wiley's blog. The idea is to be able to name 100 different species of flora in the area. I think we'll also keep a separate list for fauna, since we're studying zoology this year. People from all over the country, even all over the world, are participating, so it should be fun (and education:) to see everyone's entries. Anyone is welcome to participate, and here are the official rules:

1. Participants should include a copy of these rules and a link to this entry in their initial blog post about the challenge. I will make a sidebar list of anyone who notifies me that they are participating in the Challenge.

2. Participants should keep a list of all plant species they can name, either by common or scientific name, that are living within walking distance of the participant's home. The list should be numbered, and should appear in every blog entry about the challenge, or in a sidebar.

3. Participants are encouraged to give detailed information about the plants they can name in the first post in which that plant appears. My format will be as follows: the numbered list, with plants making their first appearance on the list in bold; each plant making its first appearance will then have a photograph taken by me, where possible, a list of information I already knew about the plant, and a list of information I learned subsequent to starting this challenge, and a list of information I'd like to know. (See below for an example.) This format is not obligatory, however, and participants can adapt this portion of the challenge to their needs and desires.

4. Participants are encouraged to make it possible for visitors to their blog to find easily all 100-Species-Challenge blog posts. This can be done either by tagging these posts, by ending every post on the challenge with a link to your previous post on the challenge, or by some method which surpasses my technological ability and creativity.

5. Participants may post pictures of plants they are unable to identify, or are unable to identify with precision. They should not include these plants in the numbered list until they are able to identify it with relative precision. Each participant shall determine the level of precision that is acceptable to her; however, being able to distinguish between plants that have different common names should be a bare minimum.

6. Different varieties of the same species shall not count as different entries (e.g., Celebrity Tomato and Roma Tomato should not be separate entries); however, different species which share a common name be separate if the participant is able to distinguish between them (e.g., camillia japonica and camillia sassanqua if the participant can distinguish the two--"camillia" if not).

7. Participants may take as long as they like to complete the challenge. You can make it as quick or as detailed a project as you like. I'm planning to blog a minimum of two plants per week, complete with pictures and descriptions as below, which could take me up to a year. But you can do it in whatever level of detail you like.