Snowbird Tram

Another excursion we went on was to the Snowbird Tram, which we think about doing every Fall, but usually decide is too expensive. It was cheaper with me as the only adult (though we missed Sam!), and the youngest three were free, but it was still a lot of money. "Once in a lifetime!" I told the boys. :) We enjoyed it accordingly. The tram takes you up (over beautiful scenery) to the top of Hidden Peak, 11,000 feet up. It was interesting to see how scant the vegetation was way up there (hardly any trees!). On the peaks below we could see the elevation lines where various types of trees grew---this was too high for anything but conifers, and not many of them! 

The other tram (we were on the red one)

A few hardy wildflowers (Heartleaf arnica)

Thistles

Guess who wanted to look over the edges of all the cliffs?

Tram mechanism (fascinating!)

Looking out

UPDATE: Everyone kept busy making their own trams out of various things at home for the next few weeks. Here are a couple of Sebby's:

The red and blue balls are the "trams" going along the yarn cable

Then he progressed to making paper cars that actually had doors, so he could put his tiny animals inside.

Millcreek Hike

I usually post all my pretty Fall leaf pictures on my other blog, but I guess they'll go both places this time. These are pictures from our hike in Millcreek Canyon. You have to pay ($3) to go up Millcreek, which stopped us from going for a long time, but now that I know how great it is, I don't mind paying. It's so lovely---the road is smaller than in the other canyons (not a big highway) and you feel a lot closer to the trees. Sometimes you drive through big tunnels of trees, which I love. And, since you've paid to get in, all the picnic areas are free (I think---at least the ones I've seen), which makes it actually cheaper than the Cottonwoods, if you're picnicking.

Anyway, the leaves were gorgeous. The weather all week has been just beautiful. Perfect for a hike.

Meadow at the top

There was a big round platform by the restroom here. I don't know what it was for, but Daisy and Sebby made use of it in the obvious way (running around in circles).

We were looking for several things on this hike. Sap was one of them. Mission accomplished!

We also wanted to find seedlings and saplings. The kids were very pleased when they found trees the same height as themselves!

I tried and tried to get a picture of this pretty spiderweb. This one only sort of shows it.

Lovely backdrop for a picnic!

Tree and Leaf Unit

Sebby said I shouldn't call this unit "Trees and Leaves" because leaves are already part of trees. He's right, but I'm calling it that anyway. And if this unit sounds like a gratuitous excuse to get outside at this time of year and see the Fall Leaves, it is. I love taking advantage of the season to learn about things we'd be wondering about anyway!

We discovered lots of interesting things during this unit. I remembered from my own school days that the autumn-colored pigments were in the leaves all along, just masked by the chlorophyll, but I learned for the first time that only the yellows and oranges (carotene and xanthophyll) are actually present all year. Red leaves appear when glucose is left in the leaves (from photosynthesis) rather than all used up when the weather turns colder. When the glucose is exposed to sunlight, another pigment (anthocyanin) is made, giving the leaf its red color.

We also learned that the largest living organism is a grove of aspen trees in Utah! Its name is "Pando," which means "I spread," which freaks me out just a little, but I'm okay.

The kids really liked this online quiz about things that come from trees.

This website has some interesting tree/leaf information. Every year I try to remember what kind of weather makes for the brightest leaves, but I always forget. So I was quite happy that this site told me:

A succession of warm, sunny days and cool, crisp but not freezing nights seems to bring about the most spectacular color displays. During these days, lots of sugars are produced in the leaf but the cool nights and the gradual closing of veins going into the leaf prevent these sugars from moving out. These conditions – lots of sugar and light – spur production of the brilliant anthocyanin pigments, which tint reds, purples, and crimson. Because carotenoids are always present in leaves, the yellow and gold colors remain fairly constant from year to year.  

The amount of moisture in the soil also affects autumn colors. Like the weather, soil moisture varies greatly from year to year. The countless combinations of these two highly variable factors assure that no two autumns can be exactly alike. A late spring, or a severe summer drought, can delay the onset of fall color by a few weeks. A warm period during fall will also lower the intensity of autumn colors. A warm wet spring, favorable summer weather, and warm sunny fall days with cool nights should produce the most brilliant autumn colors.

We enjoyed extracting the chlorophyll from leaves (see here)

And I had the kids memorize this poem, which is one of my favorites:

Gathering Leaves
by Robert Frost

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?

Logo and Uniform Design

Sam's lesson for our football unit was on Logo and Uniform Design. He talked about image readability, and the requirements for a good logo (things like recognizability at any size, simplification of detail, the way your lines reinforce your message, etc.) Then we used the templates above to make up our logos.

I couldn't find everyone else's finished pictures, but mine is the blue bunny. He may not be fierce, but he's fast. :) The shark is what Sam drew as our example to follow. And Malachi drew that cute pink birdie on the bottom left helmet. I think it's marvelously simple.

Football Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

I left Thursday blank, but Sam talked about tackling and logo/uniform design that day.

I wondered if there would be enough "school-y" stuff to fill up this week, but there was more than enough! We could have easily taken another week, even with as basic as we were being about most things.

For our study of physics, we used this website extensively--we thought all the videos were quite good, and three of them reinforced Newton's laws (which we were putting most of our focus on) very well. This website, while over-detailed in places (for our purposes), was helpful as I prepared.

We made this bottle accelerometer as we were talking about acceleration. And the boys were even more delighted with the old swing-a-bucket-full-of-water-in-a-vertical-circle trick. (Ha, I couldn't think of a more elegant way to say that!) They re-created the demonstration over and over during their free time that day! :)

This was an interesting video.

The boys thought this was really fun: we took these NFL team logos and tried to match them to their teams. Some were easy, but a few were surprisingly hard.

Then we printed out the logos and looked up the location of each team, so we could paste their logos in the correct place on this map:

As far as actual football rules, the boys' favorite element was probably learning how the offense tries to disguise the moment of the snap using the snap count. They never got tired of calling out "5, 5, 3, 15, 27, Monkey, BANANA!" (and so on) as they hiked the ball. They also really liked filling out the position worksheet I made:

(answer key)

My favorite thing we did was playing memory game with the referee signals. I printed out the signals and their meanings here. I just picked out the most common ones, and cut out the pictures only. I glued them onto index cards, and then wrote the words to match. Like this:

Even Malachi had a lot of fun playing this game, and Daisy liked going around the room with her hands in the air yelling "Touchdown!"

When this unit was over we went to our local high school football game, which was really fun. In some ways I think it's easier to see what's going on in high school ball, since they don't move as fast as the college and pro players! Plus, the stadium lights went off mid-game, so we got to sit in the dark for 20 minutes while they figured out how to turn them back on, which was very exciting and the kids liked it. :)

Water Blob and Wave Study

Our last day on water was focused on waves. We learned about how ocean waves get started, and some of their behaviors.  Because we'd enjoyed learning about water slides so much, we made sure to study artificial waves---in wave pools---too.

Here is a good explanation of wave pools (with video)

This video is awesome

We loved this site's information (you may recall we used the companion piece on water slides as well); they have great diagrams and clear explanations of what is going on

We filled up the bathtub and experimented with making different types of waves, using our hands, dropping in objects, blowing with straws, etc. (Here's a good place to start)

This video about how ocean waves develop was pretty good too.

There are some interesting ways to harness energy from waves and tides, which we read about in some of our library books (This one was probably the most informative on the subject)--but I think the information online is the most up-to-date.

Then, on to the water blob! This was such a fun way to observe waves in motion, and to experiment with their origins and their effects! I only wish our yard was flatter so we hadn't had to be bunched down at the bottom of the hill. But hearing Daisy say "I want to go play on the Bob!" for the next few days was adorable.

Here's the tutorial for the Water Blob. It's really simple and straightforward. The only challenge is keeping the duct tape from sticking to itself or to the wrong places---but we got better at that as we went. :)

Taping the sides

Filling the blob (we added blue food coloring; a little went a surprisingly long way!)

Junie was SO EXCITED when we put her on the blob. She widened her eyes and wrinkled up her nose and giggled and giggled. She kept looking over at me and laughing, like, "Can you believe this?!" The boys bounced her up and down, and she fell over and scrambled up again, and loved every minute. So cute!

Current Planning Method

I am far from experienced at planning curricula, but I did have some experience teaching preschool at BYU, and I have drawn on the ways I plan for other areas of my life to decide on my current methods. I expect this will change over time as I find better ways to do things, but for now, I thought this might be helpful for someone (maybe just myself, later) as a detailed explanation of one way to approach planning.

1. Decide what units we want to do; block them in roughly on a calendar. Decide how many weeks each unit should take up. Plan in holidays/breaks, if applicable.
For the summer, I took inspiration from whatever we had going on at the time---the Primary elections, Pioneer Day, the Fourth of July, etc.---but I imagine that the inspiration for what we will do will vary as we go along, based on things like what grades everyone is in and if we're drawing from state standards or something similar. [Our state standards are found here. I am not particularly concerned with presenting all of these in order or by grade level, but having them for reference is useful.] We may spend some time doing whole term themes (American History, for example, or Mesopotamia, or Biomes) sometimes too, and basing our smaller units around those "spines." Anyway, for summer I tried to tie things in to what we would already want to be doing, so field trips etc. were easier. Sometimes an activity we wanted to do anyway helped inspire a unit (e.g. touring the Governor's Mansion or hiking in the canyon).

2. Get on the library website and do subject searches related to the upcoming units (I do a couple units at a time if I can.) I try a bunch of different searches (e.g., for the Water unit, I tried "waterfalls," "irrigation," "floods," "rain," "hydropower," and so forth. Browsing the catalog alphabetically by subject usually yields a bunch of search terms I hadn't considered yet.) in case they give me an idea for which direction to take the unit in.

3. Save books that look promising to a list, and request (i.e. put on hold) the ones for the unit immediately upcoming. I use Abe's and Seb's library cards too, since we can only request 10 books per card. We can check out 30 per card, so that gives us potentially 90 books at a time---we had almost that many (including our fun/free reading books) for the water unit!

4. Pick up the books from the library and look through them, deciding which ones to keep. Request more from the list if necessary.

5. Sort the "keep" books into groups that will form sub-units. There is usually a kind of order that emerges naturally as I read them; they fall into different areas of focus. For example, from the books I picked for the flower unit, there seemed to be mostly:

• books on flower classification/names,
• books on the structure and parts of flowers,
• books on how seeds and fruits and reproduction work;
• books on how we use flowers.

So I planned the different days of the unit around these topics.

6. Figure out specific topics to cover as part of each "sub-unit" (not sure if that's the most useful term, but it's all I can come up with right now). As I'm planning and reading through the library books, I usually get a better idea of which topics actually are most relevant and necessary. I may decide to add "prep days" where we lay the groundwork for what we want to learn the next day. For example, with our fireworks unit, it was clear that we needed to review chemical reactions and basic molecular structure (things like how combustion occurs, what CO2 and H2O mean, etc) before we could really get into how and why a firework explodes. So we spent some days doing that first. Or maybe these "groundwork" ideas might come later--like when we talked about dams. The simpler books just described how the turbines turned a generator, which "converted the energy into electricity." But that explanation didn't satisfy the older boys, who wanted to know HOW it worked. So we spent a day on just electricity, talking about ionization and electrons and currents, so they could have a clearer idea of why the magnets and the copper wire in a generator could produce an electric current. The little kids get some of this, but it's fine if they don't understand all of it, as we will come at it from other directions again and again as time goes on (well, and that's true for the older ones too, of course)! Anyway, if I need some more books at this point, I can look for them at the library, or search for further information online.

7. Discover/brainstorm which subjects this unit could include. Once I have different sub-units, I look in the books, or online, for activities or hands-on work that could go with each aspect of the unit. I have a spreadsheet where I brainstorm (often with Sam) different things we could do, and put those ideas into columns for science, literature, history, art, music, physical education, religion, psychology, and so forth. Like this:

(sorry for the horrible picture quality; this computer doesn't read Numbers files, so I have to scan them in instead)

I brainstorm and then narrow down later---and I don't worry about covering all those things in each unit, but it helps me see at a glance if we are covering a good range of subjects (and sometimes gives me ideas for ways to come at a subject from a different angle). We try to do a variety of activities, so we're keeping a good balance between drawing/writing (coloring maps, labeling worksheets, etc), making crafts, larger-scale movement and games, listening or singing to music, watching videos like The Happy Scientist, going on Field Trips, etc. There are so many angles to approach from, and the children seem to like them all. I like this integrated approach---for these family study units, anyway; when studying just Math or Spelling it is less applicable---much better than saying, "Today we will learn about chemical symbols" unrelated to any real-world application. That's not to say I won't ever use that approach, but I know for me, even memorization or "building-block"-type learning comes more easily when it's linked to, or jump-started by, more practical, real-life topics.

Side note: I have read a lot about "learning styles;" the idea that you should find out if your child is a visual learner or a kinesthetic learner or whatever, and then teach accordingly. I agree it can be helpful to notice which things tend to catch your child's interest best, but I also feel strongly that all learning styles can benefit everyone! Sam and I are both convinced that the "right brain/left brain" dichotomy (as expressed in people identifying as one or the other) is greatly exaggerated--or at least, that the "divide" can be overcome with practice. Though I like to gain information through reading (is that the verbal style?), I always find that if I can reinforce that knowledge visually or from some other direction, I will know it even more deeply. I think it's good for the children to do work in all sorts of styles so they will be comfortable with all of them. (Not that this is a controversial or new idea; I know most educators draw from different learning methods.)

8. Put activities and topics into the Unit Schedule and rearrange as needed. Once I have lots of good ideas (and I try not to spend forever combing the Internet for ideas--there is so much information available!--so at some point, I have to stop getting inspiration and just let the ideas come together in my own way!), I put them into my planning spreadsheet---the Unit Schedule/Lesson Plans I usually post here. I look at the calendar and make sure our busier days have fewer activities, etc., while still trying to arrange the lessons in a logical progression. Sam's lessons are usually on Thursdays (he works from home Thursdays) and are fairly short (he is supposed to be home working, after all!). I listen to those lessons too and I LOVE them! Maybe I will learn to be a better artist someday if we keep this up. :)  Friday is a good field trip day, but some field trips work better on other days, so we just move things around however we need to, and of course if we do field trips on Saturdays we can all go, including Sam, so that's a great benefit.

Hydropowered "Generator"

Well, frankly, this was a little disappointing. When I was preparing to teach about hydropower and generators, Sam said, "Why don't you build a generator?" I didn't think I could handle helping the boys do that by myself (I'm just barely learning how they work myself!), but the more I thought about it, the more I thought the boys would get really into that idea, so I finally found some instructions that seemed detailed enough for even me to follow. They had pictures and a supply list and everything. The hardest part was finding copper magnet wire, which the instructions acted like could just be picked up at any old store. Home Depot and Lowe's didn't have any of this gauge (very small---24), and neither did Radio Shack, where they sent me. I finally ordered it from Amazon, which I should have done in the first place.

The rest of the supplies were mostly things we already had, or fairly easy to come by, so we set aside an afternoon to work on it. Seb and Abe (the only ones I really thought could participate) were SO excited. We wound and wound and wound until we had four coils of wire. But then things started to be complicated. We didn't have quite the right size cork, or quite the right size dowel, and we tried to make it work but we weren't sure if it was going to. And our current, when we tested it, was definitely doing something . . . but we couldn't quite tell if it was doing what it was supposed to do.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is, the turbine turned beautifully (with enough water pressure, e.g. the hose) but we couldn't tell if it was actually generating any power for us or not. The tiny flashlight bulb we tried to hook up didn't light, but we weren't sure if that bulb would even work with alternating current, and then our multi-meter didn't get consistent readings, but we don't know if that's because we didn't have good contact with the wires (hard to hold it still when you're trying to hold the hose on the turbines) or because the current wasn't running. There were just too many variables. Was the incorrect dowel size causing trouble? We couldn't see why it would be, but who knows? Did it matter that I put the turbine in the bottle upside down (yes, that was my stupid mistake) so we were sending in the water from the bottom instead of the top? I just don't know enough to decide what matters and what doesn't.

After spending so much time building the thing, we were quite sad not to know if was actually working or not! However, the upsides were: 

• it was cool making the turbine spin---the boys loved that, and it was impressively fast and powerful (better than our paper cup waterwheels).
• it was pretty fun to build---we liked wrapping wire and cutting spoons and so forth
• we really got a solid understanding of the parts of a generator. You always remember things better when you've handled them and worked with them; so now, for example, the boys don't forget which part is the stator and which is the rotor, or which part has the magnets, or why the turbine has to be attached to a shaft that turns the rotor, etc. I feel like I truly grasped those concepts for the first time as we were making it.

So I wouldn't say it was a waste of time, and I do think it was probably our mistakes that caused us to go wrong, not the instructions---they were pretty clear. (Though perhaps they could have been slightly clearer . . . ) This is a project we may attempt again later, when I've recovered from this time. :)