January 7:  Day 2

     Today was crazy cold at our house as it was across the country.   -39 with the windchill in the morning.  Our house has its own windchill factor, having been built before insulation was a thing.  I decided to make muffins for breakfast, thinking that there was no rush to get XYZ done before a certain time and the oven would warm up the house.  Also, there was no cereal in the cupboard and only that new veggie bread that smells exactly like hay when it is being toasted.  I never, never, never make muffins for breakfast and after I had used almost every dish in my house, even the Slap Chop, I  remembered why I don't like to be ambitious in the kitchen first thing in the morning.  But as my baker-girl whacked away at the walnuts I thought I'd seize the teachable moment to share the interesting fact I had heard somewhere about how a lot of foods resemble the organs that they benefit.  When the muffins were in the oven ,we consulted that respected online medical journal--Woman's Day--and found great comparison pictures of a sliced carrot and a retina,  a whole walnut and a brain, clams and testicles etc.   The boys even learned proper terms for their nuts and all agreed that saying that clams resemble testicles is a stretch of the imagination.  
     Each kid has about 20 pages to go to finish the first of two math books that make up our regular Jump Math program and I decided I would like them to finish it (I paid for those babies!) before we leave all workbooks behind for the year.    I'll be glad when they're done.  If the kids were reliably quick and efficient in finishing their two pages I would probably keep it up all year but they are not and too much daylight is burned in prodding the pokey ones. Especially if you are also trying to wash a mountain of breakfast dishes during the kids' freshest brain hours.  When math was done we sat in a semi-circle, facing the heat register and brainstormed 6 different ways of gathering information about a subject that interests us.    So now we have 3 lists to keep adding to as we go:  talents, interests, and research methods.  Tomorrow we'll compile a list of different possibilities for presenting the info we gather.     I don't know want to be too methodical about how we go about pursuing a subject but it seemed to me that these 4 lists would be a good base for how to go about learning independently.
      Besides piano practice and Rosetta Stone French , that was all the formal lessons we had today. (Ya can't learn a language without daily practice and I'm a certified French teacher so they are stuck, stuck, stuck with it.  They like Rosetta Stone , though, even if they say they don't.)
      Here is how the rest of the day rolled out:

• Anneke decided an interest that she wanted to develop was making crafts, so we used a craft book she got for Christmas to learn daisy chain seed bead patterns  She caught on quick and loved the intricate pattern she was able to bead all by herself.  A conversation about native women beadwork and wampum belts came up and we got out our First Nations non-fiction books and learned to use an index to find out more about wampum.   One page talked aobut how wampum is no longer used partially because kids forgot their own customs as a result of  being snatched and brought to residential schools.   Anneke became indignant and used her hands-on-hips-snotty girl voice to say that white people shouldn't have done that.  They should have just left those kids to learn their own things.    You said it , girlfriend!
• Isaac read Harry Potter #6 on his bed for quite a while.
• Tobin helped Ruby build a lego zoo using generic lego as well as online instruction for mixing boxed sets.  (Really, any excuse to consult an electronic will do with the boy.)
• We read another chapter of The Railway Children.  Isaac is not an aural learner and has never really liked being read to.   He remarked, "Those kids save people too much".
• Some sort of running through the house at top speed hide and seek game happened for a while.
• A friend posted that she had thrown boiling water up in the air outside so we gave it a go too.  POOF! it vapourized and hardly any came back to the ground.  Coolio.  We then blew bubbles and watched them get frosty patterns before they shattered.  Saw that once on You tube.
• Stories for Ruby and GEMS for Anneke, in the evening.

I'd have to say that I'm loving the pace, so far.  I spend so much less time being frantic and irritable.  Except maybe when I was ransacking the freezing cold garage for fishing line for the beading for a really long time.  It's only been two days and we haven't really gone full swing yet, though.  I'm loving the mindfulness of cultivating learning in the moment.   Blogging helps with that.  I hesitated with letting anyone know that I was blogging because I wasn't sure I felt like dealing with opinions, but the accountability factor is super helpful.  Here's hoping I can keep it up.