Camian Academy

Or at least that’s the message Whole Foods Market is sending. Someone recently noticed that the July/August Mothering Magazine was being covered up at Whole Foods. Why? Because there is a baby nursing on the cover. Click the link and look at it. It’s a beautiful picture and no more skin is showing than at a typical beach mid-summer (less really!). A fellow nursing mom went to the Whole Foods in Springfield and discussed this issue with the manager. She was told that the corporate office was getting tons of letters screaming about exposed flesh and so it wasn’t just Mothering Magazine being covered. I guess any flesh, no matter if it is for sex or for nursing a baby, is the same to Whole Foods. What I find ironic is, as you can see from that very “covered” issue the point was that we need a “breastfeeding culture” where breastfeeding is the norm. It is not something to be covered.

So, this fellow nursing mom has put the word out that she’ll be at that Springfield Whole Foods Market this Saturday, September 23rd at 11:30 with her little nursling. I think I may just have to be there with mine, too. And, in the meantime, I’ll just keep on shopping at My Organic Market. They sell Mothering Magazine there, too, and the issue with the breastfeeding baby was out on their display for all to see, no covering necessary.

Comments can be sent to Whole Foods Market here.

I had an epiphany a couple weeks ago about food. It had to do with a Mother Earth News article and me finally getting what Jamie has been saying about eating organic food for a long time. So we went to MOM’s and got most of our groceries for two weeks. Anyone who thinks organic food is the same as conventionally grown food just more expensive has clearly never eaten much organic food. Organic just tastes better to me and oddly fills me up better too. Clearly there is something missing from conventionally grown food.

And there’s something added to conventionally grown food. Take for example one of our favorite meals. Summer Tomato Pasta. I zest three fresh lemons for that meal. I always have a strange tingly taste after eating it and it’s much worse after being in the refrigerator all night. I figured it was just something in the lemon peel. Well, that didn’t happen with the organic lemons. The lemons felt less waxy, too. I don’t want to even think about what we were eating all those years.

Organic dairy is so much better, too. We don’t drink milk, but do put it on cereal. Organic milk tastes sweeter than conventional milk. Must be the lack of pus from those poor cows plagued with mastitis (and, as a nursing mom who twice has had very mild cases of mastitis, I really feel for those cows). About a month ago I made cheesy spinach lasagna with all conventionally grown ingredients. It was very good. The kids absolutely loved it. So I made it again last week. This time at least the pasta sauce and the ricotta cheese were organic. I hate ricotta cheese. I tolerate it in lasagna. My mom suggested using cottage cheese, but I don’t like that either. Anyway, when I opened the container of organic ricotta I noticed it was much thinner and very curdy. I tasted it. And it was GOOD! It had a nice flavor. So I made the lasagna and it was so much better than the one we had a few weeks ago.

Yeah, organic food just tastes so much better without even getting into the health benefits.

So yesterday we joined a buying club. Going through the catalog I want so much of the stuff but we have to pace ourselves or we’ll end up in the poorhouse. The nice thing, though, is this is a great way to build our food storage due to the whole case lot thing. Maybe one day I’ll even get brave and join a CSA.

Ani got the idea to “teach” Fritz Latin on Saturday evening. She took her flash cards and held them up one by one telling him what the word was in Latin, pausing for him to respond, and then telling him the word in English. He loved it. He loves any attention from his big sister. She did more yesterday. Again, he loved it. So I told her she can feel free to keep doing it. I think she learns better as the teacher rather than just reading the flash card and telling me what it is in English. It’s just a very funny sight to see a two month old laying on the floor next to a 6 year old with the 6 year old holding up flash cards for him and telling him Latin words and the two month old squealing over and over with delight.

Forget being Mama and Papa Duk and the Duklings. We are actually Mama and Papa Klutz and the Klutzlings. On Tuesday Jamie was running down the stairs and banged his head into the ceiling above the stairs. Result: a big old goose egg. On Thursday I accidentally broke the charger for the iPods. And, so, Jamie informs me he guesses we are even. A week and a half before his 3 year old iPod died. The cause: he accidentally dropped it in the toilet. I wouldn’t exactly say that’s even ($29 charger versus $349 iPod), but, nevertheless, a new iPod and charger are on the way. And then yesterday I accidentally banged my right ring toe (the one by the pinky toe) into the couch. I heard a snap. It hurt. The result: a broken toe that is several very ugly shades of purple and red right now. Luckily the big kids haven’t had any injuries or accidents nearly so bad and the baby is still to little to know if he’s a klutz, too, but, as we always say, Ani inherited my grace (which, I can assure you, is about zero). With a Mama Klutz and a Papa Klutz what else can our little ones be but Klutzlings.

Jamie and I reviewed what Ani does for school then I went over it with Ani for her input. We’re tweaking a few things.

Latin - We’re sticking with Latin for Children. It’s working well for both of us. Ani wants to be the teacher more often.

Read-Aloud - We’re going to finish our collection of great illustrated classics and then the heroes of America series. We are no longer reading a certain number of pages or chapters a day, but instead are reading a few depending on time and interest. We are still keeping the running list of the synopses and reviews. Once we finish all those we will move into reading regular books, both classics and other books we think would be good to read, aloud as a family. There are several classics the kids are interested in reading “for real” because they liked them so much in the GIC form.

Religion - We’re going to finish the Illustrated Book of Mormon series (there are 8 volumes) and then we have discussions for kids, Book of Mormon timeline, devotional poems, and devotional scriptures. Then we’ll memorize the articles of faith. I’m thinking after that we’ll memorize the scripture mastery scriptures. The kids will be all ready for seminary then. And of course then there is just plain reading the scriptures (which Ani is already doing on her own - reading the actual version of the Book of Mormon with plans to finish it before her 8th birthday and baptism).

History - At Ani’s request we are now doing a section of Story of the World each day. She loves history and really loves how it’s taught in Story of the World. Ani does not like the activities in the activity book so we’ll skip that with future volumes. She just wants to hear the story and talk about it. She’ll continue memorizing various historical lists from the Kingfisher ready reference. Next year (2007) we will be doing a lot of focusing on early America, particularly Jamestown colony. It’s a benefit of living in Virginia during the 400th anniversary. A lot of good stuff is relatively near by. Once we complete Story of the World we are planning to do some in-depth geography… somehow.

Science - Another subject that has been moved to daily at Ani’s request. We are following the outline for science in The Well-Trained Mind matching along with the volume of Story of the World we are in. No idea what we’ll do once we finish the first plants/body/animals - astronomy - chemistry - physics cycle and still have grammar stage age kids.

Music - Ani’s enjoying her weekly Alfred’s Prep Course piano lesson and is starting to practice a little on her own without being assigned. She reviews her flash cards once a week. My biggest goal with her learning to play the piano is to learn the notes and music theory, not to be an accomplished pianist unless she decides that’s what she wants to do. I’ve cut down the classical composers we are doing to ones that I recognize or I think have a nifty sounding name. Once we finish those we have a few ideas for more modern music and music genres.

Art - We have several more artists to learn about and copy their methods using Discovering Great Artists. Once we finish those we’ll move on to art appreciation and identifying styles/periods and artists. The kids (particularly Cameron) do arts and crafts regularly. Cameron does not like to be told what type of art to do which is fine with me since he’s always creating something anyway. He does like to learn about the artists, though.

Spelling - We’ll continue with the Spelling Workout books. Ani likes them and she does well with them. Once she finishes through book H I’ll just start keep a running list of words she misspells and using them for her spelling tests.

Memorization - I was planning on doing away with poem memorization, but as it turns out Ani loves to memorize poems. So we’ll keep them. She’s getting quite a long list to review regularly so I really must record them and get them on her iPod so she can just listen to them whenever.

Copywork - Ani requested that she do copywork daily. This will actually be a good thing since I’ll have her do it all in cursive. Not sure just what we’ll have her copy, though. We are doing away with dictation for now at least.

Free Writing - For one more week Ani will have writing prompts. Then she will be assigned to write in her composition book daily, but with no specific topic. She likes that idea very much. I have my composition book from first grade and I love to look back over it now so I want her to have the same type of thing to look back at when she has grown up.

McGuffey - Ani will continue reading the McGuffey Readers. She likes them a lot, espcially the old style of writing that comes up a lot.

Rod & Staff - I like their way of teaching grammar. Ani likes it sometimes and doesn’t other times. I’m doing away with the worksheets since she really doesn’t need the extra practice. She’ll still do the unit tests. I’ll be skipping the teacher’s manual for the next few levels at least. The oral review questions drove Ani insane and made her dread her grammar lessons.

Math - We love Math-U-See. Ani will continue with them moving as fast as she wants to. We’re taking the next week off of math because Ani has a tendency to get stuck on some math concept and it just gets worse if we keep pressing her to finish it. If we take time off she tends to be fine and it has sunk in and she no longer has a problem. She’ll continue working with the Flashmaster daily for a while longer. She’ll also continue the look-ups for a while as well. She gets upset if she doesn’t know more than 2 or 3 of the ten so instead of repeated the ones she’s missed over and over I’ll do more random ones and one or two repeats each day.

Spanish - Ani will continue to work in Rosetta Stone as much as she wants each day.

I’ve stopped recording the books we read each day. We did it for a year. I got bored of it.

The kids will also persue their chosen subjects as they want and create their final project as they want. Cameron’s really into planes and gets so excited over the books we’re reading. In a few weeks we’ll be going to see the plane of a guy Jamie works with. My parents are taking him to the Air and Space Museum. We’ll be going to an air show. We’re going to make some airplanes (paper, balsa wood, styrofoam, etc.) and fly them in various ways (no wind, with the wind, against the wind). That type of learning is right up Cameron’s alley. Ani’s learning about trees. She loves trees. She’s planning on doing a leaf pressing/indentification project as soon as we get the leaf press from my parents. We’ll likely press colored fall leaves as well in a few weeks once the leaves change colors. The funny thing is my parents still have my leaf identification project as well as one my mom did when she was in high school. So once Ani does her’s we’ll let her look at our’s and compare. They will all be slightly different locations of the same geographic area. Northern VA (Ani’s), southern MD (mine), and Baltimore, MD (my mom’s).

We check out a lot of books on the topics of the week for history, science, music history, and art. I’ve been reading them at our regularly read aloud time rather than specifically as part of school. This plays into one of our goals of homeschooling. We want learning to be a lifelong thing and not something that is done at a particular part of the day. That is also why giving Ani lists of work to complete as she wants seems better to us than having formal sit down and do school time.

Ani will, of course, continue to read as much as she wants. She’s been reading like crazy the last few days (or rather, nights). I also will continue reading a lot to the kids every day.

I’m sure other things will be adjusted a little as time goes on, but every so often we do a major formal sit down and analyze what we are doing.

We went on another walk in the morning. I put Fritz in the Moby facing out. He looked like the joey in his mother’s pouch in his stuffed kangaroo with just his little head poking out. We stopped at a playground on the way back home. Fritz and I swung on the swing together while the big kids played. When we got back the big kids drew pictures. Ani drew another fire hydrant and various other things. Cameron drew a heart shaped leaf of some plant. A lot of the people in our neighborhood have those plants in their yard and Cameron loves them, but we saw the biggest ones we’ve ever seen on that walk. They were absolutely huge!

Ani decided she wanted to be the Latin teacher today. She led me in the chapter maxim and the chant and the first five vocabulary words. Then she taught me me second five vocabulary words. She really was teaching me since I don’t know them and am learning right along with her. She was so cute trying to come up with a dertivative or some other way of remembering the words just like I do for her. Then she led me in chanting all 10 vocabulary words. She said she wants to do the teaching all the time. I told her that is fine with me. She also did 10 vocabulary flash cards. I read 3 chapters of Ivanhoe (great illustrated classics) aloud. I read 10 pages of the Illustrated Book of Mormon volume 6 aloud. Cameron was so excited that I was reading about the 2,000 Stripling Warriors. Apparently he just loves hearing about them. Maybe I ought to get him one of those Momma’s Boys t-Shirts. I read the part of Story of the World volume 1 about Alexander’s Invasions aloud. Ani narrated it (history). The kids love hearing about Alexander since we recently moved away from a city called Alexandria. We read about tasting and Ani narrated it (science).

Ani worked on memorizing her wars list (history). She did two pages of Spelling Workout C. She worked on memorizing Building Sentences. She did free writing with the prompt of “white.” She wrote that white is the color of paper. She read lesson 20 in the McGuffey Fourth Reader. She did lesson 53 of Rod & Staff English 3. She played with the flashmaster and did 10 math look-ups. She had to look up four of them (3+8, 7+3, 7+4, and 5+3). She was very frustrated by getting 4 of them “wrong.” She doesn’t like getting things wrong. She did half a worksheet I made for extra practice with 3 digits divided by 2 digits. She essentially knows how to do the problems but she gets frustrated because she doesn’t want to make an educated guess for each answer. She doesn’t want to get them wrong the first try. And so, after doing Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and 2/3 of Delta, Ani has hit her first Math-U-See stumbling block.

I made a comment on the LDS Mothering Naturally message board about me having Moby Wrap envy. A sweet sister on there told me she had one she had been given and never used and if I wanted it she’d send it to me. How cool is that? It arrived in the mail a couple days ago. Yesterday I tied the Moby on and put Fritz in and the kids and I went for a walk. The Moby was very comfortable for me, Fritz seemed to love it, and the big kids enjoyed the walk. When we came back in I had the kids draw their favorite part. Both kids drew the berry (not sure what kind) trees and the fallen berries they had fun squishing. They also drew the fire hydrant at the end of our street. They were both utterly fascinated by the fire hydrant. I had planned on another walk this morning but it was drizzly most of the day and just generally icky so no walk today.

Today the checklist got done all in one day. Together, we learned the Latin words good, bad, known, unknown, and new. Ani did 10 flashcards. I read four chapters of Ivanhoe (great illustrated classics) aloud. The great illustrated classics have one page of words facing a page of a picture. Each picture has a caption. Ani sat next to me as I read and wrote every single caption in her spiral notebook. I read ten pages of the Illustrated Book of Mormon volume 6 aloud. We read about M.C. Escher (art). Ani took a spelling test. Out of the 20 regular words she missed just two: sixth (sikth) and shovel (shuvel). She misspelled two of the five bonus words: breathe (breath) and thief (thefe). She recited the Spanish alphabet. I read the part of Story of the World volume 1 on Philip and His Son aloud. Ani narrated it (history). We read about smelling and Ani narrated it (science). Ani decided that today she wanted to write the narrations all by herself.

On her own, Ani worked on memorizing the list of ancient wars (history). She made a tessellation drawing in the style of Escher (art). She did two pages in Spelling Workout C. She worked on memorizing Building Sentences. She wrote about “red” for free writing. She wrote than red is a primary color. She read lesson 19 in the McGuffey Fourth Reader. She did lesson 52 in Rod & Staff English 3. She did page 22C of Math-U-See Delta. She played with the Flashmaster. She did 10 addition look-ups. She needed to find two of the on the chart (7+4 and 3+8). She played in Rosetta Stone Spanish.

Ani’s now all caught up and her lists are all checked off through Wednesday (not that I’ve even written Thursday’s yet…). Together, we worked on the magnus first and second declension adjective chant (Latin). That was easy since we already know the endings (-us, -i, -o, -um, -o, etc.) and this was just taking those endings and slapping them on the end of magn- (large or great). She did 10 flash cards. I need to make more flashcards of her vocabulary words now. She’s gone through all the ones I’ve already made. I read the part of Story of the World volume 1 on The Greeks Fight Each Other aloud and Ani narrated it (history). We read about seeing and Ani narrated it (science). In her narration, she talked about how each eye sees something slightly different and then she added that your brain then creates a “thought bubble” to tell you what you are looking at. Interesting insight into her brain (especially since she has never read any comic strips yet still came up with the thought bubble idea). Ani did dictation (I belong to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. - now how many Mormons are out there “thinking” the rest of the song - “I know who I am, I know God’s plan…” lol).

On her own, she watched the video for Latin for Children chapter 12 (she did that before the magnus chant actually). She worked on memorizing the list of ancient wars (there’s only three of them) and reviewed her other two history lists. She reviewed her piano flash cards. She did four pages of Spelling Workout C. She worked on memorizing Building Sentences. She did two free writing prompts. Fot the first, yellow, she wrote that the cup she had just drunk out of was yellow. For the second, orange, she wrote that red and yellow make orange and she just discovered this a couple days ago while painting and mixing colors (that really has been such an excitement for her and even though she already knew from being told that red and yellow make orange, by actually mixing the colors to get orange now she truly knows it is a fact that she has seen proven with her own eyes). She read lessons 17 and 18 in the McGuffey Fourth Reader. She completed the Rod & Staff unit two test. She scored a 95 1/2%. She completed lesson 51 including worksheet 32. She watched the video for Math-U-See lesson 22. She did pages 22A and 22B. She had a bit of trouble (3 digits divided by 2 digits) and I think part of that is because she is afraid to make an educated guess to see if the number divides into the other number that many times. She’s afraid she’ll be wrong. I keep telling her that’s okay since she certainly doesn’t have skip counting by 26 memorized. If she actually does the problems she generally gets them right. She just avoids doing them for so long that it takes her way longer than it should. She did 10 math look-ups. The 7 facts are definitely not her strong point (she needed to look up 7+6, 5+7, 6+7, and 7+4). She played with the flashmaster.

Together, we read 10 pages of the Illustrated Book of Mormon volume 6. Ani may not be too interested in the wars we’re reading about, but Cameron sure is. I think he’s also hoping to hear more about Samuel the Lamanite since he’s on the front cover and we talked about him and listened to the full version of Book of Mormon Stories for family home evening Monday night. I read chapters 4-6 of Ivanhoe (great illustrated classics) aloud.