All Around the World

The New Year is always a good time to evaluate what you do, how you do it and how you can do it better. This year we decided to change things up a bit for our homeschooling. Teaching all the kids at the same time wasn't working. They all needed help with different assignments and yelling out "Mama" was becoming too common a habit. So Peter and I came up with a new plan. Eben and Kivi do their jobs all the way until lunch time. If they finish their jobs, they can do their typing lessons and then play on their new laptop at 15 minute intervals switching off with each other. While they are busy cleaning, Mama works with Jasper and Opal on their letter writing, reading and counting and we have story time which the older kids are allowed to join. The kids also must come to the Mama now, put their hand on my knee and wait for me to ask what they need. That in itself has helped a ton!

To make our learning more united and fun we decided to travel around the world! We even made our own passports and built a plane out of pillows and chairs. Our plan is to stay in that country or region until we've learned all we can about the culture, environment, animals, people, language and any other interesting things we can find.

To start our voyage I hid clues around the house that the kids had to find to guess where we were going.

Then they all had to look at each other's clues and figure out our destination.

On January 2nd we "flew" to the Arctic! We had so much fun and learned a ton. As soon as we arrived we got our passports stamped and then played in the snow. (The powder in the insides of diapers.)

We took pictures of things we saw (on the internet) and printed them up in a book. For our dinners we ate caribou (actually cow) steaks, caribou stew, fish, smoked oysters (which Berg loved!), and homemade clam chowder. Sadly we didn't get a chance to try any seal liver.

Eben, Kivi and Jasper made scrimshaw out of Ivory (soap, not real tusks).

Eben and Jasper made igloos and Kivi made a snow owl.

We built and licked an igloo, a gift from Buggy.

And we learned all about the Inuit people and built these cool things called Inuksuk which the Inuit used as landmarks.

We returned home on January 12th. We had so much fun in the North Pole. I'm sure we'll all have fond memories of our Arctic Tale. To remember some things we did, I finally finished our dining room/homeschool room wall. The frames had been hanging up for sometime, but they still had the art that came from Goodwill in them. Now it's complete and ready to be changed out for the next month and filled with things from our next trip. In the frames: Eben's batik art, Kivi's family portrait, E, K and J's snowflakes, Kivi's snowman painting, E, K and J's scrimshaw and Pella's footprints.