We went to an exhibit on robots at the Science Museum a couple of weeks ago and ended up doing an impromptu unit on robotics that Jordan and Alex really enjoyed.

 Here Alex is the “robot” and Jordan is the “programmer”. The programmer must give instructions on how to move so that the robot picks up the block and drops it into the container. The robot can only move in the directions/way that the programmer says (and is blindfolded so that he really depends on those instructions). They learned both how difficult it is to give exact instructions and how difficult it is for a human to move precisely the same way each time. They played this over and over.

At the end of the unit we designed a robot. They had to come up with a purpose for the robot (a job), provide how the robot moved, the tools it needed for its job, how it was powered and how it sensed its environment. Here is Alex’s fish tank cleaning robot.

Reading a book that had a quote from Carl Sagan that has really resonated with me this week.   He wrote “Our children long for realistic maps of a future they (and we) can be proud of.  Where are the cartographers of human purpose?”

I love the metaphor of our homeschooling as being cartographer to our children.   Daily I work to help the kids find and make their own map of their world.   Of course, the map keeps changing location, and one day it is a simple flat map with clearly defined borders and the next day the topography springs up and the borders are blurred by mountains and rivers.    Some days I think I know where the journey is heading, and then suddenly we seem in uncharted waters. 

 Okay, drug that metaphor into the ground now, lol.  

 The book is “the Power to Transform - Leadership that Brings Learning and Schooling to Life” by Stephanie Pace Marshall.  I just ran across it at the library and it focuses on educational reform within the system itself, but I’ve found that many books such as this are often unknowingly a treatise for home schooling.   Don’t know if I’ll make it all the way through, but I’m finding it an interesting and thought provoking read at this point.

Before it is a mess again.  I got tired of having piles of stuff and crammed overful cabinets so I decided to organize the school room.    We don’t do a lot of school work in there, but it is where they go to play quietly (ha!) when I’m working with someone else and it is where we store everything.  Usually there are legos or k’nex or cars or craft projects strewn everywhere.  Now I have different cubbies for language and math and science for our manipulatives, games and montessori style stuff I’ve made. 

My HS group had a science forum today on the topic of space.    Here is Aubrey with her project which explains that the Big Dipper only looks the way it does from Earth and that the stars are really nearer and farther away and appeared from a different location, appear very differently.

As viewed from Earth

View from a different galaxy, far far away…

 Jordan and Alex (and, well, ok, me) made a model of the space shuttle.  Jordan wasn’t all that interested, but Alex gave a thorough and very animated explanation of how the space shuttle takes off and lands. 

 Jordan opted instead to recite part of a space shuttle poem from a book we got from the library.   

 ”I am a space shuttle, I love to fly.  I always look up when I mount to the sky. ”   There’s more, but that’s what I remember.  Such a clear display of their different interest/learning styles. 

On Halloween we did the kids favoriate writing game.   Group story with dice.  We go around and each person rolls the dice and then adds that many words to the story before passing to the next person.      The result was an almost coherent story–not bad for four authors.

It was a dark and scary Halloween night and in the darkest part of the haunted house a coffin sat.   The coffin moved in the darkness.  A skeleton was hanging its arm out of the mouse hole.  A rock spider ate a severed head of a zombie.  The zombie shuffled down the creepy hallway then lurched down the stairs.  The haunted house was so creepy everyone ran out of the house and called 911.  The police hit the house with their anti-ghoul ray but the house fought back.  The zomie came outside and told the police the house was scared of them.  The police decided not to keep fighting the house and its residents.

The End.