Prehistory on a time line

The furnace installers were here all day today, so now we have a working furnace with a new thermostat that will take weeks to learn how to use (so far we have learned how to change the font of the display).

But with workers in the house from 8:30 until 5:30 Calvin and I found ourselves home bound. That's not always a bad thing. I have piles of laundry to catch up on, surfaces to dust, and plants to water, and today was the perfect day to do all those things. It was also the perfect day to move all the dining room furniture and drag out the felt to make a massive interactive timeline of evolution. We got all the epochs and periods and massive extinctions marked, and the Cambrian creatures are made. Maybe I'll get to the laundry tomorrow.

Since Calvin's sudden fascination with prehistoric evolution I've been drooling over the Charlie's Playhouse site. This is a great find for any family interested in teaching the subject, especially if they have extra money floating around. We have a new furnace instead, so no matter how much I wanted to order that really awesome 18 foot fold out book play mat thing, it wasn't going to happen. Instead, it became the inspiration for our own 12 foot (because that's the length of our longest uninterrupted wall) interactive felt version of the Charlie's Playhouse timeline. Ours has removable prehistoric creatures and a lot of our own time, energy, study, and thought put into it. We've only filled in the first period so far, but there's plenty of time (ha ha).

We also read Bang! The Universe Verse and It's Alive, both by James Lu Dunbar, both entertaining if nothing else. And we played Mammoth Hunt, practiced the piano, ran through the yard (which needs rain again), and Calvin filled in a dinosaur color by addition sheet. But all of that is moot comparatively.

Linking up to

This busy life

A day of pleasantly warm sunshine to break up days of chilly fall rain. Although I've always thought of September as being the month to usher in fall, this is the first in a long line of years that I remember it being quite so chilly and actually fall-like. This isn't really a bad thing, although since the new furnace doesn't go in until tomorrow there were a few rather chilly nights in the house last week when temperatures outside dipped below forty degrees. Brrr.

Today I was faced with the bare fact that a discussion of evolution must bring with it a discussion of mating. Years of conventional thinking causes a spark of indecency when this lesson comes to mind, and yet I see nothing unnatural in the progression towards that topic. For now, though, I am going with the time tested tradition of providing information on an as needed basis. Steve Jenkins, in his book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution, says simply that "Many living things reproduce sexually. This means that there is a father and a mother and that each baby has a mixture of the qualities of the parents." For now this has answered our needs and sparked no further questions.

We re-watched BBC's Walking with Monsters, penciled in a timeline of life on earth, and read a few books on the subject, most notably the above noted. We also went to lunch with family, shopped for winter clothes, groceries, and craft items, went on a nature walk, practiced the piano, tried out some map scaling worksheets, took notice of the warm sunshine, and straightened the house for the sake of the people who are coming tomorrow to put in the new furnace. October is a lot closer than I keep thinking.

Evolution

Antarctica has now cleanly melded into a vigorous inquiry on the beginning of time.

I had intended to introduce the concept of American history this fall by beginning with the Land Bridge, since that would be the beginning of human American history, but it's funny how when you try to begin in one place it can seem as though you need just a little more first. Land bridge? What about the humans who used it? So okay, early humans it is first. But that's kind of an open beginning, and after watching the History Channel's Ape to Man he had questions about evolution, and the step before that is the introduction of life, yadda yadda. If we were an actual unit studies family one might have to call this the American History Unit Study: From the Big Bang to the American Revolution and Onward. Ha ha.

Calvin is now all kinds of interested in the dawn of time. We followed up Ape to Man with BBC's Walking with Monsters, a rather enjoyable series of three videos on the Paleozoic Era. This afternoon found us scouring the library for books on evolution, Charles Darwin, and the very beginnings of life. There's a surprising amount of good material out there and we have a tall stack of books to go through this week, or as we see fit, plus some related play dough and painting projects, a science look at what it means to be alive, color by number (addition) pictures of Paleozoic life, and possibly some new felt to design, make, and play with. I'm sure we'll also watch the videos again, and there will be other activities that suggest themselves as we go. We'll spend as much time as we like traipsing through seriously historic history, and eventually we'll get around to America and U.S. history. Eventually.