March, come and gone

How about a quick run-down of the month of March, which came and went with a speed so determined that it left us all wondering where the fire was. In fact, I'm not sure I noticed that March was gone before the first days of May had arrived. What, then, happened to fair April? Part of my confusion might be the odd weather of this year that is delivering April showers at the beginning of May. Part of it was our run-in with tag team illnesses—flu here, flu there, a cold, Strep Throat. But the biggest part of March's sneaking right by was a schedule that just wouldn't let up.

We celebrated a birthday

We kept up with school

We took a salsa class with our homeschool group

We braved the still cold and snowy weather to spend a delightful day in town

We played a lot of games, and tried to encourage spring to begin.

4H fair time

This past week has been all about 4H for us. Not that we raise sheep in our sub-division backyard, or visit a riding stable on a regular basis (or really any basis at all, for that matter). In fact, we don't even have a suburban chicken coop under our deck. But it turns out that, while 4H is definitely about raising animals and riding horses and sheering sheep, it's also about a lot of other things. Their real tenets aren't about the animals, but the learning and teaching, the making of friends, and the growing up in a healthy, loving environment.

Our homeschooling group is actually a 4H club, which means that Calvin is a card carrying 4H member, so when this year's annual 4H fair rolled around, he opted to participate in their still projects category. That means that he didn't ride anything, raise anything, sheer anything, or show anything, but he did put a lot of work into five different projects in three different subject categories: natural resources, photography, and computer science and video. For natural resources, hours and hours of work produced three project notebooks with photos (taken mostly by him) and species information on 15 different native trees, 8 different native wild animals, and 8 different wildflowers found in the state. For photography he created a display of five pictures on one subject (his pear tree in our back yard). And for computer science he, with his dad's help, created a video game that teaches the finer points of backpack camping in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. All research, writing, and illustrating were entirely his own.

On Monday, he collected his projects and, on his own, presented them individually to the category judges at the fair. The 4H still projects judging process is a unique one. Each kid presents his project to the judge, who then chats a little with them about it, asking things like why they chose that topic, yadda yadda, and also offering tips and advice for future endeavors. In Calvin's age group, the Cloverbuds, parental assistance is allowed and encouraged, and only participation ribbons are awarded, but for ages 9 and up, non-competitive grades are assigned to each finished project, and a few projects are given the competitive disignations of "honors" or "best in show".

Of course the fair went way beyond the still projects. On Sunday we helped our club set up our "club table" and took our turn working in the kitchen, and throughout the week we stopped by to see friends compete in such live events as chicken showing, archery, and horsing around (really one of the many horse events, I just don't know which one). We also spent a lot of time learning about animals and animal care from very interested, and interesting, kids, and we touched a lot—a lot—of good natured farm animals.

We were there on several of the fair's six full days, and will be there again tomorrow for clean-up duty, and Calvin is not tired of it yet. All week long, as he slipped off with his friends to do this that or the other thing, I was repeatedly reminded of the fair in Charlotte's Web, when Fern disappears with her friends and becomes enamored with everything there is to see and do. And it wasn't just the obvious parallels, but also a sense of harking back to another time. There we were, surrounded by livestock, friends, and polite, knowledgable kids everywhere. It may not be time to move to the country and raise goats, but I can really see us enjoying 4H through the years as a family.

Walking the computer science judge through his video game.

Sharing his game with homeschooling friends.

Stage and screen

Last night, Jon and I had a chance to go out, just the two of us, and enjoy the opening night of The Great Gatsby. Opening night for most movies is a real hoot, and this was no flop. We got our tickets to see it at the historic Michigan Theater in town, where we also enjoyed a live band, a sing-along, 1920s cocktails, and the occasional flapper before the show. Most screen performances pale in comparison to the books they try to enliven, but Baz Luhrmann is no slouch, and it turned out to be a great show. Even in 3D it was classy. Just don't expect ragtime. In true Luhrmann style (think Moulin Rouge), the sounds of this prohibition-era film are a unique blend of modern hip-hop with just a hint of the roaring twenties. We loved it, every note, every line, every actor, every moment.

Speaking of flappers...

Speaking of classy?

Earlier in the day was a different kind of celebratory performance. I raved last year at this time about our wonderful group and all the opportunities it provides. We meet indoors only during the cooler months, and we use that time to offer classes to the kids (in the warmer months we meet at parks, the only structure about the meeting being the agreed location and the suggestion of timing). When our indoor meetings draw to a close we celebrate with a party, a hobbies display, a talent show, and the theater class's play, the culmination of their semester's work.

This was the our second year meeting with the group, so it was our second "last day of school" party, but it was actually Calvin's fourth play. His acting debut was as an extra god in the stage production of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. That performance earned him more lines in the next play, The Wizard of Oz, when he played the lead munchkin and flying monkey, and his first character part in the third play, when he played the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Calvin has a good memory, has always spoken with relatively good diction, and loves to play make-believe, so it's not really a surprise that he has continually done well on the stage.

This semester the group performed a special stage adaptation of a book trilogy written by the dad of one of our very own members, and Calvin was one of the four main characters. Lots of lines, but he still knocked it out of the park. And he had a great time doing it.

Oh, and the talent show, too.

Soccer

We became a soccer family this weekend. I realize that for some this is considered a late start. In fact, it is such a late start that, were we to take up the sport through our local rec & ed, Calvin would be behind by about three years compared to the other kids in his age group, a fact that astounds me to no end. He's only six.

We've put off the start of team games for a lot of reasons. For one thing, have you ever seen a three-year-old taking part in cooperative play? It falls somewhere in the "no it's mine" category. Plus we've been selfish with our time. Nothing about multiple weekday practices and giving up our Saturdays to games was appealing to Jon or to me. But the main reason we've waited this long is the competitive nature of team sports. We don't like it, so we've avoided it. I recognize that team sports are supposed to teach cooperative behaviors, but if you've ever seen the soccer parent caricature, you know what I'm talking about. So we've sought the teaching and learning of cooperative behavior in other ways, ways that throw teams together without pitting them against other teams.

What's different now? Well, this year our local homeschooling group, which is rather unruly and large for being local in such a small town area, decided to organize a summer soccer association. Surrounded by parents who, by and large, have similar ideas about team sports, we though it would be a fun way to start. Plus we meet only once a week. The group had enough kids for about five teams, ages all over the map, of course, and enough parents interested in teaching and coaching to make it a viable summer activity. We designed t-shirts, we paid enough to purchase a few balls, some scrimmage jerseys, and a slew of orange cones, and we're off.

Yesterday was our first practice. The main goal right now, according to the parents, was to have fun, stay fit, and learn how to play the game. The main goal, according to the younger kids at least, was day dreaming, I think. In any case, we got the first one right; the kids sure had fun.

And the blue team is ready for action! Or maybe not.

The other team scored once, and after that Calvin was afraid to leave the goal. At some point a few other blue team members caught on to the importance of the goalie, too, and we suddenly had three goalies...out of a team of 5.

At least it was sunny.

Love is in the air

Candy hearts, Red Hots, roses, chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, wearing red, wearing purple, s.w.a.k., ribbons and lace...what does Valentines Day mean to you?

From my own school days, I remember sitting at our kitchen table with a class list and a pen or pencil, painstakingly writing out the names of classmates on cards carefully selected for their innocuous messages (don't want that guy in the third seat back to think you actually love him). I remember being devastated the year that school was cancelled on the 14th due to winter weather. I remember spending hours designing the perfect card collecting device, which was inevitably made with a paper bag that would taped to the back of one's chair in the classroom.

Now, though, one can't pass out a card without attaching some additional token, usually in the form of candy. And nobody brings a paper bag for collecting their cards anymore. That would be blasphemy. We are part of two homeschooling groups this year; we still attend the same one that we joined last year at which Calvin takes a couple classes a week, and this year we've also started joining our little local group that meets in our library to visit and play games. The first one is more structured, the second more relaxed, but both did Valentines parties this year, which found Calvin designing, assembling, and addressing over eighty Valentines in all, and enjoying every minute of it. I refused to jump on the Second-Coming-of-Halloween bandwagon, so to speak, though. We handed out glittery pencils attached to downloaded and printed cards, as the shaft of Cupid's arrow to one group, and as an owl's tree branch to the other. Pinterest, again, was my friend.