Detroit Parade Co. tour

The Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade is one of the traditions that has remained strong in the streets of that beleagured city. According to the Parade Company's website, it is a 90 year old event that takes 4,500 volunteers and reaches over 100,000 viewers in their homes every year while about a million spectators line the streets. It's a big deal, preluded by parties, music events, and a charity run, all over the city. 

To pull it all off, the parade relies on the Parade Company, which takes all the support, physical and monetary, and manages it until it produces a festivity for the ages! And they do it from the skeleton of an old auto plant building in an unsurprisingly barren part of the city. This warehouse is where they store old floats and build new ones, and they offer group tours of the facility year round, although I can't imagine wanting to go anytime other than November, when the space is crazy with creativity. 

We went last week with our homeschooling field trip group. The tour took the better part of the morning as we were ushered through the facility by a well informed guide. We spied the tracks on the ground from the old assembly line, and noticed the spots where the artsy but poorly planned roof windows tend to leak. We got to take pictures with iconic floats, like Santa's sleigh, and peaked at, but couldn't photograph, the up and coming new floats for this year's parade. The world's largest collection of paper mache heads will stick with me for some time (possibly in nightmares). When we left, nspired and excited for the parade just a couple of weeks away, we were sporting red clown nose parting gifts.

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November Nature

Golden hues, the smell of crispy leaves, the rustling of digging squirrels. These are some of the things that define fall for me. That and football games, apple pie, pumpkin everything, and brisk nights, not to mention a new focus on school and studies. We combined some of the above today by taking our science study out into the field to merge it with the signs of fall.

There are certain things that we study with lesson specificity, others, though, we learn more through rhetoric and reality. To me, arithmetic is learned in sprints, while reading and writing is a marathon study—slow, steady, and more a way of living than a way of studying. Science can be either. We'll learn the periodic table in a sprint, but lessons like evolution and seasons are better trained for like an ultra-marathon. These are a fundamental way of thinking about, speaking about, and seeing the world around us.

So we learn them by doing exactly that. A book can tell us about different species, it can even define for us how their aspects evolved, but only field work and discussion can give a person a feel for what those things mean and the ability to problem solve with that understanding on their own. In the woods today we talked about the adaptations species in our area have for enduring the deprivation of the winter months. We visited about seeing these adaptations at work, especially in the trees. And we chatted about the migrating location of the sun in our sky and the aspects of our orbit that define that movement.

We are several years into studying these concepts, and our introduction to them came from the early chapters of BFSU and from reading and discussions at home, but we build on that introductory learning by living the concepts and seeing them in the living things around them. This isn't homeschooling, per se. It's life schooling, or learning through life itself. This is the way of thinking, the way of being, that we strive for every day.

 

Field tripping

The response I hear most when I tell someone we're homeschooling is "what about socialization?". The question comes in many forms. In its most blatant it sounds like an accusation, but other times it comes disguised in curiosity "Do you get together with others much?", and I'll be honest, I'm always torn between giving them the rundown of our social interactions and responding that no, we are what's known as closet homeschoolers: we learn alone in a dark closet.

I know most of the queries are well-meaning or simply curious, but if the askers only knew. In fact, the social experiment of homeschooling might be what draws me most. Yes, connect every Friday with a group of like-minded homeschoolers (because there are many different kinds of us out there, you know), and when we do get together the lack of division between age and gender is truly heartwarming. And it's not the only place we see our fellow homeschoolers. A group of us, connected via facebook, band together to earn field trip privileges at various local places. There's more I want to say about the "socialization" aspect, mainly about how an education in how to be social should not come from someone equally as clueless, and about the value of learning the social aspects of community in the community at large, but right now my focus is really on the second homeschooling group and the amazing field trips we get to take together.

There are lots of good reasons homeschooling field trips are great. For one thing, again, there is no divide along age or gender lines. Then there's the high adult to child ratio. But possibly the most wonderful thing about a homeschool field trip is that pretty much everyone who's there wants to be there. This is no obligatory trip. When the leader posts field trip options in the group, everyone decides for themselves if they want to join up or not, and there's no shame in staying home if, for instance, you aren't interested in the art museum or robotics class. There's no limit to the range of options, the group leader is open to suggestions from anyone and everyone, and the list is there for kids to pick and choose.

This year so far we have taken science classes in the park, gone on guided hikes, and spent a night in the zoo sleeping next to the giant aquarium after feeding the nocturnal animals. Today it was a hands-on class about electricity. Next month it will be a tour of the Parade Company's warehouse. 

Feeding the hungry

I don't know what it feels like to go hungry. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family that had enough—more than enough—and have been fortunate enough as an adult to never have to wonder more about my next meal than what work I'd have to do to prepare it. The same then is true for Calvin. He knows his dad goes to work to pay for our family's expenses, and he knows that I plan meals carefully so as not to waste food, and that some foods are considered "splurges", expenses we won't incur very often. And I'm glad—very, very glad—that so far in life he has not had to worry about getting enough food, but I would like him to know more about the reality of our world—that his experience is not actually the norm, that many kids don't get to make "wish lists" as part of a weekly shopping list, that still others don't get to make lists at all, and that the least fortunate sometimes don't even know when their next meal will come.

We have a wonderful assistance program in our area that collects unused food from a variety of sources in order to redistribute it to areas of the greatest need. Food Gatherers is an award-winning program, and their logo is a familiar sight around the city. Our first more intimate understanding of the group came through my dad, who upon retiring started volunteering with them a few times a week. He rides out on the trucks to pick up pallets of unwanted foods from groceries and restaurants. The foods then go back to a warehouse where they are sorted to be delivered to food banks around the area, and sometimes he delivers those pallets as well. Thanks to my parents, we've also been able to attend their annual fundraising picnics. I'm so pleased that Calvin both knows that his grandpa volunteers there and that he gets to hear stories and details about the group.

Then last week we got the opportunity to go volunteer at the warehouse site with our homeschoolers field trip club. Kids eight years and older were welcome to attend, and our group assembled about twenty volunteers for the afternoon. A Food Gatherers representative (educator?) started us out with a brief info meeting in their conference room where a lot of numbers (pounds upon pounds of food!) were tossed at us, and we got a sort of foggy idea of what a large operation it really is. Then we got a tour of the warehouse, from the dry good shelves, to the freezer, to Princess Di (the "digester" that breaks down compost into fluids), before ending up in the "food rescue" room for the afternoon. There we were put to work going through cartons of donated produce, separating the good from the bad before it was to go back out for distribution. It was fascinating, and it felt good, wholesome even, to do something to help such a noble cause, though I think the kids' favorite part of the day was feeding Princess Di.

In the end, the few hours we put in that afternoon ultimately made very little difference for the hungry people living even in our small area. I struggle often with reconciling the prodigious stature of the world's problems compared with the tiny amount of help I'm able to give. But those few hours did do something else. They started a young boy, and probably myself, thinking more clearly about the reality—the actual physical nature—of food as a need, but not a given. And those few hours we spent might also have started him thinking about the physical reality of being able to do something—anything—to help. Plus now he knows that there are such things as digesters that can turn anything organic into sludge.

Grade 5, a new beginning

It is that time of year again. The days are lengthening, the temperatures dropping (maybe a little? Soon, at least), and football is right around the corner. It is time for a new school year. Although Calvin does some school work year round (math, spanish, and music mainly), and though we live with a general atmosphere of learning, we do still celebrate the beginning of the tradiitonal school year the same way others do: with new books, new tools, and, now that he's older, a return to the pencils, papers, and desk.

Although our local schools didn't start until this week, the day after Labor Day, we went ahead and started a week earlier because we'll be taking a couple of extra vacation weeks during the year (shh! Don't tell). It was quiet around here, and plenty easy to settle down to business, so we're now well into our second week of fifth grade and it's sliding along pretty smoothly. I'm actually a little in awe of how much easier the work goes down this year, and of how much he loves his very first honest-to-goodness text book. It's a Spanish text, the only curriculum we could find to fit our needs, so I'm thankful for his enthusiasm.

Actually, it's going to be a year of many firsts for us. In a couple of weeks I'll be dropping Calvin off for his first ever public school class—fifth grade band. And he's taking tap and ballet dance lessons, both new to him. And I feel like this year especially he's growing right in front of my eyes, not only physically (as evidenced by my having to return the hiking shoes I got him for a larger size only two weeks later), but in confidence, poise, and occasionally ornery moodiness. There's a first for everything.

But with new beginnings come some closed doors. There will be no more cy365 this year: he's asked to have it taken off his school list and I'm barely keeping up with it anyway. And the bus stop play is different this year, because his two best friends, being different ages, now attend different schools and are picked up at different times. For Calvin this means getting up earlier if he wants to see his 5th grade friends off, then he gets a second go at bus stop play with the slightly younger crowd twenty minutes later. So far it hasn't been a problem, but we'll see how long the older kids want to get up in the cold and dark to play ball against the garage door before school.

I posted our Year 5 School Plan (a resource and goal list) here.

History: Story of the World Volume 4

Tech & Engin: Snap Circuits with Student Guide 

Geography: Draw the USA

Math: Math-U-See Geometry

Michael Clay Thompson's Level 4: Classic Literature Series, Sewing School, Javascript for Kids, Drawing With Children, Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, Avancemos Spanish 1

Avancemos Spanish 1