I should have done this a long time ago. I wrote a whole Anatomy Workbook/Curriculum! Between four kids who love science, a mom who is a nurse and loves human anatomy, and my years as a Challenge A Director, I’ve spent the last several months compiling all of my favorite experiments, dialectic questions, simpler drawings, and all the crazy memory hacks my mom used when I was little to help us memorize everything. It was one of those projects where I felt like I could have kept writing it forever, adding new interesting research and information I dug up, but I also wanted to make it doable. An independent, open-and-go curriculum with an easy answer key that wasn’t online and was screen-free. I also tried to tap into middle schoolers’ natural desire to form opinions and argue with everyone around them. Ahem.
You can find the printable digital version here. Or… You can find the printed and mailed-to-you version here.
And now, on to the thing that sparked this whole adventure. I think THE TALK is a universally dreaded conversation to have with your kids, and it always seems to be in capital letters in one’s head. And the worst part (at least in our family) is that when you finally muster up the courage to have the conversation, you forget that your kid has an auditory processing problem, and you make it so low-key and chill that they promptly forget the whole thing, leaving you to experience Groundhog Day. Good times. The internet is chock-full of all kinds of books, instructional material, and helpful advice, but it can be daunting and overwhelming, and thus we disassociate until another day and hope we don’t wait too long, or heaven forbid, give it too soon (where are my pearls to clutch).
So don’t take this as advice or a strong opinion, but if you’re looking for a plain, factual lesson, I’ve got you covered. For those who have visual learner kids, but don’t want something super graphic and are looking for a more science-friendly approach, here’s the Reproductive System Lesson from the workbook. A freebie science printable, as they say. You can hand it over, or do it alongside them, or edit it, or use it as a starting point to build with more information as they get older and more mature (or perhaps less mature in the case of middle schoolers). Enjoy!
Or you know, you can always go the super expensive route and buy a homestead and have animals, and then the reproductive education (mostly) takes care of itself!
Do numbers have personality and gender to you? Fueds, family trees, romances…sibling squabbles? Or are they just numbers?
This question came up in my Challenge A class, and out of six kids and a few adults, only one kid and one mom didn’t do this. Since I’ve done this for as long as I can remember…involuntarily with both notes/music notation and math/numbers, I sort of assumed everyone did it to some extent (except for Jim because he’s one of those weird spreadsheet people). Obviously, 0 is the patriarch and 1 is his firstborn son who’s been such a disappointment to him. 2 is the matriarch… 7 is the perfect child who drives his siblings crazy because he really shouldn’t be…etc etc etc.
Turns out that’s an actual thing called Ordinal-Linguistic Personification, which is a form of synesthesia. A large percentage of kids do it, but they usually outgrow it. Only 1% of the adult population has Ordinal-Linguistic Personification, so I guess Jim’s not the weird one after all. There are other types of synesthesia too! Some of them I’ve never even heard of:
Grapheme-color synesthesia – associating letters or numbers with specific colors.
Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP) – attributing personalities or genders to numbers, letters, or days of the week.
Chromesthesia – hearing sounds and involuntarily seeing colors.
Lexical-gustatory synesthesia – associating words with specific tastes.
Auditory–Tactile Synesthesia – Hearing a sound causes a feeling somewhere on your body.
So now I’m super curious about who else is a closet synesthete. 👀
But back to math, this whole number personification thing has made math discussions in class and at home so much more interesting. I was listening to the math map podcast and Dr. Gilpin recommended making your own number cards for quick arithmetic games…it’s hard sometimes to remember what numbers kings and queens are and if we decided aces were high or low. Plus, it would be nice if the cards went up to 15 like we do with skip counting.
Soooo, thanks to the power of the internet and a little late-night insomnia, here are some personified number cards for all your little creative math geniuses (or right-brained ADHD-prone kids). If you want four suites like regular playing cards, print two sets. (make sure you select “fit to page” otherwise your printer will chop off the color). You can make blue cards negative numbers and red cards positive numbers…you can add the red and minus the blues…or multiply and divide. The sky is the limit! (I included a whole list of quick, fast medieval-themed math games that will tempt even the most dysgraphic sensitive kid into doing math…perhaps even liking it) Enjoy.
(and if you’re looking for other screen-free homeschooling help like Challenge A survival Latin or Cartography, you can find them here.)
The world right now feels a bit like a flamingo trying to put on pantyhose in the dark. Lots of staggering involved. Maybe it’s because I have one kid going through the Fallacy Detective right now, or maybe we’re just in a new season of family dinners where varying opinions, debates, and conversations are flying on a more “oh hey look my kids are actually mini adults now” level and not the old days of “Please put your underwear back on, and no you cannot stick beans up your nose.”
So all that to say, we’re on a logical fallacy kick around here. We find them in movies and ads, we catch each other doing them and we find them in spades on the internet and news. Whether your kids are homeschooled, private schooled, public schooled, or meet under a waterfall in some Waldorf-inspired space, I think it’s safe to say raising discerning thinkers is a high priority for all of us. Equipping them with the tools to think, discern, and pursue truth is like a broken record on the to-do list.
Not that I have anything remotely close to the answer, since persuasive rhetoric is supercharged these days, and we’re just as susceptible as the next person. So this is not a promise for “life-changing” results, but we’ve been enjoying these cards and matching game which you can download here. It’s led to lots of great conversations and I like that the youngest is catching up quicker than his older siblings did.
Or if you feel like supporting a small business, (mine!) you can download the full flipbook for a few dollars here. I made them to be neuro friendly and brain “sticky” in all the ADHD/Dyslexia ways. Even my older kids are picking it up and reading through them….which….let’s just say I’ll take that as a win!
Why oh why, does Spelling (it looks more doomful with a capital letter) feel like an unsolvable riddle sometimes? The word “dyslexia” has to be one of the most discouraging entries in the dictionary. Besides being just an ugly word to look at, the poor word conjures up visions of kids staring at pages like they’re written in ancient Sumerian with a lone tear trickling down their cheek. Meanwhile, we parents are over here googling “reading therapy” at 2 a.m. and wondering if a fish oil supplement will help. To make matters worse, there isn’t just one type of dyslexia, and it isn’t just “words wiggling” or letter reversals. It’s a whole Easter basket of struggles in (sometimes) hilarious ways. Here are some of the types we struggle with around here:
1. Phonological Dyslexia: The Sound Scrambler
This is the classic, most well-known type. Kids with phonological dyslexia struggle to connect sounds to letters. They can hear the difference between “bat” and “but,” but when it comes time to spell them, it’s like trying to remember the 400-digit Wi-Fi password at a hotel
2. Orthographic (surface) Dyslexia: The Rule Breaker’s Nightmare
English is a mostly phonetic language, but not entirely. (Looking at you, “colonel.”) People with surface dyslexia can sound out words just fine—until they hit an irregular word like “yacht.” Then their brains short-circuit. When they can’t rely on phonics, they get frustrated. If you’ve got a kid writing a word five times in a row… and still spelling it differently each time, you might be dealing with this one.
3. Rapid Naming Deficit: The Brain’s Slow Typist
Ever tried to recall someone’s name and your brain just gives you elevator music? That’s what happens to kids with a rapid naming deficit all the time. Their brains take a beat too long to retrieve letters and sounds, making reading feel like wading through molasses in January.
I’m not sure what the answer is. We’ve had great success with vision exercises, right-brained strategies, and a heavy emphasis on the science of reading/Orton-Gillingham (so there are as few exceptions as possible). I’m currently neck deep (mid-year deep?) in writing my own spelling curriculum that combines all my favorite things and cuts out the things I think are dumb. But I have to admit that was rather ambitious and cocky. Turns out what works for one kid, doesn’t work for the other kid, and despite all my attempts to make it fun and manageable, I still have kids hitting brick walls.
But we are making progress! It helps to put all the spelling rules to music. I have hope that we will figure it out, but in the meantime, if you have a child mixing up “their, there and they’re”, here’s a little visual memory hook to help. You can download it here.
I’m loathed and embarrassed to even use such a clickbaity title, but I stumbled upon this method quite by accident and either it’s an anomaly for my kids/friends kids/students or it really is magical.
In all my spare time, I (try to) read books on neuroscience and listen to podcasts on all the latest cognitive strategies (hello Huberman), but there’s a difference between absorbing parasympathetic systems and dopamine receptors, and the real strategies for down-in-the-trenches help. So if I were to analyze this method dispassionately, I would say it’s the adrenaline and dopamine receptors that are kept guessing, that make this strategy so effective, but enough of the navel-gazing…. what is this?
A printable board game and a few dice. I’m not joking. I can literally get my kids and my cottage school kids to do anything with this game. Math? done. Latin? done. Spelling? done. If you only have one kid, you’ll have to play with them as you need at least two players. Sometimes I do their work alongside them to show that even moms have to do school too, and sometimes I have them assign me my own “school work” like switching the laundry or starting lunch. After all, fair is fair, and if I’m asking them to do half a math worksheet, then they can assign me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (little do they know, that I need the ADHD motivation hack too).
I named it “Via Triumphalis” which means “The Road of Triumph” in Latin. But don’t worry, you don’t need to understand Latin to play this game beyond knowing that “Proelium” means battle, and “Porta” means gate. You also need dice, and dry-erase markers (or a penny or something to move across the board…we use dry-erase markers). I have two versions, a simple one for younger kids, and a more complex one with character cards if your older kids get bored of the simpler version.
Word of caution though, don’t use it too much….act reluctant…only pull it out every two or three times they ask for it, otherwise (like with all things) the novelty wears off.
We’re on winter break, “enduring” the prettiest, gentlest snowstorm, and enjoying everything being canceled. Back last Summer when it was 100 degrees with 100% humidity I started (what I thought) was going to be the simple task of making math notation flashcards for myself and my kids. I got about halfway through when the school year officially started and we all feel like we’ve been tipped off a cliff or tossed off a high dive. Since then it feels like it’s been a thousand years with a few battles with the Balrog, but finally, I came face to face with enough time to finish those soul-sucking math notation flashcards. Definitely a labor of love. Ten out of ten do not recommend. Trying to figure out how to make logarithms and formulas on Canva is definitely not my idea of a good time. The only thing that kept me going was that I couldn’t use the normal ones. The ones CC sells are double double-sided, i.e. they put answers and questions on both sides, so both sides of the card criss-cross and contain both a question and an answer to the other side. It’s brilliant really. Nobody wants to carry around an enormous stack of flashcards and this cuts the stack in half. They’re great flashcards, well done…high quality…fit perfectly in the little flashcard boxes at Walmart/Target. You can purchase them here.
My eyeballs literally can’t handle them though. No matter how many times I tell myself this x has nothing to do with the “geometric mean”, it’s like my brain takes a picture and it’s stuck in there permanently the wrong way.
So for those who are also visual learners…have ADHD…or dysgraphia, here is a PDF of all the flashcards with just one notation and answer(s) on each card. I made them humorous and satirical with a grumpy cat and an over-enthusiastic stick figure. I also added some Latin explanations (couldn’t help myself)
Please, for the love of all the things that got neglected in my house to make these (the mud tracked in, wood shavings everywhere, cats hiding behind water heaters), use them if you need them. Hopefully, they do someone else some good too.
Now I’ll return to working on writing, spelling, and Latin curriculum, where letters mean their actual letters and not points of an angle.
It’s February, and it’s ok to feel like Frodo on the side of Mt. Doom, right? Right. (Also, can you tell what Snowday books/movies we’ve been consuming?) ahem.
Don’t tell me if someone has already done this, but I finally drew an accessible world map. Straddling the GenX/Millenial line means I know how to use electronics better than a Zoomer, but not as well as a true dyed-in-the-wool GenX. Consequently, I have been struggling to find the perfect whole world map for nigh on 7 years now. You’d think it would be easy, but it needed to:
A) Be easily photocopiable and printable (you’d be shocked at how many maps have weird gray areas or water that don’t copy well). B) Have the longitude and latitude lines go OVER the countries. This is super important to be able to draw it using the grid method. C) Be the least garbled Mercator projection so the grids are in straight lines. D) Have nice thick, easily traceable lines so it could be put on a window or lightbox. E) Fit on a standard 8.5×11, but also be printable in bigger sizes.
It has been driving me crazy for years because I’m sure it exists somewhere and I didn’t need to draw one myself, but I couldn’t find one I liked. But I really didn’t want to make one myself because drawing the whole world takes time and effort…two things in short supply when you have 4 kids and a million other responsibilities and priorities taking up one’s time (like reading historical fiction till 2am…cough cough). I tried several times, but someone always spilled something on it, or I couldn’t get the perspectives and lines right. It was my own personal Sisyphean task…every time I worked on it, I somehow found myself back at the beginning.
So even though it feels rather anti-climatic at this point (faint drumroll), here is a fully traceable, fully drawable, fully expandable world map that may or may not be totally accurate. (I used Google Maps for the most up-to-date borderlines, but the world isn’t exactly stable and black and white right now):
There’s even a matching blank grid included. I think drawing and familiarizing kids with the world is incredibly important, especially these days. Once when I was working as a server, I had a table of customers who were from Kyrgyzstan. They asked me if I even knew where their country was. Not only could I tell them where it was, I could also tell them every country that bordered it. In all fairness, they didn’t realize how many years I’d been teaching middle schoolers how to draw the world by heart. But seriously, world news and issues make so much more sense if you have a working mental picture of the world.
I’ll get off my soap box now. I figure at the very least I made an exceptionally time-intensive free art page. Heck, you could even print it super large, paint it with your color scheme, and frame it… or color all the places with missionaries you pray for…or color in a new country every day and do a unit study…or…or… I’ll stop now.
I thought tutoring Challenge A this year was going to be easy because I’ve done it so many times. I remember the ol days when students circled typos in It couldn’t just happen, backline maps were in the back of the guide and the math map wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye.
Then I got a corneal ulcer from some sort of death ray staph/mrsa which in my imagination looks like the eye of Sauron erupting on the top left side of my left iris. It’s not only taken out a good bit of my vision, but it also makes my eye spasm like I’m on some sort of hellish carnival ride with strobe lights. All of my dreams for a smooth school start have come crashing down, but in some ways it’s good, the kids are all pitching in and my 3rd born may turn out to be my most independent Challenge A kid yet.
Of course if I could have chosen a year to have this happen, I wouldn’t have chosen The-Year-Of-The-Math-Map to be a director, but here we are. Our class is slowly sampling and nibbling at this advanced math feast, and I think good conversations and connections are being made. But holy wow, I cannot handle the math notation flashcards. I don’t know if it’s because I’m half blind, or it’s my ADHD or what, but my brain cannot handle the double-sided flashcards with the definition matching the opposite side. I look at it over and over, confusing myself even more and more.
In a fit of internal angst…over so many things, I made Grumpy Cat Math Notation flashcards. Since Math symbols can have a variety of definitions, I put the main on in the speech bubble, and all the extra information in Grumpy Cat’s thought bubble. First tour students can work on the speech bubble level, and more advanced folk can memorize the extra information.
Since It really is quite difficult to see (especially a computer screen…this blog entry is being typed with my eyes closed and shoutout to Grammarly), I only have the first 4 weeks done (15 pages total, so if you do one page a week you should have them memorized by Christmas and can start over and review in the 2nd Semester).
P.S. If you aren’t in Classical Conversations and have no clue what I’m talking about, thank your lucky stars. Although if you think it sounds fun to teach your child the definition of a radix point or the Greek phi (not to be confused with pi), then by all means feel free to include them in on the fun. Math is for everyone! We’re in our math era.
Printing tips: Print black and white and save ink and toner if you’re printing on thin paper otherwise you can kind of see the answers. Select “double sided” or “print on both sides” and then select “head to head” or “flip on long edge”. Make sure the orientation is set to “portrait” and hit print!
We only have three weeks of school left, the green baby leaves have finally outnumbered the gray tones, and I’m sitting in my living room wallowing in jello-like humidity (which I know is only a whisper of what’s to come, but in comparison, it’s for sure a hearkening). Clearly, Summer is almost here.
I’ve been mulling over what we want to do this summer: Hopefully, lots of gardening, river floating, and playing football or basketball in the morning after we’ve slept in, eaten homemade crepes, and read books together (one can dream, right?). But when I was thinking back to what has worked in previous summers I realized there is a clear winner that has threaded its way through all of our summers since my oldest was a wee lad.
Yeah, I know it’s kind of old school at this point, but I swear it really does painlessly teach fast arithmetic facts. I’ve always called it their “summer vitamin” and no one has really balked at it much, although that may be because it takes less than 10 minutes and has a clear beginning and end.
I don’t like to use it during the school year because Saxon takes so long that even ten more minutes feels like a duel-worthy insult, but I like to pull Xtra Math out in the summer just to keep everyone’s minds sharp.
And if we don’t get to it because we’re camping or picking ticks off, well then…that’s ok too.
Once upon a time, we took our Classical Conversations Challenge B class to Rome and it was life-changing.
As we were sitting in church tonight for our Good Friday service, something in the sermon reminded me of the Rome Catacombs (not to be confused with the Paris Catacombs…cough cough). So I’m reposting my blog/journal entry from that epic homeschooling field trip here. (maybe mostly to remind myself that I need to take the next batch of students to Rome).
Today was the last full day in Rome and each day I’ve thought was the best… so of course today was no different. At one point I was flying down the infamous Appian Way in a taxi listening to 70’s music, discussing the resurrection message we’d just heard deep under the earth in the catacombs, and I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
Jamie and I started out the day with cappuccinos and chocolate croissants like we always do. I kinda never want to see a chocolate croissant again, but the coffee I will miss. Not that we don’t have good coffee in San Diego, but our truly good coffee has to be sought out like the holy grail, whereas it’s on every street corner in Rome. …Actually, that’s how Rome is in general. Our most glorious basilica in the United States is copied and pasted a hundred times in Rome. In Rome, you’ll be walking around a church trying to take it all in and figure out which painting is the Raphael you’re looking for, when you find out the church’s relic is Baby Jesus’s manger. Jamie said he didn’t really picture the nativity with a manger of intricately wrought gold, silver, and jewels,…which is what it looks like… but the humble wooden manger is protected inside of it. (The jury’s out in the academic world on whether it really is the authentic manger).
The religious lines got a little wonky for me today. I’m a happy protestant who grew up Evangelical but appreciates the beauty of the more liturgical Presbyterian church. I used to be staunchly reformed and Calvinistic on all things (and I still am), but the older I get the more “big tent” Christian become. In some ways, I think of each type of Christian as a genus that’s entrusted with doing one thing (or a few things) well. The Roman Catholic church has the market on tradition, loyalty, and engaging all five senses.
We went to the oldest church in Rome and I could picture the early home church that started on that spot, and I could see its transformation through the ages, and I could witness people worshipping Christ today. Across the street from the oldest church, there are stairs where Jesus allegedly walked up to his trial (Constanine’s mother brought them from Herod’s palace in Jerusalem). The marble steps are so worn and sloped from thousands of years and millions of Catholics kneeling and praying on them, the steps have been closed for the last three hundred years. They’re open now. For a few months, you can pray on your knees up the twenty-some-odd steps. Even if they aren’t the real stairs Jesus walked on (I can’t turn off the rational part of my brain), it was a moving scene.
I didn’t think anything could top the manger, Herod’s stairs, and the oldest church, but the catacombs were the next thing on the itinerary. I was nervous because it had proved super challenging to get tickets for our group. The lines are long and limited everywhere (and for almost everything) in Rome. So in order to get 22 tickets for anything, we had to book them in advance. The Colosseum, Borghese, and the Vatican were all challenging in their own way, but the catacombs were most difficult on the front side due to the language barrier, specific rules, and lack of 21st-century technology in use to aid communication halfway around the world. After much angst and multiple tries (and being hung up on several times), all I had was an email that said “Your reservation is confirmed”. No order number, no mention of what that confirmation entailed. It worked out perfectly though. A sweet old Italian gentleman had our tickets reserved for us on his handwritten list (the couple behind us were from San Diego too!). All of the guided tours that go through catacombs (and aren’t third-party tours) are led by a priest. Ours was Father Tren. He didn’t look like a stereotypical catholic priest. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, was young, and had a dry sense of humor. He preached the gospel with such sincerity and passion: Though the catacombs are deep underground, dark, and filled with the dead, it is actually a place of hope. Hope in the resurrection. At the end, he prayed for us, that we would be encouraged and strengthened not to get discouraged. To remember those who came before us. To rest in the saving power of the cross. Even the atheist was moved. There are 500,000 Christians buried down there, with marble slates filled with Latin and Greek…lots of them with misspelled words and grammatical errors. The walls are filled with scratchings of messages “I miss you.” “We will see each other again.” “May God be with you”. Father Tren called it “Devotional Graffiti”.
We finished the last day with the usual three-hour dinner from 8pm to 11pm, we’ve got lazy our last few days in Rome and have been eating at the restaurant right next door. The servers gave us hugs tonight and told us to come back…which was big of them. I could never quite tell if they had a panic attack every time we walked in with 12-18 people or if they appreciated the business we brought. Jesse wins the prize for the most adventurous eater this trip with fried sheep brain for first place, and Ben is right behind with squid for second place. Honorable mention to a parent for the consumption of tripe. Jamie wins for most gelato consumed, and Hayley wins for most candy consumed. My favorite dish was veal and artichokes and I will miss being able to enjoy a glass of wine. It didn’t give me a migraine like it does in the States which makes me think it was all in my head in the first place (pun intended?). Maybe I should give wine another try, or maybe I’ve grown out of it.
Not ready to leave, but feeling like a homing pigeon who needs to set the course back for home. I’m not actually a very adventurous person. I don’t particularly love to travel, and I much prefer my own home and people. But my ideas get ahead of what my biological self prefers to do. Thus the conundrum of magical trips like these (but so worth it).
Scholar Forge 
