It is amazing what the addition of two hot little bodies to the school room does for spare time. The mathematical equations are as follows, where c = children; t = tween; k = kindergartener; T = teenager:
c + t + k + T = 1 hr spare time/wk
However, add the following equation and the math comes out quite differently:
c + 2t + 2k + T = -1 hr spare time/wk
And so by the wayside go such niceties as the school blog, my personal blog, and any semblance of organization to the time after lunch each day. On top of the extra bodies we are now venturing out of the house almost every day to explore the nooks and crannies of Muscat, take tennis lessons, dance like mad people, and visit other homeschoolers in the area, which takes time and energy and time. And so it has been good-bye blog, until today.
Today I sat down to dump the photos off of the camera and thought, "Shoot, I have 10 minutes to kill here before I start my nightly round of medical journal edits and planning for tomorrow. Let me post some shots." If all goes well, you should see some picts of the last few weeks of school.
Week 4
We started a quick dash through cell studies, which pretty much devolved into knowing the names and functions of the parts of a plant cell, as well as the workings of the cell as a system. In actuality, it was an excuse to make a cells out of the green jello we have had sitting in our cupboard for the last 8 months.
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Silas and Alfie eat their cellular cytoplasm together.
Hamid and Cady and their cell. Notice the crumpled paper acting as a vacuole? Very clever!
Week 5
This was a "Whoa! How did we almost miss that?" week. The Tour of Oman, a professional bike tour that comes every year and attracts great bikers, went right past our neighborhood a couple of times. Finally I threw in the towel, packed the kids into our great big car, and chased the boys down as they started their last day of the tour.
As you may have predicted, this whole event put me miles behind on what I had planned to cover for the rest of the week and eventually I just kind of threw in the towel and **GASP** followed the kids' lead in terms of when and what they were ready to learn. That was a hard pill to swallow. After all, in spite of the rhetoric we are fed as public school teachers ("Differentiate differentiate differentiate and engage them with creative instruction!") inevitably this is what that command is followed with: ("But only after you have dragged them kicking and screaming through the state mandated crap"). I have been going full tilt on someone else's schedule with these curricula I am using, kind of just out of habit. However, I am now seeing the light. At least a sliver or two. Running on the kids' timeclock for once made for a very pleasant week, some amazing stuff from the kids, and some great photos by Silas, who was the cameraman after Hamid started vomiting everywhere minutes before the bikers left the starting line.
Week 6
After two weeks of running the kids and myself ragged with at least an hour in the morning spent OUTSIDE and well away from the house, I decided that this had been a GREAT idea and that I should continue in that strain. So we inaugurated the new school week with a wadi walk for science. In one fell swoop we covered geology, botany, ecology, biology, and geography (who knew that Azerbaijan has sections that are just as desolate-looking as the areas around Muscat?).
I personally learned that photographing six children is far harder than photographing three, as is evidenced by their collective inability to look at the camera WITHOUT their mouths wide open.
Alfie's hat gets lifted by an accacia tree.
And so Al Mawaleh American School chugs along.
