Category Archives: Fun Learning Stuff

Journey North’s Mystery Class: A Progress Report

In late January I posted an announcement about the Journey North Mystery Class project that was about to start. This has been our first year participating in the project, and I have to tell you, we are having the best time. Can’t believe we haven’t done this before!

We’re about halfway through the project, and it gets more exciting by the week. Here’s Journey North‘s description:

The Mystery Class investigation is an 11-week hunt in which students try to find 10 secret “Mystery Classes” hiding around the globe. The changing amount of sunlight at each site is the central clue. Students take an inspiring journey from knowing only sunrise and sunset times, to discovering exact locations of the 10 Mystery Classes. Mystery Class begins January 30 and ends May 5, 2006.

Here’s how it works. Every Monday we visit this website to find out our local sunrise and sunset times for that day. The amount of daylight between sunset and sunrise is called the photoperiod. Week by week, we have recorded each Monday’s photoperiod on a graph, watching our hometown photoperiod get longer and longer every week. The gray days of February were made a little less gray by the knowledge that we had some twenty minutes more sunshine every week.

Every Friday, Journey North sends out sunrise and sunset data for the ten Mystery Classes. Using this information, we calculate the ten Mystery Class photoperiods and add this data to our graph. (We are working as part of a group with other families from the 4RealLearning message boards; each family calculates the data for one Mystery Class, and we pool our results.)

Graph_2Here’s what our graph looks like so far. (Click to enlarge.) You can see how almost all the lines are on their way to converging at a central point: that’s the 12-hour photoperiod line, which is where everyone will be next Monday, March 20th, on the vernal equinox.

Almost everyone, that is! Mystery Class #6 has been enjoying 24 hours of daylight since the project began. This means they’re somewhere in Antarctica…You can (faintly) see their line at the top of our chart.

The photoperiod data is helping us narrow down the latitude of each Mystery Class. By comparing each Class’s photoperiods to our hometown photoperiod, we are able to make guesses about how far north or south of the equator these hidden classes might be.

This week was a big week: Journey North released the longitude clues. To help us calculate each Mystery Class’s longitude, we were given their March 20th sunrise times in Greenwich Mean Time. By calculating the number of minutes between Greenwich’s sunrise and each Mystery Class’s sunrise and dividing by four (because the earth spins one degree longitude every four minutes), we have been able to determine each Class’s longitude, including whether they are east or west of Greenwich.

So now we’re really narrowing it down! Jane and I are beginning to make our guesses about where the Mystery Classes are located. In the weeks to come, Journey North will give us additional clues about culture and terrain. In late April, our group and others all over the world will submit our guesses, and the following week Journey North will post the answers.

Already we have learned so much during this project. Never again will I have trouble remembering which is latitude and which is longitude. There has been a lot of math and a lot of globe-spinning. (Mr. Putty has been getting a workout!)

If you’re kicking yourself for not having joined in the fun this year, it’s not too late. It would take some serious work to bring your graph up to date, but the data is all still available and it could certainly be done. Or you could just drop in to 4RealLearning and eavesdrop on our group’s speculations. Click on the “Great Outdoors” forum and look for topic threads labeled “Mystery Class.” We’re still collecting longitude data from our group members, and we’ve agreed not to start guessing out loud about locations just yet—we want to give every family a chance to do the guessing on its own first.

And if this isn’t your year to join in the fun, there’s always next year. Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently post links to Journey North—for example, I love the Monarch watch that begins every spring, as we follow the butterflies’ progress from their wintering grounds in Mexico to our own backyards. All of Journey North’s activities are free and tons of fun.

Interesting related links posted by our group members:

Antarctica Journal
World Daylight Map
Daylight Savings Time Map (This site gave us a clue a couple of weeks ago when the sunrise/sunset times for one of the Classes suddenly shifted by an hour.)
NationalAtlas.gov
On the Same Day in March: A Tour of the World’s Weather (A picture book by Marilyn Singer.)


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The Unicorn Tapestries

37802xfpxobjiip10wid404hei400rgn02153465For this month’s picture study, we’re doing something a bit different. I thought it might be fun to take a close look at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s famous Unicorn Tapestries. These spectacular late-fifteenth-century tapestries are on view at The Cloisters, the Met’s uptown collection of medieval European artwork. Designed in Paris and woven in Brussels and the Netherlands, the seven large wall hangings vividly depict the hunting of a white unicorn in a richly flowered wood. The gorgeous weavings are rich in symbolism and drama—there are at least three layers of meaning to explore here. In addition to the excitement of the hunt, complete with lanky greyhounds, odd-looking lions, and a smiling stag, there are the symbolic interpretations of the story:

“They can also be explained as a tale of courtly love, presenting the search and eventual capture of the lover-bridegroom by his adored lady. And there is the Christian interpretation as well, the symbolic retelling of Christ’s suffering, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.”

Cloisters_galleryThe Met’s Unicorn Tapestries website is loaded with information and pictures. If, like my family, you can’t venture to NYC to view these incredible weavings in person, a long exploration of the website will be the next best thing.

Related links:

New Yorker article, “Capturing the Unicorn: How Two Mathematicians Came to the Aid of the Met.”

• Another set of tapestries known as The Lady and the Unicorn, on display at the Musée National du Moyen Âge in Paris.

• Wikipedia entry on unicorns

Children’s books about weaving

Cloisters2• The Cloisters—field trip info (Go ahead, make us jealous!)

Unicorns in children’s literature:

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle

The Unicorn Treasury : Stories, Poems, and Unicorn Lore by Bruce Coville

The Game Guide

What a great new find! Two enterprising home-educated boys have launched a blog for video and computer game reviews. Well-written and comprehensive, their reviews provide some much-needed guidance for bewildered parents wandering in a wilderness of gaming options. I for one am delighted to know such a valuable resource exists. These guys know their stuff.

This post from their mother’s blog gives a behind-the-scenes look at the vision behind The Game Guide. Very cool.

Feast Your Eyes and Ears

A smorgasbord of links to share:

Hone your note-reading skills with this free online drill at MusicTheory.com. (Hat tip: MacBeth.)

Explore free art lessons at the Getty Museum (Hat tip: Tabatha Yeatts. Thanks for sending the link, Tabatha!)

Interested in Australia? Here’s a great list of picture books from Down Under!

The Headmistress treats us to several sites featuring free audio recordings of literature and children’s programming, including this terrific find: Librivox, at which site you may listen to a long list of unabridged classics including Pride and Prejudice, Pilgrim’s Progress, A Little Princess, Notes from the Underground, and Call of the Wild.

And speaking of audio, Farm School‘s Becky has the scoop on audio recordings of poetry.

Light a Fire

In Brave Writer and Classical Writing, Julie writes:

Kids deserve to be expanded by great literature, myth, epic poetry, legend, artwork, history, scientific discovery, the stars, mathematics as a language (not just as a workbook), Shakespeare, theater, music, dance, and languages. These sources provide rich material for imagination, vocabulary, and inner life. Such inner lives naturally spill over into writing with content and texture.

I have certainly found this to be the case with my kids. Julie continues with the excellent advice to kindle your kids’ interest in the classics (or anything else) by getting yourself interested first. If I want to reignite their enthusiasm for nature journaling, I get mine out and start drawing. Next thing I know, there’s a crowd of kids around me begging to join the fun. In the same way, they developed an interest in mythology, Shakespeare, the Odyssey, poetry, knitting, basketball, birdwatching, gardening, and any number of other things—by witnessing mom or dad’s passion for the subject and wanting to know what the heck was so exciting.

By the way, the Heaney translation of Beowulf that Julie mentions is one of my favorite books. Language so rich you can taste it. Begs to be read aloud. Makes Scott stomp around the house like a Viking, bellowing colorful oaths. Now that’s the way to get kids begging for more classics.

Scheduling Read-Alouds

My Mr. Putty post prompted a flurry of emails from readers wanting to know how on earth we fit so many read-alouds into our day. By chance, a recent discussion thread at the 4 Real forums focuses on the same issue. I’m going to crib from my forum post to answer those of you who have written me privately with this question. And to those who wrote—be encouraged by the knowledge that you are not alone! I think I’ve had more email about read-aloud time than any other topic except “So when is the next Martha or Charlotte book coming out?”

Around here, it sometimes seems as though read-alouds are all I do! For several months now, I’ve been having some pregancy-related mobility problems, and I’m not up to nature walks (a pity with the gorgeous weather we’ve had this winter) or big messy art/cooking/science projects. Right now, the kids are on their own for that kind of thing. But what I can do is read. Since I’m in one of my high tide phases, we’re doing a fairly structured Charlotte Mason-style reading and narration thing.

Between 9:00 and noon every day, the children and I gather in what I jokingly call our “sitting room.” It’s supposed to be a dining room, but we don’t have the furniture. For our first couple of years in this house it was mostly empty: Scott’s beat-up old bachelor computer desk in one corner—that’s where I’m sitting right now, as a matter of fact—and in the middle of the room, a big Brio train table we inherited from his sister. Then a friend’s father had a sofa he wanted to get rid of, and I jumped at it, and now that big blue couch is where I spend my mornings.

Wonderboy bops around the room, playing with Wedgits (my best toy purchase ever) and Playmobil, and the girls perch in various locations: on the arm of the couch, the back of the couch, the edge of the train table…(I guess just plain curling up on the couch isn’t interesting enough.) Their hands are busy with Sculpey or yarn. I have a basket of books at my feet and a mug of tea on the windowsill beside me. And I read.

I read from the Bible, a book about saints (currently 57 Saints for Children), a book of poetry (right now it’s either Longfellow or Frost, alternating), Our Island Story (twice a week), This Country of Ours (twice a week), D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods, Famous Men of Greece (twice a week), 50 Famous Tales (twice a week), a picture book for Beanie, and a chapter from whatever novel we are currently reading. I finished The Penderwicks last week (did I mention we adored it?) and now we’re giving recent Newbery Honor medalist Whittington a try.

In between the various books (and oral narrations following many of them), we sing (very badly), do our German & ASL lessons, do picture study, maybe do a little math, take run-around-the-house breaks (inside the house or out, depending on the weather), change Wonderboy’s diaper, draw pictures, watch birds at the feeders, clean up juice spills, and so on. The morning passes in a flash.

After lunch is a two-hour period of quiet time. Wonderboy naps, I read a picture book to Beanie and she naps, and then I take a half hour to eat my own lunch and check my email. Yes, it is a blissful half hour. Then I spend one-on-one time with the two older girls. I’m reading Old Yeller to Rose, and then she likes me to sit with her while she works on her pet project, ancient Greek. Jane and I do lots of different things together during her one-on-one: science projects (okay, she does and I watch); play Settlers of Catan or other games; write notes back and forth to each other in her Redwall notebook (I have been requested to read the whole-entire-really-really-long series and report my thoughts back to her in writing); stuff like that.

At 2:30 we all gather again for Shakespeare-and-snack time. Right now we’re reading As You Like It. After that, Scott comes up from work, and the kids go out to play for the rest of the afternoon, and it’s time for me to go down to the office and write.

At bedtime Scott is the read-aloud guy. Usually he reads to all three girls together but right now he has separate books going with each of them. Which, yes, makes for a very long bedtime routine, but Daddy deserves some one-on-one time too.

In many ways my pregnancy hip troubles have been a blessing for our family, because without the option of doing lots of active stuff (art projects, field trips, nature hikes) I had to rethink our routine, and despite many rounds of illness—Wonderboy has had pneumonia twice, and that ain’t the half of it!—and other challenges, our days this winter have been rich and fun. We have traveled all around the globe with Mr. Putty; we’ve picked apples in New England and fought Saxons in Old England. We’ve encountered frost giants, one-eyed monsters, woodland bandits, and a host of other strange folk. We’ve journeyed in hot-air balloons and dragon-headed ships. Not bad for a woman who limps like an injured duck.

Have voice, will travel.

Around the World with Mr. Putty

Recently the kids and I hit upon a new idea that has brought an extra layer of interest and mirth to our morning read-aloud sessions. We decided to make a little marker that we could move around the globe to the location of each story we’re reading. We started with a little blob of blue putty—you know, the kind that was supposed to hold our timeline to the wall without marking up the paint. It didn’t. Instead, it seems to travel all around the house in the busy fingers of my children.

Well, now it travels around the globe. A little piece of it, at least. Such a simple idea, and such fun! Yesterday Mr. Putty began (as he always does) here in Virginia; hopped over to Palestine; sojourned down to Egypt; zipped to Italy to visit St. John Bosco; flew back across the Atlantic to New England, where Robert Frost was picking apples; escaped to Germany to avoid hearing my children mangle the language in our sitting room; reunited with us in Greenland, where a windswept traveler was regaling the household of Eric the Red with tales of a new land to the west; hurried to Scandinavia, arriving just in time to see some strange folks pop out of the armpit of Ymir the frost giant; and there he lingered for the rest of the day.

The girls take turns assisting Mr. Putty with his travels. (Beanie often has to be dissuaded from allowing him to visit her grandparents in Colorado instead of venturing to his next book-inspired rendesvous.) At some point, our intrepid explorer sprouted a tiny American flag (complete with gold-painted toothpick flagpole) from the top of his blobby self. While I’m a little uncomfortable with the imperial overtones of such an adornment—Mr. Putty is, in effect, planting the U.S. flag in the soil of countries all over the world—it does make it easier to see where he’s stuck himself now. And it’s such a sweet little flag.

Dear Mr. Putty! I wonder where in the world he’ll go today?

Journey North’s Mystery Class Begins Monday

From Journey North:

World Citizens Needed to Solve International Mystery

Calling all emissaries of inquiry. Ten secret Mystery Classes have gone deep undercover around the globe. In fact, they’re so hidden that their location might never be located again–that is, unless YOU join together as citizens of world to find them. You’ll connect, collaborate and compete to solve this international mystery. (How secret are the locations? They’re so top secret that details of their whereabouts are not even known here at Journey North–except in the minds of one or two people, and they’re not talking!).

There’s no time to delay. The hunt begins Monday, and you’ll only have eleven weeks of sleuthing before you’ll be asked to solve THE mystery: “Where in the World Do You Think Our Ten Secret Mystery Classes are Located?”

Click here for more details.