Learning Chemistry at Home

Avril's doing Chemistry in our homeschool this year. 

We use Apologia's text. 

She reads one module (or chapter) every one or two weeks, and she completes all the On Your Own Questions for every module. 

She or I or both of us together will check her answers to the On Your Own questions in her notebook with the text's answer key, and then she makes corrections as needed until she gets all the right answers. 

But she usually has very little corrections to make, because she read the material carefully to begin with. 

How quickly I make her move through the modules depends on how much time we have, which depends on how much vacation we've been taking. 

Right now, she's reading one module a week for the next few weeks to make quicker progress through the text, since we just took a few weeks off of school to go to Florida. 

I make her choose one lab from each module to complete. She gathers the materials and/or tells me what she needs if it isn't in our homeschool closet or kitchen. 

She makes a record of each lab and the results in a lab journal that I assess every week. 

She's using the same lab journal she used for Biology last year. 

I don't really believe in tests for Chemistry, so I don't make her take them. 

It's more important to me that she learns the virtue of steadily reading and working through the huge text and completing all the assignments and labs to gain and demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the subject. 

I want her to learn how to learn a subject like Chemistry as much or maybe even more than I want her to learn Chemistry.  

I can't tell you how often in public high school, I passed a class like Chemistry having never read the textbook or engaged with the material much with my own mind, but rather, the expert teacher lectured and gave tests on the lecture notes, and I just passed those tests on the notes and forgot everything before the next test.  

So I never really learned Chemistry. 

I believe I would have been better served by a Chemistry textbook and consistent time and quiet to read it and let the information become a real part of my soul.

So, Avril's grade, at the end of this year, will be based on whether or not she did all the reading and questions and assigned labs, whether or not she actually did the very personal work of learning Chemistry. 

She will, most likely, get an A, because she doesn't move to the next module until she has completed all the reading, questions, and labs and gotten the right answers to the one before. 

Homeschooling through a subject like Chemistry doesn't take an expert; It isn't rocket science. 

It just takes consistent reading and engagement with the outstanding Chemistry textbook we have.  

Mastery of anything, even Chemistry, usually comes easily enough if you are simply willing to show up and actually do the work. 

Snow Sabbath

A snow storm covered us (and a lot of the United States) in snow last Sunday. 

It's a good thing church was cancelled and only online that day, because if people had been out at church or anywhere else, the roads would have gotten too bad too fast. 

Everyone knew the snow as coming for a while. But once the snow started, it came down fast and steady and kept falling all day and night. 

So, we started a fire for the first time this winter, gathered in the living room and watched church, and we got a lot of rest on that snow sabbath (unless we were out shoveling). 

The plow came Sunday and cleared the driveway, but the snow just kept coming.  

On Monday morning, it was as if the plow never came; There was so much snow! 

The girls had work and/or homeschool work to do on Monday, so they weren't free to play until Monday evening, about the time the sun went down. 

But they went out anyway. They turned the outside lights on and explored the yard and edges of our woods and built a snow fort inside the massive pile of snow the plow made on the side of the driveway. Below is a picture I took from the warmth of the inside while I was making dinner. 

I imagine they won't always want to play in the snow, but I'm glad they are still young enough, or young enough at heart, to want to play in the snow. 

And I'm thankful for the pockets of quite stillness and rest winter provides. 

Winter can be, in a sense, one long sabbath if we are apt to observe it. 

An Element of Chaos

Arcus brings a lot of joy and an element of choas to our otherwise orderly days. 

 He's a fun friend to have hanging around. We're so thankful for him. 

Braces Off!

Avril got her braces off! She celebrated by immediately chewing a piece of gum on the way home from the orthodontist. 

English Muffin and Sally Lunn Breads

I am still baking my way through the breads in Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads.

I made two batches of English Muffin bread; That's four loaves. 

We enjoyed a loaf and a half at home ourselves. 

I shared half a loaf my our hairdresser, one whole loaf with my homeschool co-op, and another whole loaf with one of my besties. 

I did buy some pretty, paper bags to make it easier to share extra bread with others. 

Now that I've given a few loaves away, I have to say, sharing fresh bread is almost as great as eating it! 

Later in the week, I made a loaf of Sally Lunn bread. 

This is a sweet, fluffy loaf of bread traditionally eaten as a roll at tea time, so I made it in the evening, sliced it, and served it with hot tea for dessert. 

It tasted almost exactly like a sweet, soft, traditional dinner roll!

I've always wanted to be able to make delicious dinner rolls rather than buying them at the store. 

I want to adapt and find a pan so that I can create the smaller, more traditional Sally Lunn dinner rolls, rather than I large loaf like the one above. 

 

Teaching Gideon For A Season

I'm co-teaching a ladies' Bible study on the Old Testament hero, Gideon, at our church every week for the winter session. 

We are using Priscilla Shrier's Gideon workbook and videos. 

We have close to forty ladies in our class. 

The book and videos make it very easy to led the group. 

That said, I'm still taking the opportunity to dig into the material for myself as a learner and grow spiritually. 

I do the workbook for my own morning devotions then personally wrestle, think, and pray through the Biblical text on my own. 

This particular portion of the Old Testament is very challenging to me. 

The Bible reading is provoking questions in my own heart that the Gideon workbook is not asking or answering, so even though my personal questions aren't likely to come up in class, I'm reaching out to friends/ scholars and dusting off/ digging into other resources I haven't used in years, maybe since Bible college. 

I'm also simply praying about my questions and waiting on God to answer one way or another. 

I am so thankful to have a class to teach again in this season! 

I felt led to stop leading Classical Conversations a few years ago. 

At CC, I was always needing to teach some group: a Challenge level, an Essentials class, a group of moms at a teacher-training event, etc.  

After putting out my fleece about one million times, leaving CC felt like the right decision or about one million reasons in that season. 

Nevertheless, I still grieved the loss of my students and the loss of the opportunity to use my teaching gifts in community. 

But it can be the right thing to make a change when seasons of life change, and it can even be right to stop using your primary gifts for a season. 

Instead of teaching in public, I focused on my own homeschool more. 

I went to grad school and became the student again. 

I freed myself to visit and serve my aging mother and my aging mother-in-law more, since I had less teaching commitments. 

But now, I am truly thankful to be teaching again. 

This time, it's for church, not co-op. 

So it's a different group, a different subject, but it is another right way to use my gifts to bless my community. 

Sourdough Cont.

I made two loaves of sourdough last week. 

I baked one loaf inside a new, enameled, cast iron loaf pan with a lid. 

It made the same dough into a traditional, rectangular loaf that shaped like the sandwich bread you can buy at the supermarket. 

I baked the other loaf in my enameled, cast iron cloche-shaped pan. 

I really enjoy making sourdough this way. 

However, in this pan, the bottom of my round loaves becomes very thick and hard when I complete the baking time on the recipe (45 minutes covered, 15 uncovered). 

Perhaps I'll adjust the baking time to see what can be done to get a thinner bottom crust.  

One of the things I am starting to really enjoy about cooking and baking is the opportunity to improve and adjust recipes to suit my own tastes.