September 16, 2006

Autumn Reading List--an antidote to burnout

September 16, 2006/ Elizabeth Foss

Truth be told, I'm too tired to write and contracting too much to sit here, so I dug up the autumn reading list I used a couple of years ago when I was battling bigtime burnout. We were just talking about what to do when you just can't make the plan happen. These books and lots of outside time (for both mom and children) are a great place to start.

Although nature study is to be pursued every day, every year, one fall I gave over at least twelve weeks to the intensive study of the world around us and to the study of nature-related literature and biographies. We did a little math and everything else revolved around nature. My goal was to acquaint my children intimately with the natural world near our home and to develop a love for natural history writing and illustrations. Perhaps more importantly, I wanted to embrace with them the world God created for us, to be inspired and to rest in the comfort and splendor there. My sense was that we would head for the hills (the woods, the pond, the river) and never return to doing school at home again! Here are some books we enjoyed that autumn and a smattering of samples from nature notebooks. We get these books out every year as the evening air starts to turn crisp. Now, they are familiar friends with whom to embrace the season!

Read Alouds for Everybody

Caddie Woodlawn

My Side of the Mountain

Where the Red Fern Grows

Paddle to the Sea

Minn of the Mississippi

Owls in the Family

Level Three Readers

Black Hearts in Battersea

Nightbirds on Nantucket

The Wolves of Willouby Chase

Michael O'Halloran

Freckles

The Keeper of the Bees

The Harvester

The Best of Beston

Girl of the Limberlost

Level Two

Trumpet of the Swans

The Herriott Treasury for Children

Autumn Moon

One Day in the Woods

One Day in the Alpine Tundra

Kildee House

Owl in the shower

The Blue Hill Meadows

Tarantula in my Purse

Winter Moon

Picture book biographies to share

Into the Woods

A Man Named Thoreau

Black Whiteness

Pond Watching with Ann Morgan

Bug Watching with Charles Henry Turner

Bird Watching with Margaret Morse Nice

Nature Art with Chiura Obata

Flower Watching with Alice Eastwood

Fish Watching with Eugenie Clark

Exploring the Earth with John Wesley Powell

Wildlife Watching with Charles Eastman

Girls Who Look under Rocks

(note: We enjoyed this last book, with inspiring stories of young scientists. But, as a homeschooling family, were surprised?there is a specific bit of information the author did not include. Miriam Rothschild, for instance, never went to school. Why didn't the authors mention that her family believed that school was a waste of time, and that it stifled scientific creativity? And what of the early education of other women naturalists? Be inspired to use this book as a starting place, as an inspiration for more in-depth research. --MacBeth Derham)

Picture Books
(but good enough for everyone to enjoy):

Give Her the River: A Father's Wish for His Daughter

Crawdad Creek

Henry David's House

Henry Hikes to Fitchburg

Henry Builds a Cabin

Louisa May and Mr. Thoreau's Flute

More great picture books:

Joanne Ryder

Eric Carle

The Very Quiet Cricket

The Very Lonely Firefly

The Very Clumsy Click Beetle

Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Mixed up Chameleon

The Grouchy Ladybug

The Honeybee and the Robber

Cynthia Rylant

The Wonderful Happens

This Year's Garden

Not to be Missed

America The Beautiful

Salamander Rain: A Lake and Pond Journal

Crinkleroot's guide to Knowing the birds

Crinkleroot's Guide to Animal Habitats

Crinkleroot's Guide to Knowing the Trees

Resources and books for Mom and/or high schoolers

The Amateur Naturalist

Golden Guides:
Pond Life, Insects, Birds

The Wild Out Your Window: Exploring Nature Near at Hand

The Curious Naturalist: Nature's Everyday Mysteries

Reading the Mountains of Home

Writing Naturally: A down to earth guide to nature writing

Fun With Nature Take Along Guide

More Fun with Nature Take Along Guide

Drawing From Nature

Keeping a Nature Journal

A Crow Doesn't Need a Shadow

Acorn Pancakes and Dandelion Salad and 38 Other Wild Recipes

Hurricane Reading
Peter Spier's Rain

Galveston's Summer of the Storm

Hurricane

Magic School Bus inside a Hurricane

Rain Makes Applesauce

Come on, Rain!

Down Comes The Rain

One Morning in Maine

Picture Study

Cloud Dance

Mountain Dance

Where the River Begins

In Blue Mountains

Walking With Henry

August 27, 2006

How's that for ironic?

August 27, 2006/ Elizabeth Foss

The school year is not going to start as planned. I've gotten distracted. I am distracted by a series of books that I purchased to help me better understand Attention Deficit Disorder. I have been derailed and distracted by Delivered from Distraction!

It all began innocently enough. I was feeling sick late one afternoon and began to channel surf to distract myself from the nausea. I happened upon EWTN and Johnette Benkovich was talking to Ned Hallowell, author of several books on ADD and crazy-busyness in general. His descriptions of ADD adults so fit a person I dearly love that I stopped clicking the remote and listened. My newly diagnosed teenager wandered in. He listened. The show ended; I went to the computer; the books were on their way in minutes.

One thing I knew before the show was that I needed to spend some time thinking about how to structure Christian's day, week, year so that he has the necessary support. But I also know that there are other people in my household who need serious structure. And I had a sense these books could help me to help them. So, instead of starting the school year and then scrapping the program after reading the books, I decided to take another week, read the books, and start really well prepared. The neighborhood kids don't start until next week anyway.

For me, the most riveting point that Dr. Hallowell made was that we are not to strive for independence. Instead, we need healthy interdependence. The ADD adult needs support people. The wife of a man with ADD can foster healthy interdependence and really be an asset to her husband. There is difference between supporting and enabling though (and I'm still reading to learn more about that). As I pondered this whole dynamic of interdependence and I thought about countless struggles to "fix" or "change" those very prounounced ADD tendencies, it occurred to me that part of the vocation of a woman whose husband has ADD might just be to fill that support role in a deliberate, tangible way. Similarly, the mother of a child with ADD needs to look not so much towards making him tow the line like everybody else but to embrace how he is wired an dharness that uniqueness for something good. My role is to coach and to do what I can do to make home as structured for success as possible.

Dr. Hallowell also makes the point that just as there is true ADD (a neurological condition), there is envronmentally induced pseudo-ADD. The environment in which we live--to which we are wired--feeds frenetic activity, muti-tasking, and distractiblity. We are Crazy Busy: Overbooked, Overstretched and About to Snap. I'm just guessing here (haven't read that book yet), but an ADD individual living in a crazy-busy world might not be the best scenario for success.

The last nine months have been slow. Really, really slow. Every time I think I can add things in, up the busyness factor, God slows me down. This morning, my son Stephen told a friend of mine that he wasn't going to play travel soccer this fall because that would really make mom pass out. It's a little extreme but the truth is that every busy day we have had has been followed by two or three "pass out" days. I have spent nine months saying, "I can't." And every time I'm forced to dial back, I ask what God is trying to teach me. Now, close to the end (please Lord) of this extreme form of reminding to slow down, I am beginning to understand that crazy busy isn't ever going to do any of us any good and little and hidden needs to be my way of life well past this baby's birthday. I truly believe that the success and the happiness of this family depends on my ability to take seriously these principles of Dr. Hallowell's in my own life:

10 Key Principles to Managing Modern Life

Do what matters most to you (the most common casualty of an excessively busy life):
Don't spread yourself too thin - you must choose, you must prioritize. In order to both do well and to be happy, you must say , "No thank you," to many projects, people and ideas. "Cultivate your lilies and get rid of your leeches."

Create a positive emotional environment wherever you are:
When the emotional atmosphere is less than positive, people lose flexibility, the ability to deal wtih ambiguity and complexity, trust, enthusiasm, patience, humor, and creativity. When you feel safe and secure, you feel welcomed and appreciated, you think better, behave better, and are better able to help others.

Find your rhythm:
Get in the "zone", follow your "flow" - research has proven that this state of mind elevates all that you do to its hightest level. When you find your rhythm, you allow your day to be taken care of by the automatic pilot in your brain, so the creative, thinking part can attend to what it is uniquely qualified to attend to.

Invest your time wisely so as to get maximum return:
Try not to let time be stolen from you or let yourself fritter it away - use the Time Value Assessment to guide you in what to add, preserve, cut back on, and eliminate.

Don't waste time screensucking (a modern addiction - the withdrawal of looking at a computer/BlackBerry/etc. screen):
Break the habit of having to be near your computer at all times by changing your environment or structure - move your screen to a different room; schedule an amount of time you are allowed to be on the computer; plan mandatory breaks.

Identify and control the sources of gemmelsmerch in your environment:
Gemmelsmerch, the force that distracts a person from what he or she wants to or ought to be doing, is as pervasive and powerful as gravity.

Delegate:
Delegate what you don't like to do or are not good at if you possibly can. Your goal should be not to be independent, but rather effectively interdependent. You do for me and I do for you - this is what makes life possible.

Slow down:
Stop and think. As yourself, what's your hurry? Why wake up, alrady impatient, and rush around and try to squeeze in more things than you should, thereby leading you to do all of it less well? Your hurry is your enemy.

Don't multitask ineffectively (avoid frazzing):
Give one task your full attention. You will do it better. You may eventually get so good at it that your conscious mind can attend to other aspects of the task other than menial ones. This is the only way a human can multitask effectively.

Play:
Imaginatively engage with what you are doing. This will bring out the best part of your mind, focus you on your task, and make you more effective and efficient.

August 18, 2006

Summer Road Trip Envy

August 18, 2006/ Elizabeth Foss

Be still my heart and those of my little girls! Here's a summer road trip we'd love to take: Betsy-Tacy and Laura Ingalls on the same trip? Read all about it.

August 17, 2006

For the Birds: A Rabbit Trail

August 17, 2006/ Elizabeth Foss

Throughout the spring and summer, we caught the "birding bug." We hung a feeder and set out some simple birdbaths and even built a rudimentary nesting box. We rejoiced in the nest and the eggs, celebrated the birth of the babies, and mourned the terrible, violent death of the baby birds. As ugly as the twist of nature was, we were still pretty amazed by the birds in our backyard. I especially love the early morning, before the busyness of the day and the traffic in the kitchen frighten the birds away from the window feeder. This morning, as I sipped a very mellow cup of tea, I pondered the bird-coffee connection (for some reason this made me think of Dawn; I'm sure she'll appreciate it). We've certainly developed a bird-watching habit.

As the sunflowers grew, the goldfinches came to entertain and a red-winged blackbird and a cardinal were regulars at the feeder. More and more bird questions were generated while we watched from the sunroom windows. It is time to officially launch a rabbit trail into the world of birding.

My plan, rough as it is, is to study birds intensively for the next month or so (until the baby is born) and then to just maintain our watching and recording habits through the next year. Birding is a year 'round venture and so this is a year 'round rabbit trail, with some instensive time up front. We began our study at Wild Birds Unlimited, a great store and place of resource that is located within my five mile pregnant mom travel radius.

The very knowledgeable and helpful salesclerk got us all set up with an array of feeders and food to take us well into the fall. She assured us that it isn't too late to attract hummingbirds and she showed us how to attract even more goldfinches. We talked a bit about the demise of our nesting birds. We'll try again with those in the spring. We returned home to set up feeding stations around the backyard, all still within clear view of the sunrooms windows. And we were richly rewarded with goldfinches and hummingbirds within an hour of hanging the new feeders!

While the children ~~spilled seed all over the backyard~~ filled feeders, I busied myself sketching out content I want them to learn from this unit study. We know that if they understand the vocabulary of a topic, they know the topic. So, I began with a preliminary vocabulary list. I fully expect the list to grow as we read and watch our birds, but this is a beginning.

birds of prey
swimming birds
diving birds
game birds
aquatic birds
songbirds
hummingbirds
warm-blooded
ornithology
migrations
resident birds
homing instinct
flight muscles
keel
humerus
upstroke
downstroke
syrinx
hatchling
countour feather
down feather
semi-plume
filoplume
bristles
preening
plumage
motling
nesting
scrape nest
brood nest
woven nest
no nester
cavity nester
mound nest
earth hole nest
adherent nest
platform nest
mud daub nest
hanging cup nest
clutch
mating/courtship
brooding
egg tooth
fledgling
camouflage
field marks

We'll encounter much of this vocabulary in the books I've chosen for the "Bird Basket." For the younger children, Crinkleroot will be their guide and they will become well-acquainted with Crinkleroot's Guide to Knowing the Birds.

Crinkleroot's Guide to Knowing the Birds (Crinkleroot)

Jim Arnosky does a masterful job of introducing even young children to some pretty sophisticated bird concepts and vocabulary. It's well worth the search you may have to undertake to find a copy. Our other "spine" is a brand new book in the the Apologia series for elementary/middle school children. I'm not a huge fan of Apologia science in high school but I do like the series by Jeannie Fulbright. Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day is no exception.

Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the 5th Day (Apologia Science Young Explorers)

We'll just use the first section of the book (on birds) this fall and then perhaps hit insects intensely next spring and summer.All the bird info this mom needs to know can be found in Fulbright's book and at the Wild Birds Unlimited store. That's a good thing because I'm going to be doing some pretty intense nesting of my own while we undertake this study!

The bird book basket is at the ready. This is where the stories and the pictures will take us beyond our backyard and nurture intimacy and interest with all things avian.

Picture Books

Angelo

Albert

Owl Moon

Make Way for Ducklings

Owls

Owl Babies

Gulls, Gulls,Gulls

About Birds: A Guide for Children

Soaring the Wind: The Bald Eagle
Wild Birds
The Bird Alphabet Book

The Bird House
The Birdwatchers
The Blackbird's Nest, Saint Kevin of Ireland
The Song of the Swallows

St. Francis and His Feathered Friends

Chapter Books

Cry of the Crow

My Side of the Mountain Triology books

There's an Owl in the Shower

Owls in the Family
Coot Club

Mr. Popper's Penguins

The Trumpet of the Swan

DVDs

Fly Away Home

March of the Penguins

Reference
Birds, Nests, & Eggs (Take-Along Guide)
Peterson's First Guide to Birds of North America

Fandex Family Field Guide to Birds

Backyard Birdwatching for Kids

Watching Water Birds

Biography

Bird Watching with Margaret Morse Nice
I'm looking for a biography of John James Audobon for children. I know I read one with the big kids but I can't remember the title or find it here. Any suggestions?

Coloring Books

Fifty Favorite Birds

Audobon's Birds of America

Birds Alphabet Coloring Book

This will be a notebooking rabbit trail as opposed to a lapbooking one. The vocabulary lists will go in the notebooks and so will drawings of birds they observe in the yard. They will map a bird and label the parts and they will draw and label the parts of an egg. We're going to talk a bit about taxonomy and all the birds we observed will be labelled correctly. Our field guides will serve us well in this endeavor.

In the beginning, we are going to talk extensively about how to attract birds to our backyard.

We don't have a lot of trees of hedgerows for cover, so we're going to have to do a bit work outside. We are planning to build some nesting boxes, though the nesting season is pretty much past (except for goldfinches). Other hands-on acivities will incude dissecting owl pellets and identifying and labelling what we see, making suet feeder food and making pine cone bird feeders. In February, we'll participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count. As with all our nature endeavors, there will be much blogging and record-keeping at Blossoms and Bees. Please visit there frequently to see what's new in our bird-friendly backyard!