We went to an SCA meeting tonight. Attending were me, Gilbert, Faith, Abby, and Sophia. Bede and Sean stayed home.

We had much fun! We’ll be going to the Arts and Sciences meeting in a few weeks as well. Yay!

In my (most likely idiotic) desire to be part of the SCA again, I’m now trying to figure out exactly how much I’ll have to do to get us all to an event in period style.

Garb needed for…

Me: one light undertunic/chemise (I’d love linen, let’s be realistic, it’s going to be unperiod cotton muslin because it’s cheap)
one overdress/gown/kirtle
An aside: All of mine has to be nursing-friendly too. Good thing I’m not afraid to show a functional breast in action, as the most accurate way to nurse a child in period was to pop the boob over the top. No problem.
Shoes
Cloak
Cap or kerchief

Sean:
One or two tunics
Trews (pants, he refuses to go barelegged like a real Irishman. He’s so civilized.)
Shoes
Cloak

T.J. and Sophia, who want to go too:
T.J. - same as Sean
Sophia- same as me. But not so nursing-friendly

The Girls, in total:
four little chemises with ample hems for ease of growth
two wee overdresses, same hem theory
shoes
cloaks
a few caps or kerchiefs

The Boys, in total:
four tunics big hems
four baggy pairs of pants
shoes
cloaks

The Baby:
Two or three very long tunic/chemises
Something warm to wrap in
Several chin-tie caps

The cloaks are just rectangles of wool tartan and won’t require anything beyond being cut out. And the shoes will mostl ikely be bought. Everything else needs sewing. By who? Why, by me of course. Have I ever mentioned that in my life I’ve sewn one diaper cover, one pair of shorts and one wall-hanging quilt thingy? By machine, I mean. I’ve sewn loads by hand.

I’m crazy. CRAZY! The one nice thing is I can buy the fabric for each person as we go so I won’t have to lump out a huge amount of cash all at once. As we get more some ease in our budget I’ll be able to make a $15 to $20 purchase each month to get this moving along. ANd the total shouldn’t be horribly high either, somethng like $75 to $100 for all of this.

At this rate I’ll have everyone’s clothes made and they’ll have outgrown them. Drat! Note to self: make garb in FIFO order.

Last year, and the three years before that, the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Libray System hosted Food for Fines in late October. Here’s the deal: for one week anyone who brings a nonperishable food item to the library gets their overdue fines erased, as long as the materials have been returned and they weren’t damaged. I hope VERY MUCH that they do it again this year, as I have an embarassingly high fine.

::shuffles feet::

Otherwise I’ll be having to check out books on my kids’ library cards, forever. Oh the humiliation!

I want a place to keep all my garb links. I’ll update as I find them.

What is a T-Tunic?
Reconstructing History
Tunic Generator
Virtue Ventures
The Renaissance Tailor
Celtic Garb
Living Past

Faith and Abby played with Renée’s kids, S and Z today. I’m not sure what was the most fun, but it’d be hard to beat the elaborate pipework constructed from soda straws in our bathroom going from sink to tub (sometimes less so than other times. it was very wet!) Although they also had fun using cookie cutters as stencils (and I discovered that Faith really really knows how to add and subtract, which she picked up from the air, like reading. Go figure. Oooh, bad pun!) and Bede and Z had a great time with some foam bath letters too.

While they were here I made good on my promise to teach Renée to knit! I sent her home with a ball of Peaches and Creme cotton and some bulky superwash merino, and some lovely slippy slidey aluminum needles for that first-time knitter tight tension, and a copy of SnB Nation. Yay R! Now a bad-ass fiber artist, w00t!

That’s all for me tonight, gotta get some sleep!

Today when T.J. came over my friend Renée was here with her two kids (who are also homeschooled.) They left fairly soon after he got here, but not before Renée presented us with a real-world architectural problem that she needed to solve. She will shortly be building a new garage, and she wants the attic space to be 7′ at the inside peak. Given that the width of the garage is 22′, she wanted to know:

1. how long the roof beam would be from floor to peak (the roof proper, if you will)
2. what the angle was between the roof and the floor*

*left as an excercise for the reader

We figured it out, with some help from Pythagoras and a cosine table (it was more trig than geometry, the second part anyway) and with the admonition to check it thoroughly, sent them on their merry way. As Renée&co were leaving, she said to T.J., “See, there’s another reason besides just doing better on the ACT for why you need to learn geometry. You never know when you’ll need it!”

I agreed with her at the time, but on reflection I think we got it exactly backwards. I think her problem and our solution demonstrate why you don’t need to learn geometry, beyond a vague notion as to what geometry does for you and what its uses are. And then, when you need it you can find out how to do it then, right when it’s applicable to the context of your life. Not five or ten years before, when you learned just enough of it to get the grade you wanted on the tests and promptly forgot it.

And of course that’s what life learning is, after all. Just about any subject can be substituted for geometry, from English literature to European history to Euler’s Seven Bridges. When you need to learn it and you want to learn it, you learn it. Just like life. I’ve never had geometry. I sat through about two weeks of trig in college summer school before I decided that since I didn’t need it to graduate and it was a lot of work for something I wasn’t particularly interested in I should drop the course, and I did. So it’s not that I had the stuff and it leapt forth from my brain. I just had some idea that I needed geometry to solve the problem.

Anyway it was Unschooling In Action, for sure, whatever your take on learning and coercion.

In a related development, T.J. is enjoying the pure deductive reasoning portion of our geometry book so much that he wants to pursue a course in logic. Hiding my glee, I said I’d get right on that and had my first-order logic texts out faster than you could say ‘Kurt Gödel’ Hahahaha!

via HEM

Good Afternoon Friends,

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many of you are rushing to send help to our friends in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The recovery and cleanup will be a very long process and there are things that will be needed in the future, but not immediately. This is why I am writing to you today.

Project Noah is a homeschooling ministry that helps homeschooling families in crisis. We only provide curriculum and school supplies to the families that come to us with crisis needs - whether it is because their home has burned, or been flooded, or the primary wage earner has been without work for an extended period of time, or other similar crisis, we try to help. We have been serving the homeschooling community for almost 5 years now and will continue as long as there are families in need.

Although some of you that receive this letter do not homeschool, you can still help. There will be a great need for school supplies, even the workbooks that you see at Sam’s Club and WalMart will help.

The majority of homeschooling families in these states operate through their local churches. The churches as well as the families have lost much, including school books and school supplies. Having worked in the arena of these types of crisis for a number of years, I can tell you that these things are not on their minds right now. BUT…when they begin to think about these things, Project Noah wants to be able to have those things ready for them. Books, calculators, rulers, notebooks, pens, pencils, erasers, teaching tapes, textbooks - all the things that we use throughout the course of our homeschooling year - these will be needed. Even lunchboxes, crayons, markers, and on and on and on.

If you would like to help us help them in this unique niche of need, we would be honored.

To send us your donations please ship to the following location:

PROJECT NOAH
17519 Warm Winds Dr.
Tomball, TX 77377

our fax number is 713-429-5971

Please spread the word!

Your Servant,

Lisa Guidry, Director

I’m not going with the Story of the World.

Mostly because the folks behind Well Trained Mind (who also wrote the Story of the World) are specifically contemptuous of unschoolers, singling them out from all the other numerous homeschool philosophies, to represent them as possibly well-meaning but ultimately neglegtful and irresponsible parents who raise ignorant kids.

I plan to write more on this topic later, by the way, but in the meantime see page 617 of the Well Trained Mind and as an aside: please see here for a good start to what unschooling is, if you have never heard the term.

WTM suggests if you are in a group with lots of unschoolers that you should leave, immediately, before they do something child-led, or something, to your to-the-minute-parent-planned ‘classical’ model of education. Oh eek! Perish the thought!

So that’s silly to dismiss their book because of that, maybe, but I’m also told they have a noticeable Protestant bias in the next book, which isn’t so silly.

But I digress. My point is - does anyone know of another good read-aloud sort of history text? I’ve seen some Usbornes that look pretty good, and A Child’s History of the World, by Hillyer. But none of them have I actually seen and held and read.

What have you read to your K-2 kids about history that they liked? Grand sweeping overview and very specific period suggestions welcome.