Slot Canyon

M read about a slot canyon hike that was pretty accessible and we decided to all go up and try it. Little Horse Canyon is just outside the Goblin Valley State Park. From one parking area, there was a loop hike of about 6 miles. M planned to set out from one direction and we would go from the other, and turn around whenever we ran into him. It was 90 degrees and extremely windy, which also means extremely dusty. However, we thought that if we went into the canyon it would be less windy and also that if we went later in the day, there would be shade. On the way up there, we discovered that perhaps our air conditioning in the car wasn't working well. It felt very hot and perhaps a little dumb to head out into the back country in separate groups, with some hikers being rather reluctant at the beginning. We could only get them out of the car by bribing them with post-hike milkshakes and burgers. I wet some bandanas and tied them over the kids' faces to block the dust. M set out on his run. 

It took the kids and I almost an hour to go the first mile. Max was so not into hiking. He looked at every lizard track and stopped in every shadow to "rest." But once we hit the slot part of the canyon, he changed his mind and was running, leaping, scampering over rocks. It was suddenly fun and fast! We soon ran into M coming the other way and all of us ran back down the slot canyon and down the sandy river bed back to the parking area. 

We enjoyed our hamburgers very much.

Who Lives Here? Who Lived Here?

These two questions provide a good framework for homeschooling while traveling, and whenever I feel like our experiences are getting a little too strange and random, I return to them for context. Many current events like climate change and politics can be better understood by getting a taste for the geography and economy of different areas.

The first thing we think about is who lives here right now. What is the population? How close is the library? Where do kids go to school? What languages are spoken? Are the stores national chains or more regional or local? Who are their elected officials? 

Then we look at geography and weather. Where is the water? How does the weather travel? What are the sorts of extreme weather events that people have to deal with?  What kind of pollution is in the area? What wildlife can be observe directly? 

Next, we peel back the layers of history. Yesterday we got to view some petroglyphs made by some people who left the region 1,000 years ago. We also saw some orchards that are were planted by people who came about 150 years ago. It can be a little hard to piece together indigenous history of an area, but I start by checking out the map on https://native-land.ca and then look up the tribe website, if there is one in the area.  We have two myths/legends anthologies that we are working through.

The biggest lesson from this is generally that humans are on the move! Especially in the last thousand years on our continent, people have been moving around quite a bit, sometimes by choice, and sometimes under duress. There are very recent examples of migration, such as what happened on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. All around the west, you can see places where people tried to make a go of it, but the land is too overgrazed and drought-ridden to survive now. In Pennsylvania, the houses get gobbled up by the moisture and the encroaching forest or meadow, but out here, they stick around for decades without collapsing. 

The final thing we do is add our observations to our timeline. Right now, we're just using a free version of Time Toast to do this. 

Today we took a walk around Hanksville, Utah. This is a tourist town that is not really near, but more on the way to several popular national parks. The nearest library is 50 miles away, but they do have an elementary school. Its current enrollment is 24 students in grade PreK-6. People have lived here for many thousands of years, cultivating in the river valleys and flood plains. The petroglyphs were made by Fremont people, which is more a group of similar cultures that lived in this area for a long time, rather than the name of a specific tribe. 

If you come now, be sure to stop at Carl's Creature Garden and pet his goats and donkeys and look at the art.  

Colorful Colorado and Long Drive Days

We drove up and over the Colorado Rockies and into Utah in one go. Ideally, we would have spent more time in Colorado, but we needed to make it into Utah for the work week. We took full advantage of the KOA stay in Central City, arriving exactly at check in time. M got to run in the mountains twice, directly from the campsite. The kids loved playing at the playground and using the campground's wifi to stream a movie and do a watch party with their friends back in Pittsburgh. I took a walk around the campground to admire the scenery. Later M and I had a real wood campfire. When we left in the late morning, we knew it was going to be a long drive day, but the I70 was much slower than we anticipated. The mountains were gorgeous, but Colorado is so crowded! Rest areas were packed, there were hardly places to pull off and park without navigating a traffic jam (it was a gorgeous spring Sunday). We have learned the hard lesson of not stopping frequently enough many times, and we had to learn it one more time on this drive. The kids were really grumpy and argumentative - probably actually just hungry and needing to run around. The road was pretty rough for an interstate and one of our fenders partially detached. We stopped for groceries and did a quick removal and duct-tape/splicing of the wires job in the parking lot, but we need to figure out how to get a more permanent fix. 

It's pretty normal to experience the occasional mechanical problem, and driving as much as we do just shakes a lot of things loose in a camper. At least everything is still functional, although I think we need to get a new fender as soon as possible. Marko went around the camper with a screwdriver this morning, tightening up all the loose stuff. 

I'm really glad to be out of the cool, wet weather, and away from tornado threats. The midwest was cheap and empty, but storm-watching is too nerve-wracking for me. Now we are in the exact opposite in the San Rafael Desert...clear skies and tons of sun. We did our laundry this morning and swapped out all the fleece pants for shorts. 

M started his new job this morning, and I took the kids to Goblin Valley State Park. Tomorrow, we will either return to Goblin Valley or go to Capitol Reef. There are also supposedly some wild horses around and Laurel would love to catch sight of them.

First Harvest Host and camping at 9,000 feet

We stayed at our first Harvest Host last night and it was quite an experience. 

On our last night at Lake Scott, a small, but intense storm developed in the area and ended up missing the campground by just a few miles. It was nerve-wracking to watch it head straight for us and watch the NWS alerts become increasingly alarming. (Golf-ball sized hail!!??) Then at the last minute, it veered south, and pretty much missed the campground completely. On Friday, on our way to our next stop, a similar storm system appeared. Could we get lucky twice? 

Most of the Harvest Hosts seem to be wineries or breweries that are just off the highway and you basically overnight park for free in their lots, in exchange for buying something from them. This one was a little different as it was advertised as a farm. When the host confirmed my reservation she sent turn-by-turn directions with pictures....it was all unpaved roads...and dire warnings to not use GPS or we would end up in the middle of a cow pasture. We were a little nervous, as the RPod is not exactly an off-road vehicle, but it looked flat at least. As it turns out the directions were very good and the road was in decent shape, a mixture of gravel and dirt and it was well-graded. When we arrived at the farm, she directed us to pull in behind a windbreak of trees. The storm wasn't a tornado, but could have 60 mph straight line winds. Not ideal in a 20 foot travel trailer! She also showed us their underground storm shelter. It felt a little tense, but we chatted with her and two other travelers who had pulled in for the night while she monitored the storm. After a little while she announced that she thought it was going to miss us, and in fact it did. 

The farm was littered with piles of debris, which we later found out were piles of various types of recyclable or reusable materials which they were cleaning up from all over the grounds. Even shards of broken glass were gathered up to be melted down.  The barn contained an astonishing number of ducks, rabbits, chickens, sheep and goats. One of the hosts was a blacksmith and he ended up firing up his forge to show Marko how to worked! They also showed Max how to dig for fossils and let him take some that he found. It turned out that they had only recently purchased the land and while they had big plans for it, were just at the beginning stages of execution. They were also very new to Harvest Hosting, but I thought, every good at it. When we woke up in the morning, the farm was shrouded in fog and the coyotes were howling. It was a wild place, a completely delightful and unexpected stop. 

We left in the morning to beat the afternoon storms and are now camping in the mountains at 9,000 feet, just west of Denver. There are snow-capped peaks all around us! Colorado is another new-to-us state. We will just be passing through on our way to Utah tomorrow, but we can possibly come back on our return trip. 

Kansas!

We made it to Kansas! It felt like a big goal to drive over 1,000 miles in three days, but it happened without too much stress. We didn't get an early start on any of the days, and ended up pulling into the campgrounds just before sunset each night. We had general goals of where to get to each night, but we shifted these a bit, based on weather, which was not great. We joked about "following the brown signs" since we have stayed at state parks every single night. The first night we got a late start from Pittsburgh and even managed a last minute visit to M's parents on our way out of town. Not on the way at all, but it still worked out. We made it across Ohio and stayed at Hueston Woods State Park. The second night, we made it to Saint Louis and stayed in Cuivre River State Park. And then finally on Sunday, we pulled into Kanopolis State Park in Kansas, where we stayed for 3 nights, so M could work and we could rest a little bit. Just as we arrived, another homeschooling family pulled into our loop! They were traveling east, so it was fun to have playmates and someone to talk about curriculum and schedules. On Wednesday, they headed east and we moved over to Lake Scott State Park, still in Kansas, with a pit stop in Hays to do laundry and buy some beer from Defiance Brewery. 

State parks are definitely our preference. Being able to hike and run directly from the campsite is very convenient. It did require driving 20-30 miles off the interstate, which obviously adds miles and time, but state parks are pretty cheap to stay in, even if you get hookups (and super cheap if you don't). This time of year is great for birding and looking at wildflowers. Since it's before Memorial Day, sites were easy to come by. We gambled a bit with cell service, which is important for M to be able to work, but it was ok at each place. 

Kansas is beautiful....mostly flat, but with interesting canyons. It's very empty of people and sprawl. When driving we passed a lot of corn and wheat fields, cattle grazing, wind turbines and oil wells. I have never spent time in Kansas, so I really wanted to come here and check it out. The kids are unimpressed with the scenery when we're driving, but did like to hike in the state parks. Lake Scott has the northernmost pueblo ruin ever discovered and that, along with the 1890s homestead they have preserved here, helped us to answer our big question, "Who lived here before now?" The question always leads us to wonder why they came, what they did and why they don't live there anymore. Peeling back the layers of history is always a little complicated.

Having rested in Kansas, we're about ready to take off on another big drive weekend, going through Colorado to get into Utah, where we will hang out next week.

Road Trip Prep

It's T minus 2 days until we leave, and for all the experience we have packing for trips, and all the time I have put into making lists over the past few months, I still feel like I'm forgetting stuff. 

Do not google, "road trip activities for kids" . . . it just stressed me out more with the lists like 40 THINGS TO PACK FOR YOUR KIDS TO KEEP THEM BUSY. I cannot have 40 things rolling around in the car, and no, I'm not letting my kids draw on the windows with markers. (Although if I did give them markers, at least one of them would occupy himself for a very long time trying to figure out how to write fart in reverse so that other drivers could read it.) Markers dry out too fast. Crayons melt if the car gets hot. Colored pencils for life. 

More important than printing road sign bingo cards is setting intention for this trip. We want to spend time together and have fun. We want to see new places and learn about who has been there before us. We want to run on trails and meet up with a few friends and family and try all the regional fast food. 

Trips like these, during which we have to do a certain amount of work and school and vehicle maintenance, are not the same as taking a vacation trip. We have to balance a certain amount of opportunistic sight-seeing, with exercise, sleep, downtime, chores and work. 

The elephant in the room is the pandemic. Traveling with an RV is a pretty easy way to maintain distance from others, but leaving our state after staying home for much of the past year feels weird. 

Quantifying

We're putting on the finishing touches on our portfolios and wrapping up all the obligatory paperwork for the school year. 

The lines are blurring between active learning and the quiet pondering that happens after, or before. There are things that look like nothing at first glance, which actually turn out to be huge developmental leaps. Sometimes what the kids pursue on their own is way better than any of the lessons where adults show up to teach them. It's a little hard to know what to include in the portfolio. Which part of the day was school? 

If I've learned anything from the past two years, it's to expand the margins. Put lots of space in between activities. Do. Not. Rush.

Max disappears sometimes and I will find him wandering alone in the backyard, telling a story to himself (or the trees? or the universe?). He started to crave this alone-time to work through his own thoughts and imaginary scenarios, maybe to break away from the worlds that Marko and Laurel create. 

We started a routine this year we called "Max reads 5 books" (original, I know). We each have to read to him and he reads to one of us, his choice. A very simple daily task, but with many layers. M usually reads to the kids at night. This winter it was Cat Kid Comic Club over and over again, when they were not reading terrifying Norse myths, or memoirs about ultra-running. (The kids loved Born to Run.) Laurel and Marko read graphic novels to him. Pokemon and Minecraft, mostly. I read picture books, the ones with lyrical text that rolls off my tongue, that I read about on literacy blogs. Or sometimes a few pages from one of our references books. He reads Cat Kid Comic Club to us. We have all grown to love the characters of Cat Kid Comic Club.

Marko and Max split off more and more to play, where it used to be Laurel and Marko. They drag home sticks and logs, whittle them down to spears, try to make bows and arrows, fold hundreds of paper airplanes, play board games, arrange stuff animals, create elaborate scenes out of legos and construct forts. They read their Highlights and Cricket magazines carefully and I often see them doing whatever craft or recipe or project was in the magazine. 

Laurel is more fun for me to do stuff with now. We can ride bikes or go on walks and match our pace. We chat and listen to music during chores. We can wear each other's shoes. She can go off with her friends now more and more. They go on walks together, or paint each other's nails. 

Quantifying all the areas of growth feels incomplete without including these examples of not-school.

#CamperLife Trial Runs Part 1 and 2

We just finished our second of two shake-down trips to test out our camper's systems after a winter in storage, and to try out some recently purchased equipment. The first weekend was at Laurel Hill State Park and the second was at Hyner Run State Park. These are two places that we love and know very well, so it was fun to see some familiar sights and faces. We've been going up to Hyner Run in the spring for many years and the same mother-daughter camp host team is always there. Laurel Hill is our go-to spot for a quick weekend getaway since it's only about an hour from where we park our camper. There were days of nice weather on both trips, but it's not particularly warm yet, and we had rain or snow on both trips. At Laurel Hill we had full hookups and flushed and sanitized the tanks, watched a movie on our dvd player and baked cake in our convection oven. At Hyner, we had no hookups, but there is a water spigot in the park where we could fill up our fresh water tank. The solar panels worked great to keep our batteries charged up, even camped in a hemlock grove in a holler, as we were. The waste tanks were pretty full by day 4, though. We could have stretched it to another night, but only if we were really careful and nobody took a shower. The propane tank powered the furnace, water heater and refrigerator without problems. We did have a spare tank with us, but didn't need it. I don't think we'll carry an extra tank when we drive to California, but we need a way of reliably measuring what is left. M just found a scale you can use, which should be pretty accurate. Still, if we were in a sunny place, I think it would be pretty easy to keep the fridge going on battery setting if we had our solar panels set up. 

Space is tight in the rPod. We all fit, but everything must be carefully evaluated for volume and weight. We got some synthetic down blankets to replace the piles of fleece we had before. I moved the dishes to a lower shelf so the kids can reliably help with washing and putting away. I got a new puzzle and a special felt roll-up puzzle keeper. Books and art supplies will be our downfall...the kids somehow always sneak in 5 or 6 enormous hardcover books AFTER we've already checked their bags. (And insert a mental note that Max always needs at least twice the number of pants as the other kids.) I took the freezer insert out of the refrigerator. It doesn't really hold that much anyway, and it's so much easier to store tall things like milk without it. Who needs ice? Haha. 

Sometimes the less you bring, the easier it is for the kids to entertain themselves. When we went to Hyner, we had no power...no video games, no tv, no endless supply of eBooks on an iPad. The kids went fishing, reread the few books they brought, played Uno, went hunting for wildflowers and played hide and go seek. We all went to bed at the same time and M read out loud from his book. I forgot to bring paper so they carefully tore out pieces from Max's notebook when they all wanted to draw. There were three big chunks of stump that the boys dragged around to make obstacle courses. It's actually nice to have a small amount of stuff. Dishes don't take long when you only have five plates and one pot. 

We are getting better at working through the "pain points." For instance, travel days go much better if we stop for an hour for every two-three hours of driving. Playing a podcast or audiobook while everyone gets dressed keeps it calmer during the chaos that happens when we open up 5 suitcases at once (and it's totally crazy until we can get everything stuffed back into the underbed storage). We need to find some way to tame the shoes. 

We're Done!

Well, not exactly, but we did discover that we have logged the required 180 days of instruction required by the state. We started in July and typically logged 5 or 6 days a week, with several large breaks throughout the year. I made recording forms that have a reading list on the back and a grid of required subjects and days of the month on the other. It's pretty easy to check off subjects if we keep up with it on a daily or weekly basis. I added "fill out homeschool log" to the list of things that have to be done before tv/video games, and this was enormously helpful in shifting the responsibility of logging to the kids. We use a lot of digital resources like Epic Books and Libby, so if we forget stuff, it's pretty easy to go back and add it later. We review the sheet monthly and then tuck it in a file box along with any work we want to save for the portfolios. 

We do have a few more things to work on. Laurel has to take her math final and a standardized test. Marko needs to finish his handwriting book and work on the final revision and editing of an essay about Shadow. Both of the older kids will write a letter to the evaluator describing their challenges and triumphs of the past year. We did this last year and the evaluator gave us good feedback. Hopefully we can meet with the same person this year. It does feel good to have a system in place that works for us and to not have stressed about meeting the basic requirements.

Things that were so great this year that it was a pleasure to have them in our schedule and we will definitely keep doing :

Poetry teatime

Exercising with the neighbors

Laurel's virtual book club with her aunts

Outschool class for Max

Brave Writer Arrow guides for literature study

Brave Learner subscription for my own professional development

Things that seem like they are good enough to keep doing:

Spectrum + Khan Academy for math study

Duolingo

Girl Scouts

Things to improve for next year: 

Grade level reading - I've taken a "backwards planning" approach, where the kids follow their interests and I kind of trust that we will cover all the topics. We have What Your Fifth/Second Grader Needs to Know books, which they periodically read from. They do learn new things, but it feels tedious, not exciting. I think I need to plan some deeper dives into content to make it more exciting. 

Foreign language study - everybody loves clicking through Duolingo, but nobody can hold anything beyond a basic conversation. 

Making new friends - it's time to look for some homeschooling buddies. The pandemic definitely hampered this over the past year. Luckily, we have next door neighbors who were basically homeschooled this past year, but they will be going back and my kids need to meet some new people.

Happy Easter! Still a pandemic...

Well, it's been over a year of living during a global pandemic, and the holidays keep ticking past. It's super strange to not see our extended families, but we have managed to have a good time by ourselves...and developed some new traditions along the way. 

Several people sent little treats and cards for the kids. I made a dutch baby pancake with Cracker Barrel apples and whipped cream, which always gets the kids out of bed. 

I made a hilariously difficult egg scavenger hunt for the kids with "Easter Surprises" at the end. It took them over an hour to get through it! I hid clues in eggs directing them to the next hiding spot, and they had to move all around the house, and then use the letters written on all the eggs to figure out a secret phrase, which was a hint to the final hiding spot. M bought each kid a new headlamp and an exercise tracker watch. They loved the watches and checked up on their progress of steps the whole day. Marko was aggressively logging steps and ended up with over 17,000! We'll see if that keeps up. I couldn't find peanut free chocolate this year, so we mostly skipped candy, except for Peeps.  My neighbor's brother baked us a beautiful box of cookies and pastries, so nobody felt deprived for not having a candy filled Easter basket. We dyed eggs last week and read all the gospel stories about the trial and death of Jesus. Today we did the traditional egg cracking contest (my egg prevailed!) and watched the Pope's mass on TV.  We played soccer with our neighbors and chatted on the phone with some of our family. We ate leftover jambalaya and cold pizza. Overall, it was a pretty low-stress but also celebratory day. The sunshine definitely helped.