Classical Carnival: Call for Articles

It's been a while. Actually, quite a while. The carnival system was having issues, I got behind and overwhelmed, and the Carnival didn't happen. But I think I'm ready to try again with it, and I'm hoping that there's still interest. So click on over and share a post or two with us about your classical homeschooling efforts. Talk to us about what makes classical right for you. And, if you'd like to host a future edition on your blog, leave me a note in the comments and we'll talk.
 

Pianist

I was practicing this evening, but had to get up for a minute, and when I came back I found I'd lost my turn!

Owl Lapbook (Finally)

We weren't very efficient with the owl lapbook, but it's done and I'm finally putting it into his binder. It turned out nicely!

Estrogen Dominance and the Gall Bladder

That's what I'm reading about tonight. Here is a sampling of what I'm looking at:


GALLBLADDER DISEASE AND BILE FLOW
  I got a couple of interesting tidbits from this article. For instance, did you know that the bile is very alkaline? This counters the acidity of stomach acids and apparently that's important so that pancreatic and intestinal enzymes can do their thing. Another interesting thing: fiber is important for a bunch of reasons, but one of those is to help bile stay the correct consistency - it keeps it from getting too thick, which is badness. This article has a couple of practical tips for avoiding gall bladder disease.

Estrogen Dominance
 Huh. Looks like the funky way my body deals with water may be related to too much estrogen. Among other things.



Books that look interesting:
Hormones Health and Happiness by Steven F. Hotze, M.D.
Dr. John Lee's Hormone Balance Made Simple by John R. Lee & Virginia Hopkins
Why Stomach Acid is Good For You by Jonathan V Wright, MD 

This site has some book reviews by a doctor - which are particularly nice since he mentions conflicts of interest that that the author may or may not have disclosed.

 

First Harvest!

He planted them clear last year, and we removed the blossoms because our berry book says we'll get more and better fruit over the life of the plant if you don't let them bear the first year. So he's waited a looong time for these berries - the first things out of our garden this year!

Fun With Triangles

I woke up this morning so excited to do math, because I had this awesome idea: build triangles to practice subtraction. Monkey's been exploring two-digit addition and subtraction, and we do usually do these problems with rods. He calls them "tricky math." Today, I threw in a twist by showing him about degrees and building a triangle as he subtracted from 180, which I had previously given him. He could choose any numbers that made him happy as he was subtracting, and I drew the triangle that went with them.

I did the writing because (A)I was drawing the triangles, and (B)that kind of "tricky math" still requires a lot of concentration for him to do, just counting the rods. But, he liked it well enough to do again; he wants to do rectangles tomorrow. That's going to challenge our set of rods! And, not so incidentally, he got some exposure to geometry concepts this morning, in a fun way.

I looked up the sum of the angles here, and I'm sure that I'll be back to that page as we play with more shapes; they have quite a few. I think that building pentagons would be fun, but we'll have to work our way up to that.