Off the top of my head

(I posted this on Little House in the Ghetto, when I meant to post it here. Here's where's been needing an update for a while!)

Off the top of my head, what we've been doing lately, as far as unschooling. Reading about Halloween. Going to the Farmer's Market twice a week. Attending the Food Not Lawns talk on the bee crisis, learning a LOT about bees. Saw Compania Flamenco Jose Porcel at Sangamon Auditorium, that was very nice. K liked the twirling dresses and fancy footwork; I liked the music, a Spanish Gypsy melange with some Arabic influences. The footwork was quite impressive, too, though!

Kaleigh got a (disgusting) American Girls doll catalog in the mail. She's paged through it many times, oohing over stuff, and wowing at how much they want for something. Get your doll an outfit for more than I'd spend on an outfit for myself! So, she's experiencing firsthand, and hearing from us, about how advertising creates desires for things you didn't even know existed, and how conspicuous consumption works. American Girls is partly about history, though, so we can work some history lessons into looking at a catalog.

We attended Super Saturday at the Illinois State Museum, this time the topic was migratory birds. So we learned some about migratory birds that appear in Illinois, and made the usual cut-paste-n-color crafty things. (One of which was an owl puppet, but owls don't migrate!) We also poked around in the Changes exhibit (creationists beware!) and played the video game that illustrates how evolution by natural selection works. We watched the Changes movie for the umpteenth time (10 or 15 minutes of Illinois geological history and how Earth forces affect everything).

We got the woodstove going again, entering our first autumn and winter with it. K has been helping out with retrieving wood from outside, and loading the stove. Considering wood is the only carbon-neutral fuel, and hypothetically could be used sustainably, stove skillz are now leading-edge.