Seven Grandfathers

I wanted to tell you what I am hoping to achieve when I decided to home school you.

Each of you have your own strengths and weakness and I know one day you will learn what works for you.
My job as your mother and your teacher is not to make you a doctor, engineer, lawyer or whatever..
There is something much more important than achieving academic heights.
My job is to show you what that is.
For that you need to know the seven Grandfathers teachings.
Following are the seven important things that you will have to know to lead a meaningful life.

1. Wisdom: To cherish knowledge is to know wisdom.
2. Love: Love must be unconditional.
3. Respect: Have respect for all that is. All of creation should be treated with respect. You must give respect if you wish to be respected.
4. Bravery: To face a foe with integrity. To do what's right even when the consequences are unpleasant.
5. Honesty: Always be honest in word and action. Be honest first with yourself, and you will more easily be able to be honest with others.
6. Humility: You are equal to others, but you are not better.
7. Truth: Speak the truth. Do not deceive yourself or others.

As you can see knowledge is the foundation on which you will build your life. As your mother apart from my unconditional love that is the best gift I can give you.

Ocean Part 2

When you look at a globe, you will see that there is actually one big world Ocean. But to make the study of Oceans easy, we have divided the oceans in to 5 Major oceans briefly using the continents as the boundary.

1. Pacific Ocean. Covers 46% of the earth.
2. Atlantic Ocean. Covers 23% of the earth.
3. Indian Ocean. Covers 21% of the earth.
4. Arctic Ocean. 4% of the earth.
5. Southern Ocean. 6% of the earth.

When an area of Ocean partly enclosed by land it is called a sea.

2/3 of the earth's land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere and because of that 80 % of the Ocean is in the Southern Hemishphere.

Pacific Ocean

Pacific Ocean is the largest and the deepest Ocean. In order to understand how huge Pacific Ocean is, imagine putting together all the land mass on earth, Pacific Ocean will still be larger than that.

Ferdinand Magellan named the Pacific Ocean after the Latin word Mare Pacificum meaning Peaceful sea. It extends from the Arctic in the north to Antartica in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.

Mariana Trench, the lowest point in the Earth's crust ( 10911 meters below sea level) is in the Pacific Ocean.

Q1. Name 5 seas. which country borders them?

Q2. Why do you think the southern Hemisphere has most of the oceans?

Q3. Who was Ferdinand Magellan?

Lesson 1: Earth Science. Ocean

Ocean

The word Ocean came from the Greek word Okeanos meaning river. Early Greeks thought a mighty river encircled the earth.

The Ocean is the world's largest natural habitat, covering more than 70 % of Earth's surface.

The water in the Ocean is the same water that has been on Earth since the Ocean was formed 4 billion years ago. So technically you are drinking the same water Dinosaurs drank!!

So how did the Ocean form? Billions of years ago, the surface of the earth was very hot and fiery red magma rolled on the surface of earth. Water ( from the volcanoes that were erupting and also from the comets that continued to strike the earth) evaporated to form a large cloud.

Eventually the earth started to cool down.

There have been a lot of speculation as to what made the earth cool down. ( there was a lull in comets and meteorites striking the earth, a large cloud blocked the sun for a very long period of time, the sun itself was a young star and was not very hot.etc etc)

It is difficult to analyze and find out what exactly happened that made the earth cool down because there is no specimen for us to look at..Remember, everything was burning.

The oldest rock formation found on earth is the four-billion-year-old Acasta gneiss in Canada's Northwest Territories. ( named after the Acasta river. The word Gneiss is an old German word meaning Bright or sparkling). We don't know what happened prior to 4 billion years.

Anyway, eventually the surface of the earth cooled. This eventually led to rain fall and water started to get collected, eventually forming oceans.

This process of evaporation, condensation and precipitation is called the water cycle. The sun's rays causes the water to evaporate, and as the evaporated water rises up the cooler temperature in the upper atmosphere causes the water to condense and form in to a cloud. As the cloud grows it eventually leads to rain fall ( or snow) The cycle repeats over and over.

Imagine what would happen if the sun decides to take a day off.

What am I doing??

First of all I would like to introduce my children.
My daughter is 10, she likes to read, she resists changes, follows rules to a T, and will give 100% to anything that she does. She is a perfectionist and hate to get a wrong answer and will not forgive herself if she makes a mistake.

My son is 9 years old, a voracious reader, always curious and loves maths. He has a mind of his own and will do anything that he thinks can be done. He is very messy, has zero patience, extremely competitive and have very strong opinions. He absolutely hate to dance and sing in a group, but he is absolutely funny when he is at home.

My youngest daughter is 7 years old and all she wants to know and read is about oceans and whales. She is totally focused on that topic and can read a whale fact book over and over and over. She wants to work at the aquarium when she grows up. She is a very strong willed child.

I didn't not want my children to undergo cognitive tests because I don't think those tests means anything. However the teacher who works with my children when they attend challenge program has certified them gifted.

What I found after dealing with the Canadian school system the last 3 years is that if your child is smart, then for sure they are sidelined. I don't blame the teacher, because she only has 5 hours to teach and there are children withe learning/behaviour disability attending the same class and they deserve the attention.
There is an Independent Education plan ( IEP) for children like mine. Again it is self taught because the child has to do most of the work and there is very little input from the teacher. Apart from the IEP there is also a 9 weeks of challenge program offered by the ministry. However giftedness is a year round phenomenon and attending a program for 9 weeks is of no use.
Then there is MACC for grade 5,6, 7. ( Multi age cluster class). At the end of grade 7, the child has to go back to normal school because there is no program for higher grade.

The way the system works is that if the child wants to know more, then they should find the answers to the question by themselves. The same way, if the child wants to learn more, they should ask for more work.
Neither of the above scenes work with my children. They are too impatient to find the answer and they are too shy to ask for more work.
Yesterday my son wanted to know if Marmot was a mammal. I asked him to check the encyclopedia.
This is what written in the encyclopedia
Mammal, an animal of the highest class of vertebrates, the mammalia. The female has mammary glands, which secrete milk for the nourishment of the young after birth.In the majority of mammals the body is partially or wholly covered with hair,the heart has 4 chambers and only the left aortic arch is present and a muscular diaphragm separates the chest from the abdominal cavity.
I am a medical doctor and everything written above made absolute sense to me. But not to my son. he didn't know what is a diaphragm, he didn't know why heart has 4 chambers and he didn't know what is a left aortic arch. ( honestly I didn't know how to explain that either)
All he wanted to know was Is a marmot a mammal? I could have asked him to find out himself what is a diaphragm and the other things. I didn't, because I knew what would be the outcome. He would just walk away frustrated and angry.
So I explained the general features of mammals, using me as an example, then told him that like everything else in life there is a grey area.. For example egg laying Platypus, breast feeding bats etc.
He was happy.
At the end, for me that is all that matters.

I finally figured, I need to do something for my children.

I am not a good teacher. Like my son I have zero patience.
I am my own enemy and absolutely hate myself when i don't know something. I don't forgive myself if I make a mistake and I hate making phone calls and talking to people. I read a lot and I like to write. I hate to work in a group and I am a loner by choice. I live by rules( my own) and I have 100's of rules. I have photographic memory and remembers almost everything that I see by images stored in my brain.

At present I am planning to take my kids off school once a week and teach them at home. I don't have any clear guidelines as to how I am going to go about it. But I like challenges and I don't usually give up. So I am hoping something better will come out of this adventure.