Random Pieces of My Brain

School starts next week and I am not even close to ready. Piles of curriculum surround me, pdfs are opened and pages are being printed….I have so much scheduling and organizing to do.

I have 2 fantasy football drafts this weekend and have not done one drop of research. Not even reading TMR, which I love. I will probably end up just using his Top 200 list. Sigh. I meant to buy a magazine at the store the other night and forgot. Yes, I’m that into fantasy, that I will buy a magazine for something that ….isn’t real. So now you know how frustrated I am at not having researched anything yet. Funny too, that this paragraph is way longer than my school paragraph. It’s all about priorities, right???

I’m hoping to have a review post up soon about Annie Down’s book, Perfectly Unique, that comes out next week. There were lots of things I liked about it, and some things that I wasn’t really a fan of.

And lastly, I am so frustrated with how difficult it is to find a good resource to teach my kids about a country and it’s culture, and also the social justice issues that are important to that culture. It shouldn’t be so difficult to teach them about poverty and fair trade, and also love of and understanding of a culture. So I am going to try and make a little unit study type of thing that will be what I want. I’m tired of piecing together all sorts of various resources and studies to cover what I want covered. Of course wanting and doing, are two different things. Let’s see if I can accomplish what I want. Otherwise I’ll have to stop complaining, right?

So….who wants to help me with my fantasy teams??? Any must-have players? ( I refuse to draft certain people for no good reason; namely super arrogant players like Tom Brady and Cam Newton. Yes, I realize this puts me at a disadvantage. And, I’m super attached to some people, like, ahem, Peyton Manning, even going so far as to draft him in the second round last year, which, yes, was super dumb.)

http://www.fromtwotoone.com/ from two to one

What about using primary sources to explain some of the social justice issues? Like reading the declarations from the Seneca Falls Convention that kicked off the women’s rights movement (leading to women’s suffrage decades later)? I’m not sure it historical fictions books are appropriate for the age of your kids, but when we read To Kill A Mockingbird, we coupled it in school with history lessons and reading court cases.
- http://www.carisadel.com/ Caris Adel
  
  yeah, I want to do that, especially with my 6th grader this year. This year is going to be heavily geography/culture based, instead of history like we’ve usually done. So for the first few weeks we’re doing US, and then Mexico for a couple of weeks. I downloaded a sort of cool activity book from Voice of the Martyrs on Chiapas, Mexico, their poorest state. But there was no talk about how to help alleviate the poverty, or even what caused it, and I thought their attitude towards it really stunk, actually. But I loved the culture part of it, and the praying for christians part. And I have a cool Fair Trade curriculum from Equal Exchange, and I found a few cool lessons from Compassion about cultures and one was on fair trade. So I have everything I want, but to do the lesson I want them to learn (esp since their attitude towards Mexico/Mexicans will have actual implications when they grow up), I have to combine like 5 different resources.
  
  Ideally I want something that will teach them about the country and the people and the culture. Reading/activities/art/videos, etc. And then get into some of the issues, like poverty and education, for example, and then focus on what the solutions might be. I was reading a lot about it last night, and there’s even a local roaster who buys fair trade coffee from Chiapas. That is cool. So we could walk to the coffeeshop, buy a bag, and know exactly how we’re helping a little bit.
  
  I just don’t know if I can do it, haha.
http://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/ perfectnumber628

I totally agree about teaching about a country/culture and also the social justice issues that culture deals with. I feel like it’s easy to get a really distorted, one-dimensional view- “these people don’t have access to clean water, look how sad they are, they just spend all their time being sad about not having water”- when in reality, all people have interesting lives, goals and dreams, people they love, etc.
- http://www.carisadel.com/ Caris Adel
  
  yes, and it’s so easy to get caught up in ‘thank goodness it’s not me’ instead of ‘how can I help.’

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