Ok.  The picture, albeit not so clear, says it all.  Daniel with his nose covered....and the odd color of the bird....this was not a pleasant day for mummifying a chicken.  My question has to be...when will the moisture end.

You see, the bird is salted with a salt/baking powder/baking soda mixture (and I mixed in seasoning to help mask any smell).  BUT, it has so much moisture, that every few days you need to take out salt and make a new salt mixture.  

My gag reflex started kicking up and I did everything in my power NOT to breathe through my nose as I started scooping wet salt out of and off of the bird.  The problem with that is when you breathe through your mouth, you are more apt to TASTE the odors.  OH.  MY.  GOODNESS.  What will this be like in a couple more days/weeks!??!!  And can you imagine doing this to a WHOLE HUMAN BODY!??!!!  WOW!!  Those priests had strong stomachs.  If Matt were to have ANYTHING to do with this project, he would be hung over a toilet!!  Silly me...I thought the salt and spices would alter it somehow...that we would be spared the smell of decay.  NOT SO!!

We persevered, though.  I cleaned it off....we poured our salt mixture inside and outside and sealed the sucker up in it's freezer bags tomb to be looked at another day.  *shudder*

Story of the World...LOVE the curriculum, but I wonder who came up with this sick idea??  **And no talking from any of those of you who know me.  Yes, this was a project I was excited about and thought was GENIUS!!  You don't see school classrooms doing anything like this!!  AND, I complain now, but I think the end result will be just awesome....the learning experience and memories.

AND -- Let me just add....the island just cannot be cleaned enough.  I stopped at actually pouring straight acid on it.

Teaching a kid who is smart can be quite the blessing.  There is a lot less hand holding and a lot more independence.  It can be hard, though, too.

My son has never been tested for gifted and talented...I'm not sure I would want to test him.  Seems pointless to me.  But, he is very smart and school comes very easy for him...and for me, too.  He has always been really smart and blows all of our minds.  When presented with a challenge, it takes little to no time to get him to resolve it and, many times, he figures out the solution on his own without guidance.  But, when he is faced with a problem that he is having problems figuring out on his own, it can cause a level of frustration that can cause a deep emotional reaction to him.

Here is an example of a thing he is faced with this year that he knows nothing about and requires instruction from me.  Though I was advised against it, we are starting to learn grammar.  I picked out a particular program that I liked a lot because it was challenging and I believe he needs to be challenged, Shurley Grammar.  This program has been great for him because he loves writing (a 7 year old boy who loves to write? you question...why yes, he does..he has been writing stories for a couple years now as well as poetry).  It encourages journal time each day.  He never writes about his life, but writes stories or poems.  It has also been good to get him focused on the mechanics in grammar.  We have already learned the first four parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

For a while there, he would get frustrated because there is a process Shurley wants the kids to go through in order to discover the parts of a sentence (what is the subject noun, the verb, etc).  His inclination is to just jump right in and do it, but I make him slow down and go through the process (his sentences will get harder and harder as he goes along and I am creating a habit).  He might get tears at times because it just goes against him to analyze why the answer is a.  He knows the answer is a and gets bogged down in the reasoning of why a is a.  Today, we had a "ding" moment where he looked at a list of words and correctly labeled them.  I asked him how he figured it out and he said...I just asked the questions, in my head, that I was supposed to ask and I got the answers.  Ding, Ding, Ding!!

Math, however, is a WHOLE OTHER matter.  You see, he has always been fascinated with numbers.  He gets them. They make sense to him.  When he was four, he sat in his car seat..thinking to himself...and than said to me "Mommy...if I had 2 quarters and you gave me 3 quarters, I'd have 5 quarters."  Yes, I said to him...that is right.  Soon, he began just fitting numbers together figuring out the different combinations...all on his own.  He loves numbers.  It was an easy choice for us to choose Singapore Math for his curriculum...it appears it was the choice for anyone who was good at math.  Daniel instantly took to it and rarely, if ever, did he need instruction from me.  He just naturally figured out how it worked on his own.  Even the word problems.  He is a gifted reader and I suppose that played a lot into it because he would just do them and get them right.

There have been moments where we need to work together on something.  Singapore has a program you use while using the regular book called Intensive Practice and the problems in this book are FAR more challenging than regular (there was one problem we struggled with last year...1st grade level...that I ended up taking a picture of and challenging Matt's engineering degreed coworkers a crack at and only 1 got it right). 

Multiplication was introduced last year and I spent about 5 or 10 minutes going over the concept of multiplication and within minutes, he could figure out just about any multiplication problem I sent his way.  My role as teacher was mainly in name only.

Last week, he began adding triple digits and when I would check on him, I found that he was getting every answer right.........oh and he was doing it all in his head.  It was astonishing to watch.  I had to ask him to please start showing his work.  Even word problems...he just put them together in his head and came up with an answer....the space they provide for you to work through the problems would be completely blank.

Today, we faced new challenges though...challenges that caused him to pause.  He did not know what to do.  I was SO HAPPY to be able to go to the whiteboard and explain to him this new concept...but being such a strong math fella, it brought tears to his eyes that he had not worked it out in his great mind.  I think it was good for him to have this moment where a concept alluded him.  It allowed me to catch a glimpse into how he works these things out and it allowed me to show him some tricks to make it even easier.  

It can be hard on the pride to be the teacher to your child and to not feel needed.  It can be hard on the kid's pride when he has handled things just fine in his own way only to hit a roadblock.  

It is interesting teaching a smart kid.

Ok...so for MONTHS, I have been anxious for the project we started undertaking this past Sunday...mummifying a chicken.  It fascinated me and made me appreciate homeschooling that much more.

As you may recall, I thought the whole process on Saturday to be quite fascinating...very interesting.  I did not mind handling the raw chicken one bit.  The whole thing was just plain cool.

Wellllllll....the coolness of it ended today!!!  The instructions said that after a day, it would likely be wet and would need to have the salt rubbed off and be resalted in a new bag.  True to form, I checked it after 2 days and it did have liquid.  I was confident that everything would still be awesome....

Excuse me as I gag as I relive the events.  Did it smell?  Not really...though there was an odor that was somewhat unpleasant.  The gloopy salty stuff was pretty gross...especially scooping it out of the cavity.  I don't know...the whole thing was just grody and I could think of so many things I would rather be doing.

But, I persevered.  Daniel mixed together a new salt mixture.  I rubbed off the old mixture (as much as I could...the skin was sagging), put it in a bag, and instructed Daniel on pouring the new salt in...

We are supposed to check it again in 2 days.  There is a chance we will have to do this process again.  Lord help me.  I do not regret it....it was/is worth it.  I still think it is really cool.  Really.....I.....do.....

Here is what our chicken looks like now:

Towards the end of 1st grade, I bought the history curriculum Story of the World for Daniel and I to go through.  I liked that it started at the beginning of man and continues through history in chronological order...and it is in a less dry, more story form.  When I got the curriculum, I began to eagerly look through it to see what we would be doing and was SHOCKED when I got to Egypt and found an activity for mummifying an actual chicken.  It sounded fascinating and Daniel and I were over the moon with excitement over the project. 

Well, this week we got to Egypt and mummies and this morning, we started the mummification of a chicken project.  It is a six week long project so I will document everything along the way.  Sadly, this morning I took lots of pictures of all that we were doing but when I uploaded them, some of them were lost.  I am heartbroken about it.

Funny thing...I figured this would be right up a boy's alley.  Raw chicken!!  Well, not my boy.  He refused to touch it claiming it to be gross.  I was flabbergasted.  Now, I touch raw meat all the time when I cook, so I am used to it, but I never in a million years would have guessed that he would react so strongly.

Ok, so here's what we did:

Step one was to take the chicken and remove all the yucky stuff (heart, liver, kidney, neck, anything like that).

Next you wash the chicken thoroughly with hot water.  Of course, I had to do this part...lol.  Make sure you clean it inside and out.  After washing the chicken, you will need to pat it dry with paper towels....I got Daniel to ALMOST do this, though he was just not willing to put much effort into it..even though there were paper towels in between his hands and the bird.

The next step is to clean it inside and out with rubbing alcohol (or wine as the Egyptians do it, but rubbing alcohol is MUCH cheaper)!!  Pat dry again...trying to get all the moisture off.  Yep, I had to do BOTH these steps as Daniel just couldn't stand the thought of touching the thing.  GOOD GRIEF.

Next we mixed the salt mixture that will dry out the chicken.  We used a half box of baking soda, a half can of baking powder and 2 containers of salt.  It suggested adding some spices to make it smell better, so we added in some ground cloves and all-spice.  Sadly most of these pics didn't make it.

Next came time to treat the chicken.  First part was filling the cavity with the salt mixture (that smelled great with the spices in it).  I held the bird open while Daniel spooned in the salt mixture.

Next you pour some of the salt mixture into a freezer bag, put the chicken in the bag and begin adding the rest of the salt mixture...making sure the whole chicken gets covered in the salt.  Seal the freezer bag and than put into another freezer bag and seal.

So, of course I lost all the pics of the sealed up bird, but that is it.  Tomorrow, we will check the chicken out and make sure the salt is dry and not wet and clumpy at which point we have to re-salt the bird.  It will be a lot of observation over the next several weeks as well as some re-salting.  Stay tuned for further updates!

*And I will likely use my iphone for pics from now on!

As I have stated in previous posts, I made the decision to take a more literature approach to reading with my son Daniel about half way through 1st grade.  I compiled a list of books I would like us to go through and began reading books.

A couple of the books we read were...well....not great.  "Stuart Little"?  Wow!!  TOTAL BORE and REALLY weird.  "Tornado" by Betsy Byars was...pretty ok.  Daniel LOVED "Mr. Popper's Penguins".  And then we decided to try "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".  My daughter had a read a couple Roald Dahl books, but I hadn't.  I wasn't sure what to expect...I just knew I wasn't a fan of either movie (Gene Wilder's version or Johnny Depp's).  BUT, I heard from a couple moms how great the book was and decided to give it a go.

Daniel and I had GREAT fun reading this book and I have to wonder at Roald Dahl and his wonderful imagination.  His mixture of fantasy, creativity, and poetry was just fantastic.  Daniel loved the Oompa Loompa songs and we had fun laughing together as we read the book together.  It was a great lesson in being good and unspoiled.  I do not think I have ever enjoyed reading a book to my kid (Sierra or Daniel) more than I did this one.  I highly recommend finding the above copy's version...it is very colorful...each page the color of candy...the illustrations were just wonderful.

Upon finishing the book (it took us months because of summer break), we decided to watch the movie.  From everything I read, the Johnny Depp version is supposed to be the closest adaptation and it is, indeed, very close.  We watched it last night and except for a few minor changes, it was very close and Daniel and I shared many knowing glances at scenes we remembered laughing at during the reading of the book.

However, I can't help but think of the Gene Wilder song "Pure Imagination".  I can't help but think this a theme song for Roald Dahl himself.  As I have looked through his other works and read about how one is just as good as another (and I certainly look forward to reading more of his stuff with Daniel), I just think....this song is for Dahl.  So far, in my opinion, I would say he is tops as a writer of children's literature.  I am thankful for authors like him who had the imagination and skill to write such a great story as this one and I look forward to reading more of his novels.