terminado

This has been a really bad homeschooling year. I had planned a pretty fabulous year, but almost none of it got done. My illness ate the lesson plans. But there is one thing we did get done: the South America salt dough map. That's right folks, we completed a project. A hands-on project! We'll never ever do it again. Salt dough maps are homeschool hell. I don't know what the folks at Greenleaf Press were thinking when they wrote that article in 1997 that convinced me to long for the day when I'd have kids and we'd do salt dough maps. Maybe, since they had twelve kids and therefore an older child to oversee the projects of the youngers, they didn't personally have to experience the thrill of painting delicate boundaries onto a surface textured like the roughest sandpaper. I also chose to stand in the next room during geography. This was necessary so that the Scientist's radiating salt dough hate wouldn't increase my risk of cancer. I know I should take a picture of the thing. I won't because we all want to put this behind us, far far behind us. Anyway, if it gets into the Flickr homeschool projects pool it will permanently damage my reputation. Instead, I will ask you to use your imagination and conjure up a green and brown kidney with black worms crawling on it, laid out on a blue operating table for too long. That's a good likeness. As I type the children are being rewarded for their suffering with a travel documentary on Brazil. This is the last day of our South American geography unit study. It is done. Done is such a grand little word.