the true cost of coal

We're still doing a lot of talking about the elements and the periodic table around here, and though it was weeks ago that we were talking specifically about carbon and the CO2 cycle, we recently found ourselves on the landing of our stairs, talking about it again.  This is where we have hung a poster from the Beehive Design Collective, called The True Cost of Coal.  It is large. And it is heavy. Heavy like we are talking about mountain top removal, and unemployment and the serious loss of habitat and other natural resources besides coal.  We live at the edge of Appalachia, so it is a subject that is both historic and current and affects people around us directly.

credit: Beehive Design Collective

The poster itself is arranged so that you can fold it up to show first the area as it used to be - the incredible biodiversity of the forests around here, the animals and plants (mayapple! dogwood! blue cohosh!), and then you can open it up to see what is going on now - the dragline stripping of the topsoil, the destruction of the forests, the polluting of the water, and the disconnect of people to the land.

credit: Beehive Design Collective

Dude, why do you have this thing hanging on your stair landing? Isn't it totally depressing??  Well, it is a feast for the eyes.  We play eye-spy, looking for beloved familiars from the woods. There is also a booklet that comes with the poster that talks about the history of the land, and the history of coal extraction and the history of the people of the land, and every time I look at it I see one new small thing that stays with me.  So, the thing that I caught last week and shared with the girls was this "aha!" about coal.  I knew of course that it is used for fuel, but I had never considered its natural role in things.  Undisturbed, coal acts like this huge filter in the earth, pulling toxins from the water:  the water that flows from the taps of Atlanta and Washington originates here (Appalachian mountains), where it's purified by underground coal seams.

credit: Beehive Design Collective

Hm. Now I'm wishing that I could tell you that we drove to West Virginia to a rally protesting moutain-top removal practices, but we didn't.  We sat and talked for a long time about how living things work together so well when they are undisturbed by people.  How the people who originally lived here on this land seemed to maintain a fair balance with the other living things here, and how that changed when new people from other countries arrived and got greedy.  How every new wave of people had newer and bigger ideas about how to squeeze the most out of the land to the point where they were willing to destroy it for the benefit of just a few people.

And then we also thought about how sad my terrarium was looking - the one without the activated charcoal, which isn't the same thing as coal, though it is another form of carbon and acts also as a filter - and how maybe it was time to jazz it up with some charcoal to see if it could thrive like the others were.

Eliza's thriving terrarium

my kind of sad terrarium

Small ideas, little reminders of things happening in the world around us...something to think about when we round the corner of the landing.

the bits I missed...

Because of the way we do things here - a certain amount of planning and "scheduling" (to please my need for order) (Dan - stop laughing. I do have a need for order, it's, well, just not the same as your need for order...), and then a willingness to follow a flow where it leads - I find that the record-keeping that other homeschooling families might do, the grades, the checklists and finished curricula, comes more in the form of keeping track of what actually happened around here.  I obsessively write down the conversations, the book titles, the card games and art shows, and it grounds me to have a little evidence of What We Do.  This blog is also a part of that, of course...and so, the bits I missed from this week....

While Eliza had dance rehearsal, Ani and I got out for a short hike in the sunshine, finding animal evidence everywhere - tracks, woodchips - and stopping to soak in the winter beams when they came through the trees.

the kitchen floor is still a preferred place to play

Eliza rescued an abandoned bike that our old neighbor found, and discovered that it fits her perfectly, just when she was longing for a new bike.

Within inches of the doldrums securing their hold on my spirits, we made it out to the community contra dance; it was the best decision I made all week!  We almost didn't go; I was tired, Dan was working, I didn't think I had that kind of energy to expend on being with other people.  It had been a week of feeling let-down and disappointed and I was not handling it very well.

Oxygen (and a string band) to the rescue! It was so lovely, as always...

giving each other the eye, doing the "gypsy"

dancing with a favorite partner

I love that our science study - the periodic table of the elements and sooooo many tangents, like the stories of some of the scientists who discovered elements - has started to crop up in creative play.  Don't know why I'm surprised; it's how the girls often absorb and interact with life.

Dear Einstein - i hear you are a great scientist and you live right next door!  We should get together and talk "science" soon.  Sincerely, M. Curie

more play - not an "assignment"

 We also discovered a game in the closet that I've had for years and thought too dull to get out, but too "new" to toss without giving it a shot.  Turns out it suited Ani's love of putting things in their proper spots, and she talked through and filled in the entire table, with side comments but no help from me.  She's picked up so much from the past month and a half of playing with the elements.

tada!

 And one of my favorite moments of the week, sitting in my big girls' boredom with her for a bit and just being company until the idea to work on the gnome hat she's knitting in coop bubbled to the surface, and then I got to hang out and mend, with her feet in my lap, while we listened to stories of the Old Testament (Jim Weiss), which lead to a search for Bill Cosby's Noah skit online (voom-pah voom-pah voom-pah), a big favorite of mine from childhood.

Finally, there has been a lot of this:

Clementine, Ivy and Bean, biography of Marie Curie, books about extinct animals, old-school Nancy Drew (I think this has finally caught Eliza's imagination enough to pull her far enough into the book that she doesn't want to stop!! She is a notorious one-chapter and leave it kinda girl.)...many hours "lost" in reading...so good.

to the Glasshouse (and more carbon)

It has been a relatively mild winter here in southeastern Ohio.  No snow days off for the school across the street, no major ice storms causing trees to lose limbs and roads to shut down.  It has been noticeably winter, though, on and off, and that means brown and grey, with the occasional brilliant blue of a sky here and there.

When we lived in Seattle, we used to walk to the botanical conservatory at Volunteer Park on the colder, dark grey days of winter, to enjoy the balmy warmth and colors of the rooms full of orchids,  ferns, and bromeliads.  When my friend Jen asked if we wanted to join them on a field trip to the local world-renowned Glasshouse Works nursery, we jumped on it.  It is tucked off of the main drag through a tiny town, and you'd never know it was there if you never veered off of that main street.  What  you find is a mini oasis, run by two men who love - LOVE - what they do, and dote on every single plant there.

  

We were there to look for plants for terrariums (carbon cycle!), but everything is packed into one greenhouse right now and will be until spring, so we had to squeeze, tread carefully and peer through other things to find the little plants.

praying mantis egg case!

We didn't mind.  It was all so amazing and lush.

By contrast, when we drove to the top of the ridge to Jen's farm, the trees were still covered in ice from a frigid night earlier in the week.  Down in town we'd lost the ice by the end of the day, but not here.  It was like the fairies had visited...

We put our terrariums together (rocks - carbon! charcoal - carbon! plants - CO2-carbon!) out on the deck, and we could hear the sun warming up the iced trees, crinkle, crinkle, crinkle...

Eliza's jewel orchid

Ari's earthstar

Ani's terrarium

I'd never added actual plants to mine before - I usually go more for  "oooh, there's some pretty moss growing on my avocado peel!", so it will be interesting to see if this fares better than my low-tech (and no charcoal) terrarium.

my terrarium, with a small ficus

c'mon c'mon and meet the elements

hunting for elements in the house

 We've had  a great week exploring the periodic table of elements (PTOE)!  It's funny - when I tell someone what we're doing, they either grimace and shrink away or get goofy excited.  I would definitely fall into the former - my high school chemistry teacher was intimidating, difficult to understand and told inappropriate jokes all through class (many of which I didn't even get until many years later), and it is a miracle that I got through the class with some sort of a B.   But when I read about the activities Lisa from 5 Orange Potatoes did with her kids, I thought that we might have some fun, and stashed the thought away for a couple of years. This fall one of our friends from Richmond decided to teach a PTOE class, and we shared some resources and ideas and I benefited from her getting to it first, and so, inspired, we went for it this week.

We started with Meet the Elements from Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants.  (I've decided we could just study science following the tracks on their CD; when we started talking about photosynthesis 'cause we were talking about the carbon cycle, the girls started singing Photosynthesis! a-ahhh-AHHHHH.) Then we got out a couple of Periodic Tables that we have and a basket of stuff from around the house and got to business. 

We spent some time getting to the know the table - Ani was enjoying the patterns and relationships - and went on a table scavenger hunt that my friend Kimmy devised (name an element that's named after a state; name 5 elements whose symbols don't "match" their name, etc).  We wrapped it all up laughing at Daniel Radcliffe's party trick (he's Harry Potter in the movies, dontcha know) of singing Tom Lehrer's elements song.

Later in the week we got to playing with Carbon.  We fed some yeast some sugar and trapped it with a balloon in a honey bottle and watched the balloon fill up with CO2 (yeast burps).  We built carbon molecules - graphite and diamonds.

(ok, really, we could probably do this for hours, but our gumdrops were probably 3 years old and were crumbling apart and then we suddenly realized we were about to be late for choir and were still in our pajamas, and...)

We went for a walk one afternoon with some neighbors and headed for the traintracks to see if we could find some coal (more carbon!).  I am obsessing a bit on coal - I mean, it is billions of years old. It used to be a plant. I am amazed.

We talked about and drew the carbon cycle which lead us to talk about balance and then imbalance and the girls have a pretty firm grasp of fossil fuels and how we have contributed to this imbalance.  We were talking about how the excess CO2 in the atmosphere was making earth too warm and suddenly Ani says, "wait - you mean like global warming???" It is actually what got her on board for the walk - she wanted to drive somewhere else to walk but we talked about how we had a good place to walk without getting into the car...

coal!

 We have found ourselves talking about the elements all week; we'll see what else we get up to...Sometimes these things ignite and have a life of their own and sometimes they don't!  

Yeast burps.