Honduras: Week 4

Our last week in Copan Ruinas!

We started it out by touring a coffee farm. Neither The Kid nor I had previously had any idea how coffee was grown. It turns out to be grown on little trees on steep mountainsides. This was an interesting trip that managed to keep both of us engaged - perfect for our last big Copan excursion!

One coffee berry, squashed open to find the coffee bean inside

Lots of coffee bushes! Oh, glorious coffee!

I'm super pleased with our Spanish progress. I'm now able to speak in future and past tenses as well as present. The Kid has unlocked the mystery of conjugating verbs that previously eluded her and is much, much more comfortable actually using the Spanish she knows. I call that a definite success!

My daughter's teacher, during a class time trip to the park

This week was *really* hot! Three days at 95+ degrees! It's been so long since I lived without air con that I just forgot how miserable those temps can be. We spent a lot of time indoors to be out of the sun. Even ice cream would have melted too fast to eat.

We had only been out to one restaurant plus out for some snacks, so we splurged one day on a nice restaurant lunch. It was an awesome treat!

On Friday, we left school after just two hours and headed to the bus station. We had a 7 hour bus ride in front of us, which turned out to be 8.5 hours. Ugh. The Kid did great, just played on her iPad pretty much the whole time. I get carsick if I try to use a tablet or read a book in a moving vehicle, so I spent the ride watching Honduras go by out the window. We then spent one night in a hostel in La Ceiba before taking the ferry to Roatan the next day. That afternoon, we finally got to see my husband again! He met up with us for this week in Roatan, along with a family friend. Impressions and stories from Roatan will be coming next week!

Honduras: Week 3

Allergies? Seriously? Other than mild seasonal allergies, The Kid has never shown any sign of allergies. Until now. Of course, at home, I could think about what new thing had been introduced just recently. But here, there are lots of new things. Where would I even start?

We'll probably have no idea what caused the crazy rash that covered most of her body. It was red and itchy, started slowly on Friday and by Sunday was covering her. At that point, we went to the pharmacy and asked for something for allergies. There is no wandering the aisles of a pharmacy here like at home. You walk in, there is a counter, you tell them what you want (in whatever Spanish you have), they give something to you, and you pay. As it turns out, what they had was liquid loratadine (generic Claritin) with dosing instructions in both Spanish and English. I would have preferred Benadryl, but took what I could get. Whether it was the medicine or the rash resolving itself, it did get much better in the days to follow.

After a cool weekend, the weather heated back up. I like the warmth, so no problem for me! The Kid was happy for the excuse to go for ice cream in the park. Ice cream bars cost around 15 lempiras (US$0.75) and a small ice cream cone costs 5 lempiras (US$0.25). Tuesday was hot enough that the ice cream would have melted before it could be eaten, so we opted for licuados instead. Licuados are fresh fruit, sugar, water, and ice blended together and absolutely wonderful.

Climbing trees is a great pasttime no matter what the country!

As before, school is great but uneventful. The Kid is learning to conjugate irregular verbs. I'm learning how to use the past tense. We get a lot more practice now in our homestay. We talk to people at the table over meals. The Kid plays with the seven year old. (The seven year old goes to the bilingual school and is reasonably fluent in English, but happy to operate mostly in Spanish with The Kid, so it works well. They start with Spanish and if there is difficulty, they try flipping into English.)

On Saturday, we headed to the hot springs. Soaking in warm water for three hours was a bit much for The Kid, who kept wanting to move around and splash, so I felt like I spent all my time trying to corral her and zero of my time relaxing. The night before, it rained, making the rural roads muddy and difficult for the van driver to navigate, meaning the "40 minute ride"each way turned into an 80 minute ride each way. Overall, I have to say between the long ride and corralling The Kid, this excursion was more of a bust. We did both like the natural mud bath.

Honduras: Week 2

Week 2 started with a bit of a stomach upset for me. Nothing major, just traveler's sickness. Still, it meant very little food for about two grumpy days. The Kid seems to have an iron stomach.

Still, we had plans. Sunday, we went to Enchanted Wings, a small mariposaria (butterfly farm). It was pretty, totally worth the quick trip.

Monday morning, The Kid and I had a talk about our "B&B homestay". We had both enjoyed our homestay last year in Guatemala and were pretty disappointed not to be living with a family here. During the first week, The Kid played with two other kids here, but they both speak fluent English. The adults were too busy working to spend much time letting me practice my Spanish. We had specifically wanted to live with a family, not a hotel. After classes, we talked to the school director, who promised to look into other possibilities for our homestay.

School was uneventful. Every day, we went and learned new things. Every afternoon, we did our homework. We're definitely learning more and more.

Studying in the garden after class

Friday, we moved to our new homestay. There was an awkward conversation with the first homestay trying to explain that we liked them and didn't want to hurt their feelings, but wanted to live with a traditional family while in Honduras. The new homestay was exactly what we hoped for! We settled in immediately, had some wonderful soup for lunch, and started learning names. That afternoon, we walked about this new part of town with a couple of local children, including the seven year old granddaughter of our homestay mom and a neighbor. Oh, I wish I were better at mental mapping!

The one downside to the new homestay - they do not have Internet. It's been a while since I've been without internet for any appreciable amount of time and I forgot how isolating it can feel. There is Internet at the school, but not much time in which to use it.

Saturday, we went to the bird sanctuary. In English, it is known by the name Macaw Mountain. To the locals, it is El Parque de Aves. Either way, it was an absolutely gorgeous place to walk through the forest. They have a number of very nice, large cages for a variety of parrots and toucans, obtained either as unwanted house pets or confiscated by the government when found in illegal trade busts. There is a small breeding program to reintroduce macaws (guacamayas) to the nearby ruins, where there is already a flock thriving.

With a macaw at the sanctuary

Some of the flock of macaws at the ruins

We capped off that visit with a stop at The Tea and Chocolate Place (el luger de té y chocolate), an amazing place that grows absolutely everything they sell - the plants for the teas, the cacao for the chocolates, any herbs used... All of it, and all organically. The Kid ordered the best hot chocolate either of us had ever had, ground cacao unfiltered in the milk and just a touch of sweetness. We took advantage of the unusual selection to buy an Equinox present for my husband and a couple small presents for our homestay family. I also squirreled away a package of freshly ground cacao to make more of that amazing hot chocolate at home!

Lots of freshly roasted cacao beans!

Honduras: Week 1

The Kid and I traveled to Honduras for five weeks! Some of our adventures from week 1:

Getting there: a plane from Indy to Miami and then another to San Pedro Sula. Our plane arrived too late for the last bus to Copan Ruinas, so we took a hired car. This made for a loooong day of travel! We woke around 4am and arrived at our destination around 7pm (6pm local time). I exchanged some money, which seemed totally sketchy as it was exchanged by some guy standing in the airport holding onto a big wad of cash and a calculator, but this is apparently the actually official way to do it.

We had a cheap upgrade to first class! Woot!

When we woke and took a look around, we discovered that our "homestay" was actually a small B&B. Hmmm. We had been looking forward to staying with a local family, as we did in Guatemala last year. We debated but decided to give this place a shot. The owner's 6yo granddaughter comes around frequently, which is a big plus for The Kid.

Our "B&B homestay"

We took a walk and found that this parque centro had a lot of kids and a tiny bit of green space - major improvement over last year! Plus someone selling little ice cream cones for only 5 lempiras ($0.25).

The parque central as seen from the second floor of a nearby coffee shop

Monday was our first day at Escuela Guacamaya. The Kid gets two hours of one-on-one instruction per day and I get four hours. Really, 3 1/2 hours and a break. Day 1 included each of our instructors trying to figure out what we know, which can't be easy with the odd hodgepodge of Spanish learning we've each had.

Throughout the week, we've been thrilled with the teaching we've had. The Kid already has the usual "kid basics" down - colors, foods, animals, basic nouns - and they've been working a lot on verbs, expressing opinions, etc. there's lots of game playing and she has "homework" for the first time. Most of the first week has been closing holes in my own knowledge, increasing vocabulary, and trying to work on my horrendous accent.

All of our meals are provided at our B&B homestay, but we have gone out for some snacks. Ice cream bars are available in most of the little stores for under US$1. We had this feast of a huge piece of torta, a cup of Honduran coffee, and a licuado (smoothie) for US$5 at a cafe downtown.

Torta and drinks

On Saturday, the end of our first week, we visited the Mayan ruins that the town is named for. In addition to the ruins themselves, The Kid was thrilled to finally get her first tuk tuk ride of this trip! A tuk tuk is kind of like a three-wheeled, semi-enclosed taxi. They're cheap and plentiful, but we don't take many because it feels too lazy!

After the ruins, we had a late lunch at Pizza Copan. That's right, American food! I forget how awesome comfort food tastes after a week of eggs, beans, and tortillas.

New Goals: A Side Effect of Child-Chosen Classes

As I talked about a few posts ago, The Kid gets to choose two classes per six-week session of school. We brainstormed a big list of things she might want to choose for classes based on current interests and things she has randomly mentioned.

She really, really wants classes with other kids. There are no academic co-ops available to us. She knows about online classes, so she asked to be able to take one of those - online kids are definitely better than no kids! After some exploring, The Kid decided she would like to try a class through Athena's Advanced Academy next fall. So, yay, I won't even have to teach all her classes next fall!

Most of Athena's classes have similar prerequisites - a minimum reading level, being comfortable speaking in an online classroom, the ability to give 4-5 sentence responses to forum questions. She's got the reading levels and the ability to talk (boy, does she ever!). But she's a hunt-and-peck typist and when I told her she would have to write her answers in paragraph form she asked me what a paragraph was.

Per our new scheduling, she gets to choose two classes for spring and two for summer, so she has already chosen that spring includes typing and summer includes paragraph composing. Yay for being able to set goals!

Creating Unit Studies

When I went in search of curricula for some subjects, sometimes I couldn't find what I was looking for. I started pulling together a mishmash of resources, and only later started thinking of some of these as unit studies. I thought I'd share the steps I go through in creating these.

1. Choose a topic. This includes not only the general topic, but any areas we want to focus on. We consider how deep we want to go and a general idea of how much time we want to spend.

Example: My daughter requested a unit on chemistry. She wanted quite a lot of information on it, definitely wants to cover the periodic table/elements, and wants lots of hands-on. We had a big trip scheduled, which presents a natural ending point for us, so we had about 6-8 weeks to spend on this.

2. Start gathering resources. Ask on homeschooling groups, do internet searches, see what the library has, take a critical look at anything we already have in the house we can use, check out online MOOCs, field trip opportunities. The idea here is to see what is available to you, not to do any choosing yet.

Example: "Chemistry" is rather a huge topic, so I decided to start by asking on one of the homeschooling groups to get ideas for materials others have found especially good. I needed to narrow the field. I knew we had a couple things in the house, including a molecular modeling kit, so I wanted to incorporate that. I got recommendations for a huge amount of books, curricula, websites, apps, and kits.

3. Evaluate the resources. Some just won't fit with your goals, your ages/abilities, your interests, your time frame, your budget. You might want to keep a record of these for the future, but take them out of your options for now. Some will hopefully be standouts and have you and your child really excited about jumping in - these are the essential pieces you can most build your unit around. Some are very good, but not spectacular - if they are affordable, then these are great to have on hand for open exploration even if you don't formally incorporate them into the unit. Some may not make you excited, but are the best choice for fulfilling some aspect of your goals.

Example: So much stuff! I find this the most overwhelming part of planning a unit because I want to include ALL THE GREAT STUFF! I had been wanting to try the Ellen McHenry units for a while, and she has one called The Elements, so I looked at a sample with my daughter, who agreed it appeared to be a good fit, so that became one of our main pieces. There are games in that, but not much in the way of experiments, so I needed something to fulfill that piece. I was planning on a traditional chemistry set, and Thames and Kosmos has some decently well rated ones at a fair price, so I looked there. While looking there, I came across Candy Chemistry - light on the chemistry but heavy on the fun and the candy! My daughter is young, and we'll definitely do more serious takes on chemistry later, so I went with Candy Chemistry. The kit is a bit ridiculously priced, so I downloaded the manual for free and gathered the supplies. There are some great books that were available at the library, and some recommended apps that were priced ok, so I added those to the stack, though I don't intend to formally include them. Add in a periodic table placemat, and videos from subscription sites we already have and we can easily fill our time!

4. What else can I incorporate? What can I let go of in the rest of our schooling?

Example: We were ready for a break from formal math, and there's a fair bit of math in chemistry anyway, so we shelved our math program for a bit. She kept some notes and did some written activities, so handwriting was covered. We were just about to do a bit on crystals in science anyway, so we did that and also included the crystal growing kit I had for that - fits in perfectly alongside the chemistry unit!

Interesting Asynchronicity

I just posted about our new scheduling. So what does The Kid choose for one of her first subjects?

Chemistry.

I was thinking mixing things together to see what happens. She wanted to learn about the Periodic Table. She wanted to learn about atoms and molecules. She wanted to learn about electrons.

Really, kid? You're five years old.

The Kid writes very little, has about third grade math skills, and generally wants high input and low output. She can read at a high school level but prefers mid-to-late elementary text with lots of pictures, enjoys verbal instruction at about a late elementary/early junior high level, and will happily watch documentaries of YouTube information at adult level. Balancing this is weird. It's not like I can add up all the different grade levels, find the average, and pick material for that level.

The Internet came to my rescue and I found that other parents had already been there and done that with interested young kids. I actually was able to put together a chemistry unit that we both loved, was appropriate for her level, and kept us learning and busy.