Zachary's Grade 8 Grad

We celebrated Zachary's Grade 8 Graduation on June 20th, 2014. There were 9  Grade 8 homeschool grads and 1 Grade 12 grad.  It seems hard to believe that we have been homeschooling for 9 years already.
The graduation was held at Rice Road Community Church with a dessert reception afterwards.  All the grads looked splendid.  Zachary was cheered on by Jacob and Grandma and Grandpa Hoffele

The Fonthill Airborne Regiment

So I quit the Royal Westminster Regiment back in the 1980s before I got to jump out of an airplane. To make up for that, the boys and I are forming our own airborne glider unit out on the slopes. We've got passes to Holiday Valley in Ellicotville, NY (about 1:40h drive away) this season and we've decided that this is the season we learn to do jumps and tackle (sometimes literally) the terrain park. Rather than just riding the black diamond runs, we're now seeking out every little bit of small terrain and dip in the green and blue runs as an excuse to get airborne.

The shadows underneath the boys' boards prove their jumping abilities, and these were taken pretty much from a near-standstill! The past two times, we learned how to ride on the flat box, and the boys have now taken things further by riding a stack of boxes and also riding/jumping an "A-frame" box!

The great thing with homeschooling is that we go during the weekdays when there's minimal traffic on the roads or the slopes. And the "group" lessons we get with our passes generally end up as private ones. Here the boys are with David (L) and Dom (2nd from R), who have both taught us. Dom is especially awesome and fun to ride with, and we help him out by saving him from teaching beginners...

Snowboarding is just a fabulous day out and a way for us to bond as three boys, plus the bonus is that Debbie gets the day off from having to take care / put up with us!

ROBO MADNESS

Pelham Lego Robotics Team Takes First at Regional Competition

At this weekend’s Niagara Regional FLL (First Lego League) robotics competition, Pelham was well represented having 3 teams out of the 13 competing.  The Lego Da Vincis took the 1^st Place Champion award, in addition to the Robot Performance award, while their mentor team, Legolas, won the Rising Star award.
The competition consisted of 4 categories: the robot game obstacle course, robot design, project research and solution and core values, which includes problem solving skills, team work and ethics.  This year’s topic was “Nature’s Fury” so the teams had to research natural disasters, identify a problem and develop innovative solutions. The Lego Da Vincis have developed a solution to connect neighbours in the event of an emergency, so they don’t have to call 911 as often, and efficiently care for others in their community in times of crisis.  This initiative consists of a website to raise awareness on local emergency situations, how to plan a “block party” and how to construct an emergency preparedness kit.  They have presented this idea to the Mayor of Pelham and Fire Prevention Officer Saskia Holditch and have been invited to present it to Pelham Town Council on the 16^th of December.  Teams are also judged on their robot design, with one judge commenting that the Da Vincis “set the standard for programming efficiency.”  The robots compete against each other to complete autonomous tasks on the obstacle field.

3 teams advance to the East Provincials Competition on January the 18^th in Oshawa at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.  The Lego Da Vincis (a team from the home schooling community), the Fonthill Fury (composed primarily of St. Alexander’s students) and the Princess Margret Panther Bots from Niagara Falls. The 3^rd team from Pelham, the St Ann’s Stallions, made Pelham proud and took home the Robot Design award and put in a stellar performance in all other areas.

Congratulations to all students on the fruits of hard work and ingenuity!  Your community is cheering for you on January 18^th!

Dr. Freeze and the Freezies!

"Freezies" work for Freezies, apparently...Jacob works on the shoot's storyboard...

A video of what happens inside the lab of a mad scientist!

Last fall we shot an episode of "Science Scoops" for Virtual Researchers on Call, a group producing news and videos for grade school kids about the fun and importance of science. Debbie had the great idea of "if it's meant for grade schoolers, then why not have the boys interview you?" Here's the result that went live on YouTube today!

Josh Tiessen - Shipwrecked Treasure

Saturday June 1, Zachary and I went to Stoney Creek for the Stoney Creek Artists Stroll event and also the Battle of Stoney Creek (200th anniversary) re-enactment. For the artist stroll, we went to visit Josh Tiessen at his studio. What a terrific artist and great young man - all of 17 and already making a great career for himself as a painter. He was also homeschooled and really appreciated the chance to have the ability to focus on his passion and talent for art - and what talent it is.
His paintings are really something, and he's had a piece exhibited at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa along with being mentored by renowned artist Robert Bateman. I bought a giclee print of his "Shipwrecked Treasure" for Debbie and I to celebrate our upcoming anniversary and to reflect our Nova Scotian heritage. Here's Zach with Josh and the original.

Soldering Fumes

On November the 20/21, we went to daddy's lab, and helped Geoff do some soldering, and other things to help fix the equipment. First we soldering some wires together to make some cables, Then we put together a box used for the metabolic cart, which measures how much work we do. we also put together another box with all of the wires in it, but I don't know what it was for.

when you solder, you are pretty much gluing the 2 pieces of metal together, by melting the solder,(which melts very easily) and when it cools, it hardens and sticks the 2 pieces of metal together firmly. There is also a little gun for sucking up the extra solder, when you get too much, Geoff says the problem most people have is that they put too much solder on.

Brugge!!

on July 4th we went on a few trains to brussels to see our friends the Beskys, And we stayed over night, we also played one game of "Lord of the Rings risk" and one game of "Star Wars risk." It's a bit hard to tell which one I liked the most. Then we took 2 trains to Brugge and had some pizza then we went back to the hotel.

Waiting for the boat tour on the left. Our hotel's cafe on the right.

The next day we went to 2 art museums, the Kamarama, and the Groninge museum. then we found a good boat tour, but we waited until we had found dad to go on it so when we found dad we went on it it was very good an I also liked the things that the tour guide added in like the crocodiles in the canals.

Jan van Eyckplein on the left, lots of windmills along the canals on the right.

The next day we climbed up the belfry and then went to a special Pablo Picasso exhibition. then we went to the hotel and had a nap then we went to Pizza Hut for dinner.

Mandred the Unmagnificent

Once there was a planet named after it’s leader Mandred and he liked fighting and so every day he tried to conquer another planet, until he owned the whole galaxy. And then one day he was wandering around in his spaceship when he saw the end of the galaxy so he said to himself “what if there was more beyond the end of this galaxy?” so he went over and then found himself in a new galaxy and the one planet he liked the most was blue and green. So the next day he sent 1000 platoons of 100 aliens to take over the planet called earth.

Now I will tell you off a few things that happened when they landed in earth, first a few of his spaceships landed on a train track and a train came and destroyed them, next some landed in the ocean and the water got in but they were aliens and they didn’t know about water but when they landed they were swallowed up and never seen again, then there were the ones who landed in streets and were safe but then the sun rose and they turned in to statues of gummy bears. When everyone was awake they looked out of their windows and saw all those piles of gummy bears and all the children ran out of the houses and ate them all up.

When he heard that Mandred was furious, and he sent out a bigger army and told the space pilots to not to land in the blue stuff (water) and when any light came to get into the spaceships immediately, and not to land on  the lines going over the green stuff (land). And when the aliens completed the task of landing without being destroyed, they all landed together in a war zone and the night patrol saw them and opened fire and the aliens returned fire but their bullets did totally nothing to the soldiers. The aliens had blood and if they lost one drop they would disintegrate into a pile of gummy bears and none of the human soldiers were killed.

Only one of the pilots survived and flew back to Mandred and reported the bad news, and Mandred said "If I can't have it, nobody will," so the next day he made a lot of meteorites and sent them showering on earth until everyone was crushed and earth was destroyed. and then he conquered the rest of the milky way except for the sun which was too hot for his aliens to live on.

Heidelberg

Finally posting a couple from our Germany trip!
We only had a short time to spent in Heidelberg but we had a nice stroll around the old town. We climbed up to the castle and walked around it but to me, the castle seems the most impressive with the way it sits nestles in the hills on the edge of town. There are 3 main churches in the old town. The church of the Holy Spirit has a tower where you can climb up and get a magnificent aerial view of the town, bridges across the Nektar River and the castle and surrounding hills. The Jesuit church is very light and spacious with a magnificent organ at the back of the church and St. Peter's Church, "Pieters kirk" is the oldest, build in 1645?

We were able to see the Gothic Renaissance building side by side with the later Baroque style. Most of Heidelberg was destroyed between 1686 and 1689 and few buildings survive from before that. On exception is the "Rathouse", now a hotel and restaurant. Most of the buldings build as the town was reconstructed are in the lighter Baroque style (pictures)

Fortunately, Heidelberg was spared in WWII since it didn't have any significant military or industrial sites, and so can see these beautiful buildings from the 1700's.

Windmills

Windmills are big machines that rely on the wind to work, they are used for pumping water, grinding grains, and making electricity. The first windmill was built by Heron from Alexandria in the first century AD and was used to power organs, that was the first time wind had been used to make energy. In Holland windmills had many uses, especially for draining the land.

When not being actually used to drain land or to grind flour, windmills also make for nice pictures! There's Daddy riding through a windmill near Amerongen, and the more modern wind turbines for electricity near Spakenburg. Daddy rode right under them, and was amazed at how fast the blades turned and how silent they were.

L'eggo My Lego

First Lego League Open Finals 2012 were held in Mannheim, Germany and there were 70 teams representing almost 30 countries. The teams had all qualified in their own countries at regional, provincial and national competitions. The competition was held in the Rosengarten conference centre which has a beautiful facade and is across from a welcoming park with a big water tower called "der Wasserturm."

Der Wasserturm on de left, Shaun the Sheep slipper on de right.

The Robo-Raptors Team from Ontario

Each team was judged in a number of areas divided into core values, research project, robot design and programming and robotic games. The robotic games were the only part where spectators could watch and cheer for all the teams but each team also had a booth where you could meet them and ask them questions and they usually had some sort of game or give away  prepared. At one of the Swiss tables you used a Lego gun to shoot an apple from the hat of William Tell to receive a Swiss chocolate. The Slovenian Rooster team had handmade pottery medallions that they had made themselves. The team from Iceland had collected beach rocks and painted them with the flag and Viking symbols.   They also had posters and handouts showing their research and information about their country.

One of the Dutch team Lego and a group of Dutch coaches

The research topic this year was about Food Safety and it was amazing to see the ingenuity and the amount of work that went into these projects. The projects varied from better shipment of apples to protect them to filtering shell fish bits out of saltwater, making contaminated corn safe to eat by adding 2 certain spices, testing milk for evidence of mastitis, determining if an isolated town could survive on its own if it didn't have any imported products.  It was also interesting to see how different teams attacked the problem of how to build the robot, some were small and compact and others were big massive structures.

There were 2 teams from Canada. The Robo Raptors are a team from Stoney Creek with 4 members at the competition and 3 more still in Canada. Their project involved designing an automatic hand washing station to improve sanitation in restaurants.  They won a second place trophy for their robot programming for using a unique way of calibrating light sensors. The other Canadian team was from a school in Mississauga and they also won a trophy for their research project. They had looked at using UV light to sterilize equipment used with food. At first they had difficulty because the experts would talk to them because they were  "too young," but they persisted and came up with an excellent project.

It was obvious that everyone was having a lot of fun there. I think the coaches were having as much fun as the kids, although some of them were a little stressed.  There were about an equal number of girls and boys and there were at least 3 all girls teams that I spoke to. Most of the teams were experienced having been together for several years but I met the Australian team of 3 girls ages (9,9 and 11) and it was their first year as a team and they made it all the way to this level. The most fun loving team seemed to be the Terminators from Ireland.  The award for the most indomitable spirit goes to one team from Israel who had a fire in their hotel the first night and lost everything - robot, passports, clothes. They showed real spirit and courage by continuing to compete in every category they could and greeting everyone with a smile and a taste of Baklava.

As a spectator, there was lots to see and do and everyone was friendly and willing to discuss their project. The kids have gone to so much work to get to this competition, it is obvious that they have learned many things besides just Lego and robotics.

Lego Robotics Competition

From June 7-10 we went to Mannheim Germany to see our friends the Ferriers, who had made a Lego robotics team called the Robo-Raptors. On June 7 we took 7 trains, and got to Mannheim Germany then we found the man we were renting the apartment from (he was pretty friendly) and then he showed us the apartment and we went and got some pita gyros and bubble tea (very cultural dinner I call it.)

Then on June 8 we went to Heidelberg and Zach got a nice hat then we went to mannheim and we found the place where the competition was, it was right beside the water tower. on the first day there was the presentation the core values and the competition. On the second day there was just the competition and in the finals it was China vs Japan and they played each other twice, on the first round China got about 260 and Japan got 96 on the second round china got 200 and some thing and japan got 100 and something, you could see that Japan was really flustered. At the end of the competition all the players from the teams were trading T-Shirts and things. then we went out for dinner with the Ferriers and had pizza then we went home. June 10 today we went on 6 trains and got home to Netherlands safely.

7 Trains and a Bus

Zachary, Jacob and I are off on a 4 day road trip to Germany. We are going to see our friends from Canada who have qualified for the First Lego League Robotics finals in Mannheim, Germany.  We are traveling to Germany today and will visit with them at the competition on Friday and Saturday and also  visit the cities of Heidelberg and Mannheim.

Our trip itinerary today involved a city bus and 7 trains. We even managed to make 2 connections that were 4 minutes.  If you want a geography exercise for today, see if you can find all these connections:

Amersfoort - Ede-Wageningen

Ede-Wageningen - Nijemegen

Nijemegen - Venlo (this is the border town between Netherlands and Germany)

 Venlo - Monchengladbach

Monchengladbach - Koln  (Cologne)

Koln -  Mannheim

Mannheim - Heidelberg

Check out our upcoming blogs from Mannheim, Heidelberg and the Lego Robotics competition.

What's on our reading list in the Netherlands

Since I've told you what we have been reading in Greece and Italy, I will add what we are reading in Netherlands.

The Diary of Anne Frank - we have found several online versions, but with the first many of the words ran together and were difficult to read. This one is a bit better. http://www.readanybook.com/online/42_0.
We have also visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam so that helps us to be able to picture the rooms that are being talked about.

The Hiding Place - this is the story of the ten Boom family from Haarlem. They owned a watch shop there but during WWII, they were involved in the underground and hiding Jews. Eventually their home was raided and all the members of the family were taken to prison. The book tells the story of Corrie and her sister Betsie's time in  prison in Holland and concentration camps in Holland and Germany. After her release, Corrie spent the rest of her life helping those damaged by the war and travelling around the world spreading the news that God was with them even in the concentration camps. She traveled to over 60 countries and wrote over 10 books. We are planning a trip to the Corrie ten Boom House Museum in Haarlem.

Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates - we read Hans Brinker, written by American author, Mary Maples Dodge, earlier on our travels but it is a lovely story of a poor Dutch family and village life. It also describes a lot of Dutch history.

Upcoming on the list:
Peter of New Amsterdam
The Dutch Twins
Dutch Fairy Tales. 

The Stories of the Greeks and Romans

Since we have been living out of 4 suitcases this past year, we obviously haven't brought with us our stacks and stacks of books that surround us at home. We have worked very hard at our schooling but in different ways than normal. Perhaps I will go into more detail about that in a later post, but here I just want to illustrate 1 example.

We have discovered a wonderful site called Baldwin Project at www.mainlesson.com. This is a site that is attempting to collect and make available online books for children in all sorts of genres. For example, in the ancient Greek section there are approximately 40 books which cover biographies, histories, mythology, fiction.

We only managed to read 3 of these - The Story of the Greeks by Helene A. Guerber, The Wonder book for Children by Nathaniel Hawthorne and an autobiography of Alexander the Great by Jacob Abbott. We also read a story of the Greek War of Independence by G.A. Henty. With the Story of the Greeks, we would read 2 (short) chapters and then Jacob and Zachary would each narrate one. At first they were dictating and I was typing for them and then about half was through they switched to typing for themselves. This practice of written narration was promoted by a teacher named Charlotte Mason, who is well known to many of my homeschooling friends. This promotes good reading comprehension and summarizing skills as well as the mechanics of spelling, punctuation, sentence structure. If you read their narrations, you can see that we still have to work on that!

The Story of the Greeks has approximately 125 short chapters, so to read and narrate/summarize it took a considerable amount of work.  Here is a link to the manuscript if you are interested.

We spent 3 months in Greece and it took all that time to work on the Story of the Greeks; when we went to Italy, we also wanted to read the Story of the Romans, but in the interest of time (since we only spent 2 weeks there) we read Story of the Romans but did not narrate it.

You can find the BALDWIN PROJECT at www. mainlesson.com

Story of the Greeks

Story of the Romans

Jacob's fishy story

There was once a nice little fishy that liked the world where he lived but the only problem was that in the world where he lived water when it froze shrank and did not expand so it would not just freeze the surface of the water, but the winters in that world where not as long as in our world but then one year the little fishy was in his little anenome watching the FBC (fish broadcasting company,) and when it came to the weather channel usually his favorite part he got a bit scared because the weather fish said that that winter was going to be a very long winter.  So for the rest of the summer he was always thinking of how to avoid the long winter that was about to come and finally he  found a plan, when the winter came and all the fish were hiding in their anenomes. He lived in a big group of lakes so he went out and went on land and  went from lake to lake until he got to a lake where it would be like any usual winter. And when he got there he found a good comfortable anenome and stayed there the rest of his life.

This was part of my science project... And the below is great weather for ducks and fishes...

Greece Top Ten

Top 10 Things I'll Miss about Greece (not in order)

Seeing shepherds along the road with their sheep and goats

Being able to bike everywhere

Seeing the mountains from our apartment windows

Loukoumades and Loukoumies

Souvlaki

Walking to the Bakery in the morning for bread

Greek lessons with Nick

Flopodopolous - our stray dog at the cafeteria

Having school at the university computer lab with more computers than we can use

Our friends from the university and church