I hopped on Periscope this afternoon for a quick Q&A about Journey North Mystery Class. If you’d like a peek at our graph (behind as usual) and a walk-through of the project, here you are.
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fun learning stuff, geography, Journey North, Journey North Mystery Class, Periscope
...starts next week! Are you ready?
Here’s a post I wrote three years ago about the project. We’ve done it every year since, gosh, 2006 I think? Every year it has been a blast. Always so exciting when you start figuring out where the ten mystery cities are…
We’ve done the project by ourselves as a family, with a group of online friends, with a group of local friends—all sorts of arrangements. The last couple of years have been immensely fun, each year culminating in a big feast where each group brings a dish representative of its assigned Mystery Location.
Can’t wait!
The baby is three weeks old today, can you believe it? He smiled at me this morning, a big, real, eyes-lighting-up-in-recognition smile when he focused on my face. Scott was there to see it. It was one of those moments where you wish life came with a freeze-frame button so you could stay in that flash of time for ages.
Scott went back to work today after two weeks off, sob, and my parents, who flew in for a short visit (yes, my mom was just here helping before and after the delivery, but my dad hadn’t seen the baby yet), went back home this evening. We are missing them already. And of course this means that tomorrow, for the first time, I am on my own. It’s a day full of stuff to do, too: big kid stuff, running around. Should be interesting…
Speaking of big kid stuff: It’s time for one of our favorite activities of the year: the Journey North Mystery Class. We have done this fascinating project four times, either alone or with a group. This year, another mom in our circle of homeschooling friends has very kindly offered to host the Journey North gang, what with my being three weeks postpartum and all. Jane is extremely excited. Truly, this geography project is one of the highlights of our year.
Our Shakespeare Club took a two-month hiatus for the holidays and my delivery, and we’ll be maintaining a low-key pace during the ten weeks of Journey North so as not to overload anyone’s schedule. But my Taming of the Shrew kids will be working on their scenes during the break, and we plan to get together now and then to rehearse. Jane spent this afternoon walking around muttering Katherina retorts under her breath. We’re doing a couple of scenes, which means a couple of Kates and Petruchios. Fun fun.
Haley S. sent me the link to Academic Earth, a WAY COOL site full of video lectures from top university professors. Thanks a ton, Haley. I’m psyched about the Nabokov lectures, having recently shuddered my way through Lolita for the first time.
Gosh, I read a lot in January. Eight novels and two nonfiction books. For the first half of the month I was too pregnant to do much BUT read, and during the second half I was snuggled up with my sweet bairn, under doctors’ orders to take it easy. I’ve been working on a “books read in January” post, mainly for my own records, but I keep getting too chatty about individual titles and it’s taking forever to write.
The January Carnival of Children’s Literature went up last week. I haven’t had a chance to peruse the posts yet but it looks like a doozie.
Speaking of children’s literature, I’m pretty excited about the new Kidlitosphere Central website that was just launched by a team of my favorite children’s lit bloggers:
“KidLitosphere Central strives to provide an avenue to good books and useful literary resources; to support authors and publishers by connecting them with readers and book reviewers; and to continue the growth of the society of bloggers in children’s and young adult literature.”
Spread the word!