How Did You Get Here?

My World Building kids just turned in a two page creation myth for their world, and I'm not sure if they have more fun doing the homework or I have more fun "correcting" it -- there is only so much correcting to be done, when the whole point of an assignment is to use your imagination.

So far I have a world created by everlasting raindrops who spontaneously form new life within themselves when they get super excited, several worlds formed by different pantheons of competetive (and often interrelated) gods, a world formed artificially by beings escaping earth, at least one caused by a divine sneeze, one formed from the body of a dying creature, and just about anything else you can imagine.

Said worlds are populated by everything from fairies to giant reptiles, from to gnomes to castaways, and from cavemen to highly advanced humanoids.

They are currently working on illustrations for their creation stories, so, if I get their permision, I'll try to scan some of the pictures in for you to see.

The amount of thought, logical thought, that they have put into these things, even just so far, is pretty impressive. It's amazing how much of what's going on in their heads comes out when you let them write and create.

"I write to find out what I'm thinking. I write to find out who I am. I write to understand things"

-- Julie Alvarez

Welcome to Kandar

I seem to have a knack for ending up in imaginary central Asian countries. This time, though, I wasn't being locked in prision by hostile gaurds. This time I was trying to uncover a plot and find a nuclear trigger before it was passed to the wrong hands.

My family and I went on vacation to New York City and Washington D.C. While we were in D.C., we went to the International Spy Museum and became spies for an hour.

Our mission was to hunt down a nuclear trigger that had been stolen and try to break a ring of international terrorists. The first assignment was to get through a door -- a hidden door -- but a door none-the-less. After we finished celebrating the fact that the ten of us could, in fact, open doors, the real mission started.

We tracked suspects through a hotel using security cameras, un-garbled bugged phone conversations, snuck through hidden doorways, disabled security cameras, dodged gaurd dogs, broke into an office, picked the lock on a safe, ran a lie detector test on a suspect, rode in the back of a delivery van during a car chase, hid in a safe house, got picked up off the roof by a helicopter, and scored a four out of five on our mission.

A little imagination is an amazing thing.

Country and Language Please

How would you like to invent a fantasy world or create your own language -- and have it count as school?

That's pretty much what I'm doing as a teacher at CHECK (one of the local homeschool co-ops) for the next four months. I get to "teach" middle school and high school students about linguistics/grammar by having them write a language and about sociology by having them imagine a world and then write it a mythology.

We had our first classes this Wednesday, and, personally, I had a lot of fun. It makes my nerd side happy, and, hopefully, the kids will actually learn something, even if they don't realize it.

--Now I just have to figure out how to keep four new languages and fourteen new worlds straight...

Home Sweet Home??

I'm finally back in the Tri-Cities, and I'm quite sure what to think. In some way it feels really good to be home and I can't picture myself trading it for the world, but, at the same time, it's really just odd and I'm not certain of where I fit into things.

I don't feel that much older than when I left, but the people around me are older. Kayla is the same grade that I was when I went to Denver; Melissa's a senior; Mariah is the age I was when I did the MARK (Motivated Acts of Random Kindness) group in SOS. My Sunday School kids are in Middle School, and people who were students at camp when I was a counselor are at CBC for Running Start.

Not that I really have much to base my lack of certainty off of. We left for New York and D.C. before I had even finished putting away all of my stuff from school, and I've only been really back for three days since then.

The trip was really fun though, and we took five billion pictures between the six of us. Some of mine are on my facebook page, so you can see the D.C. ones here and the N.Y.C. ones here.