Current Events Scrapbook

The very best kind of homeschool day is one where I have dinner in the crockpot before we even begin! Today it's Crockpot Brown Sugar Cola Glazed Ham. We got a huge ham from the food pantry and I have had a lone can of RC Cola in the fridge since December, so this is perfect!

Yesterday we had a long and very intense discussion around the Article of the Day. One child chose the front page article (which was massive and took up the entire A section) of Sunday's Southern Illinoisan and the other child chose the editorial, which was related to the exposé.

People Still Live Here

One year after HUD took possession of the Alexander County Housing Authority, people still live with the roaches, rats, mold, and despair

This was such an important article (and the conversation, including busting the myth "what I don't understand is, why don't they just get a job" and explaining what your financial picture is like when you work 40 hrs a week at minimum wage) that I wished we could save it. And I felt the same way when we went to see the Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan and there was an article about her in the paper... and when we went to the local Women's March and there was an article about that in the paper... and finally I realized that a logical extension from AOTD is a Current Events Scrapbook.

Not everything we read will be worthy of keeping for posterity, but I sure wish I had kept some of the political cartoons from the presidential election!

So it's time to look through my stash of remaining MLBs for the year and bring out one of the extras for this purpose. I happen to think spiral bound MLBs would be better for this -- they lay flat when they open so they're easiser to paste things into -- and I think the ideal color is Red. Red is Art for us, and a scrapbook is a visual medium. Red is also a cousin to the Orange we use for History/Geography. I always get my MLBs from Pamela at Meadowsweet Naturals.

So today we will add Sunday's article from the Southern to inaugurate our new project. I see this as part of creating a portfolio for the school year, and I think it will be a great momento to look back on. Long term projects like this, or our daily gratitude journals, are worth so much as they slowly build, and gradually come to reflect the cumulative experience of our learning together in a shared time and space.