Proud moments in home schooling

A few weeks ago, I was driving around the town contemplating my failures as a home-eduactor. I mean, are my children learning anything? Just as I was in the depths of my "what am I doing and why am I ruining my children's future with my inability to teach anything worthwhile?"-mode, Ammon interrupted my thinking with this: "Mom, I've got a joke for you. Which Greek god laughs a lot? Laphrodite!"

I know it's not funny. But he learned about Greeks and their gods, including Aphrodite, from me. AND he learned it over a year ago. I stopped worrying.

This gets even better. We were camping near the beach a couple weeks ago. (Sidenote: my computer has been ridiculously uncooperative and is not letting me upload pictures with ease. Hang in there. I'll keep trying.) A camp-worker (not officially a ranger) came to our campsite to invite us to attend a little class to learn about sea otters. Ammon really, really, really wanted to go. So, his aunt Tammy and I took him over there. (Another sidenote: did you know that sea otters, once hunted for their pelts, were thought to be extinct? When they built Highway 1 in California, they found 30 lonely sea otters hanging around the Monterey area. They protected the species by law and biologists and their friends have worked very hard to allow sea otter populations to grow. Unfortunately, the species has plateaued somewhere between 300-500 and they have stayed in the Monterey area. They once ranged at least from the Baja peninsula all the way up the Pacific coast.)

We learned that sea urchins are one of the primary sources of food for sea otters. Sea urchins eat kelp. So (for obvious reasons) sea otters hang around kelp forests. That's where the good food is. The teacher asked, "When there were no sea otters in this area, what do you think happend to the kelp?"

Ammon raised his hand and said, "The kelp started disappearing, too." Now, you may think this is no big thing, but I LOVE that he was able to make this connection about the way ecosystems work. Ammon knows that when wolves were hunted and killed until they were entirely extinct from the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, elks (and other herbivores) had no natural enemies. They ate so much grass and so many small trees that aspen trees began to disappear and grass began to disappear, leading to tremendous erosion especially around riverbanks. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in the early 1990s, elks retreated to the more forested areas. Those grasslands grew back and the smaller birds, insects, and mammals who thrive in grasslands and in the trees are coming back in abundance.

My point (yes, I have one) is that Ammon understands the role of a predator in an ecosystem--the predator is necessary for the well-being of the vegetation. He learned that from me. I taught him about Yellowstone and he applied that same concept to Monterey Bay. Yay Ammon!