Weird Dreams

(copied and pasted from a Facebook Note I just wrote)

What's the weirdest dream you've ever had? Can you find its roots in your life and see why you might have dreamt that?? Have you ever described a dream without the phrase, "And then for *some* reason...."

I think I've had one of my all-time strangest dreams last night. Here are the ingredients from real life:

1. Study Ben Franklin in both fact and historical (children's) fiction for 2 weeks for daughter's homeschool literature unit

2. Read one of Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" books for 2 hours at bedtime, where the main character is a special agent for crimes against fiction and has the ability to jump in and out of books, usually to fix something that has gone wrong.

3. Stay up until 1:45.

4. Have in your existing back-brain obvious clues pulled from "The DaVinci Code" (book, NOT movie); Hamlet quotation "The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right"; a recent read of fantasy novels centering on a thief posing as a noblewoman; and... not sure where the last ingredient came from, but possibly a reference to the biblical Samson, but it could also be a weird dream alteration of Ben's fur cap.

Mix well and sleep. You'll find yourself a time-traveling agent needing to fix history. It turns out that Ben Franklin is also an agent, but has gone rogue. This is evidenced by the inclusion of the Hamlet quote in Poor Richard's Almanac, long a sore spot for historical scholars, why would he try to take credit for such a famous quote that predates him by so many years? (No, it's not really in there!) Your dream centers on the need to jump into history and retrieve his hair from a famous haircut (???WTF?) before it gets buried and discovered again, altering history. You go to 1780's Philadelphia, and stealthily swipe the hair which turns out to be cut from a wig. Upon returning to the present time, it turns out that Ben is a good guy after all, but it's still important that the hair does *not* make it into the historical record until "discovered" in the 1960's, so you have to go back and re-insert the hair under the barber shop just before it burns down. All the normal sci-fi strictures apply: you can't be in the same time twice, Ben can't go because he's alive in that era, you have to go back after you left from your first trip, you can't overlap those times. You'd already cut it quit close getting the hair out in the first place, and had nearly been discovered.

Well, there was a lot more to the dream, too, but that's the 60-second summary. Definitely one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had, with a "plot" that spanned several weeks of apparent time lapse. Tell me about your weirdest dream!

Excited

I'm very much looking forward to this next unit of Moving Beyond the Page curriculum. We're done with the first concept of Interdependence, and now we're moving into Force and Power. The first book we're reading is "Ben and Me" by Robert Lawson, a historical fiction novel told from the perspective of Ben's good friend Amos, who just happens to be a mouse. The corresponding science unit jumps into magnets and electricity. We're touching on everything from Ben's inventions to the 13 colonies to even parts of the French Revolution. What does it mean to be an inventor? How do you start a new nation? What is diplomacy? The science kits with many kinds of magnets, the circuits and resistors, lighting a fluorescent bulb with a balloon.... What a fun filled next couple of weeks.

I know Shannon will be thrilled, Science is her favorite subject. In fact, she was very saddened last week at Girl Scouts because she was the only girl in the troop to say it was her favorite subject. "What's wrong with liking science, I ask you?" she demanded of me. I was worried, did anyone make fun of her for liking it? No, just apparently they all stared at her when she said it was her favorite. Ah, well. This will be a great hands-on unit, more exciting than the plants and ecology units we've been covering so far this year.

We'll be doing this three-week unit, then going on vacation. When we get back, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" will be waiting, as well as studies of the power of people, voting, and citizenship.

I'm still happy with this curriculum. It's working out so much better to have the notebooks in hand rather than the online version where you activate one unit at a time. I love browsing ahead late at night to see what's coming up. It makes such a difference to go into depth with these topics, I love the social studies and science units being inspired by the literature we're reading. Shannon is so sad to see our Native American stories go away, they really inspired her.