The Joy Of Creation Age Rating
Fabulously Favuzza
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We really enjoyed history this year. Beginning at creation we worked our way to Ancient Greece. It was so interesting learning about how all of the ancient civilizations began. My girls really enjoyed the Ancient Egypt study this year. My favorite book was the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History From Ancient to Modern Times. It is an internet linked book. You can visit their website and enter the book title, it will give you videos, games, and other resources pertaining to each page. My girls loved looking through it.
Streams of Civilizations is meant for older children. I would sometimes pre-read myself and then summarize for my girls. But after while I got tired of doing that and I would just read straight out of the book while they colored or worked on a project of some sort. The bulk of what they learned/ remembered was from the Usborne history book.
This curriculum mostly uses Science in the Beginning. I love the idea of this book. It goes through all things science from day one to day six of creation. For each day there are various experiments to conduct. After the experiments you read about what you did. Then the children can answer questions about it. There are notebooks that go along with the curriculum but I opted to go a different way. I had my girls keep a science journal. So after each experiment they would draw a picture of it and then write about what happened. My oldest usually wrote more detailed explanations than my youngest. They both really enjoyed the science up until the last couple of months of school. Towards the end the experiments are 3 times a week. It was just getting to be a lot of work. And a lot of times my girls asked to skip certain experiments.
When studying Ancient Egypt we used the Pyramids book. This was actually really fun to do. It included some fun activities and projects that go along with pyramids. My girls enjoyed doing the various activities together.
For Bible each day we usually just read different passages in the Bible. We started in Genesis and have worked our way up to Nehemiah. We also used the DK Illustrated Family Bible as well. I mostly read from this instead of the Bible readings except for when there was no suggested readings in this book. They also had weekly memory verses to copy and recite.
English From the Roots Up will be used in the following curriculum as well. During CTG you learn all of the Greek root words and next year the Latin root words. The curriculum includes a book with all of the root words, definitions, and derivatives of each. It also includes how to use the book and some teaching notes.
The book is meant to be drawn in, but if you have more than one child or would like to reuse it they recommend making copies of certain pages. I chose to get a blank sketch book for each of my girls to use. For lessons where there were things you had to draw on I would just quickly draw them in their sketch books for them to fill in. For example, the photo below shows a lesson where they had to draw designs on the two pots. So I drew the outline of the pots for them to draw on. I know not everyone can or wants to do this, but it worked for us.
The music studies were mostly listening to cds of famous composers, their biographies and their music. My girls always enjoyed when we would listen to them. I would usually play it while they were doing independent work or art.
I love having a curriculum already set up for me. I love having the lesson plans done and the resources and books selected. But I also really love adding our own spin on things. Especially additional projects, crafts, and activities. That being said I added a few various books and resources this year that we all really enjoyed.
If you only do one extra thing, join the Facebook group! This group is full of other families who are working through or have already completed the curriculum. It is the perfect place to ask questions and get recommendations on the curriculum. The file section is jam packed with free resources to use in conjunction with the curriculum.
Before we started the school year I searched for some fun projects to add to our curriculum. I found these cool Art in History art projects that I knew my girls would love. They have many projects for various time periods. I got this one for our Ancient Egypt study and this one for our Ancient Greece study.
I also added my own projects I though my girls would enjoy. For Ancient Egypt they painted and decorated a sarcophagus. For the mummy they wrapped gauze around a thick dowel rod. They also made their own cartouches, which is suggested in the curriculum. But I took it up a notch and made them out of clay. Once they were dried my girls painted them gold.
For science my girls keep a science journal. They each have a Juniper Grove Journal with a notebook insert. I customized a notebook with a half blank page and a half lined page and labeled it Science. After each experiment they drew a picture of what happened and explained the process. Although we skipped quite a few science experiments throughout the year.
Toward the end of the year the experiments are 3 times a week. My girls started to get very uninterested in all of the experiments so some weeks we would skip a day or two. I would have preferred this curriculum to be 1 experiment a week with maybe some reading or videos the other day or two.
I have always loved the book basket in the back of the teachers manual. And I was really good about getting books the first half of the year. But again, after we were all sick in January, that was one of the things I started skipping. And then I just never really added it back in. I hope to utilize it all next year though!
Thank you so much for your support over the years on my blog, Instagram, and Facebook page. I love sharing about our homeschool journey, the things we love to use, and what works for us in hopes that it might help you in your homeschool journey. Please let me know if you have any questions about this curriculum or anything for that matter!
The highest availability available for unlimited purchase during character creation is 12. The "Restricted Gear" 5-pt quality (from Runner's Companion) allows the purchase of any single item up to 20 availability, and may only be taken 3 times.
While this is expressly contrary to the RAW, all GMs I have seen run Shadowrun, myself included, have allowed characters to combine multiple purchases of the quality in order to purchase a single item, rather than just a number of more common items.
Restricted Gear (Original version)
Cost: 5 BP
The character knows just the right person to get ahold of that one elusive piece of restricted gear or miltech weaponry she really needed. Every time the character takes this quality at character creation (max 3 times), she may exceptionally buy a piece of gear with an Availability of up to 20. The character may also save the quality to buy one such item during play.
Restricted Gear (Houserule version) Cost: 5 BP The character knows just the right person to get ahold of that one elusive piece of restricted gear or miltech weaponry she really needed. Every time the character takes this quality at character creation (max 3 times), she may exceptionally treat the availability of one item she purchases as 8 less than normal. The character may also save the quality to buy one such item during play.
In the latter case the highest availability rating possible to acquire during character creation is 36. This has very few practical consequences as the only published items I am aware of requiring more than 28 availability are:
In my experience, many characters have no gear higher than 20 availability at the end of character creation and almost all characters have no gear over 28. A great many non-mage characters have one piece of gear over 12 availability, however-- usually whatever general tool is most important to their role in the team.
But you may buy an advantage at character creation for 5 character points that allows you to purchase an item with an availability rating of up to 20. It's called Restricted Gear. You can take it up to three times to purchase three different items.
The way it goes is that once a developer thinks they are done with coding, they invite other team members to review their work. This is nowadays, typically done by raising a Pull Request and inviting others for a review. But, because reviewers are busy with their own work items and a plethora of other things happening in the team, they are not able to react immediately. So, while the author is waiting for a review, they also want to feel productive, thus they start working on something else instead of twiddling their thumbs and waiting for a review.
Eventually, when reviewer(s) become available and provide feedback on the PR and/or ask for changes, the author of the PR is then not available because they are busy with something else. This delayed ping-pong communication can extend over several days/weeks and a couple of iterations, until the author and reviewer(s) converge on a solution they are both satisfied with and which gets merged into the main branch.
A good share of teams I had the chance to coach and advise in my career were at some point curious to try out ways of working that were different from async code reviews. One thing they were not sure about was how they were currently performing and what kind of metrics would help them understand that.
Also, having a background in eXtreme Programming (XP), Lean, and the Theory of Constraints, there were some metrics I was curious to see in the async code reviews world, so I decided to do a study. It started small but turned out to be a fairly extensive one, where I analyzed over 40,000 PRs from more than 40 very active repositories of product development teams doing PR-based async code reviews.
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