Craft Knife

Super Bowl Village People

2012-02-01T12:07:00.000-05:00

Matt loves football, I'm generally fairly down with being a tourist (even though I DON'T love football), and the girls just get dragged wherever we go, so off we went to hang out at the 2012 Super Bowl Village, just up the road in Indianapolis, one day recently.

You get a welcome right up front--

--and ample driving directions downtown--

--which is a good thing, because just in case you were relying on turn-by-turn driving directions from Mapquest, you should know that some of the streets have been, um, festified:

There are a lot of activities downtown that cost money, but are also pretty cool--even I would have liked to go to the Super Bowl Experience to see the championship ring collection, and I DEFINITELY would have done the zip line--but it being Matt's day, and being that Matt's favorite thing to do in the world, other than watch football, is not spend money, we stuck entirely to the many free activities (okay, I would have bought a zip line ticket anyway, but they were all sold out for the day by the time we walked over there).

We posed:

We watched the ice sculptures being made:

We watched participants struggle through the Hundred-Yard Hamster Wheel, cheering them on with the cry, "Be the hamster! Be the hamster!":

And we goofed around on the football field set up just outside the stadium, just under the zip line with people passing hollering overhead every minute or so:

We didn't do everything, no, but we did pretty much all the free stuff, our Matt had a good time on his idea of the perfect budget, and we got away with plenty of time to hit the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and Trader Joe's.

Super Bowl Village, done and done!

Coloring Pages and Fine Motor Skills

2012-01-31T10:38:00.000-05:00

We've been doing some "formal" handwriting study these past few weeks. It's true that this particular area of study is not so much child-led, since it comes from me noticing Willow struggle through writing something, only to end up frustrated that it took SO much work and was absolutely illegible, and taking the lead to insist that it's time. As a seven-year-old who's been reading since she was five, it's obviously been clear for years that her handwriting needs work, but she's never wanted to, and I've never pushed--until now. I'm feeling that now is finally the appropriate time, however, because when I did insist, Will did not argue.

My Will. Did not argue. The child who will throw a huge tantrum when I insist that she wear pants to the grocery store, or stop reading so that we can get ready to go to the ice cream shop, did not throw a tantrum about weeks and weeks of daily handwriting practice. Amazing and illuminating to behold, that is.

It's quite possible that Will simply didn't possess the level of fine motor skills necessary to pursue neat handwriting until recently, and pushing her would have been much more frustrating (for everyone!) and taken much longer to accomplish than it will now, when she's clearly mentally and physically ready. If she had been in public school, imagine how unhappy she and her kindergarten and first grade teachers would have been with each other!

I'll save the actual handwriting for another day (although if you're curious, I'm doing it myself and using Startwrite 6.0 to create custom copywork). What I wanted to tell you is that in addition to the copywork, I'm sneaking into the girls' days lots and lots of drawing--

--and lots and lots of coloring pages:

The kids are both thrilled about it because every day, they can tell me what kind of coloring pages they want--horses, dangerous mythical beasts, cats and dogs and unicorns!--and I'll find them online and print them out. For whatever reason, the kids haven't asked for and I haven't strewn coloring pages in a while, so they're novel again, and apparently hugely enjoyable, because the kiddos whip out pages and pages and pages each day.

Coloring pages? They're fine motor practice. My Syd, who's been scribbling with a perfect tripod grip since she could hold a chubby crayon, and has had neater handwriting than Willow for years now, colors in each little section with precision, but I've long noticed that Will prefers to paint great swaths of colors across the page, nearly regardless of borders and guiding lines. I've never pointed it out to her, but I've gradually noticed over the past few weeks, as we've been doing both handwriting copywork, drawing lessons with Daddy (more on that later, too), lots and lots of coloring pages, and also lots of these that I purchased back when Sydney was a toddler who didn't know her numbers up to ten (vastly easy for the children now, and yet they still come back into favor every now and then), that her coloring in has become more precise. Her work isn't yet what you would call "inside the lines," but it's approximately so, these days, and her crayon movements are shorter, closer together, and more conscious of detail.

Mentally and physically ready for detail, my kid. We're also starting book reports this week, because when you're ready for detail, you're ready to perform critical analysis, mwaa-ha-ha!

Dragon Dance the Rest of the Day

2012-01-28T15:23:00.005-05:00

What started out on Chinese New Year as simply the perfect opportunity to get out the dragon puppet kits that I purchased on clearance from some big-box arts-and-crafts store long ago, so that the girls could make them, along with red cake, as our little celebration--

--turned into something else. It turned into this face:

And this face:

And then a lot of this dancing, to some Chinese children's folk music tuned into on Spotify:

How magical these kids are, to take a cheap-o out-of-the-package activity that I basically tossed at them just to clean off my shelves, the most half-assed New Year's celebration ever, and to make it into magic, too.

For the rest of the day, those two dragon puppets were The Greatest Things EVER in my daughters' eyes. They flew, they danced, they roamed upstairs and down, they played out elaborate roles in their pretend sagas:

Needless to say, math and handwriting and geography waited just fine until the next day.

P.S. I haven't seen the dragon puppets since. No doubt they were tossed down at the children's feet the moment that I called for dinner or bedtime, and, like the Velveteen Rabbit on Christmas Day, utterly forgotten. Children's magic...so wild, so fickle, so fey.

Montessori Math: Building Big Numbers with Base Ten Blocks

2012-01-27T13:33:00.000-05:00

As we've casually, slowly, and happily meandered through our first couple of homeschool years, we've gradually evolved into ways that keep us happy, engaged, and productive. We're no longer the unschoolers that we were for over a year, and yet we still do not follow a curriculum, and, believing that play is still the most important work of my so-big seven-year-old and five-year-old, I still strictly limit the amount of formal, structured work that I ask my girls to perform each day.

In other words, no matter what you're doing with your own kids, you can feel free to agree that I'm doing it all wrong.

The girls' schoolwork is almost entirely guided by their interests--Ancient Egypt, werewolves, the desire to be in the next community fashion show, the desire to earn exactly enough money to buy herself a certain ipad app. I see my role as to surround the girls with all the resources at my disposal involving their interests, to guide them through formal study of their interests to deepen their knowledge (and thus appreciation) of these areas, and to set up and moderate as many hands-on, context-deepening, multiple-intelligence activities as is desired. We do this until their knowledge is, for the time being, sated, adding other areas of interest and focusing and re-focusing and coming back to former loves as the little ones wish.

Our number-building study came about when, for some reason, it kept coming about that Willow needed to add multi-digit numbers. She needed to add the tax to the list price of an ipad app to calculate how much money was going to come out of her piggy bank for it, then she had a lot of change to add up to see if she had enough, and when I did the math in front of her, talking her through the carrying the ten and such, it was mysterious and fascinating and something that must be learned!

We watched the Khan Academy video on addition with carrying for background, but obviously when it comes to actually mastering the skill, you've got to back that train on up. Here's the progression:

Before she learns the shortcut, Will needs to understand the concept of carrying tens and hundreds to the next place value.
Before she understands the concept of carrying tens and hundreds to the next place value, she needs to understand how numbers are built from hundreds and tens and units.

We've played with that second concept plenty, so that it was a comfy review for Willow before we moved onto the first concept (where we'll be for a while), but such regular review is very important, because not only does it continue to cement the concept, but it also aids contextualization--Will sees that multi-digit addition with carrying is built upon the concept that numbers have place value, and when we go back to this review again before we start subtraction with regrouping, she'll see it again.

To build numbers in a way that highlights their place value, in a way that internalizes the basic fact of each number, in a multi-sensory, hands-on way, you need two things: Montessori-style number cards, and a BIG set of Base Ten blocks. Base Ten blocks consist of one-centimeter-square unit blocks, ten-bar blocks that are ten centimeters long by one centimeter wide and represent "ten", hundred flats that are ten centimeters long by ten centimeters wide and represent "one hundred", and a thousand cube that's the size of a stack of ten hundred flats and represents "one thousand." We're happy with one regular set of Base Ten blocks, and an extra purchase of eight more thousand cubes, on account of I wanted nine of them total.

To start the number-building unit, Will cut out a few of the following math journal prompts, and glued them, one to a day, in her math journal:

Building Numbers With Base 10 Blocks Math Journal Prompts

She didn't do all of these prompts, but Sydney, when she finishes the patterning math stuff that's currently fascinating her and starts on number building, probably will.

Each day, Will reads the prompt in her math journal and gets out the appropriate supplies. To build the number 487, for instance, she first gets out our Montessori number cards. She chooses a 400 card, an 80 card, and a 7 card, and lays them out in her work area left to right. Next, she gets out her Base Ten blocks--

--and builds the number, with four hundred flats next to the 400 hundred card, 8 ten bars next to the 80, and 7 units next to the 7:

To finish, she stacks the number cards from biggest to smallest, and behold! The number appears:

We also own a set of Base Ten stamps, so that Willow can write the number and record how it's physically built right in her math journal:

On days when we didn't feel like dragging out all the blocks and the stamps and doing some elaborate math, Willow played with this Montessori number-building app to further reinforce her skills:

I like the step-by-step, physical building work involved in this activity because I want the concepts, and the ones that come beyond, to be something that the girls can mentally visualize. I think it helps them to actually, physically see what a thousand looks like, and to see that a big number is made up of so many thousands, and so many hundreds, and so on.

Here are the manipulatives that we're using:

Teach Your Children Algebraic Notation!

2012-01-26T13:41:00.000-05:00

Our family loves a casual game of chess. Matt and I are evenly matched--he's a more creative player, although I have a better structural knowledge of strategy--and Willow plays a great overall game for her age, although she hasn't yet mastered setting up a checkmate.

If you merely love a casual game of chess, then you likely don't need to learn algebraic notation, the method of recording the sequential chess moves of your entire game. If you find intellectual pleasure in chess, however, then you must learn algebraic notation, because I guarantee that you'll love what the knowledge of algebraic notation can open you up to. And if you have children who enjoy chess, then you must teach them algebraic notation, as well; not only is it a great precocious math skill, but otherwise they, too, are closed off from studying and mastering the game. The study of chess is full of just the sort of things that delight little children--tricky pawn tricks, secret strategies, patterns that carry you straight to checkmate if you only recognize them as they're unfolding, etc.

Here's a little of what you can do:

algebraic notation in action

Will's a reluctant writer, so don't tell her that this is writing practice! Finding a specific point on a grid is a crucial math skill, and translating the board's play to paper builds her three-dimensional visualization skills, which will be powerfully useful throughout her life, everywhere from performing high-level physics to nagivating her way on the highway one day.

I date-stamp her game notations just as I date-stamp all our schoolwork, and I have her write them in one spiral-bound steno notebook. When she's a more mature player, she'll be able to play these games back and alter the outcomes using better decision-making. Also--what a cute memento of a childhood!

replaying a game using notation

Of course, right now Will usually chooses to replay a game, using her notation, immediately upon its conclusion--this is called a Post-Mortem, and it's actually an important strategy in chess study, as you have the unique opportunity to study the board and recognize better/alternate moves while your reasoning for making the original moves is still fresh in your mind. In chess club or at a competition, your teacher or coach will go through the Post-Mortem with you, and it's also an opportunity for them to see where your skills stand--needless to say, this opportunity is lost if you don't know algebraic notation.

Will simply thinks it's fun to play both sides. Sneakily, the Post-Mortem also requires her to read and translate the algebraic notation back to the board, again strengthening her math, logic, and three-dimensional visualization skills.

re-playing famous games

Here, Willow and Matt are re-playing Bobby Fischer's The Immortal Game, with Matt (and later me, because Matt doesn't have the practice at algebraic notation that Will and I do and got overwhelmed, poor dear) calling out the moves using algebraic notation, and each player moving where the notation says to. This sounds dry, I know, but if you like chess it's actually really fun--the game moves fast, since you're not sitting and thinking up the moves yourself, and it's a GOOD game, because it's one that great players have played, with exciting tricks and tricky traps and fabulously bold machinations. Usually the game that you're reading through will be annotated, as well, to point out both the genius moves and the boneheaded ones, and it's fun to see.

When we do these re-plays, I always position Willow on the winning side, to give her practice at developing a checkmate. It's especially fun because, when a great game is playing out in front of you, even a little child can often see and exclaim over these genius or boneheaded moves--there was much outraged shouting during this particular match over Donald Byrne's dead-end strategy of simply moving his king back and forth in the endgame. It's an excellent model, because you can see how the center is developed and how the pawns get sacrificed and how truly excellent it is to fork your opponent's pieces. Several times, after Fischer did something amazing, we rewound the pieces and played it out again to better see how he set it up.

And yes, that's how we spent last Friday night. Do not judge.

studying chess problems

Will's not normally a kid who loves worksheets, but nevertheless these are fun for her, probably because of their novelty. Worksheets set up chess problems, from simple "What are the possible moves for the knight here?" to the more challenging "Find the mate in two moves" types. Since these worksheets abstract chess from the board-and-pieces manipulatives, they distill into some serious intellectual work--consider the difference between solving 19+24 with Base 10 manipulatives, and solving the same problem on paper! Many studious chess players can go one step further, and work these problems, and even entire chess games, entirely in their heads, the same way that you and I mentally solve 19+24.

Will's also a member of our community's scholastic chess club for children, which is nice because she can play with children her own age and has access to coaching that we otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. She's also a scholastic member of the USCF, which means that she receives a children's chess magazine quarterly and can earn rankings when she competes--a leg up in case she decides to get serious about competitive chess later in life. Sydney's not yet interested in chess, so it's divide and conquer so far: Matt attends chess club meetings with Will, and I accompany her to competition. I'm looking forward, though, to Sydney's inevitable decision to try chess out for herself--just think about how much more fun we'll have when this game is truly an activity that the entire family enjoys together!

Until then, it's something special that Will has with just her parents, which, of course, is also pretty great.

Along with several chess sets, including a magnetic travel set and a cheap chess board on which I wrote all the algebraic notations for easy reference, and Android and ipad apps for chess play, here are the chess resources that Will likes the best:

Here are the resources that Matt and I like the best, for use with Willow or for our own entertainment:

What I've Been Busy With

2012-01-25T22:07:00.001-05:00

Whew! Now just two more orders to make tomorrow, and then I'm going to do something entirely non-productive.

The Third Biggest Milestone--

2012-01-20T12:07:00.001-05:00

--lagging only behind toilet training and sleeping all night in their own bed (and, well, breathing on her own, but you can't count Syd milestones that way, lest you first count down a list of at least forty medical-related milestones, from 1. breathing on her own to 41. finally getting our insurance companies to cover her $200,000 hospital bill), is witnessing the children put on all their own snowgear, from snowpants with the elastic ankles and zipper up the front and overall straps, to snow boots that go under the elastic ankles, to sweaters that need to be buttoned or zipped, to the hat that's pulled on just right to keep hair out their eyes, to the coat that needs buttoning AND zipping, to both mittens, even that tricky second one that you have to put on with your other hand in a mitten!

Of course, it's handy to have a sister to assist you.

Chocolate Pumpkin Icebox Pie from the Pantry Stash

2012-01-19T13:20:00.000-05:00

I am saving money. Week by week, sometimes day by day, sometimes one challenging minute at a time, I'm setting aside bits of hoarded cash--a $3.99 ipad game that Willow wanted me to buy for her, but that I asked her to pay for herself. Plus tax, that's five dollars in my stash.

A trip to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, sans the typical visit to the gift shop. That's a good fifty bucks in the stash.

A choice not to order take-out at all last week. That's thirty bucks in the stash.

I'm saving money for a (hopeful) September trip to Disney World, if you must know. Yes, it's silly and expensive, but the girls and I want to go, and Matt is willing to indulge us, and so I'm saving money.

One of my most controversial money-saving experiments, and one that I'll have to evaluate for a couple more months before seeing if it's actually worth it, is attempting to do without one of our weekly trips to the grocery store each month. We spend approximately $150 a week at the grocery store, so that's $150 straight to savings every month if we can pull it off. The theory behind the practice is that we have ample food supplies in the pantries and the freezer--stuff that I bought at good price in bulk ages ago, stuff that I have a lot of and don't regularly use, stuff that got lost and then re-purchased and then found again during the Great Kitchen Remodel. I certainly don't need the excess, and I certainly don't like the clutter that an entire case of canned tomatoes, or three half-used jars of tahini, or a giant bag of powdered milk out of which approximately one quarter-cup has been taken, adds to the minimal storage in this house.

Wouldn't it be nice to save money AND declutter our food storage, and spend a week eating a nice canned tomato-pesto soup with homemade bread and last year's frozen corn, and chicken and dumplings from that frozen chicken we need to process, and DIY pizza with homemade dough and all those bits and bobbles of leftover cheeses, and barley with our stir fry one night instead of rice, and peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches for lunch one day, because why on earth do I have half a jar of marshmallow fluff in the back of the pantry?

That's the idea, anyway.

So with a can of pumpkin (minus the quarter-cup that I used making pumpkin-spice latte creamer), a cup of chocolate chips, and a pie crust that I found in the back of the freezer (I DO know how to make a pie crust from scratch, but Matt doesn't, and he's the one who made the pumpkin pie last Thanksgiving. Apparently frozen pie crusts come in pairs?), I whipped together one of our favorite desserts, the chocolate pumpkin icebox pie from Chocolate-Covered Katie. I often make desserts from Chocolate-Covered Katie, and I'm always pleased with them--they're healthy-ish, since they're minimally sweetened and made mostly from highly nutritious foods, they're delicious and satisfying, and they feel better in my tummy, probably because they don't have all the usual crap. I have a big sweet tooth, and it's highly UNUSUAL for me to be satisfied with desserts that aren't southern redneck rich, so these are extra happy foods.

The chocolate pumpkin icebox pie calls for lots of nutrient-dense pumpkin, a pie crust that you could make far more healthily than Matt's leftover Pillsbury pie crust, a cup of melted chocolate chips, whose sugar content you can monitor when you select the brand, and some extract (I used vanilla and orange extracts, because that way I could use up the last little bit in the orange extract jar, and I really liked the resulting flavor). It looks like this after it's set:

But less than an hour after all four of us came back from sledding, the entire pie looked pretty much like this:

I usually make hot cocoa from scratch these days, so I had no idea that we still had all these envelopes of powdered hot chocolate! Another no-groceries-week score.

Hands Off My Pinterest!

2012-01-18T19:32:00.000-05:00

Snowy Day

2012-01-17T19:43:00.000-05:00

Our part of Indiana has not yet been blanketed in snow this winter.

It's odd.

Right now, for instance, there's thunder and lightening outside, and the making of what would be several inches of snow by the afternoon...if the temperature was only twenty degrees colder. Which it usually is in January.

Odd, indeed. A little troubling, frankly.

We did have a light snowfall this past weekend, when the temperature WAS twenty degrees colder (see? Odd), and even though the snow didn't even completely cover the ground, it was very special for two reasons:

1) It was a weekend, and Matt was home with us. It NEVER snows on a weekend when Matt can be home with us, usually.
2) On one of their visits since last winter, the girls' Grandma Janie and Poppa brought them thin little plastic flexible sleds. Unlike our antique wooden sled behemoth, with actual metal runners, these little sleds don't actually require that much snow to work their magic.

Do you hear that laugh? That kid was AIMING for me!

Even the adults got into the act:

Even me, your normally dedicated behind-the-camera woman!

The girls' other favorite snowy day activity, when they're not sledding, is to explore the snowy playground--

--where slippery snow makes even your most run-of-the-mill playground slide vastly exciting--

--and where there's always just one last bit of virgin ground to dedicate to angel-making:

The girls will tell you that their favorite part of the day was the sledding, or the sliding, or how Momma fell on her butt, or the hot chocolate and chocolate pumpkin icebox pie that we came home to afterwards.

My favorite part of the day, however?

This guy. Always.

Dehydrated Orange Garland, Country-Style

2012-01-16T17:11:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, it's so countrified that it kind of makes me wonder when I'm going to start cross-stitching ducks in bonnets, but still...

Pretty, right? The view straight out my study window in winter is, shall we say...unlovely--something about the next-door neighbors and my sinking suspicion that it's their bathroom window, uncurtained, that I'm staring directly into through the bare branches of the rose of Sharon that sits between our houses. I've gotten into the habit lately of putting some pretty things up in the study window, then, pretty things that can be taken down when the rose of Sharon flowers in the spring, pretty things that look especially pretty when placed in a window, such as this dehydrated orange garland that the girls and I made, so lovely to look at when back-lit by the morning sun:

Our house is naturally so dark that blocking a window at all seems almost criminal, but until we find our dream house one day, with many bright windows and lots of roses of Sharon but absolutely no neighbors for acres and acres, this will do.

Seriously, though, a little curtain in front of a bathroom window? That's not hard!

Math We've Been Loving

2012-01-14T11:58:00.003-05:00

In this season, this week, this moment, we've been loving:

puzzles

Base 10 blocks and stamps

magnetic Fractiles (thank you, Santa!)

answering prompts and recording work in the girlies' math journals (thank goodness that they love these, because they've been incredibly effective!)

anything ipad app or CD-Rom. Anything.

doing chores to earn more money to buy more ipad apps (I'm a mean Momma, and I make them do the math to figure out how much tax they have to pay me back for each app, too)

computation--addition and subtraction and math facts up to ten!

computation--triple-digit addition and subtraction with borrowing and regrouping!

Khan Academy--finally I understand the concepts of borrowing and regrouping!

LEGOs

making recipes, almost always involving delicious sweetness (because who doesn't need a little more sugar in their diet?)

calendars--what's the day? What's the date? Is it still January? Will it be Spring tomorrow? No? Why not?

pogo stick and jump rope, and the oh-so-important Counting of the Jumps

Sometimes my girlies' minds are fairly quiet and restful--lots of quiet pretend play, lots of lounging with a lovey and listening to audiobooks, lots of looking at books and picture books and relaxing sorts of stuff. Lately, though, it's like both their little brains are exploding into new stuff all at once--it's lots of math, Ancient Egypt AND Ancient China AND Paleolithic peoples, Magic Tree House and Tales of the Frog Princess being played on two different CD players in two different rooms while one child also reads a different Tale of the Frog Princess and the other child works at a Dr. Seuss Kindgergarten CD-Rom, hiking and walking and hiking some more, swimming and ice skating and gymnastics and ballet, a playdate in the morning and a playdate in the afternoon, a documentary on the Great Pyramid before bedtime, the little one learning to read, the bigger one learning to borrow and regroup, making clay terra-cotta warriors and salt dough maps of the Fertile Crescent, chess club, and they both seem to have grown inches in days, so that all their brand-new fleece pants are just almost too short, sigh.

It's thrilling, and a privilege, a little startling, and a teeny-tiny little bit sad (where have my babies gone?) to watch these minds at work.

Tutorial: Baked Ham and Eggs

2012-01-13T13:54:00.002-05:00

Grease a muffin tin--standard, silicone novelty shapes, or my favorite mini-loaf pans--then add in one slice of ham, letting the edges stick up. Break one egg on top of the ham, and add spices, cheeses, or diced veggies:

Bake in a 350-degree oven for 20 minutes:

The baked ham and eggs made in muffin tins are perfect to put inside biscuits or English muffins. The novelty shapes are cute for holiday breakfasts. And the mini-loaf pans?

One hearty breakfast, one fabulous series of books:

One excellent start to an excellent day.

Our Comfy New Desk Chair

2012-01-11T10:44:00.000-05:00

I swear, I've been wanting to do this for years, and it just never happened. A mom friend borrowed the yoga ball for her pregnancy, and kept it to use with her babe while she was wee. We got it back deflated, and had misplaced the hand pump by then. We found the hand pump at some point, but had misplaced the yoga ball by then. Also, what to do with the giant office chair that already lived at the desk?

There was a room move (hey, THERE'S where we put the yoga ball!), a garage sale (goodbye, giant office chair!), and experiment with cheap-o metal folding chairs (ouch!), and finally, finally--

--my long-awaited yoga ball chair.

I'm in love for the following reasons:

It's comfy. It's vastly more comfy than the hard, chilly metal folding chair, and even more comfy than that giant office chair with the back that was a little too deep and the armrests that were a little too in the way.
It's active. I'm pretty heavy-set, and I'm always looking for ways to be more active. Bouncing a little, rolling a little, sitting up straight--it just feels better than shlumping in a chair.
It takes up MUCH less room. Just roll it under the table and boom--tidy!
The girlies love it. The yoga ball is more comfortable for them, too, and they're free to roll it off and play with it when I'm not using it, as long as they bring it right back to me when I need to sit at the desk.

It's getting a LOT of use, and so I really doubt that a yoga ball chair is ultimately going to be cheaper to own than that pricey office chair, because I've already resigned myself to the fact that an air-filled ball that gets this much use is bound to need regular replacing, but it's fun.

How fun is an office chair?

Tutorial: Circular Perpetual Calendar

2012-01-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

For kids of a certain age, the new year is the perfect time to begin a study of the calendar. My goals for this study are for both girls to memorize the sequence of months and a canonical poem relevant to each season (we've already got "Stopping by Woods" in our back pockets, so there's plenty of time to search for a springly-type poem). Will might not be interested in much more beyond that, although I have a list of books on calendar history and calendar cultural studies to sneakily sneak into her library book stash, but for my Syd, who's really enjoying her art right now and who could always use more practice with number sequencing, I have in mind a year-long project, really, having to do with creating a twelve-month calendar, working on one month, well...a month!

For starters, however, I wanted each girl to discover for herself the pattern of the months and the seasons, so together we made each of them her own circular perpetual calendar.

To make the calendar, you need a large piece of paper, the larger the better. We used some professional-quality artist's paper leftover from Matt's days as an undergrad majoring in art, but white posterboard, or a large piece of newsprint, would also be perferct.

Mark the centerpoint of your paper (it's fine to eyeball it), and draw a circle around that centerpoint. You want the circle to be large enough to give the seasons their due, so...a diameter of at least six inches or so? Use a plate as a template, perhaps, but one of the round ones, not the pointy-hat Halloween one that, yes, is STILL in circulation in our house.

Dividing the paper into twelve equal slices around a single radius can be tricky, so I created a template in InDesign, saved it as a pdf, and uploaded it to Scribd for you:
Circle With 12 Dividers

How fun is that? Scribd is basically my new best friend.

Download, print, and cut out this template, and match the centerpoint to the centerpoint of the circle you've already drawn on your paper. Now, here's the tricky part--using a ruler or yardstick to extend the lines of the template, draw these twelve divisions only from the perimeter of the circle you've drawn all the way to the edge of the paper. Do NOT draw these twelve divisions inside that central circle, or you'll mess up your seasons.

Draw these lines in black Sharpie, because you want them to be very visible, and make that very top vertical line extra dark--that's the yearly division between December and January.

Inside the circle, you now want to make four divisions, so that you can line up the four seasons with the months. The next tricky part comes from the fact that the seasons don't line up vertically and horizontally--winter includes December through February, you see, so the inner quadrants will look off-kilter. When you've figured out where your quadrants go, again use your rule to extend the relevant line from the perimeter of the central circle right through the middle of the paper and back again to the perimeter.

Only after I had completely finished these two outlines did I invite the girls to make their calendar. Using the black Sharpie, each girl first wrote the names of the seasons in the proper order in the proper space--

--and then added the months in THEIR proper places:

If you use watercolor paper or some other kinds of professional artist's paper (NOT posterboard), I personally think that these calendars would look simply glorious painted using wet-on-wet watercolor (if you check out my tutorial, please note that I've come to prefer wetting huge pieces of watercolor paper section by section with a sponge, as opposed to the dunking that we give small pieces). Neither of the girls were really feeling the watercolor groove, however, but neither was interested in coloring in those large spaces with pointy crayons or marker tips, either, and so I had another reason to be thankful that I went ahead one day and bought a set of Stockmar block beeswax crayons, even though I have big girls, not toddlers:

The result of the each girl's hard work is a calendar so special that it gets to live on permanent display, one in their shared bedroom, and one on the wall in our study/studio:

Will developed the neat little trick of color-coding her months, so that she could remember what fun holiday each held, such as this red and green December that reminds her of Christmas:

I have to say, however, that barely into January, this is already the season that I, personally, am most looking forward to:

And we haven't even had any truly gigantic snowfalls yet!

Tutorial: Perfect Paper Snowflakes

2012-01-06T11:53:00.000-05:00

Start with a perfectly square piece of paper:

We primarily use origami paper, kite paper, or 12"x12" scrapbook paper; you can also just cut a rectangular piece of paper to size.

Fold in half diagonally:

Turn the paper so that the point is on top (you don't really have to, but it makes the instructions easier to visualize):

Fold the triangle in half from point to point:

Turn so that the triangle again has its top point up top, and fold one corner over by about one-third (my fold isn't perfectly one-third here, which is fine):

And the other corner over where the first fold ends:

If you've done it perfectly, the end of that second fold will come right to the edge there, but honestly, it really doesn't need to be perfect. This is way NOT perfect, and it's still going to work.

Flip it over, and you'll see the flat line where you folded the corners over the middle of the triangle, and below that those two points sticking out. Cut off those points:

Cut squiggles and notches and doo-dads and fancies, being careful never to cut away an entire folded side:

You can cut away the entire bottom if you want, because there aren't any folds there.

Carefully unfold:

And snowflake!!!

Willow made a couple of paper snowflakes, and I made several, but Sydney? Oh, my goodness, Sydney made--dozens? Hundreds? See all that paper in the background:

Yeah, those are all HER snowflakes, and she clearly isn't done. She learned to do the folding almost independently, had a few tantrums when cuts didn't go the way she wanted (the kid finds dealing with frustration a major challenge, sigh), but mostly happily folded and cut and decorated away:

I like her idea here of drawing a pattern for the cuts she'd like to make:

I don't remember now if it worked for her, or if she still through a huge fit, but still...clever girl!

Especially if you use thin paper, such as origami paper or kite paper, you can stick these right to the window with a glue stick:

Which reminds me that we need to make some snow-white and Valentine's Day pink and red Waldorf window stars!

We used:

The Santa Saga and the Pogo Stick

2012-01-04T13:30:00.003-05:00

Sydney really, really, REALLY loves Santa. Because of this, right before Christmas I signed us all up for a breakfast with Santa session at our local YMCA--lots of Santa time, you can take your own photos, and there are pancakes. Whoopee.

Sydney was so excited to talk to Santa at this breakfast that she had trouble getting to sleep the night before, and when we woke up that morning it was nothing but, "I'm going to say hi to Santa! And I'll ask him what his reindeer like to eat! Do they like carrots? I bet they like carrots!", etc.

So off we trek, the girls in their Christmas finery, the grown-ups in their work-out gear (because after this breakfast business we might as well throw them in childcare and get a work-out in, since we're already at the Y and all). Before we can even sit down to our pancakes Sydney has just GOT to see Santa, so we walk right in, give the elf our names, and...

You know how sometimes you have A Really Big Moment coming up, and you're so excited for it, and you just can't wait, and then the Really Big Moment arrives, and you just...freeze?

Will's not really into Santa, so she had no desire to sit on his lap, and Sydney just...froze. Wouldn't sit on his lap, wouldn't talk to him, would hardly even look at him.

As soon as we left his presence, however, and found our seats at the breakfast table, she suddenly realized what she had done:

Poor kid.

Of course, the good thing about our breakfast with Santa is that there was breakfast, and there was Santa. We could have some pancakes and juice, get our blood sugar up, and then have another go.

While Sydney was busy stuffing her face with pancakes, I had a little murmured conversation with Willow. I reminded her that she was the big sister, and that her little sister looked to her to know how to react in new situations. I told her that I knew that she wasn't really interested in sitting on Santa's lap, but that Sydney really, really wanted to, and was just too nervous. I told Willow that if she did do it, if she walked right up to Santa and sat down on his lap and had a conversation with him, then her sister would see that it was okay, and she would sit on Santa's lap, too, and wouldn't it make her feel so good to see her sister do something that she really wanted to do? Willow agreed that this would make her feel good, so we had a high-five, and we had a plan.

My Willow is an amazing kid. She generally prefers not to speak with strangers, and always needs to be reminded before walking into a relative's home that I do require her to look into their faces and greet them and give them a hug (yes, I'm from the South, and it IS required, and she's lucky that I don't force her to kiss everyone, too, like all the true Southern kids have to). However, knowing that her sister was counting on her, knowing that her good example was necessary to help Sydney be brave enough to do something that she really wanted to do, Willow walked right up to Santa and sat down on his lap and had a conversation with him:

And then...so did Sydney:

Mind you, we do a list to Santa, but it's not one of those "You write it and send it in and then Santa's definitely going to bring it to you" deals. First of all, I don't have enough money for that sort of arrangement, second of all, I reserve the right not to buy crap even if my kid asks for it, and third of all, the only things on Sydney's list this year were:

a white kitten small enough to hold in the palm of her hand
a robotic unicorn that's big enough to ride
the longest hair in the world

Yeah... no. I tell Sydney (Willow doesn't care) that Santa knows what would make you the very happiest, and that's what he brings you. It's a lie, of course, because what would make Sydney the happiest would be a tiny white kitten, a robotic unicorn that she could ride, and to have the longest hair in the world, but what can you do? Science has only progressed so far.

And so, to be fair to what I'm about to tell you, I did know that this particular item was on Willow's list; I just had no intention of purchasing it for her. I'd already bought her professional-quality balloon-twisting supplies, and a big snap circuit set, and some fleece pants, because who doesn't love fleece pants?

Anyway...there we are, Willow sitting on Santa's lap having a little chat, Sydney looking on, absorbing it all and gathering her strength. The conversation between Willow and Santa goes like this:

Santa: "And what do you want for Christmas, Willow?"

Willow: "A pogo stick."

Santa: "A pogo stick?"

Willow: "Yep. I want one a lot."

Santa: "Okay, Willow, then I'll bring you one."

................what?

All I can say is thank GAWD for Wal-mart. It's the only place in town that had junior-sized pogo sticks in stock, and I know, because Matt called them all. We were thisclose to driving to Indianapolis, for pete's sake. Call this Reason #4 why lists for Santa suck.

Except.........

Santa was right. He was absolutely right on target this Christmas. Because of him, Willow received a present that I never would have actually bought her otherwise, and because of that--well, check out this home movie. No, I don't expect anybody except for this child's mother to watch her pogo for two full minutes, but do watch her for a few seconds (the kid's a natural), and then fast-forward to the last ten seconds or so, when I ask Willow how it feels to be the "world pogo champion of the world", and look at her face as she says those words:

Thank you, Santa.

Many, Many Christmas Gifts

2011-12-31T14:47:00.000-05:00

We're not one of those four-present families. Truly, it sounds sweet and meaningful and all, but I'll be honest with you--for me, Christmas has got to have more stuff than that.

Terrible, I know. I'm terrible.

I have a sort of unstable homeschool/craft supplies budget, taken entirely from whatever money that I earn from my freelance writing, etsy sales, and blog advertising each month. My tricky trick is that for the couple of months before Christmas, I sneak away the purchases made from that budget into the Christmas stash. Our wonderful family gifts the girls with a few wonderful toys (or science projects, or books, or art supplies, since I send my mother a selection of catalogs in mid-October)--

--and it's very exciting, as you can see--

--but other than a couple of small, sweet treasures that are just for loving--

--our gifts (and Santa's gifts, too, oddly enough...) are the kinds of homeschool enrichment supplies that little unschoolers love the best:

Look--Santa loves the Clickety Clack etsy shop as much as I do!

Other Christmas treasures included a big snap circuit electronics kit, a magnetism project set, sketch pads and a gigantic box of crayons, a nice new leaf press (from my mother), a miniature cupcake maker for the young chef (also from my mother), an art sticker book, magnetic pattern blocks, real clown make-up, a pogo stick (much, MUCH more on that later) and this most special gift, something that I just knew would be perfect for my big girl:

A thrilling new hobby, yes?

To their credit, my generous girls have always been just as excited about seeing others open the presents they've made or chosen for them as they are opening their own. In particular, this year I let the girls choose whatever they wanted for their father (subtracting their own outrageous purchases from my own budget for him, ahem). Each girl chose for him one ridiculous flashlight, one giant bag of Twizzlers (EACH!!!), and one LEGO set--they know him THAT well. I love listening to the selling points of this pricey LEGO set:

Ah, five-year-olds...

My own favorite part of Christmas morning is witnessing how well those little girls love each other, whether it's spending a very long time decorating a present with an elaborate picture of a dragon, for the girl who loves dragons--

--to the other one spending her own money to buy her sister a very unusual gift that's just right:

And yes, yes it begins crazy with the presents, but from the Game of Thrones box set for Matt (which I immediately stole from him) to the picture book about weather for Sydney to this brand-new book from Willow's Grandma Janie and her Poppa--

--this is always how Christmas morning ends in our family.

At least until the feast!

An Overhead Projector Christmas Tree

2011-12-28T10:51:00.000-05:00

Probably anyone who owns an old-school overhead projector knows how much free play they get. Sure, we use the projector for map tracing, copywork of all sorts, and all sorts of math and science activities, but with just the clear plastic sheets and a nice set of overhead markers, the kids dream up all sorts of fun play--during a playdate a couple of weeks ago, one little girl drew at least a dozen scenery pages on the plastic sheets and then projected an entire play that she'd just made up, using her fingers as all of the characters.

If you have any other accessories, such as translucent pattern blocks, then you're perfectly set up. I bring out the overhead projector as an actual party activity, especially for little siblings or friends on the younger side of the guest list, but my own girls will still spend entire quiet mornings or afternoons engrossed in play with the projector.

Only rarely, outside of helping out with some academic activity related to one of their areas of interest, do I set up an actual "activity" involving the overhead projector, but I was so delighted to see on Play at Home Mom that some other parent besides me is ridiculously fond of a projector that I invited Syd to create the overhead projector Christmas tree from that site.

She drew a tree on a clear plastic page:

She set the page on our projector, and decorated it with translucent geometric shapes:

She enjoyed its projection on the wall--

--before taking it all apart and doing it again!

Unfortunately, we only have a small amount of wall space suitable to using the overhead projector in our living room, although as wall space it is ideal, since you can tape a large piece of paper onto it and copy from the projector:

One day, however, the finished basement playroom will become a place that the children do not fear to tread (something about a monster with lots of arms, and one of them is really long and has a pincher on it...), and therefore a place where it gets more use than as a dumping ground for out-of-favor toys, and then, I tell you, THEN we'll have tidy shelves of art supplies and books and toys, and plenty of room in the middle for active play, and a TV so that I have room to use my old-school workout videos...

...oh, and a much larger wall space for the overhead projector.

For this project, we use:

The Secret to Life's Happiness is Baked Doughnuts

2011-12-27T13:19:00.002-05:00

Because doesn't this just look like perfection?

Willow has made the baked doughnuts from Knead It, Punch It, Bake It!: The Ultimate Breadmaking Book for Parents and Kids a few times now, and every time I swear they turn out tastier! This time we refrigerated the dough overnight before rolling it out, simply because Willow ran out of time to finish that evening, and I do believe that it made the dough much easier to work with--less sticky, easier to cut, etc.

But of course, who cares about the baking instructions? Everybody knows that the real treat is dunking them in melted butter, rolling them in cinnamon-sugar--

--and munching them up while they're still warm:

Fabulous, yes?

Even better that they're made by the seven-year-old.

Tutorial: Popsicle Stick Christmas Ornaments (or Wands!)

2011-12-25T20:30:00.000-05:00

When the holidays become most bustling--to and fro to winter gymnastics camp, to and fro to playdates with schooled children who are temporarily out of school, to and fro for last-minute bits and bobbles, to and fro to the library to appease the child who CANNOT take a major car trip without several dozen novels, back to gymnastics camp for the winter show, shitfire we have to make one more trip to the grocery store for cookie dough and oranges, not to mention, you know, the TEN-HOUR car trip--that, to me, at least, is when simple Christmas crafts are the most magical. Everyone settles down, everyone slows down, everyone relaxes back into the home and back into the process, not the product, of the winter holidays.

While, due to the bustling, some of our most favorite Christmas crafts, such as baking cherry bread with Daddy and decorating gingerbread houses with me, have actually been relegated to post-road trip New Year's activities, we made the time every day to come together for some simple special activities every day, such as these painted and glittered popsicle stick ornaments.

To start, you'll need plain popsicle sticks and glue--yes, you can use plain white glue for these, but you'll have to let them dry for several hours before you paint if you do, and if you use hot glue, you'll be painting five minutes later. A Star of David is two triangles--

--with one upside-down and on top of the other:

A tree is one triangle and one stick--

--placed vertically from top to bottom:

Of course, after an ornament or two, the girls were done with that nonsense and fully focused on popsicle stick wand-making. This is why we only have a half-dressed tree at the best of times.

After the glue is dry on the popsicle stick creations, paint them--

--and then, while the paint is still wet, sprinkle the glitter right on:

Wait, did I say sprinkle? I meant douse. Liberally.

When the paint is dry, hang up your obligatory two ornaments onto the tree, and then spend the rest of the evening wielding your wand:

She was turning me into something not very complimentary, alas, on account of I had just told her that it was time for bed. Such is life for a young wizard...

Candy Christmas Trees

2011-12-20T12:09:00.001-05:00

We're doing gingerbread houses just as a family this year, so in lieu of last year's larger gingerbread house party (which was well worth it, as everyone had a fabulous time, but did require me to pre-bake and assemble a half-dozen gingerbread houses), this year the girls had over a little buddy and his mama (my buddy) to make far simpler candy Christmas trees.

The Christmas trees really are quite simple, requiring only waffle cones that Willow trimmed with kitchen scissors to sit evenly upside down, green frosting (I used white chocolate melted in our fondue pot and dyed green, similarly to what I do with gingerbread houses, but I quickly realized when the kids all got to work that this was major overkill), and loads of yummies.

They were messy--

--a little ugly (and yes, of course, that's mine below that I'm calling ugly)--

--and absolutely wonderful.

Beeswax Ornaments: Honey on the Tree

2011-12-17T19:55:00.000-05:00

For a couple of days it seemed the crafts-only crock pot was always hot, keeping beeswax melty, spreading that honey scent throughout the entire house, while we all took our turns (many turns!) making beeswax ornaments for our Christmas tree, and the trees of our family and friends.

So simple, so satisfying, so sweet(!) to make:

To make your own, check out my beeswax and fabric scrap ornament tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Caution!!! Elves at Work!

2011-12-15T13:57:00.000-05:00

with beeswax

and silicon molds

fabric scraps

and a sewing machine

bias tape

and waffle cones

red and green M&Ms

and cardstock

kite paper

and glue

a guillotine paper cutter

and FIMO clay

Photoshop

and digital scrapbook supplies

Sharpies

and, of course, a well-used box of

Christmas is busily, happily, (and quite inefficiently) being crafted. And photographed, and written about, of course--but not for now! Everyone knows that Christmas craft revelations have to come AFTER Christmas!

Beeswax Paper in Bee Culture Magazine

2011-12-12T15:32:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite things about writing for Crafting a Green World is the fact that I retain ownership of my own work. That means that when the editor of Bee Culture magazine, having seen my beeswax paper tutorial posted at Crafting a Green World, writes me to ask if I could submit that tutorial to their magazine for publication, I may say yes!

I wish that getting my work in print was ALWAYS this easy!

On Horseback

2011-12-09T17:42:00.001-05:00

I have a mental list of practical skills that are, while not actually so much practical in the strictest sense of the word, are nonetheless skills that are, rather, useful to have, since they involve activities that we may be called upon to participate in off and on throughout our lives on a casual basis, and that can also be quite dangerous if we participate without knowing what the hell we're doing.

Short and incomplete list:

lighting a bonfire, fireplace, or grill
swimming
ice skating
shooting a rifle or pistol
using a chain saw, wood chipper, or other large power tool
driving a stick shift
steering a boat
horseback riding
using a pocket knife

Sure, ice skating is more merely painful, and absolutely no fun, if the first time you've ever been on the ice is in a group outing with some of your buddies from college, but I know of plenty of idiots who got themselves seriously injured because they didn't know how to light a fire properly (hint: it doesn't involve a Dixie Cup full of gasoline), and I know of one wonderful child who was killed his first time on horseback, on a poorly-run, unsafe trail ride at a state park in Missouri that his parents didn't realize was unsafe because they were unfamiliar with horses, too.

But forget the fear-mongering--call my list, instead, a life skills bucket list, or a list of accomplishments for the well-rounded person. Whatever you call it, and lengthy intro aside, what I am wanting to tell you is that my little girls were basically living the dream last Friday:

First horseback riding lesson? Mark it off the bucket list, and you might as well just go ahead and skip Christmas after that, because it does not even compare.

The girls' horseback riding class at PALS featured a well-fitted helmet that each child wore at all times when around the horse (not just when upon it)--

--and a dedicated side-walker for each child, and a second walker holding a lead rope:

In addition, since PALS is primarily a riding-therapy program for people with special needs, the horses are invariably, calm, kind, patient, and well-trained. The absolute only thing that I had issue with is that they didn't require students to wear a heeled boot (just a closed-toe shoe), but I put my kids in heeled boots anyway, so no problem.

The girlies learned how to mount their horses, how to start them walking (with Willow's lazy horse Splash, this involved a big kick!), how to hold the reins and balance--

--how to steer--

--how to stop--

--how to hang on when they work up a little speed--

--how to take off their tack and groom them and make them comfy--

--how to talk about them using all the right words, croup and forelock and barrel and such--

--how to wait patiently, still and quiet--

--and how to put away all their tack and gear in just the right place, even if it's REALLY heavy:

Along with always looking out for things that I want the kiddos to know, I'm always looking out for sports and activities that have value for building them into the types of people that they'll want to be.

Forget the discipline, patience, affinity with another creature, willingness to grub and muck stuff that are of such value--it took a total of one lesson before the girls informed that they want to grow up into the type of person who was good with horses!

Well, okay.

Rainbow Waffles = Nom

2011-12-07T20:14:00.000-05:00

Near-ish lunchtime the other day, the girlies seemed hungry for a big lunch and an elaborate project--you know, that sort of wandering, opening and closing the refrigerator, declaring that they want something to eat but all suggestions are deemed unacceptable, wanting me to do "something" with them but they don't know what, kind of behavior.

Inspired by these rainbow pancakes from my Our Favorite Family Foods pinboard, but personally finding standing at the stove and cooking pancake after pancake to be the worst form of torture, I re-translated the recipe into rainbow waffles (because I find standing in front of a waffle iron and cooking waffle after waffle to be a very slightly milder form of torture).

The girls had a gorgeous time dyeing the divided waffle batter:

I know, Sydney looks totally beat up in that above photo. We'd gone to a pumpkin patch the day before (Freeman Family Farms, I'm looking at YOU!), where they'd set up a little barnyard petting zoo, in which there was a miniature Shetland pony, who bit my child ON. THE. FACE.

Yeah, we'll be visiting a different pumpkin patch next year. Anywho...

Since I loathe using the waffle iron, and I happen to have, if I do say so myself, two quite competent children, I set the waffle iron up on the living room table instead of the kitchen counter, demonstrated its use to the little people, and let them have at it. There were a couple of burned fingers, sure, but the kiddos? They LOVED it:

They did themselves a pretty darn good job, too:

Since my other thing about waffles is that I refuse to believe that they contain enough nutrition or protein or filling power to sustain a meal, I used my break from the waffle iron to cook up the remaining parts of a big ole' breakfast:

We've got yogurt, and bananas, and bacon, and eggs (cooked with a little bacon grease, obviously), and waffles with maple syrup. When I showed the girls how to use up the dregs of each bowl of colored batter to make a few last super-rainbow waffles, you could tell that they totally wished that they'd thought of doing that for every single waffle they'd made.

That's a giant breakfast on my plate there, right?

Well, if you think that's giant, you should see my five-year-old's breakfast:

Well, it was breakfast, and then morning snack, and then lunch, and then afternoon snack, but you get the idea.

And that's the story of how I no longer have to be the one who works the waffle iron!

Saturday Morning, Baking Bread

2011-12-06T21:26:00.001-05:00

add honey from the honey farm

to the bowl with yeast and warm water, and set aside.

in a separate bowl, measure bread flour

and salt

mix by hand

Not literally!!!

Oh, okay...literally

pour in the frothy yeast mixture, and mix some more

knead for ten long minutes, to make your muscles strong

Let it rest, let it rise, punch it down, let it rise.

pat it into greased loaf pans

Let it rest, let it rise.

bake it in the oven for a long, LONG time

I make bread often, and when I'm solo, I make my bread solely using the easy five-minute method.

But that, of course, is because when I bake bread solo, I only care about the product, those rolls or that pizza crust or the next day's sandwiches and toast.

When my little girls ask to bake bread, they're not asking to bake bread because they want to eat bread (at least not solely). They're asking to bake bread because they want to measure, and mix, and taste honey and salt on their tongues, and sift bread flour between their fingers, and knead bread dough with all their strength, and warm their feet on the oven door while they watch their loaf rise, and burn their fingers because they just can't stop themselves from touching that brown crust before it's cooled.

Baking bread...when I tell you that it's the process, not the product, when I seethe so hard that my heart speeds up as I watch a dad take the glue bottle from his daughter's hand and micro-manage her craft project at the library, when I let my girls make big messes and big mistakes, when they draw on themselves with permanent marker, when they do a terrible job of brushing their hair, when we spend an entire day together and don't "do" anything...well, then that's when I want you to think about baking bread. Sure, that bread that my girls baked tasted delicious, tasted even more delicious to me because they'd baked it, but that wasn't really the point of the activity, was it?

The point of the activity was the process.

P.S. We use the bread recipe from here, and we love it:

Pumpkinbear on Pinterest

2011-12-01T10:21:00.001-05:00

Do you pin?

Oh, my goodness, do I pin!

I have my own little Pumpkinbear Pinterest land right here:

On it you can see my seemingly millions of boards, all neurotically categorized.

I have board for projects organized by theme:

I have holiday boards, with projects and recipes and crafts and homeschool unit studies:

I have recipe boards, some for recipes that I want to make--

--and some for recipes that I make all the time:

I have boards for projects that are imminent to-dos:

I have homeschool boards:

I have idea boards:

I have boards for projects organized by material:

And those aren't even ALL my boards.

Also, because I'm a big nerd with a library science degree, I curate my boards, which means that I go through them, perfect the links, cross-reference them to relevant boards, and edit the commentary to be descriptive, accurate, and informative.

I can't believe how useful Pinterest has been for me. I use it to brainstorm for homeschool activities within the girls' areas of interest, and for holiday projects and kid crafts. I try new recipes from Pinterest (I've got these cranberry sauce meatballs in the crock pot right now!), and if I like them, then I move them to my Favorite Family Foods pinboard so that I can find them again easily.

Didn't people used to use file cabinets for stuff like that? Geez, wasn't that a fire hazard?

Triple War!!!

2011-11-30T13:56:00.001-05:00

Of course I HAD to take a photo!

Tutorial: Fat Quarter Cloth Napkins

2011-11-29T11:51:00.001-05:00

If I could dress the girls in raincoats at dinnertime, with drop cloths under their chairs, and a Roomba and a medium-sized dog to clean up after them, I would.

If I could get them to stop wiping their fingers on their shirts, or their bare chests, or the underside of the table, I would think fewer evil thoughts quietly inside my head, I have no doubt.

I'm currently, slowly, building up our collection of nicely-sewn cloth napkins to use at mealtimes. I'm not really into white linen, though--my favorite napkins are ample, double-sided, and made from mismatched quilting cotton. I like each napkin to be different, and I like to use fat quarters to make them, so that they sew up quickly and end up identical without me having to measure. I like to have a lot, though, because I like to wash them often, and so every time I make a new set of four and put them into the dinner rotation, it's not long before I think to myself, "We could really use at least one more set of napkins!"

If I happen to be at the store when the fat quarters are on sale, I'll have the girls help me pick out a selection to make a few more napkins, and Willow is happy to help sew them.

First, you have to wash and dry and iron your fat quarters, then match them up. I like to use two different, but complementary, prints for each napkin, but the girls are the most fond of novelty prints and combinations that in no way match or look good together, but hey, if it gets them to use their napkin...

Match up two fat quarters, then lay them out, right sides together, on a cutting mat, as lined up as you can get them. With a clear plastic ruler and a rotary cutter, square up the fabric by trimming all four edges, using the gridded cutting mat to make sure that you've got right angles at all four corners:

Pin the napkin all the way around--

--leaving about six inches that will be open in the middle of one side. I use chalk to mark the ends of that unsewn part:

Starting at one chalk mark, sew all the way around the perimeter, making good turns at corner, and stop when you get all the way around to the other chalk mark:

Clip your corners!

Use the opening to turn the napkin right side out, and use a chopstick or an unsharpened colored pencil to poke out the corners. Iron the napkin flat, turning the raw edges of that unsewn opening to the inside and creasing them so that they're even with the hemmed-and-turned rest of the napkin.

Edge stitch around the entire perimeter of the napkin, catching the folded-under raw edges of that unsewn part and sewing it shut as you go:

These fat quarter napkins are so big that I like to quilt them a little, so that they stay flat and properly shaped in the wash:

We currently have enough napkins to last us about half the week, which is technically plenty since I do laundry at LEAST twice a week, but...it's not enough. I really need at least one more full set!

For breakfast and lunches, I sew my lunchbox cloth napkins, which are about a quarter of the size, and I definitely need more of those, because the girls are ALWAYS eating, and it's always something messy. Since they generally help themselves to their own meals during the day, my dream is to sew a couple of rainbow sets of lunchbox napkins for each of them, so that each girl has a fresh napkin for each meal, color-coordinated by day, that she can put into her own laundry, which she does herself.

While I kick back on the couch, eating chocolate and watching "Days of Our Lives," of course...

Crayon on Candle, Melted

2011-11-28T15:16:00.001-05:00

The morning began (as many mornings around here do) with encaustic art:

It soon became apparent to me, however, that on this day, Willow was more interested in the reactions of the candle and crayon to each other than she was in their effect on the canvas surface, so I showed her how to drip some wax onto the canvas and use it like glue to mount her candle, at which point she could experiment more closely with her specific interest:

The rolled beeswax candle IS really fascinating to play with in this way--sometimes the melted crayon pours down between the rolls, so that you can vaguely see it through the translucent layers of the candle, and sometimes it pours down the outside, and layers add to layers, etc.:

Will burned that candle down to the ground, let me tell you, and many unwrapped crayons lost their lives, but the intuitive knowledge that she's gaining of the math of how fluid flows and the rate at which fire burns, and of the chemistry of heat reactions and changes in states of matter, and the practice that she's getting in problem-solving and meeting inquiry, not to mention how her mind and body are experiencing the ego-less pleasure of immersive free play, and the contemplative state of being of watching soothing, smooth, unpredictable reactions--well, that's a morning quite well spent!

P.S. I have a round-up of crayon crafts that DON'T involve coloring over at Crafting a Green World today, if you're interested.

Practical Life: Using a Washboard

2011-11-27T10:48:00.001-05:00

Okay, these days using a washboard probably isn't considered so much practical life as it is hands-on history, but if you've got anything in your wardrobe that prefers to be hand-washed, or washed on the delicates setting in the washing machine, then I assure you that a washboard is the way to get those clothes the cleanest while keeping them the soundest with the least expenditure of effort.

And so, when the baby's ballet togs begin to look dingy, I send her into the bath with leotards and tights, a bar of my hot-process soap, and the washboard:

I generally do a quick pre-wash and rinse of the dirtiest parts of the uniform myself--the feet and knees of the tights, the belly and butt of the leotards--using a bar of Fels Naptha and the washboard in the sink, before passing it all over to the kid, and in the past I would give each item a second rinse, as well, as she passed it to me, before wringing it out and hanging it over the shower curtain rod, but this last time Syd had rinsed everything so well that I didn't find any extra suds, so next time that's just one less job that I'll have to do for her!

I think that I could hand-wash each of Syd's ballet uniform pieces in a couple of minutes, flat, and the fact that Sydney takes an hour in the tub hand-washing them just means that she enjoys the job so much. In fact, I'm imagining that in the summer, when she can take the washboard outside with a bucket, a bar of soap, the garden hose, and the clothesline, I could probably ~~trick~~ permit her to wash all our white T-shirts and handkerchiefs and what-have-you's independently out there and hang them right up to dry.

Don't you love it when the play that is a child's work is actual, you know, WORK? I sure do!

Tutorial: Melted Crayon Canvas Art

2011-11-25T20:25:00.001-05:00

At any given moment, I have on the back burner easily two dozen projects that are kid-centric, just waiting for a willing kid or two to come and do them--models of the Nile seeded with chia so that they really grow, a working model rocket just waiting to be put together, a bag full of wood scraps to paint and glue into sculptures, a DIY sailor's valentine kit, instant snow powder, UV-sensitive beads, embroidery, BINGO, you name it. Normally, a kid or two chooses something, and I come along for the ride, making my own acid-base eruption or dipping a few leaves in beeswax, myself, before I back off and let the kids explore.

Sometimes, however, we do a project because I want to do it. That is, I see a project online or wherever that looks so awesome that I want to do it myself, so I set it up and start working, and then a kid or two comes by and sees me and says, "I want to try!" and I set it up for them, too.

Such was the case with the melted crayon canvas art that I've been seeing around, a simple encaustic art activity (and you know how we love encaustic art!) that just looks so cool that as soon as I saw it, I wanted to try it myself.

You will need:

stretched canvas (I pick these up every now and then when I can find a good price, and keep them in the closet until needed)
crayons (need I even admit that I over-buy these when they go on back-to-school sale? I'm betting you could have figured that out about me already)
glue (I use E6000 for my own art, but my impatient girls both used hot glue, and the heat gun didn't melt it later)
embossing heat gun (you probably don't think that you need one of these, but they're surprisingly useful. I've used mine dozens of times, and never yet for embossing!)

Choose crayons that still have their wrappers, although, as Sydney discovered, you can break them or cut them to size. Keeping the glue on the wrapper, NOT the crayon, glue the crayons to the canvas wherever you want them. Both Willow and I chose straight lines at one edge of the canvas, the better to show off the melting wax--

mine

and Willow's

--but Sydney awesomely glued her crayons just every which way:

Set the canvas propped up on a table, with newspaper underneath it to catch the drips. You want the canvas tilted somewhat, so that the wax can leave a trail and not just fall plop onto the newspaper, but you don't want to tilt the canvas too much (or do you? It's your art!), or the wax won't go far before it re-solidifies.

The embossing heat gun blows its hot air, so you don't want to hold it too close to the crayons, unless you LIKE splashing molten wax on yourself (although that's a thing, isn't it? Well, now you know what TO do, I guess). It won't take you long to discover the sweet spot in which the heat gun melts the crayons just right, and to figure out how to hold the heat gun to manipulate the wax:

Sure, it looks cool and all, but it's hard to get a reading of exactly HOW cool all that brightly-pigmented, different colored wax looks as it's melting, so I made you a video!

I know, right? You're totally sold now, but I'm still going to show you how great our finished canvas pieces look:

This, though, is my favorite part:

The texture of the finished piece IS fascinating, and I love watching my daughter explore the tactile dimension of her finished art.

So that's our new artwork! And now on to that chia seed Nile...

Felted Wool Sweater Christmas Trees

2011-11-23T17:37:00.001-05:00

New in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, one of our favorite handmade holiday decorations: felted wool sweater Christmas trees--

I use wool sweaters that I felt, and then I overdye them green--the color doesn't catch on all of the sweaters, but it catches enough that the trees all match, while retaining the obvious juxtaposition of different colors and patterns:

The day after Thanksgiving: that's the day that our own felted wool forest will come to life here at home!

Homeschool PE: Jumping Rope

2011-11-22T10:06:00.001-05:00

The girls have been transitioning into some new passions lately: fairy tales, particularly princess stories, for Syd, and for Willow--dragons, Garfield, and board games of all sorts. Money math and Ancient Egypt, while still being explored somewhat, are less all-consuming now, the girls haven't read a Rainbow Magic book in weeks, and they've both rediscovered their gigantic collection of those little Safari Ltd. animal toys and play with them for hours daily. With my encouragement, both kids have been willing to start trying out nature journaling a couple of days a week and math journaling most days. Willow is back into chess, and she recently asked if I could request more dinosaur books from the library--whew!

Another new-ish passion: jumping rope:

Willow was the instigator on this one, but I also LOVE taking turns with her, as jumping rope is an excellent cardio activity, and Sydney--

--well, Sydney is NOT going to stop until she gets it.

Another thing that I love about homeschooling is that an area of interest isn't just one academic field here--instead, it's everything. That jump rope may be an excellent cardio, large muscle conditioning, hand-body coordination tool--

--but it's a stepping-off point for memorizing jump rope rhymes, and learning jump rope games played around the world, and me figuring out how to make/procure a bigger double-dutch rope so that we can do Cinderella Dressed in Yella. That jump rope is also ROPE, and with rope, and hours to explore it, amazing things can be discovered, such as how to finally make use of the playground's zip line, which is too high up for a little kid to reach:

Also at the park during this time were not only a pesky kid that the girls played with for a while, grew weary of, and then practiced how to gently fend off (ah, the life lessons learned on the playground!), but also, amazingly by coincidence, a group of four older boys, perhaps around age 13 or so, who also had rope. They were tying a loop into one end of this rope, tossing it around the top beam of the swing set, and then taking turns stepping into the rope and being pulled all the way up to the top beam by the other three boys. My girls watched them, entranced and highly impressed.

And at the hardware store later that evening, shopping for concrete, tile grout, and a new oven, I bought the girls their own nice, loooong length of rope, a metal pulley to fit the rope, and a carabiner to fit the pulley. Let the games begin!

Me and Willow and Home Education Magazine

2011-11-20T19:42:00.001-05:00

Here we are!

Here's my article that I wrote for Home Education Magazine about the peculiarities and particularities of parenting my precocious little kid. It's in the October-November 2011 issue of Home Education Magazine (ask for in a bookstore or library near you! ahem...), whose production was delayed, and so the magazine has only been on the newsstands for perhaps a couple of weeks (Remember how I had an article accepted for publication into Craft, and then Craft went under? When it looked like HEM wasn't going to make it to this issue, Matt started calling me the black widow of the magazine industry).

Will is pretty blithe about her utter stardom--since she's recently discovered how awesome dragons are, it's rare that she looks up from her latest dragonology encyclopedia (yes, seriously, they make them) to offer any insights or opinions about much other than dragons, or eagle nests, or chess strategy, or Angry Birds, but my little Sydney has already begun asking me when I'm going to write a whole story about HER.

I do have a little something in mind, actually...

Practical Life: Lighting a Match

2011-11-18T13:01:00.001-05:00

Here's a simple, fun, useful, educational activity that (bonus!) kept the girls intensely engaged for nearly an entire morning recently:

I did require the girls to close the matchbox before lighting a match on it, and to keep the matchbox that they were using separate from the other matchboxes that we have, and to stay in one specific area where I knew where they were and that there wasn't anything particularly flammable nearby.

However, I let them practice until they could light a match nearly on the first try, and I let them experiment with lighting more than one match at the same time, and with lighting a match held by a sister with an already burning match, and with how long they could hold their lit match, and with whether they wanted to shake it or blow it out, and I let them panic and drop lit matches onto the ground, and burn their fingers a bit, and they went through at least four entire boxes of matches, and had themselves a wonderful time.

I did the same exact thing when I was their age, only I was hiding in the backyard with my grandmother's stolen cigarette lighter...good times, that.

Six Weeks Early, Five and a Half Years Later

2011-11-17T12:44:00.001-05:00

six weeks early

Actually, that picture was taken a little over a week after Sydney's precipitous, premature birth. We didn't bring a camera on that quickie weekend road trip to visit some of Matt's relatives, and it simply never occurred to me to ask Matt's extended family for a camera so that I could take photos of our unexpected baby girl.

Some dear friends of ours drove ten hours to bring us some things from home, using a house key that Matt overnighted to them the day that Sydney was born, digging around in our basement for the Rubbermaid bins of baby clothes that I hadn't even begun to sort through. When they stopped by to visit us, they brought their camera! It was the kindest, most thoughtful, most generous thing that's ever been done for me.

Sydney took a turn for the better right before our friends arrived (oh, the turns that a preemie will take! Better, then worse, then better, then much worse...I was terrified to leave her alone), so they didn't have to see the CPAP that took up her whole face, and in this photo you can't see the needles stuck in her body or the wires glued all over her. I regret not having photos of my labor to show her now, but I don't miss having those first days of her life on film--having the memories haunts me enough.

five and a half years later

Is it indulgent to have a surprise half-birthday party for a five-and-a-half-year-old? Sure.

Is she worth every simple pleasure, every indulgent little surprise, five and a half years after she needed a machine to help her breathe, and a tube down her throat to feed her, and a team of neonatologists to treat her, and a $200,000, three-week NICU stay?

Oh, you bet she is. I'd give that kid a flying pink unicorn for her half-birthday, if only I could get my hands on one, I'm so thankful to have her.

Today is World Prematurity Day. Who are you thankful to have?

Sydney Masters the Hundred Grid

2011-11-16T10:49:00.001-05:00

We're big fans of the hundred grid around here--it's such a versatile math tool! You can use it to help you add and subtract, with skip counting, with coin calculations. Because Sydney likes puzzles, she also occasionally enjoys using our big laminated hundred grid with some overhead transparency number tiles that, even though I bought them at different times and places, happen to be exactly the same size--score!

I especially like the transparency of the overhead tiles, because if a child is still working on number recognition (and, as I learned while assisting Sydney through the most tedious three games of BINGO ever played at their 4-H club holiday party this week, we ARE still working on number recognition!), then that transparency allows instant self-correction.

During our most recent play with this board, I witnessed Sydney unlock one of the patterns implicit in the number grid. No more random seek-and-find for her--watch this girl go!

I was pretty thrilled that I was there to see it happen.

Syd has a lot of focus, and although she wearied a bit of the task near the end, she kept working, because she wanted to see it through:

Success!

Pretty proud kid, right?

We have an old garage sale BINGO set of our own, and I think that we'll be playing a lot of fun at-home BINGO games this week, because not only is Syd clearly ready for number recognition up to 100, but I'm not taking her near another BINGO party game until she has it down--geez Louise, what a nightmare!

Five Things to Paint with Watercolors, OTHER than Paper

2011-11-15T14:42:00.001-05:00

salt dough, play dough, or cornstarch dough, wet or dry

I didn't get a picture of Sydney's finished work, mostly because by then we were deep in the process of all things watercolor, but every homemade kind of dough that I've ever worked with has taken watercolor like a champ, and doesn't seem to get wet or sticky as a result.

popsicle sticks

The watercolor ends up looking like a vibrant wood stain with these. As a matter of fact, watching the girls paint these, and seeing how vivid the colors stayed, I was left with an idea for an upcoming project... Stay tuned!

coffee filters

And nope, you don't have to cut them into novelty shapes first! The fun with these is watching the colors bleed and blend, which is why it's so great to use an eyedropper--you can drip and observe, drip and observe...very contemplative.

unfinished wood of all sorts

We have a grab bag of random wood objects that we're ever so often painting, in preparation for a gigantic and ridiculous free-form sculpture project that I'll introduce at some point in the future, but any unfinished wood, such as tree branches with the bark peeled off, or lumber scraps, is very fun to paint and takes the paint well. Again, the paint will bleed at the edges, so I haven't found watercolor good for detail work on wood, but it's great for abstracts.

ice

Eyedroppers are the tool of choice here, as well. Now that the weather is cool I put whatever ice the girls want to paint and sprinkle salt on in an aluminum baking pan on the table inside--when they're done or the ice has completely melted, it's easy to pour out into the sink and then rinse for re-use.

We happen to use Colorations Liquid Watercolor Paint, and we're lavish with them--no watering down for us! However, you can use whatever watercolor floats your boat, and it's not going to bother me. I'm going to be too busy working on my secret liquid watercolor and wood project to complain.

Ancient Egypt at the Indianapolis Children's Museum

2011-11-14T12:56:00.001-05:00

As if a day of play there isn't educational enough (it IS!), the girls and I occasionally sign up for the homeschool classes offered monthly at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. I've found that these classes work best for us when they're covering a subject that's already in the girls' areas of interest, so that they have some context in which they can place all of the information that they're cramming in, and all of the projects that they're working on in that short hour and a half.

Fortunately, this recent class that we attended on Ancient Egypt is right in my girls' backyard, academically speaking. They LOVE Ancient Egypt:

There are three really nice things that generally occur in homeschool classes:

1) The kids are of all different ages, and their parents are with them, and it always seems to be a really good mix, so that everyone has a lot of fun with each other.
2) The kids pretty much all want to be there, and all participate eagerly.
3) No matter the subject of the class, at least some of the kids there have obsessively, passionately studied that subject, and so there's always someone able to answer a question.

In this Ancient Egypt class, I happen to have one of the kids who's obsessively studied the subject, bringing to life a fourth pleasure in homeschool classes:

4) You get to watch your kid raise her hand and speak up with answers. Seriously, how cool is that? I imagine that kids are doing that all day long in institutional schools, but on the occasions when my kids are in that particular situation, I'm generally nearby, watching and beaming with pride and reporting their triumphs back to Matt in the evenings.

In the laboratory, the kids got to help the scientist with the dummy mummy. When the scientist was discussing the removal of the organs, Willow shouted out, "But not the heart!" and cackled at her joke, along with a bunch of other little Ancient Egypt obsessives. She was fine with helping to remove the liver, though:

Sydney helped take out the intestines:

While they were in the lab, the kids all started their own experiment:

1) You take four pieces of apple, and put each piece into a little lidded cup.
2) Leave one apple as the control, so all you do is put the lid on that one.
3) In each of the other containers, cover the apple completely with one of three substances available to the Ancient Egyptians--salt, sand, and natron (our natron did not come from the banks of the Nile, but was made in the museum's laboratory):

Check the apples daily, and unlid them in a week to see which substance (if any) preserves the apple the best. Remember that we're not concerned with DRYING the apple, necessarily, but with PRESERVING it, since preservation was the true goal of the Ancient Egyptians.

We also learned about the amulets that the Ancient Egyptians made, particularly the process that they used. Basically, if an Ancient Egyptian carved a really super amulet, they'd press that amulet into clay to make a mold of it, which we did. Then whenever they wanted a copy of that amulet, they'd press more clay into the hardened mold, which we also did:

We got to take our amulets AND our amulet molds home so that when the clay hardens, we can use them to make even more copies of authentic Ancient Egyptian amulets.

We discussed hieroglyphics, specifically cartouches. We took a tour of the museum's exhibit on King Seti I, and found and translated his cartouches (two, of course, since a pharaoh has a given name and a throne name). The girls used a hierogplyphics alphabet to create cartouches of their names--

--and then they carved their cartouches into clay:

Recently, one of our relatives (after listening patiently to the girls describe their class, and inspecting their salt dough maps of Ancient Egypt and their other work that only those obsessive and passionate about a subject of study can produce), told me that at the school where she works, children study Ancient Egypt in the sixth grade. This brings me to another pleasure, not in homeschooling classes, per se, but more in regards to homeschooling as a whole, for us:

We can learn as and when we choose. Willow and Sydney don't have to wait until the sixth grade to study Ancient Egypt for their school. They don't have to wait until after school and the weekends to study Ancient Egypt in their "free time," while doing a serious of interesting and uninteresting things at school for the greater part of each weekday. When they study Ancient Egypt, they can study as they wish, reading about gods and figuring out whose canopic jar is whose and building pyramids and relief maps and exploring the saga of Moses--they don't have to only do the projects that a teacher asks, in the time that is allowed for the project, producing something that's not as special on account of everyone else is doing the exact same project at the exact same time.

And yes, they can NOT learn something when and as they choose. I don't give a flip that Willow can't tie her shoelaces or tell time. She CAN tell you exactly how the Nile's flood process works, and why the Nile delta is named as such, and which is Lower and which Upper Egypt.

And after she does that, she can take you to ride the vintage carousel three times in a row, because her class just took place at the Children's Museum!

How We Learn: Playing Games

2011-11-11T09:47:00.001-05:00

Over the time that we've been homeschooling now, I've occasionally deviated from the unschooling method that obviously works so well for us to try out other systems, only to be struck by the also obvious failure of those systems.

Nope, my girls do NOT want to sit down and do formal academic activities every day. Requiring them to do so only resulted in power struggles, them figuring out how to do a half-assed job on an assignment to get it over with, and almost ruining their pleasure in activities like worksheets and the other school-ish projects that they do enjoy when they're presented casually, as one interesting part of an entire interesting day.

These days, I tend to let my little free-range girls run wild, and they tend to spend their days in elaborate pretend games that run from inside to outside and inside again, in listening to audiobooks, in playing the ridiculous number of computer games that we check out from the public library, in hanging out in parks and playgrounds, in solving mazes, in immersing themselves in elaborate and really messy art projects, in reorganizing their toy Egyptian pyramid, in jumping rope, in collecting leaves, in baking cookies, in checking out too many books from the library, in coming with me to puppet shows and museums and children's parties and playgroups, in reading for hours in various little hidey-holes around the house, in pestering the cats, in sewing stuff, in having lots of playdates with their friends, in fooling around with magnets, in playing with their collection of little toy animals that I keep buying them despite the clear indication that they have plenty...

It's actually easy for all of us to get lost in our days these days. The girls can happily spend an entire day, after their chores are done, making their own meals and snacks, getting out and putting away their own activities, moving from quiet, individual time to wild and loud play with each other, running inside and outside, hopping in the shower if they feel like it, turning on the Netflix streaming for their choice of the day and then turning it off when their show is through, all without assistance from me. When the kids are happy and don't need me, I go about my own business--blogging, photographing, making, writing, cooking, cleaning, planning, etc.

For my own benefit--just to spend a little time with my babies, some days!--I ask them, for their "school," to simply spend time each day doing a one-on-one activity with me. With Sydney, I may find myself reading an entire children's chapter book (that's almost a two-hour commitment, by the way, after which I often need to be committed, myself!), or baking something, or doing art, or putting together a puzzle.

With Willow, it's one choice only:

GAMES!!!

Blokus, Othello, Quirkle, chess, Battleship, Monopoly Junior, Sorry, quiz decks, Chutes and Ladders, cards, checkers, Connect Four, Scrabble--my Willow loves them all.

Shh...don't tell her that these games are also highly educational, and give her killer math skills and hone her logical reasoning, which will help her learn even more. I wouldn't dream of telling her that Blokus increases her intuitive knowledge of geometry, which is going to make future formal study of it easier, or that Quirkle is all about honing her pattern recognition, which is the key to a high IQ, or that Othello and chess are making her a masterful tactician, or that Monopoly Junior is all about computation, or that Scrabble is not just about spelling and vocabulary but also about anagrams, or that if there's ever a math skill that I want her to learn, I just teach her a card game that reinforces it.

Just tell her that our time together every day, just she and I, is special, and that her Momma loves it:

Which I do.

Homeschool Science: Ice Skull versus Salt

2011-11-09T14:07:00.000-05:00

Too many holidays, too little time!

ESPECIALLY after the advent of Pinterest, my planner is absolutely chock-full of dozens and dozens of fun, beautiful, and educational project that the girls and I would absolutely love to do for every single holiday that you can think of. Now the problem is that there just isn't enough time to do them all!

In October, we did autumn projects and Halloween projects. We colored and cut out paper garlands with jack-o-lanterns and skulls on them, carved pumpkins, made garlands of autumn leaves using paint chips and crayon boxes, baked pumpkin bread and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, sewed Halloween costumes, did leaf rubbings and pressed leaves and coated them in beeswax, baked mummy dogs, and assembled giant laminated paper skeletons and hung them on the porch. We did NOT make haunted candy houses, or carve turnips, or assemble a bone garland or a gourd garland or a candy corn garland, or play with dry ice, or bake jack-o-lantern pizza, or paint pumpkins, or make eggshell ghosts, or even half of the other billion wonderful projects in my Halloween Craftacular pinboard.

And even though Dia de los Muertos was practically my favorite holiday back when I was living in Texas--dancing skeletons, sugar skulls, tissue paper flowers, Mexican beer!--it's going to have to be celebrated next year, because this year it just passed us by in our post-Halloween candy coma.

Of course, that doesn't mean that we can't do any of the awesome projects that I'd had planned--they're just regular old projects now, not festive thematically-appropriate seasonal projects.

And that's how this big old ice skull, made from a mold that I bought a few weeks ago from Joann's at 65% off, is in our regular rotation these days not as a Dia de los Muertos or Halloween science project, but just as a regular old fun science project:

Any big ice cube will work for this project, although you have to admit that the skull is pretty gruesome! I've also made the girls icebergs by freezing water in a mixing bowl, however, and that kind of simple ice mold will work just as nicely here.

You also need liquid coloring--we use liquid watercolors, because I'm a sucker for those bright, saturated colors!--and plenty of cheap salt.

Liquid watercolors alone, simply because they, themselves, are above the freezing point, will assist in melting the ice mold in interesting ways as you dribble, drop, and spoon them on, but the best fun comes from adding salt into the play. Salt lowers the freezing point of water--for instance, a particular salt solution might lower the freezing point of the water that it's mixed in from 32 degrees to, say, 20 degrees. When you add it straight to ice, then it hastens the ice's melting, because room temperature is now even farther above the ice's freezing point than it used to be.

This is all fun because the ice melts the fastest right where you add these things:

See? Gruesome!

Of course, it's also fun just to scoop and pour and mix and generally make a big mess:

Besides, who wouldn't appreciate some crayon skulls and x-ray viewing and plaster of Paris skeleton making mixed in with the handprint turkeys and pumpkin pie baking and walnut shell Mayflowers this season?

It's turning out to be such an interesting autumn!

Winter Sport

2011-11-08T09:54:00.000-05:00

Southerners who move north tend to go one of two ways: either they embrace all things snow and cold because they've never had it before, or they loathe all things snow and cold because they've never had to deal with it before.

I follow the latter path.

That's not to say that I haven't gotten used to the winter weather here. When my Papa calls from Arkansas and gripes about how cold it is there when it's only in the 40s, I roll my eyes across the phone lines. When my in-laws visit from California in January and pull on their coats and scarves and mittens and hats just to go out to the car, where it's going to get warm in, like, ten minutes, I just sigh and grab a hoodie and off we go.

But that doesn't mean that I LOVE the weather. I just have a high pain threshold. When some local mom friend invited me and the girls to go over to her house and play some family version of football outside in the snow after dark, I was all, "Ummmm.... no." I have no patience for snowman-building, so if the girls want something taller than they can do, they have to make Matt do it. I'll take them to the park and spend all day there with the sledding and the nature walks and the futzing about with the damn snow, but it's more like torture as my thighs go numb and I realize that I didn't wear the right warm boots, etc.

Therefore, the upcoming winter must be handled more like problem-solving.

I will splurge on fancy wool long-johns.
I will sew pocket handwarmers.
I will knit scarves.
I will always know where my hat and mittens are.
I will focus on the (few) things that I love about winter, such as my babies on ice:

I will even suck it up a few times and get on the ice myself.

I swear, though, that if I fall and break my tailbone (AGAIN!), that you and I are through, Winter!

Red and Green Play Silks for Christmas

2011-11-07T09:31:00.000-05:00

Personally, I'm feeling more like autumnal colors still, browns and oranges and burgundy, but Christmas IS a'coming, and soon enough this red and green 30"x30" play silk will be the pinnacle of festivity:

It's still pretty mild here--I wonder how many other outdoor photo shoots I can sneak in before it starts snowing?

Putting the Garden to Bed

2011-11-04T10:26:00.000-04:00

We have a Community Garden plot here in town, it being a place that, unlike ANY place on our own property, actually gets, you know, sun. We had to put it to bed recently, tearing out all the perfectly happy kale and chard and lettuce (wail!), and raking and mulching it, and harboring the suspicion that we'll have even more volunteer husk cherries next year than we did this year--thanks, Cake!--and, of course, uprooting and hauling to the car the most giant, ridiculously heavy, hugely indulgent dried-up sunflower that ever was:

For all its inconveniences, the nice thing about our Community Garden plot is that we HAVE to get it done (or pay a fine). And that's why that plot is all tidy and resting, while here at home the leaves need to be raked over the gardens, and the herbs need to have hay spread on them, and we haven't finished planting the tulip bulbs, and Matt STILL hasn't moved those bushes that he promised to move for me last fall, and I'd really like to move the compost heap and get rid of that big brush pile, and all the ungainly bushes and shrubs on the property need to be hacked back yet again...

And no, I have no idea what we're going to do with that giant sunflower that the girls dragged home, either.

Big Kid Babywearing

2011-11-03T11:43:00.001-04:00

The baby REALLY wanted to spend some time with Dadda on a recent Sunday morning, but the Dadda REALLY wanted to finish putting up the tall wall shelves in the girls' brand-new-to-them bedroom. Fortunately, crunchy granola attachment parenting Momma always has a compromise handy:

I don't think that Matt really wants to repeat the experience of doing manual labor while carrying a 40-pound load on his back anytime soon, but the shelves DID get built, and the baby WAS all smiles in the meantime, so mission accomplished.

You're welcome.

A Very Young Fashion Designer

2011-11-02T11:26:00.000-04:00

Ever since I learned that Barbie-sized dressmaker's dummies DO exist, I've been coveting one for my~~self~~ girls. Even our no-sew Barbie dress is limited, in that it's really open to only one sort of style and one fabric, other than embellishments, but with a dressmaker's dummy--what limits, other than imagination?

Back in May, in Arkansas, we all wandered into a Toys R Us so that my mother could buy a birthday present for Sydney, and then we all waited around for me, as I walked through every single aisle of that store, gasping at desperately low clearance prices on much of our favorite plastic crap--big-box niche stores aren't doing too well, are they? Whatever.

Matt and I were just about at an all-time low income-wise around then, otherwise I may well have stocked completely up for the girls' entire Christmas and next-year birthdays right then and there, but as it was my mother got a GREAT deal on a gigantically expensive Playmobil set with unicorns and fairies and all that crap on it for Sydney, Matt and I bought that Playmobil advent calendar that I'd been making cutesie eyes at last year AND the Playmobil Egypt set that Willow had been making cutesie eyes at for OVER a year (only there, at a third of its original price, was it actually affordable), AND we bought a Harumika fashion design kiton clearance, solely because it happened to include a Barbie-sized dressmaker's dummy.

The Egypt set was basically that kid's best birthday present ever, and the advent calendar will make its appearance next month, but the fashion design toy set went to sit on a spot on the activity shelves, and there it sat. For months. And months.

Stuff like that doesn't really bother me--unschooling philosophy is all about the "strewing" of awesome stuff here and there and everywhere, to be taken up and explored at the child's will, and so I have faith that all awesome stuff will eventually be made full use of eventually. The tangrams lived on a shelf for years before they came off of it, and now they're quite beloved. The obsession with cassette tapes comes and goes and comes again. The dollhouse is back in vogue. We still haven't made the model rocket, but we will. The sandpaper cursive letters have come out only once or twice so far, but they'll come out again. Perhaps next summer will be the summer of the washboard. I'm betting the instant snow powder will have its heyday soon.

And the fashion design kit, with its little Barbie-sized dressmaker's dummy? Syd just picked it up one morning, brought it to me, and asked if we could play with it. Its heyday is here!

A neat little component to the dressmaker's dummy is a slit up the back, with soft silicone edges, so that you can tuck your fabric in there to get the right fit. Of course, hot glue works well, too:

The kit itself came with about three pieces of fabric, which I imagine would make it a REALLY crappy toy in a home where no one sews. In our home, however--

We have a scrap bin, and we're not afraid to use it:

Syd spent hours making fashion designs for this dummy for two solid days, photographing each one for posterity:

It hits all her sweet spots--her creativity, her love of clothes and color, the enjoyment that she takes in dolls and other little toys:

Well worth the wait.

Sweet Life

2011-11-01T14:25:00.000-04:00

Miss Willow, inspired by all the Bunnicula books that a little girl could ever dream on, is dressed as...

a VAMPIRE!!!

I sewed her voluminous black cape, complete with epic hood, out of a big piece of stash stretchy velvet that I bought at Goodwill sometime or other.

And her fangs, can you tell?

Yep, plastic fork.

Sydney wanted to be a "leaf mermaid," whatever that is. I sewed her a pillowcase skirt, she decorated the skirt with Tee Juice fabric marker leaves (and a sun and sky and raindrops and clouds, etc.), and then I safety-pinned one of her no-sew tutus to the bottom to flutter out like a mermaid's tail. The rest of her outfit (what little there is, yes, I am aware) is made from our hand-dyed play silks tied around her:

We have a FABULOUS neighborhood for trick-or-treating--lots of families, LOTS of houses with porch lights lit, lots of undergrad rentals in which, if they're girls, they give out enormous amounts of really good candy, and if they're dudes, they come to the door half-dressed, look surprised to see you, then shuffle around in their cabinets before handing over sweet stuff like powerbars and cans of soda and money.

LOVE our neighborhood:

We always head out at sunset, and I always force everyone to arm themselves amply with glowsticks, and Matt always looks about like this about his glowstick necklace--

--but I swear, that article that they run in the newspaper on Halloween every year, advising drivers to be especially cautious because kids will be running around like idiots? They write that article on account of my kids, who ran around and dashed back and forth across the street and fell down porch stairs and walked right into people's houses while I ran after them and shouted a lot:

Yep, I'm the unwary mom who lets my girls accept cups of apple cider from total strangers, the lax mom who does not pay my kids to take their candy or hand it off to the candy fairy or stuff it in the freezer to dish out a piece a day or whatever the cool parents are doing this year, the neglectful mom who, when a kid looked up from her haul later that night, her mouth full of candy, and asked, "Hey, did we have dinner?", replied, "Candy. That's your dinner."

And yet somehow I HAVE managed to get the children to keep their candy wrappers picked up (so far) this year, and they keep coming up to me, unbidden, and offering me pieces of chocolate, which they know is my favorite, and this year my shy girl went up to every single house with her little sister, and said, "Trick-or-treat!" and "Thank you!" AND "Happy Halloween!" at every. Single. House!

See? Sweet life, with Reese's cups and all.

Family Portrait at the Pumpkin Patch

2011-10-31T11:41:00.001-04:00

Happy Halloween!

Halloweening

2011-10-30T16:30:00.000-04:00

our Halloween bunting

I've been wanting to make a second one of these, by the way, since we love this one so much. For some reason I always have it in my head to make two copies of our favorite handmade home items, like buntings and scrapbooks and holiday decorations, so that my girls don't fight over them when I'm dead.

I have GOT to be the only person in the world who worries about stuff like that.

decorating the leaf mermaid skirt

More on that later, but yes, Sydney is dressing as a leaf mermaid for Halloween.

Whatever that is.

baking pumpkin chocolate chip cookies

There were a few weeks when I was pregnant with Willow when mealtime for me consisted of two giant pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, washed down with a giant glass of milk. It tickles me to see her baking her own batches of cookies now.

cutting out cardstock autumn leaf decorations

My favorite part of these decorations is that I don't have to take them down until after Thanksgiving.

And, of course, there's the pumpkin patch, and the jack-o'-lantern pumpkins and pie pumpkins that we got there, there are the heirloom Funkins that the girls carved again this year, there's making vampire fangs for Willow out of a plastic fork, and the men's basketball scrimmage with trick-or-treating and a costume parade, there's the colored and cut out Halloween bunting, the party with Kid Kazooey at Max's Place, and the mummy dogs tonight for dinner.

Oh, and TOMORROW's Halloween. The party continues, my friends!

Play Silks of Blue

2011-10-28T14:25:00.000-04:00

Inspired by a custom order that entailed dyeing a giant play silk canopy in three shades of blue, I repeated those shades in a set of three of the 30"x30" play silks that my girls seem to like best:

I think that they like this set pretty well, too, don't you think?

Homeschool Field Trip: The Creation Museum

2011-10-27T13:20:00.000-04:00

My little girls and I spend a lot of time reading world myths and legends. We know Anansi, Bible stories, the Gollum, Isis and Osiris, Zeus and his pantheon, and just about anything, in any worldview, that includes a dog or a horse or a unicorn.

We know that different cultures believe different things, and live their lives through those beliefs. A kid's own interest in Ancient Egypt is enough to teach her that lesson, without any adult say-so.

We know our good etiquette. We know that we never make negative comments out loud in public. We don't tease others. We don't make fun of what we see. If we are guests, we make ourselves agreeable, even if we disagree. We smile, and we say thank you, and we express enthusiasm when meeting strangers, etc.

These are all works in progress, obviously (and honestly, I'm not the family member with the least to learn), but all well enough along that when my dear friend, Mac, planning a visit to our part of the country, invited us along on a a trip that he was taking to the Creation Museum to research an article that he's writing, and said that he could arrange press passes for us so that our visit would be free, as well, I was thrilled.

Seriously. Animatronic dinosaurs hanging out in the Garden of Eden? Sign me up!

The Creation Museum is a dinosaur lover's dream come true, in any worldview:

That's our friend, Mac. He made an excellent co-parent for the duration of the trip, a far cry from the random wanderings around Europe that he and I once made together, with two changes of clothes, a sweater, a notebook, and a novel for a month of travel. Now my day trips involve two bags of groceries, a dozen picture books, a dozen children's novels, crayons, coloring pages, mazes, the GPS, Angry Birds on my Android, and the entire first Harry Potter novel on audiobook.

Oh, and children's cold medicine, hand sanitizer, and a whole bunch of wet wipes.

And there still weren't enough cans of raspberry lemonade!

We all briefly met the very nice, very charming director of the museum, and while he and Mac had an interview, the girls and I wandered.

Animatronic dinosaurs, right above our heads!

Of course, this is what I was there to see:

Mac caught up to us as we were viewing the exhibit of live finches and frogs--

--and off we went down the time tunnel, back to the Christian Creation and the Garden of Eden. There are lots of really cool components to this worldview, including the idea that before the Corruption (the second of the seven C's that we learned about), there were no carnivores. That dinosaur is eating a pineapple!

Here's the money shot, folks--Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with the dinosaurs:

After the Corruption, some creatures became carnivores, as this display of a snarling, lunging animatronic dinosaur, a bloody dead dinosaur corpse at its feet, shows. The girls were fascinated by how GRAPHIC the display was, with a bloody tongue hanging out of the dead dinosaur's open mouth and everything:

No weeds! Who knew?

Willow did an abysmal job on this computer quiz about Bible trivia, bless her heart. We know the stories, sure, but apparently not enough of the details:

Fortunately, the displays have a lot of handy little trivia bits. I now know what a cubit is!

Willow is seven, and has always had a pretty good grasp of the difference between fantasy and reality. She's never been snookered by Santa Claus, or my attempts to insist that unicorns are real. These historical revisions through the Christian worldview honestly didn't throw her for a second. She knows when dinosaurs really lived, and can enjoy the fantasy without being troubled by it.

Sydney is five, and she pretty much lives in a fantastical world of her own making. She couldn't give a flip about the difference between fantasy and reality, and had a ball trying to figure out interpretations of all the exhibits. She looked at this exhibit of workers building Noah's ark:

"Pirates?" she queried.
"Nope," I said. "Noah's ark. The workers are building a gigantic wooden boat that will hold two of every single kind of animal in the whole world to keep them safe from a big flood."
"Oh," she said, perfectly satisfied. She knows about Noah's ark. It makes just as much sense as pirates, who also make sense.

After the ark is built, we move to models to describe the rest of the events. Here are all the animals boarding the boat:

See the dinosaurs?

When we saw the dinosaurs getting on the ark, we were all, like, "Whoah!" Mac and I thought for sure that the explanation for why there aren't dinosaurs NOW would surely be that they weren't invited on the ark, but there they are, happily boarding two by two right behind the giraffes. Alas, there wasn't a docent around to ask, so that when Sydney, gazing fascinatedly at the ark model, asked, "Did unicorns get to get on, too?", I had to be all, "I have no idea!". Maybe?

In the next display the boat gets launched, and it all goes to hell. Literally:

I wish you could see the details in these models! There are people in the act of drowning, people who are lying on the rocks, dead, people falling to their deaths, people throwing punches at each other, people signalling the ark...it's off the freaking hook!

See the bears? There's a dude getting attacked by a bear! And I think somebody is going to throw a boulder down on top of that other person. And that woman? Dead. I don't have much hope for the chances of any of those people, frankly:

Catastrophe is the most exciting of the seven C's, so after that we breezed on past Confusion and Christ and... there are two more C's in there somewhere, but the point is that we breezed past them, detoured to ride the dinosaur--

--and went outside to the petting zoo. There were goats, and llamas, and wallabies, and peafowl, and the zedroids--a zedonk, a zorse, and something else to represent modern-day adaptation and genetic change and variety, etc. The camel ignored me and the girls, but LOOOOOVED Mac:

There was a great natural area to explore, with a swinging bridge and a floating bridge to jump on, and koi ponds, and ducks, and fountains, and lots of trails to hike:

At the gift shop I did NOT purchase the imitation crown of thorns or the sucker with a scorpion inside, I wanted to purchase a toy Noah's ark set but couldn't find one, and I did purchase a postcard of the Noah's ark scene (dinosaurs and all!), a Newton's cradle, a dimorphodon glider, and two little toy animals for each of the girls, from the large collection that represents the variety of creation. Willow purchased two dragons, and Sydney purchased a horse and a dog-like creature.

"What's that?", Mac asked her.
"A baby werewolf," she nonchalantly replied.

It's a couple of years before we're even going to start working on that fantasy vs. reality business with her.

Willow's New Pajamas

2011-10-26T09:29:00.000-04:00

Somewhere in the midst of the vampire cloak and the mermaid skirt and the biography fair project and painting the girls' new bedroom purple and orange and putting our community garden plot to bed, Willow's new pajamas got themselves sewn:

The pattern is an old McCall's 6535. I like the style of the shirt quite a lot, but the sizing is way off--Willow is lost in her size 7!

Fortunately, the size 7 pants are perfect, and may find themselves sewn up some more in fleece this winter. Time will tell if I attempt to re-size the shirt for another go, or if I just use a different pattern next time:

Will chose the fabric, of course. Now that I've given up craft fairs for the foreseeable future I don't thrift constantly, and thus don't have a huge stash of thrifted material always on hand, so we're visiting the fabric store a lot more these days--thank goodness for sales and my educator's discount card!

I still try to keep my rule that every project must include SOME components from the stash, however, so these pajamas are made from a flower flannel purchased for this project and a purple hearts fabric purchased who-knows-when:

I made a second pair of these pants in that flowered flannel, and I think that one pajama top with two matching pairs of pajama pants will serve nicely in lieu of two complete sets of pajamas. Syd is getting one pair of pajamas and one nightgown, AFTER the Halloween costumes are finished:

And then both girls are getting some pairs of fleece pants for the winter, for everyday wear accompanied with thrifted T-shirts (or thrifted elaborate party dresses, in the case of the younger sister):

And what will I wear this winter?

Eh, who cares?

Last Class

2011-10-25T10:52:00.002-04:00

I taught my final (at least, what I assume to be final--who ever knows, you know?) cloth diapering class at The Green Nursery last weekend:

Since my kids are now five and seven, it's really time that I stop having to keep up with all the cloth diaper trends (wool! hemp! bamboo! one-size! hybrids!), but still...all those pregnant mommas taking notes, all those adorable colors and patterns and teeny-tiny little diaper covers, all those well-padded baby butts...

...sigh.

Poetry Speaks: Sydney Masters Robert Frost

2011-10-24T13:46:00.000-04:00

She did it!

Willow mastered "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost, back when I first asked them to memorize it last winter. Back then, however, Syd just found it a little too challenging (although she had memorized the entirety of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" just a month prior!), and so I dropped it when she seemed to get frustrated at always forgetting one line or another.

Our impending homeschool biography fair, however, seemed like a good time to finish a good job, so I suggested to the girls that they make their presentation on Robert Frost, and then they could each simply recite one of his poems for the oral component.

Done and done, and an excellent excuse to get that tricky Robert Frost poem under one's belt once and for all:

Done and done, kiddo. They are going to CONQUER at that biography fair!

WIP Wednesday (and into Thursday): Magnetic Skeleton

2011-10-20T11:39:00.001-04:00

A skeleton pdf that has had so many uses in our family in the past four years gets yet another iteration on flexible magnet paper:

I don't know if the addition of a layer of paper and a layer of Mod Podge onto the sheeting overwhelmed its meager magnetic force, however, or if the magnetic sheets are just crappy (I'm a magnet snob, yes), but this particular skeleton just plumb fell off the fridge.

And so we overcompensate, turning this into a skeleton with adequate magnetic force that won't be fully cured until this evening:

And thus begins the research into stronger magnetic sheets.

Melted Beeswax Play all Day

2011-10-18T09:24:00.001-04:00

This is the season in which beeswax simply lives in the crafts crock pot, which in this season lives on the living room table. I was the most recent person to turn the crock pot on to make beeswax paper (at which activity I was, of COURSE, kept company):

That crock pot did not get turned off, however, at least not for several hours. All day long my girls, who are as familiar with beeswax as they are with any other art supply, simply played with it, turning the heat down to partly solidify it then up again to melt it, stirring it and studying it--

--scooping out bits to play with--

---and just generally have the most intense, creative, joyful time that two little children can have, quietly and gently and occupied for hours.

I got SO many things done that day!

Magnetism Unit Study: Ferrofluid

2011-10-17T12:18:00.002-04:00

The girls' interest in magnetism has primarily served as my excuse to spend all our homeschooling budget on all kinds of awesome magnets--teeny-tiny magnets, square magnets, spherical magnets, magnets that form a perfect circle when you link them just right, magnets so powerful that they have to be stored separately and played with carefully.

Along with the magnets, I've discovered a whole world of magnet accessories, not the least of which is this incredibly awesome material known as ferrofluid. Ferrofluid consists of nano-sized ferromagnetic particles suspended in a fluid and coated in surfactant--it's a magnet-loving fluid that flows.

I put a healthy dollop of ferrofluid into a Mason jar, filled the rest of the jar with a water/glycerin combo, and then glued the lid on (I've heard that ferrofluid can be QUITE messy, of the leaping out of its container and splashing all over the wall because you've got a magnet stuck there kind of messy).

To play, you run a magnet along the outside of the Mason jar, and the ferrofluid will be attracted to it, the power and shape and location and number of the magnets all adding new variables to explore:

Of course, there are a million more ways to play with ferrofluid--some of them involving open containers, gasp! And no, I'm STILL not done buying magnets!

The Homeschool Shelves

2011-10-16T15:53:00.000-04:00

One of the best things about switching the girls' bedroom with our study/studio is the mindful reorganization that has taken place. Fabric is neatly folded and visible, reference books are accessible, the paint is all together in one place, what was once lost is now found, etc.

In our NEW study, I've been paying special attention to how we store and display our homeschool supplies. I try to follow the girls' interests from week to week, which means that most of our homeschool work is done in unit studies, which means that the more I can keep like-minded materials together, the better.

The big and unwieldy stuff sits on the floor, so here we've got the conventional globe and the chalkboard globe, a model rocket kit, a crate containing all the base ten blocks (nine thousand cubes, nine hundred flats, and loads of ten bars and unit blocks) and the Cuisenaire rods, and the state quarter map.

Above that is the math shelf--math games and boxed activities, a Playskool abacus and a traditional Chinese abacus, playing cards and dice, a binder for worksheets and flash cards (I'm a big proponent of math fact memorization), lots of workbooks (I'm also a big proponent of math drills), and math manipulatives, such as pattern blocks, tangrams, mosaic tiles, and a geoboard. To the right side of each shelf I've glued little magnets, to hold the various accessories of homeschool work--scissors, bar magnets, drawing compasses, staplers, etc.

Moving to the left and up a level:

That lower shelf is science stuff--magnets, board games, the plaster of Paris volcano, science activity books, the microscope and its accessories, and a chemistry set. Above the science shelf is the art shelf--specialty markers and crayons, extras of the crayon, marker, and colored pencil sets that we use regularly, the stapler and extra glue, books for cutting up, extra lined paper and dry erase boards, pipe cleaners, the UV-reactive beads, and the acrylic-dyed school glue.

To the right, on the same level:

The lower shelf on the left has biology stuff, with the plaster of Paris skeleton mold, the human x-rays, a couple of anatomy books, and several biology and medicine DVDs. Then we've got some environmental science stuff, with sun-reactive paper, a kite, and wind energy stuff. In the front is ferrofluid and iron filings for more magnet play, then biology encyclopedias and children's magazines, and then books on all branches of the sciences.

The top shelf is still art, with a glass bowl of acorns on the far left, then Waldorf window star paper, professional-grade art supplies, and modeling beeswax in the front. To the right is language arts, with workbooks and mad libs, sticker letters and sight word flash cards, and Scrabble and Boggle on the far right.

Higher on the shelves is the stuff that requires my prep work, or the stuff that the girls don't usually choose without my encouragement:

The lower shelf there is history on the right, with Magic Tree House books (the girls have these memorized, and regularly re-read library copies, so I usually only bring our own copies down when we're studying something relevant), all the Story of the World activity books and other children's history books, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. presidents flash cards, and the ink that we use with our quill pens.

To the left on the lower shelf is geography--a map quilt project of Willow's, some atlases, a blank U.S. map paper pad, and a sailor's valentine kit from Florida. Above that is the art materials that require either adult prep or adult supervision--powdered tempera, professional-grade artist's acrylic paints, watercolor paints, things like gesso and sealant, and beads.

The top shelf is stuff that we're not ready for yet--higher-level workbooks, and cut-and-assemble paper model kits. There's also a bag containing a ridiculous number of little paper bags, good for goodness knows what.

Here's what the shelves, or most of them, at least, look like in panoramic, including one show-off and a colored dinosaur picture:

And when the girls aren't simply digging around in the dirt or playing with toy ponies all day, that's some of what we have to do!

Her First Embroidery Project

2011-10-14T11:20:00.000-04:00

Mind you, I'VE never done an embroidery project before.

I do, however, have the habit of purchasing, when they're on enormous sale, or acquiring, when I find them for free, craft or homeschool supplies that I think will be useful "someday," and then putting them on our craft or homeschool shelves. I find that with my creative, busy, industrious children, someday does come, and so I wasn't really surprised when Willow pulled Sublime Stitching off a shelf one evening, spent some time flipping through it, and then asked to do an embroidery project.

I bought that book, or perhaps received it as a Christmas present, years ago. This is how it happens here.

I think I could have pulled together all the needed supplies--fabric, embroidery hoop, embroidery floss--here and there from my stash of freely acquired stuff, but I also have, also bought years ago, also at a good price, a Sublime Stitching Stitch-It Kit, complete with two tea towels, an embroidery hoop, and embroidery floss.

And that's how, twenty minutes after she first professed her desire, without a lot of fuss or stress or searching about, Willow was here:

We read the directions and properly set up the embroidery transfer on the fabric and in its hoop, and organized the floss in an untangled manner, but I didn't see a good point to asking Willow to master any particular proper "stitches," so I just let her have at it:

Yes, the transfer is on the dark and thick side. It's meant to be transferred lightly, but I wanted Willow to have a good outline to follow.

And so onward, towards a swan with a blue beak and pink feathers, and a plan for green wings, I believe:

Like any good embroidery project, this one is set aside and taken up again at leisure. It lives, in its free time, on a shelf here in the study, right next to the embroidery book and the stitch-it kit and Sydney's embroidery project, because of course she took one look at Willow working away, and realized that she, too, had always longed to embroider.

It's Always a Fine Day for...

2011-10-13T11:16:00.000-04:00

...sidewalk chalk paint!

Homemade sidewalk chalk paint is a VERY easy recipe, but it's more of a niche art supply here, in that the girls tend to forget all about it for months at a time, and then, goofing around outside while their dad cleans up the front porch (it had reached the point where, even though I'm not all feng shui and I don't always tend to the appearance of our home from the outside, I was starting to worry that trick-or-treaters would be too frightened to approach our house!), one of them discovers the sidewalk stencils, and then it's as if a lightbulb goes off--

"Sidewalk chalk paint! Yeah, let's do it!"

And there goes the afternoon!

WIP Wednesday: Flannel Kid Pajamas

2011-10-12T09:32:00.001-04:00

It's my new study's inaugural sewing project--flannel pajamas for Willow:

The pattern is McCall's 6535 (which means that I could also make Willow a karate uniform!) in a seven--no, I did not bother to consult the finished measurements, but nevertheless I'm shocked to tell you that this pajama top is just massively too big. Willow is lost in it! I don't know what seven-year-old would fit into that top, but whoever it is, they're actually ten years old, at least.

At least I can adjust the pants size using the appropriate elastic, and I'm thinking of making them reversible, simply to make them look nicer when they're (inevitably) cuffed, and to give them more wear, because apparently Willow will be able to fit into these pajamas for YEARS.

Do you like the fabric?

The purple flannel with hearts was in my stash, but there wasn't enough to make a full pair of pajamas, so I gave Willow a piece of the fabric and let her choose a complementary pattern at the fabric store. I am LOVING my educator's discount there!

When these pajamas are finished, Sydney has her pair all lined up--pink flannel princesses and pink flannel hearts in an Oliver + S pattern--and then I think I'll make them drawstring pajama bags to match.

I wonder if I could talk them into wearing Little House on the Prairie-style nightcaps to bed if I sewed those to match, too...

Homeschool Field Trip: Peden Farm

2011-10-11T10:35:00.000-04:00

Our hometown is the kind of town where yes, there is an entire working family farm within the city limits, an historic homestead that's only a few minutes' further drive than the house of one of my kiddos' best buddies. Every year, usually in the spring but this year in the fall (this last spring was rainy!), the Pedens generously--SO generously!--open up their farm to visiting schoolgroups--including homeschool groups, of course--of little tykes.

It's called the Children's Farm Festival, and we love it.

Collecting Feathers from the Free-Range Poultry

Blacksmith Demonstrations

Chickens!!!

Admiring Hand-Painted Gourds

Willow made a rubbing of every single leaf on display. There were a LOT of leaves:

Hay Ride

Shearing the Sheep

Old-Time Toys

Hand Pumping Water

Hand-Grinding Corn

So Many Chickens!!!

And yes, for the sake of my child, also interviewed, I even put aside my own horror of interviews and spoke a series of benign inanities to the very nice reporter:

Not bad for a schoolday!

Making Beeswax Leaves

2011-10-10T10:51:00.000-04:00

This is the time of year when the crock pot dedicated to crafting sits in near-permanence on the living room table, a pound-ish of beeswax solidified at the bottom. It's required to live there so that every day, when the girls and I come home from whatever walk or adventure or woodsy parking lot we've just enjoyed, we can turn the crock pot on, melt the beeswax (sweet honey scent!), and make beeswax leaves out of the bounty of our most recent collection:

My full beeswax leaves tutorial is over at Crafting a Green World.

Dissecting a Honeycomb: The Yummies Live Inside

2011-10-08T15:05:00.000-04:00

Whenever the girls ask what's in a particular dish and I don't want to tell them--either I don't feel like reciting a list of eighteen spices, for instance, or I know that a revelation that the dreaded SUN-DRIED TOMATO or the horrible PEANUT BUTTER or the villainous GINGER or the monstrous PEPPER live inside the recipe will mean that I'm eating dinner alone tonight--I tell them that the dish contains "yummies," as in:

"Momma, what's in the pasta?"
"Hmmm...noodles, and tomato sauce, and garlic."
[Suspiciously eyeing what is, in fact, a sun-dried tomato]: "What else?"
"Oh...just yummies. Want a serving or a taste?"
"Serving, please!"

The only thing this has to do with our honeycomb dissection is that...know what lives inside the honeycomb? Um, bee spit and the occasional bee part and beeswax, etc. You know, yummies!

Here's our honeycomb piece, bought from Hunter's Honey Farm on our recent field trip:

As we learned on our tour, the hexagonal cells are made by the bees from their wax, are filled with honey by the bees, and then sealed by them with more wax.

You can cut it open for a cross-section, and to verify that, yes indeedy, there's sticky honey inside of there!

And of COURSE you can eat it!

Even if you're not too sure about the wax and the spit, etc.

After all, it's apparently MUCH tastier than a sun-dried tomato, sigh.

How Many Pennies in One Dollar?

2011-10-07T08:59:00.000-04:00

I re-branded the hundred grid as a dollar grid, so let's see...

This many!

It looks so cool that I considered having Sydney glue the pennies down to the grid so that we could keep it...

And then I thought, "Heck, no! I'm not wasting a whole dollar!"

The girls have recently wearied of all this talk of coins and commerce, so our math is moving on to geometry. Geomags, constructive triangles, spirograph, geoboard, patterns blocks and mirrors--that ought to hold us for a while!

Brownie Batter Bake-off

2011-10-06T10:21:00.000-04:00

You knew we'd do it again. The bake-off has become our go-to way to do up desserts around here.

Following in the steps of the cookie bake-off and the carrot cupcake bake-off, I mixed up a batch of extra fudgy brownies using my library copy of The Good Neighbor Cookbook, then divided it into three bowls and laid out every single thing in the pantry:

I figured that I had a sure winner with my peanut butter, lingonberry jam, and wheat germ brownies, but they--and I can't believe that I'm about to say this!--had too much peanut butter. Who knew there could be such a thing?

In my opinion, the best mix-ins were the tart lingonberry jam, the little dried date pieces, carob chips, and wheat germ. It doesn't matter, though--even the brownies with marshmallows, peanut butter, raisins, cream cheese, candied ginger, almonds and poppy seeds got this same reaction:

Delicious.

We used:

At Hunter's Honey Farm

2011-10-05T16:28:00.000-04:00

It's that time of the year when our homeschool group seems to have the best field trips! After a few chilly, rainy weeks, it was perfect weather at Hunter's Honey Farm for our field trip there:

Outdoor field trips on beautiful days are the best, wouldn't you agree?

The hive tour was set up so cleverly. One beehive stood on a table in a grassy area, underneath a tent with mesh walls. All the families stood just outside the tent peering in, and the beekeeper stood inside the tent with the hive. He lectured us on the finer points of bees, then took the hive apart frame by frame, found all the interesting things on that frame (pollen! cells with honey! empty cells! the queen!), and walked it around the inside perimeter of the tent so that everyone could see:

He took care to make sure that every single child saw every single fascinating thing:

Inside, we took another tour of the processing area. Mmmm, raw, unwashed honey!

The girls felt pretty fine, indeed, to already be expert crafters of rolled beeswax candles:

But I do believe that the most THRILLING thing for each of them was when they each got to fill their very own honey bear:

Each girl has a honey bear of her own!

Each honey bear is quite sticky by now, as you can imagine.

Let's see...I took home:

one jar of raw honey (full of protein, and good for your immune system!)
one half-gallon jug of wildflower honey, because the girls sure as heck aren't going to let me share their honey bears
one one-pound chunk of beeswax, soon to coat the outsides of autumn leaves, in just the first of its MANY uses around here
one small section of honeycomb, just this afternoon dissected and then devoured by the children

That may have possibly been this week's grocery budget, but hey--everyone loves honey on toast, no matter how many meals they eat it in a row!

The Great Room Switch: Painting the Study

2011-10-04T10:47:00.000-04:00

When Will was a toddler and we first bought this house, we moved all her toys into the second of the house's three bedrooms, really just an enlarged pass-through from the hallway into our own bedroom. It's big enough for a full-sized bed if you keep it low so that it doesn't block the window (although having that window sill above the bed has been the reason for one child's visit to the emergency room so far), has a couple of good walls to build shelves on to hold the girls' ridiculous amount of toys, and it's just a doorway away from our bedroom, so that when little girls make a peep, the Momma and the Dadda are just a doorway away.

Just a doorway. No door. Ahem.

Add to THAT the issue that the girls are early birds and turn on the lights in their room before the sun comes up, AND that they don't want to share a bed anymore, and you have the storm that caused me to hatch the plan that I sometimes see as brilliant and sometimes see as hare-brained:

We're switching the girls' bedroom with the third small bedroom that lives in the front of the house, a room otherwise know as our Study/Studio.

Can you think of two rooms that are MORE full of a truckload of crap to have to exchange? Nope, you can't.

Friends, this move has been ridiculous. Absurd. Worthy of a nervous breakdown. First, we moved all the girls' stuff down to the playroom, where you can no longer even walk due to the accumulation of that on top of the playroom nonsense. I went through a bunch of our stuff. We had a garage sale. I went through a bunch more of our stuff. We took a load to Goodwill. I went through a bunch MORE of our stuff, and we put some stuff out by the side of the road with a sign that read "FREE."

We still have a bunch of stuff.

When we first moved into this house, we were in a big hurry, and so we didn't change anything or make anything look nice. We also had this toddler, so there wasn't really much time to do a good job on whatever we did try to do, like painting or gardening. And then we had another kid just a few months later--you should have seen the lousy paint job that I slopped on their bedroom walls, with them rolling around my feet making messes and getting into trouble.

This time around, one of the things that I'm most looking forward to is the chance to make each room look...nice. Do a little planning. Use a little forethought.

And then I went ahead and painted our new study silver anyway:

And I let the girls help:

No, it's not turquoise like the studios of all the famous crafty ladies, and it doesn't make the room in this already very dark-ish house any brighter, but that's what track lighting is for, and I love how the walls are shiny--it's like living in a treasure chest, or a magpie's brain.

The former gigantic toy shelves are getting all set up with homeschool supplies, and I wrenched my back moving our brand-new IKEA table, and the fabric looks all neat and tidy so far, and you would not BELIEVE the number of fights that Matt and I have had so far about super-important details, like the locations of power strips...

This study is going to be so excellent.

Painting the Salt Dough Maps of Egypt

2011-09-30T09:29:00.000-04:00

The Nile is blue, and runs to the Delta and then into the Mediterranean (which they finally remembered!):

Willow decided that the Nile is in flood during the time of her map, so that's more blue:

Sydney is representing the rest of Egypt as one great, sandy beach:

Will has a reputation for grousing a bit whenever I want her to begin a new project (or brush her teeth, or leave the house, or do anything, really), primarily because she never wants to stop whatever it is that she's currently engrossed in. However, she also has a reputation for then becoming completely engrossed in that new project, and thus enjoying it, too, immensely.

Therefore, although there was a fit of gripes when I asked her to come over and paint her map, since Syd was already painting hers and so all the paints were already out and Usborne Quicklinks would still be there when she'd finished--a fit of gripes, I tell you--Willow's map has not just land and water painted, but also the Nile flood plain, representations of the areas ruled by the Red Crown and the White Crown of Egypt, the white limestone covering the pyramids, and the gold capstones:

And no, we're still not finished! Currently, the girls are having a fabulous time putting together a set of little lapbook minit books about Ancient Egypt, and they don't know it yet, but my papyrus order just arrived, so there are many more good times ahead, indeed.

Rainbow Play Dough Love Fest

2011-09-29T09:56:00.000-04:00

Goes something like this: "Hey, girls, I made something like ten pounds of rainbow play dough. Want to go to the park and play with ALL of it?"

Boy, did they!

I sell play dough by the pound, including this rainbow play dough set, in my pumpkinbear etsy shop. Whenever anybody orders some, I make another ten pounds for my girls.