Quill Pen Compositions

Last year during our big Boston trip, Matt's parents took all of us for a day at Plimoth Plantation. Honestly, Plimoth itself was not my favorite tourist spot--it's one of those recreated villages, and I am just not comfortable walking up to a stranger minding her own business grinding corn and being all, "Hello, who are you? What are you doing? How long will that corn last? What's your preferred method for making corn pone?" like you were supposed to do.

Mostly I tooled around and took in the kitchen gardens, and snuck into people's huts to stare after they had walked out of them, and the Wampanoag village was actually pretty awesome, but I did do some damage in the gift shop. I bought the girls little porcelain Pilgrim dolls (and I wish now that I'd bought Sydney the big ones, too), and a cornhusk doll-making kit, and seeds to grow a Three Sisters garden, and lots of postcards for scrapbooks, and a quill pen making and writing kit.

When I buy stuff that's on big sale, or stuff that's unique in that way, I throw it all into my Magic Craft Cupboard, and whenever the time is right it comes back out again.

Let's see...the girls still play with the Pilgrim dolls, we made the cornhusk dolls back in the winter, we didn't end up doing the Three Sisters garden this summer because the Tom Thumb popcorn looked more exciting in the seed packet than the Plimoth Plantation corn did (but I think the seeds will keep for another year, so def a Three Sisters garden next year), the postcards will probably come out again this fall when we'll study pilgrims again, and that quill pen kit just happened to look mighty tasty just recently when Sydney and I were reading some book or other about the Declaration of Independence (Independence Day has been an area of interest lately, obviously), and she said that she wished that she could write with the pretty feather, too.

You do, huh? Well, let's take a trip to the Magic Craft Cupboard and see what we find!

I used my x-acto knife in dangerous ways to cut each girl's quill at an angle, carve it into a nib, angle the nib, then slit it up the middle a little, while the girls used eye droppers to drip water into their powdered ink to rehydrate it. Then I handed each girl her quill and a giant piece of textured artist's paper, attempted to demonstrate how to properly hold the quill (they weren't such good listeners, sigh), and let them go:

I did ask each girl to write her name with the quill pen--we'll crop them later and put them in their Independence Day scrapbooks:

Ignore the fact that they both keep holding their quills backwards--my theory is that kids these days only ever use writing instruments with rotational symmetry, and thus the concept of one specific pen grip is too foreign to get right away.

Writing all kinds of words was fun--

--but Willow, especially, got really into the artistry of pen and ink, and covered a whole huge page just beautifully, in my opinion:

Everybody loved using the quill pens, but all I can tell you is that after using quill pens as one's sole writing instrument, the using for the first time an ink pen that didn't require pausing to dip it into ink every few letters must have felt AMAZING.

Ink pens just aren't this pretty, however:

Here are some other Declaration of Independence resources that we've been enjoying this month:

Declaration of Independence recreation from Fat Brain Toys

Google images and Western Writing Implements: In the Age of the Quill Pen for quill pen pics

A Quill Pen and George Washington

Our studies this summer have taken a turn for the schizophrenic--in science, we've been working on botany AND the brain; in geography, we've been working on Africa AND the United States; for literature, Will has been working on grammar AND Latin AND Tom Sawyer; and for history, we've been working on SOTW ancient history AND pioneer life AND the first presidents!

It's kind of like unit studies, but unit studies have started to feel claustrophobic, so here we are.

A day's requirement in a subject generally boils down to a book + a memory piece + a hands-on, contextual activity. For history the other day, then, I read the girls a picture book about George Washington (I'll put a list of my favorites at the bottom of this post), asked the girls to memorize the dates of his presidency (Sydney also memorized the fact that he was our first president; Willow already knows all of the presidents in order), and then let them play around again with quill pens:

It's been a year, almost exactly, since we last played with quill pens, and it was interesting to see that they still remembered it, and fun to see that they still enjoyed it: 

The big difference this time is that instead of making our own ink, earlier this year I took the girls to the little indie art supplies shop near campus and let them each pick out a color of real bottled ink. What a difference the quality of that one art supply makes! I noticed that both girls did a lot of exploring with line width and shading and color saturation, far beyond just exploring the feel of working with a quill pen, which I think was their main occupation last time.

It also increased the impact of that activity when I later brought out our copy of the Declaration of Independence--the girls were all, "They wrote like THAT with quill pens?!?" They were MUCH more impressed with the document than they otherwise would have been.

A calligraphy pen is clearly on my school supplies wish list these days.

Here are some of our favorite George Washington resources (so far):

Quill Pens from Chicken Feathers

We have goose feathers and ink bottles in our homeschool/art supplies, and the girls play with them every so often. When Will asked to do quill pens this weekend, though, it was with one key difference. Syd wrote with a quill pen made from a goose feather--

--and Will wrote with a quill pen made from Fluffball, her chicken:

When Will asked to make a quill pen from one of Fluffball's glorious feathers that she'd found, I knew it would work, but I didn't realize how difficult it would be to create. I had anticipated teaching Will how to make the quill pen herself with her pocket knife, but the chicken feather had a far narrower, and thus stronger, interior channel, and thicker walls, it seemed, and I had to use a lot of force just to make the pen myself.

The final product, however, although more clumsily made than usual, worked just fine! Syd wrote a letter to a friend using her goose feather pen, and Will wrote out all her vital information--full name, birthday, age, grade, etc.--with her chicken feather pen.

Remember how I've told you on numerous occasions that my children have an absurdly poor memory for their vital information? Just this weekend, on their way to audition for the roles of the No-Neck Monsters in an IU student production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," (clearly a tale for another day!), we were going over audition etiquette and I said to them, "And what would you say if the director asks what grade you're in?", and they were both all, "I don't know." Well, they come by that poor memory honestly, because as they were working, Will asked me a question, and, only paying half attention as I replied while doing my own work, I said something about "since you're eight years old, blah blah blah." Several minutes later, a new thought occurred to me and I suddenly shouted, "Gah! You're NINE!!!" and hugged that protesting baby to my bosom in both joy and grief.

And that's what school is likely to look like at our house!

The Homeschool Shelves

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!