Games Kids Love: Story Dice

Santa brought the kids this set of story dice for Christmas, and like most of his stocking gifts (so weird that Santa mostly brings the children educational toys...), I expected that they would mostly be put away in the playroom, and discovered and played with just every now and then. That's where the interactive book on cool things that you can do with mirrors lives, after all, still not played with, and the water clock kit, still not played with.

To my surprise, however, the kids LOVE these story dice! They play with them at least once a week (we have an indulgent amount of playthings for the children, so weekly play is a pretty good record), and even bring them out to play with during playdates, during which it seems that their friends like them, too.

To use the story dice (this may not actually be how you're "supposed" to use the story dice--I've never looked to see if there are any instructions, but this is how the kids have used them from the beginning), you simply roll them--

--and then make up a story that uses each one. Each die has little images engraved onto each side that direct the story, but are quite open to interpretation:

Syd and I played this game recently, on an afternoon that Will spent at the library. Here are some of her stories:

Cute, right?

It's been a while since we've carried on with our art lessons, although I do often remind the kids, when we're drawing together, to remember the Drawing With Children shape families and the Drawing with Children rule that we should work with mistakes instead of, as Syd would prefer, crumpling up the paper and throwing a giant fit. But anyway, these dice would also fit well into a Drawing with Children-style study, since the lines are clean and simple: you could take turns rolling the dice one by one, incorporating each into your drawing as it comes.

Ooh, or written storytelling--perhaps you could just roll one or two, and use that as a story starter. Or roll them one at a time after every paragraph, as a "What happens next?" game.

Or gross motor skills, acting, and improv--Charades can be hard for little ones, but these would be a manageable number of prompts to roll from and act out, especially if they're familiar with the dice.

Got any other good games to recommend to us? Summer is birthday season in our family!

Practicing for the Fashion Show

If there is one thing that we've learned during years of participation in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show (and there are, of course, MANY things that we've learned...), it is that a fashion show takes PRACTICE!!!

There's no point in practicing before the show's first rehearsal--a couple of years the marks on the runway that they want the models to hit have changed, and one year the entire venue was different from the previous year--but after that first rehearsal, we tape down a masking tape runway indoors and draw a sidewalk chalk runway outdoors, and the model practices daily.

This is the first year that Will is also a model, and there was some sister drama to start, hopefully smoothed over now. During their first rehearsal, planning their routine, Will had the audacity to suggest one alteration to the routine that Syd had in her head, and she immediately pitched a giant fit. Rehearsal was stopped and frankly, I sent them both to bed.

The next morning, Syd was in fine form and ready to listen to any and all suggestions, but Will was still pissed at her for last night's behavior, and pissed at me because I'd asked her to practice instead of read, so she grumped and sulked until I sent her away and had Syd practice alone until she had her routine memorized. You can see Will in the background of this video, actually, using birdseed to lure the chickens away from the road:

These are some very superhero poses, aren't they?

These are some very spoiled animals that we have. Whenever we're outside, they insist on being underfoot:

Seriously. The kids and I went for a hike in our woods this weekend, and at one point I turned around to find that all three cats and both chickens had followed us!

Of course, the kids are equally besotted with their pets:

And that's how rehearsal segued into play, which segued into more rehearsal when a friend who's also in the show came over, and that segued into more play, and then the friend left and the kids did their math while I wrote, and then did their spelling and vocabulary, and then we worked on memorizing a Robert Frost poem, and then we listened to a CD of Robert Frost reading some other poems, and then there was Minecraft.

And that was a fine school day!

Behind the Paleo Window: Fossil Prep with the Kids at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

The kids and I volunteer in the fossil prep lab of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis about once a month. It's one of the perks of having gone on their Family Dino Dig, and it remains a much loved and much appreciated experience. Here's what it looks like:

We wear Paleo Prep Lab coats, and sit on stools at the big work table. There are gooseneck lights to help us see, and we work with x-acto knives, paintbrushes, and Paleobond. In the background you can see a large legbone fossil with a window behind it; that's the Paleo Window that faces the exhibit hall, and families can come up to that open window to speak to the paleontologist working there and ask questions, one of which often is, "What are those kids doing back there?"

This is an edmontosaurus rib fragment, in fine shape, that I've cleaned and am about to polish. I am always struck, when here, of the huge honor that it is to be able to do this work and handle these objects. 

Will scrapes surrounding dirt off of a fossil. The paleontologists here are wonderful in their trust of children's capabilities; they show the children what to do and then let them get on with it. I'm impressed, as well, that they also don't accept careless work. Scraping off all that debris isn't always fun, but if a kid brings over a fossil to be inspected and it isn't completely clean, she's shown what else needs to be done and sent back to work. 

Look at the detail in this fossil!

The fossils have been carefully field prepped on site, either field jacketed in plaster or wrapped in paper towels and then foil and taped up and put in a plastic container. Each fossil is photographed on site, and mapped, and there's a form filled out with that info, as well as what it's suspected to be, and who discovered it and who all has worked on it. I wonder who discovered this particular fossil?

That's who! How cool is that?!?

I love how seriously the kids take their work, and how focused they are. 

This is Syd making her Very Important Scientist face.

Not all the fossils are great, of course. This one is totally borked. The amateur Paleobond mess isn't doing it any favors, but it's so fragmented that it really doesn't matter. I cleaned it off a bit, but fossils in this kind of shape are generally just donated to the local schools. My kids are so desensitized by their familiarity with really great fossils that I actually had to explain to them how cool the teachers and kids would find this particular specimen. 

This one's another school donation. I'd have had to jackhammer off all that dirt Paleobonded to it there at the far end. This is why they don't let amateurs work with the really fancy fossils!

This is really cool. It's an air abrader machine, and it's used to polish the fossils once they're clean. That little wand blasts out baking soda; you aim it not directly at the fossil, but across it, so that the baking soda can gently smooth the surface and make it shine.

Both kids know how to use it, and it's pretty much our favorite toy in the lab.

We generally stay in the lab for about an hour and a half, which is enough time to completely prepare a small fossil in decent shape, or get some real progress made on a larger piece or one that needs more work. After that, it's back into the museum to play some more, and where do you think the kids always want to go first?

Paleontology exhibit. Of course. 

My Latest: Knitting and the Rain

a round-up of DIY rain chain tutorials

an essay on knitted heart implants in Bolivia

and an essay on knitted pouches and nests for wildlife rescue centers

Although I didn't put any tutes up on CAGW this week, I actually ended up doing a lot of crafting. The kids and I have become obsessed with Perler beads, for one thing, and have spent every afternoon this week slouched over the big table in the family room, testing our eyesight and practicing our fine motor skills. I've also been playing with a blowtorch that I was given to review, and I've found a LOT of things that I can ruin with a blowtorch (there's a concrete block on top of a table outside that is the scene of a game that the kids and I play called "Will it melt/burn/explode?"). And now that the snow on our property has melted, I've been doing a ton more scavenging and finding lots of interesting objects to use in future projects--a hand-forged latch, perhaps for a garden gate? MANY limestone blocks, also for gardens. And I found a bunch of insulators lying abandoned around a double circuit steel pole power line at the very back of our property--these are going to be a garden border, I think.

And with that, you can probably tell what activity I'm going to be focused on next week!

Civil Rights for Kids

We first studied Civil Rights back in 2012, in preparation for a trip to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta (and we have to go back again, because they have a Junior Ranger program!), but it's been a regular component of our curriculum since then.

My methodology has remained consistent, because it seems to work well for my kids. We memorize dates, because they make a good scaffold for whatever context we later add, we explore biographies and living histories, and through those, we unpack a particular issue or event.

Because this study is mostly memorization, conversation, and reading, it works well both for my kid who will do anything that I ask her to, and my kid who will do nothing that I ask her to. The contrary kid has the gifts of a sharp memory, a passion for books, and a love of philosophy and debate; she can't help but learn this way. The amiable kid will power through anything that doesn't have a "correct" answer for her to freak out about, loves stories, and couldn't stop talking if I paid her to; she'd be happy adding in lots of hands-on projects, but this is also a good way for her to learn.

The first time that we studied dates (and put them on our big basement timeline--how I miss you!), Martin Luther King, Jr. was the perfect biography to explore, because, of course, he was present at so many of these crucial events. We read plenty about his life, but our main emphasis was on his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with this book in hand to help us unpack and understand that speech:
Since then, we've studied the Civil War (crucial for understanding racism and the need for Civil Rights), Native Americans (another historically disenfranchised people), and other African-American scientists and inventors (remember Will's prize-winning essay on Patricia Bath last year?), but recently, we all found ourselves in the middle of a unit on school segregation and desegregation. It started with this audiobook--
--part of the Dear America series. I've found that series spotty in how well it can keep the kids' interest, but this one enthralled them. We listened to it in the car, and even Will, who prefers books about animals to books about people, and books about magical people to books about real people, was an avid listener. So this was the living biography that inspired us.

For the dates and facts, I turned to our very own town, which sports two former colored schools. One of them, the first colored school in town, is located downtown, blocks from campus. It's now our county's history museum, so we've visited there often. Kids attended this school until the local university moved to its current spot. The Powers that Be didn't want a colored school so close to the university, so they built a new school further to the west, on the far side of the furniture factory that employed quite a lot of the town, reasoning that with the school way over there, African-Americans would have no reason to approach the university's campus.

Nice, huh?

This second colored school, the one that non-Caucasian children attended until desegregation reached our town, is now the community center that my kids, like many other homeschooled kids in our town, are in and out of multiple times each week. In fact, we're there right now--the kids are in math class, and I'm in the library getting some writing done.

A few weeks ago, I set up a time for the community center's program coordinator to talk to our homeschool group about the building's history. She discussed segregation in our town, described the layout and conditions of the school, and walked us through the former classrooms (which we've seen many times before, as one room is the library and the other is the math classroom!) to show us the surprising number of original features that still exist. The blackboards are the same blackboards that were used by the colored school! How cool is it that my kids are now part of their history?

We've very lucky in that the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, a place that we visit probably once a month, also has what I imagine has to be the world's only Civil Rights exhibit that's geared specifically to a child audience. It's called The Power of Children, and although it was a little too scary for the kids when they were younger, it's now perfect for them.

The exhibit focuses on three children famous for their experiences of discrimination. We haven't yet visited the Anne Frank section (although now that we're studying World War II, we will), but recently, the kids spent a long time exploring the sections on Ruby Bridges and Ryan White.

The Ruby Bridges section did a wonderful job personalizing discrimination for two little white girls who've never personally experienced it:

It also had plenty of artifacts that I was interested to see. I'm racking my brain, and I don't think that I've ever seen artifacts like these on display before:

Much of the exhibit focused on the inequities of segregated schools, and the inequities that Bridges faced in her first year at the integrated school:

The unfairness was abundantly clear.

The kids seemed to feel less in response to the Ryan White exhibit, partly because they were distracted by White's truly epic amount of 80s era swag. Alf! Star Wars! Max Headroom! But they had a LOT of fun filming this news report!

I, however, adored the Ryan White exhibit. First of all, I remember hearing about White when I was a kid; he was a few years older than me, and I was struck by his story. This exhibit also makes his story very real, because, of course, he's from Indiana, and the school that he was driven out of and the school that he was made welcome in are both Indiana schools. White's mother donated most of the artifacts that make his exhibit so vivid, and she's also a regular visitor and speaker at the museum.

While there are clearly people in Indiana who need to relearn the anti-discrimination, anti-bigotry ethic, as evidenced by the RFRA nonsense that my state is now undergoing, I hope that my kiddos will never be the kind of people who dehumanize another, or who stand by and let it happen.

Here are some of the other resources that we've been using in our Civil Rights studies:

A Giant Crayon Peace Sign for YOUR House

A friend regifted me a fabulous giant peace sign silicon mold, and I could not rest in any sort of sense of happiness until I had figured out something good to use it with. Melted bead suncatchers sort of worked, but also sometimes caught fire (I really miss that star-shaped mold!) and always gave off enough fumes to make me fear for the neighborhood bird population.

Finally, however... huzzah! I melted down crayon stubs and, just my opinion, but I think it's just the thing:

This turned out way too cute to keep in my house where the kids and the cats are just going to wreck it, so it's up in my pumpkin+bear etsy shop.

The Horse, the Princess, and the Unicorn. Oh, and the Mule

Even though it's Monday, I'm not sharing our work plans for the week.

Gasp, I know! Has the Earth stopped turning? Do pigs finally fly?

The truth is that my fiercely independent, self-determined Will needs a break from being told what to do for half the day, and I need a break from fighting her to the death for every single task that I'd like her to accomplish. Her non-compliance has been gradually ramping up for a while to this untenable extreme, so I'm hoping that a complete break will refresh her attitude.

And the house is, at least, more peaceful since the break. Will puttered outside for the entirety of one day, then played Tokyo Jungle for eight hours the next day, followed by reading the entire Gregor the Overlander series within the next 24 hours, followed by playing outside with her sister for another half of a day. She skipped two family hikes and her Syd's gymnastics meet, BUT participated in family dinner conversation without any bad attitude, talked me into ordering FIFTEEN chicks for her to raise, and listened to me lay down the rules for the usage of her Nook (recently returned from its embargo due to her lying about its usage) without a single sigh or glare or protest.

Will's generally a pretty nerdy kid who can do things like tell you the world's percentage of coffee consumption or the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius without a blink, so there's no danger of her "falling behind," whatever she chooses to do for however long she chooses to do it. My plan is simply to give her the freedom to make her own choices, and watch her for signs that she might be ready have a little more structure--sixth-grade Math Mammoth will be waiting for her whenever she wants it. Of course, I'm also not ruling out the possibility that she'll want to determine her own courses of study from here on out; perhaps the puttering and the video games and the novels will recalibrate themselves between some other, larger projects or areas of interest. Wait and see, I suppose...

Anyway, the big bonus to this is that it gives me a way to focus school time solely on the kid who can never have enough attention. Every school day after breakfast, she and I sit down together (I always invite Will to join us, of course. One day she might!) and I write while she does her Math Mammoth, then we do First Language Lessons together, then she does spelling/handwriting, and then she reads me a book. In the afternoon, after lunch and outdoor play, I invite both kids--generally just Syd accepts--to join me in a project. Last week it was starting seeds one day, painting another day, and transplanting bulbs, which Will DID join us in, on another day. This week's projects will likely consist of making bottle cap jewelry, brainstorming Syd's upcoming birthday party, creating Mandarin vocabulary flash cards, and helping me construct and install a rain chain. It's a good active thinking, problem solving sort of time.

All that being said, here's something totally unrelated to any of that! I wanted to show you why, so often on our work plans, I ask Syd to "write a story." It's because this is what it looks like when she does:

She gets so focused on her work, and makes such elaborate compositions and illustrations, and the results are always so cute--

How could I not assign that every single week?

I made a note in my planner that while we were out and about last week (just coming from the library, of COURSE), Syd asked for my help in finding some "How to Draw" books for her. We couldn't do it while we were in the car, so I wrote it down so that I wouldn't forget it, and then I forgot it.

Until now! I guess that's what we'll do for our afternoon project today!