My Latest: Rain, Bones, Feathers, Candy, the Ocean, Density, and Aluminum

June has been bustling--as usual! I've been creating lots of etsy orders, as well as working on house and garden (poison ivy is EVERYWHERE, and I've discovered that we have tons of black raspberries hidden behind tons of multiflora rose and honeysuckle!). Homeschool continues throughout the summer, as does Girl Scouts, and therefore so do lesson plans. We snuck away on a short weekend trip to Arkansas, and also, we have chickens!!!

In the midst of all that typical chaos, here's what I've been working on for Crafting a Green World:

a tutorial for making upcycled aluminum and washi tape pendants

a tutorial to make my 55-gallon plastic drum rain barrel

a tutorial for whitening bones

an essay about the illegality of collecting/crafting with many found feathers

a tutorial for making a candy wrapper-embellished picture frame

a definite Pinterest fail

a tutorial for having kids explore density by making their own discovery bottles

and a round-up of other discovery bottles to make for kids

a tutorial to make a plastic jug watering can

and a tutorial for making mixed-media beeswax collages

Coming up, I've got some books to review, a chalkboard project to tell you about, some nature crafts to try as soon as I stock up on colorful yarn, and I'm thinking of learning how to make video tutorials. The kids and I are exploring earthquakes, so I'm planning the construction of a shake table, and we're finishing up our study of Georgia O'Keeffe, so I'm setting up a still life for us to paint today, and I desperately need to label and pack all the things for the kids' next week at sleepaway camp!

But right now it's raining, so I'm going to go make myself a cup of coffee and an egg sandwich instead of weeding the strawberries. Yay!

Ballerina: Three Years

Spring ballet recital, April 2012

Summer Intensive ballet recital, June 2015

Ballet has grown this girl in so many ways, and I'm thrilled to watch her embrace it, enjoy it, and excel in it. I've noted before how easy it would be to push this kid--she's a perfectionist, she's driven, and she adores approval. Wouldn't it be so temptingly easy to put her into competitions, to instruct her to practice for hours every day in order to reach perfection, to allow trophies and prizes to be the positive reinforcement for yet more competitions and more hours of daily practice?

And she'd love it, I suspect. She'd crave the feeling of winning, grow addicted to the possibility of actually achieving perfection, let losing hit her self-worth and spur her into greater effort. 

I fear that. I actually fear the higher levels of dance, because I fear that she'll somehow hear and internalize those beliefs, internalize body standards and mold herself to them. I have a friend who dances, however, who assures me that in the world of ballet, that kind of thing is actually very rare. Instead, she tells me about self-confidence, about strong cores and excellent posture, about developing work ethic and focus, about the bravery that performance brings. 

And as I sit in the university's large dance studio and watch the children from the Summer Intensive class perform their recital, half of which they choreographed themselves, see my child spinning in duet with a friend dizzily about the space as another child leaps with out-of-control abandon and three more march in circles in front of all the parents and grandparents, showing off this number that they "choreographed" themselves ("Think if it more as an improv," one of their instructors informed us in her introduction to the piece, "that expresses the joy of dance"), I don't see anything here about unhealthy standards or an unattainable drive for perfection. 

I simply see a bunch of kids--all with excellent posture and a lot of self-confidence, to be sure--expressing the joy of dance, and I love it.

How to Make a Stylus from a Dowel

Easiest. Tute. Ever, y'all!



Sometimes you need a stylus. A stylus is useful for embossing into aluminum, or creating scratch art, or carving into clay; none of those things can be done well with a pencil, which is going to get graphite into your work, or with a nail, which is too sharpy.

Of course, you also totally do not have a stylus. Seriously, who has something like that?

Fortunately, it's super easy to make.

You will need:

• dowel. Choose one of the thinner diameters, but otherwise, anything from your stash will do.
• saw. A hand saw will work fine.
• pencil sharpener. An old-school metal one with several sizes of openings is the kind that you need for this.

1. Cut the dowel to size. Six inches is a good maximum length for a dowel, so mark and hand-cut your dowel to that length with a hand saw, 

If you really need to use a circular saw on account of you love power tools, I'm not going to stop you, but a hand saw is all that's necessary.

2. Here's the awesome part: SHARPEN YOUR DOWEL IN THE PENCIL SHARPENER!!!!!!!!!!11!!!!!

 You've got to use a metal pencil sharpener for this, and unless your dowel happens to be the diameter of a pencil (stranger things have happened!), the pencil sharpener will have to have an adjustable diameter--think elementary school pencil sharpener--but other than that, it totally works like a dream.

And Friends, I also sharpen CHALK in that pencil sharpener!

My kids used these this weekend to make embossed aluminum pendants for Will's Girl Scout Junior Jeweler (say that three times fast) badge, but once upon a time, I waaaaay overbought scratch art sheets, and these styli--it's totes a Latin word, so hence the 2nd declension masculine nominative plural ending--are great for that as well. The kids also use them for clay, and yes, I have seen Will shoot sharpened dowels from her bow. We play rough around here, Friends.

Kitchen Science: Density Cake

You'll excuse me, I hope, if this reads as a bit scattered today, but I bolted awake before dawn this morning to a phone call telling me that the big kid's chicks were at the post office waiting for us!

The kids and I took a field trip to the fire station a few months ago, and during that trip a firefighter lectured us on the importance of middle-of-the-night fire drills, because when people are awakened from a sound sleep, they awake confused.

Friends, I awoke confused.

I tossed the room looking for my pants, gave up (I found them a bit ago, tangled in the sheets), couldn't find new pants, found pants, forgot where I put my phone down, spent ages looking for it, found it, woke the kids, remembered that the brooder wasn't completely set up, had a right panic about it, couldn't get the heat lamp at exactly the perfect height to emit exactly the perfect temperature and was completely unable to troubleshoot this, tried many things, gave up and went to lie down for a few minutes, remembered the ladder and dragged it in from the garage to serve as a heat lamp stand, couldn't find the address of the post office, set the phone down and lost it again, etc.

Fortunately, by the time the kids had found a height that worked for the heat lamp and got the brooder temperature approximately correct, the fog of sleep had somewhat lifted from my brain (the coffee that I drank as the kids worked was crucial to this process), and I only had to go to the wrong building, call the post office and get directions to the right building, and then go in the wrong doors of the right building once before I successfully located our chicks.

They're safely home now, drinking and eating and bopping around their brooder, and I've declared today a Chick Holiday, because who can be expected to do math and spelling and history when there are FIFTEEN CHICKS BEING CUTE?!?

Therefore, the science project that I'm going to tell you about actually occurred earlier this week. I'd told you that we were finished exploring density for a bit after the Great Density Experiment, but then I realized that the kids had really only explored the density of liquids, so I thought that I'd set up just one last little project so that they could note to themselves that density also applies to solids.

The goal of this experiment is to determine which cake toppings are less dense than cake, and which are more dense. Instead of measuring mass and volume to determine this, the kids let the substances themselves illustrate their density, by placing all toppings on top of the cake, baking it, and then examining it to determine which toppings fall to the bottom of the cake and which toppings stay up top.

To do this experiment, you will need:

• cake mix. The kids are capable of making cake from scratch, but that's another project in itself, with different variables (Did the kid put in enough baking powder and soda? Did the kid put in the correct amount of flour?), so to make sure that the cake itself would be a neutral substance, I let the kids pick out a boxed cake mix.
• toppings. Guide the kids just enough to make sure that they're choosing substances that will float and substances that will sink.
• paper to record the experiment. Lab notebooks would be ideal, but I'm still working the kids up to those.

1. Have the kids prepare the cake mix and put it in the baking pan.
2. Lay out all possible toppings. The kids used frozen tart cherries, candy-melt wafers, caramels, chocolate chips, almond slivers, pecan pieces, M&Ms, and dehydrated marshmallows.
3. Have the kids grid out the cake on a piece of paper, and as they place the ingredients, they should record each location on their grid, along with their hypothesis of the substance's behavior during baking. The grid will look like this:

Pop the cake in the oven and bake it according to package directions. When it's finished, you can evaluate your hypotheses based on observation--

--and core samples:

I was pleased that the kids hadn't correctly predicted the behavior of every single substance, because surprises are fun. And the little kids who came over to play "mud kitchen" with my own little kid that afternoon quite enjoyed helping us eat our density cake!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, homeschool projects, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Great Density Experiment, or, The Best Science Project EVER

I don't even remember now how the kids ended up getting interested in density (if you do, please remind me!), but fascinated they were, so I planned a little unit of study for them to explore this property of matter.

The kids watched the density videos from Simple Science, memorized the definition of density (Density is the relationship between a substance's mass and its volume) and the formula to calculate it (d=m/v), and I attempted to guide them through the creation of an ocean in a bottle, a craft project that would be both cute and would demonstrate the interesting interaction between oil and water, but I didn't realize that the sand called for in the project is craft sand, and so I used SAND sand, and it was a total Pinterest fail:

The following day's density lab, however, was one of the most successful homeschool projects that we have ever done. I set up the following invitation--

--with the following supplies:

• pan balance scale
• measuring cups
• empty, clean peanut butter jars
• eyedroppers
• test tubes and test tube rack
• liquid watercolors
• mineral oil
• glycerin
• marbles
• container for water
• liquid starch
• corn syrup
• rubbing alcohol
• vegetable oil

The kids brought out their own science/math journals and pencils.

The kids' instructions were simple: explore the substances, making observations about their densities when compared to each other, and record everything in their notebooks (I'm working my way up to introducing them to lab notebooks, but hoping to do it gradually enough that Will won't rebel at all the writing required in keeping one).

The kids found this activity completely engrossing. Using the test tubes and peanut butter jars, they explored every single substance in every single combination possible, I imagine, constantly making discoveries and uncovering wonderful interactions:

water and liquid starch

mineral oil, colored water, and corn syrup

adding more corn syrup by eyedropper, and watching it fall to the bottom

Will kept adding to this one, and we kept being amazed by what happened:

recording it all in her notebook without a fuss--yay!

This is the notebook that she earned for completing the scavenger hunt at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Liquid watercolor and water

The colored water, administered by eyedropper, falls through mineral oil and bounces off of corn syrup:

ordering the substances by density in her notebook

Will reproduces Syd's experiment, with the same fascinating results.

When the kids found combinations that they especially liked and that seemed stable, I asked them to reproduce them on a larger scale, so that we could keep them to observe for a few days:

This was a gold-standard homeschool project, the perfect combination of concrete learning and free play that I know I'm going to be striving for in all our future projects. For now, we're leaving density and moving on to earthquakes, of all things, but this is a lab that will certainly bear repeating, with even more substances to choose from, the next time the subject comes up.

Here are some of the other resources that we used in our study of density:

• What Floats? What Sinks? A Look at Density
• Super Simple Science Experiments with Mass
• Mr. Wizard's World

What Have We Learned This Year?

I generally count our year-round school year as August-July, but since this week marked the end of our local public school's school year (and today we're going to the open house for the kids' sleep-away camp next month, and tomorrow the younger kid starts her Summer Intensive ballet program!!!), it made me curious to review what we've learned so far this year. Here are just a few of our larger themes:

(Note: I put in a few links and photos, but you'd want to search my blog for the full curriculum plans that I used and all of our other activities and resources)

Art

color theory

drawing

Durer

fashion design (for the younger kid)

flower arranging

limestone carving (for the older kid)

pottery

Foreign Languages

Latin

Mandarin Chinese

Spanish

History

Ancient China

Civil Rights

Civil War

Western Expansion and the pioneers

Math

area

decimals (just the older kid)

fractions

long division (just the older kid)

multi-digit multiplication (both kids!)

subtraction with borrowing (for the younger kid)

PE

aerial silks

ballet (for the younger kid)

horseback riding

ice skating

Practical Life

Girl Scout cookie sales

cooking

woodworking

Reading and Writing

fiction writing

infographics

NaNoWriMo

research papers

Science

aquatic ecosystems

botany

how to identify, clean, and prepare dinosaur fossils

Robotics (for the older kid)

Although the kids are in and out of all kinds of interests, all the time (lately, for instance, they are OBSESSED with density, and we've been doing tons of density experiments/demonstrations together), these listed are the main ones, the ones that have seemed to find their way into our studies all year. The older kid used area calculations to figure out the layout of her butterfly garden last week. The younger kid made me a lovely arrangement of peonies for the table yesterday. As part of her school this month, the older kid is reading a college paleontology textbook, which she can understand because she's studied so much paleontology.

Our days are sometimes hard, and they sometimes feel too long, and they sometimes seem too short, and sometimes nobody wants to do their math or their grammar or their chores--including me! But looking back through the year, seeing that a kid who couldn't subtract with borrowing in August can now calculate multi-digit multiplication problems, that a kid who was so nervous that she forgot her silks routine in December just walked a fashion show runway in front of a full auditorium in April... well, that's encouraging. It's inspiring.

Frankly, it's a large part of why we homeschool.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!