Work Plans for the Week of August 17: Police!

Last week's school week went well. Big hits included the introduction of a bug collection, which it turned out Will still really, really, really wants to do--there are three butterflies in the freezer right now, waiting for her to take them out later today and set them to dry on the spreading board. The mapwork for World War 2 countries was also super fun, even though I made the process more troublesome by using a modern map instead of a World War 2-era map, meaning that we had to draw our own country borders for the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, etc. The process turned into a fabulous exercise in ready-reference, however, as Will constantly kept my fingers flying over the keyboard to look up her questions--"What did South America do in the war? What did Canada do in the war? Why is Norway's literacy rate 100%?" Syd loved making invisible ink from lemon juice, as I knew she would, and flipped through this secret formula recipe book to find instructions to make a pinata, which is now drying on our coffee table.

I have never seen a more convoluted recipe for papier mache paste than in that book (Sugar? Alum?!?), but she cooked up the entire thing herself, so whatever.

I woke up the kids at 3:30 on Thursday morning to hike over to the drive-in and watch the peak of the Perseids--beautiful! The kids claimed that they saw some meteors, as well, although every time I looked over at them they were rolled up in their blankets in a fetal position, dozing. They must have spent some time awake, however, because this one fell asleep in the aerial silks rig:

Will also liked the manipulative that I made her for multiplying and dividing by powers of ten ("Hey, it makes sense now!"), but HATED the manipulative that I made her for multiplying by decimals ("Do I have to do this? Why can't I just multiply it?!?"). For that one, I finally just let her model the answer, instead of using the model to work out the problem. Sigh...

Another project that didn't work out last week was the Bee Citizen Scientist Project. I didn't get many flowers into our summer garden this year, and so the children didn't find any bees to photograph. We'll be spending a day at a state park this week, however, and another afternoon at our local hands-on science museum, which has a beehive, so I'm hoping it'll happen this week. Regardless, Will LOVED the bees of the world book that she read as part of this assignment:

There are so many great species of bees in the world!

For memory work this week, I am going to have to require that Will finish memorizing her World War 1-era poem, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," as she has dragged it out long enough. The children will also have more daily practice on Mango Languages (where I also need to spend some time, to catch them up in Hawaiian!), a spelling list of "wh" and "w" words to memorize and define, and the list of World War 2 leaders and their countries.

The Book of the Day assignments for this week consist of living histories and books on bees, butterflies, cartooning, and Hawaii. We're eclectic readers!

And here is the rest of our week!


MONDAY: For Math Mammoth this week, Syd is working entirely with place value--she's mastered this concept, so I'm hoping for a week free from (math-related) tantrums! Will has a review on decimals, and is then moving on to graphing, which I think she'll also enjoy.

Will completed the requirements for her Girl Scout Cadette Comic Artist badge, but since both kids have written comics before, I didn't think that the badge requirements asked enough of her. I'll fix that! For today, I printed out tons of different comic panel formats, and I'll be asking the children to create comic strips from a variety of them. I think they'll discover for themselves in the process that bigger panels ask for bigger moments, and that the different formats ask for different pacing and storylines.

We've got our weekly volunteer gig at the local food pantry today, as well--if nothing else, I have to return the electric tiller that I borrowed from them last Monday. Mental note to go outside in an hour or so and clean the dirt off the tines!

TUESDAY: If Will is going to be freezing and mounting a selection of butterflies, the least that we can do is also feed them, so I'm going to show the children how to make butterfly nectar on this day. I'm hoping to impress upon them that science always goes with stewardship.

Our World War 2 study this week focuses on the leaders of the major countries involved in the war. For this assignment, the children will merely need to match each leader with his/her country, then research a photo of each leader to add to their page in their World War 2 notebook. Later in the week, however, likely on the weekend, Matt will give us a lecture on each leader, including the most important moves and decisions that each one made. In these ways, we're approaching the same main events of the war over and over through different lenses, which I hope will allow the children to see these events through a larger context, not just as straight facts to memorize (which I also ask them to do).

The construction of a decoder wheel is actually an activity for the Girl Scout Junior Detective badge, and so both kids have already done it last year, when Will was a Junior working on this badge. We lost those wheels in the move, however (or I tossed them... whichever), and they were really fun to have around, so I'm asking them to make new ones as part of Syd's badge work.

WEDNESDAY: I'll be asking each child to ask at least one question to our tour guide during our field trip to the police station on Thursday, so we'll take the time on this day for the children to research the law enforcement field, look through their Girl Scout handbooks to see what badges might ask for an interview with a police officer (off-hand, I know that at least Detective and First Aid do, and perhaps Animal Helper, as well?), and then write down their questions in the notebooks that they'll take on our field trip. I can't emphasize enough the benefits of having kids conduct interviews, and letting them ask their very own questions during these interviews--their interview of their great-grandfather about his experiences in World War 2 were WONDERFUL.

This fruit observation is yet another activity from a Girl Scout badge--Detective, again--but, as with many Girl Scout badge activities, it's wonderfully academic. Basically, we'll be putting a selection of fruit into jars (the badge book suggested peanut butter jars, but I don't have enough empties to spare, so we'll be using glass canisters), then the children will be observing them over the course of their decomposition, sketching them and taking notes. How cool is that?!? Now I just need to find a place in the house to display several glass jars of rotten fruit...

One of our family goals this summer is to "eat at every ice cream place in town." To that end, I'll be giving the children a giant map of our hometown and the phone book. They'll need to look up the ice cream shops, find those addresses on the map, and then mark each one. Finally, they'll of COURSE choose one for us to visit that evening. Yay for map skills!

THURSDAY: With our homeschool group's playgroup and our field trip to the police station on this day, the only other work that the children have is their math and an assignment to find and watch some examples of hula dancing on YouTube. There are hula competitions, so there are some really fine examples to find. There are also many instructional videos, so we're going to give it a whirl for ourselves, as well.

FRIDAY: Neither kid has ever actually worked ahead to have Friday free, but I still keep independent assignments on this day, just in case they do, and to give myself a bit of a break--the big messy projects that we do each day are rewarding, for sure, but they take a lot of mental and emotional energy out of this introvert! On this day, then, the kids have three more pages to do in their grammar books (we use library copies Exploring Grammar and Mastering Grammar, worked with a plastic sleeve over each page and a dry-erase marker), their Friday Math Mammoth assignment, more fossil prep (Will is also studying a college-level intro to paleontology text--it's dense, but she knows enough of the material already to make her way through, if we go slowly and discuss it often), and an educational ipad app--the children NEVER choose to play these apps in their free time, so at the least I'm asking them to play and review each one, then tell me if we should keep it for further use or delete it.

While the kids are doing all of this, I'll be spending my week researching hands-on activities for graphing, completing my writing assignments, and working on several projects in-progress--a dollhouse remodel with Syd, a building blocks remodel for a writing assignment, how to turn a static comic into an animated comic, our fall garden, and much, much more.

It's going to be a great week!

American Girl Goes a Little Bit Goth: A Pink Skulls Reversible Skirt

Here's the latest listing in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop: a pink skulls American Girl doll skirt!

I started off by making one for Syd, of course, and then made a second one for my shop.

I LOVE this reversible wrap skirt because the Velcro makes it super simple for the kid to use.

On the reverse side the skirt is plain pink, because you don't always want to wear skulls.

My next project is to see how this skirt works with jersey knit, because I'd love to upcycle T-shirts into doll skirts.

Here are the couple of doll skirt types that I've made so far:

• Doctor Who reversible wrap skirt
• postage stamp quilt reversible wrap skirt

Sense a pattern?

Perler Bead Business Cards

I had been procrastinating on making business cards so shamefully that I was actually sending packages out without business cards in them.

Rookie move, Pumpkin+Bear!

The problem is that making business cards can be a little (lot) boring, so every time I have to make a new batch I try to do something different with them, to make the process more fun. I've done plain business cards on the backs of old record albums, fabric-backed business cards, vintage paper-backed business cards, business cards with stitching on them, business cards with beads dangling from them, photo business cards...

Inspiration was a little hard to come by.

As I was cleaning out one of my desk drawers (my desk is woefully messy, by the way. Sharing space with my laptop at this moment are a couple of packages to be checked, several books to review, schoolwork to be collated, shipping supplies, lots of pleasure reading, my morning coffee, a list of library books that need to be read and returned, the children's letter from Santa from TWO YEARS AGO, etc. Sigh...), I found all the little Perler bead candies that Syd had made, originally for her candy-themed birthday party, but, of course, she made about three times the amount that she actually needed for favors. I had tossed them into my desk drawer, not knowing what else to do with them.

And just like that--inspiration!

I used a little piece of double-sided tape to stick each one on, so that you can take it off and use it as a charm for something else.

Perler bead sweets aren't terribly thematically appropriate for my etsy shop, but, oh, well--they're cute and they were fun to make and they used up some bits and bobs that I didn't know what else to do with.

And they'll only last me for about a month or so, so if you've got any cute ideas for handmade business cards, send them my way!

Work Plans for the Week of August 10, 2015: Math, Maps, and Many Animals

We had a great week last week! Mind you, a day in our house is never what you'd call tantrum-free, but the majority of each day contained content children who worked hard on their responsibilities, played together, played outside, and didn't give me too much of a hard time.

This chalkboard helps, I think:

I've been compiling it on Sundays, as I'm finishing up the next week's lesson plans, and then during the week, I really only have to update the daily chore list and erase the special events as they pass and the memory work as it's successfully memorized.

For memory work, daily practice on Mango Languages is a constant, as daily guitar practice for Syd will be when I can sort out her lessons. Mango Languages can be a little frustrating, as it's designed for adults and therefore moves quickly, but I continue to explain to the children that I do not expect perfection, or speedy progress, just the consistency that will allow their brains to master the material. And they do seem to have settled into their daily practice:


I'm studying Hawaiian, too, as I've never learned an Austronesian language before. Will does some Hawaiian, but also likes to explore the other languages, but after trying Mandarin Chinese, Syd seems happy to stay with Hawaiian for now. Here's she is comparing her pronunciation to the native Hawaiian speaker's:

Written work also went well last week, and has tended to go much better since I made the commitment to myself that when the children were working at our school table, I would be working there, as well, generally on my computer, which allows me to answer the random ready-reference questions that always come my way, but also with a white board and dry-erase marker at hand, tools that are essential for easily demonstrating math calculations. By these ages the children ought to be able to do their written work independently, but if working in companionable silence with me helps them focus, then I'm not going to protest--especially as I always have plenty of my own work to do!

Having a chick at the table to assist is also essential, apparently:

Anyway, this week's memory work includes Mango Languages, Will's World War 1 poem (Syd has mastered hers, but Will's is more challenging), the countries involved in World War 2, spelling words, and Hawaii state symbols. Spelling words and the poem can be knocked off the list by proving to me that they've been mastered, and we'll move on from World War 2 countries to World War 2 leaders next week, whether or not the kids have the countries down--this won't be the last time that we study World War 2, so I really just want the children to be familiar with these facts, not necessarily have them memorized cold.

The children also have an assigned book to read each day, and this week's books include picture books of butterfly and frog metamorphosis, living books on Hawaii and World War 2, a biography of Marie Curie, and some titles for STEM enrichment or that are related to the kids' current Girl Scout badges in progress.

Here's our week!


MONDAY: We're starting the week with some hands-on math enrichment. Syd loves fractions, so on this day she'll be exploring a set of fraction blocks and activity cards that I checked out for her from our local university's education library. For Will, I put together this model for multiplying and dividing by powers of ten, and printed out a multiplication by powers of ten worksheet for her to complete using the model. I laminated the strips that you pull through the model, so with a dry-erase marker, she can write each problem down on the strip, physically manipulate it to show the process, then erase it and begin again with the new problem. I think this will make the process very clear very quickly, as Will is excellent with patterns.

We don't follow a formal spelling curriculum; I prefer to keep an ear out for any words that a child needs help spelling, then create a list that contains that word and words that are spelled following similar rules or that have similar sounds. This week, for instance, the spelling list contains "oo, ue, ueue, ew" words. Next week's list, I already know, will contain "wh, w" words. Some weeks I use the spelling word list as cursive copywork, but this week I've created a word search; when finished, the children will keep the page in their binders as a study sheet.

I wanted the children to be able to recognize a few specialized terms in our brief mosaics unit, mostly to help them remember that there is a science even to artworks. I won't have them memorize these terms, but I do want them to practice their infographic-making skills to create a reference sheet that we can display.

We have our weekly volunteer gig at our local food pantry today; while I stock the pantry and assist customers, the kids can be found weeding and harvesting in the garden, repackaging bulk food, rinsing storage bins, snacking, helping themselves to seed packages to plant in our home gardens, or reading or playing quietly. They keep themselves entertained!

TUESDAY: Math is back to Math Mammoth today; Syd has a lesson on estimation, and then some review, and Will has word problems. She will be SO excited to move away from decimals next week!

Time spent outside on lovely summer days has allowed the children to become interested, again, in insects, so I have a few activities that we can build on if they seem to enjoy them. One is this BumbleBee Citizen Scientist Program, which will involve the children hunting down a bumblebee to photograph, and will give them the opportunity to research an identification for it, and to have that identification confirmed by an expert in the field. We'll see how it goes.

For our World War 2 study this week, the children will be labeling a world map with the countries that participated in World War 2, using these World War 2 notebooking pages. This lesson won't have a lecture component, but will simply be a useful reference for the rest of the unit.

Syd has a playdate planned for this day, and you might remember that I count even playdates as part of our scheduled day, since playdates aren't exactly the same thing as free time, and preserving the children's free time is very important to me.

WEDNESDAY: Syd has Math Mammoth again on this day, but for Will I created worksheets to teach her how to use this model to multiply decimals. Her worksheets simply consist of decimal multiplication problems, each followed by enough clip art hundred flats (you can also use a blank hundred grid) to model the problem, and space below to write the answer.

Syd is currently working on her Girl Scout Detective badge, so she and I will be making invisible ink using lemon juice, and playing with invisible ink pens that require a black light to reveal their writing--lots of good science there! Will is working on the Comic Artist badge, so she'll be studying comic strips and creating her own, for lots of good visual arts and creative writing practice. See why I love the Girl Scouts so much?

I've been sitting on this book that I need to review, and since Mango Languages has recently gotten the children interested in the variety of world languages that exist, I thought we'd give reading a chapter out loud a go. We'll read it together, looking up the pronunciation of the French words that we encounter using an online dictionary. We'll continue that next week if the kids seem to enjoy it, and if they don't seem to, I'll just pass it to them to finish reading on their own. Regardless, it's a nice little intro to the French language.

Will has often expressed interest in creating a butterfly collection, and I finally feel confident that I've done enough research to choose the most humane way to go about it. I've found some Youtube videos that provide a good overview of the process of collecting, euthanizing, preparing, and displaying insects, and I've purchased all the relevant supplies, so I'll have the kids watch these videos on this day, and if they're still enthusiastic about it, we can begin!

THURSDAY: Syd has her Math Mammoth, but Will has a review of multiplying and dividing by powers of ten and multiplying by decimals. If she doesn't have the process down cold by this day, then we're just going to move on anyway and revisit it in several months.

Our geography assignment for this week is simply a coloring page of Hawaii state symbols and facts, which the children can color while listening to traditional Hawaiian music streaming on Spotify. These facts will then be added to their memory work to review until they've mastered them.

Our homeschool group's playgroup is on this day, and that tends to take up most of the afternoon. Will has her horseback riding lesson following it (we've switched stables recently, and I think it was a good decision), and while she's in her lesson, Syd and I do a project together. Last week, we started a blog for her, and this week, I think we're going to work on some decorations for her bedroom.

FRIDAY: I purposefully stock Friday with work that the children can do independently; throughout the week I encourage them to work ahead on Friday's work so that they can have that day off, and even if they don't do it, assigning work that doesn't require my input still gives me a bit of a break on this day. Their grammar comes from library copies of Exploring Grammar (Syd) and Mastering Grammar (Will), with laminating pages over the workbook pages so that the children can complete them using dry-erase markers.

Froguts is a frog dissection ipad app that's realistic and humane--yay!

We now have a decent approximation of many of the basic fossil cleaning tools used in a paleontology lab--x-acto knife, dental pick, test tube brush, paintbrush--although I still need to buy some super glue, and as I recently also bought several specimen boxes, we've been able to get some good work done on cleaning and preparing our fossil finds from our 2014 dinosaur dig. Fossil prep is a LOT of work, however, and I anticipate that it'll be a long time before our specimen boxes are complete. In addition to this work, Will is studying a college-level intro to paleontology textbook, and then discussing each chapter with me.

We've got some other fun plans this week, of course--the Perseid meteor shower, an afternoon at the splash park, perhaps weekend swimming at the YMCA, and definitely the drive-in movie--but that encompasses our work week!

How to Model Metric Conversions in Grams: You Use Rice!

It gets harder and harder to find hands-on methods for modeling mathematical concepts as my older kid gets older. Preschool and early elementary were all about math manipulatives, but many of the sources that I rely on--blogs, Pinterest, education manuals--peter out around the fourth and fifth grades as far as hands-on learning. It's as if many 10- and 11-year-olds are simply expected to memorize shifting a row over by one space (multi-digit multiplication), or moving a decimal (multiplication and division with decimals) or any of the other calculation shortcuts kids start to learn in these years, often taught without context or the explanation and modeling that makes them make sense.

There are many good teachers who still rely on hands-on methods, of course, but, nevertheless, I've been spending a LOT more time on math research in the past couple of years, sussing out my own hands-on methods to present these skills to the kids in ways that actually make sense to them.

For instance, I had to do a ton of research when the older kid began a recent unit on the metric system, specifically metric conversions. In her Math Mammoth curriculum, multiplying and dividing by powers of ten and multiplying and dividing by decimals and metric conversions are all tied up together, and she's been struggling to comprehend the basic concept uniting them all (struggling so much that I suspect that this isn't an age-appropriate concept for her to be expected to master, but that's a different issue to discuss with you on a different day, perhaps).

Powers of ten, especially, can be hard to make hands-on, because, of course, things get big (and small) FAST. I mean, have you seen the "Powers of Ten" documentary? If you haven't, stop and watch it right now. It's required viewing for all of humanity:
Metric conversions, however, do allow for a bit of modeling of powers of ten and multiplication and division by them, how much so depending on your equipment. When the older kid modeled liter conversions, for example, she could manipulate and visualize measurements from 1 milliliter to 1 liter. For the gram conversions in this activity, the children could manipulate and visualize measurements from 1 gram to 1 kilogram.

Prior to the activity, I made the older kid a chart that was simply a row of the metric conversion chart (kilogram, hectogram, decagram, gram, decigram, centigram, milligram) copied out seven times, with space to write the conversions above each row. I set out our balance scale with its gram weights, a set of Ziplock bags and a Sharpie, and baggies of dry rice dyed with liquid watercolors--I use the recipe in 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids for the rice, also published here by the author. I didn't also bring out Base Ten blocks for further modeling, because it seemed like we already had a lot going on, but you can.

Although the kids worked together on this project, the younger kid hasn't yet really studied metric conversions, so she helped with weighing the rice, then she poured each measurement into its Ziplock bag and labeled it while the older kid calculated its conversions on her chart.

To begin, I challenged the kids to accurately measure out 1 gram of rice. This required a lot of cooperating/bickering. Of COURSE.

Once both children were in some semblance of agreement, or rather after they'd grown weary of one kid insisting the rice was too heavy and picking out individual grains while the other kid insisted that her sister was incorrect and the rice was too light and putting back individual grains as they were removed, etc., the younger kid poured the gram of rice into a clear plastic baggie and labeled it "1 gram" while the older kid wrote a "1" over the gram entry on the top row of her conversion chart, and then calculated the conversions of 1 gram up to 1 kilogram and down to 1 milligram.

To also model this with Base Ten blocks, first ask the child to imagine that 1 unit represents 1 gram. Lay out the ten bar, the hundred flat, and the thousand cube with the decagram, hectogram, and kilogram, respectively, then tell the child, "If one unit represents one gram, then this ten bar represents one decagram, or ten units. What is the decimal that represents one unit in this ten bar? That is the decimal that represents one gram in the decagram."

Continue up through kilogram.

To convert down to milligrams, lay the Base Ten blocks out so that the thousand cube represents one gram, the hundred flat represents one decigram, the ten bar represents one centigram, and the unit represents one milliliter. Ask your kid the same types of questions, this time asking them to imagine that the thousand cube now represents one whole gram.

You can use this modeling system for the entire metric conversion chart; every time there's a "1", whether that's 1 decagram or 1 decigram, you can model that as both one unit, using the unit cube, or one whole, using the thousand cube.

Measuring out a decagram of rice is also pretty straightforward with our set of weights, but measuring out 1 hectogram required the children to add gram weights to reach 100--

--and when it was time to measure out 1 kilogram, they were stumped. "We don't have a 1 kilogram weight or anything that adds up to make 1 kilogram!" the older kid noted.

"Hmmm, how could you solve that problem," I asked?

No clue.

"I see that you have 1 gram of rice, 1 decagram of rice, and 1 hectogram of rice. Could any of that help?"

A-ha! The children decided that if they measured out 1 hectogram of rice ten times, they would have 1 kilogram.

YAY for metric conversions!!!

Unlike the liter conversions, which got poured over the older kid's head in the end, these gram conversions get to stay with us as permanent metric models:

And now I need to make a new batch of dyed dry rice, because kilograms are BIG!!!

Anybody got any other good metric conversion activities for me? I need ones that are not so much lessons, but that we can incorporate into our lives, the same way that the big kid is now responsible for calculating all restaurant tips, on account of $32.68 x .2 is multiplication with decimals!

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

American Girl Meets Dr. Who: My New Hobby

Syd loves playing with dolls, dressing them and taking them on adventures and changing their clothes and taking them on more adventures. She has a large collection of vintage handmade doll clothes from a great-grandmother, and she loves to make her own temporary fashions, using scrap fabric and lots of tape and rubber bands, but when we visited the American Girl store for her birthday in May, I could tell that Syd also longed for REAL clothes for her American Girl doll.

Clothes that fit the doll perfectly. Clothes that were well-made and didn't need rubber bands or tape to keep them up.

And so what is a Momma to do, but start an entire new hobby of creating American Girl doll clothes?

I don't love fussy sewing, so I actually do appreciate sewing for a larger-format doll such as the American Girl (I know that Syd wants "real" Barbie clothes, too, but I dread the eensy seams that would come with that sewing, so I'm putting it off), and in that sewing, I'm consciously choosing the least fussy patterns available, ones that also allow for a lot of customization, such as this reversible wrap skirt.

The skirt pattern comes with a copyright that allows for personal use AND sales of finished skirts made using that pattern (which is AWESOME!), so while I made skirts for Penny, Syd's own American Girl doll, I also made a duplicate of each skirt for my pumpkin+bear etsy shop. Here, for instance, is the Dalek reversible wrap skirt--it's also my favorite:

I also "made" the shirt in the last two photos, if you can call cutting a single straight line "making" a shirt. Can you tell what that shirt USED to be?

Yep! It's a newborn onesie!

I'm a little (LOT) surprised at how much I'm enjoying making these doll clothes. But again, Syd has always been the kid who stretches my interests into outlets that I'd never have explored without her, whether it's dance or fashion design or hairstyles or makeup or, yes, doll clothes.

Work Plans for the Week of August 3, 2015: Back to Work Plans!!!

Although we school year-round, I haven't written these weekly work plans since March. First, Will was being extremely defiant about doing her work, so I made plans only for Syd for a while, and left Will to read and putter and mind her own business. After a few weeks of that, Will wanted to work again, so I began to make daily plans for the children on a dry erase board.

The daily plans worked really well, and I would still be doing them, except at our family meeting yesterday we discussed several school issues--what foreign language should we study, who wants to learn a musical instrument, how is the schedule working for everyone, etc.--and I learned that both children would prefer going back to weekly plans. In addition, Will would like a five-day school week with fewer assignments per day, and Syd would like the four-day school week that comes with having more assignments per day, so the weekly work plans allow me to set up a Friday school day that consists entirely of independent work; Will can complete that work on Friday, with minimal assistance from me (so that I get more of a break), and Syd can work ahead throughout the week and have Fridays free.

Will also promised to help me make my work plans every Sunday, so yesterday she collated math assignments and researched educational ipad apps while I fleshed out our week:



Add to this a few daily chores, consisting of whatever I especially need done that day, and a daily book for each kid, non-fiction or a living book, on whatever subject I think is interesting--this week it's a lot of horse books, a couple of art books that focus on mosaics, a picture book of the Trojan War, and an interesting how-to-write-stories book.

Memory work this week consists of the World War 1-era poems that the children are memorizing--"Anthem for Doomed Youth" for Will, and "In Flanders Fields" for Syd, and daily work on their foreign language of choice, beginning Tuesday. Next week, I'll likely add the state capital and main islands of Hawaii.

MONDAY: We'll be back at our weekly volunteer gig today after two weeks off for traveling and day camp. I consider that service learning, and count it as part of our school day.

In math this week, Will is still working on decimals, and Syd is finishing up a four operations review and then working a little more on graphs.

I don't know how really essential word ladders are, but the kids enjoy them, it's a puzzle, and it gets them thinking about vocabulary and spelling in a new way.

For our World War 2 unit study this week, the kids have timeline figures for 1939 to put into their World War 2 notebooks, and then one evening this week, Matt will give us a lecture on the events of 1939. It would never have occurred to me, but the children, especially Will, LOVE these history lectures by Matt. And since he minored in history, he enjoys them, too, and he's good at them.

One funny thing that both children wanted written into the schedule, as discussed at our family meeting, is play time with each other. I've never denied them play time, nor asked them to stop playing to do something else if it wasn't absolutely necessary, so I'm thinking that this is more of a recognition by them that their time together is important, important enough to be on the schedule. When I asked them, during the meeting, how long they thought that they'd play together each day, their estimates were both around 2.5-3 hours. Cute little kids.

TUESDAY: I don't really have a unit on mosaic art planned, but my Girl Scout troop made a large outdoor mosaic as a service project for our local food pantry a few weeks ago, and the kids enjoyed it so much that I thought I'd introduce them to a couple more mosaic-making activities, and a little of the history behind the art form. I'd wanted both kids to make mosaics using dyed beans inside clear CD cases, but I could only score one old case of just the kind that I wanted, so I think that I'll also set out my button stash and and let each kid choose a bean mosaic in a CD case or a button mosaic on canvas.

Our library has a Mango Languages account, so we can learn, like, a billion foreign languages for free online. Both kids expressed interest in continuing Mandarin (which was a shock to me, as I hadn't gotten the impression that they'd super enjoyed their classes last semester), but both also expressed interest in learning Hawaiian before our October trip, so after we set up their accounts, I'll let them play with both before I ask them to commit. This will then become not a school assignment, per se, but a part of their daily memory work study.

The volume measurement and conversion activity with Will went so well that I'm going to do it again, this time with grams. This time I'll also include Syd; she can help with measurement, and Will can do the conversions. I've got several large batches of dyed rice that I think they'll have fun working with, and unlike the volume measurements, we can keep these permanently in Ziplock bags. Yay for making our own math manipulatives!

WEDNESDAY: Syd has a few Girl Scout Junior badges that she's already been working on, but this will be a good time for Will to look through her Cadette book and choose something that she's interested in. I like to turn their badge work into mini unit studies, so I'm excited to see what she'll choose. Syd will likely continue working on the activities for the Jeweler and Detective badges that she's begun; we lost our decoder wheels in the move last year, so that activity might be a fun one to try next.

Both kids still enjoy Magic Tree House Club, and I can't say enough about the way that their teacher, Ms. Roni, keeps the kids engaged while adding geographical, historical, and scientific context to each Magic Tree House book. This month's book is A Good Night for Ghosts, so I imagine that the children will learn a lot about New Orleans and Louis Armstrong during their club meeting.

The children also enjoy the children's LEGO Club that meets monthly at our public library. It involves group work and problem solving... and LEGOs! Even though something like this would be an extracurricular activity for children in schools, for mine, I incorporate it into their school day, simply because any structured activity takes time away from unstructured activities, and I consciously limit the hours each day that the children spend following someone else's agenda.

THURSDAY: I count Park Day as part of our school day for the same reason. Yes, it's just a playgroup for homeschooled children, but it's not the same thing as free time. It also takes hours, and Will has horseback riding class after it, so if I had them buckled down on schoolwork for the entire morning, then when would they chase butterflies and pick peppers from the garden and play LEGOs and look at stuff under the microscope (this, by the way, is a list of the activities that the children have done so far this morning; we haven't yet started school, because who would interrupt THAT?)?

I LOVE these customizable maps from Megamaps, and I use them all. The. Time. I printed out a 3x3 map of the Hawaiian islands, and the plan is to have the children watercolor the ocean, then label the islands, the state capital, and some of the destinations that we know we'll be visiting in October--Pearl Harbor, Volcano National Park, perhaps Mauna Kea, the southernmost point in the US, etc. Later, the children will be adding other destinations, sites of historic note, and geological features.

FRIDAY: The kids never use the tons of educational apps on our ipad, and it rarely occurs to me anymore to ask them to, so for a while we'll be going on a little weekly tour of our apps, I suppose. We can delete the ones that the kids don't enjoy, and it'll hopefully help me remember to assign the others where they're relevant.

Syd requested that we study dinosaurs some more (I swear, is there ever a time when we're NOT studying paleontology?), and that reminded me that although we completed most of our fossil unit last year, we did not ever get around to actually cleaning and displaying our fossils! No better time to remedy that than now.

Correspondence isn't the truly substantive task that it used to be back when handwriting and sentence formation were major skills, but it's still useful to keep in practice, and when both children owe letters, anyway, then it's a fine time to review handwriting and sentence formation.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Often we've got extracurriculars or special events on the weekends, but this weekend is totally unscheduled, which is also nice. We need to reinforce the chicken yard, and the kids have been wanting to make caramel apples for some random reason, and there's always something good playing at the drive-in next door.

And that's our week!

The Amazing Adventures of Tagalong Catdog

We met this sweet kitty back in January, when she politely came up to the porch and meowed for some supper:

I gave her that supper, of course, and then it became part of the kids' daily chores to make sure that Tagalong, as we named her (it was Girl Scout cookie season then, as you might recall), always had food and water. I didn't think she was abandoned, as she was a healthy weight and didn't have the look of a stray; I figured that she was simply a neighborhood roamer, a cat with a family who wasn't averse to hitting up another family for regular snack-times. I mean, you've never seen a more friendly, loving cat than Tagalong; clearly there was someone out there who was treating her right. Our own Spots, you might remember, was infamous for this in our old neighborhood, and even had people who would let her into their houses for a nap on their heating vent.

As winter moved into spring, however, it became clear that if she had some other families out there, she didn't like them as much as she liked us, and she became a fixture in our yard. I put her photo on our town's Lost and Found Pets Facebook page, although nobody on that page or in the newspaper had ever reported her missing. Matt wanted to drop her at the animal shelter, but Syd became hysterical every time he brought it up; those months that Spots was lost last year were hard on everyone, especially this kid who just wants everyone and everything to be happy.

"We can keep her for now," we finally decided, "but she is NOT coming into the house."

It wasn't long after that declaration that I let her into the house. I mean, of course. After that, she spent most of her days completely blissed out on a pillow on the couch, looking comfier than any cat has ever looked before.

The drive-in doesn't open until summer, so we don't see the owners for much of the year, but early in the season, one of the owners, Mark, stopped by to chat. As we're hanging out on the driveway discussing whatever, Tagalong comes strolling past. Mark stops mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open, then says, "CATDOG?!?"

Mark and his family live on a farm a few miles from us, and they have a lot of animals, but Catdog, a large grey tabby, was Mark's special pet. She always seemed to know when he was about to go somewhere in his truck, and she'd jump right in for the ride. But Catdog had gotten lost sometime in the winter, when Mark was working in a different state and relying on his kids to keep things going back at the farm, and nobody had ever been able to find her.

It turns out that during that winter, his boys had taken the truck over to the drive-in to check on it one day. That night was the first night that Catdog never came home to them.

The next day was when a friendly grey tabby came to our door and meowed for some supper.

We'd kept their cat for them for four months without them knowing, right next door to their own drive-in. Catdog had never had a chance to even see Mark, because I make all the animals come in on the weekends before the drive-in opens; I'd shooed her inside, some days, just as Mark was pulling in next door to prep the concession stand and open the gates.

Mark didn't want to take her back from us, because we'd had her so long and the kids clearly loved her:

But I could tell that Mark loved her, too, and frankly, our two cats never did get used to her, and bullied her something fierce. What would they all three do shut up in our house together while we enjoyed our summer travels?

Anyway, she just wasn't our cat, although we sure did love keeping her for a while:

Tagalong finally went home with Mark a few weeks later, and although she didn't want to go (we had to shut her inside an old birdcage of Mark's to get her to go with him), he reports that she's happy as a clam now and back to her usual business.

Our Spots wasn't as lucky as Tagalong when she got lost last year; she did a lot of roaming, and had gotten pretty wild by the time we found her again. She'd clearly also been treated right by a lot of people, however, and the person who called us about her said that she'd been hanging out in his neighborhood for weeks, living off of handouts. As happy as I was that Spots had some help during the time she was lost, and that we had help finding her, it also made me happy that we got this chance to take care of someone else's cat for them, too, to feed her and love her and keep her, it turns out, close enough for them to find her again.

It's lost cat karma, y'all.

Ravenden Springs

We don't always make it down to my family's yearly meet-up in my grandparents' hometown in the Arkansas Ozarks, but this year we did. Ravenden Springs is a very small town, probably what you imagine when you imagine Arkansas living, and the small country cemeteries around it contain almost all the ancestors that we know.

abandoned church at one of the cemeteries that we visit

Not a direct ancestor, but if he's an Allison and in this cemetery, then I'm related to him!

We bought crayons and sketch pads to do headstone rubbings, but Syd also liked to copy them.

 

This is my great-grandfather, who died when Pappa was between the ages of my two kiddos. When he died, Pappa had to leave school and go to work full-time to support his mother and siblings.

I should mention that the kids, though they were troopers, were bored to tears during this trip. They come by it honestly, at least, because I remember these trips as among the most boring events of my childhood, battling for the honor with visits to my great-great aunt (six-hour drive to St. Louis, sitting for the rest of eternity in her apartment flipping through a Norman Rockwell coffee table book, six-hour drive back home, with ZERO sightseeing during the entire duration of the trip. Seriously, people. We were in St. Louis! Take me to the freaking zoo, why don't you?!? Or maybe, I don't know... the ARCH?!?). 

I, however, now that I'm grown, really enjoy revisiting each cemetery and special spot in this small town:

The list of graduates of the Class of 1944 from the Ravenden Springs school, which taught all grades in a single building. My grandmother's name is at the bottom of the list.

Part of the old school building is now used as a town hall.

Another part of the building is used as the town library.

 We also get the chance to meet up with the distant relatives who still live in the area, as everyone comes out to the same cemetery on the same day to clean it up, put flowers on the graves, and visit.

One guy brought a bunch of his family's old photos. 

I love looking at all the details in old photos. Check out that kid's dress! And their dolls! And that guy's fedora! And that little girl's giant hair ribbons!

This is definitely one of the traditions that made my family what it is, one of the defining aspects of my family, and it's the centerpiece for a lot of what I want my children to know about what it means to be a part of our family. Things like yes, your great-great-great grandfather did fight for the Confederacy. We can go visit the battlefield where he fought on our next trip.

Yes, all these graves do belong to very young children. They're your Pappa's brothers and sisters.

Yes, many of these headstones are homemade. Store-bought headstones are very expensive, so many people made the headstones for their loved ones themselves. See the carving marks?

No, there wasn't always a store here. This used to be a field where your Pappa worked every day when he was your age. No, he didn't go to school. Remember all those brothers and sisters? He had to earn money to take care of them.

Look, here's your Nana's grave. You didn't know her, but she made the best peanut butter cookies, and she always put cherry icing on top.

Yes, I know you're bored. Get out of the car anyway and come look at more old graves with us.

Yes, you are getting on my nerves, actually. Go have your cousin take you to poke around inside that abandoned church for a while.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I probably will be buried here on top of this mountain, too, a million miles from everywhere, just to make you come back every now and then and keep remembering for me.