Homeschool Geography: The Geography of the California Coast

I'm sure that California children study this in much more detail, just as they learn about all those missions and dutifully perform earthquake drills.

My little land-locked Indiana girls, however, needed just a brief romp through the geography of the California coast so that they can better orient themselves on their California vacation with their grandparents. I mean, how can you have fun on the beach if you don't have the direction of the prevailing winds memorized, and you don't know if you're playing on a bay or a cape, and you don't understand how your specific location affected the history of shipping and sailing in the state?

I based this particular week's unit on the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, which is one of the places that the children will probably visit on their trip. They completed all the parts of their Junior Ranger books that they were able to do at home (I'm keeping a manila envelope of all of their partly-completed Junior Ranger books that they can take with them to California), and then we set off on the really fun activities, all inspired by the national park's curriculum materials.

Can I just stop for a second and say that the curriculum materials provided by national parks are AMAZING?!? So many of our activities in this California unit are using them, and they're cross-curricular, engaging, and academically rich. I highly recommend checking them out.

In our first activity, I gave the kids a big road map of California (courtesy of AAA) and asked them to highlight all of the place names that had the words "bay," "harbor," "cape," or "point" in them. You can see that they quickly zeroed in on the coastline, and found plenty of names to highlight there:

They found so many that this one staged a protest at all the highlighting, sigh:

See? She's dying because I'm working her too hard, the poor little lamb.

I asked them to visually describe what a bay, harbor, cape, or point might be, based on the geography of the places that were named after them (hint: we focused on the specialized language of "sticky-outy" or "sticky-inny."). We discussed these geographical features for a while, and then I gave the kids a research/building challenge to build a LEGO model of a bay, a harbor, a cape, and a point, each on its own baseplate, and to label each with a one-sentence definition. They hit the internet, divided the work amongst themselves, and then got building!

While they built, we discussed the history of sailing and shipping around California, and how the coastal geography affected that. The main take-away that I wanted them to retain is that the prevailing winds along the California coast are from the northwest, so in a storm with heavy winds, this was a great danger to ships, as it could easily drive them onto the rocks or into the many cliffs that are there. Capes and points stick out, and so are extra dangerous, but bays and harbors are sheltered spots where a ship can escape dangerous weather.

Don't believe me? Let's test it!

The kids fussed at my specific requirements that they build their geographical features to a certain height and on individual baseplates, but I made them do that because I had a secret special activity planned! I hauled a large, flat clear bin out onto the deck, had the kids collect some rocks, and fetched a couple of corks and a couple of straws. The kids filled the bin with enough water to float the corks, then put in a LEGO model and weighed it down with rocks.

And then they tested it!

One kid is the storm and the other kid is the sailor. The sailor has to sail her ships around the cape or point or into the harbor or bay while the storm blows against her. We began with the storm only allowed to blow from one stationary point in the northwest, for better accuracy, don't you know, but as things do, well... they got a little chaotic:



The sailor will likely find that sailing around the cape or point is hard going, and so is aiming for the bay and harbor, but once her ships are in the bay or harbor, they should be well protected from the storm (if the storm isn't cheating, which of course the storm is).

The kids loved this activity, and I was pretty pleased, myself, with how it involved research, memorization, modeling, experimentation, and plenty of hands-on, creative play in the water. I've been sad and stressed lately, and so it was nice to simply sit on the deck in the twilight and watch the kids play and bicker. And yes, I know it sounds strange to say that I enjoyed watching them bicker, but frankly, if they weren't bickering with each other then I might not recognize them!

She is Ten! A Minecraft Party for Syd

Even though her sister has sworn off birthday parties, Syd still loves them, and I love helping her plan and host them. Every now and then over the years someone has asked me why I'm throwing my kid an elaborate birthday party, as if I'm putting myself out and overindulging her.

I always respond, "Well, I like it." Easy enough. That's why I homeschool and plan unit studies, why I sew, why I write fanfiction, why I keep chickens, why I blog, why I read all of the time. I like it. Sometimes I like to lay in the hammock and read all afternoon, and sometimes I like to spend weeks helping my kid put together the epic Minecraft birthday party of her dreams.

Such as this one!

First, the invitations: Syd wanted invitations that looked like Minecraft cubes, like these. I agreed that they were super cute, but you know what I always like to do?

Go big.

I kept my eye out, at the food pantry where we volunteer weekly, for boxes that were perfect cubes. Those are surprisingly hard to come by, but fortunately we scored big and a pallet full of quinoa snacks, all in boxes shaped like perfect cubes, finally came in for me to snatch. Matt did the design work, and here's the full tutorial for our Minecraft cube invitations:

Are they ridiculously adorable or what? You could probably mail these, but I didn't want to spend the money, so we either doorbell ditched them or I sneakily passed them off to kids' parents when I saw them, for them to surprise them with themselves.

I don't normally do a lot of decorating for a party, because I find that the kids neither really notice nor care, but for this Minecraft party, I did have Matt print these Minecraft food labels--it was VERY important to Syd that all the food be Minecraft-themed, so labels were important to make sure that everyone was in on the joke. It turned out that the kids LOVED the signs, and were pretty hyped about eating Minecraft-themed food, so another good move on Syd's part!

We had watermelon, baby carrots, pretzels, chips, strawberries, blueberries, and the only two things that I had to cook, pizza and cake. I used to bake homemade pizza about every week before our oven died at the beginning of the summer (new game: how long can I go without an oven? I'm hoping until at least Black Friday!), so making a giant pizza in a sheet pan wasn't so much of a big deal: prep the dough in the morning, leave it to rise all day, preheat the oven an hour before the party, prep the pizza and let it rest, bake it about half an hour before the party starts, slice it and set it out when the first guest arrives. Syd is a nut, so I left it to her to cut pepperoni and peppers into squares to make the appropriate decorations for a Minecraft pizza (I put the non-square bits into a Ziplock baggie and we ate them on a pizza of our own the next week).

The cake, now... the cake was my masterpiece. I used two boxed chocolate cake mixes, and baked them in a square Pyrex dish. I wanted the layers to be thick, so although you're supposed to divide the batter in half with each cake mix, I baked the entire box at once, for two super-thick layers. I was leery of making the marshmallow fondant, but it actually turned out perfectly, and was totes easy to roll out, lay on the cake, and then cut to look like a Minecraft cake:

We were both thrilled with how it turned out:

Will helped me carry our big homeschool table out to the garage, and I set up all the food there, along with my computer. I streamed video from the kids' favorite Minecraft Youtuber while playing the Minecraft party playlist that I compiled. Considering how many of the kids stopped to watch part of a video or commented on a song, it was all the decoration that we needed!

The kids and I put most of our effort into planning the party activities. It was a three-hour party, so I planned for some time to do art, two games, the pinata, cake, presents, and free time to play, with the campfire going in case it got chilly.

When the party guests first arrived, they were invited to either work on the fort (a giant cardboard box with a door and windows cut out of it, and big pots of craft paint and plenty of brushes and cups of water) or paint their own Minecraft sword, using higher-quality craft acrylics. The Minecraft sword was also their party favor:

The kids all seemed to LOVE their swords! I was really happy watching them all paint their swords with careful detail, and then as soon as they were (mostly) dry, they jumped right into playing with them:

Yes, that is a dad whom all the kids are swordfighting. Yes, that dad DID paint his very own sword, too.

Yes, I did let the kids really swordfight. No, they didn't actually hurt each other...

...mostly.

Our first game, Zombie Tag, is recycled from the Dragon Tag game of Will's birthday party. Syd cut a flag for each kid (and yes, she did write "LIFE" on each flag to make it thematically relevant, sigh...), and the rules of the game are as follows:

1. Kids line up, close their eyes, and put out their hands.
2. Some kids will receive a flag. They are the "alive" kids. They tuck one end of the flag into their pants.
3. Some kids will not receive a flag. They are the zombies.
4. Give the living kids a head-start by telling them to open their eyes and run first.
5. A couple of seconds later, let the zombies open their eyes and run.
6. Zombies chase living kids and try to steal their flags. If a zombie steals a living kid's flag, that kid turns into a zombie, and helps chase more living kids.
7. The last living kid standing wins the game.

The kids usually want to play this several times, with different combinations and amounts of zombies vs. living kids. There's lots of running, so I'd do this BEFORE you let them eat cake and ice cream:

Even though this game was Syd's idea, she actually loathes competitive games, and so totally had a panic attack about two seconds after that picture was taken. Matt took her inside to chill out for a few minutes, while the rest of the kids played a few more rounds of Zombie Tag.

Because Syd loathes competitive games so much, she insisted that the Spawn Egg Hunt be collaborative, which worked out just as well as my original plan, which was to simply tell each child the maximum amount of Spawn Eggs that she could collect.

The Spawn Egg Hunt is just an Easter egg hunt, a concept that I've recycled from Will's Dragon Party and Syd's Dinosaur Party. Even just a month after Easter, kids still LOVE an Easter egg hunt! To make these Spawn Eggs extra-special, the kids decorated them to look like "real" Spawn Eggs (I mean, of course!), and we also turned them into cascarones:

The kids had a good time working together to find all of the Spawn Eggs that I'd hidden in the front yard that afternoon (and yes, there were exactly two that we never found...)--

--and they seemed to have a FABULOUS time smashing them on their own and/or each other's heads to spawn them! 

In this photo, I've just asked Syd to demonstrate to the children how to spawn the eggs, using her sister as the Crash Test Dummy. Will was all, "Wait... what?"

 A pinata is not my own personal favorite party activity, but it IS Syd's personal favorite! She knew exactly how she wanted her Creeper pinata to look, so I collected the boxes for her from our food pantry, but otherwise pretty much left it to the kids to put together and paint:

We make our pinatas VERY strong with lots of papier mache. It's no fun to be the last kid in line to hit the pinata if the first kid busts it open!

With Mr. Creeper here, I think the kids were all able to go almost three full rounds!

Pinata free-for-alls kind of horrify me, so I always tell the kids how much there is for everyone. In this pinata, every kid could get six pieces of candy, a honey stick, a fruit leather, and a small toy. A couple of the kids have severe allergies, so the honey stick, fruit leather, and toy were to make sure that everybody got some stuff they could actually have.

In all the many birthday parties and holiday parties that I have thrown for these kids, this Minecraft party is for sure in my Top Two. Syd had a good time and had great manners, the kids all seemed to have a great time and were crazy-adorable, and it was a lot of fun to watch them enjoy the games and activities and swordfighting and painting and playing together.

A bunch of sweet kids being super cute, visibly appreciating our hard work, having a fabulous time, and loving my kid?

That's why I love to throw elaborate birthday parties!

P.S. Here's my Minecraft Party pinboard, with about a million more Minecraft party ideas that I didn't do. See? The party could have been even more elaborate!

Homeschool Science: A Crystals Study

As I am wont to do, I collected an immense amount of resources for our study of mineral crystallization, and we ended up with a rather nice crystals study apart from our overarching inquiry into rocks and minerals. In fact, I may have been the one most fascinated by our little rabbit trail into crystals!

There were two main parts to our crystals study: we modeled crystals, so that we could understand their formation, and we made them, so that we could observe and identify them.

Modeling Crystals

crystal paper models. You can search for and find these on Ellen McHenry's website which, if you haven't been to it before, I highly recommend that you give it a browse--it's amazing! Both of my kids could make these paper models independently, and each one represents not just one basic crystal shape, but also includes information about that shape right on it, excellent for ready reference and research. After the kids made these and we studied them, I added them to the science shelves in my homeschool closet as a permanent resource.

mineral chemical composition game. This is also on Ellen McHenry's website, and it's not actually about modeling crystals, but if you want to understand why crystals are different and not all the same shape, then you should learn that they have different chemical compositions, and what some of those chemical compositions are. I print the game pieces out on white cardstock, the kids color them in with watercolor pencils (this is an excellent research project, as of course you want to color them in realistically!), we cut them out, and then we play!

After you roll your elements, you have to look to see if you can build any minerals from the combination.

Lucky me!

Zometool crystals. These were the most fascinating models to build, because you didn't know what you were going to get--you had to figure out for yourself how to logically follow the form, and then you got it!

crystal diagrams. The text on this page is pretty sophisticated, but the diagram can be printed large-scale for reference.

Making Crystals

You can't make the crystals that form out of magma, alas, but you can make the crystals that evaporate out of solution. The following recipes are all ones that involve supersaturating something, then waiting for it to evaporate out in crystal form:

rock candy (ie. sugar): Rock candy never looks as nice for us as it does in other people's tutorials, and guarding against ants is always a huge problem. Nevertheless, this one is special because after you've observed it, checked it out under the microscope, and tried to count the sides of its crystals, you can eat it. Kids LOVE this one.

stalactites and stalagmites. We didn't make these models, but I have the idea in my pocket for a caves unit that I'd like to complete this year. 

Epsom salts. 

borax. These particular crystals are also super fun to grow on a pipe cleaner. 

egg geodes. We grew our crystals mainly in Petri dishes, but these egg ones would make a lovely Easter decoration.

 seashell crystals. Like the egg geodes, but in seashells! You can also use rocks, or whatever else you can think of that has a bit of a tooth to it.

aragonite crystals. 

crystals on charcoal.

Wayne This and That's Crystals page. I haven't tried any of his tutes, but his website also includes his X-Files fanfiction, the "best vanilla pudding recipe," and a page about how much he loves bettas. So, basically it's pretty great.

alum crystals.

Reference Materials

A lot of books about minerals are really dry, and a lot of other books about crystals are all about their woo-woo energies, but her are some that we found useful and enjoyable:

Homeschool Science: Zometool Crystallizations

In our rocks and minerals study, the kids learned about atoms, elements, and molecules before we even began to look at rocks and minerals. Now that we've finally reached the minerals unit, the kids are well-prepared to learn that minerals are crystalline solid substances with specific chemical compositions.

We built paper crystal models, grew crystals from sugar and other substances, and played a dice game involving the chemical composition of minerals, and I'll tell you about those another time, but what I want to show you now is the coolest thing EVER that we did with our Zometools: we built our own crystal structures from the ground up, and we didn't know what we would get until we got it.

The basic idea behind building a crystal is that you first build a simple polygon (perhaps one of the ones that we built in our stellation activity). Then you tile that polygon. Once you've tiled it two-dimensionally, you stretch your brain to figure out how to logically tile it three-dimensionally, and off you go!

Interestingly, Syd, who if held at gunpoint I would admit is my more "visual" kid, had more trouble with this activity than Will. Will chose to make the simple square that she first made in our stellations activity, and it's an intuitive process, when you have a square, to make a cube from it. She ended up with quite a lovely symmetrical structure that she happily worked on for quite a long time, for her:

Syd had trouble, in her first iteration, with arriving at a stable two-dimensional shape and correctly tiling it. After a couple of frustrating tries, she finally, perhaps inspired by Will, landed on the rectangle, and then tiling it and making it three-dimensional was a breeze:

I, now... I believe that I may have inadvertently broken my brain.

I began simply enough with a kite shape. Just a kite. It was easy to tile it two-dimensionally, and after doing that several times, I thought that I could see how to bring one of the short sides of the kite out three-dimensionally and extend the kite form that way. When I got that one figured out, I could see how naturally another kite went with it. And then another. And then after several, I could see another polygon forming, that I could create simply by adding the struts that fit perfectly between the balls. And then... I looked at it, and didn't quite understand what the hell I had:

 Seriously, what the hell? This started out as just a simple KITE! Here's another view of the weirdness:


Do you see how I've somehow made two perfect hexagons in there?

Okay, and it gets weirder. I have worked on this crazy thing for hours, long after the kids lost interest in their creations. It's hard for my brain to always see where the next logical extension goes, and I wonder if I've gotten it wrong in a couple of places, but finally, after using up every single one of those small red struts so that it's impossible to build anything else onto the structure without them, here's what I have:

You can see that as well as the hexagons, I now have a regular ten-sided decagon, but those red struts, seen on edge, alternate up and down to make it:

I've got more hexagons in there, also with some alternating struts--

--and although I've figured out that one single complete crystal is result of five kites on top and five kites on bottom, as you can see if you look closely at the top part of my structure here--

--I am nowhere near figuring out a complete, regular structure once you start intersecting those crystals. This structure is unfinished, but all those sticky-outy bits? I have no idea what's going to happen to them if I continue to build:

I am delighted, astounded, and also super-confused about how my simple shape got this complicated this quickly. I tried looking it up to see how it looks when completed, but I can't find it, so I'm probably going to win a pretty big award for discovering it.

And yes, I am kinda thinking about buying another 60-buck set of Zometools just so I can keep working on it...

Giveaway! Win a Pair of 18" Doll Shoes

I have a giveaway up at Crafting a Green World for just another 15 hours, which is just enough time for you to hop on over there and enter!

You can win a pretty great, super cute pair of 18" doll shoes, and I know you want to. Your kid wants them. If your kid doesn't want them (although your kid does), then your kid's friend wants them at his/her next birthday party. If your kid's friends don't want them (although they do), then your family's kids want them for Christmas. Wouldn't it be nice to have one gift, at least, all sorted?

But because I don't want you to win anything janky, don't worry, I took up the burden of getting a free pair of doll shoes, too, to check out, and I'm not gonna lie--I wrapped them, gave them to Syd for her birthday, and when she gasped and squealed and said, "Thank you!", I was all, "You're welcome!" Here Syd is running the shoes through their paces:

Yeah, I'd say that she likes them pretty well!

P.S. Go enter! Go win!

Adventures from the International Grocery: Junk Food

We love one particular international grocery store in Indianapolis SO MUCH that when we go, we have to establish a category of purchases for ourselves. Like, "Today we'll only buy frozen food," or "today we'll stick to pasta." If we don't I've discovered, much to my budgetary regret, that we will come home with just a ridiculous amount of frozen food and pasta and fruit and other stuff that we can't identify so that it's just... no. I cannot spend another entire month eating only food that I can't identify on account of I blew an entire month's food budget on that food.

On this latest trip to Saraga, the kids and I focused on junk food. I mean, of COURSE! We didn't, alas, purchase every single potato chip bag and candy packet and box of cookies that we saw, but just one or two selections from every region, just enough to get a good cross-section of international junk food.

Well, we did get some fruit, too. I mean, of COURSE! We got our favorite, dragonfruit, and also a Korean melon (I only know this because I take a cell phone pic of the label of whatever fruit we buy--otherwise, it gets real hard REAL fast to identify it!):


But anyway... back to the junk food!

The deal is that we taste all of our purchases as a family, admiring the packaging and giving our opinions on the flavors and textures of the food and in general just making a really big deal of it. I am an especially huge fan of the packaging, and I save most of it, for what I do not know.

Seriously, though, check out these packages!

Potato Master Chef, amiright?!? The flavor of these chips was "cream and paprika," and they were tasty--the cream was supposed to be more like cream cheese, I think, and you couldn't so much taste the paprika.

And then there's Yokitos:

I was all about the picture of the alligator nomming on a giant ear of corn! Although these chips were different shapes, they both tasted pretty much the same to us--kind of like cheese puffs.

Churritos, now... I can seriously mow down some Churritos!

They're kind of like pretzels without the brown outside--maybe more like mini crunchy breadsticks? The kids liked them okay, and Matt didn't get to try them at all, because I loved them so much that I finished off the bag before he got home. And I didn't even care. He doesn't love spicy food, anyway.

And now to the sweets! Along with my usual buy of Jaffa cakes (yum!), we tried a couple of different kinds of wafer cookies (a mango kind, and an espresso kind) that were NOT winners, and these guys:

The kids are big fans of DiamondMineCart on YouTube, and along with his Minecraft videos, he also posts a lot in the genre of what I refer to as "Cute Boy Eating Japanese Candy." It's not always Japanese, of course, but for some reason those videos of him taste-testing foreign junk food, reacting on camera to what he's eating, etc., are really popular with my girls. 

And so I goaded my girls into making their own video:

I'm sure they'll forgive me one day!

Okay, now this last thing that we bought, this last thing is game-changing. Life-changing. I will never look at bread the same way again.

Here we go: SPRINKLES THAT GO ON YOUR BREAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We ate them one morning on this homemade Hawaiian sweet bread (the last baked thing that you may see from me forever, because our oven died this week and I kind of don't want to replace it) with peanut butter, although I have since learned that you're actually supposed to use unsalted butter instead. Even with that extra punch of protein instead of fat, though?

It. Was. AMAZING!!!

If you don't believe me, then just look at this kid's face as she chews her first bite:

Yep, we like it real well.

Next time we go to Saraga, then, we now have on our list not just mochi ice cream and frozen stuffed naan and Jaffa cakes, but Churritos and Isleri and SPRINKLES THAT GO ON YOUR BREAD!

Oh, and next visit's focus? It may just be all the Ramen. There's a lot of different types of Ramen in the world, My Friends.

Work Plans for the Week of May 23, 2016: Abraham Lincoln, and the Gold that's in Them There Hills

I made it through last week, and perhaps I do feel better with it behind me. Mac's death is less of a shock that I keep reminding myself of every second and more of a constant ache in my head and my gut. But on Tuesday, I spent an entire hour and a half at my fencing class without thinking of him, and I also felt happy, as I beat the advanced fencer who was my opponent in my very first ever electric fencing match. Everyone was excited for me, nobody knew that I was grieving, and the adrenalin did me good.

The fact that somehow during the match I jacked up my knee also did me good, I think, since I wasn't able to run around like a maniac to distract myself for the rest of the week, and instead had to slow down, rest my body, and consequently think the thoughts and feel the feels. Yuck, but I'm probably the better for it this Monday, when I probably am going to start running around like a maniac again.

As usual on our weeks off from formal work plans, I required the kids to continue with a lesson in Math Mammoth and a required reading assignment every day, and then I tacked on a couple more little assignments for them each day. We played a lot with our Zometools:

The kids both completed the web version of the Denali National Park Junior Ranger book (and now both REALLY want to go there to meet the huskies in person!), finished their animal posters that they began the previous week, Syd made cupcakes, Will mowed the lawn, Syd had a friend over, Will mowed over that friend's polka-dotted hoodie, and we spent a day in Indy, visiting the Children's Museum (we're going to start volunteering there in July!), buying sheet metal, and detouring to our favorite international grocery and buying a stupid amount of foreign junk food. Chili lime churritos--nom!

Cursive this week is copywork from a poem in the Story of the World v. 3 activity book, the one in chapter 42 about gold. The kids can earn a couple of extra bucks for memorizing it, and Will might want to, because it mentions a despotic monarch, the type that she's a fan of. Books of the Week consist primarily of non-fiction about Sutter's Mill and Abraham Lincoln, the two brief unit studies that we'll be undertaking this week. There's no Project of the Week this week, as it's a short one, and I'm hoping that this time we can actually play with the Sculpey that I want to be our open-ended material of the week, since last time that I suggested it Syd countered with Perler beads AGAIN. Well, she already knows this week that we can't do Perler beads, as I still have to buy the three shades of brown that I need to complete my Perler Bead Doctor Whooves that's in progress on the playroom table, so Sculpey will simply have to suffice.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: We were supposed to be just getting back from a weekend camping trip today, but we had to cancel that trip after rain that was NOT forecast as late as Thursday insisted on pissing down all of Friday afternoon and evening and much of Saturday morning. Of course just as we decided that even if it stopped raining right that second the forest would stay too wet to enjoy for the rest of the weekend, it stopped raining right that second and the rest of Saturday and Sunday were gorgeous. Today is gorgeous, too, goddamnit. I really needed that camping trip!

So instead of packing up our campsite this morning and then coming home to shower, eat, sleep, and veg, we're going to our volunteer gig at the local food pantry as usual, stopping by the library so that the children can sign up for the summer reading program, and sitting down to schoolwork. In Math Mammoth, Will is finishing up ratios--which she FLEW through, thank goodness, since I'm still traumatized by how much trouble she had with multiplying and dividing fractions--and moving on to decimals, which she already has a good grasp of so should hopefully also fly through. Syd is finishing up geometry this week by reviewing perimeter, area, and volume, and then she'll move on to fractions next week.

For our American Revolution unit on this day, we're reading From Colonies to Country about the War of Jenkin's Ear, the important takeaway of which is that it becomes clear, during this war, that so many countries are never going to be able to peacefully occupy North America. The children each have a copy of this early map of North America, and they'll label the colonies on it and we'll discuss who "owns" what, where the Native Americans are, what's going on in Indiana at the time, and why this setup is unstable.

This week's California unit is focused on Sutter's Mill and the Gold Rush. The site of Sutter's Mill is actually called Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, and it's unlikely that the grandparents will actually be able to take the kids there, as it's a bit of a hike, but it is a possibility, and you can't study California without studying the Gold Rush! Even though it's a state park, the place does have a Junior Ranger program, although don't tell the children that since you have to buy the patch for it yourself, we won't be completing this one and mailing it in if they don't happen to go there. Patch or not, a Junior Ranger book is a good way to get a good overview of the park and learn some of the vital information about its history and cultural context.

The kids both LOVE the PBS series, Nature, so I try to make a point to put a Nature film fest into our school week every now and then, to keep us caught up. We sit on my bed, eat popcorn, and color, and it's a darn good time.

TUESDAY: A few weeks ago, Matt helped me design centimeter-gridded paper models for all the squares from 1 to 12, and the kids colored them and cut them out, and we talked about them a little, but most of that lesson was about the making. On this day, we'll bring them out again for more exploration. There are interesting discoveries to make with these square models on the topics of area, perimeter, volume, ratios, and even decimals and fractions. And since they're done in centimeters, I can break out the Cuisenaire rods and Base Ten blocks for more interesting explorations.

The kids have studied Abraham Lincoln off and on throughout the years, but on this day, we need another brief, biographical overview of him in preparation for a field trip that I set up for our homeschool group at our university's special collections library. They have an extensive collection of Abraham Lincoln artifacts, including copies of the life models that Daniel Chester French molded as he was preparing to sculpt the Lincoln Memorial, and I'm really excited for all the kids to see them! Enchanted Learning is always a good place to start when you're looking for this type of topical overview, and we'll be using Abraham Lincoln: A Book for Fluent Readers, with more memory work drill on that information during our daily ten minutes of memory time in the car.

Although Matt will do one of his popular history lectures on the Gold Rush one evening this week (we'll have to abandon our usual evening pastime of following the adventures of Frodo, which we also make Matt read to us while we color or mess with each other's hair), much of this week's Gold Rush unit will be taught by other sources--Story of the World on Thursday, and the PBS website on this day. I haven't previewed these games from the American Experience website, but if the kids don't care for them, I do have other options with PBS Kids or BrainPop.

Alas, Will and I don't have fencing again until June, but we DO have our homeschool group's playgroup on this day--yay!

WEDNESDAY: Field trip day! I am VERY excited about heading back to the special collections library, where I used to work as a Reading Room attendant and handle all the lovely books, manuscripts, and artifacts, and afterwards, I have plenty of other adventures planned on the lovely, lightly-populated summer campus. Perhaps the library's puzzle collection will be open, and so we'll play with puzzles. Perhaps we'll bring leaf presses, sketchbooks, and portable watercolors, and go on a tree identification walk for Will's Girl Scout Cadette Trees badge. Perhaps we'll go bowling in the student union. Perhaps we'll visit the greenhouse. Perhaps we'll eat in a dormitory cafeteria, although the cheapskate in me tells me that that's unlikely. Perhaps we'll follow the campus' meandering creek from border to border, and the kids will play and stomp in the water while I read. Perhaps we'll visit the art museum, or I'll show them the racist mural in one classroom where I used to TA. It's pretty graphic, and basically what they spoof the entire time on Parks and Recreation.

THURSDAY: We had some great lessons on the chemistry and crystal formation of minerals, and on this day we'll move on to looking at the eight most common minerals. One of my reasons for doing this unit study is to help the kids get interested in getting their large rocks and minerals collection (ie. their giant, heavy box of random rocks) organized, so we'll also be dragging that beast of a box out and seeing if the kids have any of these most common minerals already. If so--organize and label them!

We've taken a break for a few weeks from our cooking curriculum, partly because I couldn't be bothered to mentor it and partly because the last two recipes haven't been great--in fact, the kids' attempt at quiche was given entirely to the chickens. To get back into the groove, I'm asking the kids to remake the macaroni and cheese, which was a big success, and then we may try the quiche again, or we may move ahead. Either way, I'll likely be curating the book's recipes a little more, and not just blithely assigning the next one as we go.

Story of the World v. 3, chapter 42 has an excellent summary of the Gold Rush, and so this will be the main information that we study. My activity book for that volume has reading comprehension questions that allow the kids to basically memorize all of the relevant information (I include them in our memory work time in the car), and the mapwork, which we'll also be doing on this day, provides good geographic context.

FRIDAY: I am liking NaNoWriMo's Young Writer's Workbook a lot more these days, primarily because it's grab-and-go and the children are finally getting into it. Yay! Election 2016 is also meant to be grab-and-go, but I can't stand not providing enrichment activities, so after their reading selection, which covers the kinds of stances and issues that presidential candidates take, I'll be having the kids research what issues are important to our three remaining presidential candidates and their stances on them. I'll also expect the kids to identify what issues are important to THEM, and their stances on them. I'm very interested to hear what they come up with!

The kids did really enjoy our craft time last week, so on this day they'll be helping me review another craft book. None of us have ever crafted with paracord before, and I'm looking forward to it. Will is looking forward to a ping-pong event at the public library. Has she ever played ping-pong before? I have no idea. Maybe it's a latent skill!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY/MONDAY: We may try to reprise our failed camping trip, but I'm a little leery of the Memorial Day weekend crowds, so we also may not. Maybe there will be a good movie at the drive-in, or maybe Matt and I will go see Captain America in an indoor theater. Maybe we'll get my giant metal magnet memo board up (this last weekend, we cleaned out the garage and mowed the lawn instead).

Or maybe I'll do what I did this last weekend, which is read, eat delicious things cooked on sticks over our backyard campfire, and putter in the garden.