Homeschool Math: Marking Giant Circles in the Snow (and Measuring the Radius of a Signal)

It was snowing up a storm on the day that I'd planned for us to explore acoustic signals in animal communication, specifically how to measure the range of a signal.

Snow was absolutely perfect. It meant that I didn't have to get out the upside-down spray paint!

But first, it was really important that we play with the dog. You understand.

The relationship between this kid and her dog is my favorite thing.

 Our measurement of the radius of a signal was a little wild and woolly, but basically, it goes like this:

1) We set Will up in a clear spot, with Mozart playing on her tablet at a level of about 60 decibels (as measured using an app on my phone--what would we do without technology?). Will had one end of a rope, and Syd had the rest of the rope, feeding it out as she backed away, to the point at which she could no longer hear the music. She might be able to hear a little bit of the sound, but she shouldn't be able to understand what she was hearing. The information of the signal should be lost.

2) When she reaches that point, she and Will keep the rope taught between them as Syd shuffles her feet around the circumference of the circle that the radius makes:

3) When she's back to her starting point, the kids use a tape measure to measure the radius of the circle that they've created:

With this information, you can calculate the diameter that measure the full linear distance of the signal, or the circumference that is the outer edge of the signal, or the area of the circle in which the signal can be understood.

And look at what a lovely circle they've created!


To play with our understanding, I had the kids go into our woods and perform the same experiment to find the radius of the signal:

My hypothesis (which I didn't share with the kids) was that the radius would be shorter, as trees and brush would be in the way of the signal. Actually, however, the kids found that the radius was longer than it was in the open field!

New hypothesis: the woods is further away from the road and the houses than the field, so is less subject to ambient noise that interferes with the signal.

 We marked our giant circle in the snow as a tool for a science project, but of course this is the perfect activity for geometry units. Get yourself a nice, big, snowy field, and you can make those circles in the book come to life, as well as practice the real-life measurements and calculations that are always so much more interesting when they're done on anything other than paper.

And if you have a dog to take on your adventure?

So much the better.

P.S. Here are some other ways that we've explored circles in our homeschool:

• DIY decoder wheel
• DIY circular perpetual calendar
• skip counting around a circle
• making mandalas with compass and protractor
• DIY color wheels

Work Plans for the Week of January 9, 2017: Poseidon and the Girl Scouts

Last week, we finally got something that Syd has been desiring for months:

Snow!!! Can you believe this was our first real snow of the season?

It turns out that Luna likes snow almost as much as Syd does!

We got most of last week's plans done, even with the distraction of snow and the Friday Girl Scout meeting that wiped the two introverts of the family out for the rest of the day. Will was a rock star, though, and led the entire meeting of eight girls completely independently, earning herself the Leader in Action badge for the Brownie Wonders of Water journey. 

You know when a kid does something cool, and THEY know that it's cool, and so they're super proud of themselves, and they're so proud of themselves that even though they tend to play their emotions close to the vest you can actually tell that they're proud?

Yep, it was like that. 

We've got our first five-day school week in what feels like forever this week (and we won't have a five-day school week next week, either, on account of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), but I'm trying to keep my expectations managed, because fencing and ice skating are starting back up, so that cuts into our free time quite a bit, AND it's Girl Scout cookie season, and, as usual, both of my girls have big goals (Syd wants to buy toys for all of the animals at the shelter, and Will is trying to earn money for a hoped-for Girl Scout trip to Costa Rica in 2018). 

Memory Work should pick back up more regularly again this week, as well, as extracurriculars and cookie selling mean time in the car, so we can hopefully get Sonnet 116 nailed down, as well as review fraction terminology, the order of operations, and spelling words. Books of the Day include some YA literature and sci-fi for Will, fairy tales, The Whipping Boy for Syd, and Material World, because if the kid is going to visit a third-world country, she should start learning what that looks like. 

Our keyboard is broken, so there's no daily keyboard this week, but other daily work includes typing practice, Analytical Grammar/Junior Analytical Grammar, Wordly Wise for Will and a word ladder for Syd, and also for Will, SAT prep on Khan Academy and an online Red Cross first aid class. 

And here's the rest of our week!

MONDAY: We somehow managed to put off that demonstration from Story of Science AGAIN last week, and I have no idea how. Or why. And that's just super awesome, because it involves water, and until the plumber comes (please please please today!!!) we don't even HAVE water in the kitchen this week. So... great time for a water-based, messy experiment. 

I have had to start a rule that only a parent can check off an assignment as complete. For a long time, I had trusted the kids to complete their independent work independently, then check it off when done, but recently they've been neglecting to give me their completed work to edit, say, in math, and then continuing the next day on the next day's assignment, which means that sometimes they were continuing mistakes that they'd started making in the previous assignment, and they've been "forgetting" to do more distasteful parts of their work, such as diagramming the sentences in Analytical Grammar/Junior Analytical Grammar, and then pitching a fit when I finally see their work and tell them that they have 40 sentences to diagram. So there's going to be more supervision until good habits get re-established.

In Math Mammoth this week, Syd is continuing with calculating fractions, and Will is finishing her review of the order of operations and moving into calculating integers. 

I took a Mental Health Afternoon on Friday, so the kids didn't outline their essays as planned; fortunately, we've still got plenty of time to complete the essay-writing process this week before the deadline for the contest that they're both entering. Here's how we write outlines. 

This week's Greek god is Poseidon, with no extra activities other than the trading card. I absolutely must sit down this week and plan out our studies for the theme tests on the National Mythology Exam. I've already left it too long, so the next few weeks may be mythology-heavy. Good thing the kids enjoy it so much!

The kids did their observations for their long-term assignment in our Animal Behavior MOOC, but they didn't take good notes. I don't know what good they thought that would do, but yay for homeschooling, in that we can repeat assignments that didn't get done correctly the first time! We'll try again this week, sigh...

TUESDAY: Today is rough draft day for the essays. Rough draft day is the worst day. Remind me that it gets easier after rough draft day.

I could probably wring some more hands-on activities out of Module 3 of our Animal Behavior MOOC, but I feel like the kids have grasped the important aspects of animal communication and signal behavior, so I'm ready to have them finish the viewing assignments and take the test.

Will's work on her Cadette Journey made me suddenly realize, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, that Syd also wants to earn her Bronze award this year--actually, she *needs* to earn it this year, as she bridges in the fall--and to do that, she also needs to complete a Journey! Fortunately, there are two other Juniors in our troop who also want to complete a Journey and earn the Bronze, so she'll have some company. Regardless, we're going to start busting through the Agent of Change Journey, which actually fits really well into our current studies, since the Power of One award, which comes first, is all about women who've made a difference. That's the same topic that Syd is writing about in her essay this week!

Our Tuesday homeschool playgroup may be meeting at an indoor playground an hour away. I don't feel enthusiastic about this, but I guess we'll be able to knock out our Memory Work, and then listen to our next in-car audiobook, sigh. We finished the entire Dark is Rising series last week, so we're ready for a new adventure! Sword in the Stone, perhaps?

WEDNESDAY: Rough drafts are all about simply vomiting the words out, so it's good to have a couple of days of editing and crafting that final draft, doncha know?

THURSDAY: Over winter break, Syd, Matt, and I worked through creating all of the regular polygons, from the triangle through the dodecagon, from Paper and Scissors Polygons (more on that another time). The goal on this day is for the kids to help me mount and label them for display, because they turned out so awesome!

FRIDAY: Matt and I are designing a printable decanomial square in centimeters, ideally to offer for sale on Teachers Pay Teachers. On this day, the kids will help me cut out and mount the pieces to foam core, both so I can test the design and hash out good instructions for others to use the material, but also so that we can have our own nice copy. The decanomial square is a mad useful manipulative, especially for upper elementary and middle school!

Hopefully, I'll have kept the kids on task better for their Animal Behavior MOOC's observation assignment, so that they'll actually have the information to complete this step. I'm very curious to see what queries they each come up with!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY/MONDAY: We've got a couple more weeks until ballet starts, so it's one more long free weekend before the real late winter grind begins. The kids will for sure sell Girl Scout cookies every stinking day. I kind of want to go to the zoo. The cookie selling is cutting into our family hiking time, but maybe with a long weekend, we can squeeze it in. And with Matt home an extra day, he'll probably want to help me build shelves for my record album collection, don't you think?

What are YOUR plans for the week?

New Year's Resolution: Hike More

At least every weekend, ideally.

Also a New Year's Resolution: obedience training for the dog. Heel, Luna!

Dang it, I said, "HEEL!"

Just FYI, but I don't know what on earth we did before this dog. She's basically the greatest dog ever, even if she won't walk nicely on a leash.

But she will run!

We'll have a lot more hikes this year, and perhaps one day, we'll even have a well-behaved Luna hiking with us!

Work Plans for the Week of January 3, 2017: Back to Work

The children made a horrifying discovery yesterday. We were on our way to meet a couple of their friends at the library, when one child commented, "I didn't know [insert friend's name here] homeschooled." It was a Tuesday, morning, doncha know, and everybody knows that if you've got a Tuesday morning playdate with a friend, that you and that friend both homeschool.

"Oh," I blithely replied, "The public schools have another week of winter vacation."

Imagine for yourself the mental image of a record screeching to a halt.

In order to stave off a full-on revolt, because of course my own children had been handed their week's work plans, simply chock-full of schoolwork, approximately an hour previously, I had to remind the kids of the two-week road trip that we took in October, in the middle of the public school's fall semester.

Do NOT remind them that most of that road trip was deliberately educational.

Do NOT mention to them that for part of that time, their public schooled friends were also on fall break.

Just... shh.

Regardless of the fact that I do kind of wish that I'd planned my own little road trip with the kids this week, especially as I'm facebook stalking other friends whose kids are, you know, at Disney World today, or on a road trip through the national parks of the south, we are, indeed, back to work. Our last school week, that of the week before Christmas, went well, with everything done except for one science demonstration that I was missing one supply for (I have it now!)--

--and although we had a very slow and inefficient start yesterday--partly because the kids were slow and inefficient, and partly because we accidentally spent four hours at the library--I *think* we're back on track for a fine week this week, too.

Books of the Day include This Book is Gay and Of Mice and Men for the older kid, more of the Green Knowe series and some fairy tales for the younger kid, and a few short non-fiction titles. Memory Work includes fraction terminology, a review of the order of operations, and more Sonnet 116. Other dailies are typing practice on Typing.com and progress in Wordly Wise or the completion of a word ladder (I'm just going to have to let the younger kid finish that whole dang book before I can get her to do more Wordly Wise). The older kid also has SAT prep on Khan Academy, and progress in an online Red Cross class as part of her daily work. I did have keyboard on the schedule, but we couldn't get the dang thing to work yesterday, even though I'm pretty sure that I put new batteries in after it stopped working before Christmas.

Did I just think that I put in new batteries, or does this spell the end of our keyboard lessons? Stay tuned!

And here's the rest of our week!



TUESDAY: We spent more of our day than I thought that we would at the library, thanks to a playdate and our homeschool playgroup both meeting there, so this day's work was primarily done in the evening. Both kids are starting a new Math Mammoth semester this week, the younger kid with fractions and the older kid with a review of the order of operations.

Analytical Grammar and Junior Analytical Grammar are going okay. The younger kid doesn't enjoy it, and the older kid fights against diagramming, but I can see that they're both absorbing the content, and that's all I need.

The kids both have an essay assignment for the next couple of weeks that will replace their daily writing assignment. On this day, I gave them each a list of the possible essay topics and had them conduct some research on each one. I'll find out today which topic they've each chosen!

I still wish we were doing more with Story of Science, and I may sit down this week and make it into more of a cross-curricular unit. For now, though, we're continuing to let the Quest Book guide us. This day's demonstration is the one assignment that we didn't get to before Christmas, so instead of continuing in Story of Science, I just have the kids doing that one demo on this day. We'll learn about the pH of air, and I'll do some thinking about cross-curricular history/science unit studies.

This week's Greek mythology topic is Athena, and for some reason, I found loads of cute little hands-on extensions for her. On this day, the kids made a paper Parthenon, and began work on their Athena trading card. I've got some more reading and viewing of the Parthenon and Ancient Athens planned for our non-school time.

The Animal Behavior MOOC is building towards a big project, the first step of which is to do some significant, extended observation of an animal or animal group. I long to buy a membership to the Indianapolis Zoo and take the kids there every day as part of this assignment, but a daily three-hour round-trip drive is so unrealistic. Thank goodness for webcams!

WEDNESDAY: We may find ourselves back at the library on this day, researching each kid's essay topic. I do have some books checked out, however, and I'm hoping that we can get away without making an extra trip, especially because we'll be spending the evening at a party at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Somehow, even without all the extracurriculars this week, we're still crazy busy!

Here, by the way, is exactly how I structure an essay-writing assignment. I even refer to this post, myself, whenever we're working on an essay.

We're going to spray paint the yard again for this day's Animal Behavior MOOC unit on how auditory signals are heard and spread. We're going to play with pitch and volume and practice calculating the radius, diameter, circumference, and area of circles while we test how well we can hear various tones in our open backyard, the woods behind our house, and inside our house from room to room.

The kids LOVE playing with Sculpey, so I'm hoping that we can set aside a leisurely hour or so to play with a new project that I found on Pinterest--basically, you take a small glass bottle, and you sculpt something cute around it. You can apparently bake it like normal, and then you have your very own special little treasure bottle! My main challenge will be convincing the younger kid that we should do this project AFTER math, not instead of math...

I found several projects that excited me in Greek Mythology Activities, including a set of worksheets that introduces numbers in Greek, then has some simple-ish word problems that must be answered in Greek. This is the kids' math enrichment for the week.

THURSDAY: The Animal Behavior MOOC on this day explores the concept of "dishonest" communication between animals. The lecture includes a few examples, so the children's assignment is to research their own example and explain it following the format that is used in the lectures (provide the example, then show how the example fits the definition). The kids don't know it, but lately they've been doing a LOT of point-proving using a concrete flow of logic--this is one of the main skills that I had to teach over and over and over again in my freshman comp classes, as too many 18-year-olds showed up unable to cogently explain to me how they came to a certain conclusion, or to prove a claim using evidence.

The younger kid is loving the Girl Scout Scribe badge, and has more work to do on it on this day, which is good, because the older kid is really going to need my help to hash out the agenda for her Girl Scout meeting on the following day. I'm thinking of having her narrate the lesson plans to me in outline format, so that she'll have some structure to follow during the meeting. Teaching your first class can be scary!

We've got a second day of essay research on this day--maybe this would be a better library day!

FRIDAY: The kids will outline their essays on this day, probably dictating that outline to me; they can then let it rest until next week, when they'll write, revise, and edit their essays.

If the kids have, indeed, been doing regular work on their Animal Behavior MOOC assignment, they should be well-prepared to complete the second step on this day. I'm pretty excited that the instruction for this assignment also covers the scientific method and how to conduct a good experiment--we haven't done a ton of that on our own, so it's handy that someone else is doing it for me!

The only other school "work" on this day is a fun Athena craft, because I imagine that most of this day's mental and emotional energy, at least for the older kid, is going to go into the Girl Scout meeting that she's hosting. It never would have occurred to me that she would want to do something as socially engaging as actually lead a Girl Scout meeting all by herself, but hey--a girl will do a lot more than that to earn a Girl Scout badge, and THIS is a special award pin, which is even better!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We have one more weekend's respite before all of our extracurriculars start back up! There's a children's film fest that I'm hoping to attend, a home improvement project that I'd love to get Matt interested in, and some Outlander that I really, really, REALLY need to watch. I'm in Season 2 now, so I've traded Jamie's knees in kilts for gorgeous French costumes.

I'll be okay.

Our Duct Tape Wallets

When Will mentioned that she wanted a wallet, instead of being normal and just going out and buying her a dang wallet, I said, "Ooh! I've been dying to make duct tape wallets!" and I instead went out and spent twice as much money on duct tape (I bought this exact set, and we've been very happy with it).

Because this:

image via Something Turquoise and Death to the Stock Photo

When I craft via tutorials, I generally use photo-heavy written tutorials, but I've found that when the kids use tutorials, mostly for their Sculpey creations but also for the occasional other random project, they really find video tutorials the best. There's lots of rewinding and playing segments over and over again, but also, I think they just find watching another person making the actual muscle movements required to be the modeling that's needed for a lot of these more sophisticated projects.

We skimmed through several YouTube duct tape wallet tutorials, blowing some off for poor lighting, some for having over-engineered wallets, some for requiring materials I didn't feel like finding (a lot of tutes include a clear plastic piece so you can make a window for your driver's license, but I have never been in a situation in which I was asked for my license and showing it via that clear plastic window sufficed, so I don't see the point of it), but finally we settled on this one:



Why are all of the most useful YouTube tutes created by teen girls?

Don't answer that. I don't really want to know.

Anyway, with the tute at the ready, rewound and played over and over, the wallet creation was more-or-less a walk-through:

Surprisingly, it was Syd who needed some help with this, as you can see in the photo below, in which I've got one of her duct tape pieces on my mat. She's generally "craftier" than Will, but she's also far less tolerant than Will of results that deviate from what something is "supposed" to look like, and she gets frustrated more easily. Once I helped her even things up, though, she was happier:

I wish I'd had more of my secondary color in my wallet, but somehow I ended up only cutting enough of it to make one inside pocket on each side from it, not realizing that meant that only the very top bits would show. I like Will's wallet, center, which has her secondary color used for all of the binding, and Syd did both of her inside pockets on each side in her secondary color, which also looks nice:

Here's a closer view of the inside. There are two hidden pockets that open towards the center, and the pocket for bills that extends the entire length of the wallet and opens at the top:

The kids weren't interested in futzing with their wallets anymore after they'd completed them, but I couldn't stop until I'd put a little duct tape embellishment on my wallet. I cut out a shark stencil, traced it onto duct tape that was still on the roll, then cut the stencil out of the tape with duct tape scissors (that work only okay on duct tape, but they're better than working super crappy, as other scissors do, I guess?)

I could have done a much neater job on my shark, but eh.

This isn't the wallet that I use every day, although it really is sturdy enough that you could. It's now the wallet that I keep in my backpack, with a little emergency money and a few membership cards and discount cards, etc.

Because if you've ever seen me around town, walking down the street like a pack mule with my gigantic Army surplus backpack stuffed full of crap, you've noticed that what I really need is just one more thing to put in it, amiright?

Christmas and Cookies 2016

This was my children's first Christmas in their own home. The first time in 22 years that I haven't taken a road trip to Mamma and Pappa's house for Christmas.

I tried to keep it calm and mellow, the better to mask when I needed to go hide in the bathroom and cry for a few minutes, and, of course, I had to honor my Southern heritage of eating one's pain, and that meant---

Cookies! ALL THE COOKIES!

Syd and I made the gingerbread dough the day before, let it chill, and then Matt and I cut out the house pieces and baked them that evening after dinner. The next morning, a cup of coffee in one hand, I melted some chocolate and assembled them. After breakfast on Christmas Eve, they were ready to decorate!

 We really only "needed" gingerbread houses--

--and a couple of cookies for Santa--

Will has posed with her finished gingerbread house just like this every single year since she was five.

--and yet somehow we ended up with over a dozen gingerbread cookies extra AND an entire batch of homemade sugar cookies, to boot...

Okay, this gingerbread person might be a *little* inappropriate. I'd possibly broken out the bourbon by this point...

Syd got to this Millennium Falcon before Matt did, and decided that it was a bunny.

Meanwhile, Will turned the actual bunny into an alen.

Another alien

Syd decorated these to leave out for Santa.

And I don't really know WHAT she was thinking when she decorated this guy!

As much as I miss Pappa, I will say that it was nice to go to sleep in my own bed on Christmas Eve, and to wake up in my own bed on Christmas Day, sit in front of my own tree on my own floor--

Dog included!

 --and see what Santa brought everyone.

Santa brought Syd a Rapunzel doll and Will some magnetic Thinking Putty.

Will's grandma gave her a game of Exploding Kittens.

I bought the kids this marker airbrush, and as soon as I'm done writing this, I'm going to go snatch it out of their arms and play with it!

Syd gave Will some bracelets. She liked them.

Will gave Syd a charger for her tablet and a pair of headphones. She REALLY liked them!

Somehow even the cats and the dog ended up with presents.

Gracie LOVED her cat toy.

Luna did NOT like this Santa hat.

Will is super into dragons, so I bought her this handmade stained glass one from Glass Castle Arts.

My brother-in-law and his girlfriend bought us our newest Most Favorite Game EVER.

 And my mother-in-law introduced Will to the phenomenon of the Softest Blanket EVER:

She has been in this blanket burrito pretty much ever since.

 I never could figure out why you'd want to eat another traditional American feast just one month after you already had one, so we went to our favorite Indian restaurant for Christmas lunch (I thought we'd be the only ones there, but it was hopping!) and came back home to lie on the bed with comfy and full tummies and watch TV, play with stuff, and color for the rest of the evening.

Oh, and eat cookies until our tummies were no longer comfy. Can't forget the cookies!

It was... okay. And next year, I have high hopes that it will be better than okay.