Creeks and Fossils: Earning the Girl Scout Cadette Eco Trekker, Senior Eco Explorer, and Ambassador Water Badges

With a multi-level Girl Scout troop, activities tend to snowball. I'm absolutely of the mindset that not everybody has to earn a badge for everything, but... to be honest, I'm actually not so much of that mindset in practice, not with my older Girl Scouts. It was different when they were Brownies and Juniors, we met up more often, and they were all eager beavers who could be counted on to also earn a ton of badges outside of meetings. 

Now that they're all big kids, we don't meet up as often for badgework. The kids are all too busy with all their other kid stuff! Combine that with the fact that older Girl Scout badges are more work and take longer to earn, and these busy kids don't really earn them on their own at home, anymore, either. 

So when we do make the time to meet together, in an activity that the kids have chosen and are enthusiastic about, then yeah, I want them all to be able to earn a badge for their work.

And because they're at three different levels, that means three different badges.

For this meeting, the activity that the kids were enthusiastic about was finding fossils in our local creek. One of our troop co-leaders is an expert in local fossils and spends much of her free time looking for them in the many creeks around town, so she and her Girl Scout took charge of the fossil activities. I added in water activities to fill in most of the rest of the steps to earn the Cadette Eco Trekker, Senior Eco Explorer, and Ambassador Water badges, and the kids collaborated on the activity for Step 5 for each badge.

Field Trip to a Local Creek: Cadette Eco Trekker Badge Step 1

I didn't discover creek stomping until I moved to this little Indiana town, but now it's one of my favorite activities. When my kids were small, I'd put them into their swim trunks and we'd all go down to our favorite creek. We probably never walked more than half a mile in either direction down the creek, but still we could stay there for most of the day, me reading on a bank while the kids splashed and fought and caught crawdads and minnows and filled their pockets with fossils and geodes.  

It turns out that going to the creek with teenagers is much the same!

Lesson on Fossils and Geodes: Senior Eco Explorer Badge Steps 1-2, Ambassador Water Badge Step 1

My co-leader gave the kids a lecture on crinoids, the main fossil that we find locally. She showed them images of what crinoids looked like when they were alive and examples of fossils from her extensive collection. She can look at a fossil and tell you exactly what part of a crinoid it is, which is a super cool superpower!

Afterwards, the kids played in the creek and hunted for fossils and geodes:

I'm really glad that I remembered to bring my rock hammer, because it was a hit (ba-dum-dum!)! Everybody likes bashing open a geode and seeing what magic is inside.

Stream Health Assessment and Water Quality Testing: Cadette Eco Trekker Badge Steps 3-4, Senior Eco Explorer Badge Steps 3-4, Ambassador Water Badge Steps 3-4

I get bored with the similar structure of Girl Scout badges, but it sure does help with a multi-level troop! Steps 3 and 4 of each badge ask the Girl Scout to explore and work on an ecosystem issue; for the Ambassadors, the issue must be water-related.

To complete these steps, I taught the troop how to conduct a visual stream assessment, combining this worksheet with this contextual information. We talked about floodplains, channelizing, banks and erosion, and habitats for macroinvertebrates. Our town just experienced a major flood, and its impact on numerous local businesses has been in the news, so we also discussed how proper stream management is crucial not just for the sake of the natural environment, but also for urban infrastructure. One of the flooded businesses is located directly on the floodplain of a creek, and our entire downtown, which flooded so quickly that patrons were trapped in bars and restaurants, sits directly on top of another creek that was closed in and covered by a heavily-trafficked street. The flash flooding was a big disaster, with one person dead and one business still closed due to the damage; if the city had respected the creek's floodplain and maintained its riparian buffer zone, it likely wouldn't have been so dangerous or caused so much damage.

If you want to add more context, particularly regarding your area's overall watershed, these topographic maps are a great resource. 

A visual assessment is a great way to monitor a stream's overall health, but you can't get the whole picture with just your eyes alone. I wanted the kids to get some experience conducting chemical analyses, so I walked them all through how to collect water samples, then we reconvened under a nearby picnic shelter and I taught them how to do several of the tests from my favorite water monitoring kit:

With the supplies that I had left after Will's APES labs, the kids were able to test for dissolved oxygen, fecal coliform, nitrate, and pH. While we did the tests, we discussed the importance of dissolved oxygen, the fine line that is nitrate, and how fertilizer and sewage runoff are so dangerous partly because they're so nutritious for bacteria and algae, which will consume all the dissolved oxygen if they grow too much, and that will suffocate all the rest of the life in the stream. 

Both the dissolved oxygen and nitrate results for our stream were shockingly low, and I am VERY curious about that!

Make an Art Project: Ambassador Water Badge Step 2

Fortunately, my co-leader is also an artist who works with fossils, and so she was able to set the kids up to make absolutely beautiful collages with some of their fossils and cool rocks:

The kids had a fabulous time with this activity as they explored aesthetically-pleasing ways to display their collections. Some kids made collages in pendants, some made collages in frames, and some organized their collections in little bottles. They all turned out so cute!

Share What You Learned: Cadette Eco Trekker Step 5, Senior Eco Explorer Step 5, and Ambassador Water Badge Step 5

All the badges we covered have, for their final step, an activity that encourages the kids to pass on their knowledge, teach someone, educate, inspire, etc. Girl Scouts really encourages kids to find their voices, and older kids, especially, are often asked to try their hands at mentoring or teaching.

The kids in my troop each completed this final step independently, although we talked about possible avenues for sharing while they worked on their art projects, and they edited a Google Doc of ideas and possible scripts together. We brainstormed possibilities like writing a letter to our local Parks and Recreation Department informing them of the results of our water quality testing, writing a letter to the newspaper, making a flyer or brochure and displaying it or passing it around, writing a Google Maps review of the park with our water quality test results included, and other ideas. When we meet again, they can share what they shared!

When I teach kids, I always wonder if the info stuck. Did they learn anything, or were they just along for the ride? Did they understand the importance of dissolved oxygen and nitrates, or were they just dropping tablets into water and looking at the pretty colors? After all, I know well that a polite, biddable kid can act like they're 100% with you, doing everything you ask, with their eyes glazed over and cartoons playing in their head.

HOWEVER... this morning, my kids and I spent a couple of hours at a local park, hanging out with friends while Will completed a science lab (nectar guides for the win!). On the walk back to the car, we went across a pedestrian bridge over one of our town's many, many creeks. I stopped to look down at the water, and the kids stopped with me.

"Hmmm," one said. "This creek has definitely been channelized. And it doesn't have a very good riparian buffer zone."

"It's got fish, though, so it must have some habitat for macroinvertebrates."

"It could just be a hardy species."

"Look at that bank erosion!"

Yeah, I think they earned that Girl Scout badge!

We Have a Raspberry Pi

 

If your kid isn't tooling around with Raspberry Pi, are you even a homeschooler?

We finally joined the world of homeschoolers who tool around with Raspberry Pi thanks to this Kano computer kit:

We've actually had it for ages, with Syd, especially, eager to unbox it and play, but dang, did her public school schedule leave zero time for any extracurricular educational fun! This summer, though, I've been taking both kids through the Girl Scout CSA Think Like a Programmer Journey--Syd needs a Journey under her belt so she can start thinking about Gold, and Will, as usual, wants to Summit at the Ambassador level. Even though the Think Like a Programmer Journey is more about learning and utilizing the logical, step-by-step, user-centered problem-solving sequence that programmers use than about actual, literal computer programming, you know I had to sneak in the actual, literal computer programming.

Starting with putting together your own computer!

The manual is super cute and perfectly suited to walking even young kids through assembling the computer parts while explaining what each part is, what it does, and how it works with the other parts:

And when you're finished, you hook it up to the TV, which the kids thought was exceptionally fun and charming:

The little games and apps that are already installed on the Kano are below the kids' interest and experience level, unfortunately, although they did play around with them a bit. What we're most looking forward, to, though, is playing around more with that Raspberry Pi! I have requested just about every iteration of Raspberry Pi for Dummy Idiot Kids books for us from the library, and I hope that soon the Raspberry Pi programming experimentation will commence!

Homeschool STEM: Our Popsicle Stick and Kite String Wave Machine

 

Because energy travels in waves, and we can prove it!

This DIY popsicle stick and kite string wave machine is one of many hands-on projects that Will and I are doing as part of the spectroscopy chapters in her astronomy study, but we're both completely obsessed with it. It is really fun, and really fascinating to watch. It both soothes and stimulates (if that's possible? Is that possible? It feels possible!) both of our pattern-loving brains, and we can each entertain ourselves endlessly just by flicking a little popsicle stick and watching the energy cascade down the line.

To make our wave machine, Will and I followed this tutorial: 

I don't exactly know why I randomly always seem to have 1,000+ popsicle sticks just hanging about in the homeschool closet (some clearly leftover from failed seed starting projects of yore), but they do come in handy!

The real fun, though, is in playing with it!

See the wave move, even though each popsicle stick stays glued to its place? That's how all energy moves, whether it's light, sound, or tsunamis. Beyond just that demonstration, though, there's a lot of visual interest in simply playing with and watching the patterns that emerge through various manipulations of the wave machine. That kind of play and exploration builds intrinsic understanding, which is a very real way to build concrete knowledge and skills. As part of Will's AP Human Geography study, we've been thinking about the ancient stick maps of Micronesia. These maps represented not geography as we conventionally think about it now, but instead a model of the waves around the islands, which is also a very real aspect of geography, but one that most people would find it impossible to comprehend, much less use as a navigation tool. It's likely that sensory experience of the ocean waves provided the intrinsic understanding that made it possible to use the waves in such a way. 

It is FASCINATING to see energy travel so concretely, and there's a lot of scope for play and experimentation. I wish I'd made this with the kids when they were young, as I think it would be a picture-perfect hands-on STEM project for upper elementary!

Nevertheless, we have it now, and it hangs in homemade honor from a ceiling hook in our family room. I mean, it's not like we put any effort into tasteful decorating; a popsicle stick wave machine isn't even the oddest homemade thing on display in that room. 

And when it's hanging in easy reach, we can still play with it!

Our wave machine, as I mentioned, was a quick little demo for spectroscopy, but understanding how energy travels in waves is also crucial for some of these other studies:

• CALDER AND KINETIC SCULPTURE. Mobile-making and kinetic sculptures of all kinds are a great way to explore physics, as well as to add an art history component to a STEM study. Here's a great resource on the physics of mobiles, and an interesting history of kinetic sculptures, with a lot of images for inspiration. 
• SOUND AND HEARING. Vibration is another word for waves, and there are a lot of fun ways to explore how sound travels through space and how our ears work to sense it and our brains work to process it. Use tangible demonstrations like this one with a speaker and salt, this one in which you measure the distance of a signal, and the DIY wave machine, along with a study of the anatomy of the ear. 
• TSUNAMIS. Is my kid the only one fascinated by natural disasters? I think we've done deep dives into just about all of them by now! Anyway, use the wave machine along with this TED-Ed video on tsunamis and this DIY diagram of tsunamis to explain the physics behind that particular natural disaster. 

This isn't a comprehensive list, of course--it's literally just what's happening to occur to me from our own studies as I'm writing this--and so I'd love, as always, to hear your ideas and suggestions, too. I LOVE multi-disciplinary connections!

Homeschool STEAM: An Introduction to Designing Robots (and Badly-Designed Robots!)

After you learn how to program robots, you can focus on how to design them to both meet specific challenges AND be pleasing for others to experience. 

The kids learned a LOT about robots during our Programming Robots study, and I'm excited for them to be able to make use of that knowledge while they develop creative solutions to problems that they find interesting.

First, though, we've got to figure out what it means to "design" a robot, what the qualities of good design are, and how to think about problem-solving in a way that encourages good design.

To that end, we explored this website on Design Thinking, and watched the related TED Talk:

I really love the emphasis, here, on research to find out what the intended users' needs and experiences are. Skipping that step results not just in bad design, but bad charity projects, bad business start-ups, bad Christmas gifts, bad social justice efforts... bad everything! Putting people first, and really taking the time and effort to meet them where they actually are, so that you can serve them in the ways that most benefit them, is crucial. It's the first step in everything from solving world hunger to fighting racism.

Before we get started on designing robots for real, I wanted the kids to have the chance to play around with some fun and easy designs, just to get the idea of how design can transform an object. I gave them this recycled robots kit (that I checked out from the LIBRARY!!!!!)--

--and told them to build me any kind of automaton that they wanted.

Their automatons turned out useless and adorable, just they way we wanted them to be!

As well as being cute and fun, this activity is a good example of "bad" design. Sure, the little automatons are cute and fun, but they're also useless, and their designs are meaningless. There's no particular reason for any given design feature, and although aesthetics IS a good reason for some design decisions, each decision should still have a reason for why you did it that way.

If I had this lesson to do again, I'd have the kids make their recycled robots first, then constructively critique them after learning about the Design Thinking process, and THEN redesign them on paper or as a model so that they actually DO fulfill a purpose or solve a problem.

...Actually... I may do that last part as our next robotics lesson!

How to Homeschool Math: Our Curricula, Resources, and Activities for Elementary

Yes, you CAN homeschool math.

Do not give me that sulky face, and don't you dare tell me that you clearly cannot homeschool your child because you obviously don't remember how to divide fractions.

Of course you don't remember some math stuff! You learned all that a zillion years ago! But you know what?

You are a grown-up adult. You can pick it back up. It's really not that big of a deal.

Also, remember that time that you tried to learn some math thing back in school and it was too hard and you got mad at yourself and said that you hated math and you're not good at it?

You were NOT a grown-up adult back then. You were a child.

How fun, then, not to pass that same negative mentality on to your own kids?

Elementary math can be so much fun for kids! Elementary math is fun manipulatives. It's fun games. It's jumping and screaming and singing. It's drawing and painting. It's measuring and pouring. It's reading books together, and doing puzzles, and figuring out interesting problems. It's some of my happiest memories with my kids.

ELEMENTARY MATH

Both my kiddos studied math informally until second grade, then began in Math Mammoth's Light Blue Series at either Level 2 or Level 4, depending on the kid. Math Mammoth took them both all the way through elementary and middle school math.

For part of elementary and middle school, we also used this text as a combined math/science/history study:



Here are some other textbook, reading, and viewing resources that we used:

Almost all of these came from the library, and most consist of fun picture books that I found for us to read together--even older elementary kids (and even high schoolers!) love great picture books!

And here are our most important manipulatives:



There are tons more manipulatives that I created myself or Googled, downloaded, and printed. I'm a BIG proponent of DIYing as much as possible!

Below, I've listed tons of the enrichment activities, extra reading/viewing resources, and fun stuff, that I did when my kiddos were elementary ages. They're not listed in any particular order, because they don't have to be done in any particular order! I liked to have the kids doing some kind of hands-on math activity every day, and if it wasn't inspired by them wanting to bake or build or draw or read together, then I invented a fun invitation or set up a game or suggested a project or offered up a puzzle.

I also set up enrichment and hands-on activities to support skills that the kids were struggling with, or to expand on skills that they were blazing through. Seriously, ask me how many hands-on activities I know for teaching rounding!

So scroll through my list of fun enrichment activities, and definitely set them up to support something specific, but also feel free to engage in them at random. I mean, most of what we did in elementary was totally random, and those were some of the best years of my life!

• Building Big Numbers with Base Ten Blocks. This is the BEST math activity that my younger elementary kids ever did. It's endlessly repeatable when they're little, and builds that crucial number sense that they need to make everything else make sense!
• Clock Cake. Clock reading is a skill taught in elementary math, but it's ever more abstract these days, as every device has a digital clock and analogue clocks are becoming more of a rarity. The solution? Bake and decorate your own clock!
• Roll the Time. To get even more clock-reading practice, write minutes onto a blank die, combine it with a twelve-sided die, and have a kid roll the time. She can tell you the answer and draw it onto a blank clock face.

• Demonstrating the Commutative Property of Addition using Cuisenaire Rods. Cuisenaire rods are superb at demonstrating equivalent equations.
• Pascal's Triangle. You can find the blanks for these online, and seconds later, you've got an in-depth addition review!

• Roll to a Hundred. I'd completely forgotten how many of those printable hundred charts we used in the early elementary years! There are endless amounts of games you can make using them, all of which reinforce numeracy and computational skills.

• Add Multi-Digit Numbers using an Abacus. Just as when the kids were learning to read I wanted them to see all kinds of letters in all kinds of fonts and all kinds of sizes and made of all kinds of textures, I liked the kids to practice counting and adding and subtracting in all kinds of ways, with all kinds of manipulatives. If you've never used an abacus, it's well worth learning how to work it properly!
• Write a Googol. Big numbers are so fun for little kids!
• Build Decimal Numbers using Base Ten Blocks. Just as you can build whole numbers with Base Ten blocks, you can also build decimal numbers--it's all Base Ten!
• Subtraction with Borrowing across Zeroes using Base Ten Blocks. If you can do it in Base Ten, you can generally model it with Base Ten blocks.

• Metric Conversions in Grams using Rice Models. If you have a balance scale and some rice, kids can make their own metric conversion models, using a LOT of problem-solving and practical life skills in the process. And even in high school, we STILL pull out those rice models whenever a kid needs a metric conversion refresher!

• Metric Conversions in Liters using Water. You can't keep this metric model forever, but you can use it to cool you off on a hot day!

• Hands-on Rounding. For some reason, Syd really struggled to master this concept, and so now I have a zillion concrete, physical, hands-on ways to teach rounding.
• Decanomial Square. You're going to see me refer to this a lot, as it's one of our most-used math manipulatives. It's well worth DIYing or buying one, because your kids will still be using it in high school!

• Skip Count with Coins on the Hundred Grid. It's good to practice skip counting a lot, and in a lot of different formats. This version also reinforces coin values.
• Multiplication Touch. It's quite the project to build the roll-up hundred mat and the number tiles from scratch, but Multiplication Touch is well worth it! It's surprisingly fun to play, so works great not just for memorizing the facts, but also for reviewing them for years.

• Multi-Digit Multiplication using Area Models. Centimeter graph paper, Base Ten blocks, and Cuisenaire rods are your best friends in elementary!

• Model Long Division with Base Ten Blocks and Cuisenaire Rods. You can cover a LOT of mathematical ground with just those two types of math manipulatives! By the time a kid hits long division, she's already starting to get math instruction that's more focused on teaching her how to plug numbers into an algorithm than it is on understanding what she's doing, and that's not cool with me. When I teach long division, I like to drag out all the blocks and show a kid exactly--and I mean EXACTLY!--what is physically happening to the literal numbers that she's dividing.
• Literally Walk through Long Division. The beauty of homeschooling is that nobody--not you, and definitely not the kids!--are trapped at a desk. Get the wiggles out and bring whole body learning into your math study by drawing a GIANT long-division problem on your driveway and then having your kids solve it. Who knew there was so much walking, crawling, and skipping in math?

• Compose Fractions with Rice Krispy Treat Models. Because number sense is delicious!
• Model Converting Mixed Fractions to Improper Fractions. You need circle fraction manipulatives for this activity, but the good news is that it makes converting between mixed fractions and improper fractions as clear as a bell and as easy as pie! Here are the circle fraction manipulatives that we own:

• Level these fraction models up to middle school and high school by bringing them out whenever kids need a review. They WILL randomly forget how to convert between mixed and improper fractions, but going back to the manipulatives will quickly remind them, and every time they re-learn it, they'll cement it into their brains even better!

• Montessori Pink Tower. Playing with the Pink Tower can be soooooo satisfying for the pattern-loving child, and it's great for their hand-eye coordination and number sense.
• Montessori Pink Tower and Cuisenaire Rod Patterns. If you're loving the idea of open-ended exploration of math manipulatives for young learners, then you should really check out Montessori math! These kid-built, elaborate patterns are satisfying to create and look at, and since they're built on a Base Ten system at a centimeter scale, they're terrific for building a kid's number sense. Here's the Montessori Pink Tower:

• Level pattern-building using the Montessori Pink Tower and Cuisenaire rods to middle school by having kids create their own diagrams or pattern cards from their creations. Perhaps they want to share them with a younger learner, or even publish them!

• Blow Bubbles with Geometric Figures. What happens inside a prism when you dunk it into bubble solution? More fascinating geometrical models! Here are our Zometools:

• Find the Area of Irregular Polygons using Graph Paper. Everything is more fun when it's on graph paper! For even more reinforcement, use centimeter graph paper and fill in the polygons with Base Ten hundreds, tens, and ones, and Cuisenaire rods.

• Make Mandalas with a Compass and Protractor. Here's a fun art activity that happens to teach compass and protractor use while also offering a lot of scope for creativity and process-oriented art. 
• Level this activity up for middle and high school by encouraging even more elaborate, thoughtful creations.
• Origami. This is one of the best geometry activities that your kids won't even recognize as math work! Start with SUPER simple builds so that they don't get frustrated with the fine motor requirements, but no matter what they make, they're building an intrinsic knowledge of angles and shapes and how they work together in two- and three-dimensional spaces.
• Level this up to middle school and high school by working through ever-more-challenging how-to books.

• Pentominoes. Allowing kids free exploration of mathematical models and manipulatives and interesting shape puzzles is one of the best things that you can do with them in elementary, whether or not you're officially homeschooling. Pentominoes are especially fun for older elementary kids who enjoy stretching themselves with challenging puzzles.
• Level pentominoes up to middle school and high school by working through ever-more-challenging puzzles, and calculating the number of possible solutions to puzzles.
• Ink Blot Prints that Show Bilateral Symmetry. Get really messy in order to get really symmetrical!

• Symmetry and Similar Figures with Pattern Blocks. This is a more challenging activity for older elementary, but you get to drag out ALL the pattern blocks and it makes the kinda abstract concept of similar figures crystal clear!
• Tangrams. This is another math manipulative that's endlessly entertaining, even onto middle school and high school. Heck, *I* still love to play with tangrams!

• Zometool Stellations. To stellate a polygon is to extend its line segments. It always makes something beautiful, and it encourages kids to stretch their imaginations and become more mathematically creative thinkers.
• To level this to middle school, have the kids measure the angles both inside and outside their polygons.

I don't blog about every single thing that I do with the kids, so here are some of the Pinboards where I collect even more elementary-level math resources. Some I've done, some I haven't, but I think they all look pretty cool!

• Homeschool Math: Addition and Subtraction
• Homeschool Math: Base Ten
• Homeschool Math: Fractions
• Homeschool Math: Geometry
• Homeschool Math: Measurement
• Homeschool Math: Money Math
• Homeschool Math: Multiplication and Division
• Homeschool Math: Telling Time

I LOVED doing math with the kids in elementary. I loved exploring open-ended activities with them--activities that I, too, thought were fun! I loved reading math poems and picture book biographies of mathematicians together. I loved every single time a kid was happy while doing math, every single time she felt confident, every single time she took a risk, every single time she struggled and struggled and finally understood. 

It's exactly what learning should be, and it was my privilege to give that to my kids.