Inside the Greenhouse of My Dreams

The local university has a teaching greenhouse that's also open to the public during certain hours. I am OBSESSED with it, and during a recent college break my college kid kindly agreed to go there for the hundredth time with me. 

She and I love going places and looking at stuff the most!

My college student kid spent most of her childhood longing for a little pond. I could never quite figure out how to make it happen for her (my newest dream project that I probably won't make is a dry stream bed!), but if you give me a giant greenhouse, I will!

The corpse plant actually flowered this summer!

Someone local clearly has a homemade vanilla extract side hustle going on!

I really want a bird fountain, but we have West Nile in Indiana now, and I have a horror of adding more mosquito breeding spots to my already mosquito-heavy yard.

When I brought the kids here when they were little, they were always SO fascinated by the real cotton plant!

My teenager recently observed that I "don't like to do things alone," and while I was stung by her observation... she's not wrong. The problem is that once upon a time, I had two kids living at home who liked very different things from each other, but quite a lot of the same things as me, so I became used to always having a pal for every activity. Library podcast+craft night? I brought the big kid. Concert? Little kid. Play? Both kids, but the big kid would actually enjoy it. Shopping for novelty holiday items? Little kid. Museum? Big kid. Fancy coffee date? Little kid. Hike around the lake? Big kid.

So now I keep having these fun things that I want to do, but half of the time, when I think about it, there's nobody I know who would want to do the thing with me. I could make some friends, I guess, or wait until my big kid's next college break, or just suck it up and go by myself. So far, I've relied on the second solution, but I know I've got to work my way up to numbers 1 and 3, as well. Because earlier this week, I said to my little kid, "Hey, do you want to come with me to a concert featuring a band that you know nothing about but that I was flat-out obsessed with when I was 12 years old?"

The teenager said something along the lines of "That sounds sick. Bet"--I forget the exact words, but it was some kind of teenager-speak affirmative. I was SUPER stoked, because she is the best concert buddy... but then when I actually looked at the tickets, it suddenly occurred to me that the concert? It's in late August! By late August, this kid's possibly going to be away at college, too! Both of my pals, two-thirds of the people I talk to on a daily basis, are going to be out of my pocket and out in the real world by September.

Do you want to start taking bets on what my mid-life crisis is going to look like?

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

Homeschool High School Biology: The ProtistsThat Live in the Local Lake

You will never want to even touch pond water again after completing this biology lab.

But you WILL want to have an aquarium full of pond water living in your home so you can keep hundreds of thousands of microscopic protozoa pets!

This lab is a companion to CK-12 Biology 8.4, which is the chapter on protists.

Observing prepared slides of protists is a good preliminary lab, because it allows your high schooler to review proper microscope usage and how to make microscope drawings, and to get an idea what the live protists might look like. 

Here are the lab instructions that I wrote for my teenager, and here are the materials that we used for the lab:

• packaged sterile sample container
• eyedropper
• microscope
• (optional) microscope digital camera and software
• protist diagrams
• blank microscope slide and blank slide covers
• lens cloth

There was a blast from the past on the package of microscope slides:

I used to shop in that independent educational toys and teaching supplies store ALL THE TIME when my children were wee. The dollhouse I bought one toddler to celebrate her toilet training came from there, as did the PlaySkool circus set that the other kid picked out for her sixth birthday present, about an hour before she broke her leg on the playground and it turned out that a huge Playskool set was absolutely the perfect thing for a kid with a cast on her leg to play with for a solid month!

Fifteen years after picking out that dollhouse, my teenager collected water from a local lake, brought it home, dropped a single drop onto a microscope slide, and put it under the microscope to see what lives there.

A lot, it turned out!

In the above video, I think I see an amoeba, but I think that all the larger creatures are perhaps nematodes? I haven't even looked to see what the teenager identified them as in her lab notebook, but I'm sure her guess is better than mine!

The next video is by far my coolest:

I'm pretty sure those are stalked ciliates! The teenagers and I have done this lab several times, and I've only seen these particular critters once! I'm think all the critters swimming around them are Euglenae. Or maybe Paramecia? 

Those two videos are taken at just 100x, so you can see how much you can see even at that low magnitude. 400x, below, gives you more detail, but we don't use any additives to slow down our protists, so anything speedier than that oozy amoeba at the bottom right is hard to see.

This is a different water sample on a different day. I think that might be another Euglenoid because of its chloroplasts, which perhaps makes the critters that I previously thought were Euglenae actually Paramecia. I should probably get off my butt and go see what the teenager identified everything as, because I'm sure that she did more research than I'm currently doing!

The identities might be a bit sketchy, but the point of this particular lab isn't specifically to correctly identify every protist. Think of how much the teenager learned about sample collecting, microscope usage, and protists in general, as well as the practice that she got writing a lab report, problem-solving in science, and making decisions about identification. 

And most importantly, she got to see all the magic that lives out of sight in our local lake!

This protist lab pairs well with this macroinvertebrate identification lab, as well as this larger Water unit. 

Day 5 in England: The Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum

Overall, my teenager was fairly patient with being hauled along on Mom's England Trip of a Lifetime, but this kid who used to be my best traveler now insists that she hates all travel with the fire of a thousand suns... and she hates visiting museums with the fire of almost a thousand suns.

Funnily enough, the kid who used to be the worst traveler... just, OMG the WORST TRAVELER!... is now the best traveler ever, and by that I mean that she loves all the same travel things that I do: museums, tours of old shit, a few more museums, grubbing in the mud to find literal trash, eating local junk food, and for a nightcap, we'll hit up one more museum then go to bed early so that on the next day we can be at our first museum right when it opens.

So although I was sad to leave my teenager home on this day of museums, she was ecstatic to have the choice to opt out and spend the whole day just rattling around the AirBnb by herself.

And my college student and I, Matt in tow, were ecstatic to catch the bus around the corner and take it all the way to the front door of the Natural History Museum.

We were there right when it opened!

I was the most excited to see the Fossil Marine Reptiles Hall, which is where Mary Anning lives, but in the interest of crowd control, we first hit up the gallery I was second most excited to see:

DINOSAURS!!!

This was not my favorite dinosaur exhibit--for some reason, many of the fossils were mounted overhead, in dim light--

--and I had a lot of trouble simply making them out, much less peering closely and nearsightedly at all their tiny details, as I prefer. 

Still, there were some wonderful treasures! Here is part of the first (known) T-Rex fossil ever discovered:

We also saw the first known Iguanodon fossils ever discovered, two teeth found by Mary Ann Mantell. Later, a quarry owner discovered part of an Iguanodon skeleton inside a limestone slab that had been blasted apart. These Iguanodon teeth are another example of men intercepting women's finds and claiming them as their own, as it's Mary Ann's husband, Gideon, who gets most of the credit for the Iguanodon. To be fair, he was the one who researched it and described it, but he's also the one who had the education and the freedom of movement to do so.

I'm interested in the history of paleontology, and I like to look at exhibits that are still set up to look like they might have in the 1800s and early 1900s. It was really fun, then, that both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum had exhibits like this!

I like to look at the labels on older fossils to see if anyone interesting collected them. A couple of these fossils are labeled as coming from the Mantell collection, as in Gideon Mantell, and a couple more are labeled as having been collected by W.E. Cutler. There's not a ton of information about him, but a couple of cool points: he died of malaria in 1925 while on a dinosaur dig in Africa, and he has a mystery! In 1920, Cutler uncovered a partial Chasmosaurus skeleton and put it in storage to await a buyer. In 1921, he was hired to dig in Africa, where he died. He left no records saying what he did with his Chasmosaurus or where it is. There *is* a Chasmosaurus fossil in the Natural History Museum that resembles the field photographs of Cutler's fossil, but it doesn't have any associated records. 

I would happily spend the rest of my life in some museum's endless archives, puttering away and solving little mysteries like this one.

There were several good specimens from the collection of Georges Cuvier, who I used to be into until I learned about his WHOLE THING with "scientific" racism. He "dissected" the enslaved human trafficking victim Sarah Baartman after her death, not to figure out why she died but to get some primary source support for his racist beliefs, part of which included the idea that Adam and Eve were white. He was super gross, and I'm not happy to have to add him to my list of Misogynistic Men of Science. 

After the dinosaurs, since we were in the area and all, we looked at every mammal, every invertebrate, and every fish, reptile, and amphibian:

Then... Mary Anning!!!

Mary Anning's first articulated plesiosaur fossil!!!

I do not understand the Natural History Museum's obsession with displaying artifacts up high, but a large number of my precious plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were mounted easily 15 feet up. I can't read the labels from that high! I can't closely inspect every bone!

Seriously, look at this nonsense!

Still, even though you have to crane your neck, there were so many beautiful fossils. Look at Mary Anning's marvelous ichthyosaurs!

I love how they're still in their original mounts, in their cases that call them Sea-Dragons!

Only the bottom fossil has a known provenance from Mary Anning, but she probably found the other two, as well. 

Two interesting things about the below inscription: 1) he uses the phrased "purchased from Mary Anning," which is a great way to not admit that she also discovered and prepared the fossil, and 2) he says that she found another part of this fossil later and sent it to him, which shows how well she remembered all of her discoveries, enough to connect one piece to another years apart, and that she was too generous for her own good. She ought to have charged him through the fucking nose for that piece.

This is Mary Anning's biggest ichthyosaur. Matt couldn't even get the whole thing in the same frame as me!

It's so big that it has other fossils ON it!

We could have easily stayed at the Natural History Museum until it closed, and we did swing by most of the other galleries, but on this day I also really wanted to check out the Victoria and Albert Museum, conveniently located just across the street. There was nothing in particular that I'd been excited about seeing there, but of course I DID find marvelous things!

See the pipe found on the Thames foreshore?!? SQUEE!!!

Thanks to all the Medieval art I studied in my misguided twenties, I got very distracted by all the lovely rood screens--

Awww, look at that beautiful sculpture of a bunch of men torturing a lone woman!

--and effigies--

--and dragons!

I really loved the large-scale architectural elements in the Victoria and Albert. The museum has saved pieces like staircases, entire balconies, and decorated columns-and you can look at them!

There was also a wonderful display of jewelry, so the college student and I spent a LOT of time inching our way around the jewelry exhibit, peering at every tiny ring and reading its label twice, then peering at it again with renewed interest based on what we'd learned from the label. I'm low-key obsessed with iron jewelry now--it was great to wear during mourning and during wartimes after you'd donated your precious metal jewelry, but it's also super bad-ass and I would wear it all the freaking time if I had it.

Also bad-ass? Queen Victoria's sapphire and diamond coronet!

It was designed by Prince Albert, who apparently had excellent taste and was in charge of making sure all of Victoria's jewelry was beautiful and classy.

I don't wear jewelry, but I could use someone with excellent taste to make sure that all of my cargo pants and T-shirts and sneakers are beautiful and classy!

Here's our trip so far!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

So Many Cooks in the Kitchen: All the Ways We've Homeschooled with Educational Cooking Projects

King cakes from scratch!

 As I was writing the other day about my kid's experiences with baking throughout her childhood, I got interested in trying to remember what-all we actually had cooked together as part of her homeschool education. 

Spoiler alert: it's been quite a lot!

Projects like these have been such a part of the pattern of our days that I couldn't remember off-hand more than a few notable ones: the cookie map of Ancient Egypt. The cookie Solar System. Mason jar butter. Experimenting with yeast.

Fortunately, THIS is why I've been a blogger for 15-odd years--it's so I don't have to lose my precious memories because of my terrible memory!

I had SO much fun going through my blog archives to find all the times we incorporated a specific cooking project into our homeschool. I didn't count the times that we did stuff solely for fun (even though that's all educational, too!), like our cookie bake-offs and our dyed rainbow waffles and cupcakes, or the food that we made together just as part of life, like yogurt popsicles and applesauce and endless DIY pizzas and quick breads. In this master post, I'm just counting specific projects that we did that were for specific topics of study. I wish I could go back and do them all over again with those magical little kids!

ART

• sculpture: bread sculptures. Bread dough is edible clay! It's also interesting to kids to see the transformation in their sculpture that comes from baking the bread. Of course, bread dough is just one more interesting sculpture medium that all kids should be exposed to, along with all kinds of clays and papier mache and anything combined with a good hot glue gun. You could also incorporate bread sculptures into subjects like math and literacy, sculpting bread dough snakes into shapes and letters and baking them into breadsticks. 

GEOGRAPHY

• Japan: homemade mochi ice cream. Try making your own awesome Japanese treat! Cooking and tasting Japanese cuisine is a great way to build context in a kid who loves anime and manga. If kids are interested, the library usually has kid-friendly cookbooks of Japanese cuisine, and I feel like most places have Japanese restaurants. It's a great segue into a study of Japanese culture. 

• local geography: locavore food prep challenge. Kids learn first-hand about the local food movement and what foods are grown and currently being harvested in their location as they collect ingredients and make a dish consisting entirely of local foods. If kids are really interested in local foods, you can spend spring through fall visiting every u-pick farm in driving distance, and look for places like independent dairies, local breweries, honey farms, and other local food providers who offer tours and workshops. Learning how to preserve those food products is a great next step! You can do also similar cooking challenges anywhere--collect ingredients and make a fun meal at an Asian or Mexican grocery; set a budget for kids to shop for a meal at the grocery store and then cook it independently; find all the Fair Trade items, etc. Even younger kids can play by finding foods with specific colors or something new they want to taste or something that starts with a certain letter, etc.

• New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Venice: king cake. Mardi Gras/Carnival is a great time to dip into a geography unit study of New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and/or Venice. Not only is there the local cuisine of each area, but also the local music, the costumes, the dances, the parades--so much for every sense! If kids love that kind of thing, there are all kinds of nation- and region-specific holidays you can explore throughout the year to build geography and cultural knowledge. If kids just like baking, you can actually learn quite a lot of American history just through baking cakes!

• map skills: cookie map. This is one of my favorite homeschool projects to do with young children. We've made cookie maps of every place imaginable, from the United States as an Independence Day project to various countries that we've studied to places that illustrate historical events. Kids can use frosting and candies to embellish the map and add features, and can make flag labels out of paper and toothpicks. The possibilities are endless! 

• Taiwan: bubble tea. If your kid is into bubble tea, this could be the first restaurant-quality food that they learn to cook at home, because it's a SUPER accessible recipe. It fits great into a unit study of Taiwan or the entire continent of Asia, or expand the geographic interest by making or tasting special drinks from all over the world while studying those places. Take it in a new direction with more exploration of the mathematics of spheres or the science of polymers. Boba is also another preschool-friendly sensory material, although it's a choking hazard for under-threes. 

HISTORY

• Ancient Mesopotamia: Gingerbread Cuneiform. See what it's like to write cuneiform... and then see how delicious it is to eat it! Other great Ancient Mesopotamia enrichment activities could include building models of a ziggurat or the Temple of Ishtar and listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Take the gingerbread cuneiform in a different direction by having a kid use the stylus to draw maps or diagrams or spelling words, or premake a gingerbread moveable alphabet to practice word building.

• Neolithic Great Britain: gingerbread Stonehenge on a cookie cake. Kids get their hands on this Neolithic henge monument by building it in gingerbread on a cookie cake base. This one is mostly just for fun, so it would be a good thing to make as a little celebration when finishing up the relevant unit study. It also almost certainly ties into ancient astronomy, so you have a ready segue into the history of science. Gingerbread is also just a great structural material, so you could have a go at building pretty much any architectural creation with it--how fun would a gingerbread Eiffel Tower or Egyptian Pyramid be for Christmas-time?!?

• Ancient Greece: cookie and Jello map. Here's your assurance from me that your kids' cooking project does not have to look perfect, or even attractive... or even not gross. I think this cookie and Jello map of Ancient Greece that the kids made looks SO gross, but they put a ton of research into it, worked really hard on it, and learned what I wanted them to learn. And they said it was delicious! 

• pioneer studies: Mason jar butter. You'll probably come to this project inspired by reading Little House in the Big Woods or visiting a living history museum. It's an especially good activity when it's miserable outside, because it gets little bodies moving and occupies them for quite a while--and then you can have a snack! Contextualize the activity by visiting a humane dairy farm or getting a 4-H kid to let you milk their cow, or doing other living history projects. It pairs well with the picture book Fry Bread, which also includes a cooking project!

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

• J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings feast. Themed dinner and movie nights are my absolute favorite thing! After we read each of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy together (Matt has read SO MUCH TOLKIEN out loud in his life!), we had a movie night with a themed dinner to watch the associated film. It's very fun for kids to remember their favorite details from the book and figure out recipes to represent them. Sometimes they like to make foods written about in the book, like seed cakes or rabbit stew, and sometimes they like to make foods that represent other part of the book, like these Ring of Power doughnuts, above. You can make a themed dinner about ANYTHING, and it's always educational for the kids to research what they want to make, shop for the ingredients, and cook it.

• children's books: Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off. The kids thought that Amelia Bedelia was SO FUNNY, and I still remember how absolutely thrilled my kid was when we finished Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off, she turned the page, and found a recipe there for Amelia Bedelia's cake! All praise to that author, because my kid could make the cake right then, using ingredients we already had on hand. Making recipes from children's books is such a great literacy connection. It builds context to the real world, and it makes reading feel even more fun than it already is. We also own and have really liked cooking from the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook and The Little House Cookbook--any literary cookbook written around a children's book is probably going to have kid-friendly recipes.

   MATHEMATICS

• fractions: Rice Krispy Treat fractions. Make Rice Krispy Treats, pour into a square or round cake pan, then when they're set have a lot of fun cutting them into various fractions. You can use any food that can be set in a round or square pan, but Rice Krispy Treats work particularly well because they cut cleanly without a lot of crumbling. Combine it with all the other hands-on ways that you can explore fractions, because it builds a kid's number sense by seeing the same concept illustrated multiple ways. Rice Krispy Treats are also a good sculpture tool for all kinds of art and model-making projects.

• geometry: heart-shaped cake. Making a heart from a square and circle is a neat little trick--and it's delicious! You can extend the geometry play with paper geometric figures that kids can pattern and make pictures with. If you're feeling really ambitious, you could then bake a cake of whatever picture they've created with their shapes!

• logic: edible chessboard. My kid and I baked this blondie and brownie chessboard during a time when chess was of high interest to her, and it was so fun! There was some good patterning and ordering involved, but things really got wild when we started removing squares from the board and figuring out how to play around them. Kids who like puzzles and games or are at all creative or mathy can get really into chess, and there are a lot of kid-friendly chess enrichment activities around. These two matching brownie and blondie recipes would also lend themselves to even more fraction exploration, patterning, and, if you frost them with letters, moveable alphabet play.

• telling time: clock cake. This is more fun than educational, but it does require practical knowledge of how a clock face is organized and the ability to write the numbers. You could expand this lesson by cutting the cake to demonstrated elapsed time, or instead writing fraction divisions on it. 

PRACTICAL LIFE

• reading comprehension/following directions: Jello. As soon as a kid can read pretty well, I think it's so educational for them (and SO fun for you to watch!) to be given any variety of easy-prep packaged food and encouraged to read the directions and make it all by themselves. Jello is perfect for this because the only cooking required is hot water, and it's very hard to mess up Jello! Instant puddings, canned biscuits and sweet rolls, and boxed cake mixes are also easy enough for a young independent reader to make.

• how it's made: homemade peanut butter. This requires a high-powered blender, but kids find it fascinating to see how easy it is to make their own nut butter. My kid did not prefer this freshly-blended, peanuts-only peanut butter (even though the peanut butter I bought her at the time was also peanuts-only, sigh), but found it VERY fun to blend other delicious things into it. You can blend in honey, maple syrup, jam, and even more creative ingredients like spices and whole fruits. Cinnamon honey peanut butter was DELICIOUS! If a kid gets into the "how it's made" part, they might LOVE the TV show, much of which is free on YouTube. If they get into the blender part, introduce them to making their own smoothies and hummus and other nut butters. Blenders are VERY fun!

SCIENCE

• astronomy: cookie Solar System. This is an all-day or multi-day project, but it is SO MUCH FUN! It requires calculation, geometry, a lot of research, and a lot of problem-solving, but the result is a tasty collection of cookie planets with correct relative size. My kids had a lot of fun reading about each planet so they'd know what color scheme to frost it and how many mini M&M moons to give it. It goes great with any other Solar System activities, many of which are equally hands-on. If you get a good cookie recipe that doesn't spread, you can also bake cookies to represent mathematical concepts like arrays and area models and larger map projects--can you imagine an entire cookie map of the world, with a different cookie for each continent?!?

• cell cycle: states of meiosis cookie models. Reinforce the stages of meiosis by building an edible model. You can turn just about any diagram into a cookie or cake model with enough creativity! Plant and animal cells also lend themselves well to being made of cookies or cake, and I have seen an AWESOME cake model of a World War I trench.

• fungi: yeast bread. The day that my kid learned that yeast is alive is one of my favorite days of homeschooling. She was so interested that we put aside whatever else we'd been planning to do and instead did some experiments with yeast, watched an educational video about fungi, looked at yeast through the microscope... and baked yeast bread! This would be a great intro to all kinds of kid-friendly yeast baking projects, including collecting wild yeast and making sourdough. 

• chemistry: gelling and spherification. Learn how polymers work by creating gelatin juice spheres. Other hands-on ways to explore polymers include making milk plastic and slime. Or continue with edible states of matter by playing with non-Newtonian fluids, densities in liquids, and ice. These taste-safe spheres also make a good sensory material for babies on up! 

• polymers: authentic homemade gummy candies. If you've got a kid who adores gummy candy, don't fall for those DIY kits or tutorials that essentially use just unflavored gelatin and juice or Kool-Aid. They do not taste like authentic gummies, and your kid will not be fooled! You really can make authentic gummies, though, that really do taste awesome, and your kid can get some hands-on experience working with polymers while you're at it! Kids who like this might enjoy other DIY food kits. There are SO many, from growing your own mushrooms and window gardens to making your own cheese and chocolate and gum.

• properties of matter: density cake. This an easy and kid-friendly recipe that kids can run when they're learning about the properties of matter and density. Kids can do some similar experimentation to make a liquid density tower, although that one's not edible. If mix-ins seem to encourage your kids to try new foods, you can expand that into all kinds of bake-offs and cooking play. 

I wish I'd taken better photos of the kids doing all this magical cooking, because I'd love to write a book of educational cooking enrichment projects, but now I don't have anymore mini models! Maybe my teenager could help me with some illustrations to use instead...