Work Plans for the Week of January 26, 2015: Essays and Indianapolis

Last week was a very successful school week. The kids worked with minimal fuss, enjoyed playdates with friends, and then on Friday, we skipped school altogether after math class, and instead went hiking and spelunking with some buddies.

See? Spelunking!

A creek runs through the cave, and although everyone wore galoshes, children's galoshes still aren't that tall, you know? My friend and I decided that we'll return to this cave in the summer, wearing Keens, and perhaps we won't leave again until fall.

And hiking:

This week, we've got that make-up day, more essays to work on, a couple of new classes to begin, and a field trip to Indianapolis.

The kids' daily book assignments (one each daily, in addition to the hours of pleasure reading that they do independently) include picture books on the theme of diversity, a history of the Pearl Harbor attack, folk tales, and more picture books about Georgia O'Keeffe.

MONDAY: We're back at our regular volunteer gig today, after skipping last week so that the kids could do a different service project with the Girl Scouts. The kids also skipped their Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson, since that was the day we went spelunking with friends instead; the lessons are short enough, however, that I'm considering having the kids complete two lessons today. It's not really necessary to do that, since I never worry that they're "behind" in anything, but still... it's worth asking them about to see what they think.

Will needs more hands-on experience with fractions, so I've invented a game for the kids to play with me today that involves fraction circle manipulatives and fraction dice. It should cover adding mixed fractions and both like and unlike fractions, so I think that it will help Will a lot. Syd will play, too, of course--one of the reasons why Syd is generally so quick at her math is this leg-up that she's always getting by sharing Will's hands-on enrichment.

Syd also has her Minecraft Homeschool class to work on this week, so that's sort of an invisible lesson slot in her work plans. It works out well, though, because Will has a biography of Anthony "Kapel" Van Jones to write this week, and it will give me time to focus one-on-one with her.

Finally, the children's horseback riding instructor is retiring from her post this week, so she deserves two lovely cards with lovely notes inside from two grateful little girls.

TUESDAY: The kids have their first meeting of a science club at our local community college on this evening. Will attends a robotics club there on alternate Tuesdays, where she is apparently a star programmer of LEGO Mindstorms, so I expect that this program will be equally excellent.

In Math Mammoth this week Will returns to fractions, and Syd reviews rounding and estimating. It should be an easy enough week for both.

The children's horse breed homework this week is the Lipizzaner. They've done this one before, but their new horseback riding instructor loved the infographic that they presented to her last week so much that she's requested that they begin to collect them into a binder, so some review is expected.

Syd knows exactly what she wants her Trashion/Refashion Show entry to look like, but she still needs to draw it for me in full-color detail. I'm afraid that I'm going to end up sewing it again this year, but I've suggested that she add capes to the costumes that she's designing, and if she likes that plan, she should be able to do much of that sewing herself.

Although the kids are working hard on their Girl Scout cookie selling (want to buy some Girl Scout cookies?), Will is intent on earning all the Junior badges before she bridges to Cadette, and so really needs to work on this every week.

WEDNESDAY: Verbs are our focus in First Language Lessons, currently. The kids are bored by the scripted lessons (as am I!) but love the diagramming, so we keep trucking through. Both horseback riding class and aerial silks class take up most of the rest of our school time on Wednesdays.

THURSDAY: Free day! We'll actually be spending the day in Indianapolis on this day, volunteering at the fossil prep lab at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and then either staying there to play for the rest of the day or going over to the Indianapolis Museum of Art to see their exhibit on Georgia O'Keeffe.

FRIDAY: Math class and Will's ice skating class also take up much of the school time on this day, but there are a few things that we'll also try to fit in. I have an idea for a physics experiment that I think the kids will enjoy--making zip lines for toys--and we still haven't gotten around to checking out typing programs! Something always seems to come up, and it's an easy lesson to put off if we're crunched for time.

The children should both be finishing up final drafts of essays on this day, as well. Perhaps we'll have a little family party that evening to celebrate!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Saturday brings ballet class for Syd and Chinese language class for both kids, with space in between for them to do something special with Matt (and for me to get a bunch of work done, hopefully, allowing me to have more family time later!). Sunday is totally open, and we'll either spend it playing at home or, if the kids and I didn't go on Thursday, at the art museum with Georgia O'Keeffe.

Work Plans for the Week of January 19, 2015: Essays of Unusual Size

Will was NOT thrilled to write her essay last week, and she will be equally not thrilled to find yet another essay for this week. Write it she shall, however, and I shall attempt to regird my patience for the inevitable upcoming struggles.

Writing, or the battle about writing, took up much of last week, and, as I'd suspected I would, I did need to delete a couple of the smaller, unimportant lessons from our plans--experimenting with watercolors can happen anytime, and Syd, at least, will be pleased to be asked to get messy dyeing Great Northern beans with me during her leisure hours.

This week's plans, however, are all important and unskippable, although I did cull them down as much as possible. I include the children's extracurriculars into their plans, but I don't include the daily book assignment, keyboard practice, memory work, and the chore chart--that's all on top of school, but the reading they'd do for pleasure, regardless, the keyboard practice takes only minutes (although they often remain at the keyboard for much longer--yay!), the memory work takes place in the car, and chores are chores; everyone in the world has to do their chores!

TUESDAY: Yesterday was our free day! Matt was off work, so he took the burden of shlepping the kids around while I slogged through my work at home; the kids skipped our weekly volunteer gig to go to a special volunteer opportunity with the Girl Scouts, and they took their weekly aerial silks lesson, happily freeing up a little more Wednesday for us.

Today, then, as I write Will sits next to me and reads her book assignment, a biography of Charles Darwin (she has just informed me that we MUST go visit the Galapagos Islands one day, although sadly we are no longer permitted to ride the tortoises, and did I know that "galapagos" is the Spanish word for tortoise?), and Syd eats breakfast and reads in the other room. Their math this week is all review drills from our Kumon workbooks--more subtraction with borrowing across zeroes for Syd, and calculating volume and area for Will. I expect that after this extra practice, we'll move back into Math Mammoth next week.

The commencement of horseback riding lessons is also the commencement of the horse breed research that their instructor always gives them for homework. I believe that my emphasis, this session, will be on efficient, effective, and informative displays of their research, so that the children become easily able to reproduce infographics and posters, as the case requires.

Will has by this moment found and looked over the essay requirement for this year's Black History Month essay contest, and already pouted about it. It's another biography from a dedicated pool of names, with some first-person analysis, as well. She's going to loathe it.

She will like better our plans for a swimming date with some friends at the gym this afternoon, and like best of all the first session of this semester's Robotics Club tonight. While she's there, Syd will be able to have some quiet time to work on her design for this year's Trashion/Refashion Show. I REALLY hope that she creates a design that she's able to sew by herself this year!

WEDNESDAY: Song School Spanish is a painless lesson to get through each week, especially as much of the work for it takes place as our daily ten-minute memory work in the car every day. I also enjoy having someone else in charge of horseback riding lessons and Magic Tree House Club (the kids were meant to attend their club meeting earlier this month, but were so busy playing that they didn't want to settle down for it; this is the last meeting for this month, so they'll definitely need to attend this one); I can get some writing done during the former, and have time to cook something a little more involved than frozen pizza or stir-fry during the latter.

THURSDAY: First Language Lessons is scripted, so sometimes I'll save that to hand off to Matt in the evenings. I won't be surprised if I need to on this day, because both kids will need my assistance as they complete pre-writing activities for upcoming essays. We have ice skating plans with children from our homeschooling group, however, so hopefully that will keep them in a good enough mood to stave off the most excessive of the fits.

FRIDAY: I usually try to keep the kids' keyboard lesson early in the week, so that they can use the rest of the week to practice, but it just wouldn't fit into the schedule any earlier than today. Fridays tend to be busy, though, with both math class and Will's ice skating class getting us up and out of the house, so this quick, independent lesson will be a helpful breather for me.

I generally let the kids cook independently these days, but since these cookies are for other people, I'll probably need to be on hand to supervise. I need to remember to set aside time earlier in the week to have the kids choose a recipe so that we can shop for ingredients, unless you think that I can convince them to find a recipe that allows me to use up the random bits of candied cherries and chopped pecans that I have in the pantry?

All this essay writing--or rather, essay dictating, to me--has made it very clear to me that it's high time for the kids to learn keyboarding. I've got several software programs checked out of the public library, so ideally the kids will like one of these well enough to at least learn the functional basics.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The kids don't have any responsibilities on Saturday, but I'm having friends over that night, so I suppose that I should do some cleaning and cooking. On Sunday, Will has Chess Club, and the cookies need to be delivered to our town's homeless shelter. I imagine there will also be Girl Scout Cookie selling. Perhaps Trashion/Refashion Show material shopping. Minecraft playing. Chicken spoiling.

You know, typical weekend stuff.

Becoming Tinkerbell

In all the bustle of getting ready for Halloween and the kids' vacation with their grandparents, I'd completely forgotten that I'd actually snapped a few photos of Syd's design and construction process for her Tinkerbell outfit.

I didn't take a photo of what, to me, was the cutest moment: Syd watching a Tinkerbell movie, sketchbook and colored pencils around her, and pausing it every time Tinkerbell demonstrated a new pose that showed off a different aspect of her outfit. Syd recorded everything from Tinkerbell's hairdo to her pom-pom shoes in her sketchbook.

Thankfully, I had felt of an acceptable color in my fabric stash. I REALLY don't want to buy new fabric until I've used up the old, but I'm also putty-like in the face of a child's artistic determination, so I'm glad that I didn't even have to think about fighting that internal battle. I took Syd's measurements at her chest and from chest to knee, showed her how to transfer the measurements to graph paper, and here she is working out the bottom width of her garment:

Syd then sewed the side seams and top elastic casing, and later fringed the bottom:

I had assumed that tight elastic at the top of this dress would be enough to hold it in place, but on my straight little noodle, it was not. There goes my idea for a Trashion/Refashion Show garment that she can sew herself! I tightened the elastic several times, but finally ended up just instructing her to keep hitching it up. 

We used part of my wire hanger wings tutorial for Tinkerbell's wings--Syd sketched the template, but the wire hangers were too difficult for her to work with, so I bent the wire--but Syd rejected any sort of fabric overlay as being too far of a deviation from her original concept, so Matt did have to buy clear cellophane gift wrap from the Dollar Store and let Syd hot glue that to the wire frame:

Matt also took Syd to a shoe store so that she could ask for (and receive!) two of those cardboard shoe inserts that new shoes come with (it's been ages since I've bought the child new shoes, so who knows how she managed to remember those!), and her plan had been to paint them green, attach pom poms, and somehow adhere them to the tops of her regular shoes, but fortunately she finally decided that her dress and wings and hairstyle were enough--whew!

The child tells me that she wants to be a dress designer and hair stylist and ballerina when she grows up, but if you ask me, she has an affinity for engineering. We often joke that Will's perfect occupation would be the dictator-for-life of a small island nation, so I think Syd would be all set as her Czar of Public Works.

Tinkerbell and the Vampire

As the kids and I were packing on Sunday, I suddenly had a panicked thought and burst out with something like, "Oh, no! Kids, you have to go put your costumes on RIGHT NOW!"

Because if the kids are going to be in California with their grandparents for Halloween, then that's where they'll be wearing their costumes, and so if I wanted to take pictures of them in their costumes, it had to be before I packed them! Yikes!

Fortunately, the kids were excellent sports, and put on their whole Halloween costumes for me, just so I could take photos of them.

Sydney is Tinkerbell:

She created her entire costume with very little adult assistance--I showed her how to draft a dress pattern to her measurements, Matt showed her how to transfer it to fabric, I threaded elastic through the casing she sewed in the top of the dress, I helped her bend the wire of her wings, and I showed her how to glue the clear cellophane to the wire. Syd thought up the entire costume, then watched a Tinkerbell movie and paused it whenever Tinkerbell showed a new angle, so that she could sketch her design from all sides. She sewed her dress, cut out the details at the bottom hem, drew a template for the wire hanger wings to follow, then spent hours painstakingly hot gluing clear cellophane gift wrap to them.

Fortunately, because Syd can be quite hard on herself, her costume turned out just the way she wanted!

Well, except for the part about the wings making her really be able to fly. That part didn't work out at all...

Will's usually an easy girl to please about Halloween costumes. For her vampire costume, she let me wrap one of my old homemade Moby Wraps around her head as her hood. Matt bought her a black shirt and black pants from Goodwill, and although she was going to make her old standby, the plastic fork fangs, she actually received a set of fangs as a favor at a Halloween party, so she was good to go!

  

Again, this costume surprisingly doesn't confer any superpowers, either; nevertheless, leaping the chain that blocks the drive-in's driveway remains a fine pastime for young daredevils:

The kids will actually be trick-or-treating in La Jolla this year, and they've already been teased quite mightily about the treats that a swanky neighborhood like La Jolla shall surely yield--full-sized candy bars! Each kid her own pony!

For my part, my health is going to take an outstanding turn for Halloween this year, since unlike in previous years, I have not had to buy Halloween candy and then buy it again five days later because I ate it all, and in the best of all possible circumstances I will not spend all next week sneaking treats from the kids' Halloween stashes, either, because the day after Halloween they have another five-hour plane ride to get through.

Know what makes the time pass quickly during a five-hour plane ride?

Eating all your Halloween candy, I'm going to bet!

DIY Junior Ranger Vest

If you've been following along at home, then you know by now that the kids, especially Will, looooooove the Junior Ranger program! Over the summer, they earned Junior Ranger badges at the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Devils Tower, and Yellowstone, Since then, they've earned their Junior Paleontologist badges (that we mailed in), and currently, Will is working through the badge book for Redwood National and State Parks, and Syd is working through the badge book for City of Rocks--we'll mail those in when they're finished, too.

Used to the Girl Scouts, where she displays every accomplishment on a vest, Will asked me to make her a Junior Ranger vest as a place to display all of her Junior Ranger badges. I used her Girl Scout vest as a template for the basic pattern, but made the actual vest more of a nature vest in style:

On her right shoulder is an American flag, and below that I'd like to put a Junior Ranger patch, when I can actually find one. The pocket below that is large enough to hold a Junior Ranger book--it'll be handy for her to not have to carry that around in her hands!

There's space on the pockets for some of her badges and patches--I know that Will would like to wear them all, but that's going to get clickety-clackety and unwieldy at some point, so when that happens I plan to make her a wall display and have her keep most of her badges there.

The small pocket on the left side is for keeping contained various small treasures--you can't take souvenirs from national parks, of course, but if she wears it elsewhere as a nature vest, she'll want a spot for crinoids and rocks and snail shells and such.

The big pocket on the left side will hold a set of colored pencils, small sketch pad, ruler, etc.

On the inside, even with the bottom hem, I've sewn several loops out of matching webbing. These, with the addition of carabiners, can be used to hold Will's water bottle, flashlight, infrared thermometer (we own this one, the same model that Will was given to use while earning her Yellowstone Young Scientist badge), and whatever else she might need while out on adventures. 

Here's a gratuitous image of Spots supervising my photo shoot:

And here's the kid!

That's a PVC pipe sword that she's holding, made with her own two hands. If you invite her to your birthday party, she'll probably make one for you, too!

I'm already worried that I didn't put enough growth into this vest, because Will has apparently decided to make a habit out of growing like a weed. There's no helping it now, of course, but I won't make the same mistake with Syd's pink Junior Ranger vest, on the list to be made after I finish sewing Will some flannel pants for fall (I also discovered this morning that I have to buy her a new pair of khakis for Girl Scouts, as I was forced to send her to her airplane workshop in black sweats with leopard spots on them--growing like a WEED, this girl!).

Doll Dress Designs

My fabric scrap bin gets a lot of turnover, as this is one of Syd's favorite activities:

This garment is cut from a single piece of quilting cotton, with tape to fasten the back and a ribbon around the waist.

Syd sewed the bodice and skirt of this outfit together on my sewing machine. It's held closed at the back with the belt cut from scrap fabric; the garment also features a matching ascot and half-sleeves held on with tape.

This pipe cleaner doll features a dress made from a single piece of scrap fabric, fastened just below the bust with a ribbon tie. Brown flannel hair is held in place with masking tape.

This simple garment is one piece of vintage scrap fabric with a masking tape belt.

I've been brainstorming how to enrich Syd's interest in fashion design--it's MUCH easier to find resources to teach kids computer programming and pottery making than it is clothing design! Once we're a little more settled in our new house (I'm currently writing this post while sitting on a mattress in the bedroom of our old house, a place that I now refer to as my "bolt hole," while Matt makes phone calls from work to try to find a plumber to repair the main line in our new house. I'm pretty sure the toilets aren't supposed to back up into the bathtubs there...), I'd like to set up my older sewing machine for Syd, as well as teach her a couple of simple clothing patterns in her size that she can use independently. I've also got some more larger white play silks to dye for her, because play silks make really versatile costumes. We should continue our drawing lessons, as well--I want to add Waldorf form drawing into the lesson schedule.

Because this is definitely a kid who could be wearing only her own home-sewn creations by high school. Perhaps she'll sew for me, too!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Refashion

the kid's T-shirt refashion

and a bunch, bunch, bunch more clothing refashion projects

I would dearly like for Syd and I to finish the pants for her Trashion/Refashion Show outfit this week, so that next week I can watch out for a nice day to do her photo shoot. I think I've decided to sacrifice my frumpy old thrifted green coat, the one that I haven't worn since Christmas 2012 (when Matt bought me an awesome biker coat, complete with elbow and back pads to keep me safe when I fall off my Harley or get shot at), to the pants cause, hopefully re-using the coat's hardware for the pants fastenings, and then *maybe* using a couple of old green T-shirts for the bell bottoms that Syd dearly desires. Syd also dearly desires green sequins, but I just do not think that we're going to be able to score anything with green sequins to upcycle into the garment.

Seriously, there has been nothing with green sequins in any of the thrift stores for WEEKS. Are people with green sequined clothing finding them so justifiably hideous that they're choosing to burn them instead of donate them?

Yeah, I probably would.

Work Plans for the Week of February 3, 2014: Science and Survival Kits

 MONDAY: We're still happily moving through one chapter a week in Song School Latin (I forgot to update our work plans with this week's chapters--oops!), and the kids are retaining the vocabulary well, and although *I'm* ready for them to get some grammar and conjugations/declensions in, as long as they're engaged and absorbing the material and progressing, we'll go at the textbook's pace.

The kids didn't practice their instruments as much as they should have last week, so we may have to repeat those lessons this week, but most of our time and energy today is going into rehearsal for tonight's Science Fair. Completing the re-articulation of the chicken skeleton took so much time that I'm letting the kids do much of their presentations without a written report to refer to, but this might have been a mistake, too, in that it takes, of course, much more practice to get that sort of presentation down pat.

This week, the kids are going to math class just once (I think they found the two days last week a little much), so we've got space in the schedule for a hands-on unit. Although we did pattern blocks in this space for several weeks, the kids are actively (if slowly, ahem) memorizing the multiplication tables currently, so I'll be keeping a hands-on multiplication activity there until the tables are mastered.

We already did our volunteer gig for the day, and tonight is the Science Fair!

TUESDAY: Math Mammoth and First Language Lessons Level 3 are always easy to schedule, and since I spend hours on Sundays creating these lesson plans, it's a relief to be able to have a few things that I can simply pop into place. The survival kit, however, is likely to take up quite a bit more time--the kids have to prioritize their list based on the budget I'm giving them, and then we'll actually have to go shopping for these supplies. Since I try not to run errands with the kids during the day, a mid-morning shopping trip may seem like quite the adventure!

Will still has a little work to do on her World Thinking Day badge, but Syd is finished and can choose another badge to start earning. We're also going to participate, I *think*, in the Great Backyard Bird Count, and so our science unit for a few weeks will concern birds.

WEDNESDAY: This is one of those rare weeks in which Will has to skip aerial silks entirely (although thank goodness their scheduling system is set up so that we don't have to pay for a class we're not going to attend), but both kids are going to be thrilled to learn that their LEGO club is back after its long winter hiatus.

The subject of this month's Magic Tree House Club meeting--Earthquake in the Early Morning--is well-timed with our California study, especially since I'd been considering drawing out that study a little longer to include some earthquake activities.

THURSDAY: What with ice skating with friends and having another friend over for the afternoon, this will be a short school day. We're ditching art for a couple of weeks in favor of Valentine's Day crafting, but the kids' individual studies are still continuing--I hope that Syd will start actually constructing her dress this week, and Will is going to create a manual version of one of the first computer games.

FRIDAY: The kids claim that their teacher is going to bring cookies to math class on this day, so they're pretty excited about it already. WE are not going to be having cookies here at home, but we will be scrapbooking, completing our mapwork activity for our The Story of the World chapter, and finishing that survival kit.

I'm most excited about the Olympics unit that we'll be working on throughout the Winter Olympics. I'm hoping to set up a somewhat elaborate Olympic nations pin flag work for the kids to do on this day, but that involves plenty of prep work for me this week, so it's a good thing that I always plan to be busy!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The kids have their all-day nature class this weekend, and we've also got a party at our local YMCA, chess club, and swimming with friends. But with no looming Science Fair presentations to rehearse and no chicken skeletons to re-articulate, we'll also have loads of happy downtime...

...which I need. I am going to be happy to see the backside of that chicken skeleton, I tell you what!

Works Plans for the Week of January 6, 2014: Back in the Game

It's another week when it's easier to be a homeschooler than not--our part of the country is stymied under record, dangerously low temperatures, and our city has basically shut down and ordered everyone to stay home and snuggle up. Public schools are out--and will be out tomorrow, too--but it's probably not so much a novelty for those kiddos coming on the back of their two-week break, and I think they're going to have to make these days up at the end of the year, anyway--yuck (Ooh, I just discovered that Indiana schools are NOT going to make up this snow day, but it will result in them not meeting their flat-out minimum 180 days of instruction this year. Interesting...)! For us, though, it's business as usual (minus our volunteer gig and aerial silks class, both having been cancelled), and the children, having had enough of vacation and staycation in the past two weeks, are happy to get back in the game.

MONDAY: I knew ahead of time that our outside activities would be cancelled today, so I snuck in an extra subject--and the kids didn't notice, whee! Our pattern blocks activity today was focused on square numbers, which ties nicely in to our current memory work of memorizing the multiplication table (Will's late to this, which doesn't bug me, and Syd's early to it... which also doesn't bug me!). In Latin, we're onto animal names, which the kids are finding super easy to memorize--a refreshing change from the struggle to keep those darned tricky words in their heads! I found some good Youtube piano lessons that are making Syd's keyboard time much easier; Will threw a fit over having to practice her recorder piece until she actually got it right, but then was stoked at having gotten it right, so there you go.

Our big project this week has to do with the kiddos' first Girl Scouts badge! We are just at the beginning of this journey, I know, but already we are all so excited about all the opportunities that come with being a Girl Scout. I registered the kids as Juliettes, which means that we can work independently and with our friends who are also Girl Scout Juliettes, but they can still attend all the TONS of Girl Scout activities and workshops and camps and classes in our area. The badge activities are excellent, too--I like that there are choices, and that they're all so cross-curricular, and the kids like that they're all so hands-on and varied.

The first badge that we're working on is the one for World Thinking Day, which is coming up next month. I love this one, as it's focused on the issue of childhood education and access to it. We've already had some great conversations about education as a right and responsibility versus education as a privilege, and how that affects children's attitudes about their education (Ahem!!!). Among other activities, both girls will be comparing girls' educations in other countries (namely India and in Africa) to their own education, and planning and executing the creation of a children's literacy corner in the local food pantry where we volunteer. For this latter project, they'll need to write to the volunteer coordinator and ask permission, design the spot to fit into the cramped area already set aside for children there, source and obtain all the supplies, set it up, and maintain it weekly. Today we talked through some of the planning, and then Will watched a video about a little schoolgirl in India and wrote a rough draft of her comparison/contrast list, and Syd created a storyboard for a photo diary that she's going to create about her typical school day.

TUESDAY: I want to start Science Fair prep as soon as possible--can you believe that it's next month?!?--but until our library books are ready for us to pick up (and the library is closed today AND tomorrow, probably, sigh), we can finish up our acids and bases study with a few more of the experiments from the kids' chemistry set. I'm back to scheduling grammar only once a week, leaving time for more projects, and I think that I'll keep the kids with word ladders for logic until after the Spelling Bee--every minute of practice counts!

WEDNESDAY: I still don't know what the weather will be like on this day, frankly, and if we'll even get out to aerial silks. Free days aren't quite as fun when the temperature is so dangerously low that your friends can't even come over for a playdate, and you can't meet them for sledding.

THURSDAY: Surely we'll be able to go ice skating with friends by then... although it is supposed to snow again on Thursday. Otherwise, we'll keep ourselves busy with chemistry experiments and drawing lessons. Will is going to master the first videogame ever, and Syd is going to sketch out some plans for her Trashion/Refashion Show design. I really hope that she designs something that she can sew for herself this year!

FRIDAY: We didn't finish the California facts during our last week of school last year, so we'll finish them now. We'll probably do a few geography-based projects next week--the vacation scrapbooks, California lapbooks, etc. I also need to remember to do the prep work this week so that we can work on some bigger Ancient Egypt projects next week, but especially after we saw those real-live versions at the Rosicrucian Museum, I think the kids will have a lot of fun creating their own model sarcophogi in cardboard.

Over break, we listened to audiobooks of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and saw the play and movie versions of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, AND made chocolate from scratch. I wanted to bring the topic back around to our summer studies of Hershey before we moved on, so I've got a documentary on Hershey for us to watch, and then the kids are going to design their own chocolate factories on large-format drawing paper. I wonder if their factories will be more Wonka-esque or Hershey-esque in nature?

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Nature class, chess club, and lots of playing in the snow and swimming at the Y, is my guess.

Barbie Fashion Show

We are deep into fashion show season here! Syd is practicing her runway walk daily, and spending much of the rest of her days thinking, dreaming about, talking about, and playing fashion show.

On our free day from school last week, I was spending the afternoon completing some orders from my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, and trying really hard to ignore all screams, thumps, and crashes from the other room, but I could not ignore my kiddo when she came in to theatrically announce that it was time for the Barbie fashion show in the next room.

A Barbie fashion show?!? Count me IN!

So I turned off the heat gun, laid a cloth over the beeswax (I've learned through experience that a cat will lie on top of rolled beeswax, and that rolled beeswax that a cat has lain on top of will never again be suitable for sale), and followed Syd out to the living room, where my clever girl had spent HER afternoon creating garments for each of her hand-me-down Barbies, and using our colored masking tape to tape a fashion show runway onto the floor.

Syd asked me to find "thumpy music" for the show, so I turned on the Club/House radio station on Spotify, and off we went!


Before I go on, I just have to ask you: you're not sitting there snarking on my house, are you? It's fine if you are, because I am not the person who stages my shots, or even runs around cleaning like crazy when someone's about to come over. Okay, I WILL clean the bathroom sink and put out a fresh hand towel, but I probably won't vacuum or clear off the table. So yes, the room that you can see through the doorway is messy, and the games don't fit on those built-in shelves, and the hallway has a kid-painted rainbow right in the middle of it, and I didn't vacuum the carpet, and I never learned that trick of how to hide a cord so that it doesn't hang in the middle of everything, and man, do our hardwood floors look run-down!

Anyway, back to the story: I love Sydney's Barbie fashion show, because you can really see how much of the process she's learned from her years of experience as a Trashion/Refashion Show designer/model. She taped her models' marks, and she walks them and poses them and walks them again, and they take care to show the entire outfit to both sides of the audience, and they certainly look like they're having fun, don't they?

But of course, the most important aspect of the model's performance is the garment, and I really, REALLY love how Sydney created each model's outfit, some from our stash of vintage Barbie clothes, but most assembled from my scrap fabric bin:

And speaking of Ken, Sydney has a further video starring him. She produced, directed, and served as costume designer. I filmed exactly as she dictated:


Hopefully we won't have anything like THAT at the fashion show!