The Most Comprehensive Solar Eclipse Unity Study for Homeschoolers

Because if there is one thing that I am great at after homeschooling for 14 years, it is making a comprehensive unit study for homeschoolers!

My favorite thing about creating a unit study around an upcoming event is that the entire world becomes your hype man. Kids pick up on how excited everyone is about the eclipse, and learning more about it becomes just another way to engage with that excitement, mwa-ha-ha! 

What you see before you is THE most comprehensive solar eclipse unit study for homeschoolers. Almost all of it can be leveled up and down, usually just about simultaneously so you can work with your kids of different ages together. Pick and choose what you've got the time and materials for, interspersing activities you know your kids will love with activities that will stretch their skills and interests a little. 

Anchor Charts, Infographics, and Other Decorations

Because when you homeschool, even your decorations are educational!

solar eclipse bunting. Sew this from stash fabric and upcycled blue jeans. 

free printable easy reader book. If you've got a kid on the cusp of independent reading, you know the pain of keeping them in those teensy books! There can never be enough! Well, here's one more!

image credit: NASA/Tyler Nordgren

NASA posters and graphics. This poster is a good US Geography resource for a middle-grade kid to use to trace the eclipse's path on a map. The back of this poster is an excellent anchor chart to use with any age to inspire further research.

printable map of the Moon. Use this with binoculars or a telescope to identify the Moon's features, or simply display it because it's pretty!

solar eclipse diagrams. They're a little dry, which in my home makes them perfect for taping to the wall directly facing the toilet in the kids' bathroom. Ahem.

April 8 Eclipse Activities

Do these activities during the partial phase of the eclipse.

Are your eclipse glasses safe? Okay, do this one BEFORE April 8! My town is getting a total solar eclipse, and so eclipse glasses are EVERYWHERE right now. I love that, but I do NOT love how I've seen some of those glasses being stored and handled by the places offering them. PRETTY PLEASE triple-check your eclipse glasses well before the eclipse, have extras on hand in case of accidents, and store them so super carefully to keep them from scratches. 

Eclipse Soundscapes project. This Citizen Science project is a great way to encourage all ages to be mindful and present during the eclipse, as well as to document their observations. If you don't want to do something this formal, you can simply talk about being observant with all the senses during the eclipse, then have kids write--ideally the same day!--about the eclipse using as much multi-sensory detail as possible. Younger kids can draw their observations and impressions.

GLOBE Eclipse Citizen Science Project. If you're in a country that will experience the eclipse, you can use the GLOBE Observer app to record observations and meteorological measurements during the eclipse. Elementary kids can do this with family help, while middle and high schoolers can work more independently. For a longer meteorology study, use the GLOBE Observer app regularly. This project would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

pinhole camera image via NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

pinhole projector. This NASA one is a little overengineered, but the experiment they suggest would keep younger kids busy and engaged during the partial phase of the eclipse. Here's a more basic one that's more than sufficient for your purpose--my kids have made this kind, and it works great!

Art and Craft Projects

Because if you're not doing a weird and unwieldy craft project, are you even homeschoolers?

image credit: xkcd

Aztec Sun Stone drawings. This slightly guided, mostly creative art project is a sun-themed craft that works with a history/geography study of the Aztec people. If you didn't want to dedicate a huge amount of time to the study (but you still wanted that cute sun craft for eclipse decor!), you could get away with reading a couple of picture books or documentary clips, as long as the importance of the Sun Stone was covered.

chalk and construction paper solar eclipse. The easiest and best model that a kid can make of a solar eclipse is also the cheapest! I'm trusting you as a homeschooler to have chalk and construction paper in your house.

coffee filter partial eclipse. I wouldn't go purchasing a set of coffee filters just for this project, but if you've already got them on hand, go for it! Add some more interest and sensory art experience by having the kids color the filter not with crayon, but with washable marker, then let them drip water from an eyedropper to watch the ink bleed. 

cupcakes. This is the easiest and cutest eclipse treat I've seen yet, and it's pretty accurate-looking, too! Even young kids can help with these, and older kids can simply up the independence-level, and/or bake the cupcakes completely from scratch.

glow-in-the-dark solar eclipse T-shirt. Because who doesn't love an excuse to play with glow-in-the-dark paint?

moon map for coloring. My kids had SO MUCH FUN one week when I printed and assembled this Moon map, taped it to my wall, and invited them to color on it with markers. 

mosaic sundial image via Marvelously Messy

mosaic sundial. You can incorporate this into the sundial lesson in the Astronomy section, below, but especially if you've got younger homeschoolers, it's totally okay to just make this simple (but beautiful!) sundial together as a family and have a fun summer exploring how it works. Learning how to mosaic is actually a surprisingly accessible skill even for younger kids, and you might find yourself with a whole new Mosaic Special Interest.

solar eclipse cake. Marshmallow fondant is shockingly easy to make, so other than the difficulty coloring it (I've never found a good black food coloring, so tbh I'll probably just buy some pre-dyed fondant), this entire cake is dead easy. My teenager and I are going to make this for our own solar eclipse guests, but I'll probably do a Victoria sandwich and skip the habanero...

solar eclipse sandwich. Even younger kids should be able to make this eclipse sandwich layout mostly independently, and it's a great way to encourage them to try a couple of perhaps new-to-them foods. 

Sun, Moon, and Earth masks. Get out the cardboard and the paints to make these giant masks with the kids... then send them outside to chase each other in them!

total eclipse tostadas. My kids LOVE themed meals! We'd make an entire spread of eclipse-themed food and then eat it while watching a nerdy NASA documentary.

Astronomy Activities, Crafts, Games, and Resources

This time period around the eclipse is the BEST time to get a kid excited about astronomy, not to mention make memories of this special, once-in-a-homeschool-education opportunity.

cookie Solar System. If you're learning about the Moon and the Sun, you might as well learn about the entire Solar System! This activity is suitable for preschoolers through high schoolers, with scaffolding for younger kids and more detail, creativity, and independent calculations and research encouraged in older kids.

If they're not doing science with dirty fingernails, how do you know they're homeschoolers?

Investigating prisms. This is a great time to dive into everything sunlight. The youngest homeschoolers can enjoy process-oriented, experiential play with prisms, while older kids can start to learn about the science of light refraction. Middle schoolers can develop their own experiment, and high schoolers can write that experiment up in the Astronomy Lab Notebooks for a lab science credit in their transcripts.

Moon journal. The most educational way is to have kids make their own from scratch by tracing a bottle cap into their observation journal or onto a piece of paper, but here's a printable template if you'd rather have a leg up. Have them sketch the Moon's phase every night and record the date, time, and weather. Incorporate a simple meteorology study by also having a kid record the temperature, air pressure, wind speed, etc. Kids can make DIY versions of all those measuring tools, or you could splurge on a simple weather monitoring tool.. or a fancy one!

paper telescope models. These paper models are quite fiddly, so I wouldn't even offer them to anyone other than the craftiest of high schoolers. My kid was practically born with a craft knife in her hand, and even SHE found them tricky! But if you've got a mechanically-minded kid who's very interested in the instruments of astronomical observation and exploration, it can be worth even making these yourself so that they can have a tactile representation of these instruments. The models aren't so delicate that younger kids couldn't incorporate them into their small-world play.

phases of the Moon demonstration and model. THIS is how you teach the phases of the Moon to kids of every age! The Oreo model is just for fun, but the prospect of making it is very good incentive to attend to the lesson, ahem. And here's a similar worksheet to keep them busy during their sibling's gymnastics lesson...

phases of the Moon flip book. Here's another great way to give kids an understanding of how the Moon waxes and wanes, especially if you can bring them outside regularly to watch it happen for themselves. You can make this flip book for the youngest kids to enjoy, but kids even a little older can help with assembly, and even older kids can use this as a jumping-off point for a flip book or animation study. My younger kid went through a HUGE DIY flip book phase when she was little!

Planet Hunters TESS Citizen Science Project. High schoolers can help scientists discover exoplanets by analyzing images from the TESS mission to look for eclipses of other stars. The project is technically complete as of right now, but does expect to obtain more data to analyze. This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

sidewalk chalk Solar System model. In the lead-up to the 2017 eclipse, my kids researched each planet and drew its picture on a labeled index card, then taped the cards to popsicle sticks. One beautiful afternoon, we headed out on our straight city-wide walking trail and we measured and placed the planets in their correct spots along the trail. It was just as fun walking back to the car, because instead of being tired and cranky, the kids kept racing ahead to find and reclaim their planets! SUCH a good way to reinforce a sensorial understanding of measurement AND astronomy!

solar eclipse foldables. For those whose kids love lapbooks and mini books, I've got you! These fill-in-the-blank infographics are also helpful for kids to use as illustrations when they write paragraphs or essays about the eclipse. This mini book is better for younger kids, who can sneak in a little scissors practice, too, mwa-ha-ha!

Solar Jet Hunter Citizen Science Project. High schoolers look for and mark solar jets to help scientists understand this phenomenon. This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

Solar oven. Even the littlest homeschoolers can help make a solar oven that will melt a s'more! Add a hot dog solar oven for a complete camping meal. Don't do this pizza box oven, though, because it's kind of crap. Older kids can do their own experimentation and engineering, and if you're really serious about it, you can invest some time and money into making an absolutely superb solar oven that will properly cook food.

sundials. Shadows are an accessible way to introduce any age of homeschooler to a study of the Sun, and kids who are studying shadows LOVE to make sundials! There are a million ways to make a sundial, from the preschooler-friendly to these more sophisticated papercrafts. 

Sungrazer Citizen Science Project. This project is for high schoolers or very interested middle schoolers. In it, you scan through images of the Sun taken by the SOHO Observatory, looking for previously undiscovered comets! This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

Sun prints. All you need is a pack of cyanotype paper to make the coolest prints and shadow art! When we did that set above, way back in preparation for the 2017 eclipse, we were all fascinated by the way the sun print plus the shadow print of the rectangular prism made a perfect cube on the paper. If your kids (or you!) are extra crafty, you can even buy cyanotype FABRIC! To add some academic rigor, combine sun prints with this free worksheet set. 

word searches. I recently reintroduced word searches to my Girl Scout troop, and they were all super into them! I feel like we as a people don't do enough analog puzzles these days, sigh. Here's a pre-made set of word searches, but you can also have kids make their own with graph paper as a template. 

History, Geography, and Social Studies Activities, Crafts, Games, and Resources

Learn about the cultural significance of eclipses around the world and throughout time.

Again with those dirty fingernails! I'm pretty sure that was the year that I put a nail brush in her Easter basket...

gingerbread Stonehenge. This is a delicious way to study ancient astronomy and the importance of the Sun to our ancestors. To be sure, it's not the most academically rigorous project, but it makes a fun capstone to a short unit on Stonehenge and its astronomical purpose.

track the path of the eclipse. Make, print, or buy a line map of the United States, then help kids use their resources to trace the path of the eclipse. Depending on the kids' interest levels, this can be the spine for an entire US geography study.

Video of Navajo and Cherokee teachings. It's probably a little too dry for the youngest homeschoolers, but if you engage with the video along with your kids you could make it fun for kids who are a little older, and middle and high school kids ought to be fine.

 

 

Cool Stuff to Buy

If you've got a little extra room in your homeschool budget, splash out with these educational materials that will encourage and expand your kids' interest.

• glass prism set. Younger kids can spend years playing with these, exploring rainbows and shadows and angles and light. Now that my kids are grown (sob), I've made little macrame hangers to put them in all my sunny windows so I can still enjoy them!
• planet stickers. My kids loved these even into high school! I let them place them (in planet order, of course!) on the wall of our long front hallway, and it's a decoration that we still all enjoy. I mean, if you don't have giant stickers of all the planets in order in your front hallway, how will your guests know that you're homeschoolers?
• Moon sticker. We had to put this in a different room from the planet stickers, obviously, because otherwise the scale would be wrong.
• star stickers. Kids do not seem to know about star stickers these days, because every kid I've ever showed them to has been SO EXCITED--especially when I explain that they go on your bedroom ceiling! My own homeschooler, as a high schooler studying astronomy, actually used star stickers to put all the major constellations all over the walls and ceilings of our entire house. It's kind of my favorite thing!
• sunprint paper. Explore shadows or make awesome art.

Okay, that basically encompasses everything that a homeschooler needs to know about eclipses! My kids wouldn't even tell you that they particularly love astronomy, but I know that our eclipse units have been among our all-time favorite homeschool studies. I mean, we got to watch these amazing astronomical occurrences FOR SCHOOL!

Your kids are going to love these activities, too.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool High School Honors World History: DIY Art History Artwork Cards

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times course uses an AP World History textbook, a college-level art history textbook, and all the other additional resources you'd want in order to flesh the study of ancient history out into a full-year high school honors course.

Among the other many resources I've compiled and DIYed for this study, one of my favorites is the new set of DIY artwork cards that I prepare for every new chapter of Gardner's Art through the Ages, which in turn I've keyed to the relevant chapter(s) in Duiker's World History. 

Artwork cards are a major component of a couple of different pedagogical approaches to homeschooling, and you CAN buy sets of them--Memoria Press is generally considered to have the nicest, if you're in the market. But if you buy sets of them you're not going to get exactly the artworks that you want in the sizes that you want, and depending on where you buy them, copyright can be an issue. 

Another option, one that I also use, is buying museum gift shop postcards. I LOVE my sets of artwork postcards, and it's nice because they're always high-quality, I know they're not pirated, and I didn't have to do any of the work of sourcing, printing, and cutting out the images. But they're hard to buy online, and they're pricey! I would NOT have the collection of artwork cards that I do if I was paying a buck-plus for each of them. I mean, geez, my kid is going through twenty or so of these cards per chapter in just her current study! And that's not even counting the separate political art or history of photography studies that we've completed fairly recently, yikes.

So you've got options, but if you want the highest-quality, cheapest, most bespoke sets of artwork cards, you probably want to DIY them like I do. 

Step 1: Go through the study materials and select the images you require. 

I always pre-read the kid's textbook chapters so that I can collect additional resources and set up extension activities anyway, so while I'm reading her art history textbook I also note the artworks that are referred to in that chapter. Occasionally, there are also a couple that her history textbook refers to that the art history textbook doesn't, or I might want to collect different types of images referenced there, like the cuneiform tablets from the Mesopotamia chapter, or the Neolithic stoneworks from the Ancient Great Britain section. 

Step 2: Find the images online and save them.

There are three ways to find good images online. First is just to do a Google Image search and filter the results for Large images:

This is a screenshot from when I was collecting images for our History of Photography study, but the process is identical.

You'll often come across pirated images this way, but you're not using your images commercially, so I'll allow it, ahem. 

Another good way is a Wikipedia search, especially for more iconic artworks. You won't get any pirated images here, but you WILL get some lower-quality images, as many will be photos that contributors took themselves of the artworks in their museum settings. 

And then ANOTHER good way is to go directly to the website of the museum that hosts a particular artwork. A lot of museums do offer free downloads of digital images of many of their artworks. My special favorite is the British Museum, which will often let me download an image so high-quality that I can print it life-sized--I've done that for both the Rosetta stone and for several cuneiform and hieroglyphic pieces, and it's so cool and useful for detailed study! 

Here's one list of museums that offer open-source images, but it's definitely not comprehensive because the British Museum isn't even on it. 

Here's the British Museum's image site; I usually download or request the super-high-quality images, because why not! Wouldn't some large-scale Greek vase images look so awesome framed and displayed in my future Life of Theseus-themed bathroom?

Here's the Metropolitan Museum of Art's image site. I like that if you're not looking for a specific artwork, but rather a time period or style, you can filter your results by open-access so that everything you see is obtainable.

The National Gallery's image site provides open-access images and also provides many of the Wikimedia images. 

Here's the National Trust images site. Only some of these images are free, but there are images that work very well with British history and geography studies. 

The Smithsonian's image site pulls from all its museums and holdings across genres, so it's a great resource not just for art, but also historical artifacts and even primary sources. 

Step 3: Print and cut.

I prefer to print my images with a laser printer onto cardstock, because I want them to look and feel nice. To make the artwork cards a standard size, I print them four to a page--

--then cut them on a guillotine paper cutter:

I label the back with title, artist, date, and, for these art history cards, geographic location, and currently I have them filed by textbook chapter.

My teenager is also keeping a comprehensive ancient history timeline, so I print another set of these images as thumbnails onto regular copy paper, and then she glues them into her timeline and labels them. 

Okay, so how do you actually USE these artwork cards? There are so many ways!

• Flash cards. Memorize the artwork, title, artist, date, and geographic location to add to one's working knowledge of art history. Having a ton of artworks memorized will make it easier for you to slot future pieces into your memory, and allow you to build context and make better comparisons/contrasts, add to your understanding of social history, and write some kick-ass essays, etc.
• Sort and organize. Having these visuals at hand allows you to easily make comparisons about style and other features of artworks that may be less noticeable when each image is trapped in the pages of a specific chapter of your textbook. How do the early Native American earthworks compare to Neolithic European ones? How does portraiture vary, and how would you sort portraits stylistically when the images are separated from geohistorical context? 
• Order chronologically. We play a lot of history card games in which we have to try to put something in chronological order. We have almost all of these Timeline games, but you can play the same game with art, and not only is it interesting, but it builds a chronological understanding of art on a sensory level.
• Display. Once upon a time, a worker who was doing emergency repairs on our old, poorly-maintained, homeowner's special home came out of the kids' bathroom after installing a new toilet and asked me if I homeschooled. I was all, "Yes?" I thought it was the weirdest, most random thing for someone to figure out about me with zero evidence! But when I told this story to the kids later, they were immediately all like, "Um, it's because you tape educational posters to the wall facing the toilet?" Because riiiiight... when I want the kids to memorize something but I don't want to go through the emotional torment of MAKING them memorize something, I just print that thing out onto 8.5"x11" paper and tape it to the wall facing their toilet. I also once put tape onto ALL our things and made the kids label them in French and that's all still around, and every once in a while I printed out and assembled a giant line map of someplace we were studying, made them label that, too, and then hung it in the hallway until I was ready to make them study some other place. I also use pushpins to make little clotheslines across our bookshelves and I have the kids clothespin these art cards to them, and sometimes I'll display them on our magnet boards. I thought I was being sneaky like this, but apparently I wasn't, lol!

I should probably act like, since these images cost only the amount of the paper and the ink, and they're just cardstock, I'll recycle them when my last homeschooling kid graduates in a couple of months, but you know I won't. I won't have the kids to label me new giant maps for the hallway, so perhaps I'll retire them all permanently on display there!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool Time Fillers That Aren't Busy Work (Even for High Schoolers!)

My high schooler would be horrified to know this, but I do sometimes assign her work that's more of a time-filler than it is a substantive assignment.

Sometimes, it's because she has a busy week and I want to keep her on schedule but not add to her stress.

Sometimes, it's because *I* have a busy week and I want to keep her on schedule but not add to *my* stress.

Sometimes we've finished up a big unit of study but it's not the perfect time to start the next one, or one of us isn't feeling 100%, or we've got an appointment or some other thing that would interrupt her flow, but I still want her learning that day.

Essentially, time fillers work well for all those times and gaps when you want your student doing something educational, but you also want it to be low-stakes for both of you. The student is using her mind but not wracking her brain, and YOU don't have to review, edit, correct, or evaluate!

Here's some of my favorites from my collection of high school-level time fillers that are educational but low-stakes:

Board Games

Sometimes teenagers just need a break from book work and screen work. Reading textbooks and solving problems and filling in answers is also just one limited, specific type of learning, so I don't like that to be all my high schooler does for school all day. 

We don't have a formal logic study currently, but logical thinking is an extremely beneficial skill, so I encourage a lot of logic games that I file as math enrichment. We play word games, association games, and creativity games for English credit, and historical games like Senet, Mancala, and Go for history/geography credit. Occasionally, I'll even find a game that we can play in my high schooler's target language.

Here are some of my favorites:

We've got some made-up games that we can play anywhere, as well, most notably the Wikipedia Game and Dictionary Definitions, and once in a blue moon I'll go to the trouble of downloading and printing an online-sourced game like Phylo, especially if it fits into a niche in a subject that we're studying. 

Documentaries

I already see the public library as my personal streaming service, so it doesn't feel like a big deal for me to do a quick catalog search whenever I'm planning the next few weeks' studies and just go ahead and request any documentaries that are on-topic and look interesting.

Documentaries about a topic of study build depth and context, and now that we're all such ipad babies, focusing on a piece of content for a whopping one hour really is something that we need to do every so often to stay in practice!

My immediate go-tos for documentaries are anything PBS, National Geographic, or BBC. Independent films and documentaries produced by news publications are also good, but I usually avoid anything else you might find on cable (TLC is most definitely NOT!) as being less in-depth than I want for a high schooler. The teenager and I are currently in the middle of a two-part PBS special on uranium, which I'm counting as enrichment for her Honors Chemistry study, but here are some other documentaries we've watched for high school:

Although they aren't quite documentaries, there are also a ton of lectures, presentations, and streams available on YouTube. Q&A sessions give me secondhand cringe, so we don't watch that part, meaning that the actual run-time is shorter than listed. This is also a good place to find performances that enhance liberal arts or language studies; my homeschoolers and I have watched lots of plays on YouTube, and lots of TV shows performed in whatever target language they're studying at that time:

Podcasts

We listen to a lot of audiobooks for the teenager's English credits, mostly while she works on her studio art and I do a handicraft and we chat. I don't want to give up that precious stitch-and-bitch time even when we're not burning through a 14-hour tome, though, so in between books I'll often fill in that space with a podcast. 

You can usually find a dozen different podcast episodes on any topic, so it's not hard to find something that fits into the teenager's current studies, but vetting new ones to see if they're good or if they're trash can take some time. We've also got favorite podcasts that are educational without necessarily being on-topic; here are a few:

 

Puzzles and Solitaire Games

We loooove our puzzles, with my teenager spending as much time working sudokus as my partner and I spend working crossword puzzles. Just in the last year or so the teenager seems to have mostly grown out of (or just mostly completed!) all of our in-house hands-on logic puzzles, but here are some of the favorites that she particularly enjoyed from childhood through the first couple of years of high school:

These days, if I want to assign her a short time-filler puzzle that's something fun, I'll have her do the daily Wordle, Murdle, or Set online. All three update daily, so there's always a new puzzle!

Process-Oriented Projects

I think that sensorial knowledge is still important to continue building, even into these older kid years. It's also important to continue building one's creativity and to remain comfortable with play, experimentation, and the concept of doing something simply to experience the process. 

To encourage my teenager to stay creative and experimental, I'll sometimes surprise her with an assignment like finding a new cookie recipe to bake, or creating a sticker design based on something we've been studying, or flipping through a stack of books I got from the library with her in mind, etc. Basically, I just want to stretch her out of her comfort zone of what she normally likes to bake or draw or read. Or maybe I'm just craving cookies but don't want to make them for myself! 

The art/math combo is my favorite focal point for building sensorial knowledge and experimenting with process. Over her high school years, the teenager has been compiling a portfolio of geometric art, and adding to it is a great way to bake some low-stakes math enrichment into the school week. Making things like mandalas, polyominoes, and tesselations put sensorial math knowledge into use, and build on geometry process that she's learned. 

Also, I'm obsessed with the spirograph!

In the lead-up to a holiday, there are all kinds of sneakily educational, mathematically sophisticated holiday crafts to create. There's a lot of beautiful math involved in wire-wrapping beads to make stars, or folding precisely symmetrical paper ornaments, or stitching felt mandalas or snowflakes. 

When there's not a holiday on the horizon, sometimes we'll just do something random like check out an origami or paper airplane book, or buy ourselves a DIY kit and decide to learn how to crochet. I'm currently low-key obsessed with a friendship bracelet loom that I made out of corrugated cardboard, so there's a lot of weaving going on around here.

As we move into the Spring semester of the teenager's Senior year, I can't decide if we're going to be doing more of these types of assignments, or less. On the one hand, I'm not opposed to ending one's high school career with a whimper rather than a bang, so as the teenager starts to finish her last units of study one-by-one, I don't want to necessarily replace them with equal amounts of puzzles and documentaries. But on the other hand, I do think that most of us need a goodly amount of productive work most days, so I definitely don't want a teenager to finish up all her learning and then sit around on my couch for several months actively not learning, ahem. 

Perhaps I'll see if there's a larger, more culminating-type project that the teenager would be interested in working on during those increasingly free school hours further into Spring? Or perhaps we'll get very, VERY good at crochet!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, homeschool projects, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Poured Rice Fantasy Map Project

I've seen the poured rice fantasy maps being made on Tiktok and YouTube, but my actual inspiration for this project was subbing in an art class in which the kids were hard at work on their own fantasy maps. They'd already done the poured rice step and were deep into embellishing their maps with fantasy and cartography elements. Their teacher had a long list of categories and a Google Slide Deck of reference images for them to use, and I spent two days in that class walking around and cooing over everyone's maps, encouraging them to add elements from a new category, debating river placement and what kinds of sea monsters are the scariest and how many volcanoes one island can reasonably contain.

You know who else is currently writing a fantasy novel AND loves art? My very own homeschooler!

For a Creative Writing/Studio Art enrichment lesson one day, she and I sat down with some large-format drawing paper, our eight-year-old kilogram of rice, and my favorite drawing pens (these are the teenager's favorite drawing pens). 

To make the map, you simply pour out your rice (I've seen some people use lentils, but I loved all the fjordy bits that the rice made)--

--then trace around it!

You can, of course, artificially manipulate the rice to spread it however you want, but the idea is that by letting it do its thing you make a map that looks organic and random and has a particularly detailed coastline.

After that, you listen to music, and you draw!

The teenager was quite happy with creating from her own brain, but I preferred to use reference images. Here's the teenager trying to show me how to draw cliffs like Dover:

I kind of got the idea, but I couldn't make it look good on the map. Oh, well--at least my barrows look awesome!

It's impossible to do any work whatsoever without Mr. Jones being actively weird in your face:

The art class kids who were spending several days on this project had to add a billion details, a compass rose, and a banner title, but the teenager and I were satisfied with our maps after just a couple of hours hanging out together, drawing and listening to music. Here's my fantastic fantasy map:

A henge is OBVIOUSLY at the center of my island, with various barrows around the outskirts. My snowcapped mountains are an embarrassment, but I'm quite proud of my road and my swampland. 

And here is the teenager's. She packed a LOT of detail into just a couple of hours!

I LOVE that her map also has a henge! All the Giant Rocks Day is such a good memory!

I'd suggested that the teenager might want to use her fantasy map as THE map for her fantasy novel, but she preferred to make it just a fantastical fantasy of a map, no lore included. But it did get her thinking about geography and place in her story, so I'm keeping this project as a cross-curricular Creative Writing/Studio Art effort.

If a kid is up for an entire world-building experience, I do think it would be cool to actually make this map in coordination with creative writing, perhaps adding new features to the map as you think of them for a story, and vice versa. Otherwise, this project lends itself to all kinds of geography extensions, from basic map-reading to AP Human Geography. Or make up your own coordinate system and then locate places on the map using it! Model the terrain in salt dough! Photocopy the outline and create a political map showing population and government! Invent a flag, then sew it! Find a partner who also created a map, pretend their island is in the same world, and form a political alliance... or declare war! 

This was our eight-year-old kilogram of rice's final act of service. It began its time as a sensory material, lived most of its life as a kid-measured exact kilogram for admiration and reference, and after this, its last hurrah as an implement of cartographic creation, it was ceremoniously retired around the backyard, where it can end its days by offering sustenance and enrichment to our flock of half-wild chickens.

It's only now occurring to me to wonder if whatever I used to dye that rice eight years ago is okay for chickens to eat now. OMG ISN'T A THING THAT BIRDS AREN'T ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO EAT DRY RICE?

You know what? Whatever, I'm sure it's fine. If you come back to my blog and find this post deleted, though, it's because I accidentally killed our flock of chickens and I need to cover my tracks.

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!