Girl Scout Troop Trip to Boston: On Tuesday We Get There

Not gonna lie: I secretly thought that Boston was an out-of-pocket choice for my Girl Scout troop's Spring Break trip. All the kids could tell me that they really wanted to do there was go whale-watching and eat seafood, but then I told them that the whale-watching season wouldn't have started yet when we were visiting, and then none of them actually ranked eating seafood like clam chowder or lobster rolls above a 2 on our 1-5 survey, but somehow they all still wanted to go!

My solution for times like these is to LOAD the kids up with ideas and make them look at and evaluate all of them. I put something like 20 places/activities into our planning doc for our 3-day trip, in addition to stuff the kids had found for themselves, and had them all research and rank every. Single. Thing. I built our itinerary around their favorites, stuck in some educational places and activities that were nearby, and padded the whole itinerary out with enough free time that we could hit up anything else that we found out about while we were there--which was so many things!

Spoiler alert: this out-of-pocket place turned into just about the perfect trip! It's definitely my own personal favorite of all of our Girl Scout troop trips, and I think the kids had a blast, too.

On our first day in Boston, it was enough of an accomplishment to fly there, buy Charlie Cards (we were staying in Chelsea, so we bought 7-Day Commuter Rail Zone 1A passes for our three-day trip. Considering that we used the snot out of them on the train, subway, and bus, we still got our money's worth even without using the full date range) at the airport vending machine (fun fact: there's a vending machine WAAAY at the back of the Logan International Airport baggage claim so you can buy your passes without having to take the bus over to Airport Station; we planned to do carry-on only, so we would not have known this if Delta hadn't forced us to "courtesy check" our carry-ons and we would have spent SO much extra time trekking out to Airport Station and back), take the hotel shuttle to the Hampton Inn Boston Logan Airport Chelsea (another one of my partner's brilliant finds! Super close to the train/bus station and to a grocery store), check everyone in, and take everyone over to the Market Basket across the street for grocery shopping. Our rooms all had mini-fridges and microwaves, and our trip budget plan was that the troop would buy groceries for snacks and anyone who wanted to pack lunches and dinners for otherwise "on your own dime" meals. Most people also wanted to use their own money to buy themselves a little stash of their own private snacks, as my own purchase of diet Sprite and Oreo Thins can attest!

After dinner and a lie-down (at least for me!), we met in the lobby of the Hampton Inn--another bonus to this hotel is that it had a really big lobby with lots of tables and chairs!--for a troop meeting. The kids had been wanting to earn the retired Games for Life IPP for a while now, but we'd just never gotten around to it, so I decided we might as well multi-task and turn it into a travel game-themed badge. 

First travel game? Boston BINGO! My partner made super cute blank BINGO cards and printed them two-to-a-page onto cardstock. I brought the cards, pens, and some scrap paper, and bought a couple of pairs of $1 scissors during our grocery shopping trip. I explained the concept of what I wanted us to do, then we all worked for a while on writing out fun BINGO prompts of things to do or see, inside jokes, and little dares, cutting each prompt out, and folding up all the little slips of paper and putting them into a hotel coffee cup. 

We passed the cup around, and each person took a prompt, wrote it in a blank space, and then put the prompt back so someone else could maybe get it. After we'd gone around a couple of times and I'd gotten an idea of the overall tone of the prompts, I also sneakily wrote out a few more and popped them in, ahem. I wanted every kid to have a prompt that was directly about them, and the kids seemed really excited about the prompts that read like little dares. 

When we got to the last couple of rounds I pulled out all the prompts one by one and read them out loud, and people could use their last couple of blanks to "adopt" a prompt if nobody had pulled it yet, or just write one down if it sounded especially fun.

Everyone's BINGO games turned out so great! Here's mine from the first night:

I got to mark one out right away because it turned out that one of the Girl Scouts and I had each discovered the Hallmark channel on our room TVs, and she and I had apparently spent our free hour the same way, lol!

During our meeting I also handed out what would quickly become our least popular troop activity, ahem: Liberty Junior Ranger badge books! I'd baked into our itinerary the five site visits required to earn the badge, and I expected the kids to finish the books in time to turn them in and receive their Junior Ranger badges during our Friday visit to Faneuil Hall. The kids did nooooooot like doing these books, but they were troopers about it, and they knew just as well as I did that I was not letting them leave Boston without a hearty serving of education along with their fun. I mean, for Pete's sake, these are high schoolers here in the Cradle of Liberty--they're dang well going to learn about it while we're here! 

Ahem.

They're lucky that I didn't also make them complete the Boston African American National Historic Site Junior Ranger badge book--instead, I got a couple of copies from one of the park rangers at Faneuil Hall, and my college kid and I are going to do them together and mail them in for our badges next time she comes home. Thank goodness SOMEONE in my life appreciates the joy that is earning Junior Ranger badges!

And, of course, I could not in all good conscience let the kids go out into Boston without having heard this Kingston Trio classic:

After the meeting, when we were all safe and sound back in our rooms prepping for the next day, our first full day in Boston, you'll be thrilled to know that my kids and I found an Office marathon on the hotel TV. It's always a good omen for our travels when the hotel TV has an Office marathon!

Here's our entire trip:

• Day 1 in Boston: Underground Donut Tour, Old North Church, Paul Revere's House, New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston City Hall Plaza Playground, Boston Public Market, and the North End
• Day 2 in Boston: Tours of Harvard and Simmons, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and Chinatown
• Day 3 in Boston: New England Aquarium, Faneuil Hall, bookstores, and Boston Ballet

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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!

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Homeschool AP US History: A Family Field Trip to the Levi and Catharine Coffin House

 

Can I still call it a homeschool field trip if there's only one homeschooler in attendance?

Sadder question: will I still be able to call it a homeschool field trip when there are NO more homeschoolers in attendance? SOB!

For the moment, though, it's eyes forward, because I have one homeschooler in attendance, and that homeschooler is taking a deep dive into the Underground Railroad.

The worst thing about the AP history courses is they absolutely FLY through the material. The older kid's AP European History study crammed information into her so quickly that we had very little time to build context and make real-world connections, and to be honest, it shows in her middling retention of the material five years later.

I've addressed that problem with my younger kid by, in the case of her World History course, abandoning AP altogether and instead creating our own study, laser-focused on Ancient History, from the recommended college textbooks, and in the case of this AP US History course, focusing very little on exam prep and using that extra time to enjoy more immersive studies of select topics.

Such as the Underground Railroad! The kid has long been interested in the experiences of the freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad (thank you, Addy Walker!), and thankfully, located as we are in southern Indiana, we're within driving distance of several locations important to freedom seekers and relevant to the history of enslavement on American soil. 

But somehow, until Winter Break, we'd never been to the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad itself, the Levi and Catharine Coffin House!

Possibly because it's low-key in the middle of nowhere, but oh, well--that's why we bought a car with excellent fuel efficiency!

Catharine and Levi Coffin were Quakers, who moved to the Quaker community of Newport (it's now called Fountain City, but I didn't get around to asking why) in 1826. From then until they moved to Cincinnati in 1847, their work assisting freedom seekers on the journey north was an open secret. They evaded bounty hunters who knew there was something going on but could never catch them, and just in case they were caught, they never knew more than one other connection of the Underground Railroad in either direction.

The museum next to the house is just one gallery, but it has some really thoughtful exhibits. I really liked this recreation of the box that Henry Brown shipped himself within:

And we have a pair of shoes from William Bush, handed down through generations of descendants. I LOVE personal artifacts like these, and I think this is an example of why these smaller museums are so important. The bigger museums of the world, the Smithsonians and the American Museums of Natural History and the British Museums, have millions more objects than they know what to do with, so the only stuff that gets displayed is the canonical stuff, the stuff most vital to the understanding of the most people.

But smaller museums can show items that are not so much exemplars of the type, but are more personal, intimate, and meaningful to the local community that the museum serves. I might not give this pair of shoes a second glance if I was looking at them in a Smithsonian museum, nor would they probably be placed on display there, competing, as they would be, with thousands of other similar artifacts in better condition or belonging to better-known people. But knowing that these shoes came from a person involved in the history of this exact place, who worked here, was buried here, and whose descendants still partly live here, is always just the absolute most awesome feeling.

One thing that I didn't love about this museum was the noise level. While I was trying to read the sign below, there were at least two--maybe even three?--other audio things going on in the same gallery, all talking over each other. It might not even be noticeable if the gallery was full of people, but it was just the four of us rattling around in there, and I found the noise level nearly unbearable, yikes!

This map is interesting, though, because these paths to freedom look like they make a point of dodging around that entire south-central area where I live:

It would have been all forests and caves and small towns and pioneer settlements, so I don't get it. Must do more research!

Here's another cool map, this one of the town of Newport. I thought it was interesting that Levi Coffin actually owns a few pieces of property on this map. One is a store that sold only goods manufactured using free labor, but I forgot to ask what that really big piece of property on the far left of the map was. Dang it!

Our guided tour of the actual house was super interesting, and I didn't take more than a couple of photos only because I was too busy stumbling all over myself to pepper the tour guide with question after question. She wasn't prepared to speak about the artifacts in the house, all of which were of the correct era and had been donated by locals (inspiring SO MANY QUESTIONS in my heart!), or really much about the building and architecture of the house itself, but she was very game to answer all of my other questions about local law enforcement, the professions and later lives of the Coffin children and further descendants, the chain of ownership of the home after the Coffins and how it became a museum site, the possible education/literacy level of Catharine Coffin, speculation about what it would look like to make this historic house ADA compliant, what the neighbors might have known about what the Coffins were doing, the general information structure of an Underground Railroad chain, where the kitchen garden might have been located, the actual division of labor regarding caring for freedom seekers (mostly relating to my theory that Catharine did far more hands-on work than Levi did), etc.

This awesome little door, below, looks like it would lead to a little closet, and could easily be hidden by just stacking a couple of boxes or a bed against it, but it leads to a storage area that extends the entire length of that room. People could hide in it if the Coffins thought they were about to be raided. All four of us got a turn to crawl inside and look around:

I also really love this spring-fed cistern. There was no reference to it in any of Coffin's papers, and no physical evidence of it when the house came into the custody of the Indiana State Museum. Excavations uncovered it by surprise. 

It's theorized that the Coffins could use this cistern to collect part of the household water, in addition to the creek that they also used just a few yards from the house. That way, no matter how many people were inside the house, anyone spying on them from the outside would only see people going to the creek to fetch a perfectly normal amount of water perfectly suited to the number of official residents inside the Coffin house:

This was a really great museum and house tour, really interesting and really accessible to a wide range of interests and abilities. We were all completely engaged and fascinated, and afterwards, we spent a very late lunch at the Big Boy and a very dull two-hour car ride back home gossiping about it. I've not also got the Reminiscences of Levi Coffin on my bookshelf, and you know I cannot keep what I'm reading to myself AT ALL so I'm sure we'll all spend even more time gossiping about it in the next few weeks!

Here are a few other things that my teenager and I have done in support of her Underground Railroad study:

• audiobook and discussion of 12 Years a Slave
• trip to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

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Homeschool History/Culinary Arts: Homemade Chocolate

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times study (2 semesters; 2 high school credits) is a LOT of work, because we're using two college textbooks as the spine for this DIY course:

• Duiker's World History
• Gardner's Art through the Ages

This homemade chocolate project is relevant to Duiker Chapter 6, "The New World," and Gardner Chapter 14, "From Alaska to the Andes: The Arts of Ancient America." It also builds context with our study of Mesoamerica, and trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, from two years ago. We discussed the Ancient Maya's relationship to chocolate then--our local university's art museum actually has a Maya vessel that still has the dregs of ancient hot chocolate inside!--but we didn't do any hands-on chocolate-making projects during that particular study.

Yay, because it gives us something new to do this year!

This TED-Ed video about the history of chocolate is surprisingly thorough for being less than five minutes long, and since our study of chocolate is mostly contained to the Ancient Maya, it builds context by centering chocolate within world history:

If you'd rather your student read than watch, here's about the same level of content as informational text from the Exploratorium.

For our hands-on project, I bought this Make Your Own Chocolate kit from Glee Gum--the kids and I have actually done this exact same kit before, but since it was a whopping ELEVEN YEARS AGO(?!?!), I figured we might as well give it another go!

The kit is marketed to and suitable for young kids like my own long-ago wee ones, but it's actually quite suitable for this nearly-grown teenager and fully-grown me, as well--as long as you're a beginner chocolatier, I suppose. If you can temper chocolate in your sleep this kit probably wouldn't cover much new ground for you, but the teenager and I didn't find the instructions or the activity babyish or overly simplified. 

And look! We got to taste real cacao beans!

The kit is sort of like a Hello Fresh for chocolate-making, in that it provides the ingredients in the amounts needed, and then you heat and combine them as directed. I especially liked the sticker thermometer for easily taking the temperature of the chocolate. My teenager was more than capable of completing the entire project independently, so all I had to do was hang out, take photos, add weird mix-ins to the candy wrappers, and then enjoy all of the chocolate!

For mix-ins, we tried various combinations of candied ginger, dried unsweetened cherries, and peanut butter. The latter two in the same truffle was my favorite combo.

If you wanted to extend this activity even further, there are a ton of ways you could go:

If you live within driving distance, Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania, would be a fun, educational-ish trip. They mostly want to sell you things, but if you're thoughtful, you can make the things that they sell you work as enrichment. We didn't visit The Hershey Story on our own trip, but it looks much more legitimately educational, ahem.

If your kid gets really into the foodcrafting part of the experience, you can buy more of the same ingredients from the kit and make more chocolate from scratch. Kid-made homemade truffles or chocolate bars would be such a lovely Valentine's Day project or handmade gift!

Another super fun but low-effort chocolate crafting project is coating random foods in chocolate. Chocolate-covered gummy bears ARE surprisingly delicious, as are sour gummy worms, mint leaves, and, um... Ramen noodles.

If you're working with a young kid, and don't want to mess around too much with molten chocolate, you could make them a batch of edible chocolate slime for a fun sensory extension activity. Or make modeling chocolate, which sculpts well and is also delicious!

Here are some books that pair well with making your own chocolate:

• The Bitter Side of Sweet. Pair this with any chocolate study to bring insight and empathy to the serious problem of child enslavement that plagues modern chocolate production. 
• The Book of Chocolate. This is a very readable history for apt middle grades and up. 
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's not for the history buff, ahem, but it's perfect if you're doing the kit just to have fun with candy. If you've never read this book aloud to your kids, are you even a homeschooler?
• Chocolate Fever. Yes, it's a children's book, but it's really, really good! Find an audiobook version that you can listen to while you do some of this food crafting, and you can probably get through the entire book in one session.
• Making Chocolate: From Beans to Bar to S'more. This book is a completely excessive tome about making chocolate from scratch, but if you've got an older kid who's interested... well, you're homeschoolers for a reason!

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!

Alchemy: A High School Chemistry/Geometry/World History Combo Study

We use CK-12's Chemistry for High School textbook as the teenager's spine for Honors Chemistry, with, of course, our own lab component added and a LOT of supplementation. 

We started supplementing right in Chapter 1, when we added a short study of alchemy to the textbook's brief history of chemistry.

I think that most teenagers find the concept of alchemy interesting--it's mystical and a little spooky, and it's very, very incorrect. Teenagers have SO much fun learning about adults who were incorrect!

Unfortunately, there really aren't a ton of great resources about alchemy that work well for a high school/undergrad readership, and there are a TON of contemporary, fantastical, and otherwise ahistorical resources that muddy up any kind of student-led research. 

Therefore, this study of alchemy was necessarily a short one, able to be completed within 1-2 hours. You could draw out the art component further, of course, by requiring a more polished piece that used a larger vocabulary of alchemical symbols and moves, but this brief afternoon's work was enough for our own purposes.

After reading the relevant material in the CK-12 Chemistry for High School textbook, my teenager and I watched this Crash Course History of Science episode (if your student isn't studying History of Science as a discrete topic, I highly recommend reviewing the playlist and adding applicable videos to their science/history syllabi as interdisciplinary enrichment):

Crash Course videos tend to be meaty, so it might be worth going over it a couple of times to make sure you absorb all the info.

After the video, my teenager and I looked through a number of alchemical illustrations and excerpts from alchemy books from alchemy's heyday. This Getty Research Institute's virtual exhibit is a treasure! Click on the link in the caption of most of the images to be taken to the digitized version of that book, which you can then flip through to find other interesting images and text. 

The teenager practiced her close reading to notice all the details in each piece of artwork, and used semiotic analysis to attempt to interpret the pieces. But also take time to notice how lovely each piece, is, as well; alchemy artwork is ART!

Using these pieces and some reference books, we then spent some time playing around with creating our own artwork that had (or looked like it had, lol!), alchemical meaning. The nature of the pieces also meant that the teenager could use the works she created as process pieces in her geometry art portfolio: 

Check out the accurate geometric shapes and the overall balance of the piece! DON'T check out my noisy digitization of the work; I really need to learn how to clean up art when I scan it, sigh...

That was as far as we took this particular lesson, but here's some further reading appropriate for an interested high school student:

• Alchemy: The Great Secret. This is a fairly accessible history for those who watched the Crash Course video but would like to learn more.
• Alchemy: An Illustrated A to Z. I wouldn't use this as a textbook supplement, but it was an excellent art reference. 
• Alchemy and Mysticism: The Hermetic Museum. Most of the text was beyond me, but it has tons of art to reference.

My favorite thing about alchemy is how it sits just next to being correct; like, they were wrong about the Sun and the Moon and dragon's blood and the mystical marriage of lead and tin, but while they were drawing their allegorical wedding feasts and busily melting silver in little pots, they were butting up against the actual chemistry that alchemy would evolve into. What they did reads now as adorably naive just because we know better, but these people were actually pretty bad-ass wizard scientists.

They also for sure all had lead poisoning, which explains a LOT of their artwork.

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Homeschool High School English: Gothic Literature, The Haunting of Hill House, and Why Teenagers Should Watch Rocky Horror Picture Show

Our 2023 pumpkin army is a vision of Gothic decrepitude!

If you know me AT ALL, you will be so surprised to learn that I think that you should watch The Haunting of Hill House Netflix series with your teenagers before you read the book!

It's really good, first of all, and it stars one of the guys from Leverage, which is another teenager favorite around here, and it's so genuinely scary that my one chicken teenager actually noped out of the experience, and it's a terrific set-up to the Gothic literature genre, especially the idea of the decrepit old house as a representation of the darkness inside ourselves... AND it's completely different from The Haunting of Hill House book in every important way, BUT has enough nods to the book that when you read it with the teenagers afterwards, they can discover all the little connections for themselves as an aid to interest and an encouragement for close reading.

The only thing to be wary of is that my teenager loved the Netflix series so much that she was Big Mad that the book was completely different, and therefore decided that she Did Not Like the Book, which is a shame because it is so good, just... different. So if your teenager, like mine, is spiteful and loves herself a grudge, maybe rethink this order.

For all the other teenagers, it's 1) the TV series, then 2) the book!

https://www.tumblr.com/brutaliakhoa/722303965399859200/what-if-the-house-was-haunted-what-if-the-house

Genre studies are very good for high schoolers, because a genre study gives them a lot of practice picking out themes from different artifacts and doing a lot of comparison/contrast, all supported with lots of evidence and that good flow of logic that connects evidence to conclusion. 

Gothic literature makes an excellent high school genre study for a few reasons:

1. It's not exactly horror, so it shouldn't actually scare off the scaredy-cats, but it IS horror-adjacent, and has a kind of aesthetic that really appeals to a lot of teens. Even kids who aren't super emo tend to appreciate Gothic vibes!

2. It's a genre that's covered a lot of ground, historically, so it gives teenagers more practice reading and analyzing older works than they're often used to. A lot of the teenagers that I've worked with get so fussy when asked to read anything with challenging language/syntax, including just about anything that's not completely contemporary. But they'll work harder for something that they find genuinely interesting, and I have a lot more luck making Frankenstein interesting than I do Romeo and Juliet!

3. Speaking of Frankenstein... there are so many excellent female authors within the Gothic literature genre, and this study is a great chance to focus on Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, and other important female authors within the canon. Gothic literature is, as far as I know, entirely Eurocentric, but there are plenty of Black voices to add, especially if you delve into one of my favorite sub-genres, Southern Gothic. Researching to find works by other POC or authors across the sex/gender spectrum or other continents (now I'm thinking that some Japanese horror could also work?) would make an excellent final project for a teenager!

https://www.tumblr.com/angrylittleburd/730460890258980864/spatial-horror-isnt-i-am-in-a-scary-place-so

For our The Haunting of Hill House study, I got my teenager's buy-in because that Netflix series was so good. After we finished, I asked if she would want to read and study the book version next.

Reader, she did!

After that, I'd planned to go on a whole Shirley Jackson deep-dive with her, doing some short stories (including "The Lottery" of course!) and then my own personal favorite Jackson book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Alas that she didn't love the book version, because it caused me to scrap those plans, but to be honest, broadening the study out to cover other authors over a larger time period was more academically sound, anyway. 

For a semester-long, in-depth study that you could put on your kid's transcript as its own English course, I suggest reading several entire novels together. A lot of very early Gothic is super messed up, though (*cough, cough* The Monk *cough*), sooo... pre-read! But even without the most messed-up stuff, though, you've got Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc. I don't usually like to get too invested in authorial intentionalism, but author studies of Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde would make good rabbit trails if your teenager seems especially interested in their works. Or utilize those author studies in their history course to add more inter-disciplinary work. 

More modern Gothic choices could include Shirley Jackson, Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby is the more obvious choice, but The Stepford Wives plays with the theme of place in the Gothic genre in some interesting ways that your high schooler can use for their compare/contrast paper), Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison. If you do Interview with the Vampire, consider contrasting it with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is just as schlocky as it sounds, but actually has some interesting things to say about enslavement. 

Here's a New York Public Library list with even more Gothic literature books.

If you don't have an entire high school semester-long course to dedicate to Gothic literature, I also like the idea of covering the same ground via short stories. This list of Gothic short stories has Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner on it, and also includes "The Yellow Wallpaper," mandatory reading, in my opinion, for any Liberal Arts major in the making.

Here's a list of Black authors of Gothic fiction that I've put on my own must-read list. I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl back in undergrad as a slave narrative only and I've only read Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Parable of the Sower, so I'm very interested in reading/re-reading the works from this list through a Gothic lit lens! 

https://www.tumblr.com/string-star-lights/691764710603980800/rocky-horror-picture-show-asks-what-would-happen

I'm trying very hard not to raise a bunch of hopelessly unemployable Lit majors like myself, so even with high school English, and EVEN with high school AP English Literature and Composition, which is the teenager's current study, I like to extend the analyses beyond just written text to a wide variety of other cultural artifacts, and the work beyond just reading and writing to a wide variety of other intellectual explorations. 

Fortunately, movies, music, and theatre are all very easy to incorporate into a literature study, because you can use many of the same analytical processes with them. They tend, especially movies and theatre performances, to hit the same plot and thematic beats in much the same way as literature does, so it doesn't feel like a big stretch for a teenager to write about them while writing about literature. But you can then help your student notice the parts that ARE different, like costume and setting and acting choices and audience, and adding those analyses helps them deepen their thinking on their topic. 

As part of this study, we watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show, both at a family-friendly live show and (because the teenager fell asleep during it, lol) at home. Especially if your student has already studied Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is semiotically rich with its overtly mad scientist and self-aware Frankenstein's monster and heroine who is required to choose between man and monster. If you watch a live show, you also get to add in the audience as further cultural artifact; the concept of a self-aware, non-consensually modified character has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, and witnessing an audience seeing the experience as a celebration instead of a taboo is enriching. 

I also recommend The Hunger and Pan's Labyrinth as semiotically rich Gothic horror films, although Pan's Labyrinth scares the snot out of me! 

For a more in-person folklore/social history/anthropology element, and depending on how scaredy your own teenagers may be, it can be very fun and intellectually rewarding to visit a haunted house (in October), or attend one of those paranormal/ghost hunting excursions that a lot of cities have. Even my own corn-fed Indiana locale hosts several such events. Place semiotics is easy to see during these activities, and although analysis of a first-person event can be extremely challenging for this age range, it's a useful skill that teenagers should start developing.

Other hands-on activities for this study include creating one's own Gothic art (take a rabbit trail down the path of Gothic art for a day or two first, because that's another whole entire fascinating exploration!); DIYing a model haunted house that fits into some of the themes you've explored (if you do this, add in some extra STEM skills by incorporating this Pepper's Ghost element); or, of course, writing one's own Gothic short story or poem. If you've got a bit of a reluctant writer, or just one who gets writer's block, it's fun and low-stress to first have them write themes, elements, characters, etc. on notecards to pick at random to be included in the work, or even to write a circular story, in which every five minutes you pass your stories back and forth and collaborate on all of them.

And in my family, we end essentially every study with a themed family dinner and movie night. Is the most Gothic dinner food bloody finger breadsticks, or is it mummy head meatloaf? 

You're all wrong. It's mashed potatoes carefully unmolded from my skull pan, with pats of butter melting in the eye sockets.

P.S. Want even more high school lit studies? My kids really love the Gothic vibe, and we've done full studies on both Frankenstein and Dracula!

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

How My High School Girl Scout Troop Earned the (*cough, cough* unofficial *cough*) Harvest Badge

Yes, we made up another Girl Scout badge.

I'm telling you, though, that if you've got a troop of older kids, especially Seniors and Ambassadors like I do, and you're not letting them make up badges, then you're sleeping on some of the best girl-led experiential learning that Girl Scouts offers!

Because if you've got a troop of older kids, I know you know that the official GSUSA badge offerings for those age groups suuuuucks. I'd way rather have a bunch of happy and engaged kids flouting the Girl Scout Badge Police than I would a bunch of bored kids reluctantly working through that same dang Robotics badge for the umpteenth time (Seriously, GSUSA? Three Robotics badges per level? At EVERY level?!? And they're all pretty much the same?!? Please hire me to revamp your badges I will do such an awesome job I swear). 

Anyway... during last Spring's budget/planning meeting my Girl Scouts got super revved up about this cute Harvest badge design--

--and decided that they wanted to earn it this autumn. And so we did!

The kids decided on most of the activities, and I fine-tuned them and sneaked in a few more educational bits. Our local council is also offering an Apple Quest fun patch this season (similar to the one I listed here), so I also bought those and we added in some more apple-themed activities to our plans.

Here are our activities!

Research apple varieties; taste-test apples.

For our apple pie meeting, each Girl Scout was asked to bring approximately five pounds of one apple variety, a small serving plate, and an informational label that they'd researched and created for that variety. 

At the start of the meeting, every Girl Scout sliced one of her apples (giving me a good chance to observe and make sure that they all had appropriate knife skills for our upcoming tasks) and displayed it on its serving plate, then we went around the room and each Girl Scout spoke about her apple variety while we all tasted it. Every apple variety was purposefully bred, so it was interesting to hear what characteristics each variety was supposedly bred for--and if we agreed! The kids also quickly noticed that the apple varieties browned differently, so that was interesting, too.

Make apple pie filling; make homemade pie crust; bake an apple pie; learn to decorate a pie.

As you can tell from the heading, this step accomplished a few of the required activities for the Harvest badge and the Apple Quest fun patch. The Girl Scouts were most excited about baking a pie and decorating it, and since apple pie filling is dead simple and my teenager knows exactly how to make homemade pie crust, I figured that baking an apple pie from scratch was juuuust about doable as a Girl Scout meeting.

And it just about was!

Here's what I asked each Girl Scout to bring:

• approximately five pounds of any variety of apple
• sharp knife
• cutting board
• mixing bowl
• oven mitt
• rolling pin
• measuring spoons and cups
• hair tie or bandana

A couple of the cleverest kids (or the kids with the cleverest parents!) also brought a vegetable peeler and/or a cutting/coring thingy and a dish towel. I attempted to teach everyone how to easily peel and core an apple with just a paring knife, but this did NOT go over well--the kids hated the very idea of it, and they traded around the peelers and corers instead. Kids these days!

I used troop funds to buy all the pie crust and the rest of the apple filling ingredients, as well as aluminum foil, plastic wrap, aluminum pie tins, a 12-pack of Mason jars, and several prepared pie crusts.

After everyone had taste-tested the apples, my teenager taught the rest of the Girl Scouts how to make pie crust from scratch, while my co-leader and I assisted. It was a process, but everyone did create a pie crust! 

The kids wrapped their pie crusts in plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator to chill while I taught everyone the dead simple process of making fresh apple pie filling from scratch. I encouraged the kids to use a variety of apples, relying on their taste-testing to help them choose, and to taste the filling as they went to make sure that it was to their preference. We might have a picky eater or two in the troop, ahem...

When the pie filling was ready, the kids took their pie crusts out of the refrigerator and learned how to roll them out and put them in the disposable pie tins I'd bought. They added the filling, then rolled out their top crust and decided how they wanted to put it on. When planning this meeting, the kids had been interested in learning how to decorate their pies and make cute pie crusts, so I showed them several inspo images from Pie Style, but everyone ultimately decided to make a lattice top, which was a new skill for most.

Then the kids crimped the edges, wrapped their pies VERY well in plastic wrap... and put them back in the refrigerator to take home. We did NOT have enough room to be baking five whole pies at once!

Instead, I brought out the prepared pie crusts and the kids used those, along with any remaining apple pie filling, to make hand pies and/or muffin tin pies. I think they might have liked that activity the best, because they baked quickly and then the kids could eat them!

Learn strategies to use up surplus apples.

Food waste is one of my personal issues (and the troop has those pesky picky eaters!), so it was important to me to show the kids some ways to preserve or prepare apples that you don't feel like eating out of hand or in a pie.

Both applesauce and apple juice are the easiest thing in the world to make, so I had both my giant stock pot and my very old juicer (it was a wedding gift!) out, and at the start of the meeting, since applesauce does take some time, I asked the kids which they'd rather make. They agreed on juice, so at the very end of the meeting, after each kid had cleaned up but before she left, she got to juice herself a pint jar's worth of apple juice to take home with her. This was a new experience for almost everyone, and I think they all really liked it! 

And, of course, the most important strategy to use up apples: while the kids worked, they threw all of their peels, cores, and scraps into a giant bowl in the middle of the table. After we'd cleaned up, I tossed the entire bowl of scraps to the chickens, and they feasted!

Create an apple recipe book.

Since most of those apple pie activities has been to earn the Harvest badge, the kids needed, in my opinion, one more apple-centric activity to completely earn the Apple Quest fun patch, so I made a Shared Google Doc and asked them to each contribute one apple recipe so that we could make a little cookbook.

I'd hoped they'd get super into the project, and at that time we had an upcoming volunteer date at a local food pantry so I also had it in my head that perhaps we could print the recipes into a little booklet for the pantry to hand out during those times when it was swamped with apples, but the kids did not get super into the project, and so we didn't do anything more with it. 

To be honest, I think they were just flat-out sick of apples! But the project did remind me that my favorite cake, Smitten Kitchen's apple cake, exists, and it's just as delicious as I remembered, so as far as I'm concerned the whole thing was a huge success. 

Contribute to a harvest meal for someone in need.

The kids definitely wanted to do a service project as part of this badge, but they dithered a bit over what, exactly, they wanted to do. Also remember that high school kids are VERY busy, and some of these kids were also working on college applications, scholarship applications, Gold Award applications... It is a lot of work to be a high school student these days!

I researched a few opportunities for them to consider, including serving a meal at one of our city's shelters or hosting a food drive for one of the local food pantries. The idea that the kids liked best, though, was volunteering on a specific day to help food pantry patrons choose the components for a Thanksgiving dinner. So the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we went to the food pantry's distribution location and helped fetch and carry and otherwise made ourselves useful. I carried soooo many frozen turkeys!

Make an autumn craft.

The kids wanted to make gnomes, but we kept running out of time to make them. Eventually, when we met to wrap the gifts they had bought for the kid we were sponsoring for Christmas (for the same food pantry as the Thanksgiving project!), I tacked gnome-crafting onto that meeting. 

I actually had almost everything for this gnome project already in my stash, so I just bought a faux fur remnant, rice, and hot glue. The gnomes all turned out sooo cute, with bodies made from one of my partner's old Henleys and hats made from some of my infinite felt stash. 

References and Resources

Here are some other resources I had available during our Harvest badgework:

• The Apple Lover's Cookbook: This book has photos and information about lots of apple varieties, and the recipes are good for Girl Scouts to flip through to see all the yummy possibilities for cooking with apples.
• The Book on Pie: The recipes in this book look DELICIOUS, so it was another book that was fun for Girl Scouts to flip there. There are so many kinds of pie!!!
• Pie Academy: This has good process photos, especially of making the pie crust and making a lattice top. It has several different pie crust recipes, and some unusual recipes for pie fillings (one contains KETCHUP!?!?).
• Pie Camp: This was my main reference book for the pie meeting. I taught the kids McDermott's "20-20-20" method for baking, passed on her tips for preventing a soggy bottom, and demonstrated how to make and use the foil shield that prevents a burned top. We also used her cooking instructions to make the muffin tin pies.
• Pie Squared: These are essentially sheet pan pies, both sweet and savory. This would be a good recipe book if you wanted to serve fresh-baked pie at your Girl Scout troop meeting.
• Pie Style: Even though it was plenty for the troop to learn how to make a lattice pie crust, because decorating pies was something they'd expressed interest in I showed them the photos from this book of faaancy pie decorations. Everyone went "Oooh!," but nobody wanted to give any of the ideas a try just then, ahem...

Overall, I think this turned out to be a very successful badge! The kids wanted to do it and helped plan it, everyone learned a new skill, a couple of kids got a chance to practice their leadership by teaching the others specific techniques, we did some community service, and now each kid has some more practical life knowledge in her toolkit. 

Up next: cookie season, including seeing if I can sneak in a cookie badge or two, and travel planning, including me looking for yet another retired or Council's Own travel-focused badge that these well-traveled kids haven't yet earned. 

Hire me to create more travel badge for older kids, GSUSA! I'll do an awesome job!

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