Celebrate the 100th Day of the Year with Me

Every year, the teenagers and I volunteer with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis' 100 Days of School celebration. Area schools bring their kindergartners and first graders to the museum, and in between visiting the exhibits, the volunteers help the kids do fun activities relating to the number 100.

This year, my teenager and I had hoped to be assigned to the 100-bean maraca station again, but I actually loved the station we ended up at even more!

When kids came to our station, we helped them measure their height and their arm span, and helped them record the information in inches and centimeters:

If the kids had a little extra time because they were waiting on a few kids to finish up, I'd sometimes also have them stand on their tiptoes and then measure their height so we could compare how much taller they were on tiptoes (usually something like three inches!), or we'd see how long they could step or how high they could reach, etc. There's a lot you can do with a horizontal ruler and a vertical ruler!

It's always fun to me to see the range of kids we encounter, and the differences and similarities--we run through something like 250 kids in two hours, so those differences and similarities are really noticeable! Most of the kids, for instance, were around 143-147 centimeters tall, and their arm spans were always a little shorter. BUT they were all wearing shoes, so I told them that if they hadn't been, their arm span would be the same as their height! It was especially fun for kids to measure themselves against the horizontal ruler and then step back to visualize their arm span, so now I'm on a whole kick about how early ed classrooms ought to have those rulers set out the same way that most of them probably have height charts, so kids can visualize lengths in two planes. 

Many of the kids could not write numbers bigger than 100, but many could, and nearly all could write the numbers below 100. Several kids did a cute thing in which if I said, for instance, that they were 145 centimeters tall, they would write "100 45" on the line. I'd then show them what it looked like to combine it into 145, but I thought their solution was so clever, especially coming from different kids from different schools!

The 100th Day of School wasn't a thing when Matt or I were in school, so it wasn't on my radar when the kids were little enough to have fun with it, and I'm actually really sad about that, because we LOVED random little holidays and celebrations like that, and it would have been as super cute as our yearly celebration of Pi Day and everyone's half birthdays and May the Fourth. The celebration is a fun excuse for kids not just to practice the one-to-one correspondence of counting and the fine-motor skills of writing the numbers, but also to build context and meaning for the concept of 100, and explore the way that larger numbers work.

It turns out that this year, the 100th day of the year is Monday, April 10, which is quite a respectable homeschool day to celebrate a holiday! Here are some activities that I think would be fun--and educational!--to do with younger kids to celebrate the 100th day of the year:

paper chain. We made SO MANY paper chains when the kids were younger! Syd, especially was all in on paper chains, and we used them a lot to count down to various big events. Here's the paper chain birthday countdown that we made in anticipation of her fourth birthday, including the discovery that tearing a link off of a paper chain? OMG, such horror. Such despair.

That's why I actually think a paper chain counting UP to the 100th day of the year would be so great. Every day you don't tear a link off--you ADD one!!! Much less distressing to those tender, tiny hearts. 

For bonus points, make these laminated index cards with the numbers and number words on them for kids to match, trace, and add to their collection each day.

hundred grid fraction art. This reminds me a little of the mathematical map coloring that the kids loved just a few years ago! Kids color a pixel design onto a hundred grid, then can play with rearranging the colors and recording the fractional or decimal representation of each color.

roll to a hundred (or roll to zero). This is a fast-paced game that both of my kids loved long after they'd mastered their numbers, addition, and subtraction to 100. And it incorporates coloring, which is ALSO super fun (and utilizes those fine-motor skills, ahem):

This would make a fun "party game" for the hundredth day of the year, and you could even possibly convince a kid to fill out a blank 100 grid in preparation.

build with 100 things. This works well if you've got sets of more than 100 of various building toys, like LEGOs or blocks, but it would also probably be even more fun and creative if you chose seemingly random things. Can you build something or create a design using 100 pennies? Can you build a structure using 100 books? Who can build the biggest pyramid out of 100 rocks? Tiny little things in bulk also make fabulous math manipulatives, so it wouldn't be a terrible idea to splash out and buy your kid a 100-set of something small and cute as a 100th Day of the Year gift.

write a googol. That time that we read a book about googols, and then I asked each of my small children to write one, turned into a bit of a wacky adventure.

I scrolled Pinterest to look at other ideas, and while a lot of projects made me cringe or looked super corny, there was also tons of non-cringe, non-corny ideas to build a kid's numeracy and inspire them to love larger numbers and help them feel festive and celebratory. Many of the printables displayed would also work well for us homeschoolers to celebrate the 100th day of the year. I know that *I*, for one, will be coloring and wearing a giant cardboard 100-shaped hat on April 10!

Syd and I Built our Own Polygons

 

Y'all might remember that I'm seriously into finding obscure education manuals and how-to books in my local university's library system.

Some of what I find isn't amazing, but sometimes what I find is super cool!

This book gave me and Syd a fun afternoon problem-solving, building her math skills, and challenging my apparently very poor spatial reasoning abilities:

The one supply that you absolutely have to have to build your own polygons according to these instructions is a long length of narrow paper--like, a LONG length. The book calls for gummed mailing tape, whatever that is, but Syd and I used a roll of adding machine paper. I think any kind of narrow paper roll would work.

Build Your Own Polyhedra starts by teaching you how to fold your tape to make an endless row of regular, equilateral triangles. You use these as a guide to make further creases and folds, twists and turns that form all kinds of regular polygons--you can explore to find them yourself, or follow the book's instructions to create them.

I had a ridiculously difficult time with both options, to be honest. When I tried to explore on my own, I just kept making the same straight line over and over again, and when I tried to follow the book's diagram to make a regular hexagon, I just... couldn't. It made NO sense to me! I'm used to being the smartest girl in the room so, not gonna lie--it kind of freaked me out!

And then Syd looked for about five seconds at a drawing of the finished folded hexagon--not the instructions, mind you, but just a drawing of the finished product!--and quick as a blink, she promptly folded herself an absolutely perfect regular hexagon:

She kindly then walked me through the process, although she kept saying, "Okay, now just repeat that over and over," and I'd be all, "Repeat it... how, exactly?", and she'd patiently walk me through the exact same step one more time. And then another time. And then another, and another, until I thankfully had my own perfect hexagon.

I don't know if we'll go on to create more sophisticated polygons, or even move onto the titular polyhedra, because Syd, as well as having some serious visual-spatial abilities, also has the attention span of a Jack Russell Terrier at an agility competition and so she's already said she's bored with the book and wants to do something different.

Whatever weird thing we do next, I'm sure I'll put it on my Craft Knife Facebook page, so come find me there!

Girl Scout Cookie Booth Analytics, or, Math Helps Girl Scouts Sell More Cookies!

If you've got a troop of motivated kids, then Girl Scout cookie season is BIG BUSINESS. Kids use the money their troop earns during the cookie season for everything they can dream up and plan. Cookie sales have paid for my troop to travel to both Cincinnati and St. Louis, to spend the night at an aquarium and a zoo, to conduct service projects for kids in need in Honduras and in our town, and to supply all the materials and fees for dozens of badge-earning activities and fun bonding activities and adventures both big and small.

In some ways, the math is simple: the more the kids earn, the more they can do with that money. In every other way, however, the math is quite sophisticated: your troop has to order cookies from the council, in most cases before you've sold them, and those cookies can't be returned. Don't sell them all, and instead of the kids earning profits, you'll be in debt to the council. You can sell more cookies at cookie booths in public locations than you can as individuals going door-to-door, but then you need to figure out how many cookies to order from council to take to a booth. Too few, and you've wasted opportunities for more profit. Too many, and you're back to worrying how to sell them all. Take cash to make change and then hope that all the kids (and adults!) count correctly. Take a credit card reader and hope that everyone successfully processes the customers' cards without errors. Count the inventory before and after the booth and do the same with the money, and hope that they both match. Take it all home, count the inventory again, and hope that it matches what your database says you should have. If it doesn't, dig into your non-existent forensic accounting skills to figure out what's wrong and hopefully fix it. Allocate cookies to every kid who worked at the booth, in proportions equal to the hours that they worked. Calculate the percentages of every type of cookie you sold, compare that to your expectations, and then use that to make your next order from council.

Do that over and over and over again. Bonus points if you, as we do, have a troop that runs several booths simultaneously in different places, and even more bonus points on the busy weekends when people are doing inventory and money counting on the fly so that they can pass stuff to another booth starting the next hour across town. And, of course, I'm not even mentioning all the skills that you're also busy mentoring in the kids all this time, and how you're teaching them to do all these things, as well, because that's a given. Add in the extra hours it takes to make sure they understand and take ownership of the process.

Four years ago this was all new to us, and fortunately our goals were set reasonably low, as well (although it didn't feel like that at the time!). Now, of course, we're such old hands that many of the kids beat that first-year goal during pre-orders, and the rest have usually beaten it by the end of the day that cookies finally come in. And yet the kids keep challenging themselves. This year, four of our nine kids (including my own older kid!) have decided to try for 1,000 sales, and one kid who's sold 1,000 for the past two years is this year trying for 1,500. Don't forget that when the kids have big goals you also have to make sure you've got enough booths to make that happen, and please know that angling for booth picks is bloodthirsty business, and you've got to make sure that your orders from council are enough to stock all these booths AND ensure that the kids can meet their goals. You want a little extra, because rarely will a kid be able to meet their goal and then stop selling that second, mid-booth, but again, you don't want too many extra because selling extra troop cookies after you've all met your goals is just about the most miserable work there is.

It's a lot to do, and a lot of it IS luck and guesswork. You can virtually elbow all the other troop leaders out of your way to get the hottest booth pick, only for a winter storm to trash all your sales that day, while all the booths in lousy spots the day before get the awesome pre-winter storm sales. Or maybe last year everybody and their dog was screaming for Do-Si-Dos, so you order them at that percent this year and it takes you a whole season to get through what you'd thought would be one weekend's supply--that happened to me last year with Trefoils, and it was SUPER stressful.

The Great Trefoil Overage of 2018 aside, though, what I've learned is that while much of it is luck and guesswork, a lot more of it is logical and predictable than you might think. If I lay everything out in graphs and charts and numbers, then I can predict quite accurately what percentages of each type of cookie to order, and how many cookies to bring to booths, and which booth spots are the best on which particular dates and times. Just choosing a booth spot that typically sells 10 more boxes of cookies an hour over another equally likely booth spot is a big deal, especially if you can do that consistently over the course of the season.

So here are some of the analytics that I use for my troop's Girl Scout cookie sales. The most important is the one that helps me figure out percentages for ordering cookies from council. The first year the girls sold cookies, I was lost. I tried asking my Service Unit Manager at the time, and she just sort of told me something along the lines of, "Oh, a few cases of Thin Mints and Samoas, a couple of cases of everything else, etc."

I was all, "Seriously? No, seriously. How MANY?!?" It was... unhelpful.

Fortunately, after you have a whole season behind you, especially if you've done several booths, the math is a lot easier. All you have to do is take your booth record sheets from the last year (which you DO have and you DID keep, yes?!?) and calculate the percentages for each type of cookie that you sold at each booth. If you're collecting donations for physical boxes of cookies that you donate locally, don't include those, as you know you mostly take them from what isn't selling as well as it should (and if you're not doing it that way, you SHOULD be!). Also don't include what kids sell individually, because they always sell what they've ordered, even if that means going door-to-door selling nothing but Tagalongs after they've sold out of everything else. Booths should be fully stocked for most of the season, so booth sales should be reflecting what customers actually want, in the percentages that they want them.

Calculate these percentages for several, if not all, of your booths, then average the percentages for each type to calculate the overall percentage of sale for each type of cookie the previous year:

Above is the master document that I make and then pull all of my information from for the rest of my analytics. Notice I've got date, time, day of the week, booth location, number of hours, total sale numbers, percentage of sale for each type of cookie at each booth, and color codes to indicate multiple booths at the same location. It's pretty messy, so you might not be able to see where all that information is, but I assure you, it's there!

That document is all scut work, looking back at the messy handwriting on all of last year's booth tally forms, trying to decipher some fuzzy calculations that were done on the fly, etc., so I don't ask the kids to help with that part. But kids can certainly take my numbers and average the overall percentage for each type of cookie; could even make a pie chart from it, although I find that kind of chart less useful for our purposes. It's good math for a kid, though.

Those averaged percentages for each type of cookie are what I order from the cupboard. I have another chart where I have my possible orders listed by the hundreds and have each type of cookie calculated in both the actual numbers and the numbers averaged to the nearest case, both up and down, so that I don't have to do all the calculating fresh every week. 

So that tells me what percentages to order, but I still need to know how many overall boxes to order. That's a whole other set of graphs!

For that, I took each booth location that we worked last year and broke it down into sales per hour. If we did several booths at that location, I put the graphs all on the same page:

 Notice that this information is less useful when we've gotten a booth spot for a really long period of time. For instance, in the bar graphs above, you can see that when we did a Sunday morning booth there, our per-hour sales were fewer than 20 boxes. But if you just looked at the Sunday where we started there at 10 but stayed all day, our average is over 40 boxes per hour. Some hours in there must have been REALLY good to bring the average up enough to mask the lousy morning sales, but I don't have the information to see where they were.

 If we only did one booth at that location, I put it by itself:

It's a decent start to figuring out sales numbers, but with just one booth spot, you can't rely on it completely.

The per-hour number, then, is a good way to figure out how much to order for a weekend of booth sales. But what you don't see very clearly in the bar graphs is that you also have to take into account how far into the season your booths are. A booth spot the first weekend of cookie sales is obviously going to sell a lot more cookies than that same spot six weeks later. Here's the graph that I made to represent how our sales fell off over time last year:

I think that this graph actually makes it easier to see how the day of the week affects sales, too. And it's certainly a good visual for the kids that extra hustling is likely to pay off better early in the season than later. 

It's a good idea to continue calculating these percentages and sales per hour as you go through the current cookie season, both because the percentages do change a little every year, and I've made some small adjustments to how I'm ordering, and because you're adding new booth dates and times to the information that you have available. This is the best time to teach the kids how to make these calculations and use this information, as well. This is Step 5 of the Junior Cookie CEO badge, but since the whole purpose of earning a badge is to use the skills you learn, older kids could be expected as a matter of course to make these calculations and predictions part of their cookie sale experience every year. 

Today, for instance, it's my older kid's turn to help me. While I'm writing this, she's going through last weekend's booth tallies and calculating the percentages of each type of cookie sold. Next, she'll average that with last year's average to come up with a corrected current average. Finally, she'll multiply by ten to come up with the number of each type that I want to order from council this week, divide by 12 to find the number of cases I'll order, and round down to the nearest whole number so that I don't have to deal with any partial cases. 

Sounds like a pretty good homeschool afternoon, yes? 

P.S. Want to read more about Girl Scout cookie booth math and marketing? Here's my complete series (so far!):

• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Analytics, or, Math Helps Girl Scouts Sell More Cookies!
• My Very Own Girl Scout Cookie Booth Calculator: How Many Cookies to Order for Booth Sales
• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Math: Equal It Out and Assign It Fairly
• Girl Scout Cookie Marketing: Kid-Led and Kid-Made Signage and Campaigns

P.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!

Homeschool Math: How to Model the Pythagorian Theorem with the Decanomial Square

Neither kid has yet studied the Pythagorean theorem in math, but they DID both study Pythagoras a couple of weeks ago, and what better way to bring him to life than to model his most famous theorem?

And fortunately, if you focus on the Pythagorean triples, the Pythagorean theorem is also actually really easy to model, and quite accessible to even a younger learner. To two kids who've studied area, square numbers, and triangles, it's a snap!

First, of course, you need to build the decanomial square. Notice that the kid starts with the square, then adds the matching pieces in descending order:

When those are all placed, she finds the next largest square and carries on:

It's also good to model your work on gridded centimeter paper. This makes the translation between model and equation much clearer:

Find the square whose side matches side a. That square is a squared. The square whose side matches side b is side b squared. The hypotenuse is c. Once you've got the squares in place, you can start to do the calculation:

You can either work the calculation first, or find the square whose side matches the hypotenuse first. Either way, your work should match:

Although that's the only Pythagorean triple that's modeled in whole pieces in the decanomial square, you can use the decanomial square and/or Base 10 blocks and Cuisenaire rods to piece together the squares of the larger Pythagorean triples:

And to prove that a squared plus b squared really does equal c squared, break down the blocks that make up a squared and b squared--

--and put those pieces on top of c squared. You'll have to puzzle them together a bit, but in the end, they should fit perfectly!

There are lots of other fun ways to model the Pythagorean theorem, although since they also mostly rely on the 3, 4, 5 Pythagorean triple, it can get tedious if you do too many of them with the kids. It's more fun to make larger square models of the other triples to test, or to use the Pythagorean theorem in real-life situations.

Here are some other resources that we've enjoyed:

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!

Work Plans for the Week of January 23, 2017: Math, Math, and More Math (and Some Science!)

I meant to post these work plans yesterday, and even got started writing them, and then I derailed into telling you every single thought that I had about Trump's inauguration address.

Ahem.

Other than bearing witness to that travesty, the kids and I had a great week of school. The older kid, especially, zipped through her requirements in record time, with, alas, as little effort as possible. I do like that the kids can work independently, but they're still more passionate and engaged when Mom is right there learning with them.

It's fortunate that this week, then, we just happen to have loads more hands-on assignments. There's a lot of interesting math, in particular, that we have time to get to this week, and I'm looking forward to the map coloring (it's mathematical, I promise!), decanomial square modeling, and Base 60 calculating that we've got going on.

Books of the Week are more David Wiesner for the younger kid, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for the older kid, biographies of other famous black Americans, and books about Greece.

Have I told you that we're possibly going to Greece this summer? We're still running the numbers and looking for flights that would be in our budget, so I can't tell yet if we can afford it this year or not. Darn our tendency to make a budget and only do what we can afford!

Speaking of Greece... Memory Work this week is Greek and Roman deities, reviewing Sonnet 116, and the names of regular polygons. Other daily work consists of typing for both kids, a word ladder for the younger kid, and for the older kid, progress in Wordly Wise 7, Khan Academy's SAT Prep, and an online Red Cross First Aid class. The younger kid completes the daily story starter or journal entry, but the older kid just flat-out won't do creative writing or journaling, so I've been giving her a long passage from our Memory Work to copy in cursive every day.

We're trying something a little different for music. As I've mentioned each Monday for the past couple of weeks, our keyboard is mysteriously broken, and I haven't even tried to fix it or replace it yet--Girl Scout cookie season is upon us, and I'm busy! It so happens, though, that this weekend I was meandering through a Charlotte Mason homeschool site... you know, as you do... and saw their recommendation for memorizing and singing folk songs.

Why, folk songs are music! We've got memory work, we've got singing, we've got the geo-historical context of each song, and for many songs, I'm sure we can find the sheet music so that we can practice reading it. And best of all, the children actually seem enthusiastic about this plan! The older kid requested "something British" for our first song, I remembered how much I love "Froggy Went a-Courtin'" and looked it up, and wouldn't you know? It's British! The kids and I listened to loads of versions (my personal favorite: Bob Dylan's), but decided that Elizabeth Mitchell's would be the easiest to learn. So that's what we're doing.

And here's what we're doing for the rest of our week!

MONDAY: Neither kid seems to be much troubled by her Math Mammoth for this week--more fractions for the younger kid and more integers for the older kid--which is awesome, but the younger kid may never forgive me for subjecting her to the Base 60 system of the math of Ancient Babylon. It was mentioned in last week's Story of Science, so excuse me for thinking that it would be appropriate fare for a child. And it IS sooo interesting! They only had 59 gliphs, because they hadn't figured out 0 yet, and to record numbers with positional notation you have to use powers of 60. So, you know how with the number 324, say, the digit 4 is 4x1, and the digit 2 is 2x10, and the digit 3 is 3x100, or 3x10x10, or 3x10 squared? Well, if you had written that number in Ancient Babylon, you'd still have 4x1, but the 2 would be 2x60, and the 3 would be 3x60x60, or 3x3,600 or 3x60 squared. How cool is that?!?

The younger kid, sobbing angrily, assures me that it is not cool at all. Also, I am mean.

Art is back on our weekly work plans for a while. My partner had been giving the children art lessons during the weekends, but that's also our relaxation time, family time, grown-up time, chore time, errand time, and Girl Scout cookie-selling time, and for the past couple of months, art lesson time had just been seeming like one more thing to get stressed out about on the schedule, to not get to and then feel guilty about. Well, nobody needs that! I may not be qualified to teach drawing or painting to my children, but there are plenty of process-oriented, experiential and creative art activities that we can do together during our school week, such as this book, Once Upon a Piece of Paper, which I most conveniently received for free from a publicist and which teaches the art of collage. On this day, the kids and I did the background painting on small panels, and when that's dry we can complete the first exercise on small, combined compositions.

Bacchus isn't actually going to be on the National Mythology Exam (perhaps because he's the god of wine, hmm?), but we're including him, of course, in our comprehensive study of all of the Greek and Roman deities, which we'll actually finish up this week. Then it's on to Hercules and then some specific myths from other cultures. And then it will be time for the exam!

The younger kid and my partner thankfully remade all of the paper polygons that somehow must have gotten recycled after the last time we made them, sigh:

I highly recommend this book. Making the polygons was a great exercise in following directions, as well as a comprehensive review of terms associated with lines and angles, and unfolding each piece at the end and finding a perfect regular polygon?

Magic!

On this day, the kids took those regular polygons, ordered them, mounted them onto poster board, and labeled them. We'll keep the posters on display in our hallway into they start looking ragged and I can recycle them, and we'll add the names to our daily Memory Work until the kids have got them down.

TUESDAY: We've proved the Pythagorean theorem using our decanomial square materials before, but on this day I want to show the kids how you can use the theorem to calculate one of the sides of a right triangle. My partner helped me mount our printable decanomial square to foam core, so I'm pretty excited that we'll have a lovely set of manipulatives to work with.

We're beginning Hercules today; he's an entire separate exam on the National Mythology Exam. Most of the study will consist simply of close reading, but I'll also put the 12 labors into our Memory Work.

I have suspicions that the children still didn't do great work on the first part of their unit-long assignment in our Animal Behavior MOOC, but it's almost impossible to look over their shoulders to check work done independently, on their own time. They may be sad kids, then, when they have to show me their work today, mwa-ha-ha! The second part of the assignment will consist of more regular observation and more note-taking.

Girl Scout cookie season is about to ramp up even further, with our cookie pick-up this weekend, delivery of pre-orders next week, and then cookie booths beginning next weekend and running all through February. It's worth the expenditure in time, both to witness the kids' visible progression of skills in talking to people, managing money, budgeting and planning and marketing, and, frankly, to have those profits at the end. The kids plan marvelous things to do with that money! On this day, however, they have just one cookie business job (although the younger kid will surely get my partner to take her out to do more door-to-door selling while the older kid and I are at fencing tonight...): decorating donation cans for Operation Cookie Drop and our troop. Last year, one of our troop's Girl Scouts discovered that when someone pays for their cookies in cash, if she asks them if they'd like to donate some change to Operation Cookie Drop or our troop, they often do! Just between us, donations to our troop are even better than cookie sales, because the council and the bakery don't get a cut of troop donations--that money is all for the kids! This year, I asked that our donation boxes be changed from shoeboxes to oatmeal canisters, because table space is just that important, and between all of the families, I do believe that we've scrounged up enough oatmeal canisters for there to be three complete sets, allowing us to run two simultaneous booths and to have one in another parent's car ready for a third.

And yes, I really can go on just that long about the art and science of selling Girl Scout cookies. Sorry!

WEDNESDAY: Mapping Hercules' journey is an activity suggested by Greek Mythology Activities, and one that I think the kids will enjoy. It involves close reading and research to determine where each of Hercules' labors was said to have taken place, then more research and map skills to place each one on an actual map.

The older kid is working through the cookie business badges in her Cadette book this month (she's currently working on the Budgeting badge--it's already led to some VERY interesting conversations!), but I want the younger kid to finish the Power of One award in her Agent of Change Journey before she starts the cookie business badges, mainly so that she can complete this day's assignment, which piggybacks so well on the Black History Month essay that she just finished a couple of weeks ago. Since she wrote a research-based essay on Mary McLeod Bethune for that, I'm hoping that she chooses a more creative response for this assignment.

Math Lab for Kids is another book that I received for free from a publicist, and I'm super excited to get into it, especially this map coloring lab. Did YOU know that there's an entire mathematical theorem about map coloring? There is, and it's utterly fascinating. 

THURSDAY: You may have noticed, but I purposely make our Thursdays and Fridays lighter. We're a little more tired at the end of the week, a little less enthusiastic, and sometimes we still have the odd project or two from earlier in the week to finish up. So on this day, the special work consists only of having the kids review, refine, and edit their Greek mythology family trees (I'm hoping that they'll be interested in decorating or otherwise embellishing them, as well), and beginning a short unit on meteorology by modeling cloud formation. The demonstration involves hair spray. We'll see how it goes.

You may also have noticed that we do a lot of science in our homeschool. We've got, what, three simultaneous science units going on right now? We have to have an animal unit at all times, because that's both children's main area of interest, our Story of Science unit is also this semester's history spine, and then I tend to throw in a unit on whatever else I think the kids need to know. Sometime before summer, that will be astronomy, because the total solar eclipse won't be fun unless we study for it!

FRIDAY: With the way the weather has been all year so far, it's wildly optimistic to think that it won't be pouring freezing rain on Friday for our cloud walk, but where there's life, there's hope! My partner designed some super-cool cloud identification windows that I can't wait to get the kids outside to use.

Now that the older kid is twelve (and a half!), she's on the verge of aging out of some Junior Ranger programs, which sucks, because she loves them SO deeply. In my "free" time, I've been browsing National Park sites that we're unlikely to visit before she's thirteen or fourteen, to see if she'll have aged out of the Junior Ranger program by then and, if so, if they offer Junior Ranger badges by mail. Our results have been pretty spotty when we mail in Junior Ranger books; we often haven't received responses even from sites that claim to offer Junior Ranger badges by mail, but it means a lot to the kid, it makes her happy, and it's educational, so why not give it a shot.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The big event of the week is Girl Scout cookie delivery! Our entire troop will meet up on Saturday to help pick up, unload, sort, inventory, and distribute the cookies to all of our girls, and then I imagine that much of the rest of the weekend will consist of delivering pre-orders. I promise you, the kids are crazy into it. It sounds insane, but I think it's one of those things that you simply don't understand unless you're in the thick of it. 

And then cookie season will begin for freaking real.

What are YOU doing this week, other than getting ready for cookie season?

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!

Tick-Tock, Make a Clock (Cake)

I'm going to call this clock cake activity lightly educational.

It requires familiarity with the clock face, so that you get all the numbers going the right way. It requires geometry, so that all the numbers are in the right places. If your kiddos make their cakes independently, which mine did, it requires all the miscellaneous math skills that go into everyday baking.

But mostly, this cake is just a fun little thing for you to do with two kids who found analog time-telling VERY non-intuitive and yet stuck with it until they had it down pat.

The cake is just a simple box cake mix, take your pick of flavor. I, personally, am not a fan of box mixes, but I AM a fan of them for the kids. The kids can make dishes like cakes and cupcakes from scratch by themselves, but not without me there to say things like, "Hmm, that doesn't *look* like a teaspoon...", and to therefore save our taste buds from a batch of cupcakes that has 1.5 tablespoons of baking powder in it--ugh!

And sometimes a kid just wants to make herself a batch of cupcakes, you know, without a big lesson on fractions. For that, I am ALL about the box mix.

Anyway, the older kid made herself and her sister a plain ole box mix cake, no drama, no maternal presence in the kitchen, in two round pans. I made up a batch of maple frosting, and colored half of it with our natural food colors and spooned it into Ziplock bags with one corner cut off--instant pastry bag!

The kids frosted their clock cakes white--

--and then worked on writing the numbers. I had them write the 12 first, then the 6 opposite the 12--

--then the 3 and the 9 halfway between the two on each side.

The numbers in between are slightly trickier, since you can't center them, but it's good practice in visualizing thirds.

I didn't think I had any other decorations on hand, but the younger kid found these gross candy corns leftover from the candy corn brownies that she and her sister made before Halloween, and she made herself a nice little set of hour and minute hands from them.

When they were done, the clock cakes looked just fabulous. They tasted pretty great, too!

The kids inhaled one entire clock cake during the day, and then we all inhaled most of the other one while watching The Avengers for Family Movie Night that night. The younger kid is a major Avengers fangirl, and we've just recently introduced both kids to the live-action films starring the Avengers characters, mostly because I SUPER wanted to go see Thor 2 this weekend!

Which we did. It was awesome. This fangirl, and the mini fangirl, were both thrilled.

Ink Blot Prints that Demonstrate Bilateral Symmetry

In math, the younger kid gets frustrated with a lot of computation, which is fine (for now--the older kid also gets frustrated with a lot of computation, and yet I still require it of her, because apparently I'm meaner to older kids), so since she's long finished up any kindergarten math requirements that I had of her, we've been luxuriating in those kinds of hands-on, in-depth, sensorial math activities that internalize concepts, and that the kid absolutely loves.

For instance, it wasn't necessary to spend weeks on bilateral symmetry. And yet... bilateral symmetry is so fun! Here are some of our activities:

• cutting out and folding shapes to discover and test their lines of symmetry
• using graph paper to draw shapes that have bilateral symmetry, then cutting them out and folding them to test them
• putting ANYTHING up against a mirror to see it in symmetry
• taking a nature walk to collect leaves, then sorting them into groups of symmetrical and non-symmetrical, then folding them to test those theories, then drawing in the lines of symmetry using Sharpies
• painting on one side of a paper, then folding the paper and pressing it down, then unfolding it to look at your magical Rorschach-style print

By the way, these BioColor paints are the BEST at that last one!

This is just the kind of activity that my little kid likes. She made print after print after print, then extended it to finger painting (discovering for herself that printing doesn't work if the paint has had time to dry), then moved on to some very colorful handprinting, then added more and more and more paint and found that she loved the feeling and the look of painting through all the layers...

...and made a GIANT mess!

And yes, to her infinite credit, she cleaned it up completely independently, including washing off the paint bottles, scrubbing the table, and giving herself a bath. That makes the activity even MORE satisfying, don't you think?

For kids whose current special interest is bilateral symmetry, here are a few more fun activities for enrichment and exploration:

• cut an object or picture in half, glue to a piece of drawing paper, then recreate the other half of the drawing
• make Rorschach ink blots, then have fun creatively interpreting them
• set up these super simple popsicle stick symmetry puzzles for the youngest learners
• print free worksheets for kids who like that sort of thing!

And our course it wouldn't be a homeschool project without lots of books!

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!

Tutorial: Circular Perpetual Calendar

For kids of a certain age, the new year is the perfect time to begin a study of the calendar.

My goals for this study are for both kids to memorize the sequence of months and a canonical poem relevant to each season (we've already got "Stopping by Woods" in our back pockets, so there's plenty of time to search for a springly-type poem). The older kid might not be interested in much more beyond that, although I have a list of books on calendar history and calendar cultural studies to sneakily sneak into her library book stash, but for my little kid, who's really enjoying her art right now and who could always use more practice with number sequencing, I have in mind a year-long project, really, having to do with creating a twelve-month calendar, working on one month, well...a month!

For starters, however, I wanted each kid to discover for herself the pattern of the months and the seasons, so together we made each of them her own circular perpetual calendar.

To make the calendar, you need a large piece of paper, the larger the better. We used some professional-quality artist's paper leftover from my partner's days as an undergrad majoring in art, but white posterboard, or a large piece of newsprint, would also be perfect.

Mark the centerpoint of your paper (it's fine to eyeball it), and draw a circle around that centerpoint. You want the circle to be large enough to give the seasons their due, so...a diameter of at least six inches or so? Use a plate as a template, perhaps, but one of the round ones, not the pointy-hat Halloween one that, yes, is STILL in circulation in our house.

Now comes the tricky part: you want the inside of your circle divided into four quadrants, but you want the OUTSIDE of your circle divided into twelve rays that extend to the edge of the paper. Here's a handy trick for dividing a circle into twelve parts without measuring angles.

Draw all your lines in black Sharpie, because you want them to be very visible, and when you decide which of the twelve outer segments will be December and which will be January, make that line very dark--that's the yearly division between December and January.

Only after I had completely finished these two outlines did I invite the kids to make their calendar. Using the black Sharpie, each kid first wrote the names of the seasons in the proper order in the proper space--

--and then added the months in THEIR proper places:

If you use watercolor paper or some other kinds of professional artist's paper (NOT posterboard), I personally think that these calendars would look simply glorious painted using wet-on-wet watercolor (if you check out my tutorial, please note that I've come to prefer wetting huge pieces of watercolor paper section by section with a sponge, as opposed to the dunking that we give small pieces). Neither of the kids were really feeling the watercolor groove, however, but neither was interested in coloring in those large spaces with pointy crayons or marker tips, either, and so I had another reason to be thankful that I went ahead one day and bought a set of Stockmar block crayons, even though I have big kids, not toddlers:

The result of the each kid's hard work is a calendar so special that it gets to live on permanent display, one in their shared bedroom, and one on the wall in our study/studio:

The older kid developed the neat little trick of color-coding her months, so that she could remember what fun holiday each held, such as this red and green December that reminds her of Christmas:

I have to say, however, that barely into January, this is already the season that I, personally, am most looking forward to:

And we haven't even had any truly gigantic snowfalls yet!

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!