Star Wars at the Indiana State Museum

A few weeks ago, we trekked up to the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis to get our nerd on at their traveling exhibit, Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination:

It featured actual props and costumes used in the films.

Squee.

Darth Vader is choking them with his mind, you see.

 

There were also detailed models that were filmed super-close-up as the real, giant ships:

Sydney is bigger than a Jawa!

I am NOT as big as a sand person:

Shudder.

I'm also not as big as a Wookie--

--but that's okay. They like me anyway.

Yoda likes me a lot, too:

The science aspects of the exhibit came through a series of hands-on stations, from stuff that we'd done before but were happy to do again, such as traveling on compressed air--

--("It's pneumatic!" she said!), to amazing experiences that we had never before had. I'm a hands-on museum aficionado, I tell you, and these activities floored me. The kids interacted with computers and real-life manipulatives to create virtual spaces:

They compiled robots from parts and put them through various scenarios to evaluate their performances. They built models to succeed in challenging structural conditions. And, coolest of all, they used LEGOs to build electromagnetically powered hover cars:

Remember how museums never stock what I want to buy? I'd have bought myself one of those hovercar kits, that's for damn sure.

I've been really thinking about encouraging the maths and hard sciences with my girls this year, thanks in no small part to this exhibit. Now that Syd's older, I think that this would be a great year to accelerate their math and get them going on some engineering, physics, and programming projects.

Perhaps we WILL be making electromagnetic hovercars...

Our Favorite Games Report: August 2013

Wanting some logic training for the girls but not finding anything packaged that I like, I've begun to consciously incorporate all kinds of puzzles and games into our days. Of course, we've always played puzzles and games, but bringing them also into our "work hours," not just our free time, has let us start playing together MUCH more often, as well as allowed the girls to feel free to explore more than just their very favorites.

Here's what we've been playing this month:

online Quiddler and Set

There's a new puzzle every day, and although Will and I don't play every single day, we do play most days.

Apples to Apples Junior

(Now that we've got the junior version, I can put the sexy cards back in the adult version that we've been using!)

The Settlers of Catan

We haven't gotten the hang of this game yet, but we're sticking with it.

 Now What?

(SUCH a great game for creativity and logic!)

Sorry

Although the rest of the family is so over this one, Sorry is ALWAYS Syd's choice!

 Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?

This one is a recent love. We tried playing it back when I first bought it around Christmastime, but it was too hard to hold the girls' attention. Since it had all its pieces, however, and since there's no price like a Goodwill price, I held onto it. 

At some point this month, on a nice afternoon when our plan was to take a couple of board games and Pandora radio on the ipad out to the picnic table by the chickens, Will chose this game again, probably because she'd forgotten how frustrated she'd been with it just a few months ago. She and I played it while Sydney watched and drew and fed stuff to the chickens, and this time, she loved it!

Key to the experience is that this time she was actually able to answer a couple of the questions--

"What city holds the Liberty Bell?"

"In what city did both the Second Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention convene?"

--and, since we had the ipad right there, whenever she was curious about a piece of trivia, we just looked it up! We looked up the details of and circumstances surrounding the United States' purchase of Alaska ("How can you just BUY a state?!?" she asked), and the Louisiana Purchase, and we watched several scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind so that both girls could see Devil's Tower--I think we'll also be able to see that one in person this summer on our dino dig road trip.

Some games are becoming a little tricky right now, because Will is growing interested in more complicated, multi-player games, like Settlers of Cataan and Axis and Allies, that just don't hold Syd's attention, but having the three of us play an hours-long game while leaving Syd out is also pretty impossible. We have tentative future plans with another family who has kids around the same ages as ours to have a dinner and game night, so that the older kids and at least a couple of the adults can try out a free kiddie D&D game that I found. If that works out well, perhaps it can become some sort of monthly family board game club!

Number Cross

Although I think logic is very important, it's a subject that I haven't yet managed to work into the girls' regular school schedule. Logic is important, yes, but so far reading, grammar, math, Latin, music, science, history, geography, and art are more important. I always have in the back of my mind, however, that one day, sooner or later, Sydney will no longer need formal reading instruction, and then I could replace that spot with logic.

I have mentally replaced Sydney's reading spot with probably half a dozen different theoretical subjects by now. I hope that reading frees up a LOT of time!

I do occasionally include stand-alone logic activities in Will's schedule--she has extra space set aside for enrichment activities almost every school day, and when I don't want to assign an enrichment activity based on what we're working on that day, I sometimes assign her a logic puzzle or game, or challenge her to a chess or Othello match. She loves word ladders, and recently she's been REALLY into this book, Number Cross Puzzles: A Quick and Challenging Workout for Your Brain, that a publicist gave her:

Seriously, how cool is this?!?

Ignore her backwards digits. She still does that very rarely when she's thinking VERY hard.

The format is exactly like that of a crossword puzzle, except instead of clues, you're given the numbers that will fill in the blanks. Many seem interchangeable at first, and only by trial-and-error or a LOT of logical forethought can you tell which goes where.

I tell you what--I LOVE these puzzles. Will is such a words girl, but she's quick at math, too; she just rarely takes the time to immerse herself in math. These puzzles give her a fun experience playing with numbers, which is something that I would like for her to learn to take pleasure in.

Will is also a girl who hates erasing and re-doing. If she wants to avoid that in these puzzles, then she must stretch herself to think ahead and visit all possibilities, but the puzzles are fun enough to her that even when she must erase and re-write, she sticks with it:

My biggest surprise, however, was when Sydney got ahold of this Number Cross book. I fear that I am sometimes guilty of underestimating my Syd--she's younger than her sister, and not yet fully literate, and has a different learning style from her sister's almost invisible way of picking many things up, so sometimes I forget that she's a very quick learner, too, especially in math, at which I am convinced she will catch up to and then pull ahead of her sister someday soon, but that's a story for another day.

Anyway, it had never even occurred to me to show this Number Cross book to Sydney, but she found it on her own, took it to Matt, who explained how to work the puzzles, and then sat herself down at the table and did this:

Not too shabby for the kid sister, huh? She's got a mind for numbers.

Pioneer Study: Morse Code

Remember how fascinated the big kid was by Morse code at Conner Prairie?

Well, we went back home and learned it.

Not all of it, but enough of it for the child to at least be able to call for help--

--and to tell a telegraph pen pal her name (sort of):

She wasn't interested enough in the topic, in the end, to memorize the entire alphabet, or make her own telegraph, or study electricity, or follow any of the other billion or so leads that a child who continued to be inspired by Morse code could follow, but she and her sister and I did enjoy the following resources in our little study:

• many, many youtube videos (for some reason, I really like this old-school Army video)
• this Morse code translator--this is a favorite, because I think that the kid's fascination with Morse code is mainly because she loves listening to it
• many, many books, including:

Because this big kid loves books the most, I like to use books, in particular, to build context and expand her interest in a particular topic. So while we have a couple of books just about Morse code there, I also offered books that included Morse code in with ciphers, codebreaking, and other languages.

It worked, because reading the code books got the kid interested in the Rosetta Stone...

So that's another topic to dive deeply into on another day!

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