Homeschool Math: Exploring Pentominoes with Middle Schoolers

Shape puzzles are super fun and excellent for mathematical and logical thinking. I've been trying to strew more puzzles for the kids this spring, along with the sensory materials that I'm already used to offering them, and out of everything that I've offered, I think that shape puzzles have been the most popular.

And, of course, it doesn't hurt when *I* become obsessed with what I've strewn!

I happened upon pentominoes in the book Engage the Brain: Math Games, Grades 6-8. It was the first time I've seen them, and I can't get enough of them! They're diabolically simple: five squares must all share at least one side. Twelve original shapes can be made from that rule.

You can simply fiddle with them, putting them together however you like and seeing what you can make, or you can solve puzzles with them, either trying to assemble them into rectangles or squares or fit outlines that others have made. There are some easy, perfect-for-beginners puzzles out there, but we started with these more difficult ones, specifically the 6x10 rectangle with 2,339 reported solutions.

"Over two thousand solutions!" you say. "Why, that must be simple!"

I'm afraid I must disagree:

The kids and I worked and worked and worked on this! The most frustrating thing is almost solving it but for one single piece. Grr!



The younger kid developed the strategy of drawing her possible solutions rather then putting them together. Took much longer to do, but it did look lovely!

Don't tell the children, but I cheated. We were all working together at the school table, and they were so focused and intent that I didn't want to disturb them by leaving, myself, without a solution. If you homeschool, you likely know that the surest way for a child to lose interest in her work is for you to lose interest first. Go take a five-minute phone call and you'll find that the school table has mysteriously absented itself of children when you return!

I figured that the only way that I could walk away from the table without discouraging the kids is if I'd solved the puzzle, but that darn 6x10 rectangle just would not solve itself! And so I cheated. The puzzle page that I linked to earlier has its solutions diagrammed, so I began sneaking peeks at the solution, giving myself more and more pieces that were correctly placed to start with. I think I'd cheated half the puzzle before I finally managed to solve it:

And then, about ten minutes later and completely on her own, so did my thirteen-year-old.

Grr, indeed!

You can make a simple set of pentominoes using just graph paper (I'd recommend the one-inch grids), but you'll notice that we have these handy-dandy, ready-made plastic pieces:



Super-awesome pro tip: they come from our Blockus games! We own both regular Blockus and travel Blockus--AND an almost complete extra set of travel Blockus pieces--all bought from Goodwill. Blockus and Scrabble are two games that I almost always buy when I see them selling for a song at a thrift store or garage sale. I had it in my head that I really wanted to make DIY versions of pentominoes, so the younger kid and I experimented with some unfinished one-centimeter cubes that I have, and we did manage to end up with a couple of sets that I like okay:

I like that these handmade pentominoes are more tactile than a paper model, and that they're three-dimensional, so they have more utility and scope for creativity than the 2D versions. However, they're impossible to make so that they fit together as snugly as store-bought, machined pieces, and that U piece, in particular, I had to remake about four times, and after painting it I realized that I'll have to remake the purple one a fifth time--it's REALLY difficult to keep that middle space open more than a centimeter!

So in this case, I've finally resigned myself to the fact that store-bought plastic is simply better:

I had additionally been thinking that I should make a DIY magnetic version, perhaps to fit in some sort of metal tin, maybe made of Perler beads and with magnets on the backs, but then I realized: duh. I can obviously just use our TRAVEL BLOCKUS set. So that's one more problem solved!

The greatest thing about pentominoes, especially if you have gifted learners and learners at different levels, as I have both of, is how many enrichment opportunities there are with such a simple toy. There are a million ways to play with pentominoes, a million ways to structure activities, a million research projects, a million projects to solve, a million ways to incorporate them creatively into play. Here are some extension ideas and resources, some of which we've used, and some of which I've put on our to-do list for later exploration:

• Chasing Vermeer. We're listening to this right now as our car audiobook. 
• online pentominoes game. The younger kid enjoyed playing through this online game.
• lesson plan. If you need to more formally introduce the concept pentominoes, here's a full lesson plan.
• pentomino alphabet. These solutions are demonically tricky, but I think it would be really cool to cheat the solutions, then use them as templates and simply draw them and decorate them on graph paper for fun.
• printable pentomino puzzles. These didn't work great for us, because the printout diagrams didn't match the sizes of the pentominoes we already have. If you needed a quiet activity that kids could do independently, though, you could print these and the included pentomino templates. Bonus points for printing the pentominoes on magnet paper, popping it all into a metal tin, and having the travel pentomino set of my dreams!
• 3D pentomino puzzles. Here are some templates especially for pentomino sets made from blocks.

See! Now you can be obsessed with pentominoes, too!

P.S. Interested in more hands-on homeschool projects? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Our Puzzle Philosophy

We have one. It goes like this: we love big puzzles. Love them. We buy our puzzles from thrift stores or yard sales, because we only ever really want to do them once, unless they're really, REALLY excellent (I have a puzzle from the 80s that has on it every single Disney character up to that year. It's practically my favorite thing ever). And if you're only going to do a puzzle once, then you sure as hell don't want to pay full retail for it.

Of course, if you're only paying a couple of bucks for a puzzle, then you're also not going to get fussed if it's missing a few pieces. We worked on this puzzle for weeks, sure that it had several missing pieces:

It didn't!

If the puzzle does have missing pieces, then we recycle it when we've finished it. If it doesn't have missing pieces, then we tape it back really well, I put a sign on it that reads something like "No missing pieces!", and we donate it back to Goodwill.

A puzzle usually stays out for quite a while as we work on it off and on, and then gets finished over the course of one epic weekend as I get sick of it taking up our table space.

After the puzzle is packed away and gone, I'll feel happy when I walk by that empty table, thinking how nice and tidy it is without a messy puzzle all over it. After a while, though, I'll walk by that table and think to myself that I wish I had another puzzle to do. I'll start checking out the shelves whenever we're at Goodwill, searching for a decent puzzle. That's the point that I'm at right now. Somebody, somewhere in this town, is about to donate a perfectly good puzzle, perhaps one with dragons AND unicorns on it, perhaps even one that's Doctor Who-themed!

And when they do, I'll wander over to Goodwill, spy it on the shelf marked at $1.99--maybe it'll even be the half-off Color of the Week!--and I'll buy that baby and bring it home to my family in triumph. Puzzle Nights will begin again!!!

Girl Scout Detective Badge: Make a Decoder Wheel

Earning the Girl Scout Detective Badge has been super fun for Will so far, and it's involved lots of great science, logic, and reading comprehension activities for both kids. Some of the activities that Will has done, and often gotten her sister to do with her, have included:

• reading about fingerprinting, fingerprinting the family, and analyzing the patterns of our prints
• reading mysteries, noting the clues, and trying to solve the mystery before the main characters do
• reading a LOT of books about forensics, detective skills, spies, and codes
• playing online spot-the-difference games
• "spying" on the neighborhood every day (sketchy, I know, but it gets her to write without complaint!)
• exploring the science of black lights and invisible ink pens

The kids also made a really easy, really fun decoder wheel that our entire family now uses to write secret messages to each other practically every day. Here's how:

You will need:

• two sheets of cardstock (I had the kids choose colored cardstock to help them tell them apart later, but that's not necessary)
• printer
• brad--Matt and I had a fun argument in the strip mall about brads, concerning the fact that I wanted to buy a package of twenty-five brads from the craft supplies store, and Matt wanted to buy an only slightly more expensive package of one hundred brads from the office supplies store. I tried explaining to him that in a decade of crafting, this is the first time that I've ever needed brads, and even now I only needed two of them, but the per-brad price was too compelling to him, so now he's in charge of of finding 98 other uses for brads in our lives. Won't that be fun for him!

1. Visit this DIY pie charts templates page, and print out two copies of the circle divided into 26 equal parts on your cardstock. 

2. Around the outer edge of one of the circles, instruct your kiddo to write the alphabet in order, one letter per circle segment. I'm ashamed to tell you that each of my fully literate children had trouble with this task. They each sang the alphabet song many times, sometimes incorrectly (Eff you, Eleminopee!), and Syd freaked out because she all of a sudden couldn't remember which was lowercase b and which was lowercase d. Just so you feel even better about your parenting compared to mine, here are other things that my children do not know: their address, Matt's and my phone numbers, which grandmother is which, the months in order, and what month it is today (I nearly disowned Will outside the public library yesterday. They have a sundial embedded in the pavement, so if you stand on the correct month then your shadow tells the time, and Will was standing there looking at it, shouting over to me REALLY loudly, "What month is it? August? January?"). They can FINALLY tell you their ages, birthdays, home states, and grades, though, so... yay, I guess?

3. Have the kiddo find a dish that's about an inch smaller in diameter than the circles, center it on the blank circle, and trace around it:

4. Cut out both circles:

5. Write the alphabet again around the second, smaller circle.

6. Align both circles so that they're centered with the smaller circle on top, then use an awl to punch a hole large enough that the top circle can rotate after you've got the brad in.

7. Insert and fold down the brad, and you're done!

You can create a secret code by rotating the top circle until the alphabets are misaligned, and then "translating" each letter of your message from one circle to the other circle. Include a key to translation in your message--you can even hide the key in the middle of the message to make it trickier to solve, or arrange a secret family code inside a code to hide the key in plain sight in the message.

Both kids LOVE to write and solve codes using this decoder. If a kid asks me a question and the answer's not urgent (such as "What should I have for breakfast?" I HATE that question!), I'll sometimes write the answer in code ("Leftover butternut squash pasta or oatmeal or an egg salad sandwich" sounds much more fun when translated from nonsense), or if I have something fun to tell them, such as a surprise meet-up later in the day with friends, I'll write it in code and make them solve the mystery:

As a super-secret big surprise for Will's Detective badge sometime soon, Matt's planning a major mystery for the kids to solve together. I don't know if it will involve solving a crime or searching for hidden treasure, but there will be fingerprinting, code breaking, witness interviews, clues, and invisible ink messages involved.

If I take lots of photos, perhaps that will quench my urge to be all, "Oooh, a secret message!" and bump the kids aside to solve the mystery all by myself. Because doesn't it sound fun?

Okay, now I'm going to go tell Matt to make me a mystery, too!

This tute was shared with Keep Calm Craft on over at Frontier Dreams.

Work Plans for the Week of March 10, 2014: Sydney School

Just as we finally hashed out in our Family Meeting on Sunday, this week I only wrote lesson plans for Syd. Will has a math packet with a full five days of math, and she is welcome to join in with whatever lessons Syd and I are doing, but otherwise she has no requirements beyond our everyday outside activities and chores.

Will has always regularly protested her schoolwork, no matter how much I change my methods to suit her. And considering that this is a kid who reads nearly constantly, who watches documentaries for fun, who, for computer time, usually chooses something from my Educational Links page, and who is a precocious, quick learner, I'm willing to try out letting her manage her own education, to an extent. Syd, on the other hand, has no limit to her capacity for soaking in my attention, and thrives with my lessons and hands-on activities.

If this week is a success, I would like to put a little more structure into Will's studies, such as giving her book lists on specific subjects, having her write summaries of the books that she reads, guiding her to regularly write those research reports that I'm so fond of, and to complete the odd project. I also expect her to join in with most of the lessons that I do with Syd, knowing that quite a bit of her pig-headedness Independent Thinker with Leadership Potential-ness has to do with her automatic rejection of anything that anyone in authority would like her to do, and being invited and welcomed is a whole different animal from being required.

So with that preface, here's what Syd and I (and sometimes Will) are up to this week:

MONDAY: This is Birthday Week for the Girl Scouts, with Wednesday marking the organization's 102nd anniversary. Every day includes a special activity that a girl can complete in order to earn the Birthday Week patch. In our council, most of these activities this year focus on computers and animation--an odd focus, if you ask me, but we've got to sneak in those STEM skills, I guess! Yesterday, both Syd and Will worked for over an hour on that day's activity, that of creating a Google Doodle for the Doodle4Google contest. I can't help but add that Will was focused on her work and thoughtful with her design, simply after being invited to work with me and Syd. If I'd required it, there's the strong chance that she would have thrown a fit, then put in the minimum amount of effort required to meet my most minimal standards.

Syd worked on her keyboard lessons, we spent a furiously busy two hours at our weekly volunteer gig (some of the other volunteers didn't show up, so I was run off my feet--yay for good healthy activity!), there was a multiplication game and a Latin unit, and just like that, fuss-free, the kids were able to spend the rest of the day in play, and the day was actually nice enough that we could all head to the park after dinner, the kids to run around like maniacs (the wall that partly fell on Will yesterday, crushing her thumb, was now completely fallen down. I felt sick when I saw it, and wished that I'd had Matt pull it down in the first place; it could DEFINITELY have killed a kid) and Matt and I to unashamedly play bad basketball on the courts.

TUESDAY: We're eating apple pie oatmeal and leftover quiche right now, listening to "Morning Edition" while Will plays Minecraft on the computer, but in exactly three minutes, Syd and I are going to work through her Math Mammoth packet, read Pippi Longstocking out loud together, complete her next grammar unit, and get ready for a season full of bird watching (I plan to use my salary from last month for Indiana and US guidebooks for plants and animals--we're going to be naturalists this year!). I bet the kids will get into a big fight while learning how to play Pong together, but it's also another gorgeous day for playing outside, and later this afternoon Matt is taking them and a couple of their friends to something called a Girl Scout Songfest.

WEDNESDAY: I'm already worried about this horseback riding class that can't be rescheduled--Will's thumb is still awfully gory and swollen--but that's something that her instructors are just going to have to figure out. We're also going to watch a children's theatre production of Pippi Longstocking, and Syd's going to read Stage Fright on a Summer Night--all by herself!--so that both kids can attend Magic Tree House Club that afternoon.

We are also, although I haven't told the children this on account of I do not want them hysterical with excitement all freakin' day, going to make cake and ice cream from scratch in order to celebrate the 102nd anniversary of the Girl Scouts.

THURSDAY: I'd like to go on a nature walk and find animal tracks to make our plaster of Paris casts from, but it's supposed to snow again on Wednesday, so if all else fails, there's always clay and cats and seashells. There's an excellent, kid-friendly pottery book that we're going to look through together as part of Syd's Potter badge, and then there's an interesting nanosecond project to complete.

And if it *doesn't* snow, maybe our homeschool group will be able to have our first Park Day of the year. I will be SO happy to get out of that dang gymnasium!

Friday: We'll be doing some natural history of Indiana, before we starting learning about the Native Americans. There's a great video to watch, and those guidebooks that I'm going to purchase, and we'll have the whole weekend for our nice, long nature hike.

I finally decided that we'll listen to the Bible chapter of SOTW, and do the mapwork, and color in a Bible coloring book to get a little better of a handle on the stories. I've also made a mental note to introduce some interesting stories from other religions at a later time.

The kids' drawing skills have been improving just a ton lately, so I'm excited for us to do the next lesson in Drawing With Children, and a word ladder should quickly finish up the day with a little logical thinking.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I think I will send the kids to that drop-in pottery class this weekend--Syd's Potter badge isn't going to earn itself!--and we have a giant, three-movie Toy Story marathon to enjoy to round off Girl Scout Birthday Week. We might go rock climbing. We might take another hike. We need to build a better gate into the chicken yard. We need to have a Family Meeting to figure out if we're going to buy those couple of Easter Egger chicks that Will wants.

AND, speaking of Family Meetings, we'll need to see if Will's school week went well, or if it's back to the drawing board for that.

Work Plans for the Week of September 23, 2013

After spending much of the summer with work hours, and the last few weeks with a daily checklist, I am EXCITED to get back to weekly work plans!

Here's what the girls have got going on this week:


Work hours and daily checklists are more flexible than weekly work plans, but Will's been feeling rather bossed around lately, I think, and weekly work plans are VERY empowering for the independent-minded child. She likes to do what she wants when she wants, and she doesn't mind chores and other responsibilities, but she doesn't want them to interfere with her big plans for the day, all of which consist of reading books in various spots around the house, yard, local park, and library.

So unlike work hours, during which I'm chaining her to her responsibilities for two hours, or even daily checklists, which must be completed even if one is feeling quite unmotivated, or has just come home with a giant stack of new library books that day, a weekly checklist lets a kiddo read for half the day, and work for half, or read all day, and work extra-hard the next day, and still complete all her responsibilities. Wednesday and the weekends are "relaxed" homeschool days, there for a kid to catch up on any procrastinated work or to spend her time as she chooses if she's kept up. These are the days that I also entice a kid into trying out the latest educational video game that I've checked out of the library, or watching a documentary that I think she might like, by adding it to her checklist.

This week, in particular, should be a good one. We had bathroom remodeling all last week, and we'll have two giant field trips next week, but hopefully, HOPEFULLY, the bathroom will be finished on Tuesday this week, letting us have some chaos-free at-home time for the rest of those days. I'm gambling on it, too, since I put some more intensive, hands-on activities into our schedule--the kids have been great about park school and library school and Barnes & Noble school, but they're ready to put the pencil down and get their hands dirty!

I think the kids will also like that chance to earn some extra cash that I snuck in there--normally I ask them to pick up after themselves in the bathroom, as well (so many wet towels and dirty clothes abandoned on the floor, so many bath toys...), but since we don't really *have* a bathroom right now, they can instead earn some candy money in that chore spot and I can get some extra chores done. Still won't get us completely caught up on chores or result in a sparkling house inside of which a nourishing dinner has been prepared, but I might get them to clean the deck. Or scrub the downstairs bathroom. Who knows what someone will do for a quarter?

Monday: I'm trying to get us back into Latin, which we skivved off of for the summer, so we'll be reviewing for a couple more weeks, I think. Math Mammoth is still going great, so both girls will keep working through their material every day this week, but hopefully next week this bathroom will absolutely be finished so I can put some hands-on activities that reinforce their Math Mammoth material into the work plan, as well. Will's scissors skills are deplorable, bless her poor left-handed heart, so she's going to have to start really practicing that every week now, which is going to result in a flurry of gripes, I know, but the fact that we'll be biking over to the public library first thing in the morning for her to do some research on her biography fair subject, as well as to see if there are any other books on dragons that she *hasn't* read yet (there aren't), should cheer her up. The girls will probably be working on their school later into the afternoon than we usually do, because our volunteer shift takes up two full hours in the middle of the day, but I've got the supplies to make pizza, and I'm sure there's something on Netflix that we can turn into a family pizza + movie night afterwards.

Tuesday: Syd might be done with the whole Sight Word Caterpillar business by the end of October; her reading exploded this summer, and since we work on it every day, I think it's safe to say she could be through the third grade sight words--which is where our caterpillar is going to end--by then. Spelling, now... wow, if you want to watch a perfectionist child throw a fit, give them a spelling word that they don't know. Syd's still doing Spelling City every day for her spelling list, because it's all fun and games (literally), but Will's participating in the Scripps Spelling Bee this year, and has a LOT more words to get through to be competitive, so we've been mixing up her spelling memory work some--some Spelling City, some drills, some videotaping herself, etc. First Language Lessons is still taking FOREVER to get through, because although the lessons are short, Syd refuses to complete more than one per day, so I'm trying to work that into more days, because I'd like to have both girls together in Level 3 of that program by summer. The animal biology portfolios are also still incomplete, mostly because we've been so uprooted by this bathroom remodeling project that we simply haven't had the time to sit and stare at critters under the microscope, or research hamster birth, etc., lately, but at this rate, with all the time that we've spent on them, they are going to be absolutely stunning when completed.

Wednesday: In the afternoon, Will has a meeting with the Magic Tree House Club, and then I take her to aerial silks class so I can gossip with my friends there while Syd spends the last hour or so of Matt's work day with him. Before that, though, I'm eager to see what documentary the girls will choose and what computer game or ipad app they'll want to play--and if they'll let me, play, too!

Thursday: We nearly always have leftover work to make up from this day, because sometimes our Park Day meet-up with friends really does take all day, but it's almost always stuff that's fun for the girls to do with Matt on the weekends, if it comes to that, so it's not really a chore. We finally got around to taking our Drawing With Children diagnostics and I'm looking forward to incorporating these lessons into our week and hoping that they go well--Syd was NOT happy with the diagnostic, but since its purpose is to contain elements that are too difficult, in order to determine your correct starting point, it's understandable. Here's hoping for a tantrum-free Lesson 1! I want to get back into our regular Story of the World study, which we took a break from for the entire summer so that we could study the Civil War instead, so we're working through the couple of random Ancient Egypt library books that we've still got on our bookshelves to get us focused back on the time period. Will's non-systematic, games and puzzles logic study is still going REALLY well; she came home complaining that her lesson at chess club this afternoon was "boring and easy", so we're doing chess as our logic this week to maybe boost her confidence enough for her to ask her coach if she can attend the advanced lesson at the next chess club, instead of the one for little kids.

Friday: I *might* cancel most of the work on this day and take the girls to the apple orchard if the weather is nice. If it's gross out, though, it'll still be great weather inside for continuing our slow-as-molasses states study, and for doing some music enrichment. Will and I are going to get back into studying the recorder pretty soon, and I'll try to persuade Syd into joining us, so I'm not sure if I'll continue this musician study, but if the girls like it, then it'll be a keeper.

Saturday and Sunday: I DO require that the girls do some schoolwork even on the weekends, and they've got a Saturday morning science enrichment program that they love, but other plans include watching rugby, attending a picnic hosted by the food pantry where we volunteer, baking carrot cake for Matt's do-over birthday (long story), and possibly getting dragged to the loathsome indoor inflatables place that the girls adore and we hate.

And then they'll head off to campus to watch football on the campus cable TVs, and I'll make another week's lesson plans!

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!