Showing posts with label social studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social studies. Show all posts

Monday, June 4, 2018

Here's Every National Park Junior Ranger Badge You Can Earn By Mail (Updated July 2023)

July 2023: I just updated my list of Junior Ranger badges kids can earn at home. I crossed out Junior Ranger badges that are no longer available to earn from home, but I added a few new ones, too!

February 2021: I just updated my map of Junior Ranger badges kids can earn at national park sites AND my list of Junior Ranger badges kids can earn from home. Earning Junior Ranger badges is still one of Will's favorite activities!

It's been four years since the kids first discovered the Junior Ranger program at Badlands National Park, and thus began their obsession. I'm never one to let an educational experience go, so since that first thrilling day, I have deliberately organized ALL of our US vacations to include as many Junior Ranger programs as possible, and I've included all of the Junior Ranger programs that it's possible to earn by mail into our homeschool plans.

"How did you figure out where all of the Junior Ranger programs are?" you ask.

Friends, I made a giant freaking map:



Yes, that is EVERY SINGLE NATIONAL PARK SITE WITH A JUNIOR RANGER PROGRAM. I put them all in by hand. I went to every single national park's website, searched for its Junior Ranger program, and if it had one I put it on my map.

When I plan road trips, I check my map for all the national park sites with Junior Ranger programs that we could detour to, and then we detour to them. During our upcoming road trip, for instance, we're visiting Saint Croix Island and Acadia National Park, primarily for their Junior Ranger programs.

But the kids' enthusiasm for earning Junior Ranger badges is unceasing, and yet we cannot spend our entire year traveling to various national parks. If only!

So I went back through every one of those websites, and I noted every park that permits children to earn their Junior Ranger badge by mail. Most of these parks provide the badge book as a downloadable pdf for kids to complete using internet or book research (often the park's own website, but we've also found useful park videos on YouTube). They mail their completed badge books to the park, and in return, the park rangers mail them back their badges and certificates.

It's always, eternally thrilling.

The kids have been doing this for years now, and still have tons of Junior Ranger badges left to earn by mail. They've learned geography, history, and several sciences in the process, experienced the breadth and depth of the national experience in ways they haven't had the opportunity to do in person, and have an intense appreciation for the variety of cultural, historical, and geographic artifacts and monuments that must be explored, preserved, and protected.

Not every national park, or even most national parks, allow their Junior Ranger badges to be earned by mail, mind you. You'll know if one does, because it will say so on its website or on the book, and it will have the book available as a downloadable pdf and include a mailing address for the completed book to be sent to. Many parks will state, kind of pissily in my opinion, that they do NOT allow badges to be earned by mail, and that's their right, but I think everyone loses when they do that--why stifle a kid's desire to learn? Why refuse an opportunity to grow someone's knowledge and love of your national park?

Before you get your kid all revved up on earning these badges by mail, you should know that since you've got to mail the completed badge books to each park, you'll be paying a few bucks for postage and manila envelopes each time. If you're conserving resources, check out the online badges that I've noted in my list--those let kids either do or submit their work online, so you don't have to pay for either supplies or postage.

Fortunately, MANY national parks are happy to have more kids interested in them and working to learn more about them! Here are all the national park Junior Ranger badges that you can earn by mail:

NOTE: I do NOT include Junior Ranger badges in which the badge book is offered as a pdf from the national park site, but kids cannot mail them in or submit them online to earn the badge without a visit to the site. Lots of national park sites offer their badge books as pdfs so that kids can get a head start on the book (which is a great idea!), and some sites even allow kids to mail in their badge books later if they didn't have time to complete them at the park, but this is is solely for badges that kids can earn entirely from home.

 I'm also not including any of the newer "virtual Junior Ranger programs," which let kids complete some web activities and then print an image of the Junior Ranger badge. Those can be fun, but this list is solely for physical badges that kid can earn from home.

This is one of my absolute favorite activities that we do in our homeschool, but it's partly so wonderful because it's so adaptable. Sure, it can be your entire geography curriculum, or just an enrichment to another spine. You can include it in your history studies, or in the natural or earth sciences. Even if you don't homeschool, these Junior Ranger books are so fun that kids can simply DO them for fun. My kids do, and they think it's a nifty trick that I also let them count them for school!

If your kids love earning Junior Ranger badges, then they'd likely be interested in learning about the national park system as a whole--there's so much to explore there, from history and culture to geology and the sciences. Here are some of our favorite resources for learning about and exploring the national park system:


P.S. Want more obsessively-compiled lists of resources and activities for kiddos and the people who want to keep them happy and engaged? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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Thursday, May 25, 2017

She Served as a Senate Page

There are so many amazing opportunities for kids these days. When they were little and I wanted to give them a diversity of experiences, I enrolled them in gymnastics, softball, aerial silks, ballet, horseback riding, Spanish playgroup, day camp at the science museum--anything to expose them to a variety of possibilities so that they could see what they enjoyed.

Now that they're older, the opportunities are just as diverse--they can audition to perform in an actual ballet, or a community theater production, or a real fashion show. I can enroll them in firefighter training for a day, and teen police academy. They can take summer science classes at our local university, and robotics classes at the local community college. They can take online classes from a university in New Zealand. There are writing circles. Chaperoned trips to big cities and even other countries. Whatever a kid is enthusiastic about, we try to make happen. Whatever she's not necessarily enthusiastic about, I encourage her to try out.

A day as a Senate page at the Indiana Statehouse was an opportunity that Will was VERY enthusiastic about. Politics and government have always been interests of hers (the Inside Government Junior badge was the first Girl Scout badge that Will completed independently, whereas I had to flat-out make Syd do it), and it's sometimes a challenge to find her enrichment activities in those areas...

...and I just spent the last half-hour falling down the rabbit hole of researching Model UN, and then I *may* have looked at pics of Princess Kate wrangling the child attendants at her sister's wedding. I'm back, though!

Anyway, yes, what was I saying? Girl Scouts! Girl Scouts have the BEST enrichment for politics and government! There's that Inside Government badge, and then the I Promised a Girl Scout I Would Vote patch that the kids worked so hard on in the fall, and opportunities to connect with global issues while earning the World Thinking Day and Global Awareness badges, and opportunities like this one, to serve as a senate page for a day. Of course, the page program is open to all kids of a certain age, but if you apply through the Girl Scouts, then you serve on a Girl Scout day, which means that all the other pages?

Girls, as far as the eye can see!

Syd and I had plans to have a special day to ourselves in Indianapolis, but first I wanted to tag along on the morning tour of the Indiana Statehouse. It had been a few years since we've toured it, so I wanted to refresh Syd's memory... and mine:




Syd sneaked up there with the big girls.


My favorite part was visiting the House and Senate chambers. Will was still pretending that her mother was not, in fact, present (hey, I was NOT the only mom tagging along! I was also not the only mom being flat-out ignored by her Senate page), but Syd, at least, hung out with me:





Unfortunately, the tour segued into the pages' first activity in the Senate chambers, so poor Syd was trapped without even an audiobook to entertain her while all the pages spent a solid hour brainstorming and creating a bill in committees, then proposing it for amendments and voting:



Although some of the committees proposed silly bills (my own daughter's committee proposed a bill that would allow pets to hold public office as figureheads. When I asked my child WHY they had suggested such a thing, she informed me that there is a cat mayor in Alaska. I googled it. There is. His name is Mayor Stubbs), the winning proposal, that all the pages then happily spent ages debating and proposing amendments to and then voting on, was a bill that menstrual products be sold tax-free.

Imagine THAT being proposed on a page day that wasn't all girls!

The kids had so many interesting things to say about this. One kid objected, on the grounds that if there was no sales tax on menstrual products, the manufacturers would just raise the prices because people were already used to spending that much. Another kid wanted to know how much money that sales tax brought in, and what the state would have to cut with its loss. Another kid wanted to amend the bill to say that menstrual products would be offered for free in public building bathrooms, including public schools and the Statehouse. It was a fabulous debate, with kids bringing up income inequality and fair access and the environmental impact of disposable menstrual products. None of them dismissed the idea outright, because all of them, ages 12 and up, knew, at least in theory, the physical and emotional and economic costs of menstruation, and I bet they all know, by now, as well, those same costs of being female.

Imagine that being debated on a day that wasn't all girls.

While I was watching this play out with stars in my eyes, my entire life's experience as female passing before my eyes and being contrasted to the experience of these kids, my younger daughter was lying prone on a bench next to me, bored out of her skull, hopeless despair in her eyes. At one point, thankfully, a gentleman from the office area outside the Senate chambers came in and engaged her in conversation. He gave her a pin, quizzed her on Indiana's state history (in Indiana, kids study Indiana history in the 5th grade, and this is apparently license for every public official and anyone in education to quiz any 5th grader they encounter about Indiana history. You've been warned), and then gave her a pin that she cherished and bragged about and showed off for the entire day:


She can now tell you what all of those stars stand for, so there you go. Indiana history!

After the debate, I managed to force Will to acknowledge that I was her mother just long enough to take this photo--


--and then the three of us had lunchtime free to eat and explore downtown:


Behind her is the Statehouse!
Afterwards, we dropped Will off for her afternoon Senate session--with the real, live Senators!--and poor Syd finally got the special time that she'd been promised. We painted that downtown red!

We did all of Syd's favorite things:
climbing on the limestone boulders by the canal
chasing leaves
looking at stuff
visiting the Indiana State Museum--museum admission was too expensive for me, but we saw an IMAX, and hallelujah, they had this activity in the lobby, and Syd fortunately thought that it was the best thing ever
trying to entice the ducks and geese that swim in the canal


There we go. Syd got her special time, and we picked up an exhilarated, inspired Will up after a busy afternoon with the Senate. And I drove two exhausted children home through rush hour traffic, put on my jammies, and pretty much read in bed for the rest of the evening.
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Monday, January 23, 2017

Yes, We Watched Trump's Inauguration. Here's What I Thought about It

Even with a full school-day on Friday, we still made time for this:

Frankly, I'm surprised at how many people have said that they boycotted the inauguration, or purposefully kept it from their children. Do as you wish, but I think it's a mistake to abdicate your responsibility to serve as a witness to current events. Not only do the unbiased news sources (here, we're watching the inauguration on PBS,  although we listened to the pre-inauguration pomp and circumstance on NPR) need us to rely on them, lest Trump use our inattention as one more piece of evidence when he pretends that all of the news media that criticize him are unreliable, but whenever possible, we need to see these events for ourselves, unfiltered. That's how you learn your critical thinking skills. You listen and you watch.

So yes, we listened to and watched the inauguration, and then we listened to and watched Trump's horrifying speech immediately afterwards. Well, I listened in horror; the kids lost interest and mostly played with the dog: 


I'm going to begin discussing Trump's speech now. If you boycotted it, do consider reading the annotated transcript from NPR here.

Watching the speech, I was reminded of a conversation that I had with a friend years ago, about her partner's experience with Alcoholics Anonymous. "Everyone has their own bottom," she said, as she explained that each person's lowest point, the point at which they finally decide that they have to make a change, is personal to them. Only they know when they've suffered enough from their struggle that struggling, instead, to make a change is worth it.

America's struggle is with civil rights. You'd think that its bottom would have been just before the Civil War, but I'd argue that instead it was after. Perhaps it was when Americans witnessed their fellow citizens having to send black children to school with soldiers to guard them, to get them to class safely as crowds of Americans screamed death threats at those children, day after day after day. Watching their fellow citizens terrorize children on their way to school would, I hope, be the bottom that people would need to see to know that the struggle for change is worth it.

I've been so happy with the social rights and freedoms that have been steadily increasing over the decades. I want consenting adults to be free to marry the other consenting adult of their choice, regardless of the race, religion, sexual identity, or gender identity of these adults. I want children to be free to identify themselves outside of contemporary social constructs of gender and sexuality. I want everyone to be free to worship, or not worship, as their conscience dictates to them. I want everyone to have health care sufficient to allow them to keep their bodies healthy, and I want that health care not to be a financial burden to anyone.

I don't want more factories, unless people really, really want to work in them. I want everyone to have gainful employment in a field that interests them, not just in a factory because that's the work they can get. I don't want factories to stay in America OR go overseas--I want robots to do all of the factory work, and let people do something more interesting.

I don't necessarily want more bridges and roads and tunnels. I want more nature. I want more protected species. I want a clean environment, and industry that's non-polluting, and I want someone to finally start figuring out how to build a rocket ship big enough to get us all off the planet in 5 billion years when our sun begins to die. And I want to keep our planet as nice as possible until then.

I don't want to put America first. I want to put people first, then all the other living creatures, then the health of the planet as a whole. I want to put the babies dying in Syria before the adult Americans who just want their own particular moral compass to dictate how other Americans act. I want all of the children in group homes and overseas orphanages and the sex trade and in situations where they're being abused to be thriving in happy families, to have healthy bodies with ample health care, to have clean water to drink and nourishing food to eat, and to have bright futures before we even think about criticizing women with unwanted pregnancies who choose abortion.

I do want to make America great, but not "again," because I don't think that it's lost anything by outlawing slavery, establishing freedom of speech and religion, and increasing the social and political freedoms of its citizens. I want America to be great in the sense that I want the world to be great, as in a great place for everyone to live, no matter where they live. In that sense, I am hopeful after listening to Trump's negative, fearful inauguration speech, not because I'm happy to think that this is the direction that America is turning towards, because I am NOT, but in the sense that maybe America has to hit bottom again in the next four years. Maybe Americans have to experience having civil rights threatened, having the rich get even richer and the poor get even poorer, having racism and sexism and religious bigotry become daily facts for most, having those factories and bridges and roads and having to deal with the economic and environmental ramifications of them, before we can realize once again that the struggle to make real changes that make everyone's lives really better is worth it.
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Friday, October 21, 2016

American Revolution Road Trip: A Tour of the US Capitol, Etc.

Sorry, but you don't get any photos of our morning spent at the National Archives, on account of there are no photos allowed. It was for sure a highlight of the trip, though, especially for me! We got to see a 1275 copy of the Magna Carta (this was a major reference point in our History of Us spine), and the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation, AND the Constitution!!!

Some takeaways:

  1. You would not believe how faded the Declaration of Independence is. Much of it is completely illegible to the naked eye by now. This website explains why, and in fact, we have that entire NOVA episode on hold for us at the library to watch next week.
  2. Americans cannot handle not standing in line. To get into the Charters of Freedom gallery, we did have to stand in line, and the guard would let in 30 or so of us at a time. As the guard verbally instructed, AND as the display of rules clearly stated, we were not to stand in line in front of the various documents; instead, we were to simply pick our way through the gaps in an organized scrum. So what do 90% of the people do, then, as soon as we're let in? They form a long line wrapping around the gallery, blocking the exit and keeping other people from being able to enter the gallery while these particular people stood in line in front of nothing rather than simply looking at what they wanted to look at and then leaving. The older kid and I pick our way through the gaps to see the various documents, ignoring the stink-eye that we get from tourists who've been standing in line for 20 minutes for no reason. Those tourists then continue to stand behind us, leaving the document displays on our other side completely empty, until a guard takes pity on them and says to them, "There is no line. You don't have to wait."
  3. Nothing beats primary resources! Over a week later at our tour of Independence Hall, the tour guide asked which colony didn't show up to the Constitutional Convention. Both of my kids knew that it was Rhode Island, because I'd stood each of them in front of the signatures on the Constitution and had them recite the colonies while finding them on the document. Rhode Island was missing! Alexander Hamilton was there, though, and we knew where to look for him thanks to my obsessive listening to the Hamilton soundtrack.
We didn't get the White House tour that I super wanted (it's my hazy understanding that it was too close to Election Day?), but we DID score a private tour of the US Capitol through the office of one of our senators. It was especially cool because we didn't meet at the Capitol itself (although we did walk right past it)--


--but at our senator's office building. Side note: the office building had a giant sculpture that was bafflingly by Calder, and Matt I were both like, "Since when does Calder do big-ass sculptures that aren't mobiles?" I just looked it up, and there was totally supposed to be a mobile there above that giant floor piece! 

The cool thing about meeting at the office, though, isn't the installation art: it's the secret underground senator train!

Friends, there is an honest-to-gawd secret underground senator train:



There are even celebrity senator sightings--we saw Richard Lugar!

The train takes you right to the basement of the US Capitol building--

--and I was even more excited about our tour group of six when I saw the giant public tour groups milling around, so large that everyone had to wear headphones so they could still hear their guide.

Here we are in the Crypt, standing by the origin point of Washington, DC's street numbering system.

This is the old Supreme Court chamber. I'll show you the new one in a little bit!

Senate Rotunda--my color is off, but it was dim.

This is the ceiling of the Rotunda, with the most insane painting of George Washington
George Washington would NOT have approved of this depiction of himself.

Sister suffragists! See the unsculpted marble at the back left? There's also room for you!
Look whose office we found! These offices are right in the middle of public spaces, I was surprised to note. Our tour guide said that while they do have extra security at times, the Speaker of the House does, indeed, need to walk through throngs of tourists to get to and from his office.

Here's the view from the front door of the Capitol--the Supreme Court is on the left and the Library of Congress is on the right.
 We couldn't take photos of the Senate or House chambers, although we did get to go sit in the galleries and look around as much as we wanted. The gallery tickets that we were given are good for the entire season, though, so maybe the kids and I will travel back to DC and sit in sometime when they're actually in session.

After the Capitol, we zipped across the street and raced over to see the Supreme Court right before the building closed for the day.
Up the stairs...

---and to the gallery!
 
Bizarrely, a wedding party passed us as we were hanging out in front of this room. Seriously, someone was getting married in the Supreme Court! I even tried to look it up when we got home, but I can find no page for reserving a room in the Supreme Court in which to get married.

Yes, I still make the kids imitate sculptures.
 
We did get to see everything that we wanted to see in (and outside of) the Supreme Court--


--but that left no time for actually going into the Library of Congress, alas: 

Good thing it's not going anywhere, then! We'll see it some other time.

Not on the next day, though. On the next day, we went to see the pandas!!!
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