In Which I Write New Kids on the Block Mary Sue Fanfiction

In order to not be a hoarder (which is a losing battle, I'll go ahead and tell you), I've lately been going through some of the random piles of papers and keepsakes that I've collected over the years.

And yes, I HAVE been tossing some of it! I saved, like, napkins from places that I don't even remember. I have blurry photographs of people whose faces I don't know. Scrapbooks full of totally random pictures cut out of magazines. I have no idea what I was up to with that...

But of course there are treasures, as well. I was stopped dead this morning when I just happened upon a snapshot of Mac, sitting in front of some waterfall or other, looking pensive and perfect and so, so young. Now that snapshot gets to go on my wall, instead. I destroyed with happiness every member of this super dorky genealogy Facebook group focused on my grandparents' hometown by carefully unbinding, scanning every page  before carefully rebinding (thanks, Girl Scout Cadette Book Artist badge!), and then uploading the entire contents of my Mamma's autograph album from the years 1941-1943 to the group. You'd think it was Christmas all over again, with the enthusiasm with which my contribution was received. I'm pretty chuffed, as well, that my Mamma's album could bring so much pleasure to people still.

The most fun, though, is recovering things that were written by and for me when I was a kid. When I was in the fifth grade, I was out of school for a tonsillectomy, and the whole class made me cards. I found (and scanned, and uploaded to his Facebook timeline...) a get-well card that one boy made for me, a really elaborate card that was a combination of recipes that all involved murdering cats (you had to stir together a cup of motor oil with a cup of cat blood and its brains, etc.) and a bunch of really stressful reminders that we had a big project coming up and our teacher was going to be mad if I didn't finish. Thanks, Chris!

I found a letter that another friend wrote me a week after I left for college, in which he referenced America Online a lot (like, a LOT) and demonstrated this new thing that he'd discovered. It looked like this:

:)

Yep, my friend wrote 300 words explaining the smiley to me. Thanks, Josh!

In my own hand... or on my own typewriter, rather, because my Mamma bought me a typewriter when I was in elementary school and I used my aunt's old secretary manual to teach myself how to type... I found a lot of...

Well, it's a lot of fanfiction, I guess you'd say.

A lot of on-the-nose Mary Sue fanfiction.

A lot of on-the-nose, Mary Sue, New Kids on the Block fanfiction.

I was into New Kids on the Block the same as I was also into Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica and Bon Jovi and The Lost Boys and Top Gun, but something about New Kids on the Block seemed to lend itself especially well to fanfiction, mostly of the sort where I'm discovered by some happy accident and join the band or something. It was pretty good stuff.

Of course, in other of my works, higher adventures ensue. Here, for instance, my friend and I happen up a--gasp!--drug deal gone wrong, and it ends in a--gasp!--murder!

You can tell from my writing that I know a lot about both drug deals and murders.

Okay, this next part is pretty great. Jenika and I have run headlong through the shopping mall, through a door marked PRIVATE, and we've just slammed it shut behind us and are catching our breath:

Gasp! We've happened upon the New Kids on the Block, themselves! I have no memory of this Biscuit fellow, but in my story he appears to be some kind of handler or chaperone. I'm betting that in reality, there would have been more staff on hand to tend to the performers' needs, but whatever. I'm also pretty sure that they're not going to serve as some sort of proxy Witness Protection Program for two twelve-year-olds. I mean, did we even talk to the police? It doesn't sound like it!

But the baby blue eyes of Joey McIntyre, amiright?

So here's where the story gets kind of weird. Remember how I was into New Kids on the Block AND Metallica? Top Gun AND The Lost Boys? Well, I now seem to introduce some sort of additional me, and the two of us converse, and, well...

Yay, I'm a vampire! That always WAS my dream! Well, that and marrying one of the New Kids on the Block. So, you'll never guess what happens next:

YEAH, I showed all those junior high bitches who never believed in me! I DID, TOO marry Joey McIntyre! And I DID, TOO become a vampire! And I DID, TOO start a vampire rock band and we're really successful!

Did I mention that I was a weird and lonely child? I probably didn't have to, did I?

Finally, the Apology Letter That I Deserve

Y'all know by now that this kid and I clash. A lot.

She is a wild little hellion who doesn't care what anyone else thinks, and who doesn't see why she should have to do the smallest thing that she doesn't want to do. She's independent and fierce, with a big brain and a big heart and a big... wherever stubbornness lives in one's body. That place is VERY big within her.

We were clashing the other day, in that I was telling her what I wanted her to do, and she was interrupting me every two words to argue as hard as she could against doing whatever it was--her math, or the dishes, or picking up that piece of paper off the floor. It doesn't matter, but she was willing to die on the Hill of Not Doing It if she had to.

Every time she interrupted me I would pause, let her finish her sentence, then say, "Did you hear how you interrupted me?"

She'd say something like, "Yes, ugh, sorry, whatever."

I'd begin my sentence again, get two words in, and she'd interrupt me.

Pause. Repeat. Interrupt. Pause. Repeat.

I finally got so fed up with this that I told her that she had to write me an essay, the topic of which would be "I Shall Not Interrupt."

Oh. My. WORD! If you thought that she was upset about doing her math or the dishes or picking that piece of paper up off of the floor, then you have actually seen nothing until you have seen her upset about having to write an essay of apology!

Side note: Is it just me, that every time I hit upon a consequence that inspires that kind of reaction, in my head I go, "Mwa-ha-ha! YES!!!"? It's probably just me. I'm mean like that.

There was more arguing from her, I mean of COURSE, but I held my ground that nothing else good would happen in her life until she had written this essay, minimum 400 words. Nothing good means no screens. No library. No summer trip to Holiday World, if it goes that far. And then I eventually walked away, as she wept furious tears and screamed in outrage for me to come back so we could argue some more.

Maybe I hid in my room and had a little glass of the wine that was leftover from the night before. We were temporarily down to one car and I was home for the day, so you can't judge me.

Later, I walked by with some laundry and saw that she was, indeed, at the computer, but was just furiously typing "I shall not interrupt" over and over again. I reminded her that a good essay has a thesis statement, and evidence and original thought, and that I would only accept a single sentence written one time. Cue more outrage and fury and tears and screaming. I did the laundry and went to have a little snackie, because I eat my pain.

Much later, I walked by again, and this time she was typing away but smiling at the screen. "Oh, Lord, give me strength," I thought, but kept on walking.

Much, much later, with an honest-to-gawd smirk on her face, she presented me with this:




This little brat has just written the greatest thing that I have ever received. My favorite part is how she hits all of my sweet spots--she knows that I think I'm a crap gardener, and after our last fencing class she comforted me the whole ride home because our instructor decided to teach us the fine and subtle art of the victory yell (there are a lot of rules to this, and it's very psychologically interesting) and I immediately discovered that my victory yell actually makes me sound like I'm a freaking fairy princess of the Flower Kingdom, and I also have an awful celebratory pose that looks like I'm about to prance off the fencing strip and go to a child's tea party. And it's instinctual. I can't stop myself from doing it. And doing it repeatedly got me so frustrated that I lost all my bouts ridiculously, going for failed counter-attack after counter-attack, when really I should have been retreating and parry-riposting, because my lunge distance is too short to even think about pulling off a counter-attack. And I fell for every single stupid feint that my opponent gave me, even though he wasn't supposed to be feinting at all because the instructor hadn't added them to the drill yet. Ugh!!!

So, yeah. I liked the part about the victory yell.

I hope this kid never loses this spirit that drives her.

Twenty Years of To-Do Lists

I was cleaning the other day (I know--big shocker!), and I found many random things. For instance, why did I move house with my entire cloth diaper stash, four years after my last baby toilet trained?

It's all on ebay now, although I probably would have made a lot more off of those diapers if I'd sold them when they weren't "vintage."

I found my wedding album, which I'd been looking everywhere for since I moved. What happened to its cover, however? No idea. I guess that now I get to design a new one!

I recycled several previous generations of instruction manuals for cameras and sewing machines that I no longer have.

I found my mending queue, stuffed into a box and moved to our new house and then put onto a shelf in the back closet. It was actually hard to look at that little stack of little pants with torn knees and little shirts with ripped seams--how did I ever have children so tiny? If you sew, then one day, while your children are still small, I want you to simply whisk away your entire mending queue--yes, the whole thing!--and put it into a time capsule. Look at it again when you and your kids share a shoe size. It will make you cry.

I also found a bunch of old notebooks, and when I flipped through them, I found a bunch of old notes! I don't know why I kept all of my college notebooks, from undergrad and grad school, but I'm pretty stoked to have them now. It turns out that I used to have way better handwriting than I have now, but I didn't start to take all of my class notes in outline format until grad school. I don't think I organized my notes at all as an undergrad!

It turns out, though, that I always wrote to-do lists, and lots of them. I don't remember when I bought my first planner, but it possibly wasn't until I had kids who had extracurriculars that had to be organized. Before that, they showed up in all of my school notebooks, all over all of the pages. Here's my to-write list of topics for the Opinion column that I used to write for my undergrad newspaper, The TCU Daily Skiff:

The other Opinion writers and I measured our success by how many Letters to the Editor were received in response to us. If you REALLY hit a nerve, sometimes a reader would send a personal letter directly to you, as well, or even find out your phone number and call you directly. I got a phone call once from the Student Health Center when I wrote that they should offer the morning after pill. I received a letter, like a genuine, in-the-mail, postage stamped LETTER once, in response to I don't remember what article, but I do remember that the writer was a very devoutly Christian woman who took deep offense to something sacrilegious that I'd written. It actually could have been the same column that pissed off the Student Health Center, as a matter of fact. Anyway, this writer made her points with different colors of inks, and stickers, and a lot of underlining and circling important phrases. Interestingly, my second job (I generally had three to four at any given time to pad out my scholarship) was in the special collections library, and I did a lot of work with the Marguerite Oswald collection. She was convinced that her son had been framed for assassinating Kennedy, and her papers consisted of her fruitless research into that topic, as well as all of the mail she received, both fan mail and hate mail. Many letters of both types were from crazy people. Many of them made their points with different colors of inks, and stickers, and a lot of underlining and circling important phrases.

I was THRILLED to receive my first crazy-person hate mail! I am sure that I still have it somewhere. Perhaps I'll find it the next time I clean...

These next couple of to-do lists make me the happiest, though. The first is from the summer that I had Will. It's clear that I was in serious nesting mode! I mean, washing the windows? I have washed the windows of this current house exactly once. This task listed below, if I ever got around to it, was probably the only time I washed windows in that house:

And this one, with a date of just days before I gave premature birth to Syd, I'm sure did not get completed:

I thought I had another six weeks to bust through that independent study project!

Here's what my to-do lists look like these days: 

All those cookie booths! 

I tend to put all my bits and bobs of notes in my planner these days, whether it's my percentages for making cookie orders, or my plans for sewing Syd's fashion show garment, or lesson plans for future school units or Girl Scout badges, or even, clearly, a bit of old-fashioned math.

I also keep these planners. I don't know if anyone will ever care about them, beyond me--I certainly don't expect to have my papers in a special collections library one day!--but I do like to look through them and reminisce. Looking at my schedule of taking little ones to gymnastics, or Creative Movement, or Montessori Family Night, is a reminder of how fleeting the inconveniences of their childhood are, as fleeting as the pleasures. Seeing something to do with Pappa or Mac written down as casual as you please is a reminder to appreciate my loved ones. Whole weeks blocked off remind me of our great vacations.

Although those to-do lists with things that never got marked through still make me kind of tense to look at...

Join the 2016 Children's Pen Pal Exchange!

I'm pretty excited to be organizing a children's pen pal exchange! The inspiration is an activity in Will's Finding Common Ground Cadette Girl Scout badge: the badge asks her to get to know someone different from her, but the suggested activities seemed a little shallow to me, mostly involved with interviewing someone and then moving on with your life.

That's not really getting to know someone. I want my kid to learn how to REALLY get to know someone, because it is absolutely a skill. Think about it: in order to truly get to know someone, you have to be able to connect with them, to let them in by sharing things about yourself, not just asking them things about themselves. You have to find out not just facts and background, but what their sense of humor is like, what their spirit is. Do they have a dry sense of humor? Do they prefer to talk about books or about people? Do they like to travel? Do they tell jokes? Do they tell stories? 

That's the kind of getting to know someone that I think that kids should be practicing, and what better way to try it out than with a pen pal exchange?

My goals for this project (at least for my own children!) are to give our kids an opportunity to practice the art of letter writing, to experience the fun of sending and receiving letters, and, most of all, to make connections with other children. If you think that your kids might like that, too, then read on and see if you might light to register to be part of this year's exchange.

As part of the pen pal exchange, your child can expect to receive an introductory letter from every child in his/her small group (I’ll be passing out the names and contact info of the children in your child’s small group to each of the participants in that group; please respect this information as private, to be used only for this year’s pen pal exchange). In exchange, your child is expected to write an introductory letter that you can photocopy and mail to each of the other children in the group.

Within two weeks of the receipt of these introductory letters, your child will be expected to:

1.       Reply to the child whose name I have assigned to you. This requirement is to make sure that all the children in the group receive at least one response.
2.       Reply to at least one other letter of your child’s choosing. Your child can, of course, respond to as many of the letters as he/she likes.

Soon after that, your child should receive their own responses! There are no requirements beyond this initial introduction and response, but it’s my hope that the children will want to continue to correspond with their pen pals.

Here is the time frame of the exchange:

Sept. 10-11: I will send you the contact information of the children in your small group.

Sept. 12-18: Your child should compose their introductory letter and mail it to each of the children in their small group.

Sept. 19-Oct. 3: Your child should receive introductory letters from each of the other children in their group soon. Within two weeks of receipt of these letters, your child should respond to both their assigned partner and at least one other child of their choosing (more if they like!).

If you would like to participate, please send the following information to my email address (pumpkin.bear@rocketmail.com) by Sept.  9:

•     Your child’s first and last name
•      Your child’s age
•      three things about your child that could connect him/her to a pen pal: hobbies, interests, pets, circumstances, etc.
•      three things that your child would like to have in a pen pal: similar age, gender, specific interests, location, etc.

Please send a separate response for each of your children; it will help me keep them organized!

I’ll do my best to put children into small groups that will start them along the path to connecting with each other, and then the rest is up to them!

World War 2 Study: DIY Propaganda Posters

Other than our trip to Pearl Harbor or the live-action trench warfare from our preparatory study of World War 1, I'm reasonably confident that making their own propaganda posters has been both children's favorite activity of our World War 2 unit study.

We began, of course, with a discussion of propaganda, and the viewing of other propaganda materials--Google Image is a great one for this. Note together, as you go through the propaganda, the overarching themes, themes such as self-denial on the home front being equated with bravery on the battlefront, or the tendency to animalize the enemy, or the portrayal of the victimization of women and children as the likely consequence for one's failure. This is a great time to discuss what racism does to a society, as racism is rife in propaganda posters.

After we had defined propaganda, and analyzed propaganda, I really wanted the children to create their own propaganda. Luckily, I didn't have to completely invent that activity--here is an incredibly cool online program that allows you to do just that! You choose from a selection of existing World War 2 posters, delete the text, and write your own:

Fangirl is one of my current favorite novels. I am currently waiting VERY impatiently for my turn in the library hold queue for its follow-up, Carry on.

The kids LOVED this activity! I had planned on asking them to each create a couple of posters, so that they could get the general idea of constructing propaganda, but they both spent most of the evening on this, making a poster, asking for a parent to read/admire/laugh at their effort, and then repeating the entire process again, to great happiness and hilarity.

On the whole, Syd's efforts remained sincere and focused on my original prompt, although their creation still brought her great pleasure. They were freaking adorable, as well, and showed excellent understanding of how propaganda works, as well as how to rewrite a slogan in her own words. Alas, she worked on the oft-wonky children's computer, and if she saved them, I can't figure out where she put them. The ether, undoubtedly, or someone's email inbox whose name is one letter off from my own, perhaps. Maybe she'll make me some more sometime, if I ask her nicely.

Will's posters, now... Well... Do you ever read my words about this feral, willful, impossible child and wonder what she's like when she's not stubbornly refusing to do her math, or put on pants, or look up from her book? If so, I can assure you. 

THIS is exactly what she's like:

It's meant to continue with "local crime board," I believe. The text box only supports a certain number of characters, and both children sometimes struggled with that.

Some of her posters were just random funniness, of course, but, as both her history and her rhetoric instructor, I also noted a pleasing mix of humor made from unpacking the connotation of a piece of propaganda and rending it overt, and the use of irreverence to replace the usual sincerity that propaganda pretends, again highlighting propaganda's inherent half-truths.

The following piece, however, hit my funny bone so hard that I laughed for minutes. I cried. Hell, I practically peed myself! I still crack up about it (get it? Crack?), and every now and then, when we're someplace where we're supposed to be serious, like in the line at the bank or waiting for a concert to start, I'll lean over and whisper the following slogan softly into her ear:

Here is the follow-up campaign:


Seriously, I can't even. It's too funny.

One of the worrisome benefits of homeschooling is that it gives you a nearly unopposed license to espouse your own worldview to your children. I find it unfortunate that this is so often used to espouse worldviews that I personally don't approve of--Creationism, for example, or the Young Earth myth--but I feel that I must tell you that one of the main points that I emphasized in this lesson is that we must be watchful for propaganda in our daily lives, and we must be highly suspicious of any organization that uses it for any reason. Product manufacturers, of course, but also our military. Also our government. I instruct my children that whenever we recognize a piece of propaganda, we must ask ourselves, "Why are they trying to manipulate us? What are they not telling us?"

And now you need never wonder why my feral, impossible, willful child is also prone to making off-the-cuff belligerent political rants. She comes by it honestly, at least.

If you're interested in also raising children who are prone to political rants, embarrassingly often in public, here are most of the other resources that we used and enjoyed during this unit on World War 2 propaganda. I highly suggest that you preview, in its entirety, every single item before you give it to your children, and even then permit them to explore it only with you there to provide context and discuss its moral and ethical concerns--I also used only isolated excerpts of many of these items, and many aren't suitable for younger kids at all:

World War 2 propaganda poster examples

Compound Sentences against Humanity

After over a year and a half of constant complaining about it, I finally dropped First Language Lessons. It wasn't working for us, and by that I do not mean that it wasn't fun, because I don't personally feel that every school subject has to be the educational equivalent of a trip to the water park. No, I could handle First Language Lessons being dry and tedious.

What I couldn't handle was the eventual, slow realization that my kids weren't learning anything from it. That question and answer, rote-style, fill in the sentence diagram just wasn't getting anything into their brains. The kids weren't really able to identify or construct anything outside of FLL's scaffolding. They couldn't diagram a simple sentence of my own creation. They could barely tell the subject from the predicate! We dumped it, therefore, and I'm back to winging my own grammar curriculum. My goals are to teach grammar concepts as they come up, to continue to emphasize memorization (which FLL *was* great for, but the kids just didn't understand what they were memorizing), and to focus on identification and construction.

I want the kids to be able to identify all grammar concepts, of course, but that will eventually become pedantic. The true purpose of grammar education is gaining the ability to USE these grammar concepts, so that's what our goal should be, no matter where we are in the process.

Currently, I'm teaching compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, beginning, of course, with compound sentences. You can learn this concept as soon as you've learned nouns, verbs, subjects, predicates, and the definition of a complete sentence, and it's actually a great place to go next, because you'll get a lot of practice in identifying and creating complete sentences, and you'll learn your conjunctions.

There's a good definition of the compound sentence here, and you'll also want to have the kids memorize the short list of coordinating conjunctions. The main point to make, however (and this is an important one, because it's both crucial to differentiating a compound sentence from a complex sentence, AND almost every other elementary resource that you'll find does not teach the correct way to identify a complex sentence, so you'll be relying on this difference when you teach it yourself the correct way), is that the two independent clauses do not rely on each other. They both have equal weight, equal importance in the sentence.

The kids won't understand that when you say it. They'll need examples--LOTS of examples. That's when you play Compound Sentences against Humanity!

Cards against Humanity is similar to Apples to Apples, but more user-generated, MUCH more irreverent, and much, MUCH more fun! I'm working on a Junior version, myself, but Cards against Humanity is otherwise very much for adults.

Compound Sentences against Humanity, however, is for everyone! This game is completely user-generated, since we're making it up, so you can include independent clauses about family members and inside jokes. Try to make all the independent clauses irreverent, as well, because that's way more fun for the kids than sentences that read, "The children pet the cat," etc. Blech!

To play this game, you'll make a set of independent clause cards and a set of coordinating conjunction cards. Make them using the Cards against Humanity template here. I did not include any "nor" cards, because the independent clause structure would have to be altered, and I also took out the "for" cards after the first game, because it was too hard for the kids to correctly structure an independent clause using it. They still memorized those coordinating conjunctions, but we'll deal with their structure another time.

Here are some of my independent clauses:

• Barack Obama is my favorite superhero.
• The Boy Scouts ate at Five Guys. (This is an inside family joke, stemming from an imaginary Boy Scout/Girl Scout rivalry that we pretend exists whenever we see Boy Scouts in uniform.)
• The Nazis invaded Poland.
• Do not swallow that magnet.
• The tiny horse loved baby carrots.
• Snakes do not fly.
• I caught fire.
• Silence is my favorite music.
• Daddy only eats "real" food. (Another inside joke, originating from the hot dog incident in Chicago)

I had some longer independent clauses that I removed after the first game, since the game requires copying them down onto your dry erase board, and it was taking forever.

This game works best with three or more players, because you'll go around the circle and have one player act as judge each time. Everyone else is a player, and everyone should have their own dry erase board and dry erase marker, with a cloth nearby to erase the boards between rounds.

The judge draws one independent clause card and one coordinating conjunction card (I marked the back of the coordinating conjunction cards with a C. Later, when we add subordinating conjunction cards, I'll mark those with an S):

Ignore the fraction on the back of that card; I'm reusing old cardstock.

 

The players will then copy that independent clause onto their dry erase board, add the comma and coordinating conjunction that are required to make a compound sentence, and then create their own independent clause to follow:

When the players are all finished, they turn their boards around and take turns reading their compound sentence:

All sentences will be admired, and the judge will award a unique prize to each sentence--Most Improbable Act to Occur Underwater, for example, or Stuffed Dinosaur the Size of Your Bedroom, etc. All prizes are, of course, imaginary. Rotate to a new judge, and play begins again:

This clause was too long, so I've since removed it from the game.

You really only need to play this game long enough for everyone to have a turn to be the judge. You don't want the kids to get tired of copying and writing, and even in three rounds, that's still two unique examples that they've created and four unique examples that they've read. But you'll want to play it again often, until you can see that it's a total no-brainer for the kids to correctly construct their compound sentences.

As extra practice, you can also have the kids work independently to write compound sentences using these cards, and then to mark nouns, verbs, subjects, predicates, and conjunctions on their sentences. They can copy just the independent clause cards and mark nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, subjects, and predicates. They can diagram just the independent clause cards. They can be in charge of creating a new set of independent clause cards.

Once that's a no-brainer, AND they've memorized a textbook definition of the compound sentence AND the short list of coordinating conjunctions, you can move on to complex sentences or to diagramming compound sentences.
 

Visual Literacy: Kid-Made Horse Breed Infographics

One of my goals for this school year was to have the kids become comfortable reading, analyzing, and creating infographics.

I mean, a research essay is all well and good, but if you can't distill your idea into a one-page visual reference, then maybe you don't understand that idea as well as you thought that you did, and you're certainly not doing any favors to others who are trying to understand your idea, too.

To that end, I switched the horse breed research that the children were asked to do each week as homework for their horseback riding class from a pre-printed infographic to one that I required them to create each week from scratch. I use the free version of Piktochart for this, and although the kids have a lot of trouble uploading their images to the correct site so that they'll stay with the infographic when it's downloaded or published, on the whole it's an acceptable infographic creator that's helped them learn the basics of graphic design.

Here's an example of what they create each week. You'll see that the children (originally both in collaboration, but now only Will, since she's the only one taking horseback riding lessons) include both facts and graphics in their infographics. You'll also see that I do not require them to edit misspellings; the research and presentation itself is quite enough to get on with here:

I'm very happy that both kids are comfortable creating basic infographics now. I would like Will to begin to create more complicated, more informative designs, but it's a struggle to get her to modify her particular technique that she's got down pat and can use to whip out a complete infographic in the half an hour before we leave for horseback riding class. We'll soon be skipping a horseback riding session, however, to accommodate various summer travel and camps, so perhaps by the time that more infographics are required, I can work out a study for creating them, ideally outsourcing it to Matt, who's a graphic designer and thus really ought to be handling this entire project for me in the first place, don't you think?

Games Kids Love: Story Dice

Santa brought the kids this set of story dice for Christmas, and like most of his stocking gifts (so weird that Santa mostly brings the children educational toys...), I expected that they would mostly be put away in the playroom, and discovered and played with just every now and then. That's where the interactive book on cool things that you can do with mirrors lives, after all, still not played with, and the water clock kit, still not played with.

To my surprise, however, the kids LOVE these story dice! They play with them at least once a week (we have an indulgent amount of playthings for the children, so weekly play is a pretty good record), and even bring them out to play with during playdates, during which it seems that their friends like them, too.

To use the story dice (this may not actually be how you're "supposed" to use the story dice--I've never looked to see if there are any instructions, but this is how the kids have used them from the beginning), you simply roll them--

--and then make up a story that uses each one. Each die has little images engraved onto each side that direct the story, but are quite open to interpretation:

Syd and I played this game recently, on an afternoon that Will spent at the library. Here are some of her stories:

Cute, right?

It's been a while since we've carried on with our art lessons, although I do often remind the kids, when we're drawing together, to remember the Drawing With Children shape families and the Drawing with Children rule that we should work with mistakes instead of, as Syd would prefer, crumpling up the paper and throwing a giant fit. But anyway, these dice would also fit well into a Drawing with Children-style study, since the lines are clean and simple: you could take turns rolling the dice one by one, incorporating each into your drawing as it comes.

Ooh, or written storytelling--perhaps you could just roll one or two, and use that as a story starter. Or roll them one at a time after every paragraph, as a "What happens next?" game.

Or gross motor skills, acting, and improv--Charades can be hard for little ones, but these would be a manageable number of prompts to roll from and act out, especially if they're familiar with the dice.

Got any other good games to recommend to us? Summer is birthday season in our family!

The Horse, the Princess, and the Unicorn. Oh, and the Mule

Even though it's Monday, I'm not sharing our work plans for the week.

Gasp, I know! Has the Earth stopped turning? Do pigs finally fly?

The truth is that my fiercely independent, self-determined Will needs a break from being told what to do for half the day, and I need a break from fighting her to the death for every single task that I'd like her to accomplish. Her non-compliance has been gradually ramping up for a while to this untenable extreme, so I'm hoping that a complete break will refresh her attitude.

And the house is, at least, more peaceful since the break. Will puttered outside for the entirety of one day, then played Tokyo Jungle for eight hours the next day, followed by reading the entire Gregor the Overlander series within the next 24 hours, followed by playing outside with her sister for another half of a day. She skipped two family hikes and her Syd's gymnastics meet, BUT participated in family dinner conversation without any bad attitude, talked me into ordering FIFTEEN chicks for her to raise, and listened to me lay down the rules for the usage of her Nook (recently returned from its embargo due to her lying about its usage) without a single sigh or glare or protest.

Will's generally a pretty nerdy kid who can do things like tell you the world's percentage of coffee consumption or the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius without a blink, so there's no danger of her "falling behind," whatever she chooses to do for however long she chooses to do it. My plan is simply to give her the freedom to make her own choices, and watch her for signs that she might be ready have a little more structure--sixth-grade Math Mammoth will be waiting for her whenever she wants it. Of course, I'm also not ruling out the possibility that she'll want to determine her own courses of study from here on out; perhaps the puttering and the video games and the novels will recalibrate themselves between some other, larger projects or areas of interest. Wait and see, I suppose...

Anyway, the big bonus to this is that it gives me a way to focus school time solely on the kid who can never have enough attention. Every school day after breakfast, she and I sit down together (I always invite Will to join us, of course. One day she might!) and I write while she does her Math Mammoth, then we do First Language Lessons together, then she does spelling/handwriting, and then she reads me a book. In the afternoon, after lunch and outdoor play, I invite both kids--generally just Syd accepts--to join me in a project. Last week it was starting seeds one day, painting another day, and transplanting bulbs, which Will DID join us in, on another day. This week's projects will likely consist of making bottle cap jewelry, brainstorming Syd's upcoming birthday party, creating Mandarin vocabulary flash cards, and helping me construct and install a rain chain. It's a good active thinking, problem solving sort of time.

All that being said, here's something totally unrelated to any of that! I wanted to show you why, so often on our work plans, I ask Syd to "write a story." It's because this is what it looks like when she does:

She gets so focused on her work, and makes such elaborate compositions and illustrations, and the results are always so cute--

How could I not assign that every single week?

I made a note in my planner that while we were out and about last week (just coming from the library, of COURSE), Syd asked for my help in finding some "How to Draw" books for her. We couldn't do it while we were in the car, so I wrote it down so that I wouldn't forget it, and then I forgot it.

Until now! I guess that's what we'll do for our afternoon project today!

How to Decoupage Pencils

Didn't they turn out cute? I wasn't sure how they'd work out, if the tissue paper would stick or if they'd sharpen okay, but they're perfect!

I wanted special pencils to go with the special notebooks that I made for the kids in my Girl Scout troop, but I didn't want to buy them, of COURSE. Instead, I experimented with our stash of plain old #2 pencils until I found a way to create the specialness that I wanted all by myself.

Well, Syd helped, too.

You will need:

1. #2 pencils.
2. tissue paper. I bought a set of tissue paper squares years ago, and we love them. Use them all the freakin' time.
3. Mod Podge and paintbrush.

In some ways, this project is uber-easy. All you have to do is paint your pencil in Mod Podge, and wrap a square of tissue paper around it, smoothing it as you go. When you reach the point where the tissue paper begins to overlap itself, paint another layer of Mod Podge, then continue wrapping and smoothing:

Repeat, overlapping the tissue paper to increase color saturation or to layer colors:

The project is a little fiddly, however, so it may not be great for those with fumbly fingers. For one thing, the tissue paper is quite delicate, especially when it's saturated with Mod Podge, and rips and wrinkles very easily.

For another, no matter what they say when you buy it, tissue paper bleeds like crazy! You must be very mindful not to paint glue with a heavy hand over the top of the tissue paper, or you'll get the color on your brush and it'll show on the other colors that you're painting. Easy to wipe off, but a pain to have to keep cleaning your brush.

That being said, Syd was able to help me make several of the decoupaged pencils, although she's pretty good with fiddly projects and does not have fumbly fingers.

The pencils will sharpen and write normally once decoupaged, although I do have to adjust our old-school, wall-mounted, manual pencil sharpener two holes larger for these pencils.

With Syd's help, I was able to decoupage enough pencils for each of the Girl Scouts (and one brother), to have their own to go with the notebooks that I made each of them. Each notebook also had some little surprises in it, such as any photos that I'd taken of that kid, and her sixth-part of the ribbons that the troop earned for their World Thinking Day display and presentation:

Syd also created a scavenger hunt for Fair Trade products in the grocery store that we had a field trip to on Monday, so the notebooks were a handy place to glue them, all ready for each kid to play!

I was happy to see many of the kids taking notes during that field trip, using their brand-new notebooks and pencils, and I'm hoping that if each kid can manage to bring the notebook to each meeting and field trip, that it will be a handy place to keep notes, glue more activities, and work on projects for quite a while!

Until next Girl Scout cookie season, of course, when I'll make them each another notebook.

So Many Essays, and How to Write Them

This HBCUs essay was a bitch to write; the kid had no choice but to slog through some difficult articles to get her information, because there's very little written for children on the topic.

For some reason, January and February are THE months in which, if you want to hold an essay contest for children, you hold that contest. The two essay contests that my kid entered for Black History Month make sense, but she also participated in a Hoosier Heroines essay contest, and both kids participated in a human rights essay contest. For my older kid, that was FOUR big essays in two months!

If she wasn't comfortable belting out a research essay before (and she wasn't), she is comfortable belting out a research essay now! She's not happy about it, necessarily, but she does have the procedure down pat.

Here's how I break down these big essay assignments into manageable chunks:

DAY 1: Brainstorm your topic.

The child reads the essay prompt, highlighting the important information. We then review that prompt together, so that I can make sure that the child notices each requirement for the prompt, and what her essay should include.

If there is a choice of topics, the child will go online or to an encyclopedia and briefly research each topic. She should take into account her preferences, but also how well each topic could be made to meet the requirements of the prompt. She should make notes as she goes.

If the prompt requires creative writing rather than research, I might write a brainstorming sheet myself or pull one off of the internet to help the child organize her thoughts. I always require her, in this case, to brainstorm at least three ideas, so that she has some choice.

Many fits are thrown on this day, because kids see the entire process as overwhelming. It's very important, therefore, to not cave in; this step, like all the steps, does require focus, and it can be time-consuming, if the essay prompt offers lots of options, but it's not difficult, and kids absolutely must see that, which they only will if they complete this step. After this step, you can remind them during all the other steps that each step alone is not difficult, and the big result will come from adding each small step to the previous one.

DAY 2: Research your topic.

First, the kid should reread the essay prompt and any brainstorming notes that she wrote about her chosen topic.

Let's go to the library! I do some sneaky pre-research for this step, both so I can recall books if they're checked out, and so I can have some expectations of what the child will find. I also flip through the subscription websites that I have access to, places like Britannica for Kids or Discovery Education Streaming, so that I can point those sites out to the kid if there's anything useful that they could find there.

This day actually can be a little tricky--some of the essay topics for the contests that my older kid entered this year were really obscure; she couldn't simply check out a library book on Anthony "Kapel" Van Jones, for instance, and she had a hell of a time finding a "Hoosier" heroine. Also, nobody has written much kid-level information about Historically Black Colleges and Universities. For those, especially, my pre-research is essential--for Van Jones, I logged into our local university's Time Magazine subscription, and pointed my kid to the Indiana Magazine of History archives for her Hoosier Heroines research, and to Britannica for Kids to start her HBCUs research.

I will let a child use Wikipedia for research--I mean, of course--but I will not let her only use Wikipedia for research.

Online articles should be printed, including the bibliographic information for the essay's Works Cited page, and relevant information highlighted. Printed materials can either be photocopied and highlighted, or the child can make notes on a separate page--my older kid loathes writing by hand, so she always photocopies and highlights

This step can be split into two or even three days.

DAY 3: Write an outline.

Have the kid reread the essay prompt, and her brainstorming notes, and have her flip through or skim her research, rereading the highlighted passages and her notes.

The kid's outline should include headings for the introduction, each key point in the essay prompt, and the conclusion. My younger kid still really likes the visual nature of this sticky note outline, but for my older kid's longer essays, I usually let her dictate to me and watch as I type the information in outline-form in Microsoft Word--she's quick to point out any grammatical or punctuation errors!

I do not permit the children to simply quote their information from their source to the outline--everything, unless they want to literally quote it in their essay, must be rephrased. Otherwise, it's too easy to forget what hasn't been rephrased yet, and much too easy to plagiarize. My older kid also likes to change as little as possible when she rephrases, just putting the odd synonym into what's basically an unaltered quote, so I require her to completely cover the sentence that she's trying to rephrase, and then tell it to me--that always results in a more thoughtful construction.

This step is the hardest--I like to have the kid get all of the hard work of thinking what to say done in the outline, so that the actual writing, which can seem like the most intimidating step to a kid, becomes just a matter of putting the information into essay format. This means that the conclusion must also be tackled--here's how I teach how to write conclusions.

Here's my older kid's outline for her Van Jones essay:

And here's the one for her HBCUs essay:


DAY 4: Write the essay.

Have the kid reread the essay prompt, and her brainstorming notes, have her flip through or skim her research, rereading the highlighted passages and her notes, and have her read her outline. She may object to doing this every day, but it's crucial to stay familiar with the prompt, all the information, and the notes that she's made so far--she may need to add information or alter things in the editing stage.

You may disagree with me here, but I have my kids dictate their essays to me. They must sit or stand at my elbow, so that they can see what I'm typing, and they must tell me where to make paragraph breaks, but dictating does mean that I handle all the spelling and basic punctuation myself. The thing is, though, that rhetoric/composition is NOT the same thing as handwriting/typing; they are two different skills, and at the ages that the kids are, learning both as they are, when they focus on both tasks at the same time, both tasks suffer. A kid who is also concentrating on forming her letters correctly or  holding down the shift button for every capital letter is not able to give her full concentration to creating an effective sentence, or when to start a new paragraph. If I want a kid to practice the physical acts of writing or typing, as well, I give them copywork, or ask them to write a letter or a creative story or even a book report. But if I want the kid to be able to do her best work on a composition, I do not ask her to also physically write or type it as she creates it.

That being said, there are no big standards for a rough draft. Remember, the idea is to show the kid that this single step that seems so overwhelming and significant is really just one small step in the greater whole. I remind the kid that an essay is more than just an outline strung together, but if that's what they end up doing, then fine--we'll fix it in the editing step. If they have no paragraph breaks (although if nothing else, the outline makes these breaks obvious), then that's fine--that's fixable in the editing step. As long as the essay has some identifiable introduction, meets all the points of the writing prompt, and has some attempt at a conclusion, it 100% DOES NOT MATTER how good or bad the essay is. It's just a draft!

DAY 5: Revise the essay.

Have the kid reread the essay prompt, and her brainstorming notes, have her flip through or skim her research, rereading the highlighted passages and her notes, and have her read her outline.

Ask the kid to read her essay and make note of anything that needs to be corrected or changed. She may note some things and she may not--it's not a big deal, either way. The important thing is to make reading that essay for the purpose of revision part of the process.

Let the kid move onto something fun for a while, then you sit down with a pen and mark that essay up. Circle grammar or transition errors that you can verbally explain or she should be able to fix without comment. Write notes about things that she's done especially well--"What an interesting fact!" and "You've put this into context very well here" and "Great choice of adjective!" Also write notes about things that she should correct--"These are long paragraphs; could you break them up more?" and "What is the significance or relevance of this fact?" and "This doesn't seem to fit here; is there a better place to put it?"

If there are a LOT of things to correct, that's totally fine. Choose to only comment on the number of issues that it seems reasonable for the kid to handle, then have her complete the revision step with those comments, then evaluate it again and let her revise again.

Have the kid read your notes, and discuss each one with her--a DISCUSSION, not a lecture. Rules are rules, so grammar and punctuation errors must be corrected, but if she disagrees with you about stylistic things, and you've said your piece and she doesn't agree, then she gets her way. It's more important for her to understand that she is the boss of her own essay than for her to have a perfect essay in your eyes.

I also tend to take any attempt at revision as a successful attempt. One of the critiques that I most often make is something like, "Add context to support this/details to expand this." I need the children to not simply string facts together, but to begin to express their own thoughts about these facts. That's why, in the essays that I'll show you in a minute, you'll see lots of details and lots of context. You'll notice, though, that they aren't always totally relevant details or context. And that's okay. I suggested that the kid add context to what she said, she did her best to do what I wanted, and I'm sure as hell not going to browbeat her until she also does it exactly according to my own ideas--I might as well write my own damn essay on Maude Essig then, right? If I'm still constantly suggesting that they add details and context, then we're clearly still at the "add details and context" stage of composition instruction. When I no longer find myself having to make that suggestion for every fact, then we can start with the "is this detail relevant?" stage.

Have the kid dictate her revisions to you as you dutifully type them, then send her on her way. Even if you're doing some of these steps on the same day, like with an older kid, the next round of revisions or the next step should take place tomorrow at the earliest.

DAY 6: Make final revisions, and write the Works Cited.

For a change, the kid does NOT have to re-read all her preparatory materials first. She'll be thrilled!

The kid should re-read her essay and make any notes for revision after every round of revision. Even when you have no other corrections to make, you should nevertheless print out yet another clean copy and have her re-read it. When she looks up and tells you that she has nothing more to correct, then, you just look at her and say, "Great!"

I have my kids make parenthetical citations for facts in the bodies of their essays, so our final step is to help the kids compile all the sources that they used, alphabetize them by author, and write them down for our Works Cited page.

Taken as a whole, I know that this process seems really intense, but this really is how you write an essay--small step by small step, taking up plenty of time. The last thing that you want to do is hurry this process, because all that teaches kids is to hurry the process, and they'll end up among those college students miserably pulling all-nighters to tumble out sub-standard essays. They certainly don't learn anything that way, and they're not enjoying themselves, so what's the point?

Here are some of the essays that the kids have written in the past few months using this process. They're not perfect essays, of course, but the kids learned a ton doing them, and, even if they didn't have fun, per se, they were pleased and proud of the results, and that's the important thing: