And if you want that timeline to be HUGE and take up all the walls in your basement--well, life is made of memories!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
The kids and I are doing a short art history study on the history of photography, so it's a fine time to bring back our absolute favorite homeschool staple: the DIY timeline!!!
We still speak often about our big basement timeline, and I wish so much that we'd continued it in this house. But its magic lives on, I suppose, in the kids' happy memories, and in their eagerness, even at the ripe old ages of 15 and 17, to DIY this photography timeline with me.
I used A Chronology of Photography as my main resource for deciding upon the photos to include. I added in additional photos of LGBTQIA+ history and the history of People of Color, but looking at our finished timeline I can clearly see that I need WAY more non-Eurocentric photos, too, yikes. I also added in photos of important events, like the first Moon landing, World War 2 events, etc., because I want the kids to remember that photography, along with its artistic value, is an important way to explore and analyze history. Photographs are also cultural artifacts that speak to the time, place, and culture of their creation, so it's helpful to also source photos where those aspects are easy to identify.
To get a high-quality image of a photograph, do a Google Image search, click Tools to reveal a set of filters, then filter the Size for Large:
Anyone else obsessed with the Cottingley Fairies? The kids and I talk about these world's greatest pranksters ALL THE TIME.
Even though the photographs that I'm printing for this project are only about a quarter-page at the widest, if I'm going to the trouble to find and download an image, I like to get the largest size possible.
Because what if next year I need a wall-sized version of the Cottingley Fairies photos, hmm? What then?!?
I rename artwork images Title Artist Year, and put them in folders that I'll hopefully be able to make sense of later, ahem.
Once I had a good selection of photos representing the history of photography, I sent the images to Matt, he put them four to a page for me, and I printed them onto cardstock and cut them out:
On the back of each photo card, I wrote the work's title, artist, and year, and that was our stack of photos all ready to go!
To play a game with these, deal out a few photos to everybody, and leave another stack of photos as a draw pile. Take the top photo from the draw pile, read out its title, artist, and date, then place it down to start your timeline.
The goal of the game is to place your photos in their correct spots on the timeline. You put your photo where you think it goes, then turn it over and read out the title, artist, and date. If your photo is in the correct spot, your turn is over. If your photo is incorrect, correct it and then draw another photo. The first person to correctly place all of their photos is the winner!
The game gets harder as it goes on and you fill in all those big gaps in time!
Look at that lovely, long timeline, chock-full of fascinating moments of history and interesting artistic interpretations:
I wanted to leave our timeline on display--maybe the kids will memorize some dates, and maybe it'll allow us the space to have more conversations about some of these images--so Syd and I tacked twine to the front of our big bookshelves, then the kids transferred the completed timeline to it:
We're slightly overlapping the map for our Meso-America study--oops!
The result isn't quite the big basement timeline of our memories, but it IS chaotic and messy enough to remind us of it!
The kids are currently working on a separate photograph analysis project, so we'll definitely add those photos to this timeline, and now that it's up I might as well keep adding more photos relevant to our other studies. You know how much I love context!
And because the kid already has quite enough screen time without also studying her French vocabulary on one.
I am SUPER old-school to be so weirded out by this, I've learned. Syd doesn't even have a single physical, paper textbook in any of her public high school classes--actually, she only has a textbook at all in two of her classes! The other three classes just have... teacher-created lessons. And YouTube video links. Worksheets of unknown provenance.
Don't tell her textbook-less algebra teacher, but I checked out a high school algebra textbook (and teacher's manual!) from our local university's library, and I've been referring to it quite a lot as I help Syd with her work.
I also print out most of her biology and French readings from the digital textbooks, which I know is the most appalling misuse of my personal resources, but you know what? The print-outs don't crap out in the middle of a timed open-book test, or refuse to load when an exhausted kid is coming up on a deadline, or lag when three other members of the household are in simultaneous but separate online meetings.
Flash cards, of course, don't have nearly that level of urgency, but I like having them physical. I like having them portable, so I can torment the children with them in the car, and I like having them readily available, so I can pester the kids with a couple whenever they randomly walk by.
So here's what I do to make my kids' lives more annoying. I take a Quizlet (you can often find Quizlets already made for whatever you're studying, even for specific chapters of specific textbooks)--
--tell it that I want to print it--
--and then set it up as 3"x5" index cards that print 16 to a page:
I use a guillotine paper cutter to cut the flash cards into rows, then cut each row in half, leaving each French/English word pair connected. To finish each flash card I fold it in half and glue it with a glue stick. It becomes the perfect, pocket-sized, double-sided flash card!
So yes, super old-school and resource heavy, but to be fair, I've been happily using flash cards with the kids since they were preschoolers. Here are just some of the things that we've done with them from preschool on up:
Laminate them and trace words with dry-erase markers.
Print two copies and match them or play Memory with them.
Print them tiny, add a pin, and use them with pin flag maps.
Print them full-page and let the kids color the line art.
Print them full-page and use them as display posters.
Leave them in the car and declare the first ten minutes of the first car ride of every day "memory" time--we did this for several years!
Here are some of my favorite flash cards that we've used:
addition, subtraction, and multiplication drill.I absolutely used these with the kid when they were memorizing their math facts. Yep, they LOATHED them, but you know what? Review only took a couple of minutes every school day, and it 100% helped seal the facts into their little-kid brains.
Chinese vocabulary flash cards.For a couple of years, the kids took a Saturday morning Chinese language class. The next week, I'd find flash cards for the vocabulary that they were studying so that we could review for just a couple of minutes daily.
European countries and capitals. We used these a couple of years ago when Will was studying AP European History and Syd was studying European Geography. Now that Will is studying AP Human Geography, I'll probably bring them back out!
French alphabet flash cards. These are pretty enough to print full-page and display on a wall--which is what we do!
sharks of the world. We used these a few years ago when we did a summer shark study, and since then I've brought them out a couple of times for Girl Scout badgework.
Story of the World timeline cards. Unfortunately, the original source for these no longer exists, but you can still find bootleg copies (ahem). We used the SNOT out of these when the kids were elementary years! We glued them to our big basement timeline, as well as laminating a set to use as memory drill. Once upon a time I even found a bootleg set of all the comprehension questions from the Story of the World books set up as flash cards, and we used the snot out of those, too!
zoo fact cards. I made these during the couple of years when Will's obsession led us to nearly every zoo in the land. It would be extra useful to make a set for a zoo or aquarium that you went to often.
insect flash cards. We used these steadily for several summers in a row when the kids were younger, and I still pull them out at some point most summers, because we always end up swinging around to entomology.
sight word caterpillar. Syd has fond memories of the caterpillar that took over our walls and taught her the dolch sight words!
Last week was not a successful week, schoolwork-wise. For a variety of reasons, the kids got very little done. They did keep up well with their math, and Will kept up with grammar, but I have to create and enforce a different system for finished work this week, because both kids have begun to simply set their finished work next to their work areas, instead of bringing it to me. If I don't see it, I don't mark it, and they blithely move on the next day, and if they've made errors, those are compiled the further they advance, sigh. Will, in particular, is not going to be pleased that she somehow forgot what a linking verb is between Lessons 11 and 12, and Syd refuses to understand that drawing her angles on a separate page, and then "losing" that page before I had a chance to see it, has the same result as not drawing the angles at all--she's doing it again today!
Regardless, the week as a whole was full and happy. The kids spent loads of time preparing for a Girl Scout meeting that was an outdoor cookout feast--
--Will has been working with Luna several times a day on their homework from obedience school--
--we spent a full day at the Children's Museum, volunteering and playing, the kids spent another full day at their wilderness class, and then we spent the weekend visiting family in Michigan.
Yesterday we took lots of naps.
Because of that, you'll find the annotations for most of this week's assignments in last week's post, where they were first assigned. And honestly, we may not be much more productive this weekend--summer activities, such as this afternoon's trip to the public pool and tomorrow's all-day trip to the zoo, are peppered throughout the coming days, but heck. Why homeschool if it's not so we can go to the pool with friends, and spend the whole day at the zoo just because we want to?
Memory work for the week consists of the first eleven lines of Beowulf recited in Anglo-Saxon, standard conversions, and Greek vocabulary. Books of the Day include some sneaky selections from the kids' MENSA reading lists, a biography of Juliette Gordon Low, a leftover book on the Celts, and the rest of the One Crazy Summer trilogy for Will. Other daily work includes creative writing for Syd and cursive copywork for Will, typing practicing on Typing.com and progress on their MENSA reading lists for both, Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd, a Greek language lesson or review and a Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson or practice for both, and SAT prep on Khan Academy for Will.
And here's the rest of our week! TUESDAY: At least hiding their work from me until I find it while tidying over the weekend lets me give them exact assignments for Math Mammoth and Analytical Grammar this week--usually the kids just correct the latest lesson and complete the next lesson. Notice that for each of these, I've also instructed them to give their work directly to an adult to mark. They put their completed assignments in the face of an adult, or their work plans for the day aren't complete--mwa-ha-ha!
Most of the rest of this day's work is reassigned from last week, although Will has some extra time to work on a Girl Scout badge, and Syd has big plans to run a bake stand in our driveway before the drive-in movies this weekend (it's kind of genius, because almost every car headed to the drive-in will have to drive by her bake stand first, and if it's a nice weekend for an outdoor movie, traffic will be stalled, meaning that every car will have plenty of time to just sit there and look at her mouth-watering treats), so she'll be working on that every school day this week, in preparation for her Friday debut.
WEDNESDAY: Day at the zoo! If there's one thing that you can guarantee about my kids, it's that they're game for any and every trip to any and every zoo and aquarium that you offer them. We're going to have a wonderful time.
THURSDAY: The only new assignment on this day is more work on Girl Scout badges--with so much make-up work to do this week, we're not really able to progress in most of our units, so Girl Scouts is filling the few gaps in the school week. Good thing there's ALWAYS something to do in Girl Scouts!
FRIDAY: Since our only Medieval history assignment last week was our field trip to look at Medieval manuscripts in the Lilly Library--which was AMAZING, by the way!--we actually are free to move on in our Medieval history unit this week. I didn't spend a ton of time looking up enrichment activities or projects for this week's chapter in Story of the World v. 2, but at least the kids can get it read and get the quiz and mapwork done, and I'll have a chance for more research this week.
One of the few flaws in our Story of the World spine is its lack of dates in the text. The author doesn't want the kids focusing on memorizing dates at the expense of understanding the events and their context, but it's just one more thing that I have to add to the curriculum to better suit my older children. I'll be printing one nice copy of this timeline, and for use in a binder or as a pull-out, and the kids can help me order and construct it and then add timeline figures for what we've already studied this semester. It's no basement timeline, but I'm hoping that it will be a suitable replacement.
SATURDAY/SUNDAY: No three-day weekend this weekend! Luna has obedience school, but thankfully that's our only scheduled activity, because summer extracurriculars begin next week.
And we'll have a five-day school week for a change!
My methodology has remained consistent, because it seems to work well for my kids. We memorize dates, because they make a good scaffold for whatever context we later add, we explore biographies and living histories, and through those, we unpack a particular issue or event.
Because this study is mostly memorization, conversation, and reading, it works well both for my kid who will do anything that I ask her to, and my kid who will do nothing that I ask her to. The contrary kid has the gifts of a sharp memory, a passion for books, and a love of philosophy and debate; she can't help but learn this way. The amiable kid will power through anything that doesn't have a "correct" answer for her to freak out about, loves stories, and couldn't stop talking if I paid her to; she'd be happy adding in lots of hands-on projects, but this is also a good way for her to learn.
The first time that we studied dates (and put them on our big basement timeline--how I miss you!), Martin Luther King, Jr. was the perfect biography to explore, because, of course, he was present at so many of these crucial events. We read plenty about his life, but our main emphasis was on his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with this book in hand to help us unpack and understand that speech:
Since then, we've studied the Civil War (crucial for understanding racism and the need for Civil Rights), Native Americans (another historically disenfranchised people), and other African-American scientists and inventors (remember Will's prize-winning essay on Patricia Bath last year?), but recently, we all found ourselves in the middle of a unit on school segregation and desegregation. It started with this audiobook--
--part of the Dear America series. I've found that series spotty in how well it can keep the kids' interest, but this one enthralled them. We listened to it in the car, and even Will, who prefers books about animals to books about people, and books about magical people to books about real people, was an avid listener. So this was the living biography that inspired us.
For the dates and facts, I turned to our very own town, which sports two former colored schools. One of them, the first colored school in town, is located downtown, blocks from campus. It's now our county's history museum, so we've visited there often. Kids attended this school until the local university moved to its current spot. The Powers that Be didn't want a colored school so close to the university, so they built a new school further to the west, on the far side of the furniture factory that employed quite a lot of the town, reasoning that with the school way over there, African-Americans would have no reason to approach the university's campus.
Nice, huh?
This second colored school, the one that non-Caucasian children attended until desegregation reached our town, is now the community center that my kids, like many other homeschooled kids in our town, are in and out of multiple times each week. In fact, we're there right now--the kids are in math class, and I'm in the library getting some writing done.
A few weeks ago, I set up a time for the community center's program coordinator to talk to our homeschool group about the building's history. She discussed segregation in our town, described the layout and conditions of the school, and walked us through the former classrooms (which we've seen many times before, as one room is the library and the other is the math classroom!) to show us the surprising number of original features that still exist. The blackboards are the same blackboards that were used by the colored school! How cool is it that my kids are now part of their history?
We've very lucky in that the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, a place that we visit probably once a month, also has what I imagine has to be the world's only Civil Rights exhibit that's geared specifically to a child audience. It's called The Power of Children, and although it was a little too scary for the kids when they were younger, it's now perfect for them.
The exhibit focuses on three children famous for their experiences of discrimination. We haven't yet visited the Anne Frank section (although now that we're studying World War II, we will), but recently, the kids spent a long time exploring the sections on Ruby Bridges and Ryan White.
The Ruby Bridges section did a wonderful job personalizing discrimination for two little white girls who've never personally experienced it:
It also had plenty of artifacts that I was interested to see. I'm racking my brain, and I don't think that I've ever seen artifacts like these on display before:
Much of the exhibit focused on the inequities of segregated schools, and the inequities that Bridges faced in her first year at the integrated school:
The unfairness was abundantly clear.
The kids seemed to feel less in response to the Ryan White exhibit, partly because they were distracted by White's truly epic amount of 80s era swag. Alf! Star Wars! Max Headroom! But they had a LOT of fun filming this news report!
I, however, adored the Ryan White exhibit. First of all, I remember hearing about White when I was a kid; he was a few years older than me, and I was struck by his story. This exhibit also makes his story very real, because, of course, he's from Indiana, and the school that he was driven out of and the school that he was made welcome in are both Indiana schools. White's mother donated most of the artifacts that make his exhibit so vivid, and she's also a regular visitor and speaker at the museum.
While there are clearly people in Indiana who need to relearn the anti-discrimination, anti-bigotry ethic, as evidenced by the RFRA nonsense that my state is now undergoing, I hope that my kiddos will never be the kind of people who dehumanize another, or who stand by and let it happen.
Here are some of the other resources that we've been using in our Civil Rights studies:
I feel like I've probably been going on for years about our off-and-on, more-casual-than-not house search. We've always loved our current location, even if we don't love our current house, so for any house to ever match the convenience and joy of living across the street from a park and a mile from downtown, it would have to be just about perfect. It would have to have some acreage, partly grass and partly wooded. It should have extra space for ranging beyond our property lines. It must have privacy. It would have to have, if not necessarily more square footage, more open areas for living. It should have personality, although hopefully not a wonky and spiteful one.
It would basically have to be the house that we just agreed to buy.
I was too excited, and the kids were too wild, for me to take great pictures of our recent visit to the house that we're buying, but, for what it's worth, here are some of my favorite parts of it:
The property has woods, albeit a sort of brambly, overgrown woods that no one has tromped in for decades:
The kids and I explored some of these woods on one morning of our visit, however, and even picking our way around thorns and through brush, we already found so many treasures--a sinkhole, a creek, a jack in the pulpit, a tree growing out of the bottom of an overturned, rusted-through metal washtub.
I've assigned the kids to trail-blazing after we move in, and they've made their own plans for a secret fort where they can spend the night, and a secondary clubhouse, and also a tree house--basically their own little primeval village.
The property has fields, and a substantial amount of them, enough for a giant garden next year. The current owner says that the huge backyard used to be fenced, and horses and cows lived there, so the ground should be very fertile. My dream for it this summer is to fence in an area for a garden next year, then set the chickens free to roam inside and do all my tilling and fertilizing for me.
The property has several odd little buildings on it, including a garage, an actual smokehouse (perhaps next year's chicken coop?), an actual root cellar--
I have no idea what we'll do with this. Do you?
--and a just-about-to-fall-down 1910 general store:
Yes, I'm serious. If it stays standing this year, we can hopefully budget to get it renovated next year--or at least get the floor stabilized enough to be able to walk inside without probably having the whole building collapse on you.
We have a goodly amount of space between us and our next-door neighbors on one side, but on the other side, we do have a neighbor pretty close:
The current owners of the house had owned this drive-in since 1955. They recently sold it to another family, who plans to open it again this month. My partner and I have taken the kids to this drive-in ever since they were born--when they were babies and toddlers, they'd actually fall asleep on the drive TO the drive-in, and then we would feel like we were dating all over again, sitting on lawn chairs watching a movie with our kids sound asleep in the car behind us.
My main goal the second that we've moved in is to somehow convince the owners of the drive-in that it would be an excellent idea to let us drag our lawn chairs over to watch movies for free anytime we want. Doesn't that seem like something that you would want to let us do if you owned a drive-in?
Okay, if you're still lingering, rubbernecking our insanity, then now you get to see the actual house!
This is the foyer:
It goes across the entire back of the house, both the 1980s addition that doubles the square footage, and the original pre-1940 portion. It has doors from the driveway AND the back deck, and has two doors leading from it to other parts of the house. I had been hoping to set up an aerial silks rig for the kids (it's the biggest item on their wish list) across one of those beams, but it turns out they're just decorative. Maybe that beam up top will bear weight, or maybe we're just destined to have an aerial silks rig in the living room. The washer and dryer are on the main level in this house--yay!--so the kids can start doing their own laundry, ideally. We also have room for a bench by the front door, and the plan is to set up a system to neatly store shoes and other outerwear here.
From this foyer, there are honest-to-gawd windows that look into the original part of the house:
I guarantee that my kids will never use a door to get from one room to the other.
The kitchen has its own table!
Think of it--a table, just for eating, right in the kitchen! AND there's room for another table in the living room:
The video game stuff that my partner and the kids like could go in here, and I don't know what else. It would be nice to have a place to watch family movies, and certainly some of the children's toys will need to be stored in here. I'm not in love with the carpet, so perhaps this is the place to put the table for messy art activities, with a cheap rug underneath. This is also likely where we'll install the aerial silks rig, if it doesn't work in the foyer. When the kids are older, though, we might give this room more over just to them, so they can have a more private place to socialize with their friends.
The kids' new bedroom is a little smaller than their current one, but it has a big closet, and won't need so many shelves as they have now, because our dream is to shelve the entire family's books together in the big family room. It does have sunny windows--
--one of which leads to a concrete patio where they can play and we can have a container garden.
The kids will also have their own bathroom, thank goodness:
On the other side of the bathroom is another room just that size that I would like to use as my study/studio space. See the skylight?
I'll also need to upgrade that lighting fixture at some point, because that other window looks out onto the foyer, not the outside. I'd love to not store our homeschooling materials in this room, because that's what takes up the majority of my current study/studio, but I'm not sure where else they'd go. This house does have two humongous walk-in closets, so perhaps one closet *could* be dedicated to homeschool materials, with materials currently in use stored elsewhere?
Perhaps here, in the big family room?
We'd like to put a permanent space for the children's computer and our printer here, perhaps underneath a loft bed that we already own, with a reading space on top and large bookshelves on each side. My dream is to shelve the entire family's books together, organized and alphabetized like a library. The space is also big enough that I'd like to score a huge conference table from our university's surplus equipment store, large enough that we could have a couple of projects going at once AND have space for schoolwork. Our big dorm couch can go here, and our record cabinet. I'd also like to attractively store our large collection of games and puzzles here , and the children's creative, large-format toys that love to have space and that the adults love to jump in and play with, too--building blocks, racecar tracks, etc. The room also looks out onto a large back deck:
It will be a friendly space to live our days on in nice weather.
My partner and I plan to upgrade to a king-sized bed in our humongous master bedroom:
We'll actually have room for nightstands to hold our books, and my treadmill could go here and not be squashed for space.
This room has its own big bathroom, with a giant walk-in handicapped shower (that wants to be renovated into a large jetted tub, perhaps?) and TWO giant, walk-in closets.
So that's our house! Our hope is to be settled in by the end of May, so we can start stressing about who on earth will want to buy our current house.
Ideally, someone who really wants a hallway with handmade comic book wallpaper, and a basement that has a giant timeline on it, and kid-painted rainbows on many surfaces...
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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