My Latest over at CAGW: Fallen Tree Branch Crafts

a round-up of tree branch crafts and a tutorial to make a wooden colored pencil, crayon, or marker holder 

The latter involved--what else?--tons of wood play!

drilling holes the right size for crayons

It was a hard job, made easier when we learned how and why to drill pilot holes first.

Cutie little girl, blowing away the sawdust!

Of COURSE the big woodworking log has to get some love, too!

 I actually put away the work bench at the end of this weekend--gasp!--which, of course, didn't deter Sydney from putting together a train woodworking kit later that day, and won't deter the girls from smashing into the broken scanner that I have for them to disassemble later this week, but we've also got a lot of other important things to do in the next couple of weeks.

Jack-o-lantern carving, paper spiderweb cut-outs to create, costumes to assemble...you know, important stuff.

Let Your Kids Dismantle Your Old Appliances

Because sometimes woodwork just isn't exciting enough!

I hate, hate, HATE it when appliances and electronics break! I HATE how it's impossible to get, say, a broken inkjet printer repaired, or if you can find a shop that will repair a broken stereo for you, it's more expensive than if you just bought a new and fancier one. I hate storing a broken and irreparable piece of equipment for months until our city's next Electronics Recycling Day. I hate having to replace it.

The silver lining: I LOVE giving a piece of broken equipment and an assortment of tools to the kiddos, and watching them smash the crap out of my now-hated appliance while they try to discover what's inside. Once last year, I even put an ad on Freecycle and collected some other people's even more awesome appliances for the kids to take apart. To date, over the years I believe that the girls have taken apart the following:

• one blender
• one cell phone
• one laser printer
• one television
• one giant stereo
• three small stereos
• two portable CD players
• one immersion blender

This weekend the girls, still on their tools kick, took apart two of those small stereos noted above (Can I just say that I HATE the quality of small stereos and CD players? Your average six-year-old does handle the equipment a little more roughly than your average adult, sure, but if she can break three portable stereos and two portable CD players in a row with just normal usage, then there's something very wrong with the manufacturing, not the kid). I loosened screws when asked, but mostly I just laid out a bunch of tools and let them go:

Look at the fine motor skills in practice!

Willow was fascinated by what she discovered digging inside the speakers:

 You can do a lot with a screwdriver, but eventually the hammer and the saw come out:

The hammer and the saw got them inside the case, and wire cutters were handy to separate all the electronic components, but the girls' favorite part is always collecting all the clever little components and pieces and doo-dads that make up the equipment. Some end up as art supplies (the ink cartridges from the printer that the girls took apart last year was MESSY fun!), some end up as aspects of their imaginative play, and some end up with uses that you'd never anticipate:

We've actually had trouble finding a jump rope that's the correct length for Willow--who knew that the solution was a stereo cord?!?

Obviously, the stereo cord now lives with the other outdoor toys in their crate on the back deck, and gets as much use these days as it did when it was attached to the stereo.

Our Florida Shell Collection

I don't want to be a person who collects things and then never does anything with my collection.

And yet, up until Willow expressed a desire to study mollusks, I admit to having a plastic grocery sack down in the basement carelessly and neglectfully holding all of the shells that I took such pleasure in collecting from Sanibel Island last year. How wasteful, right? I constantly have to fight my hoarder desires, I'm afraid.

I have therefore declared this study of mollusks to be the PERFECT opportunity to deal with these shells, ideally sorting them, organizing them, setting some up for academic reference, crafting with the rest. To begin, I chose a lovely, sunny autumn day, herded the girls out to the back deck, and brought up the grocery sack of shells with the simple goal of transferring them from the bag to a nice storage bin.

How much fun we had!

I encouraged the girls to differentiate between univalves and bivalves--this turned out to be a little silly because 99.9% of our shells were bivalves, but at least I was assured that they understood the concept, after looking at the three univalves in one pile, and the five thousand bivalves like this little cutie in another:

Have I ever actually told you about our Brock Magiscope? I did a ton of research before I bought it, and I have to say that we couldn't love it more. It's the perfect microscope for kids, and the perfect microscope for field work. The kiddos looked at our shells through it--

--and then we all got to experience the singular shock of looking at sand through a microscope for the first time:

I won't spoil the experience for you if you've never done it, but instead I'll just say... wow.

One of the souvenirs that I hadn't known that I was bringing home was LOTS of sand in that grocery sack full of shells. The girls had such a fine time with the sand that you'd never know they had a little sandbox of their own, perfectly ignored for several weeks over by the side of the house. I have such happy memories of Sanibel Island that I dug out a set of plastic test tubes (thank you, Target dollar bin!), filled one with Sanibel sand, and stoppered it up as a keepsake, similar to my Pebble Beach pendant, but destined perhaps for a scrapbook or memory box, not a necklace: 

Look at how much sand had sneaked its way into this one half shell!

Eventually, most of the shells did make their way into the storage bin set aside for them:

I scattered a big handful of broken shells in our front yard garden, and the girls brushed the rest of the sand between the floorboards of the deck and down to the likely haunted space underneath:

Thankfully, we have tons of plans for this nice bin of shells:

• identifying and nicely mounting one superior example of each shell
• making sailor's valentines
• sketching and diagramming each shell
• doing TONS of cheezy kids' shell crafts (think googly eyes!)
• shell fossils
• shell mosaics

Don't worry that there are ONLY six things on that list--my Biology of Mollusks pinboard is constantly being obsessively compiled.

This post was shared with Friday's Nature Table.

Horrorgami Review: My Grim Reaper is Better than Matt's

If you're going to do some origami, or rather some projects from my free review copy of Horrorgami: Creepy Creatures, Ghastly Ghouls, and Other Fiendish Paper Projects, then you might as well make a night of it:

• husband/partner/crafting partner
• Halloween playlist streaming on Spotify
• margaritas, heavy on the tequila

Oh, and you'd better put the kids to bed first, right?

Our confidence amply fueled by tequila, Matt and I skipped straight to the Level 2 projects, fought briefly over who got the black origami paper before realizing that the book came with plenty of black origami paper, then settled down to work, interrupted regularly by Matt's inability to remember the folding symbols from the front of the book (I should have copied that page real quick, but tequila inhibits my common sense).

I am quite proud to note that I am a much better drunk origami folder than Matt is:

My hooded grim reaper is coming together nicely.

Matt's having problems with his hooded grim reaper (he did mountain folds instead of valley folds, silly boy!)

 Although this might have been hindering Matt's folding skills:

His excuse? "There wasn't enough triple sec left in the bottle for another margarita, so I thought I'd just finish it off."

 I've never really done origami before, and I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I especially like when you have to fold and unfold something to make a crease that you then use later--so tricky!

MY hooded grim reaper can stand independently, while Matt's  deformed guy has to be held up:

 It's not going to take many souls THAT way, ha ha ha!

The bats turned out pretty great, too--

--although I should have let Matt cut my bat's head for me. I don't freehand too much, and my bat now has a Kermit the Frog head:

It was a VERY fun way to spend the evening with my Matt (You're going to think we're totally lame when I tell you that we usually just watch movies at night after the kids are asleep, NOT play Scrabble or read out loud to each other or bake together or any of the other non-TV, non-sex activities that healthy couples usually engage in). I'd set it aside as an evening activity to do with only him, however, not just to lure him away from Netflix streaming for the evening, but also because I assumed the origami projects would be too difficult for the girls, and I take no pleasure in "helping" a kid complete a craft project that is so difficult for her that the result is really my work, not hers.

That being said, look who spied the book at the breakfast table the next morning (also last evening's craft table), and jumped right into her own horrorgami!

With actually only a little help from me, Sydney and Willow both folded a pretty passable ghost, a Level 1 project, drew on its ghosty face, and hung it up to look spooky.

As I watched them work, seeing how much pleasure they were both taking in their folding, I thought to my self, "Mathematics! Logic! Fine motor skills!", and I immediately pulled up our public library's web catalog and requested several children's origami books. 

But by the time those books get picked up, I think the kiddos are going to be experts on origami ghosts, and jack-o-lantern faces, and witch's hats.

My Latest over at CAGW: Witch Hats and Wooden Checkers

a tutorial for making Sydney's newspaper and cardboard witch's hat for her Halloween costume

and a tutorial for making Willow's tree branch checkers

In other news:

• I've once again been researching DIY Montessori math materials. Could this be a better solution to Willow's math resistance?
• I painted all the doors in our hallway pink, because that's the color paint that we have and it matches the hallway walls, which are painted purple.
• I also, coincidentally, have a pot of pink play silk dye on the stove right this minute.
• I'm cooking salmon for dinner tonight, even though I don't like salmon. Since I'm the sole cook, I generally only cook things that I, personally, happen to want to have for dinner, but sometimes I get suckered in by an easy recipe. Also easy? The cheese and crackers that I'LL apparently be having for dinner.
• As soon as the girls finish the comic strip that they're writing together, we're headed out the door--first to the public library, where Sydney plans to do some research on pandas, and then to Brown County State Park, where we'll be until either it rains or it's time to go put the salmon in the oven. Our fall foliage is near peak here, and I have lots of crafty, schooly plans for the acorns and colorful leaves that we'll collect.

Obviously, I'm ignoring the leaves in my own yard. I'm pretty sure that they'll eventually rake themselves if I leave them alone.

It's in the Present Perfect Tense!

I can't believe that my local newspaper did it again!

You use the present perfect tense to describe an action that began in the past and still continues, just as the kiddo in this article in our local paper, the Herald-Times, started singing in her choir years ago and still sings in that choir today.

To correctly form the present perfect, use the present tense of the verb "to have"--

I have.
You have.
She has. He has. It has.
We have.
You all have.
They have.

--combined with the past participle of the main verb. The past participle of "sing" is "sung," so the correct verb phrase is "has sung."

Voting for Homeschool

With the girls and Matt at Chess Club, I've sat myself down to do some voter research for upcoming state and local elections.

Unfortunately, my research got stopped cold when I made to just quickly double-check that I knew who I was voting for in the state school superintendent race: the Republican dude who's run the public schools into the ground for the past four years, stymied its kiddos with huge testing burdens, and tried to punish teachers who are less successful at force-feeding context-less standardized testing information into their students' brains for years on end without a break, or the Democratic chick who has the support of the teachers' union, and wants to basically spend her term undoing all of the current superintendent's requirements concerning high stakes testing and teacher evaluations?

Simple, right? Just let me check on one tiny detail, first...

Crap. Looks like she hates homeschooling.

It's common knowledge here that Indiana's public schools are struggling (Is that common knowledge for every state? I have no idea). Our governor has taken funding from them and added a bunch of standardized tests, and from what I can gather he and the superintendent have acted like assholes to the public school teachers, because all the ones whom I know personally hate them.

With all this turmoil, and all these miserable voters who teach in or have kids in the public schools, you'd think that both candidates would want to focus entirely on these glaring concerns, these many issues. Homeschooling families are a small population, and they're not complaining that their kids are illiterate, or that they don't have access to foreign language study and music programs, or that they're being over-stressed by yearly standardized tests.

But here's what the challenging candidate, Glenda Ritz, nevertheless has to say about homeschooling: it needs regulation.

Seriously? I mean, she knows that it IS regulated, right? She knows that homeschooling families are required to school for a certain number of days each year, and are required to maintain curriculum standards at least comparable to the public schools, and that these requirements can be checked on? So that if families actually were pulling their children out of school just to serve as caregivers for their grandparents (Seriously?), the homeschooling regulations already in place could be used to stop them?

So either she's ignorant about homeschooling but still willing to trash it for applause (and thanks for THAT, teachers in attendance at that discussion--I try to vote in support of y'all!), or she knows the regulations but is willing to lie about them in order to give evidence that they need to be changed.

Should I vote for the dude who's trashing the public schools but has basically left homeschooling alone for four years, or should I vote for the chick whom the public school teachers support but who may trash homeschooling, and trust that the teachers, if called upon, would not applaud further regulations but would instead support my rights the way that I supported theirs?

No, really. I'm asking you.