Homeschool Geography: Montessori Pin Flag Map of the Olympic Nations

Our Olympics unit study has been a huge hit with the kids, and has led to so many enriching academic experiences so far, from looking up historical footage of Olympic games on Youtube, to Will choosing to research Iran and North Korea after listening to comments that Matt and I made about them during the Olympics Opening Ceremonies, to watching live coverage of all kinds of sports the kids had never before seen.

One of the most rewarding activities so far, and one of the most enjoyable for Will, especially, to complete, has been this Montessori pin flag map that I set up for the 2014 Winter Olympic nations:

The materials for this activity are, in my cheapskate opinion, pricey, but you can re-use these pin flags and maps over the entire course of your children's educations--we've already used them enough to make them money well-spent.

For the pin flags, I culled the appropriate flags from my complete collection of Montessori pin flags. When the flat-headed sewing pins got too expensive, I switched to using steel-head pins, instead. These are less desireable, because they're more difficult for the children to push into the cork or foam board, but they're easily replaced, and it's good for developing grace and focus (not to mention strengthening those handwriting muscles, something that Will, in particular, can always benefit from).

I also now use a different storage system than I planned for in that post, but I'll go on and on about that another time.

The map keys are another resource from Montessori Print Shop. I have them laminated, with the labeled map on one side and the blank map on the other, and keep them with our set of Montessori puzzle maps.

The multi-page world map is a print-out from Megamaps--I use them ALL the freakin' time (our US map in the kitchen is also a Megamaps print-out). I printed the world map in a two-by-two page format--although bigger would be better (you'll see, in a minute, how crowded Europe inevitably is, sigh), this is the largest size that fits the big piece of foamcore board that we use, now, instead of corkboard for these maps.

I was surprised that Syd wasn't more interested in this project, since she's usually our biggest puzzle lover, but Will ADORED placing these pin flags. Seriously, she loved it. She had to be manhandled away from it when we absolutely needed her attention elsewhere. Mind you, at least for a nine-year-old, this is not a project that can be completed by the kid while you're in another room, happily minding your own business, and for that, it's not very "Montessori," but since Will isn't in a three-year classroom with a 12-year-old to help her, I played reference librarian and helped her with the research, usually giving her the continent where a particular country could be found, but also looking up anything that she was curious about. We looked up a LOT of pronunciations! We also did a lot of looking up of places on Google Earth so Will could see them in real life (I am a big proponent of having Google Earth in one hand anytime you have a paper map in the other), and plenty of talking about country borders, the Soviet Union, what happened to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and how politics works in India and Russia.

Heady stuff! My nerd heart was practically bursting with happiness.

Will spread this pin flag map work out over several days, coming back to it and focusing in for a while, abandoning it, but then being inexorably drawn back to it a little later:

Often, while watching the Olympics, a kid would recognize a flag that had been placed and go fetch it.

This pin flag map was clearly such fun to put together that I have to say that it's just bonus points that the result is so gorgeous:

We'll leave the completed map out until the Olympics Closing Ceremonies so that the kids can refer to it as needed, but then I'll spend a tedious couple of hours putting the flags back into place in their storage binder, untape the map from the foamcore board and store it back behind the bookshelf, and that's everything ready for another day!

Although perhaps I should prepare another pin flag map invitation for Will right away, since she liked this one so much. A US pin flag map *would* fit in nicely with our geography studies...

Work Plans for the Week of February 10, 2014: Project Week

It's another Project Week! The kids have been really busy lately with all sorts of projects of their own creation, from valentine crafting and rubber band bracelet weaving and clay modeling--

--to fort building and fashion design--

--and lots and lots of sewing:

My personal hopes for the week are to get some serious progress made on Syd's fashion show garment, to figure out how to use my bottle cutter, and to get started on some improvements to our chicken habitat (we need an automatic door on a timer, but for some reason I can't get the idea of a chicken yard webcam out of my head).

Right now, however, both children are hard at work on their valentines mailboxes, Syd up here with some cardboard mailers and duct tape, and Will downstairs with hammer, nails, wood, and our portable work bench. I taught her how to measure a straight line, clamp the wood to the bench, and saw through it with our hand saw, but I'm not ruling out the possibility of getting out the circular saw later.

And maybe the bench grinder?

Definitely the cordless drill.

Probably not the scroll saw, but who am I to rule out power tools?

Homeschool Art: Drawing with Children, and the Foreground

Our latest Drawing With Children lesson taught us how to draw things that are in front of or behind each other.

My favorite aspect of Drawing with Children is how PRACTICAL it is. If you're a natural at art, then the step by step method taught for doing this will undoubtedly seem silly and obvious to you. I assure you, however, that for the children, and for me--the basest, most beginning-level drawer--the instructions were exactly what we needed to do this successfully:

This lesson also marked the first Drawing with Children lesson that Will completed completely without fuss, entirely without reminders from me to focus and put forth her best effort. If Will has now internalized the self-confidence to draw without resistance, then I will be THRILLED.

Our assignment was to complete an artwork that had things in front and things behind, taking time and putting forth our best effort, including creative details and embellishments, and covering the page. Will drew an elephant robot (clear evidence that art instruction does not kill creativity, yes?):

I drew a scene inspired by our history lessons:

You can see where I totally messed up trying to put that second pyramid behind the first one, and then added patterns to all of them to cover up the mistake. This is what you're supposed to do according to Drawing with Children, and why we're asked to draw in marker, not pencil. Perfectionists, beware: we don't erase!

 Syd drew several geometric-themed "family portraits," then pretended that she was a famous artist and autographed them all for her fans (practicing her cursive all the while!), drawing Will into her play, which I'm sure helped Will have this better experience with the lesson. When she was bored with that, she decided that she liked my Egypt drawing, and copied it:

Drawing with Children is also really big on copying, and in our next art lesson (after Valentine's Day, probably, because those valentines aren't going to make themselves!) we'll be creating inspiration books and cutting images out of magazines that we can practice copying. 

Homeschool Science: The Kids Re-Articulated a Chicken Skeleton

Meet Bocky:

For their Science Fair these young ones, interested in paleontology and chickens and lovers of gigantic, complicated, hands-on projects, decided to re-articulate a chicken skeleton. It WAS a gigantic, complicated project, and required a lot more parental assistance than you'd want in a school kid's Science Fair project, but we homeschoolers tend to make of things what we want, and we wanted this big, unwieldy, hands-on, fabulously educational project, and if that meant that the daddy had to get his hands dirty, too, then so be it.

Next time we do a project like this, I will use the university library to interlibrary loan a veterinary manual, because although we basically knew what went where, and we had a few diagrams to help us, there were a LOT of bones to sort through!

Spinal cord and ribs were pretty easy (although figuring out how they were ordered was a totally different matter)--

--but chickens have more long bones than we do, and their wrist bones and finger bones look weird, and yeah, we absolutely had leftover pieces when we were finished:

 But never you mind about that, because Bocky (yes, the children named their chicken skeleton, sigh...) came together just fine regardless:

You can see where Matt wired the spinal column, which was a suggestion from the only other person in the known universe to ever re-articulate a chicken skeleton for fun, but for everything else he used hot glue. LOTS of hot glue.

It was a big challenge for the kids to not pull that wishbone! I'm pretty proud of them for showing the self-restraint necessary there. 

The beak dissolved in our lye solution, but the claws didn't. Huh!

Although this project wasn't terribly well-suited to the capabilities and attention spans of a seven- and nine-year-old, I'm still really glad that we did it. The kids got to see what a genuinely difficult, real-life challenge looks like, one without one set answer and varies avenues of solutions, not all of which pan out. We tried several methods of obtaining a chicken carcass before we finally found one. We tried several ways to make certain bones fit onto the skeleton, and still weren't sure that we'd settled on the correct one.

The kids also learned a LOT about anatomy, and a lot about paleontology, too, I think. In her presentation, Will compared the work that they'd done with the work that paleontologists do, and commented that paleontology, too, must be frustrating sometimes, but it must feel great to complete a dinosaur skeleton. In Syd's presentation, she rattled off a bunch of human bones and pointed to their locations on their plaster of Paris human skeleton as if it was no big feat--she'd been thinking about those bones and where they go on people and chickens for ages by then!

I learned that projects like this are best done in the summer or fall, and in the future, if necessary, I will put the kids off until then. I was NOT happy buying a random frozen chicken carcass from an international grocery, after our attempts to source one locally from several places came up totally empty. I really wanted a local chicken who had lived a happy life, but I just had no idea we'd not be able to get one at this time of year. I feel a pull, sometimes, between what I want to express about my own ethics and the academic enrichment that I want to give the kids--I don't want to teach the children to kill on purpose, but I want Will to have the insect collection that she wants. I don't want to teach the children that it's okay to buy whatever dead animal that they want from whatever place is selling it, without caring how that animal was treated when it was alive, but I want them to have the carcass that they want to dissect. How does one raise a future entomologist without letting her make an insect collection? How does one raise a future doctor without letting her dissect? And of course, how does one raise a human to be compassionate towards animals while letting her kill bugs and dissect factory-farmed chicken carcasses?

From now on, I figure, I let them do what they want to do, but only in the most humane way to do it. The kid wants a bug collection? I guess that's why I have seven university library books on entomology on my bookshelf right now, trying to figure out which type of killing jar works the quickest. The kid wants to dissect a rabbit next (because she does)? Fine, but we're waiting until the fall, when we can get a nice meat rabbit carcass from a local farm that we know about. 

It may take me that long, anyway, to find and decipher a veterinary textbook on rabbits. 

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Card Catalogue and Catnip Mouse

a tutorial for the card catalogue photo drawer that lives in my living room card catalogue

and a write-up of the catnip mouse that is one kitty's new favorite toy

The schools have a snow day today, which for us really just means that horseback riding is cancelled and the young ones might have some company on the sledding hill. I need to finish up my prep work for the rest of the week's lesson plans, figure out how to work my bottle cutter, get in my 20-minute run while watching Dexteron Netflix, bake and puree some butternut squash, open the textbook that I finally found to go along with the MIT OpenCourse Chemistry class that I'm taking, and start designing some checklists of Sleep-Away Camp Skills (three days with no one to nag the children to brush their teeth and hair and put on socks? YIKES!!!). 

Oooh, but the girls just ran up right next to me and began to battle to the death, so I've banished them outside; this means that I might as well grab another coffee, put my feet up, and read a little to calm my nerves first, yes?

Yes!

Our Living Room that's Full of Life

As I've been printing, organizing, and storing years' worth of family photos for my card catalogue photo drawer project, I've noticed a pretty glaring pattern:

There are a LOT of photos of my kids.

That, in itself, isn't a problem, because I do want the kids to have lots of photos of their childhoods. The problem is that there are MOSTLY photos of my kids. There are barely photos of Matt. There are barely photos of our house and yard and the places that we frequent. There are barely photos of our friends and family. There are even more barely any photos of me.

So that's one of my resolutions from now on--to use my photographs to keep a better record of our lives. And in the spirit of that resolution, I'm not just deleting this quick snapshot that I took of the living room in order to test my camera lens that's been acting wonky.

I'm annotating it!

We've definitely got plenty of mess on display. Post-lunch, the kids neglected to clear their plates. Post-art, the colored pencils are still on the table. Post-music, there's that keyboard, and it looks like it's even still on, just running the batteries down!

We've also got tons of negligent housekeeping going on. I should figure out how to make the kitties stop scratching the couch corner. I should take down the paper chain and update the kids' artwork. I should get rid of those magazines, because lord knows the last time that I looked at them.

There is life, though, in this messy, negligently maintained living room. The keyboard and laptop are from Syd's keyboard lesson. The catnip mouse is Gracie's favorite toy. The workboxes and files show just how important our school is to us.The easel is part of the kids' display for the Science Fair later that night. They built the snap circuit radio over the weekend, and haven't stopped listening to it since.

I also love the stories that this photo tells. That morning, Will colored a picture from her gargoyles and medieval monsters coloring book, then showed it to me. I noticed the caption that said it was a gargoyle from Rouen Cathedral, and exclaimed, "Hey, I've been there! And hey! So have YOU!" I got down the photo album/travel journal that I made after our trip to France when Will was eight months old, and found the page from Rouen. Wouldn't you know it, I have a photo that I took of THAT gargoyle on THAT cathedral!

So there you go, Kids. Our living room was super messy while you were growing up. You didn't clean up enough, and I didn't organize. We all spoiled the cats. But you can definitely tell that we did a lot of living here in this living room.

Work Plans for the Week of February 3, 2014: Science and Survival Kits

 MONDAY: We're still happily moving through one chapter a week in Song School Latin (I forgot to update our work plans with this week's chapters--oops!), and the kids are retaining the vocabulary well, and although *I'm* ready for them to get some grammar and conjugations/declensions in, as long as they're engaged and absorbing the material and progressing, we'll go at the textbook's pace.

The kids didn't practice their instruments as much as they should have last week, so we may have to repeat those lessons this week, but most of our time and energy today is going into rehearsal for tonight's Science Fair. Completing the re-articulation of the chicken skeleton took so much time that I'm letting the kids do much of their presentations without a written report to refer to, but this might have been a mistake, too, in that it takes, of course, much more practice to get that sort of presentation down pat.

This week, the kids are going to math class just once (I think they found the two days last week a little much), so we've got space in the schedule for a hands-on unit. Although we did pattern blocks in this space for several weeks, the kids are actively (if slowly, ahem) memorizing the multiplication tables currently, so I'll be keeping a hands-on multiplication activity there until the tables are mastered.

We already did our volunteer gig for the day, and tonight is the Science Fair!

TUESDAY: Math Mammoth and First Language Lessons Level 3 are always easy to schedule, and since I spend hours on Sundays creating these lesson plans, it's a relief to be able to have a few things that I can simply pop into place. The survival kit, however, is likely to take up quite a bit more time--the kids have to prioritize their list based on the budget I'm giving them, and then we'll actually have to go shopping for these supplies. Since I try not to run errands with the kids during the day, a mid-morning shopping trip may seem like quite the adventure!

Will still has a little work to do on her World Thinking Day badge, but Syd is finished and can choose another badge to start earning. We're also going to participate, I *think*, in the Great Backyard Bird Count, and so our science unit for a few weeks will concern birds.

WEDNESDAY: This is one of those rare weeks in which Will has to skip aerial silks entirely (although thank goodness their scheduling system is set up so that we don't have to pay for a class we're not going to attend), but both kids are going to be thrilled to learn that their LEGO club is back after its long winter hiatus.

The subject of this month's Magic Tree House Club meeting--Earthquake in the Early Morning--is well-timed with our California study, especially since I'd been considering drawing out that study a little longer to include some earthquake activities.

THURSDAY: What with ice skating with friends and having another friend over for the afternoon, this will be a short school day. We're ditching art for a couple of weeks in favor of Valentine's Day crafting, but the kids' individual studies are still continuing--I hope that Syd will start actually constructing her dress this week, and Will is going to create a manual version of one of the first computer games.

FRIDAY: The kids claim that their teacher is going to bring cookies to math class on this day, so they're pretty excited about it already. WE are not going to be having cookies here at home, but we will be scrapbooking, completing our mapwork activity for our The Story of the World chapter, and finishing that survival kit.

I'm most excited about the Olympics unit that we'll be working on throughout the Winter Olympics. I'm hoping to set up a somewhat elaborate Olympic nations pin flag work for the kids to do on this day, but that involves plenty of prep work for me this week, so it's a good thing that I always plan to be busy!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The kids have their all-day nature class this weekend, and we've also got a party at our local YMCA, chess club, and swimming with friends. But with no looming Science Fair presentations to rehearse and no chicken skeletons to re-articulate, we'll also have loads of happy downtime...

...which I need. I am going to be happy to see the backside of that chicken skeleton, I tell you what!

Go outside the Coven to Play Sports

I know that this is one of those cases in which it may be the same all over, but education politics are a CIRCUS in Indiana. We thankfully feel left outside of the fray *most* of the time, but seriously, Matt and I often joke about going to the school board meetings with a big bag of popcorn in hand, just to rubberneck the fighting.

So we've got this ridiculous school "grading" system in place, started by Tony Bennett, the former state superintendent (who, it later turned out, had tweaked this system as it was being written and revised until he arrived at one that specifically gave the school of one of his buddies a good grade), a dude who lost the recent election and instead went down to Florida to start some new education scandals there. Even though he lost the election to Glenda Ritz, the candidate that teachers and parents mostly voted for, he left behind all his buddies still in their powerful political positions, and all those buddies constantly do their best to thwart anything that Ritz attempts and to divest her of her powers. The governor invented this other group that he decided should make all of Ritz's decisions instead of her, and when she went to the meeting to protest it we all got to hear on the news this entire screaming fight that happened there. And then she wanted to file suit, but she couldn't, because she has to have a lawyer to represent her, but the only lawyer that she's apparently allowed to have is the attorney general, and he won't do it because he's in the governor's pocket.

So.

So these grades are pretty arbitrary, based pretty much just on one or two of the many standardized tests that all the kids in every grade have to take every year, although the grades are also suspiciously correlated to the number of lower income kids at each school. But if you get an F for a few years running, the state government can apparently come and take over your school and even more bad things will happen, so it makes the principals and local school boards get all sweaty and panicky, and then they do all this other crazy stuff. The Friday before a three-day weekend the other week, all the kids at one of our elementary schools came home with letters to their parents saying that starting Monday, their entire school was being restructured based on each child's score in one of those standardized tests. They were all going to move classes and change teachers, and if they hadn't done well on the test they were going to be in smaller classes and do reading and math drills all freaking day, and if they had done well on the test they were going to be in large classes and not get paid attention to, probably. A bunch of the parents went nuts, of course, but all the kids had to do this anyway, except that then the principal changed her mind and moved everyone back again after, like, a day. I'm sure there was a LOT of instruction time going on during those two days!

So this panicky and sweaty local school board, terrified of getting taken over, does NOT want to lose any state funding (although they're happy to waste that state funding on gimmicky toys for each child) OR good students, and so even though we already have a charter school and a huge community of homeschoolers in town, the board is getting very prickly about outside incursion into the educational domain. This Waldorf charter school was working on an application to get started here, but then somehow the school admins managed to whip up public frenzy about charter schools taking away all the public schools' money (which they don't, but whatever) until the charter school had to withdraw so it could revise and resubmit its application after it had figured out how to combat the crazy, and then this deaf kid who does online school spearheaded this idea that wouldn't it be nice if non-traditional schoolkids could still play sports at the local schools, and the school admins kinda went nuts again.

Now add to this background the fact that the opinion page of our local newspaper is UH-MAZING. One of the "issues of the day" the other day was about the non-traditional schoolkids, and here's my favorite section of the responses:

My favorite part about the opinion page is that at some point, you can't even tell anymore who's being sarcastic and who's not. I snapped a picture of this section, just because I LOOOVE the coven quote, but I wish I'd also thought to show you the quote from the person who thinks that this is all a conspiracy to further destroy the public schools by diluting their sports teams.

Seriously. Although I guess that's not *really* that far out of the realm of possibility coming from a state that once contained a superintendent who geared the entire state's school grading system around giving one single school a good grade, sigh.

Homeschool Math: Roll n' Multiply

My mother gave the kids Roll 'n Multiply for Christmas. I know that these super academic-sounding games can be pretty hit-or-miss--will the game be genuinely fun, or will it be just a fun-sounding trick to get kids to drill facts that they don't feel like drilling?

Roll 'n Multiply? It's genuinely fun!

The key to Roll 'n Multiply being genuinely fun is that 1) it's not torture if you haven't yet memorized the facts, and 2) there is plenty of interesting strategy involved in winning the game.

To play Roll 'n Multiply, you roll two ten-sided dice, multiply them, and place the disc that holds the product onto the game board:

If you can't figure out the product in your head, you can check the multiplication table first:

To win, you need to place four of your discs in a row, but the grid is five-by-five, so there's some tricky strategy involved in playing and blocking and building from the middle. And if you roll a multiplication equation whose product is already on the game board, it gets even more fun--if the piece is already yours, you can leave it or move it somewhere else; if the piece is your opponent's, you can TAKE it! A formerly sound offensive position suddenly becomes vulnerable. A formerly blocked row is now a potentially winning play.

Both kids, but Syd especially, LOVE this game. I had been requiring multiplication table memorization as part of the kids' memory work, but since we've received this game and I've seen how the kids enjoy it, I've been letting them play this game instead; it will definitely make mastering the tables take longer than with just rote memorization, but I think the facts will stick better, AND I don't have to deal with any multiplication table-related tantrums, so there's that.

Although this is a game that the kids will actually play together--

--and I encourage them to do that when I'm especially busy, I really like to play with each child individually:

I can draw the game out, sneakily ensuring that they get more practice with the facts. I can ask them to search their memories instead of reaching for the multiplication table. I can ask them to solve my multiplication problems as well as their own. I can agree when Syd suggests another game and then another game and then another game (My brain dying quietly inside my head each time, but that's the burden of having memorized my multiplication tables). And I can also agree that yes, we should definitely stop in the middle of our fourth game together and instead create a temporary art installation:

I want to say that I should look for a similarly enthralling game or activity for each of the kids' weekly memory work requirements, but for some things, it's just a case of quantity vs. quality. The one downside to the game is that when the kids play it, they spend a lot more time on multiplication memory work each day than they would when stuck with a table to memorize, and although that's a big advantage for what would otherwise be a very dry study, if I made all their memory work this fun, we'd spend half of each school day just doing that! So two minutes of Latin vocabulary flash cards will stay two minutes of Latin vocabulary flash cards, and two minutes of US state fact-sorting will stay two minutes of US state fact-sorting.

When the multiplication tables are memorized, however, then I can see us playing Ancient History Snap, or Periodic Table BINGO, or Hippology Jeopardy, or some other such genuinely fun, super academic game.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Homemade Award Ribbons and My Clean House

a tutorial for the award ribbons that I made for the spelling bee that I ran last weekend

and a discussion of the disinfecting wipes that I made using the homemade disinfectant recipe from Homemade Cleaners

My house is NOT clean today, but there are two happily drawing children at the table with me, Tchaikovsky streaming from the computer speakers, a boiled chicken carcass in a pot on the stove (to be dealt with by Matt + children after he gets home from work tonight), and a mass Facebook messaging dialogue going on right now to decide where my friends and I will meet up to gossip this afternoon while our kids play, so life, clearly, is going just grandly regardless.