October at Brown County State Park

You'd spend all of October there, too, if you could.

The forested hills of Indiana are famous, at least regionally, for their autumn foliage. To put it simply, they're stunning. I've been taking every free day that we can wrangle lately to drive the girls the 45 minutes to Brown County State Park to tromp around in the loveliness, making use of the Indian summer that's hit us after a few weeks of chilly temperatures. Unfortunately, my photos are negatively affected by the overcast weather signalling the frequent autumn rains that have fortunately put an end to our summer drought (on both days that I've photographed here, we finally left the State Park only when it started to rain), but hopefully you can get the idea--take what you see, amp the colors up by a power of ten, and you'll have a pretty accurate estimate of what it's like here:

So many ladybugs!

Warm enough for bare feet? Not really!

a completely nature-made leaf pile

Sydney and a rattlesnake inspect each other at the Nature Center.

 The girls are impossible to hike with--Sydney RUNS down each trail as fast as she can, while Willow stops to thoroughly inspect absolutely everything. Sydney will run back along the trail to us when she can't see us anymore, but I'm always worried that Willow will look up from her minute inspection of the underside of a rock and have no idea which way we've gone, so I mostly stick with her on the trail. This also lets me capture some priceless moments in the life of my older daughter, moments that are just SO Willow:

However, you do not have to worry that my younger daughter's antics are not being recorded for posterity. It's taken care of!


A day in the woods just about guarantees a happy, relaxing day, don't you think?

It pleases me to take the girls to the State Parks, because one of my (many!) fantasies about homeschooling before we began was just this: spending entire days out in our State Parks, letting the girls play and explore at their leisure. With the difficult times that Willow and I have been having homeschooling together lately, I feel like I'm rewarding myself when I make these dreamed-about moments happen.

Another fantasy that's on its way? The girls and I are taking one of our wild and woolly road trips next month, to North Carolina (to visit some dear friends), Virginia (to see the wild ponies of Chincoteague Island), and Washington, D.C. (to meander The Mall and visit the Smithsonian). Wish me luck in my hyperactive planning!

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.

Family Art: Chalk Pastels

Because Matt is an artist, the girls and I are exposed to a wider variety of professional-quality art materials than we otherwise might have been, and it's easy to get spoiled by Strathmore art papers and Prismacolor markers, oil pastels and Micron pens.

These chalk pastels are another set of art supplies that ostensibly belong to Matt, but that in reality get played with much more often by us while poor Matt is at work and we're at home playing. Of course, on weeknights and weekends, we ARE willing to share!

Sydney was very happily working on her own landscape, but when she spied the dragon that Matt was creating, she convinced him to trade pictures with her:

Willow worked on a scene from Robin Hood, and I goofed around for a bit then handed my picture off to Syd, too, for various improvements on my theme.

We've lately been using these chalk pastels on all our chalkboard painted interior doors, too, giving those long neglected doors something of a renaissance--I love when that happens!

This weekend I need to dig out a couple of other long-neglected and ready-for-a-renaissance playthings, I believe--the kiddos are going to be thrilled to rediscover our chalkboard building blocks and chalkboard globe!

It's the Object of the Sentence!

When I taught freshman composition, my students could earn bonus points by bringing in a clipping or a photograph of a grammatical error in print, along with their explanation of the error. Here's what I found in our local newspaper this week:

When the interrogative pronoun is the object of the preposition, the correct word choice is "whom." To self-correct, pretend that you're instead using a personal pronoun--would you use "she," which designates the subject of the sentence, or "her," which designates the object?

To make it even simpler, replace the interrogative pronoun with a personal pronoun and pick the version that sounds correct:

• Vote for she? OR
• Vote for her?

If you can remember that "who" is the same as "she" and "whom" is the same as "her," then you'll know that the correct wording is--

Vote for whom?

And yes, there ARE some other grammatical issues with that particular sentence, sigh.

Little Girls and Their Tools

For the past couple of weeks, I've had several tools set up on the back deck as I work off and on at a few projects--fused plastic bead suncatchers, homemade checkers, and an expansion set of tree blocks.

This is, of course, the best kind of invitation for my girls to also work with tools. Mind you, they can work with tools anytime they wish, but that would involve the girls getting them out, setting them up, and putting them away again. If Momma already has the mess made and the responsibility for cleaning it up later, then how much more tempting the activity becomes!

I love to watch the different ways that they explore. There's some purposeful, product-driven work, yes--

drilling a hole to hang the suncatcher

 --but mostly it's just fun to use the tools and watch what they do:

drilling and engraving in scratch wood (and the workbench!)

hammering into an old piece of tree that I keep around just for using tools on

hammering and drilling (and some sawing)

smashing up a broken plate

It's still one of my goals to set up a workshop area just for the girls, similar to the one in their old Montessori classroom--but even bigger and better, of course! After finally getting around to making their Waldorf dolls this summer, after years of thinking about it, and feeling like I almost missed the window for Willow to really enjoy her doll (it helps my heart to notice that she sleeps with it every night), I'm trying not to let myself put off these big projects that I want to do for the girls, because they simply insist on continuing to grow and change and grow out of things that they used to love. They need that second batch of hand-dyed play silks that I promised, and the PVC pipe play house, and the workshop area just for them.

I suppose that the winter to-do list could always use just a few more items...

shared on Friday's Nature Table

Subtraction with Borrowing: The Video

Chalk this up to my growing list of tips and tricks for educating an eight-year-old.

These days, half of Willow's math for the school week involves problems and projects that utilize math concepts--building mathematical models, completing word problems, playing a game, etc. On another day, she plays on a Grade 3 math app on our ipad--some review, some new work, but all quick-format, question-and-answer style. That leaves one day a week for pencil-and-paper calculations. It's a slower math education than I'd originally desired--we haven't moved into fractions yet, for instance, or much multiplication and division--but it's certainly a lot broader, is a better overall way to internalize math concepts and strategies, and I'm coming to see that Willow has a lot more patience for our pencil and paper calculations when they only take place once a week.

This week, for instance, I'm pretty sure that we got through a week's worth of subtraction understanding in this one session together. Willow came to the table already understanding multi-digit subtraction without borrowing, and having worked through subtraction with borrowing with me before, without really getting the concept down. She also has her money concepts down, so this time, we used dollar bills (hundreds), dimes (tens), and pennies (ones) to model breaking down a number for borrowing, and then Will worked some problems on the dry-erase board:

When she had the method down fairly well, I told Willow that she was going to make a video tutorial to teach others how to subtract with borrowing.

At this, the entire tenor of the lesson changed.

I did, amazingly, have a willing and focused, though fairly unenthusiastic, kiddo. I now, incredibly, had a willing, focused, highly enthusiastic kiddo who suddenly adopted a calmly pedantic tone (tell me this is NOT how I sound when I teach!) and happily filmed two takes of her video tutorial:



I had assumed (correctly, for a change) that Willow would enjoy filming a tutorial. I already knew that being required to teach the method would help her further understand the method, herself, and that's why I chose the activity.

What I did not anticipate is how valuable this video would be for me. This video shows exactly what Willow understands about subtraction with borrowing at this exact moment; how wonderful that I can look at it at my leisure, away from the lesson, and evaluate it!

Here's what I see:

1. Willow understands the procedure (she has an excellent memory for things like this), but she doesn't understand the activity beneath the procedure to my satisfaction--if she did, then she wouldn't have modeled taking a "one" away from the two in the tens place; she would have explained that you take away a ten. In another take of this tutorial, Willow jokingly read the number that is created from the subtrahend after you notate your changes--211113! This shows, I think, that she doesn't yet understand that subtraction with borrowing requires "playing" with Base Ten, so that your work isn't in Base Ten format, although your answer is.
2. Although I'm glad that Willow has a handy strategy to call upon for computation, it's clear that she STILL doesn't have her subtraction math facts memorized! To me, this just makes learning a higher level of math more difficult--not only do you have to struggle to understand the concept of subtraction with borrowing, and memorize the procedure, but you also have to painstakingly calculate all the numbers, too?!?

So thanks to this one four-minute video, I know exactly where Willow is in math, and I know exactly how to proceed:

1. Willow needs more practice using manipulatives to break down the subtrahend. Next week, I bet that she'll have a ball making a video tutorial for that!
2. Willow needs more practice with worksheets of subtraction problems--if she can't erase the digits to replace them, she may better understand the purpose of the notations during the procedure.
3. Willow needs to learn the subtraction facts! I'll be replacing one of her math project days with a day of entertaining math drills--cute Halloweeny puzzles, matching games, etc. This will actually be great, since it will be one more activity that she and Sydney can do together.

We've delved far from the third-grade Singapore math workbook that I had thought would be our scaffold for math (I think multi-digit subtraction without borrowing was where we got off the bus), but after Will had mastered these subtraction concepts and can work them mentally, we'll check back in and see what Singapore wants us to do next!