Games! Games! Games!

When I spent some time at our homeschool group's Park Day last week griping about the hard time that the big kid and I have been having with her schoolwork lately, one of my friends suggested games as a way to sneak in the learnin' without the kids noticing.

It was a happy coincidence, then, that the first thing that the big kid did on Monday morning, on the first day of our mini Fall Break, was pull out a game to play with me!

Professor Noggin's Pets

And then... another!

Connect Four

And then another!

We played Professor Noggin, Connect Four, and Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? all before 9:00 am (yawn!).

researching what Carmen meant when she said that Ohio's state flag is a burgee

 

A break for breakfast, and then another!

Othello is one of my favorites.

 

We listened to audiobooks and my Starred songs list on Spotify as we played, sometimes singing along to our favorites, and returning, as well, to favorite games:

This kid LOVES Professor Noggin!

While I'm still not sure how to incorporate specific games into our specific fields of study (Anyone know a game that will make learning subtraction with borrowing across zeroes FUN?!?), my friend's suggestion does have me doing some more long-term thinking and planning.

Specifically, here's what I'd like to obtain:

• math games that practice operations and computation
• logic games
• games that reinforce facts about ancient history, especially the material from Story of the World
• geography games that reinforce facts about the United States
• science games related to the study of human biology
• Latin games
• trivia games at a child's level

I'll be on the lookout--and open to suggestions!--for the next two weeks, because a secretly educational but legitimately fun game for each kid would certainly be something nice to have under the Christmas tree!

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!

Trick-or-Treat 2012

The kiddos made their own costumes this year (except for that epic cardboard and newspaper witch hat, which had some mama assistance).

The big kid is always more of a minimalist, and this year sported a small amount of face paint and kitty ears as her cat costume. My little kid's efforts always seem to be grandiose: in addition to the hat, she cut up and safety-pinned the cape that was part of the big kid's vampire costume last year, and applied an extreme amount of face paint--and HAND paint!!!--

--to embody a witch:

The little kid also had a fine time with her face paint (best Christmas present EVER!) making me into a bad kitty--

--and her dad into a scary clown:

I don't know if he was INTENDED to be scary, but nevertheless...

In the course of our trick-or-treating we also encountered a Dalek, a member of Pussy Riot--

--the gas mask kid from Doctor Who (whom I required to perform for me no less than three times, bless his heart, and each time he did it I was so creeped out that I thought I was going to die), one gorilla who was almost too scary for the little kid to trick-or-treat from (but not the big kid!)--

--and just an entire neighborhood's worth of pirates, princesses, animals, and stars of stage and screen:

For a while in our neighborhood, we trick-or-treated just behind a real-life gang of teenaged hooligans. Dressed in regular clothing, I didn't realize that they were stealing all the candy from every candy bowl left on someone's porch (Do people in your neighborhood leave out a bowl of candy on their porch if they're not home or don't feel like going to the door? I've seen it in every state that I've lived in, so I'm guessing that you know what I'm talking about)--I just thought that every bowl just happened to be empty when my kids got to it right afterwards. 

It wasn't until one neighbor came out, furious, just after they'd run off and told us that those kids had stolen all his candy that we decided to take a right turn on the next block and stop following their trail of destruction.

On a positive note, the little kid, especially, received a huge amount of compliments for her costume. I love that strangers are willing to take notice of the clearly special effort that a kid has put in and then praise her for it. And on the other hand, I love that nobody teased the big kid for her very low-key costume. Different kids have different levels of tolerance for things, and I appreciate that she wasn't treated badly because she wasn't willing to completely costume herself.

The kids received everything from raisins and erasers to full-sized Snickers and Starburst. We gave out pencils and sour straws, which were graciously received, and when those were gone we gave out kid-fistfuls of pennies and nickels, which every single person from toddler to teenager was genuinely THRILLED about. Gotta love that cold, hard cash!

The day after our big adventure, we've had the smoothest post-Halloween behavior that we've ever had. The kiddos, who get to keep their candy and eat it at will, have eaten a ton, traded some, given ME some choice chocolate-y tidbits (they know how to sweeten their momma's temper!), and, blessed be, done their schoolwork without complaint!

And if THAT'S not a Halloween miracle, then I don't know what is!

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!

October School

I have the feeling that this is our last REAL month of school until January. We'll have just a week of real, regular school in November before we head out for a week-long homeschool road trip, then a week-long Thanksgiving plane trip (and then a week to recover? Perhaps!), and who knows how much will get accomplished in December before I throw my hands up for the month and just give the girls up to ornament crafting and endless letters to Santa?

Fortunately, it feels as if we got a lot done in October, even if it never actually feels like we get anything done  on any given day:

Chess

Will and I have been playing chess quite happily for logic study. Will goes to a scholastic chess club twice a month, and in between we've been watching episodes of Elliott's Chess School and practicing the strategies together--

--and just playing! I've discovered how to make the game a fair fight by handicapping myself--

--and so Will has started to get in some legitimate checkmates against me.

math

Variety is the spice of life, and thus math has gotten a (little) better this month. Both girls are doing memory drills once a week--

candy corn arithmetic puzzle

--and a variety of problems on grade-level math apps once a week--

--as well as learning new stuff. Will and I are in the home stretch with subtraction with borrowing (the last thing being borrowing across zeros), and Syd is quite ready to move on to big number building and multi-digit addition. Before we start that, however, and before Will starts multiplication, we're zipping through this little unit:

I've built a couple of Montessori-style time telling works, and I don't think it will take long for the girls to get the process down pat.

I really want MORE math, though, so I've started adding a second math work every school day--these math journals:

I set out the prompts a couple of weeks at a time, and I try to make each prompt very different, while also requiring a review or application of a skill that's already been mastered. This way, the journal prompts are fairly quick to complete, fairly fun, and can be done independently, including being done on the bleachers while one kid takes her ice skating class, or on the bench outside the ballet studio while the other kid dances.

music

We've still been having fun with mom-led lessons on the keyboard, violin, guitar, and recorder:

Each week each kid picks if she wants to do a music lesson that week (they usually do), with a week's worth of daily practice to follow and a "recital" at the end of the week. It's working really well so far!

Latin

Willow and I are still exploring in this subject. She's pretty resistant to conjugations and declensions at the moment, so we've been doing a lot of playing lately, trying to find a fun way to learn. Will did a couple of lessons on Mango Latin, which we can access through our public library--

--but ultimately decided that she doesn't like this program, either. I may switch to doing Latin only once a week, which will mean SLOOOOW progress, but progress nonetheless.

history

There has been a lot of historical fiction lately, with Syd playing her Little House and American Girl audiobooks from the library on the family stereo. We've also FINALLY moved into chapter two of Story of the World, where we may stay for the rest of the year, frankly, since who would ever want to leave the Egyptians?

For SOTW, we listen to the chapter on audiobook (while the girls do various odd things to occupy their hands, sigh)--

--answer the quiz questions, review the old quiz questions, do the mapwork, and then move on to the projects... so many projects!

reading

Hallelujah, Sydney is now able to read some of the easier Dr. Seuss titles! She and I are also still reading Bob books together, AND I've just discovered the new Electric Company on Netflix--how did I not know about that show?!? 

One of the interesting things that I've noticed about Sydney is that she can actually read far more than she thinks she can read--she often brings me things like instructions for something, or comic strips, to read for her that she could actually read for herself... and DOES after I ask her to! Although Will doesn't really like WeGiveBooks.org anymore because she claims that the book selection is too baby-ish, I have Syd spend some time on the site once a week or so:

She's so content spending long periods of time "looking at" books like these that I figure that she must be reading them, whether she realizes it or not.

Will and I stalled out on grammar this month. She's been so resistant to schoolwork lately that I've cut way down on even offering dry subjects. Maybe I'll sneak the rest of nouns and verbs in during the next two months, when sit-down schoolwork is definitely going to seem a novelty.

science

I keep meaning to start the entire unit on human biology that I've put together, but we got pleasantly distracted by autumn, which mean lots of time in nature, lots of leaf work--

--and lots of field trips to goof around with apples and pumpkins and tons of other kids.

Starting tomorrow, our entire schoolwork will revolve around preparations for our giant road trip in a couple of weeks--we'll read the Misty of Chincoteague books, learn about the monuments along the National Mall, and figure out what we're going to see in the Smithsonian museums. The girls are going to finish learning how to tell time, then start some new math while reviewing the old. We're going to start our Thanksgiving crafting early, since we'll have so little time at home next month.

And then we're going to go on vacation!

My Latest over at CAGW: Vegan Sugar Skulls and Last-Minute Jack-o-Lanterns

a round-up of last-minute Jack-o-lanterns to make before Halloween

and a description of the vegan sugar skulls that I made and had the girls decorate:

I might turn el Dia de los Muertos into a larger study next year (I lived for a while in Texas, so it's a celebration that I'm fond of), but these particular sugar skulls got made rather spontaneously, after the girls and I attended a yoga class at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures last week, and the craft time after the class consisted of... decorating sugar skulls! I figured that they couldn't be TOO hard to make if the instructor was willing to make two dozen of them just for small children to decorate.

It turns out that sugar skulls ARE very easy to make! Conventional sugar skull recipes call for meringue powder, but my secret trick is, if a recipe looks complicated or has weird ingredients, to search for a vegan version, and yep, cornstarch IS easier to find than meringue powder.

Will went minimalistic on her sugar skull, although she's received a lot of compliments on those creepy, sequined eyes:

She had a lot more fun, I think, and made her skull a lot more elaborate, at the Mathers, where there were a ton more things to put on the skulls that we don't have at home--rhinestones, pom poms, googly eyes in lots of sizes, feathers, etc.--so that the hoarder in me wonders if I'm stalling her creativity by not having a bunch of random crap on hand to glue to things. Perhaps I'll set a small bin in the study where we can deposit found objects of decorative potential?

Syd didn't end up gluing anything to her sugar skull, but she and I sat down together before she began and looked at lots of images of sugar skulls online, so her work ends up looking quite traditional, I think, considering that I gave her Sharpies instead of royal icing:

I LOVE how the sugar skulls turned out, and how sturdy they are:

I don't own any other large molds like this, but I'm already thinking of sugar decorations for other holidays...

Sugar turkey?

DEFINITELY a sugar Christmas tree!

At the IU Astronomy and Physics Open House

I don't know how much better you could have it than homeschooling next door to a big university. Check it:

• On chilly days, we walk to the greenhouse.
• Last week, we went to a free kids' yoga class at the anthropology museum.
• Theater and drama festivals often perform excellent children's plays.
• When Willow discovered that there are a bunch of Rainbow Fairy books not yet available in the US, the IU library inter-library loaned them to us from London.
• We hang out at the art museum a LOT.
• The creek that runs through campus is excellent for playing in.
• Around Halloween, the girls trick-or-treat at an IU basketball scrimmage.

I don't have quite the intimacy with the university that I did when I was earning my Master's degrees there and teaching there, taking the girls with me to office hours and workshop days with my students, giving them free-range in fourth-floor Ballantine and the grad student lounge. Fortunately, the university is good to its townies, so you don't have to be a grad student who spends half your days skulking around your exam committee's offices to enjoy its amenities. 

Case in point: this weekend, I roused poor Matt from his deep 9:00 am slumber to come with us to the Astronomy and Physics open house. The place was pretty crowded with school groups from all over the area, but nevertheless all the student volunteers made plenty of time to play with us:

whisper dishes

bed of nails

assembling our Galileoscope (which we got to take home!!!)

The Galileoscope kit was assembled at a workshop that Willow and I attended at the open house; we had a LOT of help from the students running the workshop! Another family, consisting of a dad with his son and daughter, sat across from us at this workshop--the dad and his son, who was perhaps a couple of years older than Willow, put together their Galileoscope while mostly ignoring the daughter, who looked about Willow's age. The poor baby just sat there, plaintively whining over and over, "I want to help! Let ME do something!". At the end of the workshop, she got to put on the sticker that reminds you not to point your Galileoscope at the sun; THERE'S a little girl being encouraged in the hard sciences for you!

answering Solar System quiz questions for prizes of pencils and lollipops

making a model comet using dry ice, water, dirt, and syrup--these were AMAZING!!!

piloting a model Mars Rover--the rover had a camera whose image was projected to the room

coffee filter chromatography

dry ice bowling, making use of dry ice's immediate transformation from solid to gas

We really should have spent the entire day there, but eventually us grown-ups were so burdened with balloons and dyed coffee filters and model comets in Ziplock bags and candy and Galileoscopes and free textbooks that we called it a morning well spent and went home to make lunch and get Sydney dressed for her ballet class. It was a perfect morning, however, at the perfect kind of event. And my favorite thing about the open house, the thing that made it so perfect to me, is that it WASN'T perfect. The students doing the physics show couldn't get their grand finale demonstration to work. The student running the dry ice bowling almost let Sydney pick up a piece of dry ice with her bare hand (but he DIDN'T!). A professor in charge had to remind the student demonstrating the Tesla coil to, you know, ground it first. My kids are so used to attending splashy hands-on science museums where all the demonstrations work perfectly and all the shows are slick and well-rehearsed that I think that they sometimes get the idea that science isn't necessarily real, you know? That it isn't messy, with mistakes more often than not. They loved that the students running the open house were well-informed, of course, and friendly, and that they gave great kid-friendly explanations of each activity, but they also loved that they were clearly real people, with syrup all over their shirts from helping kids make comets all morning.

Because when the woman with syrup all over her shirt from making comets all morning talks about how great science is, you know you've got to believe her.

Pink Play Silk

It took me too long to succumb to this one, but finally my girls have a Momma-dyed pink play silk (and a few more pink play silks up in my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, of course):

I am pretty sure that my kiddos would be perfectly happy with a toy collection that consisted solely of play silks and tiny plastic animals.

To Build a Fire: Junior Version

I amused myself the other morning by giving the girls a book of matches and the challenge to start a fire in our fire pit.

The kiddos actually had a pretty good idea initially, in that they brought outside an absolutely massive stack of newspapers from the recycling, but instead of crumpling that paper they tossed it--whomp!--into one big stack in the middle of the pit, set a lonely stick on top, and then went to town with the matches.

Of course, the edges of the giant stack of paper DID catch fire, and the second that it did, the kiddos immediately stopped all work and set to putting their cold hot dog wienies on sticks, only to turn around and...where did the fire go?

Back to light another edge on fire!

I offered no assistance whatsoever, but simply sat to one side, did some work of my own, and snickered.

After a while Willow got so frustrated that she couldn't even get her matches to light correctly anymore, and we all considered it a major accomplishment when they got the fire to stick long enough that they could at least somewhat warm their hot dogs before munching them down:

Sydney has been very into movie-making lately, and I was surprised to notice, as I was downloading these images, that at some point after this moment she sneaked behind the camera and took an ELEVEN-MINUTE video of our fire pit morning! I noticed her start the video, and I knew that she had my camera for this length of time--I just didn't realize that she was taping for the entire time:



I am also surprised to tell you that this video, which includes a little homeschooling, a little conversation, a little silence, a little disciplining, and a lot of silliness at the end, is precious to me. My child did something that nobody EVER does for me: she caught me unawares with her camera. My kiddos will have acres and acres of tape of their happy childhoods when they're all grown up, snippets of time when I've captured them, oblivious to being taped, spinning out pretend games and laughing unabashedly and talking to each other and loving on their pets, but nowhere, until here, do they have a record of their mother, just as unaware of the camera, talking to them and engaging with them just as I always do.

I'd capture a moment like this every day to enjoy in later years, if I could.