How We Spent our Winter Vacation

This year, for the first time, Matt was off work for a full ELEVEN days over the winter break, so it really was a family vacation this year!

we decorated

we drove around to enjoy other people's MUCH more elaborate decorations:

(This house belongs to the Hodo family, who live in the next town over from my hometown.)

we made our Christmas gifts to family and friends


we finished up the last of the etsy orders before I shut my shop down for the holidays


the girls received letters from Santa Claus, in answer to their own letters to him




we did a LOT of traveling


we visited my family, ate some fabulous meals, gave them presents, and received some pretty great gifts in return

My Pappaw taped bills to an empty aluminum foil roll, put it back in the box, and had the girls pull out their Christmas money bill by bill--it was a BIG hit!

we came home to a LOT of snow!!!

snug in our comfy house with piles of snow outside, we did a ton of cooking

biscuits

kale pesto and granola

with nowhere we had to go and nothing we had to do, we had a lot of crafty time on our hands

Sydney's rainbow rolled beeswax candle

Willow's clay snowman

my fleece pants for Willow, the Oliver + S Sandbox pants

we played games, in groups of two or three or four

I did NOT accept Matt's blatant cheating at Axis and Allies with good grace!

Crazy Eights

Tsuro

the girls played with toys, both old

and brand-new

This remote-controlled helicopter was a gift from Willow's Poppa and Grandma Janie, and it's amazing. It's too messy still to play with it outside, so Will's been practicing her take-outs and landings.

the girls spent some of their Christmas money

and somehow, supposedly recovering from all those rich Christmas meals, we STILL had a lot of treats

Sydney's suggestion for a family activity one morning consisted simply of "Doughnuts!!!"

Yes, we DID have frozen yogurt for lunch one day!

It was a perfect winter vacation.
It was epic.
It was amazing.
It was everything that I could ever have hoped for.

It was, I hope, one that my girls will keep in their hearts even after they're grown. (Including the part where Sydney heard Santa Claus on the roof and began to cry hysterically. She's going to hear that story every Christmas for the rest of eternity.)

Outdoor Art in the Snow

With a high in the upper 40s, most of this snow here will be melting today, and I'm already having regrets that we haven't enjoyed it enough--not enough sledding, not enough snowmen, not enough hikes and explorations and stomping around and playing. That's one of the ways that I know that I am definitely not completely sane, because we have enjoyed the snow plentifully, happily! I feel the same way every autumn, about our garden--not enough sniffing the flowers, not enough watching the basil grow, DEFINITELY not enough weeding!--and after every holiday (we didn't do an advent calendar this year, or gingerbread houses!!!).

Anyway...pack down the weirdness, and back to snow art.

To set up the art supplies for my girls, I poured colored sand into squeeze bottles, the kind with a pretty wide spout--

--and filled spritz bottles with liquid watercolor; the last time we did snow paint, I used food coloring and water, but I am vastly enamored with the vivid colors of liquid watercolors. I do need to buy more spray bottles, however, because the little spritz bottles that I usually use to make watercolor spray paint are difficult for kids in gloves to operate (although they do make the fingers of their gloves look bright like crayons!)

All the supplies that we used look great on snow:

sand

birdseed

liquid watercolor spray paint 

How fun is that?

In the break between snows (because of course there will be more snow this winter), I think that I'm going to try some better-late-than-never lasagna garden prep for the Spring.

There will be MORE flowers to sniff! MORE basil to watch! Definitely MORE weeding to do!

shared with Friday's Nature Table

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Candle Bling and Kid-Made Jewelry

Both of my tutorials this week came from projects that were really, REALLY big hits with the kids. Over our post-Christmas staycation (oh, how we NEEDED those six days all at home, altogether!), as I worked on a new design for a rainbow beeswax candle--

--Syd worked very hard on a rainbow candle of her own:

Syd maps out her candle design before she begins.

She was pretty thrilled when I showed her how we could personalize her candle with these beeswax sheet cut-outs:

 On another day, I had the idea that the girls might like to use their brand-new, SUPER awesome gel pens (Thanks, Grandma Beck!!!) to make themselves some jewelry, so I cut pendants out of old cardboard record album covers for them. I had planned that they could decorate the blank backs of these pendants, so I fussy cut interesting abstracts from the front cover side, but Willow, who in general is less interested in creating her own drawings from scratch, discovered a passionate interest in (and quite a knack for) embellishing the printed images:

Don't they look great? Gel pens are the perfect tool for an artistic activity like this, because they're vibrant and they stick to a very wide variety of media, looking equally well on rough materials like newspapers and smash books and smooth materials like glossy magazine pages and photographs.

Grandma Beck bought each girl her own large set of gel pens in a metal case, and I keep unabashedly stealing each girl's set for my own work. Every now and then a kid, who has been well-ingrained to pick up her own stuff and who prizes her pen set and so WANTS to keep it nice, will walk by, notice her pen set mysteriously open mysteriously near me, and, giving me a quizzical look, will quietly pack it up and put it away again.

They don't yet know that their mother is a thief--don't YOU tell them!

Story of the World Chapter Two Timeline Review

Our Story of the World Study looks mostly like this:

1. Week One: Listen to our current chapter on audiobook. Answer the quiz questions and review all prior quiz questions. Add the current quiz questions to the girls' list of material to practice daily that week.
2. Week Two: Listen again to our current chapter on audiobook. Complete the map work from the Story of the World Activity Book. Compare the completed map to our other geography references--Google Earth, our Montessori puzzle maps, our family atlas, etc.
3. Week Three: Read a picture book or watch a documentary related to our current study. Add new timeline cards to our materials, and glue them to our big basement timeline. Order all the timeline cards covered so far, and add ordering the timeline cards to the girls' list of material to practice daily that week.
4. Weeks Four and Beyond: Read more picture books, watch more documentaries, and complete other unit-based hands-on studies and related memory work until at least one of the kids feels ready to move on.

I always think it's exciting to add new material to our big basement timeline: 

It's still not a project that the girls ever show a lot of interest in outside of the school-time study that we do with it (although they do always perk up when I suggest putting something that they're otherwise interested in, some book or myth, on the timeline), but it makes me, personally, very happy to have it, and I think that one of these days they'll grow into it and get excited about it and take ownership of it.

Since we come back to Egypt again in Chapter 4, for Chapter 2 we'll be doing projects that deal specifically with the geography and mythology of Ancient Egypt. For books, I've checked out every single story about Egyptian gods and goddesses from our public library (yes, I AM that obnoxious!), and my hope is to have the girls record some sort of family tree/genealogy for each figure, as well as a summary of some of their stories. I'm not yet sure how this will work--a homemade book with a page for each figure and brief summaries, as well as video recordings of the girls re-telling their stories, perhaps?

Other projects that are in the running, as long as interest holds out:

• cookie map of Egypt--The girls are CONSTANTLY on the lookout for things to recreate in cookie form! I think we'll do a cookie of modern Egypt, and decorate with frosting and candy to represent the boundaries of Ancient Egypt, the Nile, and the location of major ancient monuments.
• A Coloring Book of Ancient Egypt depicting tomb art (we can do more of these in Chapter 4, when the pyramids are discussed)
• map of Ancient Egypt flip book
• labeled map of Ancient Egypt coloring page
• interpretations of the myths--I want to keep encouraging the girls to think about how stories are continually re-interpreted and used to give different meanings to different times (this will help when SOTW begins to avidly re-tell the Christian myths), so I'm considering having us watch Stargate all together, or listen to the audiobook of The Red Pyramid, which both contain some really fun re-interpretations of Egyptian mythology.
• paper models of the Egyptian gods and goddesses
• posters of the Egyptian gods and goddesses for matching games and memory work
• I SUPER want to buy these Egyptian gods and goddesses toys!!! I won't, though.
• Egyptian gods and goddesses coloring pages--these would be perfect for the book that I want the girls to make.

Okay, that's a crazy amount of projects, but it's okay, because we only have to do the fun ones.

And two chapters later, we can start mummifying things!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Homemade Lotion and Ice Blocks

a tutorial for the solid body lotion bars that I gave as Christmas gifts this year


and a tutorial for outdoor building blocks made from ice and food coloring

We've got a day filled with errands today--Sydney's currently over at the library with Matt, reading to a service dog as part of a literacy enrichment program that the library runs, and then we're all off to Goodwill (plain white dishes and a basement couch), the grocery store (whole wheat pastry flour, ginger, and broccoli, among other necessities), and a bunch of used furniture stores (since I'm probably not going to find a basement couch at Goodwill)--but a productive evening planned. Matt usually sneaks back to his office one evening a week, so that he can get actual work done without co-workers and cubicle noise to distract him, and I'll be working on next week's CAGW:

• a tutorial for the beeswax sheet cut-outs that the girls and I have been having fun making, and
• ...........

I'm sure I'll think of something!

A Big Rainbow Candle, and Taking Photos in the Snow

Newly listed, an 8" rainbow beeswax taper candle that I designed over the break:

I normally dread etsy photo shoots, because we have just zero nice lighting in our house, and finding nice outdoor photo locations for every single thing is a pain in the butt, but Will and I took these photos on Wednesday, while Syd was spending the day at day camp (a couple of times a year I'll enroll Syd in one of those day camps that the city runs on the days that public schools are out--we call these her "mental health days," because she gets to get away from me and Willow for the day!), and I discovered that taking photographs in the snow?

Is awesome!!!

I'd been waiting to take my photos until it was a blue sky day, then I took them in the shade with the perfectly white snow as a backdrop. I could not be happier with the results:

I'm contemplating going into crafty overdrive this weekend, to see what else I can come up with to photograph before the snow starts to melt later next week.

Yes, I DO Pick out My Kid's Clothes

Not the younger one--she has better taste than I do, by far. In fact, I should start getting HER to pick out her sister's clothes.

But yep, the older one. I actually pick out my eight-year-old's clothes for her.

Here's the thing:

1. Will doesn't wear clothing by choice. She hangs out naked (for most of the day) until someone makes her dress, and then she puts on the absolute minimum that she can get away with. 
2. Absolute minimum means ABSOLUTE minimum. Unless you specify socks and underpants, and then double-check that they're there, she won't bother putting them on. Normally, I don't care, but I draw the line at personal injury, and I'm weary of discovering, mid-hike, that the child has put on her jeans commando, or finally finding out near the end of our sledding adventure that she's put on her snow boots without socks. I know that a lot of parents would tell me to let Will teach herself with those blisters and frozen toes, but not ensuring that she takes care of her body feels differently to me than, say, letting her test her physical limits by climbing something that she might fall off of, which I have no problem with.
3. When she is required to dress herself, Willow doesn't care what she wears. She prefers comfy, elastic-waisted pants, and she does not prefer the pinks and purples that are heavy in her hand-me-down stash currently, nor does she like dresses or skirts and tights, but she'll wear whatever is easiest to grab from her clothing storage. She finds it VERY frustrating if she is required to search through unsorted clean laundry for something.

Until a few weeks ago, the girls kept their tops and bottoms on hangers--each kid had her own rod--and their socks and underpants in drawers. Lately, though, I feel like I've been on an organizing kick, or rather I've somehow found some extra energy to start rethinking chronic sticking points and finding solutions to at least a few of them. And my clothing re-organization is making me VERY happy.

I gave all of the clothing rods to Sydney. She carefully thinks out each outfit, so she might as well have the extra space to really look at all of her options. I moved all of Willow's clothing to drawers, and I no longer require the children to sort and put away their own clean laundry. Instead, I do it for them: I hang up Sydney's clothes on her rods, and I package Willow's clothes like this:

Pants get folded in half and laid out. On the middle third of the pants I stack a shirt, a pair of underpants, and a pair of socks. I fold the pants up around the bundle, and put it in Willow's drawer.

Now when someone finally tells her to go get dressed, Willow can simply grab a complete outfit out of her drawer--if the underpants are right there, she puts them on, and if the socks are right there, she puts those on, too. I think that somehow the packaging is encouraging her to dress herself in all the items of clothing, not just the minimum that she always chose when she had to select each item individually. Hallelujah!

 As you can obviously tell from the photo above, I don't spend much time carefully matching items, either, and Willow still feels pretty disdainful about the idea of clothing, in general, but next time I start griping about how tedious and frustrating and full of annoyances my life is, please please PLEASE remind me that my older child will now dress herself completely in all the clothes required by polite society.

As long as I pick them out for her, of course.

Gridlock is a Great Game

Our basic weekly schedule has both kids active and formally learning at set times during the day.

Mind you, that doesn't include playdates, day trips, library visits, mornings at the park, sick days, picnic lunches, field trips, etc., so it's the rare week when the plan goes EXACTLY as planned, but my point with this is to note the particular way that's currently working (yay!) to allow each kiddo to do some different work during the day, while keeping their number of activities even--that last part probably isn't really necessary, but it seems necessary to me.

Currently, Syd does one subject every day that Willow doesn't--reading--and one subject twice a week that Willow doesn't--grammar. I'd have Will doing grammar if I had a method that I liked, but nothing, not pre-packaged texts nor my own invented curricula, have seemed workable for the long-term, so I'm letting it slide for a while. Latin is good for grammar, anyway, as is the approximately four hours of independent reading that Willow does daily.

That leaves, depending on the day, one to two holes in Willow's schedule. If she's following a specific area of interest, I'll plug that into one of the spots while it lasts--we made and flew paper airplanes FOREVER, it feels like!--or if I find a new study that she might like, I'll test it out in one of those spots for a few weeks before I find a sticking place for it, like I did with the weekly comics lab that Will was doing with Matt, until he decided that he could just as easily do it with both girls on the weekends.

When Will's a bit between passions, however, as she is at the moment, I use those empty spots for more advanced work in one of the studies that she does with Sydney, and with extra math. Will is very good at math, but she hasn't found anything about it yet that she likes enough to really settle into, so I try to venture far and wide with the math that we explore on enrichment days.

One day before Christmas, the girls did a day of entirely Christmas-themed work, and Will (and Syd!), really enjoyed this game of graphing coordinates in order to draw a Christmas tree, which reminded me that, other than Battleship (which is also a game that we use for math enrichment), Will hasn't done much exploration with coordinates, and so I printed out Gridlock for us to play together on our next school day.

It's a hit!

To play Gridlock, you roll two dice--the roll gives you your coordinate pair, and you put your marker at the intersection. The goal is to be the first player to have four markers in a row. Strategy comes in through deciding which of the two coordinate pairs given by the dice roll you'll use. The download comes with a recording sheet, but while I totally get the value of using both concrete manipulatives and representational models in the same math activity, having to write would have made the game suck for Willow, so we skipped it...this time. It's a good habit to get into, though, especially since I'd like Will to get into the habit of notating her chess games, too.

So challenging to win! See how we're blocking each other, and how the number of open coordinates is narrowing?

We've played Gridlock a few more times since then, and it makes me realize that, with all of the homemade games we play, we NEED to make ourselves some much more versatile game pieces. The dominoes kept falling over (duh!), and it may take you a few tries to guess who's who in this LEGO version, below:

I can't decide, though...painted rocks? FIMO? Shrinky dinks?

Page protector and dry erase markers?

Sledding Down a Snowy Slide

First there was sliding down a snowy slide:



Then inspiration struck the littles, and the slide instead became a place to sled:




After some serious immersion into sledding for a few days, the girls seem to have gotten it out of their system a bit, in that for the past couple of days they've been able to enjoy the snow in other ways, happy to explore in the yard instead of needing us to walk them over to the park to sled every time. I put together a couple of invitations for different exploratory activities in the snow--a set of colored ice blocks, and a tray containing the liquid watercolors in spritz bottles, colored sand in funnel bottles, and a bowl of birdseed with two spoons--and although the girls were too busy stomping around and exploring with their gross motor skills in the snow today to pay it all a ton of mind, I'm hopeful that they'll spend some time tomorrow making art outdoors.

Because tomorrow night the forecast calls for MORE snow, and then we'll have a fresh canvas to decorate again!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Wrapped and Dipped

a tutorial for dipping pinecones into melted crayon, melted beeswax, and paint

and a look at the presents that I unashamedly wrapped in newspapers and brown paper bags

 

 

The girls had a good Christmas, loot-wise. After they went to bed on Christmas Eve, they heard Santa walking on the roof, along with reindeer stamping their feet and the jingling of sleigh bells--this drove Sydney into such a state of sobbing hysterics that she couldn't get to sleep for at least an hour. She wanted to run see her gifts, and she wanted to go meet Santa, and she wanted to double-check that he saw his special reindeer-shaped cookie, and she wanted to make sure that I hadn't eaten the cookie instead of Santa, and she was pretty sure that Santa was going to come back so every noise made her sit up and say, "What's THAT?!?"

That walking on the roof bit has scared the crap out of every kid in the family, which is honestly half the fun (you might have to be from Arkansas to understand that part), but the other half is in listening to the kid tell the story, for the entire coming year, of how on Christmas Eve, They. Heard. SANTA!!!

My cousin may have also wanted to poop in the yard and blame it on a reindeer, but I wouldn't let him.

Snowy Day, North and South

Believe it or not, we had a White Christmas down in Arkansas!


Yes, the children are playing in a vacant lot, on great piles of fill dirt. America can stop building playgrounds now.

The next day, we drove back to Indiana, where it is also quite white:

Remember our girls only snow day a couple of years ago, when Matt couldn't bring himself to skip a day of work to stay home and play with us? Well, that's moot this week, because his office is CLOSED!!! We can make him play with us all we want!

This is good, because sometimes I flip over my sled and need to lie down for a while:

No, I'm not wearing a coat. I bought some silk long johns, and holy cow are they warm!

  And how can a person FLIP themselves over a sled, you ask?

It's easy when you've made yourselves a ski jump!

Tonight, all warm inside and tired out from sledding, we've got a Monopoly game going, dyed ice blocks freezing outside on the porch, and Weezer playing on the stereo. Syd's giving Wild Pony a bath, and I think I'm going to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special a second time, while eating a doughnut.

Oh, and it's snowing again.

Classifying Living and Non-Living

In the months since we've begun to do school formally, I've been working through various methods of review. For history, for instance, since we're currently using Story of the World as a spine, we review the previous chapters' quiz questions, map work, and timeline cards on the same days in which we work through the current ones.

For Latin, we review previous vocabulary words on the same day that I "test" the current ones.

For math, I occasionally put review concepts into the math journal that Willow does once or twice a week for extra math enrichment, and occasionally have either girl drill a previously learned concept on Worksheet Thursday (the most hated math day of the week!).

I also consider every former area of interest still open for further study, and at the library, whenever I come across a living book that explores an old topic, I add it to our stack.

Science is a little trickier to review, for me, because it's so expansive, but since the girls and I are on the cusp of beginning a comprehensive unit on human biology, it seemed reasonable to spend a little time reviewing the order of classification that we first explored at the beginning of our briefer unit on the biology of mollusks.

Therefore, for science a few weeks ago, all we did was review the concept of living vs. non-living.

Willow and I read the requirements for life in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and I wrote them down for her to memorize. Sydney did a simple little living vs. non-living sort that she'd helped me prepare earlier in the day, and as she worked I asked her to verbalize her reasoning, and I put her words in the language of the requirements that Willow was memorizing:
I might have Syd start to memorize them next time.

Successful sort!

Living vs. non-living seems a really simple concept, because you can just look at something and sort it into one of the two, but it actually has a lot of depth, and to understand all of the criteria that makes something living--well, that's some sophisticated scientific reasoning there!

One of the benefits of science review that I'm just starting to discover is this depth that you can get into each time you revisit an old topic. For instance, I'd never want to spend weeks and weeks on the concept of living vs. non-living--I'd go mad!--but each time we briefly revisit the topic we can do another fun explorative activity, perhaps:

• science journal entry, using a checklist to categorize something as living or non-living
• Sesame Street video on classifying living vs. non-living--Will LOVES to make her own video tutorials!
• outdoor square-foot catalogue of living and non-living things
• living vs. non-living DIY book
• living vs. non-living cut-and-paste sort

Next, we're going to head down the order of classification, spending some time at each level until we get to us humans, where I think we're going to stop and stay a while.