Our Homeschool Photo Album from Snapfish

How to keep track of all the work done during just one homeschool year?

Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm...

First there's all the written work, you know--workbook pages, reports, copywork, sentence diagrams, Latin translations.

But then there are the big, messy, elaborate projects that make up the bulk of our homeschool days--the big basement timeline, the cave painting, the salt dough maps, the volcanoes in a test tube, the sewing, the baking, the pounds and pounds of clay and gallons of paint and glue that we go through, just the three of us. Can't punch three holes in that and stick it in a binder!

There's also the travel that we're able to do because of our freedom (and my willingness for the younger kid to skip a couple of ballet classes each semester). I consider our trips to beaches and amusement parks and the sites of old forts and Laura Ingalls Wilder's house and museums from Florida to Michigan to be crucial to the kids' education, even if those experiences don't fit well into a binder, either.

And then there's the other, most important category of work that the girls are able to get done with hours to themselves each day: play. How to track the marbles chased down, the structures built, the toy ponies endangered and rescued and married off and endangered again, the sidewalks drawn on with chalk (or painted on with paint--I don't care)?

Oh, and all the books that get read around here! I don't know how you would EVER keep track of that and also do anything else with your life!

Before I deal with that big stack where I date-stamp and then toss the kids' written work, I'll just start with what, for me, is the easiest way to record the travel, the projects, and the play.

Photo album!

Snapfish asked me to test their new 11x14 Lay-Flat Photo Book by making one for myself, so I chose as my topic the previous homeschool year, which in our homeschool runs August-July (we're year-rounders, ya know).

I LOVE the format for putting the book together, especially with the tons of photos that I put per page. Basically (unless you're picky, and then you can alter it), Snapfish determines the best sizing and layout for the photos, and as you drag each new photo onto a page, it immediately rearranges the sizing and layout of the entire page for you--if you don't like it, you can ask it to rearrange it, or rearrange it manually:

I loved the layouts that Snapfish chose for me, and had no problem swapping various photos around the layout to better show off my favorite ones.

You get one text block on each page (as far as I could figure), which I used to caption all of the activities that the photos on that page encompassed. Each two-page spread counted as one month of our homeschool year, and I really wanted another text box to record the month, but I couldn't make it happen for me. One of the paper choices for the photo book did include exactly the kind of calendar set-up that I wanted, but it started with January and couldn't be altered.

No fear--I simply waited until my book came, and then made my months all crafty-like!

With that addition (which makes me happy in particular, since I really like mixed-media projects, anyway), I could not love this photo book more. I think that the reader really gets a sense of the huge variety of projects that the kiddos are invested in every month, and the frequency of our field trips and other travel--it's very light on photos of actual "schoolwork" (oops!), but I don't plan for this to be our only record of the homeschool year, so that's okay.

I also love how easy it is to watch the seasons pass in this book, as the children grow from the beginning of our school year--

image on the free endpaper at the front of the book

--to fall and winter activities, sledding and ice skating on four different pages, and then stomping in mud in their sweaters, and then posing for the big ballet recital in a sleeveless leotard out by the fountain--

--and then finally posing in their pirate garb for Willow's eighth birthday party, right at the end of their school year:

How they've grown!

I chose for the cover image a candid shot that I took of the girls during their T-shirt dress photo shoot--

--and you also get to title the spine, so that I'll be able to pull exactly the year that I'm looking for out of a shelf of fifteen identical photo books when the babes are all done with school:

 

My favorite part, however, is the back cover, where you can put yet another small image and a caption:

Because even more than the chance to travel, and the time to play, and the fast-track to higher-level math, and Latin on the third-grade curriculum, if my girls someday understand that we schooled together all these years simply because of my deep love for them, then we will have had a successful homeschool.

[Snapfish gave me this photo book for free (I paid for the shipping and a couple of extra pages that I added) in exchange for my feedback on it.]

Civil Rights on the Big Basement Timeline

Although, as I mentioned before, we're not going into many explicit details of the Civil Rights struggle in America in our study of Martin Luther King, Jr., the girls are familiar with several key dates now. Instead of memorizing them, one morning I asked Willow to comb through our many reference materials and collate several such dates; she and Sydney then helped me search Google Images for appropriate imagery. The girls divided the images, dictated a caption for each, then wrote the caption with the image. They cut everything out, grabbed our big jar of sparkly Mod Podge and a foam brush, and headed downstairs with me, where I helped them place each date in its correct spot on our big basement timeline and they glued them to the wall:

Let's see...we've got King's birth and death, of course, but also the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Ghandi, George Wallace (I wasn't thrilled about including him, because I didn't want to have to see him every time I walk downstairs, and I flat-out refused to permit the girls to include images of segregation--I told them that I just didn't want to see pictures of people acting ugly on our wall), and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

I am growing ever unhappier with the lack of foresight that I showed when laying out our basement timeline--the amount of room that I allocated for modern history is critically tight. I have long harbored dreams of moving to some little hobby farm or other outside of town--let the need for a much more spacious wall timeline be added to my list of reasons to move (along with a sunny yard to garden, a creek, space for a flock of chickens and two dwarf goats, and a second storey to the house).

Horrible Histories in Song

I'm obsessed with Horrible Histories. Have you heard of it? It's a BBC show based on the book series, and it's unavailable in the US except as digital downloads (Remember my long-term gripe that stores never sell what I want to buy? I want to buy a Horrible Histories DVD set!), but clips from the shows are pretty widely available on YouTube, where I swear, the girls and I watch them by the hour. I've actually gotten into the habit of hopping on the treadmill when we start watching them--I can't set the speed very high or you can't hear the videos, but I can set the incline VERY high and so still get a good work-out in.

The nice thing about just having the clips, I suppose, is that I can show only the clip that relates to a specific topic, and I can put them in my various homeschool pinboards, and I can put some of my favorites in chronological order for you below:

At the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site

In January of last year, the girls and I did a short study of Martin Luther King Jr. Our brief study went really well, and studying Civil Rights through the lens of Martin Luther King Jr. seemed like a doable (ie. less frightening) way to introduce the subject, which is one that I do want the girls to know about, however young they are. I lecture them often about privilege and gratitude and volunteerism and responsibility (especially in a homeschool context, since Willow is going through a phase of feeling very ungrateful about the privilege of homeschooling, and very reluctant to work through its responsibilities, and I am really struggling with helping her through it), and I'm always looking for real-life illustrations to help make such vague concepts clearer to them, occurring as they do on the global level, as well as in our tiny home.

This summer we've done a much longer, much more detailed study of Martin Luther King Jr., culminating in the morning that we took off from our drive home from Florida to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site right in our overnight stop of Atlanta, Georgia:

Martin's boyhood home

 All of us (except for Sydney, but she can be pacified simply by being carried by Daddy!) really enjoyed the tour through Martin Luther King Jr.'s boyhood home, inside of which I was not permitted to take photographs (sigh). Few of the home's original furnishings remain, but the National Park Service used King's family as a resource when purchasing replacements--the family chose antiques that were identical, as closely as possible, to what they actually did own, so it's a very careful recreation.

The tour guide was terrific, too, and I learned a LOT of new information, such as the fact that although the King family's neighborhood was segregated, it was by no means ghettoized--families of all income levels lived there, as you can easily see by look at the historic homes along the street, ranging from the very small to the very large. Some of the homes are still privately owned today, and some are rental homes owned by the National Park Service, all with strict guidelines about preserving the homes' exteriors, of course. I spent a while fantasizing about moving to Atlanta with the family and living in one of these rental homes--I still might do it!

The King Center was a lot less showy, although I gather that they have an impressive collection of artifacts off exhibit (I wouldn't be surprised if they're working towards a major renovation). I was very excited to see King's Nobel Peace Prize displayed among some of his other awards--

--and the displays of some of his personal effects, such as the suitcase that he packed to take to Memphis on the trip during which he was murdered, and his minster's robes, were touching.

Willow spent nearly the last dregs of her spending money here, purchasing one of those little rubber bracelet things with the saying "I Have a Dream" on it, and some retro candy. I purchased some postcards, a Civil Rights coloring book, a deck of Civil Rights flash cards, and a retro candy choice for each of the girls (Willow was pretty stoked to be able to show up her sister by purchasing MORE candy for herself, silly girl).

The weather was fine, and the walking around the historic neighborhood was just the thing to stretch our legs before we began our long, LONG drive home that day:

Dr. and Mrs. King's lovely memorial

I don't know if the girls necessarily have a larger grasp of Civil Rights after our visit, but I'm certain that they now see Martin Luther King Jr. as a real person, and most particularly as the little boy whom our tour guide so evocatively described during our house tour, the little boy who broke his sisters dolls on purpose, who liked to play board games and listen to stories on the radio, whose favorite place in the house was the kitchen. A few days after we got back home, we were driving across town and Sydney cracked open another picture book about King that I'd checked out from the library.

"Look, Momma!", she called out, holding open the first page of the book to show me, and there was the wallpaper in Martin Luther King Jr.'s house! Many of the illustrations in My Brother Martin, written by King's sister, are clearly taken from the rooms on the birthhome tour, with details down to the fireplace screen and the old-fashioned stove and the pattern on the family's china plates laid out on their dinner table--all stuff that the kids had noticed at the time. And then Sydney got to the pages in which a childhood Martin's little friends have to tell him that they can't play with him anymore, and the look on little Martin's face is so vivid, and SO sad, that Sydney actually cried out. She may not understand racism, or understand Civil Rights, but being excluded by her playmates for no good reason--that's something that ANY kid understands. And if Civil Rights means that it's not okay to exclude others, then she's all for it, whether or not she totally gets the point of the Birmingham Jail or the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

At the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum (Again!)

I once read an essay in a travel magazine written by a woman who claimed that she and her partner had a policy to never visit the same vacation spot more than once. Now, I don't know to what level they took this--"We've been to the Mona Lisa gallery in the Louvre once, so we'll never go into that gallery again," or "We've been to the Louvre once, so we'll never go again," or "We've been to Paris once, so we'll never go again"--but the practice immediately struck me as something that I'd NEVER want to do.

Mind you, I'm also not going to be going to Disney World five times in two years like one particularly obsessed mom friend of mine (Kimberly, I'm waving at you!), but I do appreciate visiting a well-loved place again. It makes a lot of sense from a parenting perspective, since the child who loved Chicago's Field Museum at the age of four is in for a whole new world of experience when she comes again at the age of eight, and the children who just rode Big Thunder Mountain Railroad five minutes ago are going to enjoy the feeling of mastery that comes with knowing what to expect when they ride it a second time, and they're going to love it even more the third time, the fourth time, the fifth time, and the sixth time, after which they might be willing to take a break, but only if it involves ice cream bars shaped like Mickey Mouse's head.

The same scenario applies to adults, too, however--or at least to me! I loved visiting Hawaii for the first time as a kid, and I loved visiting Hawaii for the second time on my honeymoon with Matt; it was a whole new Hawaii, experienced as an adult, following my own agenda, with my partner. We didn't stay at the nice resort of my childhood, but we did stay in a hostel where we both thought that the owner was going to kill us in our beds (seriously, if I had a buck for every time that has happened to me...); we had our own rental car, we drank a ton of guava juice, and we came so close to active lava flows that if I'd tripped and fallen I would have burned my face off.

I can't wait to visit Hawaii again and show it to our girls.

So it bothered me not at all that the girls and I were just at the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum last year; we still like shells--

--the girls are older and know more science and geography with which to appreciate the museum's collections--

Shells from Africa--how apropos!

 Once again, I studied with fascination the collection of Sailor's Valentines--

--but this time, now that each girl is a year older, the project struck me as actually pretty doable for me and the girls and our huge shell collection. Stay tuned!

Inspired by our museum visit, Willow asked if we could study mollusks. I'm starting us off by learning the order of taxonomy, then zipping down to Phylum Mollusca, where I'll need to do a lot of preparatory studying, myself, frankly, invertebrate biology not being a huge part of my own childhood curriculum.

Let the adventure begin!

On Sanibel Island

It's something pretty well-known about me that I keep trying to go to the beach. In a couple of months, for instance, I'm taking the girls on a road trip to visit some friends of ours. We'll drive almost nine hours to visit them, stay for a couple of days, and then... well, it's only another seven hours from there to the beach, so why not?

A beach stay after our time at Disney World was, therefore, crucial to my planning, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Remember this little island that the girls and I visited last year? How much better it was to actually STAY there for a few days! Once again, since it was the off-season, we rented a nice condo right on the beach for a very reasonable rate, stocked up on groceries, kicked off our shoes, and stayed for a while!

Disney was exactly right for a vacation for us, but this lounging, swimming, napping, watching movies, digging in the sand... it turns out that this was exactly right, too!

Disney Day #5: A Second Day in Magic Kingdom, and Breakfast with the Princesses

Since our homeschool class the day before met before the Magic Kingdom opened, it almost felt like sleeping in to only have to be up and out--

--and on the monorail and at the park by 9:00 am. By this second day at Magic Kingdom, we also knew exactly what we wanted to do. This mostly consisted of riding roller coasters--

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad--I honestly can't tell you how many times we rode this ride! Six, maybe?

 --re-riding favorite rides--

How many times can two kids ride Dumbo?

Willow was in love with Prince Charming's Regal Carousel.

--and checking out the couple of rides that we somehow missed the day before:

We made up for missing The Jungle Cruise the previous day by riding it twice in a row.

This day, however, mainly seemed to revolve around meeting every single character in Disney World twice more. I want to say that it was the girls who were completely character focused, but by this point in our trip, I'd fallen in love with watching the characters interact with my kids (not as much as this other mom with toddler sons who we eavesdropped on in the monorail, who was telling another stranger all about their own princess breakfast, and naming which character had given each son his "first kiss"--ewww!)--so sweet, and the girls were always SO entranced, and the fangirl in me loved hearing each face character's patter that interpreted her own back story. 

Not only did we attend the Cinderella's Royal Table character breakfast in Cinderella's Castle--

Breakfast was tasty, and although I'd been afraid of feeling rushed, what with all the character meetings, we had plenty of time to eat.

The decor? Also fabulous!

--but we also Fastpassed the princess character spot on Main Street:

This was our second time meeting Cinderella (this morning!)




--our second time meeting Belle (yes, this morning!)--

See what I'm talking about with the Photopass photographers' giant cameras?

--our third time overall meeting Aurora (and did the kids ever seem to notice a difference? Nope!), but it was our first time meeting Rapunzel:

She was adorable--she asked the girls if they'd journeyed far to see her, and when they said that they had, she asked them if they'd brought their frying pans!

Of course, all this scheduled character interaction does not mean that we passed up ANY opportunites to meet characters on the street--

Fairy Godmother

--EVEN if we've already met that same character three (four?) times already!

I had a fabulous time accompanying the girls to meet all of these characters, because there was some sort of unspoken agreement on this day that every single face character would 1) compliment my children on their manners and 2) compliment me on their homemade Snow White dresses. How thrilling, right? One CM even chased us down in Tomorrowland to tell me that she had actually had that same sheet set as a child! It was super-cute that they all asked if Snow White had seen their outfits yet--I sort of thought about searching her out (I could have easily asked any CM to call and find her for us), but nixed the idea as too much trouble on such a lovely day when there were so many other fun things to do.

Cinderella's Castle looked glorious in the sunshine, and I'm pretty sure that I forced my children to pose in front of it on every side:

This was in addition, of course, to the show that takes place in front of the castle, which we also enjoyed:

One interesting fact of note is that the previous day had been Matt's birthday. He got presents from me, yes, but no carrot cake or kid-made crafts or work-sponsored birthday dinner. His main birthday celebration was SUPPOSED to consist of him stopping by Guest Services as soon as he entered the park that morning, on his way to meet me and the girls after our YES class, and receiving a birthday button from them. It says "I'm Celebrating My Birthday!", and Guest Services writes your name on it, and all the CMs that you pass that whole day wish you a happy birthday by name.

Pretty awesome, right? Well, Matt thought that it sounded kind of lame, and he claimed that he'd seen the birthday buttons around but hadn't noticed anybody getting wished a happy birthday because of them, so he figured he'd just skip it.

Want to guess what he then had to hear me bitch about for the next 24 hours?

Yep, the fact that he'd ruined his birthday and didn't want to have any fun and it certainly wasn't MY fault if he didn't have a festive birthday!

So on this day, Matt snuck off to go to the bathroom early on and came back with... a birthday button! Personally, I was still outraged, since it was not his birthday but the day AFTER his birthday, but I garnered sweet revenge from the fact that every single CM that we passed all day (and many park guests, too!) said "Happy Birthday, Matt!" Matt got told to have a happy birthday a hundred times, easily, and possibly even double that. One guy even sang. And finally, FINALLY Matt admitted that yeah, it actually was pretty awesome, after all.

This guy, performing in a show on Main Street, wished Matt a happy birthday, but only after thoroughly enchanting Sydney, first:

I don't think an hour went by while we were on Disney property that I wasn't amazed by how friendly, helpful, or just generally awesome the Disney CMs were. If one of them didn't know how to solve a problem, such as when a Fastpass machine only spit out three Fastpasses after I'd inserted all four of our tickets, it didn't take an entire minute before someone was found who could open up the back of the machine and grab another Fastpass for me. CMs at ride entrances high-fived the kids as they passed the gates. Princesses gasped, held their gloved hands to their hearts, and beamed upon meeting the girls, as if their presence had just made their day. Ride operators who'd seen us a couple of times already often offered us shortcuts back to the front of the ride or let us stay on the same ride while it re-loaded. At one point, when Matt and Willow were in the bathroom, Sydney wandered a few feet away from where I was sitting to check out a couple of CMs who were playing with bubble-blowing guns while they manned their respective kiosks. When they saw her there, both CMs immediately aimed their bubble guns at her and let her run around and chase their bubbles until she got tired. 

But that's not even the best part of that story. Here's the best part:

Look at that CM's face! Doesn't she look like she's having as good of a time as Sydney with those bubbles? One thing about being a parent is that you're kind of obsessed with how great your kids are. Even if you never admit this, you secretly want everyone to notice how cute and nice and funny your kids are, and to be as utterly charmed by them and in love with them as you are, and it always kind of sucks just a little bit because nobody ever does. 

But at Disney, everyone who works there acts like they notice how cute and funny and nice your kids are, and they act like they're utterly charmed by them and just absolutely love them. It's intoxicating.

Magic Kingdom's version of the Jedi Training Academy is Captain Jack Sparrow's Pirate Tutorial. Syd wasn't into this one, but Willow was all about learning to be a pirate!

Pirate CMs took the kids on a little parade around the grounds a few minutes before the show began.

Of course, Sydney got so jealous sitting in the audience with us while Willow fought pirate-style that afterwards she jumped right on the stage with all the other kids to take the pirate oath, too:

And then, well, since we're over there, might as well ride Pirates of the Caribbean a couple more times!

Sydney spent the very last dregs of her spending money on an Aurora doll (her favorite princess, ya know!), and I bought each of the girls a seven-pack of princess panties, with a different princess per panty. Can't have too many underpants! Matt and I never ended up purchasing anything for ourselves, and Willow came away from Disney with plenty of spending money left unspent, that clever girl.

Over the five days of our trip, we'd often joked that Willow was taking her own personal tour of the water fountains of Disney World. Our girl loves to be well hydrated, and she had to stop and drink from Every. Single. Water fountain. You don't realize how many water fountains there are at Disney World until you have a kid who seeks them out!

After a while, we all got into the game, pointing out any water fountains that we saw so she could run and drink from them. This particular water fountain that we spotted on one side of Cinderella's Castle on our way out of the park is the most elaborate that we found:

Strangely fitting that it was our last "official" Disney activity, then!

We had so much more fun at Disney World than I ever thought that we would (and I thought that we'd have a LOT of fun!), but our five days there was so much more exhausting, physically AND mentally (so overstimulating!), than I'd ever expected.

The next day, we drove to the beach. I called our days there our Disney recovery!