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!

My Latest over at CAGW: DIY Car Air Fresheners and How to Drill Stuff

a tutorial for DIY natural car air fresheners

and some tips for drilling very odd objects using a Dremel

We've been making a lot of fused plastic bead suncatchers lately--the kiddos LOVE them, and I'm secretly trying to use up our huge stash of completely random beads:

and two buttons--oops!

Other than the pasta ones, which we dyed ourselves (and which won't work in these suncatchers, so we had to sort them out), they've all been given to us from here and there and everywhere, completely unsorted, and when they're gone I'll be replacing them on an as-needed basis with a much smaller number of very carefully sorted beads, so that we'll have an easier time getting organized for specific projects.

To make the suncatchers, start out with a set of novelty silicon muffin tins--you'll see in some of the photos that I also use regular metal muffin tins, but since those don't bend they're actually much harder to get the finished suncatcher out of, and I don't recommend using them unless you absolutely need that particular shape.

Fill the bottom of each mold with just enough beads to cover the bottom:

The beads will flatten and spread as they melt, so you want your layer to be pretty thin to maintain the suncatcher's translucency:

I move our garage sale toaster oven outside to the back deck for this project, and I would NOT do it otherwise. Melting plastic is a nasty business, and it will absolutely smoke and give off fumes, and you do not want those fumes in your house. So if you do not have a toaster oven that you can haul outside for this project, then I strongly recommend that you simply not do it. Wait around for garage sale season to come back--our toaster oven cost $4, and we seriously use it multiple times a day.

Set the toaster oven to around 250 degrees, and don't bother letting it preheat. Just set your silicon mold on the tray, put the tray in the toaster oven--

--and come back to check on it every few minutes. You'll first see the beads start to look really soft and slumpy--

--but leave them in until the beads look flat and the surface of the suncatcher is even:

Take the tray out of the oven, transfer the mold from the tray to a safe spot for it to rest, and let it cool:

The finished suncatchers should be quite sturdy, and I really like the way that they look:

To hang them, you simply need to drill a hole, add twine, and string them up! It's long been in the back of my mind to make a really cool Calder-style mobile, but so far we've been hanging them all individually, kind of like ornaments for our trellis and our trees:

I've got a miniature skull silicon mold set, so now I'm considering melting the beads in a thick layer in the skull molds, then drilling a hole through horizontally to make giant skull beads.

Because the world NEEDS giant skull beads, yes?

Letters to Loved Ones

For the past three weeks we've been doing some letter writing, and so far I'm loving it for these three reasons:

1. I can get Willow to do it without much fuss about once a week. Although the copywork is tedious (of course), I think that she finds the composition interesting, and the activity novel.
2. It's a productive schoolwork, something that we do in real life and that has real-life results.
3. I feel like it helps the girls connect to our extended family, all of whom live very far away.

So far, the girls have written letters to their Uncle Chad, their Grandma Janie, and their Uncle Mac (who's not a blood uncle, but a close friend of mine who also loves the girls--does everyone have a couple of courtesy aunts and uncles in the family, or is that just a Southern thing?). Our letter writing kind of follows the Classical Education model in that first, they dictate the letter to me, while I copy it out onto a dry-erase board and make some compositional suggestions, things like "Grandma Janie asked about Disney World in her last email; you should tell her a little about it now."

The Classical Education model would want me to hold on to my dictation and present it with them at a separate time for copywork (and Sydney would be too young to copy it at all), but I then give the letter right to them, and expect that they sit right down and copy it out before the dry erase marker gets smudged or we need it for something else:

 

This is also a good time for me to sit down and write my own letter to "Uncle" Mac, or to collect a few photos of the girls that their Uncle Chad has been asking for, etc.

I address the envelopes myself, but the girls stuff them, and I used to permit them to decorate the envelopes, too, but the last time I did this I had to re-write the address on top of some very exuberant decoration and I'm still not certain that it was completely legible, so that may not be part of the game in the future.

We've got a couple of other people to write in the next couple of weeks--friends the next town over, the other grandma--and then, hopefully, the return correspondence will begin to arrive, and we can start the game all over again!

So, it costs 45 cents to get two kids to practice their handwriting, test their composition skills, and develop relationships with family and friends. 

Not a bad investment!

Music "Class"

I'm embarrassed to tell you how long I've held off on my deeply-desired music lessons for the girls (although if you can remember the guitar recital that signaled the end of Willow's formal lessons at the age of five, you'll know exactly how long I've held off, sigh).

For one, Willow is fiddly with adults, and I wasn't convinced that it was worth paying for lessons that she might loathe. For another, the kiddos' schedules are always my version of "packed," in that I simply don't like them to do more than one or two activities per season, combined with playgroups and playdates and our weekly volunteer gig; I like our at-home time! And for a third, music lessons are pricey! Worth the money, absolutely, but also easy to put off when finances are perennially tightly budgeted.

It took me a silly long time, and more than one conversation with a dear mom friend, a hard-core DIYer who has never put her kids in a scheduled activity but instead gives them things like karate DVDs to do at home (I'm waving at you, Betsy!), to realize that, you know, we could teach ourselves our instruments at home!

Bad habits? Who cares! The "proper" way to play an instrument was invented by somebody at some point, and I simply watched Youtube videos of people playing amazing music by using conventional instruments in unconventional ways until I felt better about the fact that we won't be learning piano on a keyboard with weighted keys (ours is from Goodwill!), and that the kids' violin (also second-hand) probably isn't perfectly sized to each of them.

Instead, we're going to have fun!



I've set the kids to practicing strumming on the guitar (when they can manage to pluck only one string at at time, we'll try a song), and while Sydney asks every day to do bowing on my adult-sized violin (their small violin needs a new bridge--oops!), Willow has taken off on the recorder, which is so satisfyingly easy to teach and to learn.

And she loves it. Doesn't fight me about it. Comes to me to teach her new things on it.

And yes, I do know how we sound in this video that Matt took of us playing and singing together. But again... who cares? We're having fun!

Sunset of the Sabertooth and Story of the World Ancient Times

Still on chapter one, volume one of Story of the World! We actually haven't studied in Story of the World in a while--we were doing Disney crafts, and writing Martin Luther King Jr.'s biography, and goofing around outside instead. However, the girls are fanatically fond of their monthly online Magic Tree House Club meeting (as they are of Magic Tree House and Story of the World audiobooks, in general, even if we aren't "studying" them--so much for the necessity of formal history study!), and since September's book was Sunset of the Sabertooth, I thought it was an excellent opportunity to jump back into the time period, complete one last study from it, and then wrap it up to move on.

To prepare for Magic Tree House Club, the girls listened to Sunset of the Sabertooth and read Sabertooths and the Ice Age, the Magic Tree House Research Guide associated with the book. The Magic Tree House Club meetings are fabulous--Willow loves the leader, who keeps the kids focused and engaged, leads them through some very difficult reading comprehension quizzes (on which Willow always does MUCH better than I do!), offers a ton of contextual information on the topic, teaches them appropriate online etiquette, and presents a fun hands-on craft or two associated with each book.

The craft for this book was clay pinch pots. I bought some air-dry clay (if we'd been back at my childhood home down South, I would have known the perfect place to dig for red clay, but I don't know a good spot here--hence the store-bought clay), showed the girls a video on hand-building with clay--



--laid down some newspaper, and let them go!

The girls had a fabulous time, completely immersed in their project. They each started off with a pinch pot, sure, but I was amused to see that Willow also created for herself a long-stemmed wine glass out of the clay, and Sydney made herself an entire dinner set--bowl, plate, cup, AND fork and spoon.

Even though I KNOW how important sensorial work is for kids, and how drawn they are to it, I was surprised at how much the girls loved playing with clay. We always have a ton of play dough, since I'm always making custom orders of it for my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, and the kids go off and on it, but never anymore with the level of passion that I saw here. I wonder if it has to do with density? One of the reasons why play dough is so good for little kids is that manipulating it strengthens their little fingers and hands--it still feels good to older kids, sure, but it's no longer a challenge to their muscles. Clay, however, is dense! It was certainly challenging for my kiddos to manipulate, and I wonder if that was part of the appeal?

A local artist offers homeschool ceramics classes, which so far I've never considered, since I like to encourage the girls to instead do activities that we can't do at home--gymnastics, ice skating, ballet, etc. Better value for the money, don't you know? I'm thinking now, though, that a session of ceramics from a local artist might be something that would really strike their fancy. Of course, it will have to wait until spring, since I just moved our half-day volunteer gig to the day that the ceramics class meets to accommodate Willow's ice skating classes, and I can't shift it again because Will also does running club three times a week to train for a 5K next month, and after that the girls and I are going on another long road trip, anyway...

Guess I'm going to pick up another tub of clay from the store today!

Here are the other resources that we used to study Ice Age animals:

My Latest over at CAGW: T-Shirt Bags and Name Tags

a tutorial for making these no-sew T-shirt bags (with beads and bells and fringe, oh my!)

and a tutorial for making these reusable kids' name tags for school field trips

Sadly, our field trip to Children's Day at a local farm, for which these name tags got made, was cancelled because of the rain that we're finally having, and so I've kicked my VERY antsy kids down to the basement to play, where hopefully they'll stay all day, coming up only for English muffin pizzas and apples.

Trouble with School

Willow is going through a phase (I hope).

Is it a tween thing? Re-testing the same old boundaries using new strategies learned through greater maturity? Is she about to have a growth spurt? Has she finally, in her ninth year of life, figured out that she really hates her parents and plans to make our lives difficult for the next ten years?

It's one of those short-term things, surely. Ideally.

Willow has always been one of those kids who insists on following her own agenda. I remember getting flak from her grandparents when she was a toddler, because I wouldn't make her go to the bathroom before a long car trip.

"If she says she won't go, then she won't go, and I'm not going to be able to make her," I said, already world-weary.

"I'll take her," said one of the grandparents, and off the two of them marched, only to march back a few minutes later.

"She won't go," said the grandparent, then informed Willow that we were NOT going to stop during the trip for a bathroom break.

Of course we stopped during the trip for a bathroom break. Miraculously, everyone survived.

Is this one of the unplanned bathroom breaks of our homeschool journey? No, because that's a terrible metaphor. Nevertheless, Willow, at eight years and two months, has discovered stalling and sass, and is using them whenever possible, primarily to get out of doing anything academic, secondarily to get out of doing anything else, and thirdly just for the pleasure of stalling and acting sassy, it seems.

I know that many of you are pretty sure that I'm doing it wrong (as am I on many days), but I do require my kids to study, and I do require Willow, who is very bright, to study hard. I've thought hard about my decision, and that's just the way that it's going to be. Three hours of learnin' four days a week, and a half-hour or so of chores every day, doesn't seem to be an unreasonable way for a child to live her life.

Unless that child chooses to fight me every second, that is.

Willow's Favorite Strategies for Avoiding Schoolwork

1. Sitting in front of her work, frowning at it, for an eternity.
2. When required to complete the work that she's been frowning at for an eternity, scrawling an answer illegibly.
3. When required to erase and rewrite said answer, erasing a hole in the page, then breaking her pencil lead.
4. Wandering off (Will I stop working with Sydney to focus every second of my attention on keeping Willow in her seat, or will she manage a temporary escape?).
5. Weeping and claiming that the work is either a) too hard or b) too boring to complete.
6. Insulting me.

Unsuccessful Strategies for Dealing with this:

1. Lecture. This, despite its ineffectiveness, is my go-to strategy. Every time I think that THIS time, with careful explanation, Willow will understand why schoolwork is so important, why a good attitude is the key to a good school day, and how applied effort will result in her finishing all her responsibilities in good time and having the rest of the day at her disposal. It has never worked.
2. Time-out. Matt tried this out on Saturday (which is not a school day unless you farted around all week and didn't get your responsibilities done), and it actually did end with Willow coming back to the table and starting her math, but it took a two-hour commitment on his part to mediate her through an eight-minute time-out. It might be easier if we had a spot for her to complete a time-out that is more boring and less in the family eye, but otherwise I just don't have that time to invest.
3. Taking away stuff: Matt also tried this out last week, and it actually did work for a day or two, but 1) I simply can't get on board with taking away a kid's stuff (although I'm pretending to in public for the sake of parental solidarity) and 2) Will doesn't really play with any of her stuff, and so doesn't really care that much, actually. Perhaps if she was super-focused on working to get her belongings back I'd be more invested, too, but as it is Matt simply has a car backseat full of toy dinosaurs and library books and interesting rocks.
4. Naughty chores. Although these work very well for naughtiness (Will loves to work, and I think that it distracts her from the unhelpful mindset that's causing the naughtiness), giving her a naughty chore for balking at schoolwork is essentially giving her a license to escape!

Basically, discipline strategies aren't working. The good news is that I'm slowly learning ways to recalibrate Will's schoolwork that make her more willing to complete it.

Successful Strategies (So Far!)

1. LOTS of variety. I might get Willow to complete one activity on one day without a ton of fuss, but if I ask her to do an even slightly similar activity the next day, there WILL be a ton of fuss. So instead of four days of practice doing addition with carrying, it works better to have one day of an addition worksheet, then one day  using a Grade 3 Math ipad app--

playing Splash Math Grade 3

--then one day playing some kind of math game with me and Sydney, then one day doing some kind of project.

2. Requiring some work less often. Yes, copywork is tedious, and so is grammar (to her--I think it's fascinating!), but they're both important to our study. Nevertheless, it's just too much work to get the kid to do them every school day, much as I'd like her to. Copywork is just about impossible to get Will to do more than once a week these days--

copying part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech

--but I can get her to write, say, a letter to a friend once a week, and complete a writing project once a week--

making Civil Rights timeline cards

 --and then do a craft project that involves a lot of cutting one day, to strengthen those fingers! Subjects like grammar and Latin we're down to doing maybe just once or twice a week for now, and then having Willow do some independent science or a big chore on the other days.

3. Reviews are races. After the two hours that it took Willow to do 12 math problems on Saturday (that were supposed to have been done on Friday), she was left with 8 problems to go. I challenged her to finish those eight problems in eight minutes--she finished in five. She sat down willingly to do some grammar, but got bored with it with five sentences to go. I challenged her to finish the five sentences in five minutes--she finished in three.

4. Showing their work to Daddy. The girls have weekly checklists with all their chores and schoolwork on it; when they complete something, they mark it off, and when all the day's activities are marked off, they can do as they please. I had been asking them to put their finished work on my desk after I'd gone over it with them, so that I can date-stamp it and set it aside, but lately I've been having them put their work back in their binders, and then when Matt gets home I encourage them to go show him their binders. He admires their work (which means that he knows exactly where they are academically), talks about it with them (extra review time!), praises them for what they've accomplished, and asks about what they haven't completed. I feel like it makes it a lot easier for Matt to co-parent, since he stays up-to-date on what the kids have been up to while he's gone during the day, and I certainly appreciate the extra accountability of the kiddos knowing that they're going to have to explain why they didn't finish something.

The funny thing is that these strategies that I've been painfully learning for Willow would work miserably for Sydney. Sydney loves the mastery that she feels with repetition, and she hates the getting things wrong that comes with learning new work. She likes copywork because she can get it perfectly right--

--and she likes activities like the Kumon workbooks, which drill one very specific skill over and over:

Kumon Word Problems, Grade 1

She doesn't like races (because she might not win!), and she doesn't like showing her binder to daddy if there's even a single thing that she hasn't checked off (because then it's not perfect!). While also giving her lots of repetition, I've been working on having her apply new skills in lots of different ways--

Number Bond Machine

 --and on encouraging the girls to do activities cooperatively, since Willow has also been lashing out at Sydney a lot lately:

Reading a Magic Tree House Research Guide together in preparation for Magic Tree House Club

Another strategy that I constantly employ (that, frankly, doesn't seem to work at all to prevent future naughtiness, but what else are you going to do?) is patience, patience, patience. It wouldn't help to scream at Willow--I don't think it would necessarily intimidate her, but it would certainly give her something to fight about that wasn't schoolwork!--even when I'm screaming my lungs out silently inside my head. I do a lot of what I call "boring the kids into behaving," in that they are required to behave correctly--if they do something incorrectly, they do it again correctly. If they ask for something rudely, I require them to ask again nicely. If they throw the pencil at their sister instead of handing it over, they are required to go fetch it and then hand it over again. If they stomp across the floor in anger, they come back and then walk across the floor gently. If they slam a door (also in anger), they come back in and then go back out, shutting the door gently. If Willow writes an answer illegibly, she erases it and then writes it again legibly. If she yells at me or insults me, she is required to apologize politely; if her apology isn't polite, she tries again until it is. It's wearisome (for everyone), but I truly feel like it gets the point across that appropriate behavior is required while encouraging patience (for everyone!).

I also admit that my lack of a consistent daily routine doesn't help get school done. I try to start school first thing in the morning, and most days we do, but if the kids get really involved in play first, I let them be, and if Willow decides that she wants to bake cookies all by herself for breakfast, then I think that's pretty darn important, too!

The same thing can happen after lunch, if we haven't finished before, or if we watch one documentary and they want to watch another (and another and another!), or if they want to go to the park, or even if they just want to go outside and play. All of that stuff is just as important as sitting down for school, and I just have to figure out how to get all of the priorities aligned. My overall goal is for them to learn how happy and full and free their days are when they just do their schoolwork and chores first thing.

I mean, there are homeschool families who do get it all done every school day, with cheerful, hard-working kids who appreciate their schooling, right?

Um, right?