My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: T-shirts!

a tutorial for altering a T-shirt to make it smaller

and a tutorial for altering the neckline of a T-shirt

After a long winter in which I felt particularly unwell much of the time, I started, this spring, to work towards getting healthier. Most of my efforts have involve getting more exercise and losing weight; I'm not particularly vain, nor am I size-conscious, but I just wasn't feeling good, and it's not rocket surgery to blame the 50 pounds that I've gained since my first pregnancy.

I've been tracking my food using MyFitnessPal and my exercise using BodyMedia, because I don't do well with guesswork, and I've been able to lose 23 pounds so far without actually that much stress or fuss; I wonder if I would have started getting healthier sooner if I'd known how different the options are from that first crash diet that I was put on back in the sixth grade. That first experience is the one that makes me feel kind of panicky and upset still if I get too hungry 25 years later, so there's absolutely none of that nonsense now. No tiny little kitchen scale, no tuna, no English muffins--Weight Watchers in the 1980s was a piece of work, I'll tell you that.

My major focus, though, is the amount of healthy exercise that I'm trying to get each day. I wear a BodyMedia armband that tracks it, which is often the main thing that gets me back on the treadmill for another fifteen minutes after dinner, because I want to meet my activity goals, or gets me to that Wednesday morning cardio class, because my armband reads it as "vigorous" activity. I'm teaching myself to run, even though I don't love it and I am definitely the slowest runner on the planet, and I've finally gotten the girls used to the idea that every trip to the park must also include the .8-mile trek AROUND the park, as well.

And so now I have a bunch of clothes that don't fit! I actually am not in love with that fact, because I don't like to shop, and when I do shop, I like to shop second-hand. And second-hand is NOT the way to go when you need a new wardrobe of pants right this minute. I actually had to go to Target last weekend to buy a pair of pants. I am looking forward to altering, modding, and reworking all my T-shirts, though.

But the big question... Yes, I feel SO much better today than I did six months ago. Just in general, I feel so much better! How great is that?

Star Wars at the Indiana State Museum

A few weeks ago, we trekked up to the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis to get our nerd on at their traveling exhibit, Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination:

It featured actual props and costumes used in the films.

Squee.

Darth Vader is choking them with his mind, you see.

 

There were also detailed models that were filmed super-close-up as the real, giant ships:

Sydney is bigger than a Jawa!

I am NOT as big as a sand person:

Shudder.

I'm also not as big as a Wookie--

--but that's okay. They like me anyway.

Yoda likes me a lot, too:

The science aspects of the exhibit came through a series of hands-on stations, from stuff that we'd done before but were happy to do again, such as traveling on compressed air--

--("It's pneumatic!" she said!), to amazing experiences that we had never before had. I'm a hands-on museum aficionado, I tell you, and these activities floored me. The kids interacted with computers and real-life manipulatives to create virtual spaces:

They compiled robots from parts and put them through various scenarios to evaluate their performances. They built models to succeed in challenging structural conditions. And, coolest of all, they used LEGOs to build electromagnetically powered hover cars:

Remember how museums never stock what I want to buy? I'd have bought myself one of those hovercar kits, that's for damn sure.

I've been really thinking about encouraging the maths and hard sciences with my girls this year, thanks in no small part to this exhibit. Now that Syd's older, I think that this would be a great year to accelerate their math and get them going on some engineering, physics, and programming projects.

Perhaps we WILL be making electromagnetic hovercars...

Pill Bugs under the Microscope

Did you know that pill bugs aren't insects?

I didn't know that, not until we covered pill bug anatomy for the kids' summer animal portfolio unit.

Say what you will about pill bugs, they're an easy, accessible, sturdy critter to catch and study and release. Butterflies are so much lovelier, but you've got to be so gentle with them, or take their tattered wings upon your soul. You've got to be gentle with pill bugs, too, of course, but anything that will roll up into a ball and let you roll it around in the palm of your hand is alright by me!

To study pill bug anatomy, I printed out an anatomical diagram of pill bugs from Enchanted Learning for the kids to color--

--and then I sent them outside to collect some lucky pill bugs, so that we could match the diagram to their real, live anatomy. I swear, this Brock Magiscope is one of my absolute favorite homeschool supplies:

The Magiscope works really well with both flat and 3D specimens, so we can just set a pill bug up on top of a slide, and let it hang out and crawl around while we find its jointed legs and uropods and cephalothorax and all that good stuff:

This pill bug is fine--a kid tipped it upside-down to get a look at its jointed legs.

No pill bugs were harmed during this science project, although a great many were annoyed.

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Recent Lack of Posts is Due to...

...this:

It had to be done. The bathroom sink was duct taped to the wall, duct tape also covered the many broken and missing tiles behind the bathtub, the floor was just sad, and as I write, our contractor is cutting out and replacing most of those boards in the lower half of the bathroom, since they're apparently waterlogged and rotted, sigh.

See that spot in the middle, though? We're going to put a window back in that spot where a window clearly originally was. I'm pretty excited, because I like a bathroom with a window, and I like anything that gets a little more natural light into our dungeon-esque home. 

In the meantime, the girls and I have been doing library school, park school, Barnes & Noble school, and school basically anywhere that we can't hear hammering and thudding and rotten boards being ripped away from their foundation. It's actually working out well, though--we're focusing on pencil-and-paper work, which is easily transported, and so the girls have been really concentrating on learning cursive, using printed lessons from my StartWrite program, and catching up to grade level on the odd neglected math subject, using print-outs from my pdf copies of Math Mammoth. I'm using the chapter reviews as pre-tests, which allows me to assign just the necessary chapters, and so we've been having an interesting time with geometric solids, areas of rectangles, types of triangles, and polygons. 

I've got some fun hands-on enrichment activities for these subjects, though, which normally I would be interspersing with the pencil-and-paper work, but that will have to wait until we're doing school back at home, back at our big table, back with endless shelves of school supplies and art materials and reference works.

I mean, this bathroom will be done sometime soon.

Right?

Demonstrating the Commutative Property of Addition Using Cuisenaire Rods

We're doing a little unit on the properties of addition, since it's one of the categories in the Splash Math 3rd Grade app that Will's trying to zoom through and finish up before I download the fourth grade app for her.

I would like the girls to be able to define and understand each property of addition, so I downloaded and printed these properties of addition flash cards for the girls to memorize, and we're also doing several hands-on activities to demonstrate each property, such as this one, in which the girls used Cuisenaire rods to "prove" the commutative property of addition:

Using centimeter-gridded graph paper and our Cuisenaire rods (which are also counted in centimeters, so they match!), each kid illustrated and wrote one addition equation--

--and then illustrated and wrote its commutation right above or below it:

Using the graph paper and Cuisenaire rods, it's easy to see that each equation is equivalent.

This wasn't a surprise to the girls, of course, but rather something that they perhaps hadn't necessarily spent time thinking out for themselves, so they were happy enough to write out a few examples. I've got a couple more hands-on activities to demonstrate the property, and then we'll add the flash card to our Memory Work Binder, to be quizzed on and recited from a couple of times a week until it's old, old news.

Cursive

Willow learned to print at her Montessori school, and I didn't pay a lick of attention to the process--neither did anyone else, apparently, because even after years of practice her handwriting is still pretty miserable, with several letters constructed non-traditionally. My stubborn girl would never let me re-train her to print correctly now, but fortunately cursive is a fresh start for all of us:

In the school system, Will would have learned cursive last year, as a third grader, but I really, really hoped that an extra year of practice would give her tidy and lovely print handwriting. Haven given up that dream, however, we're starting off this year with the cursive lessons from our Startwrite software program for both kids-- 

Syd, a second grader, has lovely print handwriting, and is ready to learn cursive, too.

--focusing just as much on reading cursive as writing it, but now that we've gotten a few letters done, I can use the program to create copy pages for them, too.

I have to admit, it's giving me hope that Willow could have tidy and lovely cursive handwriting, at least!

Ground

My mother bought us this small, hand-operated wheat grinder for Christmas, and we're still figuring out what's fun to do with it:

Hand-ground gomasio makes for a good start!

Our Favorite Games Report: August 2013

Wanting some logic training for the girls but not finding anything packaged that I like, I've begun to consciously incorporate all kinds of puzzles and games into our days. Of course, we've always played puzzles and games, but bringing them also into our "work hours," not just our free time, has let us start playing together MUCH more often, as well as allowed the girls to feel free to explore more than just their very favorites.

Here's what we've been playing this month:

online Quiddler and Set

There's a new puzzle every day, and although Will and I don't play every single day, we do play most days.

Apples to Apples Junior

(Now that we've got the junior version, I can put the sexy cards back in the adult version that we've been using!)

The Settlers of Catan

We haven't gotten the hang of this game yet, but we're sticking with it.

 Now What?

(SUCH a great game for creativity and logic!)

Sorry

Although the rest of the family is so over this one, Sorry is ALWAYS Syd's choice!

 Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?

This one is a recent love. We tried playing it back when I first bought it around Christmastime, but it was too hard to hold the girls' attention. Since it had all its pieces, however, and since there's no price like a Goodwill price, I held onto it. 

At some point this month, on a nice afternoon when our plan was to take a couple of board games and Pandora radio on the ipad out to the picnic table by the chickens, Will chose this game again, probably because she'd forgotten how frustrated she'd been with it just a few months ago. She and I played it while Sydney watched and drew and fed stuff to the chickens, and this time, she loved it!

Key to the experience is that this time she was actually able to answer a couple of the questions--

"What city holds the Liberty Bell?"

"In what city did both the Second Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention convene?"

--and, since we had the ipad right there, whenever she was curious about a piece of trivia, we just looked it up! We looked up the details of and circumstances surrounding the United States' purchase of Alaska ("How can you just BUY a state?!?" she asked), and the Louisiana Purchase, and we watched several scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind so that both girls could see Devil's Tower--I think we'll also be able to see that one in person this summer on our dino dig road trip.

Some games are becoming a little tricky right now, because Will is growing interested in more complicated, multi-player games, like Settlers of Cataan and Axis and Allies, that just don't hold Syd's attention, but having the three of us play an hours-long game while leaving Syd out is also pretty impossible. We have tentative future plans with another family who has kids around the same ages as ours to have a dinner and game night, so that the older kids and at least a couple of the adults can try out a free kiddie D&D game that I found. If that works out well, perhaps it can become some sort of monthly family board game club!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Book Page Prints and a Lemonade Stand

a tutorial for crafting greeting cards using vintage book pages and bilateral symmetry

and a tutorial for making re-usable chalkboard signs

most particularly to use with the girls' now pimped-out lemonade stand

I'm not actually sure what they'll be selling--beaded necklaces, popcorn, and tries on their pegboard and metal screw Plinko game have all been considered--but they'll be open for business this weekend!

Quill Pens from Chicken Feathers

We have goose feathers and ink bottles in our homeschool/art supplies, and the girls play with them every so often. When Will asked to do quill pens this weekend, though, it was with one key difference. Syd wrote with a quill pen made from a goose feather--

--and Will wrote with a quill pen made from Fluffball, her chicken:

When Will asked to make a quill pen from one of Fluffball's glorious feathers that she'd found, I knew it would work, but I didn't realize how difficult it would be to create. I had anticipated teaching Will how to make the quill pen herself with her pocket knife, but the chicken feather had a far narrower, and thus stronger, interior channel, and thicker walls, it seemed, and I had to use a lot of force just to make the pen myself.

The final product, however, although more clumsily made than usual, worked just fine! Syd wrote a letter to a friend using her goose feather pen, and Will wrote out all her vital information--full name, birthday, age, grade, etc.--with her chicken feather pen.

Remember how I've told you on numerous occasions that my children have an absurdly poor memory for their vital information? Just this weekend, on their way to audition for the roles of the No-Neck Monsters in an IU student production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," (clearly a tale for another day!), we were going over audition etiquette and I said to them, "And what would you say if the director asks what grade you're in?", and they were both all, "I don't know." Well, they come by that poor memory honestly, because as they were working, Will asked me a question, and, only paying half attention as I replied while doing my own work, I said something about "since you're eight years old, blah blah blah." Several minutes later, a new thought occurred to me and I suddenly shouted, "Gah! You're NINE!!!" and hugged that protesting baby to my bosom in both joy and grief.

And that's what school is likely to look like at our house!

History of the Video Game Unit Study: LEGO Marble Mazes

The girls and I are at the very beginning stages of our History of the Video Game unit study.

We're so early into it that we haven't even started studying video games yet!

The pre-history of video games involves portable tabletop games--primarily bagatelle, a sort of mini pool table with obstacles. That game was turned into a game of chance called baffle ball by tilting it and adding a plunger, and letting the balls fall into various pockets. Games of chance, however, are also easily made into games of gambling, and to sidestep the backlash against gambling, baffle ball added flippers, turning it into a game of skill called pinball.

Also involved in the prehistory are jukeboxes and the invention of the computer, but for now, we're beginning at the beginning: tabletop games of skill and/or chance.

So we built one!

Using a LEGO base plate as the base of the maze, first build up a wall of LEGOs around the perimeter of the plate, and then create a maze for a marble to navigate:

It's the simplest of projects, and the girls were enthralled:

Both of them re-built their maze over and over, re-running the marble through it to explore different layouts and strategies, and Sydney has come back to it daily over the past week or so. She's discovered that a maze might be simple going one direction and difficult going the reverse direction, she's discovered that you can amp up the challenge by adding two marbles, and she's gotten out our drilled wooden marble maze blocks to explore different ways that gravity can move marbles through a path.

I must make a note to take her to the Wonderlab this week--they have an inclined LEGO base plate and a big bucket of LEGOs set up in their water exploration area so that you can run water down the base plate and dam it up or make channels for it with LEGOs. I admit that I'VE spent plenty of time playing with that brilliant toy!