Pattern Block Math Play

I like to make one of our math units each week involve some concept that we're not currently studying. Sometimes it's a cool, big project, sometimes it's a small game or puzzle, sometimes it's something that connects to some OTHER subject that we're studying  (Ancient Egypt is great for math!), and sometimes it's simply something that involves one of our school materials that we haven't pulled out in a while.

For the past few weeks, for instance, that unit has been all about the pattern blocks:

We all love pattern blocks--they're so colorful and pretty and fun to play with!--but until recently, I never really had the variety of uses for them that would cause them to regularly appear in our school work. I mean, with Cuisenaire rods and Base 10 blocks and number tiles you can do addition and subtraction and multiplication and division and fractions and so on, but we only ever pulled out pattern blocks for patterning, symmetry, and fun.

But now that I've focused in on pattern blocks, I've discovered that there are PLENTY of other mathy uses for them. Most of the resources that I've been using come from our university's education library--

--in particular, this pattern blocks logic/math book that we've settled into:

The kids have been practicing some really great logic and problem solving skills using the activities in this book, especially Will, who's not naturally a visual learner:

This task in particular, which required them to fill each shape with exactly seven pattern blocks, frustrated and stumped her long after Syd had blithely breezed through it:

I know I shouldn't have helped her at all, because it was well within her capabilities, but I did suggest just once that perhaps that bigger block could be made up from two smaller blocks to increase the number of total blocks, and I was frankly amazed when she actually took my suggestion with good grace, and then ran with it, zipping through the remaining shapes. Perhaps that success will give her better stamina for the next project, so that I won't even feel tempted to help her.

At some point I splurged on paper pattern blocks and a set of pattern block stencils, so to finish up each activity I always ask the girls to either paste their solution on or trace and copy it on--they like it, and it makes it look nice for their math portfolio.

Fortunately, the IU Libraries have LONG check-out periods, so if the girls seem bored with pattern blocks in a few weeks we can take a break and still keep the book for when they seem fun again. I've also got a couple of DIY projects in mind for patterny block manipulatives, and I put a bunch of pattern block ideas into my Homeschool Math: Geometry pinboard. Next up, though: we're doing fractions in Math Mammoth right now, and it turns out that pattern blocks also make great fraction manipulatives!

A Child's First Comment Card

My kids have opinions. They have opinions about local, state, national, and international politics. They have opinions about city infrastructure.They have opinions about how people should behave. They have many, many, many opinions about their parenting.

It's important to me that the kids feel like active citizens, and that their opinions have weight in the ongoing conversation (even when I later talk them out of them, as when Will decided for a while that she was a Libertarian), so I've been encouraging them to participate. Will, for instance, has MANY opinions about the parking meters that were recently installed our downtown.

Negative opinions. She hates them. Loathes them, primarily because paid downtown parking has severely curbed our "Let's just stop by the public library for a bit!" habit, since Matt and I have a game going to see how long we can go before feeding a downtown parking meter with quarter #1. To be fair, the library does have a small free lot attached to it, and there is IU parking a few blocks away that we can use, AND we only live a mile from the library so we can walk or bike to it easily, but nevertheless, the first time that we swung by the library after horseback riding, couldn't find a spot in the free lot, didn't have our parking tag for the IU lot, and I drove us on home instead, Will was OVER the parking meters.

Since that incident, Will got into the habit of reading the articles concerning the parking meters, and even more so the often hilarious and/or vituperative letters to the editor, in our local newspaper. She decided to blame the whole thing on the mayor, Mark Kruzan, and began to refer to him derisively as Mayor Croissant to insult him. AND she began to shout things like, "I'm going to toast, butter, and eat that Mayor Croissant for this!" whenever we couldn't find free downtown parking.

We live in a small-ish town, and I began to frankly fear that we'd run into the mayor socially, and Will would insult him to his face and possibly terroristically threaten to toast and eat him, so I decided to offer her another outlet, one that requires socially acceptable language (debatable, but still...) and certain polite conventions (VERY debatable, but still...).

And that's how Will wrote her first letter to the editor of our paper.

It was a great letter. She worked super hard on it, especially for a kid who despises writing by hand, and wrote the entire thing actually legibly and correctly spelled on a sheet of yellow legal pad, which I dutifully mailed in. She unfortunately name-dropped ME as the person who won't pay a single quarter to park downtown, and even more unfortunately spun out her personal conspiracy theory that Mayor Kruzan (whom she thankfully referred to by his real name) only instigated the parking meters because his pet parking garage project turned out to be a money sink (this may have some truth in it, but I do not know how she figured it out), but all-in-all, it was an excellent argument with a clear chain of reasoning and logical conclusions.

If only the stinkin' paper had published it! I don't know if they couldn't decipher her handwriting, or don't publish the opinions of children, but I was pretty pissed for Will's sake that it never appeared. Ah, well...

Syd, now--Will's opinions are generally pretty political in nature, but Syd's more concerned with keeping the trains running on time. This girl loves to figure out how things should work better, and it was all her idea to snag a comment card from the public library and explain to them what their next project should be:

At least this is a sign that she finally knows how to tell time, right?

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Comic Book Wallpaper and Felt Wizard Hats and Pumpkin Projects and My Bra

As a testament to how busy we've been over the past couple of weeks, I've been totally forgetting to show off to you what I've been up to with my other writing gig, so here's the catch-up:

I used comic books as wallpaper

I collected Thanksgiving-friendly ideas for leftover Halloween pumpkins

My kid and I made her a witch hat out of felt

And I altered my bra to fit better

I'm particularly proud of that last project, since a great-fitting bra is VERY important to me, and also very hard to keep up with during my slow but steady weight loss. This alteration should keep this particular bra working well for a while longer, although I am eventually going to need to buy a bra with a smaller cup size.

Poor Matt is horrified.

Halloween 2013

We may have celebrated a day late (the mayor postponed our entire city's trick-or-treating hours because it was storming, complete with tornado watches and flood warnings, on the Big Day), but it was, nevertheless, just as wonderful a celebration as any little kids, particularly ones costumed as a witch and a cat, could want:

The girls received an absurd amount of candy from our generous neighbors (and, as is obligatory this many years in, they managed AGAIN to trick-or-treat at one house of college students who'd forgotten to buy candy. They instead received PopTarts!):

As of right now, Will has eaten all of that ridiculous amount of candy (well, her father and I helped a LOT, but she doesn't know that...), and Syd finally got sick of it last night and asked if the Switch Witch could take it. She did, and replaced the remains of the stash with some Hot Wheels, which have become VERY popular around here of late.

(Nota bene: I told the kids about the Switch Witch as a joke, as we were driving home from Will's ice skating class on Halloween, the kids absolutely vibrating with excitement as they could already see costumed children on the streets. I was SHOCKED when Syd requested it last night, and even more shocked when she said that she might want to do the Switch Witch on Halloween night next year! If she does do that, I must remember to have a larger present than four Hot Wheels cars on hand...)

So we are now, officially, once again candy-free! I'm pretty thrilled, since the weeks of Halloween festivities were not kind to my healthy eating plans (I'm 30 lbs down from April, if you don't count the last two weeks, which I don't), and now I can get my head back in the game...

...at least until Thanksgiving.

Work Plans for the Week of November 4, 2013

MONDAY: We possibly over-extended ourselves today, since I assigned our usual amount of work even though we're not just volunteering, but sending Will to aerial silks and spending a late evening at the library, to boot. At least Monday is not normally too project-focused; neither Latin nor math (I'm really liking Communicating Mathematics with Pattern Blocks for building logic skills and mathematical thinking, so we'll be spending several Mondays with this book) nor reading (Syd's got a computer game to try for reading enrichment, and Will knows that she's welcome to read her book and write her book report over the course of a few days) nor music ("Star-Spangled Banner" for voice for one, and "It's Raining, It's Pouring" for recorder for the other) really *need* to take a long time, although you shouldn't underestimate the insanely long amount of time that my kids can drag work out into. Seriously, Syd's been doing her math for the entire time that I've been writing this post, and yes, she's technically working, but she's also drawing pictures and and eating Halloween candy and chatting her head off about everything under the sun--happy as a clam, she is, but happy as a clam spending over an hour on ten minutes of work.

TUESDAY: Math Mammoth is still going great, and I'm still really liking its content, mostly. My kids are way ahead on computational skills, but have spent less time with fractions and geometry (and the clock, which we are STILL working on mastery of, ugh!), so it's a good combination of zipping ahead with review and settling in with new content--keeps them interested, I think. The chemistry set, on the other hand, is less meaty with definitions and explanations than I'd prefer, so I'm having to spend more time than I'd anticipated in looking up terms and such to use as memory work. I'm particularly surprised that, although the girls are working with acids and bases, the set's manual hasn't actually brought up the terms "acid" or "base," instead using the demonstrations to illustrate only types of chemical reactions. I may have to plan my own lesson on acids and bases next week, just to get the vocabulary into play.

I've decided that this month our craft time will revolve around Thanksgiving crafts, and include some historical/geographical study of Thanksgiving, as well. Fortunately, we've got some cool materials from our visit to Plimoth Plantation a few years ago, and I managed to request most of the Thanksgiving-themed library materials that I wanted before the other parents got to them, so we'll have plenty of content along with our crafts.

For grammar, we're still working through a combination of the Words are CATegorical series and First Language Lessons, although every day that I work with that latter book, I cool on it even more. I think that this week I'm going to interlibrary loan the third volume of that series, and see if I just want to move both girls right into it or perhaps find something else altogether for grammar. My main requirement for a grammar curriculum is that it emphasize sentence diagramming, so good luck with that, right?

WEDNESDAY: Our field trip day was terrific last week, but we'll probably stay home this week. Syd has a friend or two that she might invite over, and they'll both have LEGO Club at the library.

THURSDAY: Someday Syd will get sick of raisin bread, I'm sure, and then we'll move on to a different recipe, but not this week! Will and I are interrupting the history part of our History of the Video Game study for a mini unit on physics, since most video games (and pinball!) rely on realistic physics.

Drawing With Children is also still going well. Will seems less frustrated with it lately, but I'm still trying to go VERY slowly to keep her feeling confident. The memory work for Drawing with Children this week is essentially a daily repetition of last week's lesson in using the shape families to draw simple realistic pictures, and for this week's lesson, instead of moving on, I'm going to have the children draw the shape families onto several of our building blocks to make "art dice," and then we'll play with them!

FRIDAY: I may have to move some of these subjects to different days next week--Friday is awfully project-based, which pretty much guarantees spillover into the weekend. Math, at least, is just another computer game--I dearly hope that they find it too easy for them, because I am OVER fussing about telling time!--and the mapwork lesson for SOTW is generally pretty cut-and-dry, but last week it was Sunday before both girls had really finished their scrapbook pages, and honestly, I think that Will *still* has to finish up last week's letter.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: A Lowe's Build-and-Grow clinic and chess club are our only scheduled activities, which will be a lovely change of pace after the multi-week craziness of Halloween festivities. We might manage a trip to the apple orchard, or the mountain biking park, or a state park to watch the leaves change...

...or we might not!

The Indianapolis Children's Museum and the Perfectly Scary Haunted House

I hadn't planned on taking the children to a haunted house this year--it still sounds crazy to even write that phrase--but Will and Syd are addicted to "This Week's WOW," which of COURSE talked all about the haunted house that the Children's Museum of Indianapolis puts on each year, and so they asked if we could go.

And so we did!

(Nota bene: Although I'm sure they had been hearing about the haunted house for weeks on "This Week's WOW," it's interesting that they didn't ask to go until last weekend. Perhaps they had to get their nerve up!)

The girls wanted to go to the haunted house during frightening hours, but I insisted that we go during friendly hours. You've got your whole life to go to scary haunted houses, after all, but you can only pull off going to friendly haunted houses when you're little. Also, I really didn't want two totally traumatized children waking me up in the middle of the night all winter. And during the friendly hours, you get to trick-or-treat from the costumed characters in each room, showing that when in doubt, or if you think that kids might be afraid of you, bribe them with candy!

Turns out the kids weren't a bit afraid. They LOVED the trick-or-treating, but they also loved checking out all the costumes and props and settings that make a haunted house:

I was actually really into that part, too. You definitely do not know this about me, but I did my undergrad degree at an expensive out-of-state university on scholarship, and I was ALWAYS hustling for dough--I babysat a really weirdo kid (and plenty of conventional ones), I wrote opinion columns for the student newspaper, I slung popcorn at my hometown movie theater on Thanksgiving and Christmas days, and one autumn I held a meat cleaver and a bloody mannequin arm and pretended to vivisect a fellow actor at one of the scariest haunted houses in the state of Texas. It was shockingly hard work, but also so, so satisfying, in a really mean way, of course. I made adults cry, I made a man wet himself, I made someone vomit, I gave a teenager an asthma attack, and I was infamous for causing a ridiculous number of people to safeword me, I was so awesomely scary. And I didn't even last the entire season (I injured myself chasing a loudly weeping woman out of my room, so intent on catching her and strapping her to my table that I ran flat into a painted-black wall in the pitch black maze).

Anyway, I'm REALLY into haunted houses, and I was super stoked that the kids were, too.

Check out this bookshelf by the haunted house's exit. All the book titles are previous years' themes:

It was a pleasant surprise to find that the rest of the children's museum was deliciously, non-spookily themed for Halloween:

Sammy Terry is a local celebrity and campy horror film host. Love him!

The background is an actual still used in Nightmare before Christmas. 

But, of course, since it's been a year or so since we've been to the Children's Museum, it was also wonderful to find much that's remained exactly, happily the same:

I don't know if it's the homeschooling, or their personalities, but in some ways my kids are very "young" for their ages, and I love that about them. They're completely uninterested in tweeny pop music or TV shows or books, they still play with play dough and shaving cream and colored rice and sand, and they can still completely immerse themselves in toy dinosaurs--

--or pretend scuba diving:

We're actually going to start the pyramids and mummies chapter of The Story of the World next week!

But, with all the many levels of the world's largest children's museum at their disposal, I still found evidence that something else was on their minds:

So as we're spending the day at the museum, the kids mention once or twice that they wished that we could go to the haunted house's frightening hours, too, and I kept mulling it over in my head, and we kept hearing kids who looked the same age as or younger than my two talk about how THEY were going in the scary haunted house, so finally, helped in no small part because *I* wanted to go, too, I bought tickets for the frightening hours. I was sort of worried, still, but seriously, there were toddlers in line for this haunted house. One woman had an infant on her hip (I still think that was a seriously bad idea, but still...).

Oh. My. Goodness. Imagine the perfect haunted house for a brave kid--low lights, lots of jump scares, nothing malicious or gory.

This was that haunted house.

It helped, I'm sure, that we'd done the friendly hours earlier, and so the kids were familiar with the layout, but still, it was PERFECT for kids. The lights were down so that you couldn't see what was coming well, but nothing was pitch black. The actors were mainly costumed in black morph suits (I want one of those soooo bad!) with pieces of the environment attached so that they blended in, or in generic "spooky" attire--torn clothes, zombie-ish face paint, etc. No blood. No weapons. Nobody vivisecting anybody else. Their main occupation was jumping out and scaring you, which yes, is startling, but you knew ahead of time that's what would be happening, so you were prepared. After my eyes got used to the lighting, I could sort of see the morph suits, so I'd steer my unsuspecting tots toward them in every single room, and laugh when they shrieked.

Random tip: If you enter a room and the actors are already out and acting spooky, then you're going too fast for them to get set back up for you. Slow down, so that the actors in the next room can jump out and scare you!

Seriously, this has to be the only kid-friendly haunted house in the world. It was brilliant. The kids and I had a freakin' ball. They're bragging their butts off about it to everyone they see.

I wonder how many years til I can take them with me to the Dungeon of Doom?

Trick-or-Treating with IU Basketball: Haunted Hoops!

It's another Halloween tradition! Every year IU Basketball holds a free Halloween event for families, with a basketball scrimmage, games, crafts, trick-or-treating, and a costume parade. Although both Will and Syd worked hard on their respective costumes (witch and cat) for the Big Day, I did manage to convince one of them to wear the IU cheerleading dress that I scored at Goodwill a few years ago just to this one event:

The cat insisted on remaining a cat:

Thank goodness the IU campus is so nice for frolicking--lets some of us get all that sugar energy out!

That makes for *slightly* fewer wiggles and whines during the scrimmage:

But after the scrimmage, it's time for candy! And a parade! And candy! And a photo with the IU basketball team! Check out who the girls got to sit next to during the group photo:

Coach Crean is a big-time local celebrity, so even Syd, who was unimpressed enough with the random man sitting next to her for the photo that when he said, "Thanks for sitting next to me!" nicely to her afterwards she stared at him blankly (obviously, we have gone over and over and OVER appropriate responses to kind small talk, sigh), became star-struck as soon as we'd walked away and a few people said to her, "Wow! You sat next to Coach Crean!". She kept wanting to tell people that she'd sat with this famous person, but she kept forgetting the name of that famous person, so she'd start off, "Guess what? I sat next to..." and then look at us for help.

Since the girls also participated in another Halloween event at the IU dorms, that makes TWO trick-or-treating events that they've done pre-Halloween, and I also could have taken them trick-or-treating at the mall, any of our several state parks, one of our local museums, and most of several retirement homes around town. Mind you, I love the fact that our community is so community-minded that it eagerly holds these activities for children, but I would love it even more if they spread it out a bit, you know? I don't even care about the sugar rush, because my girls don't have allergies and I let them eat it all and then it's gone, but we hate being over-scheduled and/or missing fun stuff, and our weekend was INSANE and we still missed a ton of stuff that the girls would have loved. We missed the Day of the Dead event at the Mathers Museum! We missed decorating mini pumpkins at Lake Monroe! Wouldn't it be fun if some place had a Thanksgiving event, and some other place had a Valentine's Day event, and some other place had an Independence Day event, etc.?

I'll totally run the salt dough cornucopia/construction paper Valentine/2014 calendar station!

Work Plans for the Week of October 28, 2013

Our break was good for mind and soul, but I'm also very happy to be back in business. We've got so many exciting things to learn and do and see and explore!

Here are Syd's work plans for the week.
Here are Will's work plans for the week.

MONDAY: I'm trying out a new method of getting the memory work practiced regularly. It's a learning curve, though, since Will and Syd both found the concept of checking off the correct assignment on the correct day on this chart absolutely baffling at first. It's funny what random things kids don't know!

I'm trying to strike a balance between hands-on math and computation skills, so both girls are testing out a different pattern blocks skills book today (I didn't like the one we tested the other week, sigh). I'm also trying to incorporate more living books and movies into our days, since the girls always seem to remember that content so well, so I'm adding that to subjects throughout the week whenever it seems relevant. I've been downloading videos from Discovery Education Streaming and creating themed DVDs for various units--the recorder, Ancient Egypt, our 50 states study, etc.--and this makes having the kids access those videos a LOT more handy!

You might notice that Syd no longer has Reading as a daily subject! She's at about a Level 2 reader, so instead of making it a curriculum subject, I'm including in her other daily subjects something that she can read to me, and something that I can read to her.

In Latin we've moved on to commands, and in music Will is still reviewing some of her recorder songs that she forgot over our hiatus from the instrument, while I'm trying out having Syd, who has no interest in learning an instrument but who does enjoy singing, learn and practice a song this week.

TUESDAY: Over the weekend, we went to the Physics, Geology, and Chemistry open houses on campus--always a BIG hit!!!--and so I wasn't super surprised when Will said that she'd rather study chemistry now than continue with human biology. We hadn't gone far into human biology, fortunately, and have finished our animal biology unit, AND own a really nice chemistry set that comes with a series of graduated experiments and demonstrations, so I'm actually pretty excited to make the shift. It will release me from a TON of prep work, too!

I've still got Craft as a subject for Tuesdays, since it's great for fine motor and problem solving skills, and although Syd's pretty crafty in her free time, Will rarely chooses such activities. I've still got Will doing some grammar, too--although my long-term plan is to put her into the third level of First Language Lessons with Syd later this year, Will already has such an excellent inherent grasp of English grammar that it's easy for her to memorize parts of speech.

We have to remember to bring gloves to horseback riding this week. It's getting cold!!!

WEDNESDAY: I've given up on "fun school," keeping just memory work and the math packet in what's otherwise a free day. We've gotten out of the habit of doing big day trips during the week, but aerial silks, our usual Wednesday activity, is actually easy to shift to another day, so there might be a field trip renaissance in our future. First up: the girls are making noise about visiting the Children's Museum of Indianapolis' Haunted House. Do we dare?

THURSDAY: Yes, I really did schedule a full day's work on Halloween. What was I thinking? Actually, it may storm on Halloween, so it's a good thing that we did all those trick-or-treating events and parties all weekend, even though they made me miserable. Otherwise, the girls are continuing their special units, with Syd making more raisin bread (I'm trying to choose recipes that she can potentially memorize, and definitely master) and Will working more on a real-live working pinball game. I bought a clock kit, and I'm really excited to set them up with the supplies to make their own clock--you can't not know how to tell time after doing THAT!--and there will also be our homeschool group's play group, perhaps ice skating with friends, perhaps dinner with friends, perhaps trick-or-treating with friends...

It can't REALLY storm on Halloween, right?!?

FRIDAY: Math with Math Mammoth is still going great. Will's still zipping through the cumulative reviews, stopping occasionally to complete the odd unit, but Syd's found a good place to settle midway through the second grade level. She's still moving very quickly, though, so I won't be surprised if she eventually reaches the point where she can't complete a unit a day.

Scrapbooking our summer vacation is also a BIG hit. I'll share the girls' scrapbooks with you some other time, but they're having a ball gluing down photos and souvenirs and writing captions, and the scrapbooks are going to be lovely mementos for them when they're done. I'm curious to see if the papyrus paintings that we'll be doing for history will also turn out cute--it's the last project before we move on to the mummy chapter!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Oh, let's see... There's our university's homecoming parade. Evening activities at our local hands-on science museum. Read to a Dog at the library. A hockey skills workshop. Some work that needs to be done on the chicken coop. Maybe mountain biking?

I think we'll stay busy!

Teeny-Tiny Dictionary Page Envelopes

I make these dictionary page mini envelopes all the time, for my own stuff and to package pinback buttons from my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, so I finally decided to list them!

I've made these out of comic book pages before, and scrapbook paper, and even plain notebook paper, but I always come back to the dictionary pages. You've got to love an envelope that increases your vocabulary!