A Liberal Trying to Liberate More than the Law Allows

The kids are VERY into comic books and graphic novels of all kinds. Our public library has a large collection of juvenile graphic novels in the children's department, and since the graphic novel section is also where we station ourselves when we spend time there (big round table, relatively more quiet than the part of the department that has the play room and train table and board books, near the door to the program room so we can easily see when it's time to go to whatever we've signed up for), the kids early on discovered the joys of browsing and reading and checking out the graphic novels.

Now that both kids are such voracious readers, I also don't do as thorough of a job checking out their reading material as I used to do--now I mostly skim something or read a page or two of one of their books as I'm picking up after them. The other day, Syd had gotten a bunch of Archie comics from the library, then left them lying around after reading them. As I was picking them up to put them away, I flipped open one of them to check out a random page:

Um.... yeah. Archie comics probably aren't appropriate reading material for the seven-year-old.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Refashion

the kid's T-shirt refashion

and a bunch, bunch, bunch more clothing refashion projects

I would dearly like for Syd and I to finish the pants for her Trashion/Refashion Show outfit this week, so that next week I can watch out for a nice day to do her photo shoot. I think I've decided to sacrifice my frumpy old thrifted green coat, the one that I haven't worn since Christmas 2012 (when Matt bought me an awesome biker coat, complete with elbow and back pads to keep me safe when I fall off my Harley or get shot at), to the pants cause, hopefully re-using the coat's hardware for the pants fastenings, and then *maybe* using a couple of old green T-shirts for the bell bottoms that Syd dearly desires. Syd also dearly desires green sequins, but I just do not think that we're going to be able to score anything with green sequins to upcycle into the garment.

Seriously, there has been nothing with green sequins in any of the thrift stores for WEEKS. Are people with green sequined clothing finding them so justifiably hideous that they're choosing to burn them instead of donate them?

Yeah, I probably would.

DIY Montessori Pin Flag Storage

As you probably guessed during my tutorial for setting up Montessori pin flags of all the Olympic nations, at some point or other Will and I have constructed ALL the pin flags.

Every flag.

Every nation.

Every state.

Every province.

Every continent.

It was a ton of work, spread out over many days, and I did not want to risk misplacing or flat-out losing any of these pin flags that we worked so hard on, so I created this manically organized storage system for them:

I store the pin flags in a three-ring binder, pinned into pieces of felt that I've cut to 8.5"x11" and hole punched to fit in the binder. The flags are alphabetized by continent and country, and before each set I've included a key, with each flag's name listed in order. The key is printed on cardstock, to give some structure for the felt pages.

Behind each key the flags are pinned in the same order, and this makes it easy to remove some for a special project, such as a pin flag map of the Olympic nations:

I can easily see which flags are missing, and see where they belong when it's time to put them back.

After each project, I tediously reorganize the flags back into their felt places, repairing any that were damaged, and then double-checking that all were returned and remaking any that are lost forever. It's not a super fun activity, but I do appreciate the order the next time I need to prepare another pin flag project.

Which will be next week. The Olympic nations are going away, and I think I'll set the United States up.

This post was shared with Keep Calm Craft on over at Frontier Dreams.

Work Plans for the Week of February 17, 2014: Birds, Biathlons, and a Biography

Right now, it's 47 minutes past the time that I intended to start school for the day, but the kids are wildly romping together so happily--I believe that one of them is a dog trainer and the other is a disobedient dog--that there's no way I'm going to disturb them. One of the main reasons why I started homeschooling, after all, is that I realized one day, years ago, that even though my kids' Montessori boasted three-year classrooms, so that my kindergartner and my youngest grouper could go to school together every day, the next year would mean that not only would my older kid move up to SEVEN hours of school a day, but also my kids would be in separate classrooms for the next two years.

My six-year-old didn't need seven hours of school every day.

My six-year-old and four-year-old didn't need to spend the majority of every day apart from each other.

I pulled the kids out of private school and into homeschooling for many academic and social and political reasons, but I never let myself forget that among those reasons is the opportunity for these sisters to be together, and so when they're playing together (and miraculously not screaming at or kicking each other!), I let them play.

So here's what we WILL do when they're tired out and their game is through, or when they start screaming at or kicking each other, which is as good a time as any to pause play:

MONDAY: The kids and their father participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count yesterday, and had a marvelous time, so for today they'll be filling out one of these journal pages for a more in-depth study of one of the birds that they spotted. We haven't studied birds (other than chickens, of course!) in a lot of detail yet, so I'm curious to see if the kids would like to learn more. Bird watching is such a rewarding hobby that I'd be happy to see the kids develop a love of it.

The kiddos are still progressing at a rate of one unit a day, three days a week, in Math Mammoth, but I noticed this weekend that Syd seemed to have trouble remembering how to subtract with borrowing, so we'll be playing Clear the Mat for our hands-on math enrichment activity this week. Syd loves to play games over and over and over again, so I foresee plenty of reinforcement in her future!

Will's reluctance to learn her current song prompted me to ask her if she'd lost interest in the recorder, but her replies that she LOOOOOVES the recorder were loud and fervent, so perhaps that will inspire her to finally get that darn song learned! Syd really loves her Youtube keyboard lessons, so much so that figuring out how to progress after they're finished is a constant worry. A piano plus piano lessons is too much of an investment for our budget this year (dinosaur digs and horseback riding lessons are pricey, alas...), so I'll need to figure out a way to soldier on without. Unfortunately, Matt, who is the only one of us who actually took piano lessons as a child, is claiming 100% ignorance and refusing to be of any help whatsoever (Thanks, Matt!), so you may find me teaching myself keyboard so that I can teach my kid. Don't worry, though--I do stuff like that a lot.

The kids are bringing their chicken skeleton into our weekly volunteer gig today, because they're pretty sure that everyone who stops by is really going to want to see it. Will plans to station herself next to the skeleton on display so that she can answer all those eager questions that are sure to come her way. We even did some role-playing, with me playing the curious person asking questions, and Will answering them in her best pedantic tone (She used to come with me sometimes to my classes when I taught freshman comp at the university, and I REALLY hope that she did not pick up that tone from me!). How I hope that someone is genuinely interested and wants to ask her questions!

TUESDAY: We're back to our volunteer gig on this day, since the girls have an actual "meeting" about their Girl Scout service project. I can't wait to see how this is going to go.

We've been casually enjoying the Olympics, mostly watching it streaming online as we go about our daily business, but the Olympic athlete profile and Olympic nation profile in this Olympics unit study will let the kids focus in on it academically one more time before it's over. There's so much curriculum material available that you really could study nothing but the Olympics for the entire two weeks, but I tried to zero in on the activities that required the kids to practice the concrete academic skills that I'm wanting them to practice right now (here, research methods!), and otherwise we're just spectators.

There are a few children's academic contests going on this time of year. Some, such as a local playwriting contest and a poster-making contest, I passed over for this year (although I did start researching and writing a History of the Theater unit study...), but others, such as a local contest asking for a biography of an African-American inventor, and the PBS Kids writer's contest, I'm definitely going to have them enter. Academic research and creative writing? You bet!

WEDNESDAY: I'm a little afraid, especially with that meeting in the morning, that there might be too much work scheduled for Tuesday, so I'm planning that we can finish any leftovers on Wednesday, along with horseback riding class and aerial silks. Otherwise, there's plenty of time for playing dog trainer and disobedient dog!

THURSDAY: I think the kids will be pleased to discover, on the other hand, that this day is light even for a light day! They're going to enjoy their endangered species art project (part of another contest), which will also segue nicely into the beginning of our study of Indiana, since the endangered animal must be local. I wish, now, though, that I'd put this project off for a couple of weeks--I deleted the kids' independent studies from the schedule to accommodate it, but Syd and I actually really need to keep working on her fashion show garment! This is the last week that we can keep goofing around with thrift stores, and then we have GOT to get sewing, whether Syd finds the perfect green sequined fabric or not.

FRIDAY: We've studied Indiana before, but we're going to refresh our memories about our home state, and add some more context (state history, probably, and definitely Native Americans) before we move on to Arkansas and then the west.

We mostly listen to podcasts just for fun, but since Syd often asks to listen to fairy tales or audiobooks while we work on projects, I finally got the idea to pull up a relevant podcast for us to listen to while we work on a  project. The particular podcast that we'll be listening to while the kids make Sumerian seals (we saw some of these at the Rosicrucian Museum, and I am excited to have the kids try their hands at making their own) is from What You Missed in History Class. It only mentions necrophilia obliquely.

I think the kids will enjoy this winter sports sudoku, and they're eager to write to their grandmother, if perhaps only because they want her to send them more film for the cameras that she gave them for Christmas.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: This weekend is going to be a busy one! There's a Girl Scout event each day, and Will has both chess club and rehearsal for her Spring Ice Show. But IF the weather warms up like it's supposed to, it should be a wonderful weekend for shuttling kids around and otherwise playing outside in the sun!

Timeline When You're Not Tipsy

This is Timeline, a game that the kiddos' grandmother gave them for Christmas:

Will and I have played several rounds of this game this week--it's fast-paced, which I like, and it's got a great combination of trivia and logic, both of which Will loves. Many of the cards are hard enough to stump anyone, and most of them are quite hard, but there are plenty of cards that even a kid Will's age could know (lots of ancient history stuff), and plenty that she could figure out by using the historical events that she DOES know. The game also gets harder as you go on and more dates are put on the timeline, so there's some good strategy involved. Don't know when the saxophone was invented? Better get it on the timeline early when the only other dates you've got to fit it into are the invention of writing and the invention of the smartcard!

This is the Inventions version (there are a few more versions of the Timeline game that I want to collect eventually). It involves drawing cards at random and ordering them into a single timeline, discarding your card and drawing again if you've placed it incorrectly:

Here are some of the cards that I drew.

Here's Will figuring out where to place one of her cards into the timeline.

Until Will recently re-discovered this game and wanted to play it over and over again, we'd most recently played it on Christmas Day, at my Aunt Pam's house after our big, delicious, decadent Christmas lunch. Will beat me soundly in every round on that day, and was very much surprised to discover that my game play was much improved since then. Why, I was actually winning! How can that be?

Hmmm, maybe it was the slush punch that I drank on Christmas morning? And then the wine with lunch? And then a little more slush punch?

The fact that I actually had a half-full wineglass in my other hand as I played her on that day probably didn't hurt.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: The Kids are Sewing

a tutorial for setting up kids to sew

See our Olympic nations Montessori map, before the kids got started on it?

and a big round-up of projects that kids can sew independently

Even though I may, personally, be feeling the late-winter blahs, I have to say that this may be the busiest Project Week I have ever witnessed. The kids have put together our entire set of Montessori puzzle maps and made their valentines for our big party tomorrow. Syd has drawn, worked on a model of the Statue of Liberty, finished her California vacation scrapbook, and built bizarre stuffed animal/toy car contraptions, all while listening to a never-ending selection of audiobooks. Will has built, painted, and mounted a birdfeeder; built, painted, and tested a pinewood derby car; built a model covered wagon, and helped me complete our set of Montessori pin flags. They've been to math class, been swimming, worked at our volunteer gig, and right now they're in the arena next to me happily trotting around on Cody and Lola. And it's only Wednesday!

I'd like to say that the early part of the week has been more restful for *me*, at least, but with the new plans running through my brain for a children's woodworking area and a homeschool pinewood derby competition, I just don't know...

Homeschool Geography: Montessori Pin Flag Map of the Olympic Nations

Our Olympics unit study has been a huge hit with the kids, and has led to so many enriching academic experiences so far, from looking up historical footage of Olympic games on Youtube, to Will choosing to research Iran and North Korea after listening to comments that Matt and I made about them during the Olympics Opening Ceremonies, to watching live coverage of all kinds of sports the kids had never before seen.

One of the most rewarding activities so far, and one of the most enjoyable for Will, especially, to complete, has been this Montessori pin flag map that I set up for the 2014 Winter Olympic nations:

The materials for this activity are, in my cheapskate opinion, pricey, but you can re-use these pin flags and maps over the entire course of your children's educations--we've already used them enough to make them money well-spent.

For the pin flags, I culled the appropriate flags from my complete collection of Montessori pin flags. When the flat-headed sewing pins got too expensive, I switched to using steel-head pins, instead. These are less desireable, because they're more difficult for the children to push into the cork or foam board, but they're easily replaced, and it's good for developing grace and focus (not to mention strengthening those handwriting muscles, something that Will, in particular, can always benefit from).

I also now use a different storage system than I planned for in that post, but I'll go on and on about that another time.

The map keys are another resource from Montessori Print Shop. I have them laminated, with the labeled map on one side and the blank map on the other, and keep them with our set of Montessori puzzle maps.

The multi-page world map is a print-out from Megamaps--I use them ALL the freakin' time (our US map in the kitchen is also a Megamaps print-out). I printed the world map in a two-by-two page format--although bigger would be better (you'll see, in a minute, how crowded Europe inevitably is, sigh), this is the largest size that fits the big piece of foamcore board that we use, now, instead of corkboard for these maps.

I was surprised that Syd wasn't more interested in this project, since she's usually our biggest puzzle lover, but Will ADORED placing these pin flags. Seriously, she loved it. She had to be manhandled away from it when we absolutely needed her attention elsewhere. Mind you, at least for a nine-year-old, this is not a project that can be completed by the kid while you're in another room, happily minding your own business, and for that, it's not very "Montessori," but since Will isn't in a three-year classroom with a 12-year-old to help her, I played reference librarian and helped her with the research, usually giving her the continent where a particular country could be found, but also looking up anything that she was curious about. We looked up a LOT of pronunciations! We also did a lot of looking up of places on Google Earth so Will could see them in real life (I am a big proponent of having Google Earth in one hand anytime you have a paper map in the other), and plenty of talking about country borders, the Soviet Union, what happened to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and how politics works in India and Russia.

Heady stuff! My nerd heart was practically bursting with happiness.

Will spread this pin flag map work out over several days, coming back to it and focusing in for a while, abandoning it, but then being inexorably drawn back to it a little later:

Often, while watching the Olympics, a kid would recognize a flag that had been placed and go fetch it.

This pin flag map was clearly such fun to put together that I have to say that it's just bonus points that the result is so gorgeous:

We'll leave the completed map out until the Olympics Closing Ceremonies so that the kids can refer to it as needed, but then I'll spend a tedious couple of hours putting the flags back into place in their storage binder, untape the map from the foamcore board and store it back behind the bookshelf, and that's everything ready for another day!

Although perhaps I should prepare another pin flag map invitation for Will right away, since she liked this one so much. A US pin flag map *would* fit in nicely with our geography studies...

Work Plans for the Week of February 10, 2014: Project Week

It's another Project Week! The kids have been really busy lately with all sorts of projects of their own creation, from valentine crafting and rubber band bracelet weaving and clay modeling--

--to fort building and fashion design--

--and lots and lots of sewing:

My personal hopes for the week are to get some serious progress made on Syd's fashion show garment, to figure out how to use my bottle cutter, and to get started on some improvements to our chicken habitat (we need an automatic door on a timer, but for some reason I can't get the idea of a chicken yard webcam out of my head).

Right now, however, both children are hard at work on their valentines mailboxes, Syd up here with some cardboard mailers and duct tape, and Will downstairs with hammer, nails, wood, and our portable work bench. I taught her how to measure a straight line, clamp the wood to the bench, and saw through it with our hand saw, but I'm not ruling out the possibility of getting out the circular saw later.

And maybe the bench grinder?

Definitely the cordless drill.

Probably not the scroll saw, but who am I to rule out power tools?

Homeschool Art: Drawing with Children, and the Foreground

Our latest Drawing With Children lesson taught us how to draw things that are in front of or behind each other.

My favorite aspect of Drawing with Children is how PRACTICAL it is. If you're a natural at art, then the step by step method taught for doing this will undoubtedly seem silly and obvious to you. I assure you, however, that for the children, and for me--the basest, most beginning-level drawer--the instructions were exactly what we needed to do this successfully:

This lesson also marked the first Drawing with Children lesson that Will completed completely without fuss, entirely without reminders from me to focus and put forth her best effort. If Will has now internalized the self-confidence to draw without resistance, then I will be THRILLED.

Our assignment was to complete an artwork that had things in front and things behind, taking time and putting forth our best effort, including creative details and embellishments, and covering the page. Will drew an elephant robot (clear evidence that art instruction does not kill creativity, yes?):

I drew a scene inspired by our history lessons:

You can see where I totally messed up trying to put that second pyramid behind the first one, and then added patterns to all of them to cover up the mistake. This is what you're supposed to do according to Drawing with Children, and why we're asked to draw in marker, not pencil. Perfectionists, beware: we don't erase!

 Syd drew several geometric-themed "family portraits," then pretended that she was a famous artist and autographed them all for her fans (practicing her cursive all the while!), drawing Will into her play, which I'm sure helped Will have this better experience with the lesson. When she was bored with that, she decided that she liked my Egypt drawing, and copied it:

Drawing with Children is also really big on copying, and in our next art lesson (after Valentine's Day, probably, because those valentines aren't going to make themselves!) we'll be creating inspiration books and cutting images out of magazines that we can practice copying. 

Homeschool Science: The Kids Re-Articulated a Chicken Skeleton

Meet Bocky:

For their Science Fair these young ones, interested in paleontology and chickens and lovers of gigantic, complicated, hands-on projects, decided to re-articulate a chicken skeleton. It WAS a gigantic, complicated project, and required a lot more parental assistance than you'd want in a school kid's Science Fair project, but we homeschoolers tend to make of things what we want, and we wanted this big, unwieldy, hands-on, fabulously educational project, and if that meant that the daddy had to get his hands dirty, too, then so be it.

Next time we do a project like this, I will use the university library to interlibrary loan a veterinary manual, because although we basically knew what went where, and we had a few diagrams to help us, there were a LOT of bones to sort through!

Spinal cord and ribs were pretty easy (although figuring out how they were ordered was a totally different matter)--

--but chickens have more long bones than we do, and their wrist bones and finger bones look weird, and yeah, we absolutely had leftover pieces when we were finished:

 But never you mind about that, because Bocky (yes, the children named their chicken skeleton, sigh...) came together just fine regardless:

You can see where Matt wired the spinal column, which was a suggestion from the only other person in the known universe to ever re-articulate a chicken skeleton for fun, but for everything else he used hot glue. LOTS of hot glue.

It was a big challenge for the kids to not pull that wishbone! I'm pretty proud of them for showing the self-restraint necessary there. 

The beak dissolved in our lye solution, but the claws didn't. Huh!

Although this project wasn't terribly well-suited to the capabilities and attention spans of a seven- and nine-year-old, I'm still really glad that we did it. The kids got to see what a genuinely difficult, real-life challenge looks like, one without one set answer and varies avenues of solutions, not all of which pan out. We tried several methods of obtaining a chicken carcass before we finally found one. We tried several ways to make certain bones fit onto the skeleton, and still weren't sure that we'd settled on the correct one.

The kids also learned a LOT about anatomy, and a lot about paleontology, too, I think. In her presentation, Will compared the work that they'd done with the work that paleontologists do, and commented that paleontology, too, must be frustrating sometimes, but it must feel great to complete a dinosaur skeleton. In Syd's presentation, she rattled off a bunch of human bones and pointed to their locations on their plaster of Paris human skeleton as if it was no big feat--she'd been thinking about those bones and where they go on people and chickens for ages by then!

I learned that projects like this are best done in the summer or fall, and in the future, if necessary, I will put the kids off until then. I was NOT happy buying a random frozen chicken carcass from an international grocery, after our attempts to source one locally from several places came up totally empty. I really wanted a local chicken who had lived a happy life, but I just had no idea we'd not be able to get one at this time of year. I feel a pull, sometimes, between what I want to express about my own ethics and the academic enrichment that I want to give the kids--I don't want to teach the children to kill on purpose, but I want Will to have the insect collection that she wants. I don't want to teach the children that it's okay to buy whatever dead animal that they want from whatever place is selling it, without caring how that animal was treated when it was alive, but I want them to have the carcass that they want to dissect. How does one raise a future entomologist without letting her make an insect collection? How does one raise a future doctor without letting her dissect? And of course, how does one raise a human to be compassionate towards animals while letting her kill bugs and dissect factory-farmed chicken carcasses?

From now on, I figure, I let them do what they want to do, but only in the most humane way to do it. The kid wants a bug collection? I guess that's why I have seven university library books on entomology on my bookshelf right now, trying to figure out which type of killing jar works the quickest. The kid wants to dissect a rabbit next (because she does)? Fine, but we're waiting until the fall, when we can get a nice meat rabbit carcass from a local farm that we know about. 

It may take me that long, anyway, to find and decipher a veterinary textbook on rabbits. 

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Card Catalogue and Catnip Mouse

a tutorial for the card catalogue photo drawer that lives in my living room card catalogue

and a write-up of the catnip mouse that is one kitty's new favorite toy

The schools have a snow day today, which for us really just means that horseback riding is cancelled and the young ones might have some company on the sledding hill. I need to finish up my prep work for the rest of the week's lesson plans, figure out how to work my bottle cutter, get in my 20-minute run while watching Dexteron Netflix, bake and puree some butternut squash, open the textbook that I finally found to go along with the MIT OpenCourse Chemistry class that I'm taking, and start designing some checklists of Sleep-Away Camp Skills (three days with no one to nag the children to brush their teeth and hair and put on socks? YIKES!!!). 

Oooh, but the girls just ran up right next to me and began to battle to the death, so I've banished them outside; this means that I might as well grab another coffee, put my feet up, and read a little to calm my nerves first, yes?

Yes!

Our Living Room that's Full of Life

As I've been printing, organizing, and storing years' worth of family photos for my card catalogue photo drawer project, I've noticed a pretty glaring pattern:

There are a LOT of photos of my kids.

That, in itself, isn't a problem, because I do want the kids to have lots of photos of their childhoods. The problem is that there are MOSTLY photos of my kids. There are barely photos of Matt. There are barely photos of our house and yard and the places that we frequent. There are barely photos of our friends and family. There are even more barely any photos of me.

So that's one of my resolutions from now on--to use my photographs to keep a better record of our lives. And in the spirit of that resolution, I'm not just deleting this quick snapshot that I took of the living room in order to test my camera lens that's been acting wonky.

I'm annotating it!

We've definitely got plenty of mess on display. Post-lunch, the kids neglected to clear their plates. Post-art, the colored pencils are still on the table. Post-music, there's that keyboard, and it looks like it's even still on, just running the batteries down!

We've also got tons of negligent housekeeping going on. I should figure out how to make the kitties stop scratching the couch corner. I should take down the paper chain and update the kids' artwork. I should get rid of those magazines, because lord knows the last time that I looked at them.

There is life, though, in this messy, negligently maintained living room. The keyboard and laptop are from Syd's keyboard lesson. The catnip mouse is Gracie's favorite toy. The workboxes and files show just how important our school is to us.The easel is part of the kids' display for the Science Fair later that night. They built the snap circuit radio over the weekend, and haven't stopped listening to it since.

I also love the stories that this photo tells. That morning, Will colored a picture from her gargoyles and medieval monsters coloring book, then showed it to me. I noticed the caption that said it was a gargoyle from Rouen Cathedral, and exclaimed, "Hey, I've been there! And hey! So have YOU!" I got down the photo album/travel journal that I made after our trip to France when Will was eight months old, and found the page from Rouen. Wouldn't you know it, I have a photo that I took of THAT gargoyle on THAT cathedral!

So there you go, Kids. Our living room was super messy while you were growing up. You didn't clean up enough, and I didn't organize. We all spoiled the cats. But you can definitely tell that we did a lot of living here in this living room.