Monday, March 28, 2016

Work Plans for the Week of March 28, 2016: STEM Fairs, Cat Documentaries, and an Opinion Poll

Although I felt like wringing the children's necks for much of it, last week was actually a good school week. The younger kid mastered the long division algorithm, both children kept up their schoolwork with minimal nagging, and my Friday meltdown really only occurred because in all the good schoolwork we'd been accomplishing, the house had managed to become a pit.

It's still a pit, but I had a weekend to refresh myself. Back into the fray!

Books of the Week this week include Treasure Island for the older kid and a Colonial America-era book from the Dear America series (I LOVE the Dear America series!); several living picture books and a non-fiction one for older kid on rocks, as we're FINALLY moving into the rocks and minerals portion of our rocks and minerals unit; and a couple more non-fiction books about the Colonial and Revolutionary periods. Last week was fairly manipulative-heavy, what with the younger kid's long division lessons--


--and the pattern blocks that were our open-ended material of the week--


--so this week I'm going to try something a little different for our Open-Ended Material of the Week: the children's cameras. They each have one, the younger kid's a little newer and therefore better than the older kid's, and the kids are occasionally quite invested in them, but since they have to be recharged, eventually the batteries will die, the kids will forget about them, and there they'll languish for months. I've decided that what I really want from this weekly invitation is not necessarily to expose the older kid to more sensory stimulation, although I do think she benefits from that, but to expose her to more play opportunities in general--that kid is laser-focused on reading, and there's not much that will sway her from it. However, the novelty of bringing something out that she hasn't explored in a while is generally enough to get her involved, and as the younger kid always loves the chance for more play and exploration, it suits them both well.

Memory Work this week is really just Mandarin vocabulary and spelling words, although one of my goals is to put together a better list of review facts from our schoolwork that I can just grab on my way out the door; when we're in the habit of it, spending the first ten minutes of the first car ride of the day on Memory Work is one of the best homeschool routines that I've found. Even if there's one day a week that we generally don't go anywhere, that's still one full hour a week JUST on Memory Work!

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Both kids should now be on track in their Math Mammoth units, with neither struggling on any particular concept (fingers crossed!), so I'm able to devote a lesson this week to enrichment. Normally, I like to have the enrichment related to a concept that the kids are currently studying, but I couldn't think of anything super-riveting about either long division or percentages (although I was tempted to do giant long division on the driveway on this day, I remembered that we actually need the driveway to be a practice fashion show runway), so instead I'm pretty excited to try out this activity that I discovered just this weekend: you have the kids measure and mark the angles that a door makes in the doorway. Doesn't that sound AWESOME! And the older kid did struggle some in her angle measurement unit in Math Mammoth, so the practice will do her good.

I have washi tape, masking tape, a protractor, and Sharpies at the ready, and yes, we WILL be keeping this on the floor forever.

I have the sinking feeling that the younger kid may have weaseled out of completely memorizing the spelling words from last week's Wordly Wise chapter, so don't let me forget to review that before we move on this week. The older kid is currently in Wordly Wise 6, while the younger kid is in Wordly Wise 4, and I cannot say enough about these books. I. LOVE. Them. The younger kid is neutral, but the older kid loves them, too--although the kids technically have the entire school week to complete the several comprehension activities in each chapter, the older kid usually does them all on Monday. This from a kid who balks at writing the lowercase "q" ten times in her cursive workbook!

Cursive also continues, of course, with the younger kid still in the secular version of New American Cursive 2 and the older kid in Teach Yourself Cursive. I really, really, REALLY want them to start doing copywork/memorization of famous quotes from our Revolutionary War unit study, but I'm not yet sure how to work it in, since I do want them to continue regular work in these books. The older kid, in particular, needs a LOT of handwriting practice; I eventually gave in with printing, and her print handwriting is terribly unattractive as a result--legible, but unattractive. Therefore, I cannot give up with cursive until she has lovely cursive handwriting, sigh. I may still be giving her handwriting drills well into her thirties, but I will not give up!

The kids are bringing the opinion poll that they created last Friday for our Election 2016 unit everywhere they go this week, with the goal of gathering 100 responses. I won't let them query the patrons at the food pantry today, but the staff and the other volunteers are fair game. We also need to return the pasta maker that we borrowed from the Tool Share and check out a grow light instead. It's seed starting time!

We've got a little less assigned work again this week, since we have so many long-term projects going. Both children are working every day on their STEM Fair projects, and on the "documentary" that they're filming about Gracie and Spots. I'm hopeful that they have enough footage now that I can set them to putting their movie together this week. The younger kid, of course, also needs to be practicing every day for her appearance in the 2016 Trashion/Refashion Show in a couple of weeks. April is going to be a big month!

TUESDAY: Although I'm pretty confident that the younger kid has mastered the long division algorithm, I'm giving her one more worksheet page of drill problems before I set her back into her Math Mammoth unit on the topic. The older kid is spending a couple of weeks reviewing percents in her Math Mammoth, but again, I don't anticipate any struggles there.

Matt and I are both giving some major side-eye to the "tamale pie" that's the next recipe in Your Kids: Cooking, but the recipe's lesson has some important skills that I don't want the kids to skip, and so yes, we will be eating tamale pie for dinner on this day. Shudder.

You might notice that I've removed two of the kids' regular chores--load of dishes and load of laundry--from their daily work plans, and instead I have just one big chore listed. Even with the kids and I doing dishes and laundry every day, we still have unwashed dishes and laundry ALL THE TIME, usually a ridiculous amount of it, so last week I developed an incentive system in which I pay the children to keep us caught up on both, and to complete their schoolwork with a good attitude, with a bonus payment if they do all three. We're off to a pretty nonchalant start, with the only money earned so far that of the older kid for her schoolwork, but if the kids do catch on, I will consider the money output 100% worth having all of the dishes and laundry done daily, and schoolwork always done with a good attitude. Here's hoping!

WEDNESDAY: Making Thirteen Colonies covers the Bloodless Revolution in this week's chapters, and so I want the children to learn a little more about Parliament, particularly its differences from both a monarchy and our own Congress. Fortunately, the UK Parliament has a Youtube channel, and so we'll spend some time watching videos from that.

FYI: If you want to study Parliament in more depth, there are loads of resources to do it, as, of course, British teachers want their British children to learn about their own government!

THURSDAY: Now that the kids have the basics of atoms and elements and molecules down, we're ready to move on to minerals. The first part of that unit is learning about crystal formation, and what better way to learn about that than to grow your own? I scored this Smithsonian kit from Goodwill a few months ago and the kids will use that on this day, but next week I'm thinking that we'll spend more time growing crystals from various other substances--this should be a BIG hit.

The Young Writer's Workbook still garners zero enthusiasm, and I'm fairly sure that the children are half-assing all of their assignments in it, but last week they were able to tell their father all about their main and supporting character with a decent amount of enthusiasm, so maybe they're more interested in it than they let on. Either way, I'm certain that they'll better enjoy creating a villain, which is this week's assignment.

FRIDAY: Hopefully by this time, the kids have enough responses for their poll. I'm hoping for 100 because it'll make the math make more sense to Syd, who hasn't done percents, but they've both done graphs, so together they ought to be able to figure it out. They'll re-read the pages of Election 2016 that have to do with public opinion polls, and I'm curious what they'll be able to take from their personal experience creating, administering, and evaluating their own poll and apply to the public opinion polls that they see happening in the presidential race.

Since we have fewer schoolwork slots this week, in deference to the STEM Fair and the documentary-in-progress, I'm deleting Health this week; we finished up the reproductive system last week, with a science experiment done on pads and tampons--


--and I need more time to research how to present the immune and lymphatic systems. We ARE doing the Geography that I realized last week we needed to start, however; our Revolutionary War unit just isn't going to make as much sense without a good understanding of the geography of the colonies. I've got the kids making their master map on this day, and next week they can start adding relevant places to it. I bought the mapwork download from Montessori Print Shop, and even though I don't know if I'll use the three-part cards, it's worth it for the quality of the maps alone.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Always ballet and Mandarin and more ballet. Maybe a road trip to Indianapolis to buy a giant piece of sheet metal for a project. Definitely a fashion show rehearsal. Hopefully the roller derby!

It's going to be a wonderful week!

Friday, March 25, 2016

How to Model Long Division with Base Ten Blocks and Cuisenaire Rods

I want the kids to learn algorithms without losing the number sense of what's going on behind them, so I LOVE using models, even for more complicated algorithms.

LOVE it!

I was super stoked a few weeks ago to figure out how to model multiplying and dividing fractions (I'll show you that another time!), but it took a Google search and this guy to teach me how to model long division.

I read his post on modeling long division probably 50 times, and watched his video maybe 50 more before I got it, but now I got it! And you should get it, too--it makes so much sense. It's so logical. You can SEE how the algorithm works.

And it's easy!

Although you really need to go check out that post for yourself and see the magic, I'll walk you through a couple of problems that will clear up the parts that I was confused about for a while, and you can see how it works for a big kid who's in the process of learning the long division algorithm.

The biggest thing that I had to wrap my head around is the way that you set up the model. I did NOT want to set it up this way, and it took a loooong time before I understood why it's best. You start by laying out your Cuisenaire rods in a rectangle, and then you put the long division sign over it, to show that you're measuring these sides of your rectangle:

Here's what I didn't like at first:

Can you see what I don't like?

In area and perimeter models, and any type of measurement, the number on one side illustrates the measurement of THAT SIDE. So in the problem above, I want the 3 and the 4 to be reversed.

But that's NOT how the model works. The 3 measures across, as the arrow shows, and the 4 measures down. You put the arrows there to help you remember.

You have to do it that way because of the way that you model the algorithm. Say that you're starting out with a model that looks like this:


Always build the model with the hundred flats first, then add the ten bars to the right and bottom ONLY, then fill in the last rectangle at the bottom right with Cuisenaire rods.

Have the kid count the total (good reinforcement of counting strategies and skip counting!) and the number of units across, then set up the algorithm so that it's next to, but a little higher than, the bottom of those hundred flats. Don't forget the arrow!

Your kid is going to want to immediately just count down to find the quotient, especially if she's calculated area before, but keep her focused on the fact that with this model, you're going to count how many 34s are contained within this number by subtracting out groups of 34.

The first thing that the kid does is count down to see how many whole tens there are of 34s, then separate them out. We'll count them first:

Syd has separated out the whole tens by moving the rest of the model down, and I've drawn a line under the whole tens to model that we're counting those first. See how the line extends to the algorithm? It's beautiful how much sense that makes!

The kid now counts how many whole tens there are. There are 30. Review place value, and review that 30 is the same thing as three 10s. We can write 30, and just replace the zero when we know how many units' worth we'll have, or we can just write 3 in the tens column. We've done it both ways:


After she knows that there are thirty 34s within the number we've separated, she needs to count the total number of units. Again, more skip counting and adding big numbers! Syd likes to count the hundreds and write the answer down, then the tens, then the units, and then add on paper.

That answer, of course, gets plugged into the algorithm. If you've got an older kid like Syd, you can ask her to double-check the model with calculations, if she seems game. It's a way to reinforce the calculations that she'll actually have to do when she's only got the algorithm, not the model. It reinforces that they both work exactly the same way.

Next, the kid counts the total number of units left below the line in the model, and plugs that number below the line in the algorithm--that's the number still left to divide. She can double-check the algorithm to see that subtraction will give her that answer there, as well.

The only limit to this is how many blocks you have to build models with!




It's fun to have the kid build models of her own to solve--

--but I'll also give her problems with the dividend and divisor, and she gets to figure out how to build the rectangle and then calculate the quotient.

Mind you, Syd does NOT love these lessons, which we've been doing all week. This is NOT play-based learning. However, each day that we've sat down together for no more than half an hour to work these models and do the calculations together, I can see not just how her understanding of how long division works growing, but also her overall number sense. Putting your hands on math, having to group it and count it and keep track of it and organize it, AND having to regroup it and count it and subtract it and count it again, AS WELL AS having to organize and note that on paper, is some hard-core math to do on a typical Tuesday morning.

Come Monday, we'll also likely be doing this!

Monday, March 21, 2016

Work Plans for the Week of March 21, 2016: Long Division and Lots of Projects!

School has been going so well, y'all! I have figured out The Secret to getting the kids to complete their schoolwork without a giant power struggle.

I bribe them.

Will is the WORST about doing her schoolwork, because she only ever wants to do what she wants to do, and that is read. Of course, being such an avid reader means that she always needs something new to read, which means that she always, always, always wants to go to the library.

Our deal: Each morning, I highlight the required schoolwork and chores that must be done before I will take her to the library, and I tell her when they must be done in order to get to go on that day. For instance, today we're leaving the house at 11:40 for our volunteer shift, and I'm not making two trips into town, so if she wants to go to the library today (and she does!), then she needs to complete her math, cursive, Book of the Day, and dishwasher work by 11:40. If she does all this, then she goes to the library. If she doesn't, then tomorrow's train to town leaves at approximately 1:00 pm, and to get that train to make a stop at the library after playgroup, she'll have to have completed ALL of Monday's work AND Tuesday's highlighted work.

And let me tell you, if she didn't go to the library on Monday, she is BURNING to go on Tuesday!

Friends, this has worked for two solid weeks of school so far. Nothing has EVER worked to get Will to do her school for two weeks in a row before!

I have long suspected, however, that the children meet together often in private to decide which of them will play the role of the Good Kid and which the Bad Kid on any given day, so it will not surprise you to learn that in this same period of time in which Will has done her schoolwork excellently, Syd, who is normally my reliable worker, has been a total pain about getting her work done!

Here's what she's been doing instead:








It's my policy that I don't disturb a kid who's happily engaged, but she also doesn't get her screen time if she doesn't finish her school. This is usually incentive enough, considering that she's My Little Pony's biggest fangirl, but the lack of screens wasn't seeming to bother her at all, so yesterday, when Syd was starting to look seriously bummed at the big pile of schoolwork that she still had to complete, I pointed out the Barbie movie that she'd checked out of the library the day before and said, "When you finish all of your schoolwork, you can watch the entire movie."

The normal amount of screentime that one earns by finishing schoolwork is one hour, so an entire two-hour movie? And a BARBIE MOVIE?!? She was zoned out in front of it by early afternoon.

Hopefully, schoolwork will go smoothly this week, as well. Books of the Day include a couple of leftover books on the Salem witch trials, some living picture books of the Colonial and Revolutionary War times, and a couple of science trivia books--I introduced the children to Trivial Pursuit last week, and Will, in particular, finds trivia intoxicatingly fun. Our Sensory Material of the Week is our set of good old pattern blocks. I'd never get rid of them, as I'm sure we'll have further academic use of them one day, but it's been a while since we've worked with them--time for them to come out and play!

And here's what we're doing with the rest of our week!

MONDAY: Syd fussed and pouted all last week about long division. She can do it, but she doesn't like to, and anyway, I know that the algorithm isn't making a lot of empirical sense to her, so all this week, we're just going to back up and learn long division again, this time with manipulatives. You actually CAN physically do long division using Base Ten blocks and Cuisenaire rods--I learned most of it from this guy! Syd and I did many, many long division problems by hand this morning, and we'll do more tomorrow. Maybe she'll move back into Math Mammoth after that, or maybe I'll have her dividing by hand all week--we'll see!

Either way, it's a SUPER cool way to divide. I'll show you more about it some other time.

Last week, the kids completed all the grammar activities in their Wordly Wise chapters, so this week's task is to memorize the spelling of those words. The kids will practice them daily, as well as their Mandarin vocabulary and their cursive:

They'll also be working on their STEM Fair projects every day, and their Gracie and Spots documentary project. Lots of dailies this week!

We've got our regular volunteer gig at the food pantry today, and tonight's big plan is to eat pizza and Easter candy while watching the third film of The Hobbit series. Dream big, Friends!

TUESDAY: In Math Mammoth, Will is still zipping along with integers, although she has moved into the tricky bit of adding and subtracting negative numbers. We speak of it as "an absence of cupcakes," as in "You have three cupcakes. I am taking away an absence of two cupcakes. How many cupcakes do you have now?" 

I am SUPER excited about our art lesson for today. I have an entire series of first- through seventh-grade art lessons that I haven't yet used, but I like the way that they combine art history with guided viewing, discussion questions, and several suggestions for extension activities. That's just the way that I like a lesson to go! Starting with the first grade unit, I've just been looking through them to find any works that might be relevant to our other current studies, and so how awesome is it that there's an entire lesson on the Lincoln Memorial? I printed a couple of photos of the Lincoln Memorial, and so we'll be studying and discussing those, then completing an activity that replicates the way that the sculptor, Danial Chester French, worked to create this sculpture.

An afternoon at the park with our homeschooled friends will complete this wonderful day!

WEDNESDAY: Okay, I am now officially obsessed with Benjamin Franklin. I have extended the Philadelphia leg of our summer road trip so that I can spend more time fangirling over him, and instead of zipping through several chapters of Making Thirteen Colonies, our prequel text to the Revolutionary War, we'll just listen to the chapter of Benjamin Franklin on this day, the better to discuss him at length and ad nauseum.

The kids got distracted from their newspaper late last semester, but perhaps a little encouragement is all that's needed to finish up the last bits... in honor of Ben Franklin!

In other news, I need to add Geography as an additional subject in our school week, perhaps starting next week, so that we can focus just on the geography of New England, the thirteen colonies, and the Revolutionary War. Here's Syd coloring in the thirteen colonies as she listens to Making Thirteen Colonies--how cute is that?

I'm also in the market for a couple of coloring books on the Colonial and Revolutionary War periods, the better to entertain us as we listen to audiobooks. Anyone know any especially good ones?

We've finished the first chapter of our earth sciences unit, Composition of Earth--here's Will's investigation of the Ph levels of various liquids:

I want to make sure that they've memorized the main points of the chapter before we move on, so I've written a "study guide" for them to fill in, and then, yes, I WILL be giving them a test!

The NaNoWriMo Young Writer's workbook is still very much uninspiring and unpleasant for both kids, although I know of plenty of other kids who've loved this curriculum. They're working through it with so little enthusiasm that I despair of it being of any use in writing a story, for either of them, but when I asked each child, separately, what they'd rather be writing--poetry? A movie script? A journal?--they both just sort of shrugged, so we're sticking with this workbook for now.

Election 2016, now--we LOVE this text! The kids had a fabulous time last week searching YouTube for interviews and advertisements, etc. This week they learn about polls, and then I'm going to have them create their own poll that they'll then administer and record the results of on the following week.

A science experiment is our last activity for human reproduction. We'll be messing around with pads and tampons, discussing how they absorb menstrual fluid and measuring their absorbency. I asked the children what body system we should move onto next, so I can get started researching it. Will's request?

The spleen. I mean, I'm sure there are just loads of super-fun enrichment activities for exploring the spleen!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Saturday is back to business as usual, now that our university's Spring Break is over. It's a good day for me to work at home, while Matt shuttles the kids back and forth to ballet and Mandarin and back to ballet. We're actually going to the ballet this weekend, as well, and then on Sunday we'll eat lots of candy and maybe I'll finally get someone to help me in the garden!

Friday, March 18, 2016

Homeschool Math: Rice Krispy Treat Fractions

Here's a super simple way to get some extra fractions enrichment into your kids' day:

Make anything that's round or square--pizza, cake, pie, quiche, or Rice Krispy treats. Nom!

You get bonus points, of course, if your selection is a treat.

Next you give your kid a big ole knife, and challenge her to cut her treat into specific fractions. Cut it in half. Take a half, and make fourths. Eighths. Can you make sixteenths?


With a Rice Krispy Treat, you can!


Put the pieces back together in various combinations and determine their fraction.

Find all the equivalent fractions. Calculate 1/2 of 1/2 of the Rice Krispy Treat. Copy that equation down onto paper, and take a picture of the Rice Krispy Treat piece to go with it. Give a kid 1/4 of the Rice Krispy Treat, then take away 1/2 of that--what does she have left?

Even if you're doing a rigorous math curriculum, as we are, casual, simple explorations like this are crucial to a kid's math understanding. Math needs to be conversational--a kid isn't going to "get" math if the only time she encounters it is in a textbook. Math needs to be practical--what kid DOESN'T understand the need to divide a treat perfectly equally? Giving her four pieces of a treat and telling her they need to be divided among three people is the sneakiest way to get her to an understanding of adding, subtracting, and equivalent fractions that I've ever found!

Most of all, though, math needs to be hands-on and sensorial, even for these "big" kids of the ripe old ages of nine and eleven, even with something as simple as composing and decomposing fractions at those ripe old ages. Pattern building is one of the cornerstones of intelligence, and in order to build a reliable mental conception of what fractions ARE, we need to see them in all shapes and sizes and combinations so that we can build that pattern. We need to see 1/4 not just in a textbook, but in pattern blocks, Base Ten blocks, apples, game boards, measuring cups, gas tanks, bottles of milk, pieces of pie, trips around the block, and so much more, all the time, as much as possible, as naturally as possible. If you can see what 1/2 of 1/4 looks like in your head, whether you're visualizing a Rice Krispy Treat or a glass of water or your Cuisenaire rods, then you're well able to understand the algorithm that lets you calculate it, which means that it's easier to memorize and it's easier to perform and it's easier to apply.

And down I step off of my soapbox, primarily because if I continue to rant on, I won't have enough time to make egg sandwiches and prep the school table for today's work before the kids wander in and start begging for just half an hour of screen time before we get started, AND I forgot to make a big batch of salt dough yesterday, so I need to do that right after I get the kids settled in with cursive and Books of the Day. AND if I want them to help me in the garden--and I do!--I need to get them through their school quickly so that I can pretend to Will like the gardening is the work that we have to get done before I can take her to the library.

However, if you've got more time to browse the internet than I do this morning, here are some of my other favorite activities for fraction enrichment:

  • edible chessboard: Fractions up to 1/64, and you can play chess and checkers on it!
  • fraction art: The fun part is making the art; recording the fractions of each color is not fun, but IS a great illustration of what fractions look like, especially if you've got more than one person doing the activity. 
  • spiraling decimals: This is a fun game, and it's tricky! Convert the decimal cards into fractions, of course, before you play.
  • Roll a Whole: When we play this one, we usually play up to something like five wholes, and then I have the kids draw their results.
  • fraction flags: You can use these, or homemade decorations and frosting, to record the fractions on your treat.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

World Thinking Day 2016: A Trip to China, and an Electronics Fast

I've mentioned before that World Thinking Day is one of my favorite Girl Scout celebrations, a Girl Scout Geography Fair and a global issues unit study combined. Two years ago, the kids simply attended the Geography Fair without presenting their own country, and we studied the global issue of education rights. Last year, our troop gave an excellent presentation on Mongolia at the Geography Fair, and we studied Fair Trade.

FYI, that Fair Trade study still comes up, as the kids are fond of researching the "grade" of companies that we patronize. We did that just last week, when Will urgently needed some new clothes (the kid grows something like an inch a month--she always urgently needs new clothes!), and Syd was in charge of figuring out the best store to shop in. We finally settled on H&M, although with much discussion about the fact that the store's C grade isn't great, and that really, if clothing is that cheap, there's probably something unethical going on somewhere down the line, because otherwise how could a person have been paid a living wage to make it?

I bet I've also mentioned before the fact that I LOATHE shopping!

This year, our troop gave an excellent presentation on China at the Girl Scout celebration. I was too distracted to take many photos, but each child was in charge of an informational display on some topic (Will covered the Girl Guides of Hong Kong, and Syd covered Mandarin), they took turns manning the activities (Mandarin writing on a Buddha board, stamping passports, and using chopsticks to transfer beans)--



--and they performed a version of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" with the animal names sung in Mandarin, and of course there were costumes. And a dragon that chased away the other animals at the end.

It. Was. MARVELOUS!

That work on the Geography Fair was actually enough for Syd, a Junior, to earn her World Thinking Day badge, but Will, a Cadette, had to do an additional activity to help her more deeply understand our privileged access to a connected society: she had to go an entire 24 hours without electronics, mwa-ha-ha!

The entire family, of course, joined her in her electronics fast out of solidarity (except that when the kids were at the library, I raced back home and snuck in some work on the computer--don't tell!), and I tried particularly to make it a fun experience for them. I wanted the kids to feel the loss of their screens somewhat, because I wanted them to understand that lack of access to technology isn't fair, but I also wanted them to understand that choosing to avoid access to technology also opens one up to enriching connections in other ways. So even though I did make them do school--



--we listened to records all day instead of CDs and Spotify, I got the kids (mostly Will, with Syd fluttering around and pretending like she was helping when she actually wasn't) to help me get a ton of tedious and tiring yardwork done, and we played a LOT of games:


I was pleased to see that Will was drawn into games that she normally wouldn't be, such as these Story Cubes.
Timeline, however, is the favorite game of both of us.
 This is also how the current Kapla block obsession began, an obsession that still continues, as the Kapla block city that's taking up most of the walking space in our big family room can attest. Before the city came to be, there was the usual challenge of "Let's build a tower tall enough to touch the ceiling!"



In our old house, this was a do-able feat, and often accomplished. In this house, however, with its vaulted ceilings tall enough to host an aerial silks rig...


Well, even Matt had trouble, even after we convinced him to stand on top of a dictionary on top of a bar stool:


"Stand on top of two dictionaries on top of the bar stool!" we encouraged him, as he protested that he did not want to do such a thing.

"What could possibly go wrong?" we countered.

Oh, just the inevitable...


"Connect" was this year's World Thinking Day theme, and it truly played out in this experience. It's easy, in the pattern of our days, to gradually disconnect from each other, to find ourselves spending our days with me working, Syd playing with her toys in the next room, Will on the couch reading, and our evenings eating take-away in front of a movie with Matt--it's together, yes, but it's not necessarily connected. Since then, however, I've made a conscious effort every day, several times a day, to take a break from my work and connect with each child. I've sat down on the floor and played more times in the past week than I have in the past month. I've initiated more games. I've offered more treats. And it's been wonderful, of course, especially to see a kid's face light up when I sit down next to her on the floor and say that yes, I absolutely want to build a new house for her village, and to eventually lure a kid who is sulking at having to sit at the dinner table into staying there long after her sister has left to tell us all about Skulduggery Pleasant and the arcane rules behind naming in his world, and to make fun of what I decided is my "taken" name--Panther Zephyrino.

Please call me Panther Zephyrino from now on, Friends, and do not use my given name to mind control me.

Monday, March 14, 2016

Work Plans for the Week of March 14, 2016: Pi Day and Projects

I am SO excited to get back to our weekly work plans! For all of February and the first half of March, I did daily plans, written on a dry erase board each morning for each kid. Daily plans are great for zipping through our math curriculum and progressing on projects like our big World Thinking Day presentation on China, but for the more thoughtful, project-based learning that I prefer for the kids, it's really best to plan a week at a time ahead of time, with my unit study lesson plans at hand.

I've dialed back on the assigned chores a little bit this week, just to see if I can get a little less pushback, that way, when I ask the kids to help me with something on the fly, rather than their typical response of "Help you clean the living room? That's not on my work plan!" I also don't have a Project of the Week assigned--the younger kid, especially, LOVES the Project of the Week, but it adds significant chaos to the schedule, so I thought that I'd just give us a week to get settled back into our routine, maybe get some extra work done on STEM Fair projects first. It's also our school district's Spring Break, so we'll enjoy a little vacation from most of our extracurriculars--I appreciate the break!

I don't have to temptingly strew a sensory material this week, either, as the younger kid got extremely invested in Kapla block play late last week, and has done a good job strewing those around our big family room, herself, and of drawing everyone else into her play. I anticipate gingerly picking my way around her Kapla block village for the entirety of this week.

This week's memory work consists of the vocabulary words from Wordly Wise and Mandarin vocabulary from the kids' Mandarin class. Books of the Day are pretty widespread in topic this week, with selections including a couple about puberty, a couple about China, one on global water issues, a couple about random animals, and a couple on the American Revolution. I assign them as randomly as I select them, as they're just books that I think that the children should read and/or might like, with no other overarching reason for reading them.

And here's the rest of our week!


MONDAY: Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, the kids are still asleep. They also may be sleeping in because of last night's "incident:" The older kid was displeased that Matt took her tablet away from her at the end of screen-time yesterday, so to get revenge she programmed it to go off with an alarm at 1 am, knowing that we generally keep all confiscated electronics on the table next to our bed, the better to thwart children who try to sneak them back. When the alarm went off, I bolted awake with my heart in my mouth, as did Matt. Unfortunately, he could not figure out how to turn off the damned thing, so he marched it into the kids' bedroom, woke up the older kid, and demanded that she turn it off. Extra unfortunately, the older kid had not only set some sort of password to access the alarm, which she groggily had to try to remember while it blared, but apparently she'd also set the alarm so that you could only turn it off by completing a math problem, which she then had to try to do while it continued blaring. She couldn't solve the problem, so she tried to Google it, still with blaring. The entire incident took so long that across the house, I kept drowsing off, then waking up again to the blaring alarm, then drowsing off again, etc.

It was not our family's finest moment.

Anyway, when the kids do finally wake up, I'll make them egg sandwiches, then we'll settle in for Wordly Wise, cursive, and hopefully History of Us before our volunteer shift at the local food pantry today. History of Us is the spine that I'm using for our American Revolution unit study, although we're zooming through the book on the founding of the colonies first, for context. I've told you that I'm very project-focused, so you won't be surprised that even zooming comes with projects. I plan to visit Salem on our American Revolution road trip, and although I doubt that I'll take the children to any witch-related tourist traps there, I would like to take them to the real Gallows HillOld Burying Point, and the memorial to the victims of the witch trials, and I'd like them to understand the context.

And, fine, we might find a gift shop and buy a little bit of witch-themed crap.

Each kid has a composition book that I'm hoping she'll use as a combination notebook for our unit study and travel journal during our trip. I also had the kids make notebooks for our World War 2 unit, but I was disappointed at how they came out, as I think they're far too messy for the kids to be able to meaningfully refer to them or add to them the next time we study World War 2. I'm planning to provide more guidance this time, so we'll see! I printed out this Salem Witch Trials lapbook, and the kids will complete it and put it in their notebooks. The plan is that they'll leave space to also journal about our trip to Salem when we're on the road, and afterwards can add in any souvenirs and pamphlets, and the photos that we take while we're there.

The kids are still completing a page a day of cursive, the younger kid from the secular version of New American Cursive II and the older kid from Teach Yourself Cursive. I see improvement from them both every day, but it's still VERY slow going, so I plan to buy them both this cursive copybook with literary quotes to do after these books. The kids also have some correspondence to catch up on this month, mostly thank-you notes to cookie customers and relatives who sent Christmas gifts (yikes!), but the younger kid also has a couple of pen pals to whom she writes.

Our family "parties" are generally just excuses to eat stuff, and today's Pi Day party is no different. There will be homemade pizza and homemade apple pie, the viewing of a math documentary (probably the first episode of The Story of Maths), and the singing of the first 25 digits of Pi:



It's a cover of "The Pi Song," by Bryant Oden, for those of you playing the home game.

TUESDAY: In Math Mammoth, the younger kid is slogging unhappily through long division, and the older kid was supposed to be briefly reviewing geometry before moving on to ratios, but she somehow managed to confuse herself so greatly with angle measurement (she's making it harder than it is) that I'm making her spend an extra day measuring angles before she moves on. If two long pages of angle measuring does not clear up, once and for all, the difference between acute and obtuse, then I don't know what I'm going to do with her!

This documentary about Gracie and Spots, our two cats, is meant to be part of a larger Girl Scout project that the younger kid proposed, but speaking of making things harder than they are... I just can't seem to get it off the ground! I'm telling you, though: March is the month! These kids are going to get this damned documentary filmed, present it to the rest of the troop, and make some toys to donate to the local animal shelter if it is the last thing that I do!

Ahem...

Lesson 3 in the Your Kids: Cooking curriculum is tamale pie, but it just doesn't sound appetizing, so I'm putting it off for another week and instead having the kids review their first lesson, French toast. Any excuse to have breakfast for dinner!

Our homeschool playgroup is the highlight of my school week. Last week, we went to a park that has a creek, and the parents chatted all afternoon while the kids ran back and forth between playground and water. At one point, the younger kid complained about being thirsty, because the city hasn't turned the water fountains on for the season yet. I jokingly suggested that she find the park's water cut-off valve, break into it, and turn it on for herself, which led to a discussion among several kids and parents about where such a thing might be located and how it might work, which led to me giving the younger kid my Swiss Army knife to unscrew the panel underneath the water fountain. I immediately forgot all about it until another mom looked over a VERY long time later to find an entire crowd of children around the water fountain, all attempting to investigate its plumbing and how it might be sabotaged. They did manage to unscrew a couple of panels, although they put them back, but they never did figure out how to turn the water fountain on.

WEDNESDAY: The lack of extracurriculars this week allows me to assign more schoolwork, which means that we can delve in more depth into the documentary project (which WILL be done!!!) and our history curriculum. We'll slow down a lot once we get into the next History of Us book, but for now... zoom!

We can also delve more deeply into our science unit. The spine is an eighth-grade digital textbook on earth sciences; I expect the younger kid to understand less than I expect the older kid to, and I add in projects to enhance understanding. This day's lesson is on acidity, so the kids can use Ph strips to test various substances--always a good time! Thursday's lesson is on states of matter, and since the younger kid has been curious about clouds lately, as well, it's a good time to ask them to make a working model of the water cycle that shows evaporation and condensation and rain--more on that later!

THURSDAY: We're still working through the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Program workbook, although I'm still waiting for it to click with the kids and get them inspired. At least both kids are excited about our upcoming homeschool group's STEM Fair! The older kid is making an augmented reality sandbox, and the younger kid wants to design a website--I'm thinking that I'll have her use Wordpress. We'll get started with that, and with installing Linux to an old desktop computer so that it can run the sandbox programming, on this day.

FRIDAY: Both kids are really enjoying this election campaign. Can you see our Candidates Wall behind the older kid in this photo?


The kids especially enjoy marking out each failed candidate with a big, red Sharpie.

I let the younger kid watch this John Oliver segment on Donald Trump with me, and now she enjoys correcting us when we speak his name--"It's DRUMPF!!!" I like the way that this Election 2016 curriculum explains the entire process of the campaign and defines its components, so that applying it to the current election is easy. This particular lesson covers all the media components of a campaign, so we'll be searching YouTube for examples of each one.

The kids are kind of over learning about puberty, so I probably won't do all of the activities that I'd planned for with them during this unit, but I insist that they memorize their own anatomy, so we'll go over it again by making and labeling salt dough models. I also for sure want them to experiment with the absorbency of various pads and tampons, but after that I may show mercy and let us all move on to the skeletal system or something.

The kids had so much fun with our Spirograph last week that I thought that they might also enjoy pendulum painting. The younger kid also wants me to re-rig our aerial silks rig back from the hammock set-up that it's in now, and if this is the last time that we'll have an aerial hammock for a while, then we might as well do some whole-body pendulum painting!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I both want to go on a day trip to one of our local national parks AND want to spend the entire weekend planting and landscaping in the yard. I could say that I'll do one on one day and one on the other day, but the reality is that I may well just end up laying in the backyard hammock all of BOTH days, reading and eating cookies. Tough life, I know.

Friday, March 11, 2016

Her New Dress

Will wouldn't let me take too many photos of it, nor would she let me do her hair cute or go without the torn leggings underneath or put on her boots instead of her old sneakers, so yes, I count myself lucky to have gotten these two pictures of the dress that I sewed for her this week:


My design and construction notes are all here in the Crafting a Green Post that I wrote for it, but the tl;dr is that it's the Chambray Dress, size medium, from Handmade Style. It's not something that I'd sew for myself, because I prefer a top with better drape, ideally something stretchy, but it's a good look on Will, and she seems to like it well enough.

I did get Will's buy-in on both the dress pattern and fabric before I sewed it, but it's clear now that she'll always want to wear leggings or bicycle shorts underneath it. And that's how my new project has become finding a good leggings/bicycle shorts pattern!

Do you know of one?

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

The Kid Can Skate! The 2016 Spring Ice Show

Y'all, I have been SO. SICK.

Like, seriously, SO sick. The kind of sick that makes you rethink your life choices. The kind of sick that you can't even really explain to people even after you feel better, on account of the tale is too horrifying.

I am going to be traumatized for a long time by how sick I was, but I'll just tell you that I got sick on a Friday, and I did not feel better until I woke up on a Monday TEN DAYS LATER. This year's flu is no joke, my Friends.

It's a little funny, though, because I made no secret that February was a stressful month for me. I complained all the time about cookie selling and Syd's fashion show garment and all the big etsy orders that I kept getting because I refused to close my shop while I was so busy. Is it really any wonder, then, that I got laid flat by a virus? Oh, and I somehow, probably at a cookie booth, managed to catch hand, foot, and mouth disease, as well, so that happened.

Anyway, on the last day that I still felt really unwell, I nevertheless put on a bra AND a pair of button-waisted pants--my first in over a week!--and was bundled off to the ice arena, to watch this amazing kid of mine show off another season of ice skating instruction.

Rehearsals for this particular performance had been a little shaky, as the show runner had made both the dicey decision to have the kids skate to a hee-haw sounding country song AND to have them wear their pajamas while doing it. A few of the skaters were too young to take offence, but those who were well ensconced in the tween demographic, my own skater included, were not best pleased. I'm told that one child actually defected to skate in a younger level's performance instead.

Nevertheless, my own kid sucked it up and put on her wolf pajamas, and when, once we'd gotten there, I voiced the sudden panicked thought that perhaps all the other children had revolted and my kid would be the only one in jammies, Will assured me that she'd seen one of the other kids in her group already, and she was rocking a pair of cheetah-print jammies.

Thank you, Cheetah Jammies!

Here, then, are all the kids, rocking their jammies and their hee-haw song and showing off their awesome skating skills:


During the first half of the show, a little tot skater finished her performance, then somehow escaped her teacher (I would NOT have been pleased if it had been my kid) and managed to march her way all the way around the rink in her little tot skates and over to her mother in the bleachers. Her mother was sitting next to me, so I lifted the kid up to her, but I couldn't help both asking the kid, "Does your teacher know where you are?" and telling the mother, "They're going to want her for the finale." The kid stayed in the bleachers, however, and sure enough, during the finale, when all her little classmates marched and shuffled and were tugged out for their final bow, the kid began to wail. The mother said to me, in a break from comforting her kid and ceaselessly explaining to her that it was too late to go join her group on the ice, "I think you've done this before!"

And that's when it hit me: yeah, I have. Will's such a low-key kid about her activities that it can be hard to realize, sometimes, that yes, this kid has been skating every winter since 2008. She's been riding since 2013, and actually has her first Pony Club test, for the D-1 level, later today. Back in 2010, when she was holding her peaceful protest against Sport Shorties, I don't know if I believed that this kid would ever find one sport to call her own, much less two.

And I haven't even told you about the mother/daughter fencing that we've been doing all fall and winter. Another time!

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Homeschool Field Trip: Geo Fest at the Indiana State Museum

There are many things that I have to do this month:

Girl Scout cookies. Seriously, Friends. My children have been selling ALL THE COOKIES! I am doing my darnedest to support the little lambs in their endeavors, but the fact that this requires, me, as well, to pretty much sell all the cookies... it's exhausting. We're talking keeping track of inventory. We're talking door-to-door sales, in tow behind the kids. We're talking hours upon hours of cookie booths at different locations, including set-up and tear-down. Bank deposits. Different bank deposits to cover the council's cut. Organizing the orders and inventory for the other kids in the troop. Helping with their marketing. Stressing over the inventory that I'm pretty sure isn't going to get sold. Stressing over the money that has to add up right. It's worth it, because rarely do I see my children so visibly growing in confidence and quantifiable skills as they do during this intense couple of months of cookie season. And yet... exhausted.

Trashion/Refashion Show. Yes, it IS that time again. In my free time between cookie booths, I've been busting my butt over Syd's design for this year, The Phoenix. I've finished the complete muslin, sourced what I hope will be enough supplies, last night I dyed the bodice--it didn't turn out great, since who knew that khaki overdyed with yellow becomes mostly green?--and I have until Monday to finish designing and sewing the dang thing. 

World Thinking Day. It's like a Girl Scout Geography Fair. I led my troop in our display and presentation this year, and let me just say that the kids' performance of "Farmer Liang Had a Farm," with all the animal names sung in Mandarin, AND a costume for each kid, AND a solo for each animal, was masterful. They're brilliant, the lot of them.

Etsy. I am always happy to have etsy orders, since that's how I pay for birthday presents and craft supplies, among other, more boring, things, but working on them in between cookie business and fashion show designing and planning our China booth? Yep! Exhausting.

So of COURSE with all of this stuff that I HAVE to get done this month, I took an entire day to take the kids to the 2016 Geo Fest at the Indiana State Museum

I mean, come on. Fossils! Rocks! Sand! Dirt! It's pretty much a must-do.

To illustrate how off my game I am in the overabundance of activity this month, I didn't take pictures of half of what I want to tell you about. I should, for instance, absolutely have photographed for you the flourescent rocks, on account of they were freaking amazing. A volunteer had a table of them, lit with a black light, of course, and a chart. You'd admire a rock, ask him what it was, and he'd look at his chart and tell you about it. 

Ummm.... I asked him about so many rocks that finally he just gave me the chart and let me look them up for myself.

One of the coolest specimens was a piece of coal with little lines of some kind of impurity running through it. Under the black light, the coal looked blacker than black, but those lines glowed! Later in the day, at the table with the geophysicists, they were showing us specimen after specimen of core samples, and telling us what each thing was--"This one is limestone, and this is a different kind of limestone. Here is silt, but this one is sandstone," etc. One of the geophysicists pointed to one of the samples, said, "This one is coal," and I said, "Ooh, it's got lines of impurities! Do you know if they fluoresce?"

The geophysicists were like, "What?!?" and I was like, "Dude, fluorescence!", and told them all about the guy with the black light on Level 1. As we departed to go learn about groundwater from another table, the geophysicists were making plans to go check him and his coal out.

Have I ever told you that Syd is mortally offended by the atl-atl?

There's a story there, I swear it.

The coolest things about Geo Fest, in my opinion, are the activity tables. On both levels, and in the galleries, are various tables set up with exhibits to explore, crafts to do, little activities or quizzes, and THE BEST PRIZES IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE:
That mastodon bone fragment was a prize. As was the rock that the kids made into necklaces. And some mica at another table.
 You can see one of the tables in the background here, although I actually WAS taking a super nerdy picture of this trilobyte:

And yep, the kids got to keep the microfossils that they discovered and sorted. It was awesome.

Okay, so now I have to tell you about The. Coolest. THING. EVER!!! Some guy had a sandbox up on a rolling cart. Above the sandbox, he'd rigged a Kinect camera and a digital projector. The image projected onto the sandbox was a topographical map of the actual terrain of the sandbox, and as the kids played, moving sand and shoveling and digging, the map image changed in real-time to reflect what the kids were doing!

Oh, and there was also a water table algorithm, so if a kid dug down, the hole would fill with virtual water, and you could hold a fist up as a cloud to make it rain, and water would flow, etc.

It. Was. AWESOME!!!

Will says that she wants to make one of these augmented reality sandboxes for her STEM fair project, and we actually own all of the hardware except for the digital projector, which is something that I've wanted forever, anyway. Stay tuned!

We did some of the actual exhibits in the museum--

--although I was bummed to discover that the rocks and minerals gallery, which I was super excited to steer the kids into after we'd seen some of the Geo Fest stuff, is actually off-exhibit right now for some reconstruction. Dang it!

On the way home from the museum, because I am insane, I had the kids and I scheduled to do a three-hour cookie booth outside a Wal-mart. It was kind of a windy day, so we'd decided not to use the big backdrop that the kids had made, at least, so we only had to deal with unloading and transporting the table and tablecloth and donation boxes and cases of cookies.

We got everything unloaded and moved and started setting up outside the Wal-mart entrance, and it was great. People were so excited, they were trying to buy cookies before we even had anything out. I had a couple at my table, another guy standing in line, the kids racing to finish getting all the boxes set up, when all of a sudden, the wind goes CRAZY. It starts blowing like there's a tornado coming or something, and it flips the cookie table and blows every single thing, cookies and donation boxes and the little prizes that the kids had made for customers, directly into the busy parking lot. The lid falls off of the Operation Cookie Drop donation box, and now bills are flying all over. Both kids start to bolt for the money flying around the parking lot. I scream for them to stop, and they do, but every time a new bill blows by they forget and start to bolt again and I scream at them again. A bunch of total strangers start picking up cookies from the parking lot, with cars weaving around them. I put the table back on its feet, and it immediately blows over again. I let go of it, and it starts to blow into the kids. I grab it again, look right into the face of a horrified total stranger, and just say to her, in a conversational tone, "I don't know what to do."

That woman and her husband help me fold up the table and drag it around the corner of the building, where there's enough of a break from the wind that it will at least stop trying to blow away on its own. Other total strangers bring me boxes of cookies that they've picked up for me, and help me pack them haphazardly back into the grocery carts; we can't set anything down, because if we take our hands off of it, it blows away again. The employee in charge of fetching shopping carts from the parking lot finds a couple of bills and brings them to me, then buys a box of Do-Si-Dos and lets me keep the change after I tell him about more money blowing away underneath a chain-link fence.

We got everything back into the car eventually, then we all climbed in and just sort of sat there, dazed. People are walking past us to and fro into the store, leaning against the wind, their hair blowing wildly. Finally, I said, "Did you notice, Kids? Total disaster struck us and immediately, every single person in sight stopped what they were doing and helped us. We could never have fixed all of that by ourselves. We had all the help that we needed, as much of it as we needed, and we didn't know a single person here."

That's the main lesson that I hope that the children carry with them away from this crazy cookie season. They've learned how to set a goal, how to work as hard as they can to achieve that goal, and how much more work it will take next year to try again to achieve it (despite their best efforts, they're not going to sell 1,000 cookies each this year). They've learned how to market the less-popular cookies. They've learned how to work as a team. Syd has learned how to handle cash transactions. Will has learned how to use the credit card reader.

But more importantly, they've learned that there are people in this world who will ask a Girl Scout what her favorite kind of cookie is, buy that cookie, then hand the box to her to keep. There are people in this world who will tell a kid that they've already bought five boxes of cookies from a neighbor kid, then, after she says to them, "Thank you for supporting Girl Scouts!" (I taught them that!), will turn back around and buy another five boxes of cookies from them, too, just because they're polite. There are people in this world who will ask a Girl Scout a question, stand patiently smiling while she works out her answer, stay there while another child figures out the change, continue to stay while a third kid is reminded of what to say at the end of a transaction and then still leave with a smile, several minutes later. There are people in this world who will buy cookies for soldiers whom they'll never meet.

And there are especially people in this world, a lot of people, who will, when walking into a busy store on a busy afternoon after a long day at work, see the cookie booth of a woman and two Girl Scouts practically explode in the wind, stuff fly everywhere, and will pick up all that stuff in a parking lot, around the wheels of cars, and bring it right back to her. Including cookies. Including money.

I hope that I'm that kind of person. I hope that my kids will grow up to be that kind of person, too.