Coloring Book Review: Draw and Color Your Way to a Younger Brain

From the title, I'd say that Draw and Color Your Way to a Younger Brain (which I received for free from a publicist), is meant for older folks, but it turns out that artsy little tweens also like it quite a lot.

This is now Syd's special coloring book, and she's obsessed with it. She doesn't even have to play by our usual house rule of photocopying what you want to color from the coloring book first, then coloring the copy--it's that important to her to color the originals, just as they are in the book.

The book is a lot like the kid-centric doodle books that Syd also loves, but with more detailed and less silly prompts. It has a lot of "finish this picture" prompts, but also ones that invite you to continue adding detail to an embellished picture, ones that invite you to draw the mirror image of a picture, and ones that ask you to color in the detailed images that adult coloring books are made of.

Here are some of Syd's most recent creations:

finish this picture

adult coloring

mirror drawing

and some more adult coloring that Syd clearly found VERY inspiring!

That last one, in particular, is so pretty that I think that I'm going to frame it for her room.

We've got a Spring Break road trip coming up in a month (and yes, I am counting down the days to it!), so part of my to-do list for the week includes hiding this book from Syd, so that when I whip it out at the start of our trip she'll still have plenty of pages to work on. This, and Junior Ranger books, and audiobooks, and travel Scrabble and Blokus should hopefully keep us entertained!

Homeschool Math: Archimedes and the Method of Exhaustion

With The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way as our spine, the kids and I have been working through a very interesting and hands-on history of math and science. We're using the Student's Quest Guide as a starting point for the hands-on activities, and then I add to them or supplement as needed.

That's exactly what we did with this activity on Archimedes, in which the kids were meant to model his method of approximating pi by calculating the perimeters of inscribed and circumscribed regular polygons for a circle.

Note: The Student's Quest Guide attributes the method of exhaustion to Aristotle, but that's a typo. It was Archimedes.

The Quest Guide had the kids working large-scale, with rope and a meter stick. We chose to also use a tape measure and a protractor triangle.

First the kids drew a large circle on the driveway, exactly the way they did for our sound measurement activity (but with chalk, not stomping in the snow), then drew its diameter, then measured a 90-degree angle from that diameter--

--then used that information to circumscribe a square:

To inscribe a square, you can use the diameters that you've already drawn, or, if you want your inscribed square to line up nicely, you can draw the diagonals of the circumscribed square. Find the points where those lines meet the perimeter of the triangle, and make those the vertices of your inscribed square:

To model Archimedes' method of approximating pi, measure the perimeter of both the circumscribed and inscribed squares and average them, and then divide that by the circle's diameter:

That answer is okay, but it's not terribly accurate, is it?

Want to make it more accurate? Use a regular polygon with more sides!

It got a little crazy trying to do this out on the driveway with chalk and a tape measure, so we moved this activity indoors.

For this, you need a compass, protractor, ruler, and plenty of paper.

We repeated the exercise for inscribing and circumscribing a square, and I let the kids eyeball the circumscribed figures, rather than drawing a diameter to cross the middle and then measuring 90 degrees from it:

The measurements were okay, but not a good approximation of pi.

So we inscribed and circumscribed hexagons instead!

To inscribe a hexagon, draw your diameter, then measure 60 and 120 degrees and draw diameters at those angles.

To circumscribe a hexagon, add diameters drawn at 30 and 150 degrees:

I didn't give the children those instructions, and Syd LOATHED having to use trial-and-error. You can see she's got a few incorrect tries on paper there. Eventually, I told her the degree measurements, but Will was able to complete the task independently.

 Even though my circumscribed hexagon is somehow a little wonky, you can see that I got an approximation of 3.1--that's pretty darn good!

Will tried circumscribing and inscribing an octagon, but the answer wasn't anymore accurate, likely because more lines just means more places for human error. She was VERY impressed when I told her that Archimedes had used a 96-sided figure to make these calculations!

If you can visualize that 96-sided figure, you can see how the more sides you have, the more the figure resembles a circle. 

And that's how you can use a much, much, much more time-consuming method to calculate pi!

The Water Cycle at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Although it's been a while since we've been able to volunteer in the Paleo Lab, due to Victor's long illness and passing, I keep on the lookout for one-shot volunteer opportunities with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and as a whole it's been a rewarding strategy, as it encourages us to do things, primarily involving working with the young visitors, that we don't generally do in the Paleo Lab.

On this particular day, we were going to volunteer at the museum's After School Night, a special event just for children in various non-profit school-age programs around the city, and for the neighborhood's children (one of the best things about the Children's Museum is the deliberate interest that it takes in improving the quality of life of those who live in the surrounding neighborhood, an area of clear economic disparity compared to the rest of the city).

But of course if we're going to be in the museum anyway, we might as well go early to play!

And of course our first stop in the museum isn't even the museum proper, but the branch of the public library that lives in the museum:

How many other public libraries do YOU know that live inside a museum?

You might remember that we're doing a fast and loose meteorology unit currently, which means that we've been reviewing the water cycle. Remember our cloud in a jar demonstration?

It was just a happy coincidence, then, that most of our museum play happened to be related to that unit. First, as much as the kids miss the giant construction area that used to be in the old ScienceWorks exhibit, they LOVE the new, expansive water table, and they especially love it when they have it all to themselves!

Then, we timed it just right so that we were able to pop into a lesson in the SciencePort. These are always fun, but on this day, the theme was the water cycle, and the scientist had us play probably the funnest water cycle game that's ever been played (Incredible Journey, here). I especially loved this game because it dug into more than just the basics of the water cycle, covering how water is lodged in glaciers, in plants, in animals, in aquifers, etc.

The kids especially loved this game because it involved beads!

Okay, I especially loved this part, too, as you can tell when you see my own water cycle bracelet there at the bottom of the image. Every station had a different color of bead, and a die. You collected the bead for your station, then rolled the die to see where your water went next. At the end of the game, then, you had a record of everywhere your water had been. The die were loaded so that your water naturally went more often to the places where water more often is, so it was a surprisingly sophisticated model of the water cycle.

And yes, we did eventually get around to doing our actual volunteering:

By yet another happy coincidence, Dinosphere was the gallery of choice for After School Night, and we took over the perfect table for us, that of demonstrating and practicing with real paleontology tools. Well... the tools weren't *exactly* real, as you can't give small children clam shuckers and machetes and x-acto knives and Paleobond, but the experience was surprisingly close, and we were able to tell the children lots of additional details that we know from our experience at the dino dig. My favorite trick was to say, "Raise your hand if you've ever glued yourself to a fossil!" Will, Syd, and I would raise our hands, and all the children at our table would go "Wow!" and "Cool!" and "Awesome!" and such.

It was fun.

I always forget how stressful this month is until it sneaks up on me and smacks me on the head, so I'm always worried that the rigorous education that I try to stuff into my kids' brains suffers during this month, as I have more of my attention on the intricacies of Girl Scout cookie booth scheduling and Syd's Trashion/Refashion Show garment than on our weekly work plans. Days like this, however, reassure me. We didn't do math or grammar or review Greek and Roman deities, but we did listen to two hours of Al Capone Shines My Shoes, do some reading, review the water cycle, practice our pedagogy and people skills, and perform some service.

And I was home in time that night to rearrange cookie booth schedules, run the percentages for a Cookie Cupboard order, prepare a bank deposit to our troop account, and fall into bed with pizza, wine, a movie, and a heartburn pill.

Homeschool Math: Mathematical Map Coloring with Math Lab for Kids

We've had a lot of real-life learning this week. It's gone something like this:

• Monday: Let's go watch a homeschool matinee of Hidden Figures with your friends, then talk about it excitedly for hours!
• Wednesday: Let's go to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and help children in the city's after-school programs explore some of the real tools used in paleontology!
• Thursday: Let's have our Girl Scout troop over so that you can all collaborate upon the creation of two complete Girl Scout cookie booths!
• Friday: Let's run our first Girl Scout cookie booth of the season! I bet you've forgotten how much work it will be!

Counting in all of our extracurriculars so far this week (ballet for Syd, Uzbek class for Will, two nights at fencing for me and Will, horseback riding for Will) and the fact that while I take Will to her extracurriculars, Matt is generally out delivering Girl Scout cookies with Syd, and we've really only reliably had time each day for math, and perhaps an interesting project or two. Fortunately, I've always got an interesting project or two up my sleeve (or rather written down in my planner...), so the kids have kept their brains in gear without succumbing so far to the stress that is my February.

One project that we've all been particularly enjoying is map coloring, of all things. I had no idea, until I received this free copy of Math Lab for Kids from a publicist, that map coloring is a genuine Mathematical Thing... but is IS! And I have rapidly become completely obsessed with it.

The point of map coloring is that no adjacent pieces can have the same color. We practiced that in the first lab--

--and also practiced the tenet that you should be able to color any map with only four colors:

It's kind of like a logic problem, because although it's possible, it's by no means guaranteed that you can just start blithely coloring away with your four colors and make it work. It takes planning, and a lot of figuring out, and plenty of trial and error.

The second lab made the process easier, because it taught us the greedy algorithm, which is an actual thing. Using the greedy algorithm, we were all able to correctly color a four-color map of the United States--

--on the first try!

Because I'm mean, I then made the kids label their maps with all of the state names. I was surprised, actually, at how many Syd could label from memory--those road trips have paid off!

We do a lot of map labeling for history and geography, so my new plan is to add this map coloring element to that work. The kids love it, and it sneaks in plenty of logic and fine motor practice--and the results are so pretty!

Homeschool Math: How to Model the Pythagorian Theorem with the Decanomial Square

Neither kid has yet studied the Pythagorean theorem in math, but they DID both study Pythagoras a couple of weeks ago, and what better way to bring him to life than to model his most famous theorem?

And fortunately, if you focus on the Pythagorean triples, the Pythagorean theorem is also actually really easy to model, and quite accessible to even a younger learner. To two kids who've studied area, square numbers, and triangles, it's a snap!

First, of course, you need to build the decanomial square. Notice that the kid starts with the square, then adds the matching pieces in descending order:

When those are all placed, she finds the next largest square and carries on:

It's also good to model your work on gridded centimeter paper. This makes the translation between model and equation much clearer:

Find the square whose side matches side a. That square is a squared. The square whose side matches side b is side b squared. The hypotenuse is c. Once you've got the squares in place, you can start to do the calculation:

You can either work the calculation first, or find the square whose side matches the hypotenuse first. Either way, your work should match:

Although that's the only Pythagorean triple that's modeled in whole pieces in the decanomial square, you can use the decanomial square and/or Base 10 blocks and Cuisenaire rods to piece together the squares of the larger Pythagorean triples:

And to prove that a squared plus b squared really does equal c squared, break down the blocks that make up a squared and b squared--

--and put those pieces on top of c squared. You'll have to puzzle them together a bit, but in the end, they should fit perfectly!

There are lots of other fun ways to model the Pythagorean theorem, although since they also mostly rely on the 3, 4, 5 Pythagorean triple, it can get tedious if you do too many of them with the kids. It's more fun to make larger square models of the other triples to test, or to use the Pythagorean theorem in real-life situations.

Here are some other resources that we've enjoyed:

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Cloud in a Jar Demonstration: So Easy That Two Kids Can Do It--While Fighting!

Because my blog shares look weird on social media if I don't have an image, here's a gratuitous pic of the cat:

That's Gracie, Syd's best friend. Her hobbies are scratching my kitchen chair backs into tatters, meowing pitifully whenever the kids go outside in inclement weather (because they've left her, you see), and sleeping on top of the floor vents when the heat is on. She is the reason why I'm cold.

Anyway...

The emphasis of our brief meteorology unit is on clouds, just because Syd likes them. The first step, of course, is to learn how clouds form (well, perhaps the FIRST first step is to learn about the water cycle, but we've done that many, many times before...).

A cloud is formed when water evaporates, then rises and meets cool air. Cooler air can't hold as much water vapor as warmer air, so some of the water vapor condenses. If there are any particles in the air--pollution, dust particles, salt--then the condensation clings to that, and a cloud is formed.

Don't believe me? Make a cloud for yourself! You will need:

• jar with a metal lid. We used a pint-and-a-half Mason jar, because it's tall and clear. It's the same type of jar that I used with my Edison bulb lanterns.
• hot water. Water from the tap is fine.
• cold pack.
• matches.

Pour some hot water into the jar, light a match and blow it out inside the jar (we just dropped the match into the water after that, to make the motions quicker), quickly put the lid on the jar, with the cold pack on top of the lid, and watch the magic unfold:

And no, they can't even make a cloud in a jar without fighting, sigh.

Our American Revolution Unit Study

Yes, you CAN study the American Revolution with elementary students, and it CAN be exciting! Here's our complete American Revolution unit study, including all the hands-on activities that we did--and all of our travels!

Joy Hakim's History of Us was our spine for this unit, with all of the extra readings, activities, and field trips organized to be relevant to a specific chapter in her text. Although they're roughly in order below, check out her books for the real chronology of what we did.

For each activity, click on the link. If it's an outside link, it'll have the reference that I used. If it's a link to another of my blog posts, it'll have the tutorial, links to any required resources, and links to the other reference materials, readings, and assorted outside resources that we used.

1. Early America: We listened to/read Joy Hakim's Making Thirteen Colonies for context to the American Revolution, completing just a few field trips and hands-on activities.
1. Christopher Columbus unit study. He's not a role model, but he does exemplify the Age of Exploration that I wanted the children to understand, and these days there are more accurate resources available to study him. Our Christopher Columbus unit study included a workbook that had acceptable coverage, several readings to provide more detail, a field trip to see recreations of the Nina and Pinta, a hands-on project to make our own recreations, and some live-action role play of their voyages. 
2. model Jamestown. This was a great way for the kids to see what a colony looked like and how it was structured, and it came out so adorable that the kids were thrilled
3. Jamestown online adventure game. It's an online role-playing simulation. Can you survive in Jamestown?
4. Mayflower map model. We made a few of the 3D maps from this book, including this one, a map of the early American slave trade, and a map of Paul Revere's ride. They're all wonderful.
5. The Bloodless Revolution and Parliament. We went to see a copy of the Magna Carta in person, so I wanted the kids to understand the Bloodless Revolution, but it's also important to understand Parliament as a contrast to the US system of government.
1. Parliament YouTube channel. Not much is super interesting on this channel, but you can surf around and get a good idea of what Parliament looks like and how it operates.
6. Geography of the 13 Colonies. Got to have this memorized! I bought these maps and made pin flags for them.
7. War of Jenkins' Ear. From Colonies to Country covers this; here's a more in-depth map to make the divisions clear.
8. The French and Indian War. Even if you don't do the rest of the build-up to the American Revolution, you HAVE to start here. It's where Washington learned to lead, and where the trouble over land really got started. Use From Colonies to Country as your spine.
1. lapbook. We don't do lapbooks, per se, but we did do notebooking with this unit, and they put many of these little lapbooks into their notebooks.
2. Story of the World, v. 3. This offers a broader geo-historical perspective to the French and Indian War. If you also have the activity book, you can use its quizzes and mapwork.
3. Fort Necessity. I discuss our trip here, as well as telling you all of the other resources, reference materials, and additional activities that we used.
9. The Intolerable Acts.  It started as a series of taxes to make the colonies "repay" Great Britain for the war, but then devolved into more taxes just to punish them. Protests, then riots, then rebellion ensued.
1. Mission: Crown or Colony? The kids have, over the years, played this role-playing simulation of the build-up to the American Revolution several times. It never seems to get old!
2. England's Reasons for Taxing the Colonies. This little lapbook is a handy reference to have the kids make and stick in their notebooks.
3. Skittles Role Play. One morning, I divvied a huge bag of Skittles into three Ziplock baggies. Each kid decorated her baggie as one of the colonies. I decorated mine as Great Britain, and only had a handful of Skittles in mine, whereas each of theirs was stuffed full. I told them that at the end of the schoolday, they could eat all of the Skittles in their bags. And then, I began to tax them. I taxed them for breakfast. I taxed them for paper to do their schoolwork. I taxed them to look over their schoolwork. I taxed them for taking them to the park, and taxed them for taking them home. Every now and then, I would enjoy a handful of Skittles from my bag while they seethed. Even though I taxed them only a Skittle at a time, by the end of the day they each only had about six or so Skittles in their bags, and Syd was so angry that she was crying. They will NEVER forget what it's like to be punitively taxed!
4. Battle Animations. There's a good one of the Boston Tea Party here!
5. Boston's Freedom Trail. Go there if you can, and see all the sites!
2. American Revolution: We covered this in a lot of depth, with my goal to paint as vivid picture as possible of the people and places involved, and to really delve into the "why" and "how" of the events. I didn't emphasize the memorization of dates as much as I do in some units, because there was so much else that I wanted the kids to understand about this important event. They can always look up the date of the Shot Heard Round the World, but the reason why it's called that, what happened to instigate it, and what happened after? That's what I want them to know by heart.
1. American Revolution coloring book. This is a fun review activity to complete as you go; if you color each page as you study it, then in the end you'll have a completed story book of the war!
2. famous and not-so-famous people. As we went through From Colonies to Country, I had the kids complete one of these little lapbooks for each famous person we read about. 
1. Write with a quill pen. This is one of those fun activities that gets a kid into the mindset of a person living at the time. We also love dressing up in period costumes and playing the games and eating the food appropriate to the time.
3. The Shot Heard Round the World. It's so important to really understand this one.
1. "Paul Revere's Ride." It's not completely accurate, but it makes for great Memory Work.
2. Animated Map. This makes it easier to see what was going on with the Battles of Lexington and Concord. 
3. Minute Men National Historic Park. Here's our visit there, as well as the Schoolhouse Rock song that I sang incessantly. 
4. Declaration of Independence. It's the pivotal event of the American Revolution, and of the history of our country. If you can, go see it before it's too faded to make anything out of it at all.
1. Independence Hall National Historic Site. It has several Junior Ranger badges that kids can earn. Here's our visit there--you should go, too!
5. British Soldiers and American Soldiers. They were all just people, and they all had their reasons, many of which had nothing to do with Independence.
1. Military Perspectives from PBS. You can scroll over the illustrations to learn more about each soldier. 
2. Comic. This is pretty much what they were thinking, lol.
3. Clothespin soldiers. If the kids had been younger, we'd have made this.
6. George Rogers Clark. He led an exciting series of raids against British forts, and that National Historic Site is right here in Indiana! We visited it, the kids earned Junior Ranger badges, and they put brochures and postcards from the site into their American Revolution notebooks. 
7. battle sites. We didn't spend a ton of time on battle sites that I knew we weren't going to visit, because battles are really just a lot of running here and there and shooting, etc. I did have the kids complete this battle map to use as a reference, however, whenever we read about one or planned to visit it.
8. Thaddeus Kosciuszko Junior Ranger badge. From Colonies to Country tells the story of Thaddeus Kosciuszko. Go see his house if you can!
9. Valley Forge. We visited there and the kids earned their Junior Ranger badges.
1. The kids used Draw Write Now to help them create a portrait of George Washington. Instead of copying the text from the book, though, they had to write their own information about him. 
2. Mount Vernon. Although this is where Washington lived when he wasn't at war, the museum includes an excellent summary of his wartime actions. We went there, and even off-season, it was a LOT of fun!
1. We made Washington-era hoecakes, using the recipe in this book. 
10. Washington Crossing the Delaware. We visited Washington Crossing State Park, but the most interesting activity, I thought, was downloading and printing the largest-scale painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware that I could find, and then doing some guided viewing and discussion of it with the kids.
11. Battle of Trenton. This is an important battle! We didn't go there, but we did explore this interactive map. 
3. The Articles of Confederation. This is how America was governed before the Constitution was written, so it's important to understand it. We used From Colonies to Country. 
1. Articles of Confederation on BrainPop. It's a must-see! The kids watched the video and took the quiz.
4. The Constitutional Convention and the Constitution: We did most of our learning about the Constitution on our road trip to see it, and learning about the Constitutional Convention completed this unit study.
1. Independence Hall. Go see the room where it happened!
2. Constitutional Convention on BrainPop. My kids LOVE BrainPop! They watched the video and completed the quiz.
3. Germantown White House Junior Ranger badge. Although George Washington did live in this house twice, it was occupied by the British during the American Revolution, and is a great example of a wealthy house during the time period. I put it with our Constitution studies because it's in Philadelphia, and we'd hoped to see it when we went there (alas, we didn't, because it was closed).

That pretty much covers it, although I'm sure there are tons of books and videos that I've forgotten, and, of course, we thought about the American Revolution a lot, talked about it a lot, and contextualized it with our other studies in the ten months that we spent on it. It took a ton of time, and I'm happy to admit that we're taking a bit of a break from intensive history study after that, but it was so worth it, and so do-able, even with upper elementary kids!

Work Plans for the Week of January 23, 2017: Math, Math, and More Math (and Some Science!)

I meant to post these work plans yesterday, and even got started writing them, and then I derailed into telling you every single thought that I had about Trump's inauguration address.

Ahem.

Other than bearing witness to that travesty, the kids and I had a great week of school. The older kid, especially, zipped through her requirements in record time, with, alas, as little effort as possible. I do like that the kids can work independently, but they're still more passionate and engaged when Mom is right there learning with them.

It's fortunate that this week, then, we just happen to have loads more hands-on assignments. There's a lot of interesting math, in particular, that we have time to get to this week, and I'm looking forward to the map coloring (it's mathematical, I promise!), decanomial square modeling, and Base 60 calculating that we've got going on.

Books of the Week are more David Wiesner for the younger kid, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for the older kid, biographies of other famous black Americans, and books about Greece.

Have I told you that we're possibly going to Greece this summer? We're still running the numbers and looking for flights that would be in our budget, so I can't tell yet if we can afford it this year or not. Darn our tendency to make a budget and only do what we can afford!

Speaking of Greece... Memory Work this week is Greek and Roman deities, reviewing Sonnet 116, and the names of regular polygons. Other daily work consists of typing for both kids, a word ladder for the younger kid, and for the older kid, progress in Wordly Wise 7, Khan Academy's SAT Prep, and an online Red Cross First Aid class. The younger kid completes the daily story starter or journal entry, but the older kid just flat-out won't do creative writing or journaling, so I've been giving her a long passage from our Memory Work to copy in cursive every day.

We're trying something a little different for music. As I've mentioned each Monday for the past couple of weeks, our keyboard is mysteriously broken, and I haven't even tried to fix it or replace it yet--Girl Scout cookie season is upon us, and I'm busy! It so happens, though, that this weekend I was meandering through a Charlotte Mason homeschool site... you know, as you do... and saw their recommendation for memorizing and singing folk songs.

Why, folk songs are music! We've got memory work, we've got singing, we've got the geo-historical context of each song, and for many songs, I'm sure we can find the sheet music so that we can practice reading it. And best of all, the children actually seem enthusiastic about this plan! The older kid requested "something British" for our first song, I remembered how much I love "Froggy Went a-Courtin'" and looked it up, and wouldn't you know? It's British! The kids and I listened to loads of versions (my personal favorite: Bob Dylan's), but decided that Elizabeth Mitchell's would be the easiest to learn. So that's what we're doing.

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

MONDAY: Neither kid seems to be much troubled by her Math Mammoth for this week--more fractions for the younger kid and more integers for the older kid--which is awesome, but the younger kid may never forgive me for subjecting her to the Base 60 system of the math of Ancient Babylon. It was mentioned in last week's Story of Science, so excuse me for thinking that it would be appropriate fare for a child. And it IS sooo interesting! They only had 59 gliphs, because they hadn't figured out 0 yet, and to record numbers with positional notation you have to use powers of 60. So, you know how with the number 324, say, the digit 4 is 4x1, and the digit 2 is 2x10, and the digit 3 is 3x100, or 3x10x10, or 3x10 squared? Well, if you had written that number in Ancient Babylon, you'd still have 4x1, but the 2 would be 2x60, and the 3 would be 3x60x60, or 3x3,600 or 3x60 squared. How cool is that?!?

The younger kid, sobbing angrily, assures me that it is not cool at all. Also, I am mean.

Art is back on our weekly work plans for a while. My partner had been giving the children art lessons during the weekends, but that's also our relaxation time, family time, grown-up time, chore time, errand time, and Girl Scout cookie-selling time, and for the past couple of months, art lesson time had just been seeming like one more thing to get stressed out about on the schedule, to not get to and then feel guilty about. Well, nobody needs that! I may not be qualified to teach drawing or painting to my children, but there are plenty of process-oriented, experiential and creative art activities that we can do together during our school week, such as this book, Once Upon a Piece of Paper, which I most conveniently received for free from a publicist and which teaches the art of collage. On this day, the kids and I did the background painting on small panels, and when that's dry we can complete the first exercise on small, combined compositions.

Bacchus isn't actually going to be on the National Mythology Exam (perhaps because he's the god of wine, hmm?), but we're including him, of course, in our comprehensive study of all of the Greek and Roman deities, which we'll actually finish up this week. Then it's on to Hercules and then some specific myths from other cultures. And then it will be time for the exam!

The younger kid and my partner thankfully remade all of the paper polygons that somehow must have gotten recycled after the last time we made them, sigh:

I highly recommend this book. Making the polygons was a great exercise in following directions, as well as a comprehensive review of terms associated with lines and angles, and unfolding each piece at the end and finding a perfect regular polygon?

Magic!

On this day, the kids took those regular polygons, ordered them, mounted them onto poster board, and labeled them. We'll keep the posters on display in our hallway into they start looking ragged and I can recycle them, and we'll add the names to our daily Memory Work until the kids have got them down.

TUESDAY: We've proved the Pythagorean theorem using our decanomial square materials before, but on this day I want to show the kids how you can use the theorem to calculate one of the sides of a right triangle. My partner helped me mount our printable decanomial square to foam core, so I'm pretty excited that we'll have a lovely set of manipulatives to work with.

We're beginning Hercules today; he's an entire separate exam on the National Mythology Exam. Most of the study will consist simply of close reading, but I'll also put the 12 labors into our Memory Work.

I have suspicions that the children still didn't do great work on the first part of their unit-long assignment in our Animal Behavior MOOC, but it's almost impossible to look over their shoulders to check work done independently, on their own time. They may be sad kids, then, when they have to show me their work today, mwa-ha-ha! The second part of the assignment will consist of more regular observation and more note-taking.

Girl Scout cookie season is about to ramp up even further, with our cookie pick-up this weekend, delivery of pre-orders next week, and then cookie booths beginning next weekend and running all through February. It's worth the expenditure in time, both to witness the kids' visible progression of skills in talking to people, managing money, budgeting and planning and marketing, and, frankly, to have those profits at the end. The kids plan marvelous things to do with that money! On this day, however, they have just one cookie business job (although the younger kid will surely get my partner to take her out to do more door-to-door selling while the older kid and I are at fencing tonight...): decorating donation cans for Operation Cookie Drop and our troop. Last year, one of our troop's Girl Scouts discovered that when someone pays for their cookies in cash, if she asks them if they'd like to donate some change to Operation Cookie Drop or our troop, they often do! Just between us, donations to our troop are even better than cookie sales, because the council and the bakery don't get a cut of troop donations--that money is all for the kids! This year, I asked that our donation boxes be changed from shoeboxes to oatmeal canisters, because table space is just that important, and between all of the families, I do believe that we've scrounged up enough oatmeal canisters for there to be three complete sets, allowing us to run two simultaneous booths and to have one in another parent's car ready for a third.

And yes, I really can go on just that long about the art and science of selling Girl Scout cookies. Sorry!

WEDNESDAY: Mapping Hercules' journey is an activity suggested by Greek Mythology Activities, and one that I think the kids will enjoy. It involves close reading and research to determine where each of Hercules' labors was said to have taken place, then more research and map skills to place each one on an actual map.

The older kid is working through the cookie business badges in her Cadette book this month (she's currently working on the Budgeting badge--it's already led to some VERY interesting conversations!), but I want the younger kid to finish the Power of One award in her Agent of Change Journey before she starts the cookie business badges, mainly so that she can complete this day's assignment, which piggybacks so well on the Black History Month essay that she just finished a couple of weeks ago. Since she wrote a research-based essay on Mary McLeod Bethune for that, I'm hoping that she chooses a more creative response for this assignment.

Math Lab for Kids is another book that I received for free from a publicist, and I'm super excited to get into it, especially this map coloring lab. Did YOU know that there's an entire mathematical theorem about map coloring? There is, and it's utterly fascinating. 

THURSDAY: You may have noticed, but I purposely make our Thursdays and Fridays lighter. We're a little more tired at the end of the week, a little less enthusiastic, and sometimes we still have the odd project or two from earlier in the week to finish up. So on this day, the special work consists only of having the kids review, refine, and edit their Greek mythology family trees (I'm hoping that they'll be interested in decorating or otherwise embellishing them, as well), and beginning a short unit on meteorology by modeling cloud formation. The demonstration involves hair spray. We'll see how it goes.

You may also have noticed that we do a lot of science in our homeschool. We've got, what, three simultaneous science units going on right now? We have to have an animal unit at all times, because that's both children's main area of interest, our Story of Science unit is also this semester's history spine, and then I tend to throw in a unit on whatever else I think the kids need to know. Sometime before summer, that will be astronomy, because the total solar eclipse won't be fun unless we study for it!

FRIDAY: With the way the weather has been all year so far, it's wildly optimistic to think that it won't be pouring freezing rain on Friday for our cloud walk, but where there's life, there's hope! My partner designed some super-cool cloud identification windows that I can't wait to get the kids outside to use.

Now that the older kid is twelve (and a half!), she's on the verge of aging out of some Junior Ranger programs, which sucks, because she loves them SO deeply. In my "free" time, I've been browsing National Park sites that we're unlikely to visit before she's thirteen or fourteen, to see if she'll have aged out of the Junior Ranger program by then and, if so, if they offer Junior Ranger badges by mail. Our results have been pretty spotty when we mail in Junior Ranger books; we often haven't received responses even from sites that claim to offer Junior Ranger badges by mail, but it means a lot to the kid, it makes her happy, and it's educational, so why not give it a shot.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The big event of the week is Girl Scout cookie delivery! Our entire troop will meet up on Saturday to help pick up, unload, sort, inventory, and distribute the cookies to all of our girls, and then I imagine that much of the rest of the weekend will consist of delivering pre-orders. I promise you, the kids are crazy into it. It sounds insane, but I think it's one of those things that you simply don't understand unless you're in the thick of it. 

And then cookie season will begin for freaking real.

What are YOU doing this week, other than getting ready for cookie season?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Yes, We Watched Trump's Inauguration. Here's What I Thought about It

Even with a full school-day on Friday, we still made time for this:

Frankly, I'm surprised at how many people have said that they boycotted the inauguration, or purposefully kept it from their children. Do as you wish, but I think it's a mistake to abdicate your responsibility to serve as a witness to current events. Not only do the unbiased news sources (here, we're watching the inauguration on PBS,  although we listened to the pre-inauguration pomp and circumstance on NPR) need us to rely on them, lest Trump use our inattention as one more piece of evidence when he pretends that all of the news media that criticize him are unreliable, but whenever possible, we need to see these events for ourselves, unfiltered. That's how you learn your critical thinking skills. You listen and you watch.

So yes, we listened to and watched the inauguration, and then we listened to and watched Trump's horrifying speech immediately afterwards. Well, I listened in horror; the kids lost interest and mostly played with the dog: 

I'm going to begin discussing Trump's speech now. If you boycotted it, do consider reading the annotated transcript from NPR here.

Watching the speech, I was reminded of a conversation that I had with a friend years ago, about her partner's experience with Alcoholics Anonymous. "Everyone has their own bottom," she said, as she explained that each person's lowest point, the point at which they finally decide that they have to make a change, is personal to them. Only they know when they've suffered enough from their struggle that struggling, instead, to make a change is worth it.

America's struggle is with civil rights. You'd think that its bottom would have been just before the Civil War, but I'd argue that instead it was after. Perhaps it was when Americans witnessed their fellow citizens having to send black children to school with soldiers to guard them, to get them to class safely as crowds of Americans screamed death threats at those children, day after day after day. Watching their fellow citizens terrorize children on their way to school would, I hope, be the bottom that people would need to see to know that the struggle for change is worth it.

I've been so happy with the social rights and freedoms that have been steadily increasing over the decades. I want consenting adults to be free to marry the other consenting adult of their choice, regardless of the race, religion, sexual identity, or gender identity of these adults. I want children to be free to identify themselves outside of contemporary social constructs of gender and sexuality. I want everyone to be free to worship, or not worship, as their conscience dictates to them. I want everyone to have health care sufficient to allow them to keep their bodies healthy, and I want that health care not to be a financial burden to anyone.

I don't want more factories, unless people really, really want to work in them. I want everyone to have gainful employment in a field that interests them, not just in a factory because that's the work they can get. I don't want factories to stay in America OR go overseas--I want robots to do all of the factory work, and let people do something more interesting.

I don't necessarily want more bridges and roads and tunnels. I want more nature. I want more protected species. I want a clean environment, and industry that's non-polluting, and I want someone to finally start figuring out how to build a rocket ship big enough to get us all off the planet in 5 billion years when our sun begins to die. And I want to keep our planet as nice as possible until then.

I don't want to put America first. I want to put people first, then all the other living creatures, then the health of the planet as a whole. I want to put the babies dying in Syria before the adult Americans who just want their own particular moral compass to dictate how other Americans act. I want all of the children in group homes and overseas orphanages and the sex trade and in situations where they're being abused to be thriving in happy families, to have healthy bodies with ample health care, to have clean water to drink and nourishing food to eat, and to have bright futures before we even think about criticizing women with unwanted pregnancies who choose abortion.

I do want to make America great, but not "again," because I don't think that it's lost anything by outlawing slavery, establishing freedom of speech and religion, and increasing the social and political freedoms of its citizens. I want America to be great in the sense that I want the world to be great, as in a great place for everyone to live, no matter where they live. In that sense, I am hopeful after listening to Trump's negative, fearful inauguration speech, not because I'm happy to think that this is the direction that America is turning towards, because I am NOT, but in the sense that maybe America has to hit bottom again in the next four years. Maybe Americans have to experience having civil rights threatened, having the rich get even richer and the poor get even poorer, having racism and sexism and religious bigotry become daily facts for most, having those factories and bridges and roads and having to deal with the economic and environmental ramifications of them, before we can realize once again that the struggle to make real changes that make everyone's lives really better is worth it.

Happy Half-Birthday to You--With Cake!

We do half-birthdays in our family. It's not a big deal, but it's something the kids have looked forward to every year since they were toddlers--what kid *wouldn't* want to know the exact day on which they can officially add that "and a half" to their age?

For me, it's my yearly preview of being shocked at how old they are. Two AND A HALF?!? She's practically grown! Five AND A HALF?!? She'll be driving before I know it! Nine AND A HALF?!? She's over halfway to leaving me forever!!!

Twelve and a half. How did she get so big, so old, so smart? I was right there the whole time, and yet to me she's still that fussy not quite two-year-old in footie dinosaur pajamas, rubbing her eyes and grumpily insisting that she's not tired.

One of the tenets of the half-birthday, of course, is that you get your very own half-cake. I've written about how to make a half-cake here, but it's also not rocket surgery. I'm sure you can figure it out. This year, Syd was thrilled to have the responsibility to make Will's half-cake, and had it planned out to the hour, even casually suggesting to Will that she might want to be dropped off at the library after playgroup that day. I picked her up from there just before fencing, and therefore the sneaky younger sister had an entire afternoon and evening to make the perfect from-scratch chocolate cake, let it cool, frost it with homemade frosting artfully dripped down the side, and decorate it with peppermint candy melts that she'd piped into the numbers 1, 2, and 1/2.

She watches a LOT of baking videos on YouTube, Y'all.

The cake was a hit:

How could it not be, when it was created with such love?

A half-birthday: a bonus, mid-year opportunity to marvel at how big, how old, how smart, how generous, how loving these two are getting to be:

She's a lucky twelve-and-a-half-year-old to have a sister like that.