January Favorites: Post Captains, Dragons, and Pyramid Schemes

Matt and I were actually watching Syd dance en pointe for us in our family room, but I turned to look at him and he was looking beautiful, too, so I snapped his photo. Only later did I notice the nonsensical number of books in the frame!

Girl Scout cookie season is upon us, you guys. As always, it's bonkers and ridiculous, organized by the skin of my teeth and the quiver of my chin, and it will take me until January next year to recover from it... just in time for it to start again.

There were many days in January when I didn't find time to sit down or eat actual food during the day, much less engage in happy pleasure reading, and yet I'm still a little embarrassed to tell you that I read only four books during the entire month.

Only four! There are so many adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin ahead of me! So much interesting non-fiction on my library shelves! So many great recommendations from Will's last month's reading list!

Here's the best of what I read in January:



No amount of stress inherent in helping thirteen children run their own not-so-insignificant part of the world's largest girl-led business can distract me from my pleasure in reading about the many wild adventures of Aubrey and Maturin. I love them, you guys.

I LOVE THEM.

And their adventures are SO WEIRD! You can never tell what's going to happen on the next page, much less the next chapter. You can never tell if someone you've gotten deeply invested in is going to die in a couple of minutes, or how our beloved heroes are going to get out of this next pickle, or where they're going to sail to next.

I also spend a lot of time looking up nautical terms these days.

And this:



My Spanish instruction was long ago and far away, but isn't that ship named something like "hot shit?"

My other best book of January was an ethnography of dinosaurs:



The weirdest take-home from this is that there is a real sub-sub-sub-genre of literature entitled "dinosaur erotica." The second that I read this fact I had to announce it, and then Will and I spent waaaaay too long scrolling Amazon with our hands half-covering our eyes, giggling in horror at the titles.

Do you want to read Space Raptor Butt Invasion? Its reviews aren't that bad!

And yes, the rest of the family IS low-key helping me plot out some kind of super-weird erotica starring ever-more-unlikely pairings, because honestly, writing self-published megalodon erotica sounds WAY more fun than yet another novel that nobody but me is going to want to read.

Here's what else I managed to read in tiny snatches of time in January:



Even Will has been suffering from a dearth of free time; when she's not selling Girl Scout cookies or walking her dog or helping me out with all of my own scut work, she's busting her butt studying her AP subjects, poor kid.

Fortunately, she did still find some time to zone out with some good books!

Matt was excited to see this as one of Will's favorite books of January:



He's currently trying to get her to watch the Kevin Costner movie with him, but first she has to watch Watership Down with ME!

Here are Will's other favorite books from January:



Can you tell that Will took my advice to check out the sci-fi/fantasy shelves of the library? DOUBLE FIST PUMP!!!!!!!

More Will favorites:



Everyone in the family technically has this book on our January reading lists--



--because it was our latest family read-aloud, begun over winter break and finished just a couple of weeks ago. Will and Matt loved it, I liked it, and Syd loathed it so she gets to pick the next read-aloud.

Here's everything else Will read in January!



The good thing about doing a lot of tedious scut work, such as hauling cases of Girl Scout cookies here and anon, counting lots of dollar bills, calculating lots of percentages of sales and rate/time/distance formulas, and hauling around yet more Girl Scout cookies is that I've had plenty of time to listen to podcasts!

Mostly on the weekends, mostly while carrying cases of Girl Scout cookies from one end of my hall and back again, I listened to the entire first season of The Dream in January:



I don't have any skin in the pyramid scheme game, other than when I was a kid one of my second cousins once sent me a chain letter, AND when I was in college I was friendly with a guy in the fencing club who legit did Amway out of his dorm room.

But now I know ALL about pyramid schemes, and you guys, I don't think you should do those multi-level marketing business things. I mean, you can if you want, but you're not going to make any money from them, because you're not Betsy DeVos or Donald Trump.

And that 1970s trial that ruled that Amway is NOT a pyramid scheme was corrupt.

I am for sure going to listen to the second season of The Dream this month, because it's about the "wellness" industry, and I desperately need them to tell me all about Goop. Y'all remember about me and Goop, right?



Goop snark helps my sanity!

Want to know another AMAZING thing that I found?

Because not all heroes wear capes, there are people out there in the world, Friends, who make entire playlists of music that Aubrey (a violinist) and Maturin (a cellist) could have played onboard Aubrey's ship. And sometimes, they also include sea shanties!!!

These playlists are perfect for streaming while you read the series.

This one is my favorite:



It's an enchanting playlist even when you're not reading about the British Navy during the Napoleonic War, although if that's the case, the occasional sea shanty might be confusing.

The only time I've really had to watch YouTube this month is when I'm putting away laundry, but one morning while I was drinking coffee I randomly turned on the TV for a minute to distract myself from the anxiety ball already forming in the pit of my stomach (that day was a logistical nightmare of Girl Scout cookies needing to be picked up overlapping with Girl Scout cookies needing to be delivered to multiple parents at multiple overlapping times, Girl Scout cookie booths, also overlapping, to be prepped for and stocked, and a drive-thru cookie booth the next day that did not have anywhere NEAR enough signage made for it yet), and I found this completely off-the-hook video of a Carnivale parade in Rio.

It. Was. EPIC!!!

As soon as Will woke up, I made her come in and watch it with me, and then she was obsessed, too, so later we found another video and made Syd watch it with us, and when Matt got home that night and all my Girl Scout cookie nonsense was over we showed him another video, and then the next day he found yet another video, because obviously if you're not obsessed with the Carnivale parade in Rio then you don't even know what's good:



Seriously, there were a couple of guys flying around with honest-to-god rocket packs. And somebody got literally eaten by a giant dragon. And there was a guy on a boat, and a bunch of guys dancing around him dressed up like water, and they had hoses on their heads that SPRAYED WATER.

I've got to go there someday!

Wildflowers of Ohio: The Perfect Summer Study

The kids and I completed this fun--and lovely!--wildflowers study back in the summer. It was primarily an enrichment for our CK-12 Biology chapters on plants, but I also tied it into our geography/history study of Ohio by having the kids earn the Girl Scout Wildflowers of Ohio fun patch, and using those patch requirements as our spine for this little unit.

We incorporated some art and some handwork, took a road trip, and had a magical time becoming wildflower specialists!

Here are the requirements to earn the Wildflowers of Ohio fun patch:

Wildflower Basics

1. Make a diagram of parts of a flower. 

The prerequisite for all of these steps is Chapter 15, covering plant evolution and classification, of CK-12's high school Biology 1 textbook. Ideally, you'll also be reading through Chapter 16, explicitly about plant biology, as you go. In addition, you'll want to swing back and review Chapter 4, which is when photosynthesis was covered.

I didn't end up taking photos of this activity, because flower dissection is something we've done a few times over the years. Even though this is a wildflower study, I bought a grocery store bouquet for the dissection, because their flowers are nice and large! To add interest and rigor, I required the children to make their own poster, hand-drawn or digitally created, that displayed the information from their flower dissection. They were to photograph each flower part twice, once with no magnification and once magnified using our USB microscope. We bought our USB microscope way back in 2015 (and it still works great!), but it looks pretty much identical to this one:



Here are some thumbnails of the kids' microscopic portraits:

 

If your kids are younger or need some scaffolding for the project, I really like this walk-through of a daffodil's dissection. It includes observational notes, ideas to direct a kid's interest, good spots to stop and draw, and supplementary resources.

If you want to do the flower dissection as a more directed activity, or with a group, I really like the way that this lift-the-flap diagram is presented.

And here's how you'd set up flower dissection Montessori-style!

And obviously, if you're not reading every single Gail Gibbons book about plants as you go, you're studying flowers wrong! This one is particularly relevant, as it has an annotated flower diagram:



Gail Gibbons picture books, especially, always have a lot more information than you'd expect in a picture book, and they're completely appropriate to use as a resource even for older kids like mine. We often read picture books first, and then move into more complicated material.

2. Start a wildflower journal. 

I've been using journals a lot with the kids this year, and I think it was this wildflowers study that inspired it! We treat the journals more as portfolios, and they're a good way to keep all of the kids' work in one place and show off the scope of their study and their mastery of it.

If I had this step to do again, I'd have the kids create journals especially to use here (as I did with their tree journals for later in CK-12 Biology Chapter 16!), but instead, they used their nature journals, and they worked fine.

As part of preparing for our Ohio road trip, we spent some time looking through this AWESOME guide to nature journaling, and we got lots of lovely ideas and bits of inspiration from it:



It gives you tips not just about drawing, but also ideas for interesting perspectives and new ways to annotate what you see. It makes nature journaling a much more meaningful and thoughtful activity.

 2. Learn about photosynthesis!

For this step, the kids reviewed the chapter on photosynthesis in CK-12 Biology. That chapter came so early in the book that they needed to review it as they started the chapter on plants, anyway, so this was a convenient step!

Here's all the work we did for Chapter 4, and any of those activities would make a good enrichment or review of how photosynthesis works. In fact, I'd fully planned to repeat the experiment on carbon dioxide uptake in water plants by having the kids collect some from a nearby wetland, but we didn't get to it before winter, so we probably will do it in the spring, instead, and thereby remind ourselves about photosynthesis all over again!

It's a really fun experiment!

The kids did, however, redo the modeling of photosynthesis project, and this time they figured exactly how to put together glucose:

Discover Ohio Wildflowers

Here's where we had the most fun with our study!

1. Go on a wildflower hike! Visit a Girl Scout Camp, local park, forest, or a field by your troop meeting site. Bring a simple field guides to learn about what you see. Or, bring a camera, take pictures, and try to identify the flowers later using books, doing online research, or ask an expert. 

As part of our Ohio road trip, we spent a day at Hueston Woods State Park, swimming with Luna, finding fossils, and sketching and identifying wildflowers:

2. Be able to identify 5-10 wildflowers by sight and add these flowers to your flower journal! Make drawings, cut out photos, and devote a page to each new flower you learn about. Be sure to answer these questions about the wildflowers: 
• What is its name? 
• Tell about an interesting feature. 
• What type of landscape does it grow in? (Forest, fields, roadsides, wet ground?) 
• What time of year can you find this flower blooming? (Spring, Summer, Autumn?)

Here are the guidebooks that we brought along to ready-reference our flowers:



I've always found using identification guidebooks challenging, but we've gotten quite a bit of practice this year, what with all the time we've spent studying growing things out in the wild.

Nevertheless, I love the question marks that Will put after her possible identifications:



It's very bothersome not to know for certain!

3. Wildflower fun!

We did NOT take any wildflowers during our hike, because we were in a state park. Instead, on another day when we were back in town, we took one of my very favorite local hikes:

The first part of the hike is NOT Luna's favorite. Stairs are scary!

It's much more fun to tromp around the waterfalls!

 

This spot is technically a city park, so it's perfectly alright to pick flowers--and the occasional robin's eggshell!

Will is holding a filthy Mason jar because we were also collecting water for a separate project. Homeschooling is all about multi-tasking!

Will and a friend once carried a giant snapping turtle all the way from beyond the farthest vista up to where the kid's mom and I sat together on the dock from which I took this photo. They showed the turtle to us, we admired it, and then they hauled it all the way back to where they found it.

The spot we're facing here used to be a wetland, then was a reservoir, and is now a wetland again.

 Here are the flowers we collected:

And here's what we did with them!

I'm only bummed that I didn't learn how to make these until the tag end of summer--next summer, I'll make pressed flower bookmarks every day!

Plant a seed! Share what you learned about wildflowers. 

For this activity, the kids modified Syd's Take Action Project from her Cadette Outdoor Journey. For that project, she researched the appropriate wildflower seeds for our location, perfected a seed bomb recipe, and taught other Girl Scouts how to make seed bombs.

As we were finishing up this wildflowers study, we were also prepping for our Girl Scout troop's Bridging ceremony, so the kids created seed bomb kits to give out as party favors. Syd designed a tutorial, and they included information about how wildflowers are important to our ecosystem:



The little kits turned out very cute, and will hopefully spread awareness--and wildflowers!

This was a really fun little unit of study that was simple to organize, but I think it had a big impact. It's easy to see something even as concrete as biology as abstract if all you do is read about it and take tests over it. Instead, if you can find every excuse possible to get out into nature and study biology wherever it is, and especially if you get to do some really fun, really active, really creative things, then your study means that much more.

When my kids think about studying biology, I want those memories to be joyful!

Here are some of the other wildflower resources that we used in this study:



P.S. If you like the weird, exciting, totally random stuff that I do with my kids, and you want to see more of it, check out my Craft Knife Facebook page! I'm on there kind of all the time, sharing resources, griping about stuff, and planning new adventures.