Homeschool Art: The Kids Carved Rubber Stamps

This has certainly been the summer for handicrafts!

In a summer that has lasted both a billion years and one infinite day, we've had the time, the disposable income (thanks to all those canceled vacations, sigh...), and the boredom to indulge in handicrafts both old and new. Will created a hand-cut applique masterpiece. I've been turning corrugated cardboard, comic books, and SO MUCH GLUE into trays to put on on every surface in hopes that people will contain their crap there (spoiler alert: they won't). Syd has most of the school table taken up with the various supplies she needs to paint an elaborate portrait of Jones on the back of her denim jacket. We've been embroidering, and Will has friendship bracelets aplenty ready for a future when we'll see other non-family humans again.

But here's another handicraft that we've been doing, and you can see it in the background there, at the end of our table covered with crap, past Will in the process of making another friendship bracelet:

It's rubber stamp carving!

We still had some stash supplies for this project leftover from back when Syd was a Girl Scout Brownie earning her Letterboxer badge, but even if you don't hoard craft supplies for multiple years, here's all you really need to get started:

To go less fancy, substitute big pink school erasers for the rubber blocks, and to go fancier, substitute paint and a brayer for the ink pads. That's what we're working our way up to, as this particular project is one of the steps towards the retired Cadette Graphic Arts badge that Syd is trying to earn. 

We're also working our way up to real linoleum carving, screenprinting, and lithography. You can see why my handicrafts budget is so bloated this summer!

That linoleum cutter is wicked sharp, but here's photographic evidence from 2013 that even a seven-year-old CAN carve a simple rubber stamp:

And look at what a fourteen-year-old can carve!

Will had a lot of fun with this, too. Check out her zebra!

Seriously, how cute is that?!?

The kids' interest this summer in activities like wood carving, this stamp carving, and other tactile crafts remind me that even big kids--even teenagers!--can still benefit from sensory exploration, especially when their worlds are otherwise limited in many ways. I should make time this summer to get out the polymer clay, and the Perler beads, and the paracord, perhaps entice the kids into the garden with me, perhaps take them to the local lake if I can find a time when it's not overrun by racists...

But not today, because our brand-new paint-by-number kits arrived last night, and so after school today, we're going to try them out!

How to Make an Upcycled Playing Card and Upholstery Sample Bunting

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

There's nothing like a bunting to make a festive occasion just that much more special. That's why my daughter wanted a bunting as part of the decorations for her recent Alice in Wonderland birthday party--and also, of course, she IS my daughter. It's possible that a love for buntings is expressed at the genetic level...

Knowing what I wanted to make, I sorted through my stash of potential crafting supplies that surely will be useful someday (this is also known as my "stash of trash") and hit the jackpot when I came across a partial deck of souvenir playing cards. You can't play a lot of games with a partial deck of playing cards, and you also can't recycle them--and if you're me, you apparently also can't bear the thought of simply tossing them into the waste stream, not when you might want to make a bunting out of them six years later!

The faces of the playing cards would work as-is in the bunting because playing cards are on-theme for Alice in Wonderland, but as for the backs... well, my daughter for some reason didn't want scenes from Yellowstone National Park in the 1980s decorating her party. Silly girl!

Instead, I turned to another super useful piece of trash, a giant book full of tacky old upholstery samples. These sample books are notorious for being snapped up at thrift stores by avid crafters with stars in their eyes, who then take them home and never, ever figure out a way to separate the samples from their glued-on paper backings.

There isn't a way, Friends. Stop breaking your hearts on the effort.

So you can't sew those upholstery samples into anything, because they have thick paper backings glued onto them (you'll never get that glue off! Stop trying!). What you CAN do, however, is cut and glue them, stencil and paint on them, and embellish the snot out of them. That's what my daughter and I did to make her upcycled playing card and upholstery sample bunting, and here's how we did it!

Directions

1. Cut Bunting Pieces Out Of The Upholstery Samples

Use a playing card as a template to trace the bunting pieces directly onto the back of each upholstery sample.

Cutting these pieces out is sort of a nightmare, at least for my own set of upholstery samples, because the glued-on paper backing doesn't cover the entire piece. I obviously can't use my fabric scissors to cut paper, and my paper scissors are too dull to cut fabric, so I had to use two different pairs of scissors for every piece, ugh.

2. Embellish as desired

The possibilities for embellishing buntings are practically infinite, but for this bunting, I wanted to spell out a welcoming message.

Stencils and paint to the rescue!

I have a very old-school Cricut on which I can cut letter stencils, but happily, a set of store-bought cardboard stencils that I already had on hand turned out to be perfectly sized for this bunting--yay! I traced each letter onto the front of an upholstery sample piece with black Sharpie.

Because this bunting isn't washable, you can use any kind of paint on it. My fabric paint is getting a little old, though, so I've been using it on any even remotely fabric-adjacent project lately so I can use it up and have an excuse to buy more.

3. Adhere The Upholstery Pieces And The Hanging Cord To The Playing Cards

You can use any type of hanging cord that you'd like for a bunting, from a kid-made yarn cord created on a knitting spool to store-bought bias tape. Bias tape actually would have looked really cute with this particular bunting, except that I filled nearly all of the available space with my letters, and bias tape would definitely have cut the tops off of some of them. Instead, I decided on simple brown twine, to be sandwiched between the upholstery fabric and the playing card.

You can also attach the two sides of the bunting pieces together in a number of ways. I seriously considered machine-sewing them together with a wide zig-zag stitch, but then my daughter happened by and got involved, and her solution to every problem is to hot glue it. So she hot glued it!

I wouldn't use a bunting that was hot glued outside in all weather, but it was perfect for a beautiful, mild birthday party day. Afterward, we hung the bunting in her bedroom, so that every time she looks at it she can remember what a wonderful time she had at her Alice in Wonderland birthday party!

P.S. Do you also have a book of wallpaper samples that you're wondering what to do with? You can make a bunting with those, too!

Five Reversible Tote Bags

I wanted to use my obnoxiously large stash of felt to make enough tote bags that we wouldn't ever have to get paper OR plastic at the store ever again.

GOAL ACHIEVED!!!

Since I also wanted to de-stash my felt, I deliberately over-engineered these bags by making them reversible--

--AND I deliberately over-designed them by adding hand-cut felt applique embellishments to one side. Here's the tote that I designed, with my interlocking gear appliques that DO look as cool as I'd hoped they would, but all that changing direction to sew all those gear teeth was a massive pain in the butt:

I wanted the kids to each create a tote design. Syd went super simple with a single cupcake--

--but Will went all out by hand-drawing, hand-cutting, and sewing--

--EVERY SINGLE ASTROLOGICAL SIGN onto her tote bag. How awesome is this bag?!?

 

It's my new favorite thing.

Remember how I used to do craft fairs, back when the kids were tiny? It's been a VERY long time since I've set up at a craft fair, and yet I still had the felt tablecloth I made to use at my booths.

Now that felt tablecloth is a tote bag!

So now I've made a new stash of cloth napkins to replace paper napkins, I ripped an old sheet up into dish cloths to replace paper towels, I've got enough tote bags to hold all of our groceries, and the only thing left on my to-do list is to make some more mop pads for my steam mop.

Technically, the store-bought mop pads aren't disposable, but they ARE all microfiber, which is also terrible for the environment. If you want mop pads made from natural fibers, you pretty much have to make your own.

So if you find me on Facebook busily cutting up my old towels and stitching 2" elastic onto them, that's what I'll be doing!

Six Months Ago: December Favorites: The British Navy, Suicidal Misanthropes, and Drawing with Waffles

One Year Ago: June Favorites: Good Omens and Good Dragons

Two Years Ago: How to Make a Wood Burned Leather Bookmark

Three Years Ago: Greece with Kids: The Acropolis, Falafel, and Feral Cats

Four Years Ago: Homeschool Field Trip: The Tulip Trestle Beam Bridge

Five Years Ago: Compound Sentences against Humanity

Six Years Ago: Magnetism and Electricity Self-Directed School

Seven Years Ago: New Haven, Connecticut, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Eight Years Ago: At Turtle Park

Nine Years Ago: A Horse and Pony Obstacle Course

Ten Years Ago: Drawing Dinosaurs

Eleven Years Ago: Rain on My Parade (Again)

Twelve Years Ago: America the Delicious

June Favorites: Captain Aubrey, Tamora Pierce, and What I Watch during Physical Therapy

We made it through June without a zombie outbreak, so yay!

I am currently jumping with both feet into the world of the public school parent, as I watch 5 hours of streamed school board meetings on 1.5 speed, trying to determine whether or not the younger kid should try out her first year of public school in person or via the district's brand-new "online academy." The online academy ought to be a no-brainer, since, you know, there's a PANDEMIC going on, but of course the information about what the online academy will actually look like is as vague as vague can be, so right now there's no way for me to evaluate which looks like a better fit academically, much less socially and in terms of my child's health, our family's health, and public safety. You'd think that would mean I could stop worrying about it, then, until I know more, but instead I am all-aboard the fret train.

Welcome to public school, I guess?

In the service of the escapist literature that I've been craving so much lately, I allowed myself to read TWO Master and Commander books in June!

• Desolation Island
• The Fortune of War

It was GLORIOUS, even though all of Aubrey's shore-side finance misadventures stress me out, and I swear that every time I fall in love with someone who is not Aubrey or Maturin, they die. I also really, really, REALLY hope that Patrick O'Brian's information about the British Navy and its sailing ships is accurate, because I now talk about this stuff all the time as if it's full fact, and not something that I read in a genuine work of fiction. It's become my OTHER conversation buffer, along with how people die in national parks and why it took so long for Jeffrey Dahmer to get caught (spoiler alert: police racism and homophobia!).

The biggest logjam in my June reading was this massive tome:

• Alan Turing: The Enigma

I'm really interested in Alan Turing, and the chapters about his childhood were quite engaging, but most of the rest of the book is a slog. I mean, he was a cryptoanalyst and mathematician. Most of his actions consisted of cryptography and math. So that's what the author tells you about! I also like cryptography and math, but I found Alan Turing's level of cryptography and math hard to follow, so the book as a whole wasn't a very pleasurable read.

I would recommend it, however, if you enjoyed The Imitation Game, because a lot of what's in The Imitation Game isn't quite accurate, and how can you rave endlessly about Alan Turing to all your friends if your information about him isn't quite accurate?!?

Here's what else I read in June!

• Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy
• Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

The younger kid joins me in my recommendation of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. I'm a MUCH bigger fan of the original novel than she is, but we both found this modern re-telling quite satisfying in a couple of specific ways.

The big kid has settled into using our library's online hold system/curbside pickup appointments. I know she's missing her entire days browsing and reading inside the library, but right now, at least, she's doing a great job requesting books that she's already pretty sure she'll like, so check out her list of favorites from June!

• Vessel
• The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding
• The Last Life of Prince Alastor
• The Eye of Zoltar
• Daja's Book
• Briar's Book
• Rough Magic
• Book of Names
• Book of Signs
• Book of Magic
• Book of Thunder
• Shatterglass
• To Night Owl from Dogfish
• The Circle Opens
• Alanna: The First Adventure
• The Best of James Herriott

That's... a lot of favorites. But to be fair, that's a lot of fantasy, too, and you know how my kid feels about fantasy!

My greatest accomplishment is that James Herriot collection. It's my own beloved copy that I recommended to the kid, and I had to practically staple it to her hands before she'd consent to read a Mom book now that the library has curbside pickup, but once she jumped in she loved it, as I knew she would. It's so lovely and pastoral, full of animals--a remarkable book!

June got me through another podcast from my absolute favorite podcast producer(s), Minnow Beats Whale/PRA. Their podcasts are always spooky, postmodern serial fiction, and they're always super-engaging. My absolute favorite of theirs is The Black Tapes, although I highly recommend all of them.

The thing is, though, that they're all LONG, and if you take a break for a few weeks or months or whatever, it's kind of hard to re-find that thread that they've been laying out for the billion previous episodes, you know? That's why The Last Movie is so good, because there's only a few episodes! Plot-wise, it's not my absolute favorite of the shows... maybe because it's not long enough for all those tangled threads to get woven?... but I did appreciate being able to listen to the whole dang thing during five morning walks.



There wasn't any new YouTube that I was obsessively into in June. Usually I manage to discover something cool, but this month I've been doing a lot of physical therapy for rotator cuff tendinitis, and I always leave those physical therapy sessions with a LOT of painful, boring exercises to do at home, so I've become very fond of finding long-format videos of people droning on about various pop culture or historical stuff. Sometimes they're experts, and sometimes they're just opinionated, but if they're willing to simply talk at me for 45 minutes while I do various things with a PVC pipe while trying not to cry, I am there for them. Here's someone who got me through my last PT session!



And yes, J.K. Rowling IS so embarrassing, and I'm glad, now, that the November Universal Studios trip I'd been planning with the older kid is completely off the table, because I'm no longer willing to buy any products that will result in Rowling getting a portion of my money. I mean, is she now so rich and powerful that she's only surrounded by yes-men who just let her say whatever she wants and they just agree with her? Does she have nobody in her life who is willing to help her understand gender? Did anybody tell her about intersex people yet?

I also profoundly do not get that argument that people, including Rowling, keep rolling out, consisting of something along the lines of "OMG IF WE LET TRANS PEOPLE EXIST THEN MALE PEDOPHILES WILL JUST PRETEND TO BE TRANS WOMEN SO THEY CAN GO INTO WOMEN'S BATHROOMS AND MOLEST LITTLE GIRLS!!!!!" I know Rowling is all fancy now and probably only uses secret fancy people bathrooms, but has nobody mentioned to her that, actually, pedophiles are already physically able to enter any public bathroom? Gender-exclusive bathrooms don't, like, have locks that you can only open with the biologically specified genitalia--they're just a cultural convention! A pedophile doesn't have to pretend to be a trans woman to go into the women's bathroom. They could just, you know... go in there? Or... they could go into the men's bathroom where the little boys are?

Okay, I really need to stop thinking about this right now and instead go show my partner the zillion screenshots that I took during the zillion hours of school board meetings that I just burned through, so we can both fret together about how on earth teenagers are meant to learn honors biology via ipad and whether that terse "all students receive core instruction per the Indiana standards and our pacing guides" that they didn't elaborate on actually means that online kids will in fact receive a limited selection of basic classes that simply meet standards and no more.

What stressed YOU out the most in June?

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Make an Upcycled Denim Slipcover for a Couch

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Our couch is horrible.

It's got good bones, I guess. I mean, isn't that what you're supposed to say about a couch that you bought used 15 years ago and brought into a house with toddlers, knowing that before you bought it the couch lived in the lounge of a freshman dorm for who knows how long previously, and the darn thing is still standing?

It's still standing, but it looks horrible. Like, really, really horrible, in a way that even I, the queen of Lived-In Chic, am embarrassed about whenever people visit and I have to expose them to the horror of its appearance.

But here's the thing: a couch that looks horrible? That is SO fixable. Just throw a slipcover over that little monster and go on with your life! And if you don't have a slipcover? It is SO easy to sew one from scratch!

The key to this DIY slipcover project is lots and lots of upcycled denim. Fortunately, old denim is easy to come by--as soon as I announced this project, I had family and friends and people I didn't even know practically throwing their old blue jeans and denim shorts and jean skirts at my head.

I finally had to start saying a flat-out no to anyone who tried to hand me a bag of clothes (even then, sometimes I'd wake up to find a bag on my porch), and I've still got enough to slipcover all three sections of my horrible couch and probably make my entire family warm, heavy denim quilts this winter, as well--stay tuned!

Tools & Supplies

Here's what else you'll need to make this upcycled denim slipcover for your couch:

• Large-format pattern paper. Newspapers work well for this. If your paper isn't large enough, tape additional pieces to it until it is.
• Cutting and measuring tools. I work with a fabric tape measure, ruler, self-healing cutting mat, rotary cutter, and fabric scissors.
• Sewing machine with a denim needle and heavy-duty thread. For extra security, you can use the thread that's designed specifically for denim.

Directions

Grab your tools, and let's get sewing up that ugly couch!

1. Measure And Piece Together The Big Rectangle

Your couch definitely has a big rectangle. Maybe it's the back, or maybe, like mine, you'll get a whole straight section running from the bottom in front, up to the seat and across, up to the back and over, and down the back to the floor. Thanks to that big rectangle, the only slipcover pieces that I need to sew are the big rectangle and two matching side pieces.

To measure this big rectangle, here's where your fabric tape measure comes in handy. My couch is 45" across, and using my fabric tape measure I could measure everything from the bottom front to the bottom back as one continuous length of 92".

Add a couple of inches to each measurement for a seam allowance, and go piece together a GIANT denim rectangle!

To actually piece together that big rectangle, simply start squaring off pieces of denim and sewing them together. The goal is to create a piece that's larger than the required dimension so that you can square again, if necessary, and trim it down to size. Pretend that you're making a crazy quilt; the nice thing about using denim is that everything is basically the same colorway, so it'll all go reasonably well together.

And yes, feel free to include pockets and embellishments! Keep metal pieces off of this big rectangle, because you don't know yet what part will be the seat and what part the backrest, but in a minute when we do the sides of the slipcover, then even grommets and zippers are fine.

When you've got your big rectangle finished, drape it over the couch and, if necessary, trim it further.

2. Make A Pattern For The Slipcover's Side Pieces

Tape together newspaper or large-format paper until you have a piece that's larger than the side of your couch.

Line up the bottom of the paper with the floor, and hold the paper against the side of the couch.

Trace the edges of the couch onto the paper. When you've got the outline, lay it flat on the floor and use a straightedge and a french curve to help you neaten the lines. You can also add an inch of seam allowance.

Cut out the pattern piece and hold it up to the couch again to double-check it. Redraw or trim as necessary.

3. Trace And Piece Together The Slipcover's Side Pieces

Again, your goal is to piece together denim that is larger than the pattern piece, then trim it to size. I don't know who gave me their old denim skirt, but I was STOKED to see that when I cut it in half and cut out the zipper and waistband, it was still enough fabric to make one entire side panel of my slipcover! Yay!

Conversely, I did a LOT of piecing for the second side panel. Don't forget that those large pieces of denim are nice to work with, but using up small pieces and scraps is just as important when you're trying to save as much material as possible from the waste stream. In the photo below, I pieced my trimmings from the big rectangle to the panel, then traced the pattern piece directly onto it and cut away the extra. As a note, I seriously overestimated the dimensions because I was paranoid, and it's easier to trim away than to add more fabric!

I did the same trick of piecing together a section made of small scraps, sewing it to the panel, and tracing the pattern to trim the excess to make this backrest section. Since the section that I was adding was pretty small, I dove deep and used up some pretty small scraps to piece it:

4. Sew The Slipcover Panels Together

When you have the big rectangle and both side panels complete, you can sew them together. Double-check your work first by placing everything on the couch and checking its fit; when I did this, I discovered that I should cut a couple more inches off the width of my big rectangle. I don't know if I accidentally added my seam allowance twice, or was just, again, overly generous with my measuring. Regardless, the slipcover looks much nicer when it's clearly well-fitted!

I'll be frank: this is NOT the cutest thing that I've ever sewn. Patchwork denim furniture is not one of the goalposts of my interior design aesthetic. But you know what? I don't have it in my budget to buy a brand-new couch this year, nor do I have the desire to trash a perfectly decent piece of furniture that is still super comfy and only looks like garbage. This upcycled denim is just as sturdy as upholstery fabric (with NO flame retardants!), and, as I've already discovered, when a kid leaves an uncapped Sharpie lying on it, it's just as easy to patch as a pair of blue jeans.

Besides, the worn denim has made that couch even more impossibly comfortable, and the whole thing doesn't look half bad when it's covered in throw pillows and kittens and happy kids.

Homeschool Geography: A Yellowstone National Park Unit Study

Our in-person explorations this summer were supposed to be the Western Caribbean with our Girl Scout troop, southern Alabama and Louisiana with our family, and several assorted camping trips and weekend adventures with just me and the girls.

Honestly, though, at this point I'm so tired of complaining about the pandemic that I don't even feel like complaining about it. We're together at home, safe and sound, making our own fun more or less.

And instead of real travel on a cruise ship with lots of friends, exploring Mayan architecture, taking young people to get soft serve and pizza at 3:00 am just because we can, the four of us are eating popsicles at home and I'm only up at 3:00 am every day because a mockingbird lives right outside my bedroom window.

Whatever. It is what it is.

It's been several years since we took our family trip to Yellowstone National Park, and so when Yellowstone kindly announced that it would allow children to earn its normally park-only Junior Ranger badge at home, I decided that it was the perfect chance to make our own fun and I turned it into a unit study.

The study broadly follows the Yellowstone National Park Junior Ranger badge book, which at least right now Yellowstone is still offering on their site, still with the possibility to earn the Junior Ranger badge from home. The subheadings for this study match the activity titles for the Junior Ranger book, although you could complete this study without referencing it.

SUPERVOLCANO

Naked Science: Supervolcanoes is a terrific documentary about the Yellowstone supervolcano, although it scared the snot out of Syd and I have somehow managed to inform everyone that I have seen in person since we watched it (being that we watched it about 6 weeks ago, that number amounts to Matt, two socially-distanced friends, and the physical therapist helping me with my rotator cuff tendinitis) of exactly how long we in Indiana can expect to live after it erupts, and what we can expect to die of.

The documentary speaks quite a bit about calderas (there's a great Jurassic Park moment in which the scientists are frustrated because they know there *should* be a caldera at Yellowstone but they just can't find it, and then one of them is flying over the park in a helicopter and realizes that they haven't been able to see it because they've been IN it--it's that large!), and so this DIY caldera project makes a great hands-on activity to accompany it.

HYDROTHERMAL FEATURES

It's a shame that we're not really at Yellowstone, because these were the sights that I enjoyed most when I've gone! Here are a couple of decent virtual tours of various hydrothermal features at Yellowstone, and here's a fun little PBS documentary entitled Yellowstone and Their Steaming Acid Pools of Death:

It's an apropos title!

It's very easy to model hot springs and fumaroles, at least--here's a handy tutorial, as well as a list of hydrothermal features and good definitions for them. I had the kids memorize the types of hydrothermal features, but our modeling didn't go quite as well. The hot spring and fumarole were fine, of course, but my idea that perhaps the kids could engineer a way to DIY a stovetop geyser (got to practice those STEM skills, don't you know?), was unsuccessful:

Well, at least we now know a good half-dozen ways NOT to make a stovetop geyser, so that's something!

Will was interested in the difference between a fountain geyser and a cone geyser, so we found videos that illustrate each one. Here's a fountain geyser:

And here's a cone geyser!

RECIPE FOR A GEYSER

The kids and I had a LOT of fun with this lesson. Geysers are a great subject for a YouTube rabbit trail!

We started off simply trying to find a YouTube video that had a model or demonstration of how a geyser works, but got interested in this video about Yellowstone's largest and just about most sporadic geyser, Steamboat:

This got us looking for other videos of Steamboat Geyser erupting, and we found this great video from a YouTuber named David Schwartz, with lots of angles and good captions:



It was such an interesting video that we checked out his profile to see if he had filmed any other geysers.

He had!



Clearly, someone who has filmed several geyser eruptions must be interesting, so we Google stalked him.

And that's how we learned the term GEYSER GAZER! That's what you call people who've made watching/studying geysers into a hobby!

You know what else we found while cyberstalking this random person?

He appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, in an episode that was recorded live at Yellowstone National Park for its anniversary!

Of COURSE we listened to this episode.

It was not great. The kids were beside themselves with how hokey and unfunny it was, in the many lulls I read out loud to them all about Garrison Keillor's history as a workplace sex criminal, and as if we didn't already loathe our listening experience enough, when it came time for David Schwartz's big moment, he got to speak approximately half a line, then Keillor cut him off, made a joke that felt like it was at least partially at his expense (I don't totally remember, and I am NOT going back to listen to it again), and then moved on to something else!

We were livid. Syd had to be talked down from violence. She loves David Schwartz the MOST, and did NOT appreciate some hokey sex criminal denying our favorite geyser gazer his public radio glory.

I did tell you that we make our own fun, right? Ahem.

Since the kids loved studying geysers so much, I gave them the assignment to draw one. They had to find a good geyser eruption video on YouTube, pause it at an appropriate point, and then create a piece of art showing their geyser mid-eruption, making sure to include elements of background and foreground, realistic or creative. And, of course, they had to credit the video's creator, because we don't deny people their glory in our homeschool!

Here's Syd's creation:

LIVING COLORS

This lesson was a great place to add a little more academic rigor for my older students. Yellowstone has an absolutely terrific lesson on thermophiles, and learning about chemosynthesis means that you get a chance both to review photosynthesis AND compare it to a completely different metabolic process!

Will handled our photosynthesis model:

That sugar molecule is so tricky to build!

Syd built the chemosynthesis model:

For a little bit more challenge, I had the kids research and label the possible name of each thermophile represented in the thermophile coloring page in their Junior Ranger books. Everybody likes to color!

PREDICT OLD FAITHFUL

The kids and I often watch the Geyser Basin webcam just for funsies, and trying to predict Old Faithful's next eruption is actually a super accessible activity using that webcam!

I had only intended our Yellowstone study to take up our afternoon project time for one week, and we spent soooooo long on geysers that we skimped quite a bit on the rest of the unit. Here's what we did:

• A GRAND VIEW
• We read this excellent article entitled The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.
• HEALTHY HABITATS
• We watched BBC's Yellowstone: Episode 1 and discussed how the presence or absence of wolves would change Yellowstone's ecosystem.
• BEAR COUNTRY
• We watched Grizzly Cauldron: The Giant Bears of Yellowstone. If you've got older kids who love animals, there's an interesting jumping off point here for another rabbit trail. You can find amateur YouTube videos of people inappropriately reacting to bear encounters in national parks, or read accounts of bear encounters (remember that time that I told you ALL ABOUT all the ways people get killed by bears in Yellowstone?), or watch additional documentaries, like Grizzly Man. There's a lot to study on the topic of animal encounters, especially through the lens of environmental science, psychology, outdoor survival, or animal welfare.
• NATIVE BISON
• We read some legends told by native peoples about buffalo.

Is your library opened back up again? Ours has curbside check-out of online holds! If/when your library is back in business, here are our favorite library resources on Yellowstone:

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Homeschool Science: Model Chemosynthesis with Zometools

Earlier this summer, the kids and I worked through a brief Yellowstone National Park study that had us spiraling back to a favorite activity: modeling chemical processes with Zometools!

As part of that Yellowstone study, the kids and I looked at thermophiles, those heat-loving bacteria and archaea that make their happy homes in the different high heat zones of the park's hots springs. Some thermophiles, including these thermophilic archaea at Yellowstone, have a metabolism that uses chemosynthesis. It's cool and unusual, makes an interesting contrast to photosynthesis, and--just like photosynthesis!--you can model it with Zometools!

For our chemosynthesis model, we decided that our organism would be oxidizing hydrogen sulfide. There are other organisms that start with not hydrogen sulfide, but chemicals like methane or sulfide, and it would be another interesting project to model and compare various chemosynthesis pathways.

Syd used this chemosynthesis formula on the NOAA website as her reference, although when Will, who was reviewing the photosynthesis formula at the time, tried to use that same NOAA site as her reference, she discovered that the photosynthesis formula written there is incorrect! GASP!

You will be unsurprised to learn that I contacted their webmaster to inform them of the error.

One of the interesting challenges in modeling a chemical formula is figuring out the correct way to assemble each molecule:

This is frustrating for students who would rather assemble, say, hydrogen sulfide "their" way, ahem...

 Looking each chemical compound up, though, will generally also help you figure out its common name. H2S, for instance, is known as hydrogen sulfide. You probably already know that CO2 is carbon dioxide, but maybe you didn't know that O2 is called dioxygen:

So this chemosynthesis formula begins with hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and dioxygen. The fuel for the change is the oxidation of the hydrogen sulfide. This source of energy allows all of the compounds to convert--

--into sulfur, water, and formaldehyde!

Good thing THIS isn't what plants do--you wouldn't want to try to breathe formaldehyde!

I think it's important, when kids study processes like photosynthesis, to make sure they understand right from the start that there are other ways for organisms to synthesize energy. You don't want a rigid scientific thinker, who can't imagine any other way for an organism to flourish. You want a creative thinker who can look at the surface and atmosphere of an alien planet and immediately start thinking of all the ways that an organism could use those formidable chemicals and that unusual energy to live!

P.S. Want to follow along with all the other ways that I insert the search for alien life into our homeschool? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page for photos, resources, and other bits of the weird stuff we do all day.