A Montessori Family

We are going to be a Montessori family even as we homeschool. To that end, at our last family night together at this school, I asked the girls to show me their very favorite works, so that we can be sure to recreate them together at home.

Here we have the geo board with rubber bands:
I've been wanting to make one of those forever, anyway, and I also have instructions from a recent issue of for turning it into a small marble maze.

LOTS of scooping and transferring works:Sydney loves her sensory experiences, so I see lots of sand tables and rice tables and dried bean tables and river rock tables in our future.

Willow loves her photography, especially catching her sister:Sydney likes to smile for Willow just until Willow is a second away from clicking the shutter button, and then she'll hide her face as quick as she can, but Willow caught her this time.

Neither of the girls bring home these labelling works very often, but aren't they wonderful?

I'd like to have a large assortment of these kinds of activities at the ready to bring out whenever a child shows an interest in a relevant topic.

Willow loves the scrubbing station, which changes often--sometimes a gourd, sometimes a pumpkin, sometimes a big piece of driftwood, and sometimes this wonderful, large conch shell:

Sometimes Willow has the responsibility for washing some dishes at the kitchen sink, but one of the first things that I'd like to accomplish when we homeschool full-time is to rearrange the kitchen so that each child can be responsible for (and successful at) washing her own cups and plates after every use.

I have the making of lots of these types of geometry puzzles and manipulatives in mind:

There's a space in the living room that seems as if it would be a pretty good spot for temporary installations of a week or so. The electric football game hung out there for a while, for instance, before I got sick of it and it had to go live back in the playroom. Sometimes, instead of electric football, I imagine that a little science experiment could hang out there, such as this "Will It Float?" work that so absorbs the girls:And the math manipulatives!!!I don't think that I'll be doing number beads exactly the way Montessori does them, but I will be doing them, and yep, we'll be going all the way up to 9,000, too, because I find the visualization of this simple concept to be both amazing, and one of the foundations that makes the Montessori program itself so amazing.

Sydney also loves this little game:You each have a little basket of things, and there is a stack of cards in front of you. Taking turns, you draw a number, not letting your playmates see it, and count out the appropriate number of things in front of you. Then your playmates have to count those things and tell you what number you have. The kids LOVE it.

As they love dancing. Here they're all doing one of my favorites, Jump Jim Joe: The dance begins with one pair of children. After every verse, each child who danced must find a new partner, and then they dance again. So two children become four, who become eight, who become sixteen. By the fifth verse all the children in the class are dancing, and then they still do several more verses, because it's equally fun to mill around in the circle to procure your new partner as it is to Jump Jim Joe.

Since you're not under-the-rock dwellers, I'm sure you can imagine that we have taken a lot of heat for our decision to homeschool the girls after this year. And it's good to have these conversations, because our children's education is something that we should always participate in thoughtfully. But the one argument, and perhaps the only one that I've heard so far, that I find actually offensive is that I should send my children to public school in order to support public school. If everyone just pulled their kids out, public school would crash. Instead, parents should work to make a difference in their schools.

It is my responsibility not as a parent, but as a citizen, to support public school, and I do. It is my responsibility not as a parent, but as a citizen, to work to make a difference in my community's public schools, and I try. All citizens, whether or not they are parents, should do the same.

It is my responsibility as a parent to choose the best method of schooling for my own children. I firmly believe in a child's right to a free education, but I won't sacrifice my own children to that political ideal if I don't believe that the free education that they will receive will be the best education for them. Yes, I'll work for a better educational system, but I won't submit my own children to education that isn't already the best.

My children adore their Montessori school, and it is, for them, a terrific method of schooling. If we could afford to send them back next year, we would. If our public schools worked exactly like that Montessori school, we'd be even happier to send them there. But you know what? The girls are also going to ADORE homeschooling, and it is going to be, for them, also terrific.

But oh, we have been very happy in this place, too.

The Paper Chain Corollary: Numbers are Also for Writing

You thought I'd be done after the baby and I made a 40-link paper chain, didn't you? Well, I'm not! There's more learnin' to be had over here!

While Matt took the girls to a birthday party, I watched an episode of Weeds (season 2, a new addition to Netflix Watch Instant), and made flashcards using a Sharpie and 80 blank notecards. I wrote each number from 1-40 on one notecard, its number word on another notecard, stuck them back-to-back with a glue stick, laminated them, cut them out, and punched a hole in the top left corner of each one.

Now, every morning after Sydney tears a link off of her paper chain (it's quite fabulous, now that she's made her peace with it) and I tell her how many days there are until her birthday, I lay out maybe five of these flashcards, and Sydney finds the one that matches her number. Then I give her a fine-point dry erase marker and let her trace and draw on the flashcard for a while:

The plastic laminate allows the dry erase ink to be wiped off with a corner of dishtowel (or a sleeve, sigh).

When she's done playing, I give her the bookring, and she adds that flashcard to the others that she's collected. In 38 more days, she'll have the whole set!

We Spend at Least Two Nights a Week at the Cereal Bar

When Willow was very small and Sydney but a babe, I would sometimes take the girls to this place downtown called The Cereal Barn. It was a cafe that had a billion kinds of cereal and a billion kinds of stuff to put on cereal, and you could get as many kinds of cereal and stuff to put in it as you wanted in your bowl. I was quite fond of Coco Puffs, Honeycombs, and Golden Grahams with sliced bananas, walnuts, and soy milk. Willow would eat anything as long as you poured chocolate milk on it. And then she'd play with a bin of toys, and I'd eat my cereal, nurse the baby, and sense that someday the world would stop exploding around my head. It was heaven. I loved that place. I ADORED it.

And then it closed.

Fast-forward three years. Cascadian Farms, for some reason, has their cereal on CRAZY-huge sale, and so although normally I never buy it at all, now I buy, like, two boxes of everything every time I go to the store. And I also don't really like to cook. And thusly, a revelation strikes:

I could have my own cereal bar. Just like Cereal Barn.

We didn't have a billion kinds of cereal, but we had at least eight, plus bananas, frozen blueberries, walnuts, and soy milk:The babies had a spoonful of everything, heavy on the blueberries, light on the soymilk:I had cinnamon grahams, Puffins, granola, blueberries, and carob chips, heavy on the soymilk:

I loved it. I ADORED it. It's in heavy rotation on the menu now.

All I need is a storefront.

40 Days Until Her Birthday: A Paper Chain Project

Sydney has been VERY excited about her birthday lately. We've already planned her party theme--Rainbows--and we'll finish the cake specs as soon as she can pin down whether she wants the icing to be blue or rainbow.

It's very amusing how many misconceptions are also involved in the big 04. Sydney has made such proclamations as:

• she will be very tall when she is four.
• the day after she is four, she will be five.
• she is afraid that she will look all different when she is four.
• she will not have to go to school on her fourth birthday, and daddy will also stay home from work to play with her.

The words most often uttered from her mouth, however, go as follows:

"HOW MANY DAYS UNTIL I AM FOUR?!?"

This is a job for the Paper Chain!!!

While Matt and Willow spent a happy morning with I Spy Fantasy - Deluxe Edition----Syd and I went to work with markers, glue sticks, and a set of paper strips that I bought from Daiso back in the summer. At the time I recognized that it was a slightly silly purchase, since of course I have perfectly serviceable paper back home, but since Syd was super-anxious to get started, it was nice not to have to get out the cutting mat and rotary cutter and ruler and cut paper into strips, and ALSO nice to therefore not have to deal with the drama of Syd painstakingly picking out all the paper. If you don't have silly paper strips of your own, make finding scrap paper and cutting it into strips its own activity some other time so that you have a stash at the ready. We have a catalogue or two that I'm actually going to do that with this week.

We also got out Sydney's coloring calendar, and she colored on it a little more, and then I showed her today's date, and her birthday, and we counted together how many days there are until then. This was totally over Sydney's head, by the way, because the fact that the numbers on the calendar dates were not the same numbers that we were counting out loud BLEW HER MIND, but that's fine. A little mind-blowing on a Sunday is not an extraordinary event.

And then, oh dear, it turns out that there are 40 days until Sydney's birthday. Forty is a lot of days. Pause everything for a temper tantrum.

When Syd was feeling better, we counted out 40 paper strips. Starting with 1, I wrote the numbers 1-40 on the inside of each strip:Then I handed the strip over, and Syd would put glue on one inside end-- --poke the strip through the last link in the chain (I got us started with the first three), and bend the strip into a circle and press it on the glue until it stuck:For a while I had Syd count the number of links in the chain every time, and then tell me which number came next so that I could write it, but it wasn't a big deal when she got bored with that. Forty is a HUGE number, as we already established.

But yay, the concluding sense of accomplishment!!!I included today in the count, so that after we hung it up near the table where we begin our days, I could show Syd right away how to tear off the last link, turn it over, and answer the question, "How many days until your birthday?"

What I did NOT count on, ahem, was Syd's broken heart that I tore a link off of her chain. So we made a new chain that I promised, swore, VOWED TO THE HEAVENS that we will not tear.

And that is how it is to be three.

A Doll in Your Pocket Makes the World Go Right

I've been wanting to make Waldorf dolls for the kids forEVER, but they're so complicated, and I'd have to get my head around crafting with new wool, and blah blah blah the time just never seemed right.

With the help of however, I've decided to at least start. Start small, perhaps. And the kids, for some reason, have lately been taking it in turns to seriously balk at going to school. We're talking tantrum-at-the-door balk. So the first project detailed in Making Waldorf Dolls, a tiny little pocket doll, SUPER tiny to fit in small hands and to hide in small pockets, seemed just about right.

Instead of the gauze called for to make the doll's head, I used a tan tie-dyed T-shirt. Instead of new wool rolled into a ball to stuff the doll's head, I used a pompom from the children's craft stash. Otherwise, it went like this:

Circles for the head: Stuffed and tied:Little doll bodies:With yarn for hair:I gave the kids one each, for now (there might be more hiding in Easter eggs in little woven baskets next weekend). They ADORE them. They take them everywhere, and pull them out all the time for just a few minutes of play anywhere they happen to be, not unlike the way I pull out my notebook and pen to write for a minute or two wherever I happen to be. I need to make them little necklace pouches or something, in fact, because they are very disturbed when they're not wearing an outfit that has a pocket for the doll, and they've taken to tucking them into their underpants in such circumstances.

Handy, of course, but the fishing around in public is a bit of a problem, as is, of course, sanitation. 

The little kid's doll, especially, tends to accompany her the majority of the time, no matter what she's doing:I didn't tell her, in so many words, that the doll was meant to comfort her in times when she needed me and I wasn't there, but I think she's figured it out for herself.

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Third Member of the Band

I never really liked that movie August Rush as much as everyone else did, I think. I hate films in which characters don't make all the pertinent information clear to each other. I mean, why didn't Felicity just TELL the social worker that her father had forged her signature on the adoption papers? Instead, the social worker was all, "You're a bad mom!" and Felicity was all, "I know, right?"

Anyway, Sydney's latest composition, her interest intrigued by my and Willow's interest in the guitar, reminds me of that film:

It's wrong, I know, but I'm already imagining them both on the main stage at Lollapalooza.

Pinback Buttons and Happy Faces

The biggest problem with the button machine is encouraging the girls NOT to make buttons all the time. I'm all, "Sweetie, you don't work at TGI Friday's. A girl only needs so much flair." Perhaps their pinbacks will get more use when we start homeschooling in a couple of months--before that, and I can't even imagine the conniption their teacher would have if they brought their pointy little accessories to school with them.

Of course, when they see me sitting at the table making some pinbacks myself (which I was doing for my pumpkinbear etsy shop yesterday)-- --it is GAME ON.

Willow and I have toyed off and on with the idea, for over a year now, of letting her make something on her own to sell at my craft fairs. I should have thought harder, because last year I really wasn't able to come up with anything that she could make that I thought would actually sell--one time at Strange Folk a sweet old lady did pay one dollar for four of the turf clods that Willow had wrapped with duct tape and put on a shelf, but she wouldn't actually take them. So that's not so much success. But as the girls worked, and worked, and worked on their buttons--

--they came up with an idea that turned out really cool:
Smiley faces! I traced a button circle template several times on artist's paper, and gave each kid, with MANY admonishments and advisories, my very nice, fine-tipped Sharpie and Micron pens, and away they went. The simplicity of their creation works well, and it's recognizable to the average person (unlike a lot of children's art), and it ends up looking very unique without looking too childish.
And in case you have doubts that the kids can actually MAKE the pinbacks by themselves, I present Willow:

And Sydney, complete with bonus sister-squabbling action:

It's a rainy day today, so even more pinbacks is not an impossibility.