Here's Our Homeschool This Week

This week-ish, we:

painted our canvas shoes (more on that later)--

--layered colored sand into glass jars; drew a few Father's Day banners and cards; did a little watercolor al fresco--

--took some photographs, and drew tons and tons and tons of pictures

read out loud; Willow read to herself almost constantly; listened to CD readers (Manny's Cows: The Niagara Falls Tale has been a big favorite) and books on CD; spent a goodly amount of time at various bookstores; examined all the diagrams in the Gnomes book and spent a lot of time asking Momma if gnomes are real; and looked at books and fought over books and just plain loved books a lot

took swim class and went swimming; played in a couple of IU fountains (Is this legal? No idea)--

--walked and biked and rollerbladed; played at the playground and played at the yard; hiked and hiked and hiked at Squire Boone Caverns; and helped the Momma with innumerable errands and chores, including one big craft fair

worked the lever on the button machine and lots of other tasty mechanical tools; Sydney upgraded to the next level of her connect-the-dots books; played some inane Dragon Tales computer game; put together puzzles and Legos and Lincoln Logs and blocks off all sorts and sizes; and helped with cooking and baking and breakfast-making

explored an atlas on CD-Rom and marveled at geographic marvels and found shipwreck sites

played The Magic School Bus Discovers Flight and watched Dinosaur Train and Nova and Billy Nye the Science Guy and other dinosaur documentaries; performed the oil versus water science experiment; read books about shells and books about dinosaurs and books abour rainbows and books about tornadoes; had a few tornado warnings of our own; helped the Momma (sort of) with the gardens--

--had lots of hands-on fun with candle-making and gem mining and caves and a grist mill; and visited the zoo to spend time with the elephants, cheetahs, dolphins, and bears, and to pet the sharks:

And that's how we homeschooled this week. Next week, I hope for blueberry picking, an on-the-wall timeline, making butter in a Mason jar, and the beginning of the dinosaur atlas.

Pinback Prints on Pumpkin+Bear

I spent SIX HOURS thrifting today (more on that later), but look what else I did!

Clowns are Freakin' Scary

It's Okay to Destroy Stuff

Feedback is Welcome

Save the Planet

The photos are all 4"x6", which is perfect for greeting cards, postcards, wall frames, etc., and they're available in tiff, if you know what you're doing, or jpeg or pdf if you don't.

I spent WAAAAAY too long scanning pinbacks and making prints this week, so there are def more photos to come.

Homeschool Science Experiment: Oil and Water Do Not Mix

Isn't that right, BP, you bunch of frakkers, you?

Ahem.

In a kismetic confluence of events, Willow, who actually LISTENS to NPR (which I'm not super-happy about because All Things Considered? Kind of dark sometimes. Ask me later about my idea for a kid-friendly news program), has been asking tons of sad questions about the BP oil spill, and Sydney, who doesn't listen to NPR but who DOES like to do fun stuff, found a sweet book of children's science experiments at the Monroe County History Center garage sale free day on Monday.

So sweet, because on my own I likely never would have thought of this simple, sweet, fun experiment that meets both of their educational needs.

You will need:

• clear glass container (we used a Mason jar)
• CHEAP cooking oil. The cheapest that I had on hand is canola, but if the girls seem interested in repeating this experiment I'll likely by some cheap store-brand oil just for this and play dough.
• cup of plain tap water
• food coloring and stirrer
• eye dropper. This one was a toughie, and almost instigated a spontaneous trip to CVS, but finally I remembered my stash of essential oils and commandeered the dropper for my grapeseed oil. Eyedroppers, however, are definitely now on my list of must-obtain homeschool equipment.

1. Color the water any color that you want with the food coloring, providing that you don't color it the same color as your cooking oil:

2. Use the eyedropper to slowly drop the colored water into the cooking oil:

You will see the water form into spheres and fall slowly through the oil before landing at the bottom of the container:

Sydney prefers the structured part of the experiment, but Willow does not. So after Sydney and I have done an experiment over and over until she's content, I generally leave out all the materials and let Willow play for as long as she wants. And that's how Willow discovered a corollary to this oil and water experiment: pour the colored water straight into the container of cooking oil, and guess what happens?

Beautiful, and they also oiled the wood table for me. Yay, science!

Next time I may add a lid so that they can shake the container, or perhaps dishwashing detergent.

It Would Be Magical

In between the nightly tornado warnings that find us hanging out in the basement on an air mattress, watching movies on the portable DVD player, there's been a lot of swimming, rollerblading, lounging, reading, eating, experimenting, painting, etc.

Still inspired from Saturday's craft fair, and in the process of explaining to the girls about levers, I've been big into the button machine again lately. I made a ton more comic book pinbacks as an exuse to sit for a while and watch Bones on Netflix:

Pinbacks are notoriously hard to photograph. Since it's text, the camera's focus has to be perfectly sharp, and the plastic cover gives off a wicked glare. I have long wanted to sell prints of my pinbacks, however, since they're so awesome and all, so after tons of experimentation I've come up with a method that works well: (1) Scan, don't photograph. (2) Up the contrast and the clarity and the black level, but go easy on the sharpening. (3) Stick to a 4"x6", and even then don't try to fill up the frame with a single button.

The result:

I'm super-happy with the result. A 4"x6" is too small for Imagekind, where I usually sell my photographs, so I'll be putting some of these up on my pumpkinbear etsy shop as pdfs this week. Mostly, though, I have visions of notecards dancing in my head...

A Fair of the Arts in June

An early thunderstorm made sure that Saturday's craft fair won't go down in history as one of the all-time greatest craft fairs EVAH, but it still beat the hell out of the May fair, when it was inexplicably FREEZING.

And thus, a good-ish time was had by all:

Earlier in the day, this disaffected teen homeschool kid that I've chatted with at craft fairs for years slouched over with her disaffected teen homeschool buddies and bought up all my 1" comic book pinbacks that speak to the disaffected teen--"NO!" and "I hate you," and "You are nothing in my eyes," etc. So LATER in the day, this other bookish little teen homeschool kid that I have occasional bookish conversations with at the craft fair comes by and asks me if I can help her find any comic book pinbacks that have comebacks on them.

"Well," I say, "your buddies were by earlier and bought up just about anything that might help reflect their negative worldview."

"I know!" she said. "They were buying them about me!"

So I said, "Don't worry, kiddo. I always have a plan." The kiddo paid for five buttons, and then I gave her some Strathmore paper, a pen, and the one-inch hole punch, and instructed her to write her own comebacks and we'd make them into buttons for her.

While we were working, this other woman came up to get the 411 about being in the craft fair, on account of her group sells calendars. I told her that it's a juried fair, and apps for the season go out the previous winter, and the emphasis is on handicraft, prob not Kinko's calendars. So then, and this is a TOTAL pet peeve  since it happens all the time, most recently with a woman who wanted to rent half my booth from me to sell bellydancing swag, she goes ahead and gives me her entire spiel about why her group should totally be able to sell its calendars in the fair, like next month, and it's totally a handicraft. Fine by me, only I'm not, you know, actually in charge of anything, and when people get that frenzied look in their eyes while they're trying to make their case, it really creeps me out. Thank gawd Matt was there and smoothly segued a convo hand-off to himself, so I could devote all my attention to my VIP client there.

My kiddo made herself some AWESOME comeback buttons. Among the comebacks were "You went to LIE school," "I don't care," and "The feeling is mutual." She told me that she was especially proud of that latter button because when you say it, people don't know what it means and so they don't know if you're complimenting them or insulting them. So true, right?

So, low sales but high drama:

Good day, overall.

Candles, Soap, Gem Mining, and a Cave

Another homeschool field trip! This time we drove down to Squire Boone Caverns waaaaaay down south in Indiana.

How far south?

Well, we had about half an hour before we had to meet our group, so we popped over to Kentucky for lunch.

That far south.

And talk about fun. Squire Boone is a whole working pioneer industry-type center, and since we were on the group tour, we got to try it all. The girls hand-dipped candles--

--and we learned that the bump on the bottom is how you know that they're hand-dipped.

We played with the ground corn at the grist mill, and learned that it's the size of the sifter that separates the cornmeal from the corn grits from the cracked corn.

The girls mined for gems--

--and Willow, in particular, learned that the reason that she only found, like, two gems in her sifting while Sydney found something like fifteen is that the California Gold Rush, like life, was not fair.

I missed the soap demonstration since I had to perp-walk the screaming four-year-old out and stand with her by the car while she got her tantrum out of her system, but Willow tells me that it was very good.

And of COURSE there was the cave tour:

Growing up so near the Ozarks, I've done my fair share of amateur cave exploring, so I thought that I'd find it lame to be walked through a cave, but an experienced guide capable of answering all sorts of nerdy questions, and lighting well-chosen to show off the best features of the cave, were well worth the herding. It made all the difference, of course, that Squire Boone Caverns isn't hugely on the tourist scene, and that clearly a very careful job was done to build walkways and bridges that minimized damage to the cave.

At the end of the trip, I let myself be suckered (it didn't take much, let me tell you) into the purchase of two slingshots, two Squire Boone Caverns activity books, two gemstones, one fossilized shark tooth, two gemstone necklaces, and two sticks of rock candy.

And now, when you ask Sydney what her favorite part of the whole trip was, she says immediately, "Candy."

The Plaster of Paris Volcano Erupts!

This week seems to have been filled with craft fair prep and swimming lessons, but in the midst of that chaos (Last-minute shopping trips! Swimsuits still in the wash and we have to go! Do I have enough record bowls?) we made time for our latest and greatest obsesssion...

Volcanoes, baby!

Willow's desperate desire to create the plaster of Paris volcano (from a kit purchased at Goodwill for two dollars) using the plaster of Paris that we scored free at the Monroe County History Center garage sale one year was the premise behind my plaster of Paris tute over at Crafting a Green World last weekend. The numerous little plaster tchotchkes that Sydney and I created  during that tutorial went over far better than I anticipated (HINT: They make GREAT gifts), and the plaster of Paris volcano?

Clearly, it's awesome.

When the plaster was set the volcano was painted--

--it was nearly disaster time in Pompeii (We listened to Vacation Under the Volcano during our road trip).

We're not afraid of vinegar, so Sydney and I poured four teaspoons of baking soda into the volcano, put some food coloring into a quarter-cup of vinegar (I've also seen recipes that cut the vinegar with water or dishwashing soap, but like I said, we love ourselves some vinegar in this house), and, Sydney's choice of color notwithstanding (she chose purple), had ourselves a hell of an eruption:

Surprisingly, Will wasn't interested in participating in our morning eruption, but when we got home after swim class (flutter kicks and ice cream scoop arms for everyone!) she played out alone in the backyard for over an hour with the volcano, an entire gallon of vinegar, an entire box of baking soda, and a few assorted sundries.

Needless to say, cleaning up her activity entailed, in part, putting the completely empty bottle of vinegar and the completely empty box of baking soda in the recycling bins. Such is the low cost of awesomeness in science.