Homeschooling from the Dollar Bin at Target

I shop at Target seasonally--after Halloween when the costumes are cheap, after Christmas when the twinkle lights are cheap, after Valentine's Day when the heart-themed crap is cheap, and during the back-to-school sales, during which this year I bought 60 Elmer's glue sticks for $10, each girl's very own choice of notebook for a quarter each, and a handful of boxes of crayons, also for a quarter each.

That, plus my big purchases in other places of all four volumes of the Story of the World activity books, both of the Minimus Latin books, and the balance scale, and my school shopping is done and done!

However, and y'all probably know this already, but Target? Right when you walk in the door they have all these bins of cheap-o junk that costs a buck! Mostly I zip on by the cheap-o junk, thoughtlessly repeating in a monotone, "No, no, no, no, no, no..." as my girlies ask for every single thing in every single bin as we walk by. But this time...this time!

Cheap-o educational junk!

And that's how my school shopping also apparently includes six different types of flashcards, everything from astronomy to the presidents (the girls enjoy looking through these on car trips), dice, dry erase boards (which, honestly, are of such low quality that I now regret having purchased them, but if they can stand the daily use that I'm subjecting them to through Christmas, I'll be happy again), playing cards (add hot glue to your mental picture of these cards--stand by for a post on that fun project!), and puzzles that diagram the Earth's make-up--

--and give the name and face of all the presidents of the United States:

Which has apparently locked me into a second trip to Target this season, since we now need to buy a set of playing cards to use as playing cards, not building materials.

Might as well buy some more crayons while we're there.

Playing with Play Silks at the Park

I've seen a lot of methods proposed by the crafty mommy bloggers for getting good photos of the kids with your handmade stuff, but the strategy that works best for me when I need to set up a photo shoot, such as this one for my Dharma Acid Dyes review over at Crafting a Green World, is to take the kids and the stuff to the park, then simply stand back and click my shutter a lot:

Seems to work well, yes?

Poetry Speaks: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The memorization of the girls' second long poem was a long time in coming. Unlike the process of memorizing "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which they probably could have listened to eight times a day for the entire Christmas season, the girls got tired of listening to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost, before they had it memorized, so we set it aside for a good, long while.

I imagine that another factor is the fact that "A Visit from St. Nicholas" is available at our library in a dozen different copies with different illustrators, so that each repetition had new aspects, and I was even able to download a coloring book version of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" so that the girls could make their own book. Our library only had one picture book of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" for us to work with, unfortunately, so eventually it got a little old and we dropped it.

I keep checking the book out, however, and recently it occurred to me that Willow absolutely, and Sydney to a lesser extent, really have the poem almost memorized, so I brought the book back out and suggested that if they worked to read it over just a few more times, they could probably finish learning it by heart and be ready to recite it.

Syd got frustrated and dropped the project after one try (which is fine--the poem will always be there), but Will happily took up the challenge:


Rote memorization is good for our brains, but--and this is super cheesy, so get ready--that's not really why I want my girls to memorize poetry. Poetry connects us all on an emotional level, allowing us a shared outlet for feelings that we all may own, but rarely have the sophistication to voice. Because of that, to memorize a poem isn't just to know it in your mind, but also to hold it in your heart. Poems are big things for little girls to hold in their hearts, but out of all of the lifetime's worth of things, both good and bad, that will eventually reside there, their hearts will always be the better for being tempered by a heavy dose of poetry.

Our version of the poem:

• Poetry for Kids: Robert Frost

Dancing to Dvorak with Daddy

Or, How One Man Wins the Household Father of the Year Contest. Every. Single. Year.

Balance Scale

The best way to introduce the girls to a tool like the balance scale without having to, you know, INTRODUCE them to it is to just leave it out enticingly on the table, all the little brass weights that go with it shiny and bright in the sun, and then to simply ignore it.

Little girls will weigh their shoes in it.

They will use it to compare their breakfast smoothies, to see who got more.

All the toy ponies in the house will ride in it.

It will be an all-encompassing activity at playdates:

And eventually it will be put away, and its coveted spot on the coffee table will be replaced by, I don't know...the microscope? Stethoscope? Watercolor pencils?

Decreeing the next week's new obsession is a heady power!

Here are the brass weights that we use, when we're not weighing ponies and coffee cups and LEGOs:
 

Maker Faire Detroit 2011

That's where I've been!

Ostensibly, we went to Maker Faire Detroit primarily for this:

Really, though, by the time that I've made everything and we've lugged it all there and Matt's hauled everything inside and I've set it all up exactly as I want it, you pretty much only need one adult to sit there and smile and sell things.

Everyone else, well...

can swing on the water pump swings:

There's a motion sensor on the swing that stops the water right as you pass underneath it, but perhaps because the girls are so small, or their swings are so short, the makers were horrified and the girls were THRILLED to discover that this sensor did not always function accurately for them. My soaking wet girls went back time after time after time.

and build spinning things at the gears table:

Don't you love those wooden gears?

and admire the fire-breathing robot pony:

and work industriously on our scratch block:

I traced the girls' handprints overlapping the block (because I was too cheap to buy two of them), and then they decorated, proudly:

The iron pour was another entire amazing event in itself, but I'll have to show you our wonderful finished iron tile later, on account of I was too excited to take pictures. Here's our waste block, though, there in the middle:


The girls constructed marshmallow shooters:

I think they're kind of gross, and I really want to sanitize the pieces in the dishwasher, but the girls have discovered infinite ways to blow a mini marshmallow into another person's mouth, so there you go, physics

Don't worry, you fans of Matt, he got to get his fanboy on, too:

We also spent some time just tooling about in the Henry Ford Museum, which has a genuine Oscar Meyer Weinermobile!


Including a D.I.Y. hot dog station:

I did have a really cute video of Willow putting all the toppings on top of Sydney as she lay in the bun, but right in the middle of it, somebody walked by behind me and shouted out to my child, "Be still, wiener!".

Fortunately, heckling is quite welcome at the modified Power Wheel races:

I did not buy the buttery leather steampunk chic superhero mask that I REALLY wanted, but I did buy a chainmail and rubber gasket stretchy arm cuff, and the girls made themselves some superhero masks to go with it:

Will was a little disappointed that she didn't get chosen to operate the crank to start the giant Rube Goldberg machine:


(listen carefully--did you hear the windshield crunch?), but tell me if I'm wrong, but does it or does it not look like she has a future in driving an iron scrap fire-breathing jungle gym disco station dragon welded to the top of a dump truck?

Don't worry--it's not breathing fire at the moment!

So you may be thinking, "Yeah, that looks fun and all, but where's the big Vegas-style finale? And also, it doesn't look like you got sticky at all!"

Well, you know what?


We got sticky.

Independence Day Unit Study: The 13 British Colonies in America

Labeling maps is one of the hallmarks of Montessori work, and even now, after over a year of homeschooling in which they have the pleasure of choosing all their own school activities, mapwork is still something that both the girls really enjoy.

Fortunately, free maps of the thirteen British colonies in colonial America are easily available online:

• I printed this printable of each colony on its own page (from A Kid's Heart) at 1/4 size so that the girls could make it into a mini coloring book, to later be mounted into their Independence Day unit study book (I order these big bare books in bulk straight from their web site).
• I printed this labeled map of the 13 colonies for the girls to use as a reference while they completed--
• this unlabeled map of the 13 colonies:

I recopied the names of the colonies onto a separate sheet of paper, but otherwise, the printout was perfect for an old-school Montessori map-labeling activity. After it Willow, who admittedly has done a lot of extra reading on the subject, could recite nearly all of the colonies, and Syd of course will learn more with repetition, which she enjoys.

Other 13 colonies resources that were much enjoyed: