Letters to the Grandparents

Syd prefers to dictate her letters to me. I write them, a sentence or two at a time, onto one of our lined dry erase boards (one of my best homeschool purchases, by the way), and then she copies them onto regular notebook paper:

I'm impressed that her fine motor skills are advanced enough to allow her to use regular notebook paper. Will, who's nearly two years older (but also dislikes writing by hand), still requires the extremely wide-ruled handwriting paper that Syd would probably be asked to use if she was enrolled in someone's else's kindergarten.

Although I write out Syd's letters as she dictates them, I have NO responsibility for their content:

Willow prefers to type hers (thanks to that typing study!), using invented spelling and her favorite fanciful font:

As for me, I'm a handmade card with a note inside kind of gal:

At least I don't ask for giant ponies.

Yet.

Tutorial: School Glue in Many Homemade Hues

You will be unsurprised to learn that we go through a LOT of glue around here. I try to buy the kids' glue only during back-to-school sales, when they're vastly cheaper than at other times, and I probably shop the back-to-school sales flyers even more avidly than the most penny-pinching parent of an institutionally-schooled kid, because whereas that parent might purchase one six-pack of Elmer's glue sticks for a dollar, I purchase ten of them.

The glue sticks give me agonies because of their plastic waste, but I still stock up because they're the best glue for all the daily little paper projects that the girls do, and they WILL go through 60 glue sticks in 12 months, I heartily assure you. I did better with the bottles of white school glue that I bought last year--I bought a dozen or so bottles (at a quarter apiece!) AND a gallon of Elmer's at the local office supply store. I took care of the small bottles, refilled them from the gallon jug as needed (as well as pulling from the gallon jug when I need glue for projects like gak and shaving cream puff paint), and did not need to purchase any new ones this year.

I over-purchased on the bottles last year (honestly, I DO know that even two children cannot each use six bottles of glue at the same time, three per hand) because I wasn't sure how durable they'd be for frequent refilling--those orange caps do break--but now that I've still got them, it's been in the back of my mind to do something fun with the extra bottles, to get them out of the glue bin and into the art rotation. I was thinking glitter glue, or perhaps tempera paint thickened with a little cornstarch, but finding this black glue and watercolor resist tutorial on the Pink and Green Mama blog was like some kind of personal jackpot for me.

I set out ten or so bottles of Elmer's glue--

--and let Syd pick out whatever colors she wanted from our collection of acrylic paints, then unscrew the cap of each bottle and squirt a couple of big squirts of one color into each bottle:

With that done, we reverted back to the black glue tutorial by shakeshakeshaking each glue bottle to mix the paint and glue together, then getting out the Strathmore watercolor paper to play with it all:

The watercolor paper is a nice choice because after the glue dries you can then add watercolors to your art, of course--

--although Syd found markers and colored pencils just as fun to work with on top of the glue.

My favorite part of this dyed glue is that it dries puffy, like the shaving cream + glue puff paint that the girls and I create sometimes, but unlike the shaving cream puff paint, this glue paint can live happily in its glue bottle on the girls' art shelves, to be taken down anytime they desire to make a little more art.

P.S. Do you love messy kid crafts? You might love my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Coral Reef Sketching

So the chores list has evolved again. Instead of a schedule so much, I changed it to more of a list, with the same number, roughly, of chores and schoolwork activities on it (although that will soon alter, as well, since Matt's about to deem the children the official Daily Cat Litter Scoopers, as soon as he does a few days of litter scooping lessons).

After debating for quite a while, I also tied it to their allowance, in that completing the list of chores earns each child one dollar in her hand, and one dollar put away to save for Walt Disney World (do not even get me started about this, please). It's not an ideal solution to the allowance situation, but 1) I wanted the girls to perform work in exchange for their money (mean Momma, I know), 2) they don't care enough about money to do extra work to earn it, and 3) I want them to have money regularly, so that they can experience saving and spending it (and so I can have a good reason to tell them to stop griping for stuff in stores), so I needed to tie it to work that they were already expected to do, basically. If they ever get motivated enough to complete their entire responsibilities list every single day I may have to rework the system, because that's more cash than I'm willing to put out, but for now it works well.

Each child can complete her list at her leisure, coming to me when she wants to do a project that requires an adult's help, but if she takes longer than one day to finish all her responsibilities (and she does), then on the second day and thereafter she can no longer have access to her media entertainment--no computer, no TV choice, no music or audiobooks. She can still play pretend ponies for four hours at a time, for example, but no Usborne Quicklinks.

The girls can still choose to add their own things that they want to do to the list, of course, but we're on a tight budget, so they can't add something like getting ice cream or going out to eat, for example, but the Wonderlab, the public library, and playing Quirkle are all fair game.

The last change that I've made is that although I still assign projects for Syd to do with me or ask her for suggestions or give her choices, Will is now responsible enough to choose her own schoolwork subjects each day, and think of a project that she can do on that subject, and complete it with or without my help, as necessary. So when she added "coral reef sketching" to her list, she helped me clear the living room table to use as a workspace, got out the crayons while I got out the drawing paper (mental note: need more drawing paper), did a Google Image search with my supervision, chose the coral reef images that she wanted to copy, and got down to work:

Syd, of course, is not to be left out of any activity. She sat down and chose to sketch her toy cat:

A masterful representation, don't you agree?

Will created at least a dozen different sketches of different coral reef scenes that she found via Google Images. I was surprised, however, to see how impressionistic each one is. This, for example, is a reef scene that includes a starfish:

This one included a large brain coral and a school of colorful fish:

Each image that she drew from was teeming with color and life, and so it's fascinating to me to see how she distills each one:

Although I recorded this activity under Science and Art in Will's records (the requirement for record-keeping isn't clearly laid out in Indiana law, but I do know of one couple who went through a lot of very upsetting hassle because of their lack of records, so I keep them), it's one of those projects that is so clearly her own that I really don't know what she got out of it, exactly. It would be easy to look at these drawings and think that she'd just put in the bare minimum of effort, but I saw her carefully select each image to copy, study it thoroughly, concentrate on every line in her drawing, and most importantly, I saw how proud she was of every finished sketch--clearly they are masterpieces in her eyes, and therefore they're clearly masterpieces in my eyes, as well.

It's one of those projects that helps remind me how important it is for my children to own their own educations. If Will hadn't completely owned this entire coral reef sketching project, from start to finish, how would it have ever come to be?

Battle of the Home-Sewn Shorts: Oliver + S Bedtime Story Pajama Shorts

Near-ish the end of summer: the perfect time for a kid to have a growth spurt, wouldn't you say?

Will has spent years at almost the same waist size, shooting up primarily in height. This means that each summer she could wear the shorts of the summer before, if they hadn't gotten TOO short, and the pants of the winter before, only we called them capris.

In the course of just the last month, though, the kid has not only shot up again in height, but also gained an entire inch in her waist measurement. All those old shorts and pants? They're gone, baby.

These days, I generally only buy kids' clothes if they're 1) dirt-cheap (think garage sale), 2) vintage (think Syd's Partridge Family dress--squee!), 3) ridiculously fancy and therefore impractical to make at home (think party dresses for Syd), or 4) cheap but with an awesome print (think all of Will's dinosaur/Star Wars/comic book T-shirts), and even then only if they're thrifted.

Everything else, from underwear to pants to pajamas, I've been trying to make myself. So in the next few weeks, I'll be testing out a few of the kids' shorts patterns that I've gathered here and there, to find the ultimate pattern for home-sewn picky child shorts.

This Oliver + S Bedtime Story pajama pants pattern wasn't intended to be sewn as shorts, but since the pants are pretty much straight-legged, I just measured up 12" from the bottom hem and then folded the pattern there to make the longer shorts length that I prefer--shorts that cover the knee are obviously going to suffer a lot more wear at the knee, but I prefer my fair-skinned babies more covered than not, generally. Not that you'd know this if you lived near me, since I struggle on a daily basis to keep a single stitch of clothing on them as they play out in the yard, but sun protection is always a good thing in my book.

The Oliver + S pants pattern was really simple to work up, which will be great if I want to make multiples, but my favorite thing about Oliver + S patterns is how no matter how simple the pattern, there are always some special details, such as a separate waistband and binding for the bottom hem, allowing me to do them in a coordinating print:

Again, I just really like the length of these shorts, and the fit is roomy without being TOO roomy, you know?

Of course Sydney, wearing a leotard and cut-offs of last winter's pants, also feels the need to model:

How did I come to have children this unutterably ridiculous?

Will prefers to wear her shorts with a plain white T-shirt (oh, the agonies that I suffer to keep those damn things white!):

The shorts have clearly passed her test, because she can wear them unimpeded as she climbs every single thing in creation, which is her second-favorite pastime:

The shorts also work well with her most favorite pastime, of course:

Also in contention, to be duked out in future blog posts, are a vintage Simplicity pajama pants pattern, the pajama pants pattern from Heather Ross' Weekend Sewing, and a second Oliver + S pants pattern, all cut down into shorts.

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