How We Learn: Playing Games

Over the time that we've been homeschooling now, I've occasionally deviated from the unschooling method that obviously works so well for us to try out other systems, only to be struck by the also obvious failure of those systems.

Nope, my girls do NOT want to sit down and do formal academic activities every day. Requiring them to do so only resulted in power struggles, them figuring out how to do a half-assed job on an assignment to get it over with, and almost ruining their pleasure in activities like worksheets and the other school-ish projects that they do enjoy when they're presented casually, as one interesting part of an entire interesting day.

These days, I tend to let my little free-range girls run wild, and they tend to spend their days in elaborate pretend games that run from inside to outside and inside again, in listening to audiobooks, in playing the ridiculous number of computer games that we check out from the public library, in hanging out in parks and playgrounds, in solving mazes, in immersing themselves in elaborate and really messy art projects, in reorganizing their toy Egyptian pyramid, in jumping rope, in collecting leaves, in baking cookies, in checking out too many books from the library, in coming with me to puppet shows and museums and children's parties and playgroups, in reading for hours in various little hidey-holes around the house, in pestering the cats, in sewing stuff, in having lots of playdates with their friends, in fooling around with magnets, in playing with their collection of little toy animals that I keep buying them despite the clear indication that they have plenty...

It's actually easy for all of us to get lost in our days these days. The girls can happily spend an entire day, after their chores are done, making their own meals and snacks, getting out and putting away their own activities, moving from quiet, individual time to wild and loud play with each other, running inside and outside, hopping in the shower if they feel like it, turning on the Netflix streaming for their choice of the day and then turning it off when their show is through, all without assistance from me. When the kids are happy and don't need me, I go about my own business--blogging, photographing, making, writing, cooking, cleaning, planning, etc.

For my own benefit--just to spend a little time with my babies, some days!--I ask them, for their "school," to simply spend time each day doing a one-on-one activity with me. With Sydney, I may find myself reading an entire children's chapter book (that's almost a two-hour commitment, by the way, after which I often need to be committed, myself!), or baking something, or doing art, or putting together a puzzle.

With Willow, it's one choice only:

GAMES!!!

Blokus, Othello, Quirkle, chess, Battleship, Monopoly Junior, Sorry, quiz decks, Chutes and Ladders, cards, checkers, Connect Four, Scrabble--my Willow loves them all.

Shh...don't tell her that these games are also highly educational, and give her killer math skills and hone her logical reasoning, which will help her learn even more. I wouldn't dream of telling her that Blokus increases her intuitive knowledge of geometry, which is going to make future formal study of it easier, or that Quirkle is all about honing her pattern recognition, which is the key to a high IQ, or that Othello and chess are making her a masterful tactician, or that Monopoly Junior is all about computation, or that Scrabble is not just about spelling and vocabulary but also about anagrams, or that if there's ever a math skill that I want her to learn, I just teach her a card game that reinforces it.

Just tell her that our time together every day, just she and I, is special, and that her Momma loves it:

Which I do.

Homeschool Science: Ice Skull versus Salt

Too many holidays, too little time!

ESPECIALLY after the advent of Pinterest, my planner is absolutely chock-full of dozens and dozens of fun, beautiful, and educational project that the girls and I would absolutely love to do for every single holiday that you can think of. Now the problem is that there just isn't enough time to do them all!

In October, we did autumn projects and Halloween projects. We colored and cut out paper garlands with jack-o-lanterns and skulls on them, carved pumpkins, made garlands of autumn leaves using paint chips and crayon boxes, baked pumpkin bread and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, sewed Halloween costumes, did leaf rubbings and pressed leaves and coated them in beeswax, baked mummy dogs, and assembled giant laminated paper skeletons and hung them on the porch. We did NOT make haunted candy houses, or carve turnips, or assemble a bone garland or a gourd garland or a candy corn garland, or play with dry ice, or bake jack-o-lantern pizza, or paint pumpkins, or make eggshell ghosts, or even half of the other billion wonderful projects in my Halloween Craftacular pinboard.

And even though Dia de los Muertos was practically my favorite holiday back when I was living in Texas--dancing skeletons, sugar skulls, tissue paper flowers, Mexican beer!--it's going to have to be celebrated next year, because this year it just passed us by in our post-Halloween candy coma.

Of course, that doesn't mean that we can't do any of the awesome projects that I'd had planned--they're just regular old projects now, not festive thematically-appropriate seasonal projects.

And that's how this big old ice skull, made from a mold that I bought a few weeks ago from Joann's at 65% off, is in our regular rotation these days not as a Dia de los Muertos or Halloween science project, but just as a regular old fun science project:

Any big ice cube will work for this project, although you have to admit that the skull is pretty gruesome! I've also made the girls icebergs by freezing water in a mixing bowl, however, and that kind of simple ice mold will work just as nicely here.

You also need liquid coloring--we use liquid watercolors, because I'm a sucker for those bright, saturated colors!--and plenty of cheap salt.

Liquid watercolors alone, simply because they, themselves, are above the freezing point, will assist in melting the ice mold in interesting ways as you dribble, drop, and spoon them on, but the best fun comes from adding salt into the play. Salt lowers the freezing point of water--for instance, a particular salt solution might lower the freezing point of the water that it's mixed in from 32 degrees to, say, 20 degrees. When you add it straight to ice, then it hastens the ice's melting, because room temperature is now even farther above the ice's freezing point than it used to be.

This is all fun because the ice melts the fastest right where you add these things:

See? Gruesome!

Of course, it's also fun just to scoop and pour and mix and generally make a big mess:

Besides, who wouldn't appreciate some crayon skulls and x-ray viewing and plaster of Paris skeleton making mixed in with the handprint turkeys and pumpkin pie baking and walnut shell Mayflowers this season?

It's turning out to be such an interesting autumn!

Winter Sport

Southerners who move north tend to go one of two ways: either they embrace all things snow and cold because they've never had it before, or they loathe all things snow and cold because they've never had to deal with it before.

I follow the latter path.

That's not to say that I haven't gotten used to the winter weather here. When my Papa calls from Arkansas and gripes about how cold it is there when it's only in the 40s, I roll my eyes across the phone lines. When my in-laws visit from California in January and pull on their coats and scarves and mittens and hats just to go out to the car, where it's going to get warm in, like, ten minutes, I just sigh and grab a hoodie and off we go.

But that doesn't mean that I LOVE the weather. I just have a high pain threshold. When some local mom friend invited me and the girls to go over to her house and play some family version of football outside in the snow after dark, I was all, "Ummmm.... no." I have no patience for snowman-building, so if the girls want something taller than they can do, they have to make Matt do it. I'll take them to the park and spend all day there with the sledding and the nature walks and the futzing about with the damn snow, but it's more like torture as my thighs go numb and I realize that I didn't wear the right warm boots, etc.

Therefore, the upcoming winter must be handled more like problem-solving.

• I will splurge on fancy wool long-johns.
• I will sew pocket handwarmers.
• I will knit scarves.
• I will always know where my hat and mittens are.
• I will focus on the (few) things that I love about winter, such as my babies on ice:

• I will even suck it up a few times and get on the ice myself. 

I swear, though, that if I fall and break my tailbone (AGAIN!), that you and I are through, Winter!

Red and Green Play Silks for Christmas

Personally, I'm feeling more like autumnal colors still, browns and oranges and burgundy, but Christmas IS a'coming, and soon enough this red and green 30"x30" play silk will be the pinnacle of festivity:

 

 

 

It's still pretty mild here--I wonder how many other outdoor photo shoots I can sneak in before it starts snowing?

Putting the Garden to Bed

We have a Community Garden plot here in town, it being a place that, unlike ANY place on our own property, actually gets, you know, sun. We had to put it to bed recently, tearing out all the perfectly happy kale and chard and lettuce (wail!), and raking and mulching it, and harboring the suspicion that we'll have even more volunteer husk cherries next year than we did this year--thanks, Cake!--and, of course, uprooting and hauling to the car the most giant, ridiculously heavy, hugely indulgent dried-up sunflower that ever was:

For all its inconveniences, the nice thing about our Community Garden plot is that we HAVE to get it done (or pay a fine). And that's why that plot is all tidy and resting, while here at home the leaves need to be raked over the gardens, and the herbs need to have hay spread on them, and we haven't finished planting the tulip bulbs, and Matt STILL hasn't moved those bushes that he promised to move for me last fall, and I'd really like to move the compost heap and get rid of that big brush pile, and all the ungainly bushes and shrubs on the property need to be hacked back yet again...

And no, I have no idea what we're going to do with that giant sunflower that the girls dragged home, either.

Big Kid Babywearing

The baby REALLY wanted to spend some time with Dadda on a recent Sunday morning, but the Dadda REALLY wanted to finish putting up the tall wall shelves in the girls' brand-new-to-them bedroom. Fortunately, crunchy granola attachment parenting Momma always has a compromise handy:

I don't think that Matt really wants to repeat the experience of doing manual labor while carrying a 40-pound load on his back anytime soon, but the shelves DID get built, and the baby WAS all smiles in the meantime, so mission accomplished.

You're welcome.

A Very Young Fashion Designer

Ever since I learned that Barbie-sized dressmaker's dummies DO exist, I've been coveting one for myself girls. Even our no-sew Barbie dress is limited, in that it's really open to only one sort of style and one fabric, other than embellishments, but with a dressmaker's dummy--what limits, other than imagination?

Back in May, in Arkansas, we all wandered into a Toys R Us so that my mother could buy a birthday present for Sydney, and then we all waited around for me, as I walked through every single aisle of that store, gasping at desperately low clearance prices on much of our favorite plastic crap--big-box niche stores aren't doing too well, are they? Whatever.

Matt and I were just about at an all-time low income-wise around then, otherwise I may well have stocked completely up for the girls' entire Christmas and next-year birthdays right then and there, but as it was my mother got a GREAT deal on a gigantically expensive Playmobil set with unicorns and fairies and all that crap on it for Sydney, Matt and I bought that Playmobil advent calendar that I'd been making cutesie eyes at last year AND the Playmobil Egypt set that Willow had been making cutesie eyes at for OVER a year (only there, at a third of its original price, was it actually affordable), AND we bought a Harumika fashion design kit on clearance, solely because it happened to include a Barbie-sized dressmaker's dummy.

The Egypt set was basically that kid's best birthday present ever, and the advent calendar will make its appearance next month, but the fashion design toy set went to sit on a spot on the activity shelves, and there it sat. For months. And months.

Stuff like that doesn't really bother me--unschooling philosophy is all about the "strewing" of awesome stuff here and there and everywhere, to be taken up and explored at the child's will, and so I have faith that all awesome stuff will eventually be made full use of eventually. The tangrams lived on a shelf for years before they came off of it, and now they're quite beloved. The obsession with cassette tapes comes and goes and comes again. The dollhouse is back in vogue. We still haven't made the model rocket, but we will. The sandpaper cursive letters have come out only once or twice so far, but they'll come out again. Perhaps next summer will be the summer of the washboard. I'm betting the instant snow powder will have its heyday soon.

And the fashion design kit, with its little Barbie-sized dressmaker's dummy? Syd just picked it up one morning, brought it to me, and asked if we could play with it. Its heyday is here!

A neat little component to the dressmaker's dummy is a slit up the back, with soft silicone edges, so that you can tuck your fabric in there to get the right fit. Of course, hot glue works well, too:

The kit itself came with about three pieces of fabric, which I imagine would make it a REALLY crappy toy in a home where no one sews. In our home, however--

We have a scrap bin, and we're not afraid to use it:

Syd spent hours making fashion designs for this dummy for two solid days, photographing each one for posterity:

It hits all her sweet spots--her creativity, her love of clothes and color, the enjoyment that she takes in dolls and other little toys:

Well worth the wait.