Homeschool PE: Jumping Rope

The girls have been transitioning into some new passions lately: fairy tales, particularly princess stories, for Syd, and for Willow--dragons, Garfield, and board games of all sorts. Money math and Ancient Egypt, while still being explored somewhat, are less all-consuming now, the girls haven't read a Rainbow Magic book in weeks, and they've both rediscovered their gigantic collection of those little Safari Ltd. animal toys and play with them for hours daily. With my encouragement, both kids have been willing to start trying out nature journaling a couple of days a week and math journaling most days. Willow is back into chess, and she recently asked if I could request more dinosaur books from the library--whew!

Another new-ish passion: jumping rope:


Willow was the instigator on this one, but I also LOVE taking turns with her, as jumping rope is an excellent cardio activity, and Sydney--


--well, Sydney is NOT going to stop until she gets it.

Another thing that I love about homeschooling is that an area of interest isn't just one academic field here--instead, it's everything. That jump rope may be an excellent cardio, large muscle conditioning, hand-body coordination tool--

--but it's a stepping-off point for memorizing jump rope rhymes, and learning jump rope games played around the world, and me figuring out how to make/procure a bigger double-dutch rope so that we can do Cinderella Dressed in Yella. That jump rope is also ROPE, and with rope, and hours to explore it, amazing things can be discovered, such as how to finally make use of the playground's zip line, which is too high up for a little kid to reach:

Also at the park during this time were not only a pesky kid that the girls played with for a while, grew weary of, and then practiced how to gently fend off (ah, the life lessons learned on the playground!), but also, amazingly by coincidence, a group of four older boys, perhaps around age 13 or so, who also had rope. They were tying a loop into one end of this rope, tossing it around the top beam of the swing set, and then taking turns stepping into the rope and being pulled all the way up to the top beam by the other three boys. My girls watched them, entranced and highly impressed.

And at the hardware store later that evening, shopping for concrete, tile grout, and a new oven, I bought the girls their own nice, loooong length of rope, a metal pulley to fit the rope, and a carabiner to fit the pulley. Let the games begin!

Me and Willow and Home Education Magazine

Here we are!

Here's my article that I wrote for Home Education Magazine about the peculiarities and particularities of parenting my precocious little kid. It's in the October-November 2011 issue of Home Education Magazine (ask for in a bookstore or library near you! ahem...), whose production was delayed, and so the magazine has only been on the newsstands for perhaps a couple of weeks (Remember how I had an article accepted for publication into Craft, and then Craft went under? When it looked like HEM wasn't going to make it to this issue, Matt started calling me the black widow of the magazine industry).

Will is pretty blithe about her utter stardom--since she's recently discovered how awesome dragons are, it's rare that she looks up from her latest dragonology encyclopedia (yes, seriously, they make them) to offer any insights or opinions about much other than dragons, or eagle nests, or chess strategy, or Angry Birds, but my little Sydney has already begun asking me when I'm going to write a whole story about HER.

I do have a little something in mind, actually...

Practical Life: Lighting a Match

Here's a simple, fun, useful, educational activity that (bonus!) kept the girls intensely engaged for nearly an entire morning recently:

I did require the girls to close the matchbox before lighting a match on it, and to keep the matchbox that they were using separate from the other matchboxes that we have, and to stay in one specific area where I knew where they were and that there wasn't anything particularly flammable nearby.

However, I let them practice until they could light a match nearly on the first try, and I let them experiment with lighting more than one match at the same time, and with lighting a match held by a sister with an already burning match, and with how long they could hold their lit match, and with whether they wanted to shake it or blow it out, and I let them panic and drop lit matches onto the ground, and burn their fingers a bit, and they went through at least four entire boxes of matches, and had themselves a wonderful time.

I did the same exact thing when I was their age, only I was hiding in the backyard with my grandmother's stolen cigarette lighter...good times, that.

Six Weeks Early, Five and a Half Years Later

six weeks early

Actually, that picture was taken a little over a week after Sydney's precipitous, premature birth. We didn't bring a camera on that quickie weekend road trip to visit some of Matt's relatives, and it simply never occurred to me to ask Matt's extended family for a camera so that I could take photos of our unexpected baby girl. 

Some dear friends of ours drove ten hours to bring us some things from home, using a house key that Matt overnighted to them the day that Sydney was born, digging around in our basement for the Rubbermaid bins of baby clothes that I hadn't even begun to sort through. When they stopped by to visit us, they brought their camera! It was the kindest, most thoughtful, most generous thing that's ever been done for me.

Sydney took a turn for the better right before our friends arrived (oh, the turns that a preemie will take! Better, then worse, then better, then much worse...I was terrified to leave her alone), so they didn't have to see the CPAP that took up her whole face, and in this photo you can't see the needles stuck in her body or the wires glued all over her. I regret not having photos of my labor to show her now, but I don't miss having those first days of her life on film--having the memories haunts me enough.

five and a half years later

Is it indulgent to have a surprise half-birthday party for a five-and-a-half-year-old? Sure.

Is she worth every simple pleasure, every indulgent little surprise, five and a half years after she needed a machine to help her breathe, and a tube down her throat to feed her, and a team of neonatologists to treat her, and a $200,000, three-week NICU stay?

Oh, you bet she is. I'd give that kid a flying pink unicorn for her half-birthday, if only I could get my hands on one, I'm so thankful to have her.

Today is World Prematurity Day. Who are you thankful to have?

Sydney Masters the Hundred Grid

We're big fans of the hundred grid around here--it's such a versatile math tool! You can use it to help you add and subtract, with skip counting, with coin calculations. Because Sydney likes puzzles, she also occasionally enjoys using our big laminated hundred grid with some overhead transparency number tiles that, even though I bought them at different times and places, happen to be exactly the same size--score!

I especially like the transparency of the overhead tiles, because if a child is still working on number recognition (and, as I learned while assisting Sydney through the most tedious three games of BINGO ever played at their 4-H club holiday party this week, we ARE still working on number recognition!), then that transparency allows instant self-correction.

During our most recent play with this board, I witnessed Sydney unlock one of the patterns implicit in the number grid. No more random seek-and-find for her--watch this girl go!

I was pretty thrilled that I was there to see it happen.

Syd has a lot of focus, and although she wearied a bit of the task near the end, she kept working, because she wanted to see it through:

Success!

Pretty proud kid, right?

We have an old garage sale BINGO set of our own, and I think that we'll be playing a lot of fun at-home BINGO games this week, because not only is Syd clearly ready for number recognition up to 100, but I'm not taking her near another BINGO party game until she has it down--geez Louise, what a nightmare!

Five Things to Paint with Watercolors, OTHER than Paper

salt dough, play dough, or cornstarch dough, wet or dry

I didn't get a picture of Sydney's finished work, mostly because by then we were deep in the process of all things watercolor, but every homemade kind of dough that I've ever worked with has taken watercolor like a champ, and doesn't seem to get wet or sticky as a result.

popsicle sticks

The watercolor ends up looking like a vibrant wood stain with these. As a matter of fact, watching the girls paint these, and seeing how vivid the colors stayed, I was left with an idea for an upcoming project... Stay tuned!

coffee filters

And nope, you don't have to cut them into novelty shapes first! The fun with these is watching the colors bleed and blend, which is why it's so great to use an eyedropper--you can drip and observe, drip and observe...very contemplative.

unfinished wood of all sorts

We have a grab bag of random wood objects that we're ever so often painting, in preparation for a gigantic and ridiculous free-form sculpture project that I'll introduce at some point in the future, but any unfinished wood, such as tree branches with the bark peeled off, or lumber scraps, is very fun to paint and takes the paint well. Again, the paint will bleed at the edges, so I haven't found watercolor good for detail work on wood, but it's great for abstracts.

ice

Eyedroppers are the tool of choice here, as well. Now that the weather is cool I put whatever ice the girls want to paint and sprinkle salt on in an aluminum baking pan on the table inside--when they're done or the ice has completely melted, it's easy to pour out into the sink and then rinse for re-use.

We happen to use these liquid watercolors, and we're lavish with them--no watering down for us! However, you can use whatever watercolor floats your boat, and it's not going to bother me. I'm going to be too busy working on my secret liquid watercolor and wood project to complain.

Ancient Egypt at the Indianapolis Children's Museum

As if a day of play there isn't educational enough (it IS!), the girls and I occasionally sign up for the homeschool classes offered monthly at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. I've found that these classes work best for us when they're covering a subject that's already in the girls' areas of interest, so that they have some context in which  they can place all of the information that they're cramming in, and all of the projects that they're working on in that short hour and a half.

Fortunately, this recent class that we attended on Ancient Egypt is right in my girls' backyard, academically speaking. They LOVE Ancient Egypt:

There are three really nice things that generally occur in homeschool classes:

1) The kids are of all different ages, and their parents are with them, and it always seems to be a really good mix, so that everyone has a lot of fun with each other.
2) The kids pretty much all want to be there, and all participate eagerly.
3) No matter the subject of the class, at least some of the kids there have obsessively, passionately studied that subject, and so there's always someone able to answer a question.

In this Ancient Egypt class, I happen to have one of the kids who's obsessively studied the subject, bringing to life a fourth pleasure in homeschool classes:

4) You get to watch your kid raise her hand and speak up with answers. Seriously, how cool is that? I imagine that kids are doing that all day long in institutional schools, but on the occasions when my kids are in that particular situation, I'm generally nearby, watching and beaming with pride and reporting their triumphs back to Matt in the evenings.

In the laboratory, the kids got to help the scientist with the dummy mummy. When the scientist was discussing the removal of the organs, Willow shouted out, "But not the heart!" and cackled at her joke, along with a bunch of other little Ancient Egypt obsessives. She was fine with helping to remove the liver, though:

Sydney helped take out the intestines:

While they were in the lab, the kids all started their own experiment:

1) You take four pieces of apple, and put each piece into a little lidded cup.
2) Leave one apple as the control, so all you do is put the lid on that one.
3) In each of the other containers, cover the apple completely with one of three substances available to the Ancient Egyptians--salt, sand, and natron (our natron did not come from the banks of the Nile, but was made in the museum's laboratory):

Check the apples daily, and unlid them in a week to see which substance (if any) preserves the apple the best. Remember that we're not concerned with DRYING the apple, necessarily, but with PRESERVING it, since preservation was the true goal of the Ancient Egyptians.

We also learned about the amulets that the Ancient Egyptians made, particularly the process that they used. Basically, if an Ancient Egyptian carved a really super amulet, they'd press that amulet into clay to make a mold of it, which we did. Then whenever they wanted a copy of that amulet, they'd press more clay into the hardened mold, which we also did:

We got to take our amulets AND our amulet molds home so that when the clay hardens, we can use them to make even more copies of authentic Ancient Egyptian amulets.

We discussed hieroglyphics, specifically cartouches. We took a tour of the museum's exhibit on King Seti I, and found and translated his cartouches (two, of course, since a pharaoh has a given name and a throne name).  The girls used a hierogplyphics alphabet to create cartouches of their names--

--and then they carved their cartouches into clay:

Recently, one of our relatives (after listening patiently to the girls describe their class, and inspecting their salt dough maps of Ancient Egypt and their other work that only those obsessive and passionate about a subject of study can produce), told me that at the school where she works, children study Ancient Egypt in the sixth grade. This brings me to another pleasure, not in homeschooling classes, per se, but more in regards to homeschooling as a whole, for us:

We can learn as and when we choose. Willow and Sydney don't have to wait until the sixth grade to study Ancient Egypt for their school. They don't have to wait until after school and the weekends to study Ancient Egypt in their "free time," while doing a serious of interesting and uninteresting things at school for the greater part of each weekday. When they study Ancient Egypt, they can study as they wish, reading about gods and figuring out whose canopic jar is whose and building pyramids and relief maps and exploring the saga of Moses--they don't have to only do the projects that a teacher asks, in the time that is allowed for the project, producing something that's not as special on account of everyone else is doing the exact same project at the exact same time.

And yes, they can NOT learn something when and as they choose. I don't give a flip that Willow can't tie her shoelaces or tell time. She CAN tell you exactly how the Nile's flood process works, and why the Nile delta is named as such, and which is Lower and which Upper Egypt.

And after she does that, she can take you to ride the vintage carousel three times in a row, because her class just took place at the Children's Museum!