Tutorial: A Kid-Friendly Aluminum Pour

You can do anything with a Dremel.

At Maker Faire Detroit, I hadn't thought to bring my power tool collection with me (silly me!), and so the girls and I scratched out our scratch block for the iron pour with some random hand tools--a butter knife, a quarter, a spoon handle. We love our finished piece, but that was hard, tedious work for a couple of little kids, and I didn't come away from the process feeling like carving a scratch block was a very kid-friendly enterprise.

When our local hands-on science center teamed up with our local hands-on metal sculpture studio to do an aluminum pour, the scratch blocks were available to purchase from the museum several weeks in advance. I bought one each for my girls, took them home, unpackaged them, tossed the huge nails that came with them as a suggested carving tool straight into my Odds and Ends for Crafting bin, and instead brought out my Dremel and its grinding stone bit.

You might think that power tools are too dangerous for little kids to use, but really they give any kid with decent motor skills and a good pair of safety goggles safe and easy access to a wide variety of projects that are too hard, too dangerous, or simply too tedious to perform by hand. Kids like drilling holes, kids like cutting, kids like carving, and kids have big ideas. Heck, that's why power tools were invented!

Nevertheless, I get ahead of myself. At this point, all we have is a scratch block in front of us. Measure your scratch block--


--then draw out several mock-ups on newsprint so that the kiddos can practice their design:


There are two things to remember about a scratch block design:

1. The image will be reversed. This is only a big deal if you're writing words; I had the girls dictate to me the words that they wanted to write onto their scratch blocks as I typed them into our handwriting software program, then I printed them out mirror-image for them to copy.
2. What you carve in will stick up in the final block. You can do some really cool things to play around with depth in your scratch block, although this time everyone stuck to simple single-depth line art, which is fine--playing with a process takes time!

Each girl used a black Sharpie to copy her final design directly onto her scratch block--

(tangent: I love the look of peace on her sweet little face as she works. She is truly a child who thrives learning at home.)

--and then, because hallelujah it was an unseasonably warm day in mid-winter, we took the scratch blocks and the Dremel outside and didn't get dust all over the living room!

Here's what they look like when they're sketched on but not yet carved:

When using power tools, a good, clear pair of safety goggles is the height of fashion:

Using the Dremel with grinding stone attachment as a stylus, set to just perhaps a 1 or 2 speed setting, all you have to do is trace the Sharpie lines:

Have I mentioned how great it is to have a little girl with dirty hands?

Especially when she loves power tools with the same goofy love that I do?

Syd did not feel safe using the Dremel, but she's a brave kid, and so when I assured her that she was safe, and explained that I would not carve her scratch block for her, she gamely gave it a go:

And here's what a scratch block looks like after it's been carved!

Matt is REALLY hard to buy presents for (he doesn't like anything as much as he likes not spending the money for it), but he is an artist, and so a scratch block of his own to carve was my Christmas present to him:

And what did he give me for Christmas, you ask? Oh, just this brand-new laptop! Ahem...

(Hint: I'm REALLY easy to buy presents for...)

After a few days of admiring our scratch blocks, and of studying aluminum as our schoolwork, we all trooped over to the Wonderlab one Friday night to watch the metalworkers pour molten aluminum into our very own scratch blocks:

It's always the process, not the product, for us--having fun bowling is more important than your lousy score at the end of the game, goofing around in shaving cream is just as fine as doing your math right then, etc.--but I have to say that in this case, both the process and the product?

We LOVE them!!!

Homeschool Math: Our DIY Roll to a Hundred Game

I have a strict Montessori-style policy that I do not discourage my children from doing academic work that is "too easy" for them. If Willow wants to play the Jump Start Kindergarten CD-Rom that I checked out from the public library for Sydney, then that's okay. If Sydney wants to spend the afternoon working color-by-number pages, then that is totally fine by me. If Willow suddenly develops a passion for those old First Chapter Books that she first read two years ago, and reads them all again, then good for her!

It's an important part of my homeschool philosophy that repetition reinforces skills, internalizes concepts, and builds the feelings of mastery that reward children for learning, and the confidence to take on more learning challenges.

Therefore, although our DIY Roll to a Hundred Game highlights skills that both my girls have already learned, we LOVE this game! It's excellent reinforcement for number recognition, sequencing, counting, and addition concepts. The unpredictable nature of the roll of the die prepares the girls for future lessons on statistics, graphing, and averages. The coloring requires fine motor skills, and is also graphing, and pattern-building.

Oh, and the game is based on a die, so the little one can win as often as the big one does, hallelujah.

To play Roll to a Hundred, you will need:

• a copy of a Hundred Grid for each person. You can use either a labeled hundred grid, or a blank hundred grid that the child labels for herself--this turns the potentially tedious activity of labeling a hundred grid into a useful activity that a child might choose to do for herself, by the way!
• one die
• crayons

1. Decide who goes first. The first player has the advantage, so it's important to remember to take turns.

2. During her turn, a player rolls the die--

--and then colors the same number of squares as pips on the die:

3. Change crayons each time so that you can see each individual roll on your hundred grid, and the first person to reach one hundred--

Wins!!!

We play such that you have to roll to reach 100 exactly--waiting for that perfect roll gives everyone time to catch up and makes the game a little more exciting.

Ways to modify the game:

• Use two dice, or a 20-sided die, etc.
• Play on a 200 number grid. 
• Play on a number line.
• Play Roll to Zero, where the game is subtraction!
• Multiply each roll by two.
• Assign a different mathematical operation to each number: One must be subtracted, Two gets doubled, Three gets added to the previous roll, Four gets divided by two, etc.
• Have everyone graph their rolls to see how many times each person rolled each number.

It's certainly not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon!

Sneaky Momma Trick #1001

As long as some of the rice is white, they don't seem to notice that some of the rice is brown. Mwa-ha-ha!

Tutorial: How to Repair Kids' Adjustable Elastic-Waist Pants

Will was about four the first time I ran across a pair of adjustable elastic-waist pants in her size at Goodwill.

Brilliant!

I LOVE these pants for kids. They look like normal jeans or cords or slacks or what-have-you, and the length is the length that you'd expect for the size, but hidden inside the waistband is a length of buttonhole elastic, and on either side of the casing--a button!

No more Husky or Slim, no worries with hand-me-downs, no baggy waists for the kid who just had a growth spurt, and the kid who actually cares about such things doesn't have to wear "baby" pants that are obviously elastic-waisted (I told her she could also call them old lady pants, but still...).

These pants can be tricky, though, because if that button works its way out of the elastic, or (more likely) that kid who cares about such things tries to adjust the elastic herself and leaves the elastic off of the button, AND it goes through the wash, then the elastic will get lost inside the waistband, rendering it useless.

Here's how to fix it! 

(Apologies for the terrible quality of the photos. It turns out that the gloomiest, stormiest, darkest days also happen to be the best mending days!)

Take hold of the other end of the buttonhole elastic and pull it all the way out of the waistband:

If the buttonhole elastic looks worn or has lost its stretch, replace it. 

Pin a safety pin through the elastic, about 1/2" from one end:

 Use the safety pin to help you feed the elastic into one of the openings in the waistband casing--

--and then all the way through:

Now keep that elastic buttoned on BOTH ends this time, will you?

P.S. You can also add a waistband to any existing garment, sew a couple of buttonholes and buttons, and DIY a pair of adjustable elastic-waist pants. 

The Rainbow Fairies' Favorite Candles

Are anybody else's kids as rabidly into the Rainbow Magic series as my kids are? Willow's been reading them since back when she first began to read, which means that my Sydney may very well have been weaned on them, and is now just as obsessed as Willow ever was.

The Rainbow Magic books are notorious between the adults in our family for putting the both of us straight to sleep when we read from them. Syd, who can't yet read, of course, checks out piles of them every time we're at the library, and since there are no audiobook versions of the Rainbow Magic series yet (GRRR!!!), Matt and I find ourselves reading them out loud to her. Every day. For hours. It was our little joke that in the summertime, I'd always read to Sydney out in the backyard in the hammock, with a nice pillow and a summer-weight blanket, and when I'd finished the book, Syd would climb out of the hammock, give it a little push, and send me off on a nice afternoon nap.

Everything is rainbow around here again these days--the fairies, Syd's design for this year's Trashion/Refashion show (more on that later), the play dough that we're making today, the Kool-aid-flavored bubble gum that we're also making today, and all our candles. As I was out in the yard last week in the suspiciously mild weather, taking photos of some new etsy listings, I took a second to update my rolled beeswax rainbow fairy candles listing:

For no other reason than that taking yet another photo of these little fairy candles is one more excuse to bask in their yummy, tiny rainbow-ness.

Rainbow Rolled Beeswax Waldorf Ring Candles

Completing a custom order a couple of weeks ago, I was called upon to research the diameter of candles used in traditional Waldorf birthday rings.

Having FINALLY discovered the right number, I whipped up a set of rainbow rolled beeswax candles the perfect size for a Waldorf ring:

These Waldorf ring candles are twice as thick as my birthday candles, and twice as long as my fairy candles. I'm hearting them so much that I'm starting to think that I my girls REALLY need a Waldorf ring to put them in.

Rolled Beeswax Rainbow Birthday Candles

I've had it in my head to make a simple set of birthday candles in rainbow colors for quite a while, and I do believe that I've had them made for nearly that long, but winters are so grey in Indiana that it can seem a long time between those sunny days that I love so much for product photography.

And although these unseasonably mild, warm, sunny days that we've had lately have given me nightmares of a post-apocalyptic global warming collapse in which we're all forced to migrate south on foot, pushing shopping carts full of canned goods in front of us, these entire days that the girls have spent playing with toy ponies and Duplos outside, or kicking a soccer ball around with me at the park, or having the kind of mid-morning playground playdates that we've haven't done since summer sure are making me very, very happy, as is the opportunity to get plenty of product shots done.

And that's why I've done something nearly unheard of this Fabruary: I put a brand-new listing up on etsy!

rolled beeswax birthday candles, rainbow set of seven

At least Global Warming is productive!