A Big Map of Africa

Lisa over at 5 Orange Potatoes got us WAY hooked on Africam. It's a set of 24-hour webcams located at watering holes in South Africa--our favorite is located at Tembe National Elephant Park.

The first thing that I do in the morning is set up one of our laptops to the Tembe camera, where it sits all day on the living room table; the last thing that Matt does at night is shut that laptop down. In between times, birds and bats and animals of all sizes come to visit us through the camera--someone is forever and always shouting out "Giraffe!!!" or "Elephants!!!" or "Hurry, lion!", and we'll all run over to see. We've seen a lazy lion lounging on the dirt like a giant kittycat, and a baby wildebeest tromping along behind its Momma, and once, late at night after the girls had gone to bad, Matt and I totally saw two elephants have sex.

As such things always do, the Africam has inspired an educational foray into all things Africa. We checked out lots of African animal encyclopedias, because we wanted to identify the animals at the watering hole, and we checked out some children's atlases, because we wanted to see where the watering holes were located, and then, since we already know Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and thus already have a little context for Africa, I decided to go whole-hog into an Africa study.

For that, you need a map. A BIG map.

I'm forever going on about Megamaps, I know (it's because they're really GOOD!), and this is another shameless plug for their free site, since our big Africa map is a 4x4 map printed straight from their site. Willow put it together like a puzzle--

--I taped all the joints from the back side, and then we duct taped it right to the wall, because I'm from Arkansas and I duct tape EVERYTHING.

I asked Willow to color in Egypt and draw the Nile River, but she was so excited that she colored all the countries right then, matching the colors to our children's atlas:

She also drew the Nile in wrong, so we'll have to fix that tomorrow. Oops! I needed to do some fact-checking, anyway, to make sure all the countries and their borders are still accurate.

Syd had the job of painting the oceans:

 I imagine that we'll keep our big map up for at least two months (it'll be a handy ready-made project for our homeschool group's International Fair later this Spring--yay!), and I have lots of ideas of other things that we can add to it, if the girls are willing:

• Fertile Crescent and other locations from The Story of the World volume 1, which we're also studying
• all the locations from our Ancient Egypt studies
• the locations of the Africam web cams
• images of the typical animals found in various locations
• thumbnail-sized images of the picture books that we'll be reading that are set in Africa
• thumbnail-sized images of the chapter books that Willow reads that are set in Africa
• labels of all the countries (which is good handwriting copywork!)
• copies of the short book reports that the girls are beginning to learn how to do
• the Great Rift Valley, and images/info of the best finds from that area

Okay...we may have this map up longer than two months!

Chess Player, Ice Skaters

In a life in which I consider us "busy" if we have a total of two places to go in the course of one day, late winter has been a particularly busy time for us. Ice skating, gymnastics, gym days with our homeschool group--why, one day there was a homeschool Valentine's Day party AND gymnastics class AND ice skating class!

This past weekend was (I hope) the culmination, with a Saturday in which Syd and I stayed in town to run all our other errands (Spring Ice Show dress rehearsal,ballet class, Lemonade Day registration, 4-H Open House, etc.) while Will and Matt road tripped to Indianapolis for a chess tournament--

(she didn't do half-bad against this twelfth grader!)

--and then a Sunday that contained the much-anticipated, proudly performed Spring Ice Show:

This week's goal is peace and quiet: lots of Magic Tree House, some research for next's month's Science Fair, maybe a little grocery shopping, and lots and lots of sitting on the carpet putting together puzzles.

Rainbow Fairy Dress Revealed

This dress was completely Sydney's vision, with my construction to order. If you're curious, I go into much more detail about the pattern-drafting and my sewing methods in my project show-and-tell over at Crafting a Green World, but here I just want to show off the outfit that both Sydney and I worked very hard on, and that we're both pretty thrilled with in its outcome:

 

Ideally, Sydney will be modeling her Rainbow Fairy Dress in this year's Trashion/Refashion Show in our community. Otherwise/in addition, I'm sensing a spring and summer full of lots of rainbow fairy magic coming our way.

Willow's New and Improved Handwriting

Handwriting practice has been added so seamlessly to the Daily Schoolwork List (which does not get completed anywhere close to "daily," but more on that another time), that it's really a pleasure to watch the girls consistently working on it. I like to think that the kiddos take pleasure, too, in handwriting that has so steadily and vastly improved that it has to be as obvious to them as it is to me.

A dear friend, whose homeschooled son has beautiful handwriting, suggested that I show Willow examples of all the different styles of handwriting and ask her to select which she'd like to learn--it gives her ownership over the process, and allows her to learn a style that she'll find lovely. Willow's choice: the Palmer Method. It makes me crack up, because I feel like a 1950s kindergarten teacher, but Palmer handwriting really is nice.

I purchased, using my monthly homeschool budget that I fund through my paid writing and my etsy sales, Startwrite 6.0 so that I could create handwriting copywork that was consistent in method and relevant to the girls' other studies. Although the user interface is a little wonky and non-intuitive, it does have everything that you'd ever need to customize a handwriting sheet. Because Willow has formerly shown no attention to the details of letter formation or placement, and doesn't always form each letter the most efficient way, we go whole hog on her sheets--lined pages, an outline of each letter to help her stay within normal parameters, dots along each letter's path that she can aim for, arrows and numbers to remind her where and when her pencil needs to go, and a free space after each word so that she can practice:

 Syd's handwriting is pretty great, although she still likes to play fast and loose with placement on the line, and she prefers her handwriting pages with just the outline:

Even beyond the ability to customize the same page for each child, I'm loving the ability to write handwriting sheets that are relevant to what the kiddos are actually doing each day. Here, Will is writing the definition of Anastasia's Mate, a good endgame trap that she learned in chess:

And here she's writing the ingredients list for the rainbow play dough that we sell in our pumpkinbear etsy shop, to include with the order that we ship to the customer:

We've also done the names of the presidents in order (which Will is in the process of memorizing), geography labels that get cut out and pasted onto big maps that they're making (Africa, currently), short letters to the grandmas, and reading/spelling words. I like stuff that can work double-duty!

With the model, and the lines, and the arrows, and the dots, Will has a better method for completing her handwriting systematically, and although Syd finds all that information overwhelming (which is why she does without it), I think it all helps to remind Willow to slow down and write methodically. I never thought to videotape the slapdash method that she used to use to crank out her former illegible handwriting, but it's vastly different from how she works now:

Along with coloring pages and drawing lessons to practice fine motor skills in general (not to mention lots of play with power tools and taking stuff apart with screwdrivers, etc.), regular copywork practice is really, obviously working.

Yay!

Homeschool Chemistry: Acid Plus Base

As the first two demonstrations in the girls' fabulous chemistry set, acid plus base experiments are so easy, so fun, and so wildly rewarding that still, my girls do these two demonstrations over and over again, each time absorbing more information about the science behind the reaction and learning more about the tenets of chemistry.

Of course, we've long used up the chemistry set's supplies of baking soda and citric acid--fortunately, since we often bake and preserve, we've got both of those materials in our kitchen stores, and I tend to buy vinegar six gallons at a time when it's on sale, since it's about all I use for cleaning. Nevertheless, whether or not you own a chemistry set, I still highly recommend a good stock of nice glass test tubes and cheap plastic eyedroppers; the eyedroppers allow children to have more control over the amount of water or vinegar that they add to their mixtures, and the test tubes are really ideal for observing the chemical reaction.

Experiment #1: Small Scoop of Baking Soda, Eyedropper of Vinegar

It's nice to keep the amounts very small so that the chemical reaction between the sodium bicarbonate and the ascetic acid is easy to observe. Notice the bubbling, notice the fizzing, notice the foam!

Experiment #2: Small Scoop of Baking Soda, Small Scoop of Citric Acid, Eyedropper of Water

I think that this version is even more fun, because the two powders, one an acid and one a base, nevertheless do not react--

--until you add water as a catalyst!

Extensions:

• Look up the chemical formula for each ingredient, then explore the elements that make up the formulas.
• Write an illustrated tutorial for each experiment.
• Use the chemical formulas and the scientific notation of the chemical reaction as copywork or memory work. 
• Compare other liquids to water when conducting Experiment #2. Does rubbing alcohol affect the reaction? Does orange juice?
• Play with the reaction as a sensory experience, as long as you don't have any cuts on your hands. Neither vinegar nor citric acid are strong enough to hurt healthy skin, so get out a big baking pan (or go outside--I wish!) and make big piles of baking soda, on which you drop vinegar rain.
• Add powdered tempera to either the baking soda or vinegar to make fizzy paint.
• Make and erupt the traditional baking soda and vinegar volcano.
• When the kiddos were finally finished with their play (nearly an hour later!), they asked me what they could do with all their test tubes and mason jars of vinegar. I suggested that they use it to scrub the kitchen floor--and they did! 

It WAS a productive morning!

I Love My New Ruffler Foot

We have one sewing machine and supplies store here in town, independently operated. I go there pretty frequently for sewing machine repair and servicing, and when I want to buy a new specialty presser foot.

Also, I hate them.

It's the kind of place where you can go in knowing exactly what you want--a buttonhole foot for your old-school Brother, say--and the employee will still make you feel like an idiot. You can't answer some specific question about the exact type of shank on your machine, perhaps, which lack of knowledge is somehow the catalyst for her making you feel like you barely have any business getting yourself dressed in the morning, much less operating a sewing machine. And the other employee, the one who would  know off the top of his head what your shank type is, is out for the morning and won't be in for three more hours. And that book that you can see right there, the one that would say exactly the type of shank on your machine, looking things up in that book isn't the job of the particular employee in front of you, nor are you permitted to use it. Oh, and they don't stock buttonhole feet, anyway, so they'd have to special-order it, which is the responsibility, perhaps, of some third employee, who's also not in the store at the moment.

Because I'm a big chicken, I've taken to forcing Matt to patronize this store for me. He says that they're really rude to him, too, but I don't care.

The absolute only redeeming quality to this store is the fact that, since I do have an older machine, all this rigamarole notwithstanding, I do invariably end up with the correct foot, including the correct shank type, for my Brother. If you've got an older machine, you'll know that can be tricky.

And that's how I came to own this fancy contraption, otherwise known as a ruffler foot:

It's wonderful. You set the gauges for how many ruffles you want per how many stitches, and how wide you want your ruffles, then you feed the fabric into the middle, and off you sew, ruffling happily away:

I bought it because I knew that I would be sewing mad ruffles for Sydney's rainbow fairy dress, and I did NOT want to gather every single huge layer by hand (nor could I, really, with a couple of the wonky fabrics that I chose). And while I still need to do a lot of playing around with my ruffler foot before I can do a really precise job using it, with muscle, and a lot of jiggering, and some blatant cussedness, those ruffles, they did get ruffled.

While I Sew, the KittyCat Suffers

I've spent the week so far sewing Sydney's entry for this year's Trashion/Refashion Show (more on that later!), and while I've been busy, the girls have been busy, too, playing outside in the unseasonably mild weather with their stuffed animals, including all their thousand toy horses into three-hour baths with them, completely immersed in their game entitled Animal Rescue Obstacle Course.

From what I can tell--

--it seems to involve doing mean things to their toy animals and then rescuing them.

Yay, Animal Rescuers!!!