Skip Counting with Coins on the Hundred Grid

Our family is going to be participating in Lemonade Day in our town this Spring, and to that end I've reintroduced the money math unit that we first began some months ago when Willow got interested in coin collecting for a while.

My goal is (taking extra care with pricing, of course) for Willow to be able to do all the math and make all her own change at the girls' lemonade stand--whether or not this goal is realistic, I have no idea!

First step: skip counting by each of the coin denominations, followed immediately by keying the counting to the denomination. In other words, I want both girls to be able to easily skip count by fives, tens, and 25s at least up to 100, to count by hundreds up to at least 1,000, and to recognize that skip counting by fives, say, is the same as counting nickels.

The girls have been creating their own skip counting reference sheets using, of COURSE, our ubiquitous hundred grid. For nickels, for example, one day's schoolwork was simply to count off the fives and color in each five in their hundred grid. The next day's schoolwork (and the next!) was to memorize the fives, until they could recite it easily.

When a girl had her fives down cold, I gave her a new hundred grid, asked her to put a nickel down on each five, and then use the chart as a reference to solve a page of math problems:

The problems are all just iterations of how much a certain number of nickels equals. To solve the problem, the kid can either skip count over that many nickels, or just count over that many nickels, and then move aside that nickel. The number underneath is the correct answer!

Once the kiddos have all the skip counting and coin denominations memorized, I'm going to send them through the math drills in our Kumon money math workbook as well as some fun projects from my Money Math pinboard. And then when Lemonade Day comes around, providing I can convince the children not to price their lemonade at 63 cents or $1.07 or something else that will require a child to do twenty minutes of abacus work for every transaction, I think we may just have it made!

P.S. It's just occurred to me that I should also teach them to count by tens when beginning at 5. AND I should be mixing more subtraction drills into the prep work, especially two-digit subtraction.

Or I could just encourage the girls to price everything they make at one dollar?

Make Your Own Gummies Kit Giveaway

One of my favorite things about blogging "professionally" over at Crafting a Green World is the occasional treat that a sponsored review or giveaway brings to us. Basically, every now and then a company sends me a free something or other to play with and then write about at CAGW, and then they offer a second thing as a prize for a giveaway that I also host there. My girlies and I have reviewed craft kits and ebooks, and I actually have next to my desk right now two different yarns and an eco-friendly paint set that I also need to get my butt into gear and review soon, and a couple of days ago we played with the Make Your Own Gummies kit from Glee Gum:

smoothing out the cornstarch bed

digging out molds with her fingers

 stirring together the carageenan gel and the sugar/dye powder

dripping the melted mixture into the molds

yum!!!

Anyway, all that is to say that I'm currently hosting a Make Your Own Gummies kit giveaway over at Crafting a Green World. You should enter!

Foster the Kittens

We have some new houseguests:

Dustbunny, Septra, Lord Pounce, Lady Whiskers, and Hearty are visiting us from our local Humane Association. They were weaned from their mother the moment they were lifted out of her enclosure and into our carrier, but they've been solid food champs from the beginning, they're darn good with the litter box as long as the girls remember to change it every morning...

...Oh, and we love them a lot:

 Being babies, they do a lot of sleeping-- 

But being babies, they're also lively and playful and fun and just stinkin' adorable and they make us so happy:

Our jobs as foster parents are not just to keep the kittens in fresh food and clean water and to change their litter, but also to socialize them to family life. By the time they're ready to go back to the Humane Association for neutering and adoption, they should be disciplined about their litter box, they should know that biting and scratching humans is unacceptable, they should be comfortable with as many different types of people and animals and noises and environments as we can introduce them to, they should welcome human affection, and they should be very, very, very used to being handled:

We've got that part nailed down already, don't you think?

We always love our foster kittens so much. We're their first family, in a life in which we hope they'll only need one other, and even knowing that we'll be giving them back in a month, we love them wholeheartedly. And more than all the training, all the discipline, all the discouragement from scratching our hands or pooping on our carpets, it's that background of being so loved (as well as their luck in being cute little kittens) that is our gift to them, that gives us hope that when we send them back and they're left to negotiate the world without us, they'll be okay. 

Huh. Not terribly far off from raising kids, is it?

P.S. If you're curious, this is why we choose to foster kittens.

Walking on Rainbows, or, I Let My Kid Paint My Sidewalk

Sydney had a Big Idea.

If you don't know by now that 1) I don't give a flip about our property value, and 2) I let my kids do really weird things in the name of art, then you don't read my blog, but you clearly do read my blog, so it therefore will not surprise you that Sydney wanted to paint our sidewalk like a giant rainbow.

I thought it was a brilliant idea, frankly, and together we mixed up a rainbow's worth of tempera (plus pink, because that's just how the kid rolls).

It was a beautiful, mild, March afternoon, so Sydney started painting. She painted--

--and painted--

--and painted!!!

We live about a half-block from a wonderful park, and thus always have lots of friendly neighbors passing by. I hope they've gotten somewhat accustomed, over the years, to seeing naked children painting each other in the yard, or painting vehicles in the driveway, or plucking dandelion leaves and popping them into their mouths, or climbing six feet into the fork of our silver maple and then LEAPING to the ground, etc., but I'm afraid that our property is never one that just simply blends into the neighborhood.

As Syd worked all afternoon, and I went back and forth from keeping her company in the yard to making dinner to getting some writing done to tidying up in the living room (again), I could see the foot traffic notice Syd's work. Most people just took a long look as they passed, but some people stopped to watch Sydney paint for a while, one couple took some photos, and a few folks paused to chat for a bit--at one point, as I was writing on my laptop near an open window, I heard someone say something to Sydney that I didn't catch, but then she responded, "Oh, I'm allowed to talk to you; I just can't come up to you in case you snatch me."

That at least roughly approximates what I actually told her about interacting with adults outside of my presence, so I'll take it for now!

By the end of the afternoon, just in time for Daddy to come home and be surprised, and with ample time left to tidy away the paint cups before we walked over to Chocolate Moose after dinner for a Thin Mint blizz, the sidewalk was indeed painted like a giant rainbow:

It's bright and vivid and super-saturated, and won't rub off on your shoes as you dance on it:

The paint is student-grade powdered tempera, mixed a little thicker than the directions call for in order to get those vivid colors, and so of course it will wash off eventually. A rain shower or two, a week or so of steady wear, and then it will be a whole other pleasant game to spray the rest of it off with the garden hose while watching the colors run together and dissipate into the grass.

But of course, that's later, when the novelty of the artist's temporary installation has worn off. For now, Sydney is flush with pride at her major accomplishment, happy in the many sincere compliments that come her way from us and from total strangers on the street. She also likes her rainbow sidewalk pretty well herself, as you can see:

That kid is a masterpiece, if I do say so myself.

We used:

Franklin's Sub-Par Cookies

We have a happy history of making the recipes featured in storybooks. The big kid has actually made Amelia Bedelia's cake several times over the past 18 months or so, checking out the book each time to get the recipe, and the kids often ask to make food from their Dr. Seuss Cookbook (We've never actually made the green eggs and ham, but we did make the Pink Ink Yink Drink last week).

A couple of days ago I read Franklin and the Cookies to the little kid, and behold! In the back of the book was a recipe for FRANKLIN'S COOKIES!!! Even more amazingly, we actually had all the ingredients for the cookies (sugar and chocolate chips are hard to keep in our house, because we tend to use them up as soon as we buy them, and then we're just out until the next grocery store run), so we hopped to it almost immediately.

I was a little suspicious of the recipe because it called for a LOT of sugar, and it did some weird things, like not asking the child to cream together the butter and sugar, or instructing her to mix the dry and wet ingredients separately--reminds me of how I used to cook before I knew better, actually, which is why I was suspicious.

And, yeah...

The bad news is that it's not a good cookie recipe. The cookies spread beyond all reason, so that the spacing that you see above resulted in basically a giant cookie cake-type creature. They were WAY too sweet, and since the sugar was never creamed, you could actually see the sugar crystals in each cookie.

But of course, that's just my boring adult perspective. To the little kid, of course, and as it should be, these cookies were perfect. They were sweet, they were chocolate, they were Franklin's own freakin' cookies!

And she made them all by herself. How good does that taste?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Goodbye, Mothering

I almost feel like I'm selling my babies' babyhood:



I'm selling endless mornings hanging out in the playroom at Bloomington Area Birth Services, flipping through their Mothering magazines, engaging in fascinating conversation with other new mothers about the all the minutiae of our precious babies.

I'm selling a second round of those endless mornings, flipping through the same Mothering magazines, this time much less fascinated by the minutiae discussed by the first-time mommies around me. Diapering? Sleeping? Is she eating enough? Eh, I worried about all that stuff the first time around.

I bought my own subscription, I read every single article, I looked up the authors to read what else they'd written, I examined every ad, then looked up those web sites--it was my first (not nearly last) experience of feeling aghast at the prices put on unfinished wooden toys, or the kinds of woolens that can't be put in your washing machine.

I'd mark certain articles for Matt to read, and he'd come back to me, magazine in hand, saying things like "One of their kids had chicken pox and so they got all the other kids in their playgroup sick ON PURPOSE?!?". Ah, silly boy, with his own first (not nearly last) experience of some unique parenting perspectives.

I kept these magazines what feels like forever, gathering more, lending them out to pregnant friends, getting them back a year later sometimes and rediscovering them myself.

It's always sad to give away something else that signifies, to you, that you don't intend to have more children (especially if you kind of maybe might want more, just a little). Selling our cloth diapers felt the same, as did putting out the turtle sandbox, and the Duplos, and the board books at our last garage sale.

Of course, when I was looking through these magazines to write their description for my ebay listing and I found the magazine for Sydney's birth month and year, I set that one aside from the sell stack altogether. When she's a great grown-up girl and she reads for herself the parenting magazine that I was reading the month that I gave birth to her, will she be touched? Amused?

Or horrified like her poor father?

Deep Breath

I'm pleased to confess that my yesterday ended much better than it began. 

I'm supposed to remember that if I'm having a bad day, we should just leave the house, and unfortunately I did not remember that, but fortunately a good friend texted me not long after I finished writing my post to tell me that she and her kiddos were hanging at the park just down the street from us. When I got that message, I tell you, we were out of the house thirty seconds later and at the park the next minute.

Fresh air always helps, the girls and I were thrilled to get away from each other in the wide open spaces, and whether or not, in the running around and shrieking and pretend kitty games that my kids played with their little friend, they took the time to confess to her what a nightmare their mom had been all day, I certainly found relief in confessing to my dear friend what a nightmare those kids of mine had been (and, yes, what I nightmare I had been, as well). She comforted me by confessing all the nightmare things that she and her own kids had been up to lately, and then we settled down for a couple of hours of happy conversation while following her toddler around on the grass. 

We stayed at the park until dark, by which time Matt had come home, too, and heard the whole story. After we walked back home I shut the door of our study/studio and finished my etsy orders while watching re-runs of The Colbert Report; in the other room, I do believe that Matt clarified some very important issues of policy and procedure with the children, and together they tidied the living room and kitchen, figured out what to eat for dinner, and steam mopped those sticky floors!

Here's my current work in progress, now that (I can't believe it!) school and work are done for the day (what did Matt SAY to those children? Frankly, I don't even want to know...), and the only other activities on the docket are baking cookies, playing outside, and attending our online Magic Tree House Club meeting later:

Two dozen sets of rainbow birthday candles--that's 168 candles! I might get completely caught up on my entire Hulu queue with this order.