Salt Dough Fossils with the Magic Tree House Club

The girls have been having a fabulous time in their Currclick Magic Tree House club, their first online class:

Every month in Magic Tree House Club there are quizzes, small presentations based on facts from the books, and a project. Both girls LOVE it! Will has a little buddy who's also in the club, and they chat together in the club's chat room (each on their own computer in their own house across town from each other) before the meeting. During the meeting, the leader, who is live on her webcam, asks questions to the kids, and they can answer by typing. She'll often acknowledge individual children and their answers, and both girls seem to think it's pretty darn great to get your name said live on webcam. The club meets once a week, but all the meetings in the same month cover the exact same material from the exact same book; this is actually pretty convenient, because although Willow attended the first week's meeting in March, Syd was napping during that hour. Syd wanted to attend the second week's meeting instead, but it turned out to be gorgeous outside that day and I didn't have the heart to call her inside to sit at the computer for an hour when the club's meeting time rolled around. Instead, Syd attended the third week's meeting, and Willow, who'd already done the entire thing weeks ago, was still drawn back in and stood beside her the entire time, helping her type her answers.

For March, the club read Dinosaurs before Dark--there were presentations on Pennsylvania and a few of the dinosaurs mentioned in the book, and a demonstration on making salt dough fossils. We waited to do these until after Syd had attended her club meeting, too, but in the week since, we have done this project THREE TIMES!

Yeah, it's fun.

You can probably figure out the premise on your own: fossils are impressions left by organisms or artifacts, and salt dough, since it's transformed by baking to be solid (reminiscent, sort of, to the way that fossils are made permanent in nature--not by the same process, of course, but it gives you the idea of how it can come about), can be used as a model to make impressions and show off the resulting fossils.

You'll need plenty of salt dough (here's my favorite salt dough recipe). While the salt dough shouldn't be crumbly, of course, it should be on the dry side, since if it's at all sticky it will pull at the artifact as you're lifting it up and thus won't make a true impression. Using my favorite recipe, I still kneaded in at least another 1/4 cup after it was otherwise mixed, until the salt dough felt perfectly smooth and slightly stiff. It also helps to refrigerate the dough for a few hours first, so you can feel free to make it ahead of time.

Tear off a piece of salt dough, roll it into a ball between your hands, and then flatten it with your hand right onto the baking sheet that you'll dry it on. Then you can press whatever artifacts you like--leaves, shells, toys, etc.--right into the dough, and lift them straight up again.

The girls did a few leaves and flowers, but it turns out that game piece fossils was really where the fun was at:

dominoes

Scrabble tile

We poked a straw completely through the dough at the top of the fossils to make a hole in case we wanted to hang them later, and then we dried them in a 200-degree oven for over two hours. 

I like my salt dough to be REALLY dry, so I let these actually begin to brown before I took them out:

And when they're finished, you can paint them!

Have I mentioned yet this Spring how thrilled I am to be back to doing all our messy crafts OUTDOORS?!? I remember when Sydney was a baby and how I'd never felt more joyful than I did at simply being able to allow her to eat her yogurt outside.

Because the baking is a little unpredictable, the salt dough fossils don't always turn out perfectly. Some, for example, can rise a bit, distorting the impression. It's great when this happens, though, because it demonstrates the fact that real fossils DO distort, and the result can look very different from the original impression.

periwinkle flower, now nearly unidentifiable

Do you like this little table that Matt dumpster-dived for me a few weeks ago?

Of course, I have to be over-the-top, so I added glitter to my fossils while the paint was still wet:

That particular fossil is now hanging from our key rack.

As for the other fossils, I'm not sure if we'll actually DO anything with them, but don't they look marvelous, all lined up in a row?

I can't believe it, but we made salt dough fossils AGAIN yesterday. This time, the kittens helped, but that's a story for another post.

Skipping

Sydney's been working hard at her skip counting lately. She can skip count by fives--


--and tens:


I've moved her to a first grade arithmetic workbook for math drills for a bit before we tackle more skipping, but Will, who thrives on rote memorization (go figure), is going to do the 25s and 50s and hundreds before she starts on money math drills.

As further proof of Willow's pleasure in verbal patterning and recall, I present to you this lovely ditty that she created:


Doesn't that just make you want to...I don't know, not eat breakfast?

Still Life for Sydney

Yes, there really is all that magenta:

In their shared bedroom, each of the girls has one long shelf that is for her stuff alone. They put their favorite toys there, their favorite artwork, their favorite natural finds, their various little ribbons and medals, etc. Sydney also has quite a stash of make-up and jewelry on her shelf, but that's the subject of another post, sigh.

I recently wrote a review for Inca-Eco yarn for Crafting a Green World; I allowed Sydney to choose the color of yarn that we received, and since her choice, Wine, complemented not only the paint on that bedroom wall (and our tulips!) but many of Sydney's treasures, AND fit her own personal color palette so well, I wrapped her special shelf with the yarn to make a better display for treasures such as this:

It looks so nice (in my humble opinion), that I'm now officially on the garage sale/thrift store lookout for other yarns in which to wrap the rest of the girls' shelves.

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: