Homeschool Boot Camp

As I've mentioned before, I've really been struggling with our homeschool in the past couple of months. For some reason, our casual pattern of work and play just stopped clicking around then, and as the children became reluctant and combatant at the mere prospect of work, I've become resentful and frustrated, myself, to the point at which any act of carelessness or unhelpfulness, however small, on the part of other members of my family (husband included), have effected my mental state quite out of proportion to the crime.

My ultimate goal is for the children to be able to tolerate, cheerfully, approximately two hours of schoolwork approximately four days a week--part worksheet drills, part memorization, part hands-on projects. I want this work to be completed early in the day, to leave the rest of the day free for playgrounds, the library, drawing, listening to audiobooks, digging in the mud, etc. I want this work to be completely wholeheartedly, with a good attitude.

To that end, because this is NOT where we are right now, I've backed way up--basically, until they have it mastered, we're now going to spend our school time learning how to do school.

For now, forget the fun hands-on projects as part of school (I can sneak them in later in the day, if there's time and interest)--I'm not going to spend hours planning activities that get fussed at out-of-hand while the children test their boundaries. Forget work that requires a lot of parent interaction--I am profoundly weary of these negative experiences being the norm. For now, the children have approximately one hour of seatwork, at the table, to be completed right after breakfast.

All the work is in worksheet form, and can be completed independently, although I do sit with them as I read the paper and handle the day's emails and etsy shop business. Some of the worksheets are the meaningful work that they'd do anyway, such as math drills and handwriting copywork:

The rest, however, is interesting stuff that I'd normally call busywork, because it's not directly relevant or contextual to anything that we're already working on--a book of paper crafts that children can do independently, fact-based coloring pages, logic problems, drawing instruction, mazes and word searches, etc.

 

 

The work has to be stuff that I think they'll find interesting, because I do not want them to absolutely sit in tedium (unless it's necessary), but the time--approximately an hour--should also be a bit of a stretch, though just a bit. I'm pleased when I can see that they're ready to be done, and yet they still finish those last two worksheets without *much* complaint. When they're well accustomed to sitting and working, I'll take a stab at beginning to include something a little more parent-involved (and therefore more elaborate and fun), and if, by then, they've gotten themselves out of the habit of snapping at me like baby vipers just for the habit of snapping, then projects like color wheels and tulip dissection and bookmaking and microscopes can start to again take the place of some of that busywork.

When the children can sit and work for an hour, AND can interact with me appropriately in the context of school, then we're going to gradually work another, more active, hour into the work plan--nature studies, science experiments, movie making, etc.

And THEN I will win some sort of award for the nervous breakdown that I did not have in April 2012.

Tutorial: Baked Tortilla Chips

To save money, I've been trying to bake from scratch more of the things that I buy from the grocery store--especially stuff, like chips or condiments or baguettes, that it would be healthier NOT to buy at all, sigh.

If you start with a package of corn tortillas (If a healthy, organic brand is available, I purchase that one. If none of the brands look particularly healthy, I purchase the cheapest!), homemade tortilla chips are way more delicious, and CRAZY cheaper, than store-bought tortilla chips. They're healthier than store-bought (depending, of course, on the quality of tortilla), and, since you can only bake one pan at a time, they come with built-in portion control. I often find that my laziness in not wanting to get up off my butt and make more tortilla chips trumps my greediness in wanting to eat a million tortilla chips. Yay?

So, preheat the oven to the broil setting, get out a big pan, then grab a stack of corn tortillas and, using kitchen scissors, cut the entire stack into quarters. Spread them out without overlapping onto the pan, and spritz really quickly with any oil other than olive, which shouldn't be heated this high or it'll give you cancer or something. Sprinkle with kosher salt.

Pop the pan into the oven (I don't care what rack you use) for 4 minutes, then take them out and, using tongs, flip all the chips over and spritz with oil.

Pop the pan back into the oven and set the timer for another 4 minutes. At this point, check out the chips. Do they look crispy, with some brown spots?

Take them out and nom them! Otherwise, leave them in and watch them--it sometimes takes some futzing to figure out the perfect time. If you have to leave your chips in for more than one extra minute, then add a minute to the time that you first broil them before you flip them over.

I have a heavy hand with the oil spritzing and the salt, which means that my chips don't keep well--I think the salt is supposed to make them soft, and the oil is supposed to make them tough, if you try to store them. I usually make one batch at a time, and simply bake more if it looks like people want more; the chips don't take that long to make, and it cuts down on waste. I eat them with either this cashew-spinach dip or this salsa that I make so spicy that it practically burns my tongue off. Yum!

Our New Montessori Map Puzzles

Ooh, I've wanted these for so long!

Of course, I'd never say, nor would I believe, that the purchase of certain materials is required for a successful homeschool. If you've got a house full of the usual house stuff, a roving eye for adventure, a swift internet connection, and a library card, I'd say, and I'd believe, that you're all set to homeschool younger kids.

However, there IS a bunch of other stuff that I want...

And that's how, after combining my CAGW salary with a better-than-usual month (and therefore a lot of hard work) in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, I used up the majority of my crafts/homeschool budget on this gorgeous set:

This is a full set of geography map puzzles! For now, it is the favorite toy of both kids.

The set includes North America, Africa--

--Asia, the United States--

--South America, the world--

--Australia, and Europe:

The puzzles are huge, although the practice of putting the peg at the capital makes some of the pieces surprisingly fragile (I, myself, broke the Alaska piece due to the fact that the peg marking the capital is only millimeters narrower than that narrow leg of Alaska), and some of the pieces are small enough that our foster kittens were constantly in danger of swallowing one.

Syd, especially, really enjoys puzzles, and since I'm getting the idea that she may be a more physical, tactile learner than her sister, I'm happy to add these to our geography studies, combined with pin maps, map labelling, cultural studies, geography-relevant history, and, in the future, hopefully lots and lots of map copywork.

And yes, in case you're wondering, I DID have to move around nearly every stick of furniture in my house to find a place for these maps. Currently, they live on top of the overhead projector cart that we bought to sit in the living room and hold the overhead projector and our reference books. I moved the overhead projector to the basement, to a large wall shelf that I converted to a homeschool supplies shelf. The giant surplus bins that were sitting on that shelf are now piled on the floor next to the shelf, and lord knows where they'll end up, or what will be displaced when they do find a home. I'm already looking forward to this year's summer garage sale!

Tutorial: Blown-Out Easter Eggs

They're gross to make, but I love the ability to preserve an actual Easter egg, dyed and painted and colored, as a memento of our holiday. True, we've also got wooden eggs that we've dyed and painted and colored, and felted wool eggs, but there's nothing quite like a real egg-shell Easter egg...

...even if they do remain very delicate. Last year, the kids had a playmate over who didn't believe that the wicker basket-full of beautiful Easter eggs were, as the big kid kept insisting, made from REAL eggs. So she crushed one in her hand. THEN she believed, poor babe!

Again, it's gross, but blown-out eggs are, at least, very easy:

1. Take a raw egg, hold it over the sink, and poke into one end of it with an awl (mine is made for bookmaking, but I use it for a million things), or a needle, or anything sharp and pokey, really:

2. Swirl the tip of the pokey thing around inside the egg to break up the yolk, then chip away a few more bits of shell from the hole to widen it.

3. Poke a straight hole into the other end--no widening!

 4. Here's the gross part: hold the egg over a bowl (so that you can save the eggs!), put your mouth around the smaller hole, and blow with all your might until the egg comes squirting out the larger hole. It's so gross!

5. Fill a pot with water on the stovetop, and put the blown-out eggshells in it. They want to float on top, so you have to either find something to submerge them gently, such as a colander resting on top of them, or hold them under yourself until they fill with water. I usually do the latter, two eggs per hand, taking turns with all the eggs while the water heats up.

6. Make sure the eggs are boiled for several minutes (I do ten) to kill germs and bacteria, then lay them out overnight to dry. If they came in a cardboard egg carton, that's a good place to put them, because they can sit vertically to allow the water to drain and the cardboard won't hold the water.

When the eggs are clean and dry, they're ready to paint! Although the kids and I had a fun morning blowing out the eggshells, by the time they were dry the next day everyone had lost interest in actually painting them, so I simply put them up in their carton on a high shelf in our study/studio. Sometime when somebody feels like painting or doing some decoupage, I'll bring them out. I imagine it will be quite novel to be decorating Easter eggs in the middle of summer!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Eggs and Dye and Miniature Volcanoes and a Mad Scientist

Of COURSE we dyed a million eggs last week:

Do y'all do the thing in which you put your egg in a whisk to dye it?

It's quite effective.

I hate to waste all that beautiful colored water, so when the entire batch of hard-boiled eggs had been dyed, I poured another good glug of vinegar into each container of dye, and gave each girl

1. a dinner plate with a layer of baking soda spread out on it, and
2. an eyedropper.

Colorful miniature baking soda and vinegar volcanoes are FUN!

I love the fizz!


Both girls always seem to really enjoy whatever project we're doing at any given time, but every now and then a certain project will just click with a certain kid, and she will be absolutely immersed for an endless time, clearly deriving such pleasure that it's a joy to watch. The last time that Willow made oobleck (just a few weeks ago!), she was engrossed in it for days, adding cornstarch and playing with it, adding water and playing with it, adding a little more cornstarch, splashing around, etc. But this colored vinegar and baking soda and jars and plates and eyedroppers? For whatever reason, this was Syd's favorite thing to do for several hours on this day.

Eventually, eyedroppers were too small a chemical reaction, so I gave her the entire box of baking soda and a spoon:

She played--


and played--


--and played!


The deterioration of our work surface as the day goes on cracks me up every time. And yes, she did clean up her work entirely by herself, putting utensils and containers in the sink, food coloring and eyedroppers on the counter, empty(!) baking soda box in the recycling, and spray cleaning and drying off the table and the floor underneath it, without actually even much of her typical fuss--she'd had THAT much fun!

We didn't get to all of the Easter activities that I'd hoped we would. We didn't decoupage eggs, didn't paint our blown eggs, didn't study the various religious and cultural myths of springtime, didn't complete any of the Easter-themed worksheets that I'd been saving up. However, another great thing that I've learned about homeschooling--holidays become more "-ish"-like: Didn't decoupage eggs BEFORE Easter? Eh, we'll do it next week. Didn't paint our blown eggs? I'll bring them out next time we're painting. Religious myths? We can make our toilet paper tube Resurrection scene after we finally collect that tenth and final tube, and do all the Passover stuff when those books and videos make it back to the public library for us to check out.

At least we've done one thing right, in that we're up to our ears in eggs!

On the Knitting Spool

You'll have to excuse the overindulgent number of photographs that I took during a single morning activity, but I finally got a kid interested in the knitting spool ! Per usual, all it really took was for me to sit down, some nice wool yarn that needed to be reviewed at hand, with the full intention to figure out the knitting spool for myself.

Me, sitting alone, engrossed in my own business? That's a certain invitation for at least one little girl to pop over and declare a desire to be included. My pleasure, little babe:

I admit that I bought this particular knitting spool YEARS ago (before I knew that they're a do-able DIY project--perhaps something to do when both girls want one at the same time, in the inevitable future), and included it in Willow's stocking at Christmas. She showed zero interest in it, and it languished, completely ignored, on the activity kits shelf (I'll have to show you that sometime) until late last year, when I snuck it away, still unnoticed, and put it into Sydney's stocking. She, at least, sat down with it and tried to learn it, but couldn't get the knack, got frustrated, and back to the shelf it went.

Less than four months later, she got the hang of it in minutes: 

She worked for quite a while before setting it back down, making herself a nice little length of cord in the process--

--and while she didn't really find it the best fun ever, I don't think, and hasn't expressed a desire to work with it again, at least now her memory of the knitting spool involves her mastery of it, and witnessing what you can make with it, so that next time she needs a nice bit of cord, for all those things that you need a nice bit of cord for when you're a little kid, she'll hopefully remember that you can make a nice bit of cord using the knitting spool, and that it's a do-able project, and where is that knitting spool, anyway...

Knit Picks is actually giving away three skeins of this 100% reclaimed wool yarn that we used over at Crafting a Green World, and there will be TWO winners(!!!), so you should totally head over there and enter to get yourself some yarn. As for a knitting spool, did you know that you can MAKE one?

Tutorial: Make an Underwater Volcano Erupt in a Test Tube

Happy Science Fair, everyone!

Our homeschool group's Science Fair was last week, and it's the first time that the girls have not shared a single project. This year, Sydney's project was on measuring birds--

--and Willow's project was on underwater volcanoes:

For Sydney's project, she and Matt researched a few birds of North America (primarily through The North American Bird Coloring Book ), then together they drew them to scale, colored them realistically, and aligned them up with an outline of Miss Syd, herself, to show their sizes in relation to her.

Will researched underwater volcanoes using library books, Primary Search articles (an EBSCO search engine for elementary children), and Netflix documentaries, took notes, wrote a report, colored a world map and drew in the Ring of Fire, and cut out pictures of underwater volcanoes to glue to her project board, which may not look very tidy, but does look as if she did it independently, which she did.

She also did a demonstration of an underwater volcano in a test tube:

To do this demonstration for yourself, you need a narrow test tube, a heat gun (we also use these for our melted crayon canvas art), sand, water, and crayon bits.

1. Drop a peeled bit of crayon into the bottom of a test tube, then cover it with a deep layer of sand, and then pour water on top. If you haven't covered the crayon deeply enough, the water will force the crayon up over the sand, since it's less dense--if this happens, gently pour in more sand on top. Will also had good luck pouring in water, then the crayon, and then the sand, to avoid the sudden force of the water.
2. As you work, explain to your audience that the sand is the ocean floor, the crayon is the solid rock in the lower crust of the earth, and the water is the ocean water.
3. Aim the heat gun close to the test tube (which is heat resistant--you ARE using a test tube, right?), approximately where you remember the crayon being, and turn it on high. You don't have to be too fussy about holding the test tube in a spot that's away from the heat gun--as long as you don't aim it at your fingers, you'll be fine.
4. Patiently hold the heat gun in the same spot for several seconds. You'll feel shocks and tremors in the tube as the heat gun (which represents an upwelling heat source from the earth's mantle) begins to melt the crayon, causing it to change shape underneath the sand.
5. The melted crayon is hot, and wants to rise above the cold water and the dense sand, so eventually it will erupt from underneath the sand. As it rises, the water will cool it and cause it to resolidify, and you can see how underwater volcano eruptions can form mountains, and then even islands.

With a lot of effort, you can clean the crayon wax off of the test tube, but frankly, I treat these test tubes as disposable once we've done this demonstration using them. Perhaps next we'll grow a little test tube demonstration garden in them!