My Latest over at CAGW: T-Shirt Bags and Name Tags

a tutorial for making these no-sew T-shirt bags (with beads and bells and fringe, oh my!)

and a tutorial for making these reusable kids' name tags for school field trips

Sadly, our field trip to Children's Day at a local farm, for which these name tags got made, was cancelled because of the rain that we're finally having, and so I've kicked my VERY antsy kids down to the basement to play, where hopefully they'll stay all day, coming up only for English muffin pizzas and apples.

Our Homeschool Photo Album from Snapfish

How to keep track of all the work done during just one homeschool year?

Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm...

First there's all the written work, you know--workbook pages, reports, copywork, sentence diagrams, Latin translations.

But then there are the big, messy, elaborate projects that make up the bulk of our homeschool days--the big basement timeline, the cave painting, the salt dough maps, the volcanoes in a test tube, the sewing, the baking, the pounds and pounds of clay and gallons of paint and glue that we go through, just the three of us. Can't punch three holes in that and stick it in a binder!

There's also the travel that we're able to do because of our freedom (and my willingness for the younger kid to skip a couple of ballet classes each semester). I consider our trips to beaches and amusement parks and the sites of old forts and Laura Ingalls Wilder's house and museums from Florida to Michigan to be crucial to the kids' education, even if those experiences don't fit well into a binder, either.

And then there's the other, most important category of work that the girls are able to get done with hours to themselves each day: play. How to track the marbles chased down, the structures built, the toy ponies endangered and rescued and married off and endangered again, the sidewalks drawn on with chalk (or painted on with paint--I don't care)?

Oh, and all the books that get read around here! I don't know how you would EVER keep track of that and also do anything else with your life!

Before I deal with that big stack where I date-stamp and then toss the kids' written work, I'll just start with what, for me, is the easiest way to record the travel, the projects, and the play.

Photo album!

Snapfish asked me to test their new 11x14 Lay-Flat Photo Book by making one for myself, so I chose as my topic the previous homeschool year, which in our homeschool runs August-July (we're year-rounders, ya know).

I LOVE the format for putting the book together, especially with the tons of photos that I put per page. Basically (unless you're picky, and then you can alter it), Snapfish determines the best sizing and layout for the photos, and as you drag each new photo onto a page, it immediately rearranges the sizing and layout of the entire page for you--if you don't like it, you can ask it to rearrange it, or rearrange it manually:

I loved the layouts that Snapfish chose for me, and had no problem swapping various photos around the layout to better show off my favorite ones.

You get one text block on each page (as far as I could figure), which I used to caption all of the activities that the photos on that page encompassed. Each two-page spread counted as one month of our homeschool year, and I really wanted another text box to record the month, but I couldn't make it happen for me. One of the paper choices for the photo book did include exactly the kind of calendar set-up that I wanted, but it started with January and couldn't be altered.

No fear--I simply waited until my book came, and then made my months all crafty-like!

With that addition (which makes me happy in particular, since I really like mixed-media projects, anyway), I could not love this photo book more. I think that the reader really gets a sense of the huge variety of projects that the kiddos are invested in every month, and the frequency of our field trips and other travel--it's very light on photos of actual "schoolwork" (oops!), but I don't plan for this to be our only record of the homeschool year, so that's okay.

I also love how easy it is to watch the seasons pass in this book, as the children grow from the beginning of our school year--

image on the free endpaper at the front of the book

--to fall and winter activities, sledding and ice skating on four different pages, and then stomping in mud in their sweaters, and then posing for the big ballet recital in a sleeveless leotard out by the fountain--

--and then finally posing in their pirate garb for Willow's eighth birthday party, right at the end of their school year:

How they've grown!

I chose for the cover image a candid shot that I took of the girls during their T-shirt dress photo shoot--

--and you also get to title the spine, so that I'll be able to pull exactly the year that I'm looking for out of a shelf of fifteen identical photo books when the babes are all done with school:

 

My favorite part, however, is the back cover, where you can put yet another small image and a caption:

Because even more than the chance to travel, and the time to play, and the fast-track to higher-level math, and Latin on the third-grade curriculum, if my girls someday understand that we schooled together all these years simply because of my deep love for them, then we will have had a successful homeschool.

[Snapfish gave me this photo book for free (I paid for the shipping and a couple of extra pages that I added) in exchange for my feedback on it.]

Civil Rights on the Big Basement Timeline

Although, as I mentioned before, we're not going into many explicit details of the Civil Rights struggle in America in our study of Martin Luther King, Jr., the kids are familiar with several key dates now. 

Instead of memorizing them, one morning I asked the big kid to comb through our many reference materials and collate several such dates; she and her sister then helped me search Google Images for appropriate imagery. The kids divided the images, dictated a caption for each, then wrote the caption with the image. They cut everything out, grabbed our big jar of sparkly Mod Podge and a foam brush, and headed downstairs with me, where I helped them place each date in its correct spot on our big basement timeline and they glued them to the wall.

So that's reading and writing, research skills, US history, and art--not bad for a single day of homeschooling, and we definitely got some math in, too!

For the events that the big kid picked out, let's see...we've got King's birth and death, of course, but also the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Gandhi, George Wallace (I wasn't thrilled about including him, because I didn't want to have to see him every time I walk downstairs, and I flat-out refused to permit the kids to include images of segregation--I told them that I just didn't want to see pictures of people acting ugly on our wall), and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

I am growing ever unhappier with the lack of foresight that I showed when laying out our basement timeline--the amount of room that I allocated for modern history is critically tight. I have long harbored dreams of moving to some little hobby farm or other outside of town--let the need for a much more spacious wall timeline be added to my list of reasons to move (along with a sunny yard to garden, a creek, space for a flock of chickens and two dwarf goats, and a second story to the house).

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!

Horrible Histories in Song

I'm obsessed with Horrible Histories. Have you heard of it? It's a BBC show based on the book series, and it's unavailable in the US except as digital downloads (Remember my long-term gripe that stores never sell what I want to buy? I want to buy a Horrible Histories DVD set!), but clips from the shows are pretty widely available on YouTube, where I swear, the girls and I watch them by the hour. I've actually gotten into the habit of hopping on the treadmill when we start watching them--I can't set the speed very high or you can't hear the videos, but I can set the incline VERY high and so still get a good work-out in.

The nice thing about just having the clips, I suppose, is that I can show only the clip that relates to a specific topic, and I can put them in my various homeschool pinboards, and I can put some of my favorites in chronological order for you below:

At the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site

In January of last year, the girls and I did a short study of Martin Luther King Jr. Our brief study went really well, and studying Civil Rights through the lens of Martin Luther King Jr. seemed like a doable (ie. less frightening) way to introduce the subject, which is one that I do want the girls to know about, however young they are. I lecture them often about privilege and gratitude and volunteerism and responsibility (especially in a homeschool context, since Willow is going through a phase of feeling very ungrateful about the privilege of homeschooling, and very reluctant to work through its responsibilities, and I am really struggling with helping her through it), and I'm always looking for real-life illustrations to help make such vague concepts clearer to them, occurring as they do on the global level, as well as in our tiny home.

This summer we've done a much longer, much more detailed study of Martin Luther King Jr., culminating in the morning that we took off from our drive home from Florida to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site right in our overnight stop of Atlanta, Georgia:

Martin's boyhood home

 All of us (except for Sydney, but she can be pacified simply by being carried by Daddy!) really enjoyed the tour through Martin Luther King Jr.'s boyhood home, inside of which I was not permitted to take photographs (sigh). Few of the home's original furnishings remain, but the National Park Service used King's family as a resource when purchasing replacements--the family chose antiques that were identical, as closely as possible, to what they actually did own, so it's a very careful recreation.

The tour guide was terrific, too, and I learned a LOT of new information, such as the fact that although the King family's neighborhood was segregated, it was by no means ghettoized--families of all income levels lived there, as you can easily see by look at the historic homes along the street, ranging from the very small to the very large. Some of the homes are still privately owned today, and some are rental homes owned by the National Park Service, all with strict guidelines about preserving the homes' exteriors, of course. I spent a while fantasizing about moving to Atlanta with the family and living in one of these rental homes--I still might do it!

The King Center was a lot less showy, although I gather that they have an impressive collection of artifacts off exhibit (I wouldn't be surprised if they're working towards a major renovation). I was very excited to see King's Nobel Peace Prize displayed among some of his other awards--

--and the displays of some of his personal effects, such as the suitcase that he packed to take to Memphis on the trip during which he was murdered, and his minster's robes, were touching.

Willow spent nearly the last dregs of her spending money here, purchasing one of those little rubber bracelet things with the saying "I Have a Dream" on it, and some retro candy. I purchased some postcards, a Civil Rights coloring book, a deck of Civil Rights flash cards, and a retro candy choice for each of the girls (Willow was pretty stoked to be able to show up her sister by purchasing MORE candy for herself, silly girl).

The weather was fine, and the walking around the historic neighborhood was just the thing to stretch our legs before we began our long, LONG drive home that day:

Dr. and Mrs. King's lovely memorial

I don't know if the girls necessarily have a larger grasp of Civil Rights after our visit, but I'm certain that they now see Martin Luther King Jr. as a real person, and most particularly as the little boy whom our tour guide so evocatively described during our house tour, the little boy who broke his sisters dolls on purpose, who liked to play board games and listen to stories on the radio, whose favorite place in the house was the kitchen. A few days after we got back home, we were driving across town and Sydney cracked open another picture book about King that I'd checked out from the library.

"Look, Momma!", she called out, holding open the first page of the book to show me, and there was the wallpaper in Martin Luther King Jr.'s house! Many of the illustrations in My Brother Martin, written by King's sister, are clearly taken from the rooms on the birthhome tour, with details down to the fireplace screen and the old-fashioned stove and the pattern on the family's china plates laid out on their dinner table--all stuff that the kids had noticed at the time. And then Sydney got to the pages in which a childhood Martin's little friends have to tell him that they can't play with him anymore, and the look on little Martin's face is so vivid, and SO sad, that Sydney actually cried out. She may not understand racism, or understand Civil Rights, but being excluded by her playmates for no good reason--that's something that ANY kid understands. And if Civil Rights means that it's not okay to exclude others, then she's all for it, whether or not she totally gets the point of the Birmingham Jail or the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

At the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum (Again!)

I once read an essay in a travel magazine written by a woman who claimed that she and her partner had a policy to never visit the same vacation spot more than once. Now, I don't know to what level they took this--"We've been to the Mona Lisa gallery in the Louvre once, so we'll never go into that gallery again," or "We've been to the Louvre once, so we'll never go again," or "We've been to Paris once, so we'll never go again"--but the practice immediately struck me as something that I'd NEVER want to do.

Mind you, I'm also not going to be going to Disney World five times in two years like one particularly obsessed mom friend of mine (Kimberly, I'm waving at you!), but I do appreciate visiting a well-loved place again. It makes a lot of sense from a parenting perspective, since the child who loved Chicago's Field Museum at the age of four is in for a whole new world of experience when she comes again at the age of eight, and the children who just rode Big Thunder Mountain Railroad five minutes ago are going to enjoy the feeling of mastery that comes with knowing what to expect when they ride it a second time, and they're going to love it even more the third time, the fourth time, the fifth time, and the sixth time, after which they might be willing to take a break, but only if it involves ice cream bars shaped like Mickey Mouse's head.

The same scenario applies to adults, too, however--or at least to me! I loved visiting Hawaii for the first time as a kid, and I loved visiting Hawaii for the second time on my honeymoon with Matt; it was a whole new Hawaii, experienced as an adult, following my own agenda, with my partner. We didn't stay at the nice resort of my childhood, but we did stay in a hostel where we both thought that the owner was going to kill us in our beds (seriously, if I had a buck for every time that has happened to me...); we had our own rental car, we drank a ton of guava juice, and we came so close to active lava flows that if I'd tripped and fallen I would have burned my face off.

I can't wait to visit Hawaii again and show it to our girls.

So it bothered me not at all that the girls and I were just at the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum last year; we still like shells--

--the girls are older and know more science and geography with which to appreciate the museum's collections--

Shells from Africa--how apropos!

 Once again, I studied with fascination the collection of Sailor's Valentines--

--but this time, now that each girl is a year older, the project struck me as actually pretty doable for me and the girls and our huge shell collection. Stay tuned!

Inspired by our museum visit, Willow asked if we could study mollusks. I'm starting us off by learning the order of taxonomy, then zipping down to Phylum Mollusca, where I'll need to do a lot of preparatory studying, myself, frankly, invertebrate biology not being a huge part of my own childhood curriculum.

Let the adventure begin!

On Sanibel Island

It's something pretty well-known about me that I keep trying to go to the beach. In a couple of months, for instance, I'm taking the girls on a road trip to visit some friends of ours. We'll drive almost nine hours to visit them, stay for a couple of days, and then... well, it's only another seven hours from there to the beach, so why not?

A beach stay after our time at Disney World was, therefore, crucial to my planning, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Remember this little island that the girls and I visited last year? How much better it was to actually STAY there for a few days! Once again, since it was the off-season, we rented a nice condo right on the beach for a very reasonable rate, stocked up on groceries, kicked off our shoes, and stayed for a while!

Disney was exactly right for a vacation for us, but this lounging, swimming, napping, watching movies, digging in the sand... it turns out that this was exactly right, too!