Little Girls and Their Tools

For the past couple of weeks, I've had several tools set up on the back deck as I work off and on at a few projects--fused plastic bead suncatchers, homemade checkers, and an expansion set of tree blocks.

This is, of course, the best kind of invitation for my girls to also work with tools. Mind you, they can work with tools anytime they wish, but that would involve the girls getting them out, setting them up, and putting them away again. If Momma already has the mess made and the responsibility for cleaning it up later, then how much more tempting the activity becomes!

I love to watch the different ways that they explore. There's some purposeful, product-driven work, yes--

drilling a hole to hang the suncatcher

 --but mostly it's just fun to use the tools and watch what they do:

drilling and engraving in scratch wood (and the workbench!)

hammering into an old piece of tree that I keep around just for using tools on

hammering and drilling (and some sawing)

smashing up a broken plate

It's still one of my goals to set up a workshop area just for the girls, similar to the one in their old Montessori classroom--but even bigger and better, of course! After finally getting around to making their Waldorf dolls this summer, after years of thinking about it, and feeling like I almost missed the window for Willow to really enjoy her doll (it helps my heart to notice that she sleeps with it every night), I'm trying not to let myself put off these big projects that I want to do for the girls, because they simply insist on continuing to grow and change and grow out of things that they used to love. They need that second batch of hand-dyed play silks that I promised, and the PVC pipe play house, and the workshop area just for them.

I suppose that the winter to-do list could always use just a few more items...

shared on Friday's Nature Table

Subtraction with Borrowing: The Video

Chalk this up to my growing list of tips and tricks for educating an eight-year-old.

These days, half of Willow's math for the school week involves problems and projects that utilize math concepts--building mathematical models, completing word problems, playing a game, etc. On another day, she plays on a Grade 3 math app on our ipad--some review, some new work, but all quick-format, question-and-answer style. That leaves one day a week for pencil-and-paper calculations. It's a slower math education than I'd originally desired--we haven't moved into fractions yet, for instance, or much multiplication and division--but it's certainly a lot broader, is a better overall way to internalize math concepts and strategies, and I'm coming to see that Willow has a lot more patience for our pencil and paper calculations when they only take place once a week.

This week, for instance, I'm pretty sure that we got through a week's worth of subtraction understanding in this one session together. Willow came to the table already understanding multi-digit subtraction without borrowing, and having worked through subtraction with borrowing with me before, without really getting the concept down. She also has her money concepts down, so this time, we used dollar bills (hundreds), dimes (tens), and pennies (ones) to model breaking down a number for borrowing, and then Will worked some problems on the dry-erase board:

When she had the method down fairly well, I told Willow that she was going to make a video tutorial to teach others how to subtract with borrowing.

At this, the entire tenor of the lesson changed.

I did, amazingly, have a willing and focused, though fairly unenthusiastic, kiddo. I now, incredibly, had a willing, focused, highly enthusiastic kiddo who suddenly adopted a calmly pedantic tone (tell me this is NOT how I sound when I teach!) and happily filmed two takes of her video tutorial:



I had assumed (correctly, for a change) that Willow would enjoy filming a tutorial. I already knew that being required to teach the method would help her further understand the method, herself, and that's why I chose the activity.

What I did not anticipate is how valuable this video would be for me. This video shows exactly what Willow understands about subtraction with borrowing at this exact moment; how wonderful that I can look at it at my leisure, away from the lesson, and evaluate it!

Here's what I see:

1. Willow understands the procedure (she has an excellent memory for things like this), but she doesn't understand the activity beneath the procedure to my satisfaction--if she did, then she wouldn't have modeled taking a "one" away from the two in the tens place; she would have explained that you take away a ten. In another take of this tutorial, Willow jokingly read the number that is created from the subtrahend after you notate your changes--211113! This shows, I think, that she doesn't yet understand that subtraction with borrowing requires "playing" with Base Ten, so that your work isn't in Base Ten format, although your answer is.
2. Although I'm glad that Willow has a handy strategy to call upon for computation, it's clear that she STILL doesn't have her subtraction math facts memorized! To me, this just makes learning a higher level of math more difficult--not only do you have to struggle to understand the concept of subtraction with borrowing, and memorize the procedure, but you also have to painstakingly calculate all the numbers, too?!?

So thanks to this one four-minute video, I know exactly where Willow is in math, and I know exactly how to proceed:

1. Willow needs more practice using manipulatives to break down the subtrahend. Next week, I bet that she'll have a ball making a video tutorial for that!
2. Willow needs more practice with worksheets of subtraction problems--if she can't erase the digits to replace them, she may better understand the purpose of the notations during the procedure.
3. Willow needs to learn the subtraction facts! I'll be replacing one of her math project days with a day of entertaining math drills--cute Halloweeny puzzles, matching games, etc. This will actually be great, since it will be one more activity that she and Sydney can do together.

We've delved far from the third-grade Singapore math workbook that I had thought would be our scaffold for math (I think multi-digit subtraction without borrowing was where we got off the bus), but after Will had mastered these subtraction concepts and can work them mentally, we'll check back in and see what Singapore wants us to do next!

My Latest over at CAGW: DIY Car Air Fresheners and How to Drill Stuff

a tutorial for DIY natural car air fresheners

and some tips for drilling very odd objects using a Dremel

We've been making a lot of fused plastic bead suncatchers lately--the kiddos LOVE them, and I'm secretly trying to use up our huge stash of completely random beads:

and two buttons--oops!

Other than the pasta ones, which we dyed ourselves (and which won't work in these suncatchers, so we had to sort them out), they've all been given to us from here and there and everywhere, completely unsorted, and when they're gone I'll be replacing them on an as-needed basis with a much smaller number of very carefully sorted beads, so that we'll have an easier time getting organized for specific projects.

To make the suncatchers, start out with a set of novelty silicon muffin tins--you'll see in some of the photos that I also use regular metal muffin tins, but since those don't bend they're actually much harder to get the finished suncatcher out of, and I don't recommend using them unless you absolutely need that particular shape.

Fill the bottom of each mold with just enough beads to cover the bottom:

The beads will flatten and spread as they melt, so you want your layer to be pretty thin to maintain the suncatcher's translucency:

I move our garage sale toaster oven outside to the back deck for this project, and I would NOT do it otherwise. Melting plastic is a nasty business, and it will absolutely smoke and give off fumes, and you do not want those fumes in your house. So if you do not have a toaster oven that you can haul outside for this project, then I strongly recommend that you simply not do it. Wait around for garage sale season to come back--our toaster oven cost $4, and we seriously use it multiple times a day.

Set the toaster oven to around 250 degrees, and don't bother letting it preheat. Just set your silicon mold on the tray, put the tray in the toaster oven--

--and come back to check on it every few minutes. You'll first see the beads start to look really soft and slumpy--

--but leave them in until the beads look flat and the surface of the suncatcher is even:

Take the tray out of the oven, transfer the mold from the tray to a safe spot for it to rest, and let it cool:

The finished suncatchers should be quite sturdy, and I really like the way that they look:

To hang them, you simply need to drill a hole, add twine, and string them up! It's long been in the back of my mind to make a really cool Calder-style mobile, but so far we've been hanging them all individually, kind of like ornaments for our trellis and our trees:

I've got a miniature skull silicon mold set, so now I'm considering melting the beads in a thick layer in the skull molds, then drilling a hole through horizontally to make giant skull beads.

Because the world NEEDS giant skull beads, yes?

Letters to Loved Ones

For the past three weeks we've been doing some letter writing, and so far I'm loving it for these three reasons:

1. I can get Willow to do it without much fuss about once a week. Although the copywork is tedious (of course), I think that she finds the composition interesting, and the activity novel.
2. It's a productive schoolwork, something that we do in real life and that has real-life results.
3. I feel like it helps the girls connect to our extended family, all of whom live very far away.

So far, the girls have written letters to their Uncle Chad, their Grandma Janie, and their Uncle Mac (who's not a blood uncle, but a close friend of mine who also loves the girls--does everyone have a couple of courtesy aunts and uncles in the family, or is that just a Southern thing?). Our letter writing kind of follows the Classical Education model in that first, they dictate the letter to me, while I copy it out onto a dry-erase board and make some compositional suggestions, things like "Grandma Janie asked about Disney World in her last email; you should tell her a little about it now."

The Classical Education model would want me to hold on to my dictation and present it with them at a separate time for copywork (and Sydney would be too young to copy it at all), but I then give the letter right to them, and expect that they sit right down and copy it out before the dry erase marker gets smudged or we need it for something else:

 

This is also a good time for me to sit down and write my own letter to "Uncle" Mac, or to collect a few photos of the girls that their Uncle Chad has been asking for, etc.

I address the envelopes myself, but the girls stuff them, and I used to permit them to decorate the envelopes, too, but the last time I did this I had to re-write the address on top of some very exuberant decoration and I'm still not certain that it was completely legible, so that may not be part of the game in the future.

We've got a couple of other people to write in the next couple of weeks--friends the next town over, the other grandma--and then, hopefully, the return correspondence will begin to arrive, and we can start the game all over again!

So, it costs 45 cents to get two kids to practice their handwriting, test their composition skills, and develop relationships with family and friends. 

Not a bad investment!

Music "Class"

I'm embarrassed to tell you how long I've held off on my deeply-desired music lessons for the girls (although if you can remember the guitar recital that signaled the end of Willow's formal lessons at the age of five, you'll know exactly how long I've held off, sigh).

For one, Willow is fiddly with adults, and I wasn't convinced that it was worth paying for lessons that she might loathe. For another, the kiddos' schedules are always my version of "packed," in that I simply don't like them to do more than one or two activities per season, combined with playgroups and playdates and our weekly volunteer gig; I like our at-home time! And for a third, music lessons are pricey! Worth the money, absolutely, but also easy to put off when finances are perennially tightly budgeted.

It took me a silly long time, and more than one conversation with a dear mom friend, a hard-core DIYer who has never put her kids in a scheduled activity but instead gives them things like karate DVDs to do at home (I'm waving at you, Betsy!), to realize that, you know, we could teach ourselves our instruments at home!

Bad habits? Who cares! The "proper" way to play an instrument was invented by somebody at some point, and I simply watched Youtube videos of people playing amazing music by using conventional instruments in unconventional ways until I felt better about the fact that we won't be learning piano on a keyboard with weighted keys (ours is from Goodwill!), and that the kids' violin (also second-hand) probably isn't perfectly sized to each of them.

Instead, we're going to have fun!



I've set the kids to practicing strumming on the guitar (when they can manage to pluck only one string at at time, we'll try a song), and while Sydney asks every day to do bowing on my adult-sized violin (their small violin needs a new bridge--oops!), Willow has taken off on the recorder, which is so satisfyingly easy to teach and to learn.

And she loves it. Doesn't fight me about it. Comes to me to teach her new things on it.

And yes, I do know how we sound in this video that Matt took of us playing and singing together. But again... who cares? We're having fun!

Sunset of the Sabertooth and Story of the World Ancient Times

Still on chapter one, volume one of Story of the World! We actually haven't studied in Story of the World in a while--we were doing Disney crafts, and writing Martin Luther King Jr.'s biography, and goofing around outside instead. However, the girls are fanatically fond of their monthly online Magic Tree House Club meeting (as they are of Magic Tree House and Story of the World audiobooks, in general, even if we aren't "studying" them--so much for the necessity of formal history study!), and since September's book was Sunset of the Sabertooth, I thought it was an excellent opportunity to jump back into the time period, complete one last study from it, and then wrap it up to move on.

To prepare for Magic Tree House Club, the girls listened to Sunset of the Sabertooth and read Sabertooths and the Ice Age, the Magic Tree House Research Guide associated with the book. The Magic Tree House Club meetings are fabulous--Willow loves the leader, who keeps the kids focused and engaged, leads them through some very difficult reading comprehension quizzes (on which Willow always does MUCH better than I do!), offers a ton of contextual information on the topic, teaches them appropriate online etiquette, and presents a fun hands-on craft or two associated with each book.

The craft for this book was clay pinch pots. I bought some air-dry clay (if we'd been back at my childhood home down South, I would have known the perfect place to dig for red clay, but I don't know a good spot here--hence the store-bought clay), showed the girls a video on hand-building with clay--



--laid down some newspaper, and let them go!

The girls had a fabulous time, completely immersed in their project. They each started off with a pinch pot, sure, but I was amused to see that Willow also created for herself a long-stemmed wine glass out of the clay, and Sydney made herself an entire dinner set--bowl, plate, cup, AND fork and spoon.

Even though I KNOW how important sensorial work is for kids, and how drawn they are to it, I was surprised at how much the girls loved playing with clay. We always have a ton of play dough, since I'm always making custom orders of it for my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, and the kids go off and on it, but never anymore with the level of passion that I saw here. I wonder if it has to do with density? One of the reasons why play dough is so good for little kids is that manipulating it strengthens their little fingers and hands--it still feels good to older kids, sure, but it's no longer a challenge to their muscles. Clay, however, is dense! It was certainly challenging for my kiddos to manipulate, and I wonder if that was part of the appeal?

A local artist offers homeschool ceramics classes, which so far I've never considered, since I like to encourage the girls to instead do activities that we can't do at home--gymnastics, ice skating, ballet, etc. Better value for the money, don't you know? I'm thinking now, though, that a session of ceramics from a local artist might be something that would really strike their fancy. Of course, it will have to wait until spring, since I just moved our half-day volunteer gig to the day that the ceramics class meets to accommodate Willow's ice skating classes, and I can't shift it again because Will also does running club three times a week to train for a 5K next month, and after that the girls and I are going on another long road trip, anyway...

Guess I'm going to pick up another tub of clay from the store today!

Here are the other resources that we used to study Ice Age animals:

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.