Sydney Writes Thor Fanfiction

I must admit my fault in being much more open to Sydney's obsession with superheroes than I was to her obsessions with The Land before Time characters, the Disney fairies, or the Disney princesses. I still sometimes think back to when she was two years old and loved to talk like Ducky. I rarely let her watch the movies, but now that I see how fleeting a two-year-old's desperate passion can be--she doesn't give a flip for The Land before Time now!--I think that I should have indulged her more back then.

The thing that's MUCH easier about a passion for superheroes (and even for a passion for Disney fairies and princesses) is that there are so many outlets for indulging in superhero stories other than TV, which Sydney still doesn't get much of. I gave her several teeny Marvel superhero figures for Christmas, but without having to buy anything at all, Syd has as many superhero comic books, picture books, chapter books, and even audiobooks as she can handle, just from our public library. She especially likes Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, the Silver Surfer, and the Hulk, but her favorite superhero is Thor.

And of all the superheroes, Thor IS the best, because he's actually legitimately educational! His superhero origin story (or Thory, as we nerdily call it here) is similar enough to Thor's depictions in Norse mythology that I've successfully snuck in loads of further materials on the Norse God Thor without Sydney noticing.

Mwa-ha-ha!!!

Anyway, two of Sydney's reading days on her weekly schedule are actually mostly literacy enrichment days, because she still needs to move VERY slowly through the actual reading instruction and I don't want her frustrated with the process. Sometimes she gets to watch The Electric Company, sometimes we'll read a picture book together and then do a craft project related to it, sometimes she'll make puppets and perform a story back to me, sometimes I'll let her play on a phonics computer program, sometimes she'll sit down with her headphones and a stack of CD readers, etc.--basically anything literacy-linked that's NOT "sit down and decode the words in this book, pronounce them correctly, and also understand their meanings, on the sentence level and in the work as a whole." Syd loves to invent stories and loves to create books, so I thought that it would be fun to see if she'd like to invent a new story about her favorite guy, Thor, and create a book around it.

It WAS fun!



There are SO many things that I love about Sydney's creation:

1. Does that drawing of Thor not kick ass or what?!? He's got his wings on his helm, he's got his red cape, he's wielding Mjolnir, he's got lots of shiny metal thanks to those new gel pens (thanks again, Grandma Beck!). I'm also really fond of the monster that's drawn escaping from its bubble--did you see how it's clawing a hole in the bubble? The perspective is really creative there. My kid's awesome.
2. Syd mostly prefers to illustrate her books and verbally narrate them, but every now and then, when she's feeling extra confident, you'll see her brave an actual sentence. Yay!
3. See, there IS some actual fact creeping into the superhero play! When we study the Norse myths, she'll be familiar with the rainbow bridge, with Asgard, with Odin, with Loki, and with whatever other clever little details she's picking up.

Currently, we have basically every kid-friendly item on Thor checked out from our public library (Sorry, other Norse myth/superhero aficionados! You can see Thor after our lending period expires!). Here are Syd's favorites:

Our Giant Cookie Map of Egypt

Chapter two of Story of the World discusses the geography of Ancient Egypt, as well as its gods and goddesses, so I wanted to do another map project, but we did salt dough maps of Egypt in 2011, and paper maps as part of The Story of the World Activity Book for chapter two just a couple of weeks ago.

We got into the habit of turning things into giant cookies way back with the Giant Cookie Solar System of 2010, and we've discovered, since then, that many, many, many things make EXCELLENT giant cookies.

Egypt, for instance? Turns out that it makes an EXCELLENT giant cookie.

We used this cut-out sugar cookie recipe for our dough, although I'll warn you that it needs to be more exact than the recipes that I usually use for kid cooking are. Syd accidentally poured in 1 cup of milk instead of 1/4 cup, and I futzed around to try to save the recipe any other way than quadrupling it, but in the end we actually had to dump it out and re-make it. Normally, I only give the kids recipes that are very forgiving for that exact reason, but this recipe DOES result in a great cut-out cookie, so there you go.

For the template, I printed this 2x2 Egypt map, which, when assembled and cut out, was the perfect size:

We printed and cut out the one-page map first, but it was way too small for a shared project, so I told the girls that if there was enough dough leftover, they could each make their own personal Egypt cookie and decorate it silly.

The dough, rolled out--

--and cut to shape with an x-acto knife--

--looks like this!

It's very important to roll it out and cut it over parchment paper; otherwise, I don't know how on earth you'd get the damn thing on the pan.

Obviously, you're never going to be able to figure out the baking time for this beforehand. I just keep an eye out, and even then there was no way not to burn the area of Egypt east of the Red Sea inlet, but otherwise the cookie was perfect about 20 minutes in. 

Decorating the cookie was a family affair, with the adults researching on computer and ipad, and the kids, with their messy fingers, calling out monuments to be researched, modeling them out of marzipan (other edible play dough would also work), icing, and M&Ms, and placing them on the map:

checking her work on Google Earth as she places the Nile

Setting M&Ms to follow the course of the Nile

Here's the finished masterpiece!

The Nile Delta is done in green icing and green M&Ms; modeled in marzipan are the Sphinx and the larger three pyramids of Giza (the three small ones are made from M&Ms alone):

The bent pyramid, the Valley of Kings, and the Tomb of Ramses II are also modeled in marzipan; modeled in marzipan and red M&Ms is the red pyramid:

And Syd made a valiant attempt to write "UPPER" in M&Ms and icing to label Upper Egypt.

 The great geographers are very proud of their work:

They're quite fond of how it tastes, as well:

I tidied away the excess dough, and on another day, the girls were ready and willing to make their own personal "silly Egypts":

I might personally think that they look a little less appetizing than the carefully constructed extra-large version-- 

--but the girls reported that they tasted just as yummy.

A List of Responsibilities Every Day

Here's Sydney's list of responsibilities this week:


And here's Willow's:
I've never seen another homeschooling parent's work plan, so maybe these are crazy. All I know is that they work for us right now.

(Which is all that matters, right? So many arguments between fellow parents could be avoided, I think, if people simply accepted that what someone else is declaring is what is working for them, not you, right now, not for all time. But then what would I read when I'm in the mood for mama drama?)

Each day contains each child's general chores (usually listed by room--they know what they're supposed to do there) and specific schoolwork. On Monday mornings, after I finish my coffee, the girls meet me at the table with binders in hand. They remove last week's material, and I pass out these lists and the assorted printables/worksheets/whatever for them to hole-punch and insert into their binders. When we first began to use binders, I took the time to make labeled subject dividers--these have almost entirely been torn away over several months of hard use, and nobody seems to miss them much.

Every morning, each kid has ultimate free time from the time that she gets up (Syd sleeps in sometimes, but Will is always up by 6:30) to the moment that I finish my coffee, although she can start work early, if she chooses. But as soon as I've cleared the table of my coffee/newspaper habit, I call for the children to choose something from their binders. One kid might choose math, one kid might choose music practice. If both kids choose something that I need to be involved in separately for each of them, I'll ask one of them to do her chores instead, and then play quietly until I can help her. If one kid chooses a schoolwork that she and her sister will be doing together that day, I'll either get the other kid involved at that time or put the work off until both of the kids are free.

If the girls get distracted with play, or immersed in a book, or involved in a project, I'll let them be, but if I notice them at a stopping point, or see them wandering by, or hear them fighting, then I'll redirect them back to the binders. In that way, almost all the responsibilities are marked off by dinner. If anything remains undone, then Matt's there to assist us after dinner. I know that means that we're rarely "done" with school, but early on, when I required the girls to sit at the table and do their work at one go, they'd hurry through their assignments, doing poor work, forgetting to enjoy themselves, and absorbing very little. This way, a kid will very often get immersed in her activity and work far longer than I'd have required her to and delve far deeper than I'd intended. It's important to me that, even though I'm rigidly structuring each assignment, the girls feel autonomous and can own their own work.

Sometimes we have an off day (today is one!), and if that happens, I'll turn one of our three free days each week into a schoolwork day. We're definitely doing weekend school this week! If we really get off-track, such as when one of us is ill, then I'll usually just keep missed assignments in their same spot for the next week; many subjects we cover once weekly, and even the subjects that we do daily don't build off of each other that same week--math lessons, for instance, are on Mondays, with the other days for reinforcement, review, drill, enrichment, etc.

These work plans have worked well for us for several months, now, and there's a lot that I like about them:

1. They offer excellent accountability for everyone. I expect the children to mark responsibilities off as they finish them, so that I can glance at the binder and see where each child is. I file away the marked-over sheets the next week, so that if I'm ever required to prove that we've been working at (or above) grade level, I'll have the evidence.
2. They allow me to plan all week. As soon as I've printed each child's work plan for the week, I delete the entries and begin to plan, gradually, for the next week. Whatever I haven't filled in by the weekend, I fill in then.
3. They give the authority to something that can't argue back. For some reason, the girls just don't argue about what's on the list. If I told them, out of my head, to complete a math worksheet, then I'd die of old age before Willow had finished arguing with me about it. But if I say, "your list shows that you need to complete this math worksheet," well, then...who can argue with The List?!?

As the girls get older, I'm curious to see how our work plans evolve. Might they begin to write their own work plans? Might we evolve from specific assignments to blocks of time that they can use for their own research and projects? Might we transition from daily plans to weekly plans?

Who knows? All I know is that this is what works for us, for now.

(Just not today. Today, Will played while I worked with Syd on her fashion show design, and then Will and I played chess, and then we had Gym Day with our other homeschooled friends for two hours, and then I took the girls to the library for another two hours, and then when we got home I remembered that today is Willow's half-birthday and therefore I need to make her a half-cake, and then Matt came home and I was all, "Holy crap, it's 6:00?!? Here, follow this cookie cake recipe and then order pizza." Because there are plenty of hours in the weekend for math worksheets, clay sculpture, and cataloging Egyptian gods and goddesses, but this is the only day in the entire lifespan of the entire universe that my Will is turning 8.5, and we're watching the movie of her choice and eating pizza and a cookie-half cake to celebrate!)

My Latest over a Crafting a Green World: Clothing Rehab

a tutorial for mending ripped jeans

and a tutorial for re-dyeing black clothing

Everybody has a large wardrobe right now, in various stages of (dis)repair, and because I'd rather spend our budget on something OTHER than new clothes (a late-winter weekend at an indoor water park, perhaps?), I've been doing a LOT of clothing rehab lately--lengthening, mending, dyeing, embellishing, refashioning, etc.

Just today, on the sewing table, I have two pairs of pants that need to have their basted cuffs removed (little girls insist on growing up!), one pair of pants that needs to have a seat seam re-sewn, one shirt that needs to have a ripped-off tie mended, two pairs of silk long johns that need to be re-dyed, and two pairs of pants that need to be lengthened with some stash fabric.

But when my cotton fabric dye arrives in the mail next week, that's when the party is REALLY going to start!

Sydney's Sight Words

I know that I've told you this before, but it bears repeating, since it's so clearly marked throughout our school days:

My Sydney is a girl who likes to have the correct answer.

Unfortunately, school (like life) is all about incorrect answers, and daily Sydney is confronted with words incorrectly decoded, math problems incorrectly solved, lowercase y's and g's written incorrectly above the baseline.

I've taken to sending Syd to lie down in her bed and rest for several minutes when she throws a fit during schoolwork, and I'm surprised at how often she does fall asleep during this time, but mostly she isn't tired when she throws a fit.

She's frustrated.

It's led me to a different way to do school with Sydney, because Willow HATES review, but Sydney loves it. She thrives on it. Getting the correct answer, whether it's for the first or the hundredth time, makes her really, really happy.

So although this sight word activity that I'm about to show you would have driven Will utterly around the bend, it's one of Sydney's favorite moments of each school day. We call it the Sight Word Caterpillar, and it comes from Confessions of a Homeschooler, who has generously created a pdf of sight word caterpillars for all the dolch sight words from kindergarten through third grade.

Syd is currently working on the kindergarten and first grade sight words. When we first began this activity several weeks ago, she cut out all the sight words in those two groups over the course of a couple of weeks, and put them in a little brown paper bag that's hole-punched so that it will stay in her school binder. Mondays are "test days," in which Syd takes a try at reading every word in her bag, sorting each into a "can read" and a "not yet" pile (She usually has to go lie down a couple of times during this task). The words that she can't yet read go back in the bag, and every school day for the rest of the week I pull them out, read each one to her, and put it back in the bag. The words that she CAN read she adds to her Sight Word Caterpillar, which is taped near the bottom of one wall in our living room. Every single school day, during our reading time, she then does this:



Every. Single. Day. It's so repetitive that I don't think I'd make her do it if she didn't like it, but she likes it! It takes two minutes to do, it constantly reinforces what she knows, it's helping her with that subconscious pattern-building that's eventually going to unlock full literacy for her, and it's a practically painless memory drill. Even though Sydney can read all the words on the wall (they wouldn't be on the wall if she hadn't proved she could read them), she's clearly got the earlier words memorized and she's just as clearly still decoding each of the more recent words. I can't tell you how much easier she's finding reading now, with such a larger stash of memorized words to draw from, but I can tell you that we do get through entire reading lessons without fits these days.

Syd's almost through all the dolch sight words for kindergarten and first grade, and so I'm about to have her start on the second grade words. Her own reading material isn't at the second grade level yet, but after watching how these memorized words have improved her confidence in reading, my goal for her is to memorize all the dolch sight words through third grade during this academic year.

That's going to make for a REALLY long caterpillar!

A Slow and Informal Keyboard Study Progresses Apace

Ever since October, when I finally decided to stop fretting about figuring out formal music lessons and just have us all learn our collection of instruments as we liked, we've actually been doing well with our music study. There's nothing like the sense of accomplishment that comes from exchanging worry for action!

On the weekends, when I'm finalizing the girls' lesson plans for the following week, I ask them which of our instruments they'd like a "lesson" on. I figure out the next logical skill that we should be working on for that instrument and how to present it, and we have our lesson for it on Monday, so that the girls can practice that skill for the rest of the week.

And yes, you may practice your keyboard balanced on the back of the couch!

This is our most recent keyboard skill:


We've all previously learned how to find C, and how to find middle C, so this lesson involved starting each hand on C and playing a scale with both hands at the same time. Tricky!

When they've got that mastered, the C Major chord is next, and then, perhaps, a first melody?

(Re-)Introducing Multiplication Using Cuisenaire Rods

Since the kids are still working on memorizing how to skip count through all the numbers to ten, they're also still doing pre-multiplication activities for their hands-on math time. A couple of years ago, when the older kid was briefly very interested in multiplication and division, she and I did some hands-on multiplication using Cuisenaire rods, and she really liked the activity.

She STILL likes it!

This time, I added centimeter-squared graph paper to the activity (I LOVE this graph paper, because it's correctly sized for both Cuisenaire rods and Base Ten blocks, both of which we use very often). The kids picked a rod, then figured out all the one-color trains that could be lined up to perfectly equal that rod. They copied their results onto graph paper, and I helped them translate those results into multiplication facts:

They each repeated the activity, until they had found the factors and created multiplication facts for the numbers 1-10.

As they worked, the older kid noticed that the only one-color train that would work with some numbers is the one centimeter rod; my baby discovered Prime numbers! That was a good discussion, there.

Something changed about the older kid's attitude towards math during this activity, and I was privileged to watch it happen. I've long been telling the kid that she's a clever child--of course, I often tell both of my children this, but this kid is particularly quick to pick up on academic subjects, quick to discern patterns, quick to memorize. It's forever frustrated me, then, that the kid has, for a while, claimed to dislike math, because she's clever at math, and things that you're clever at are actually the things that you could really enjoy, because you could immerse yourself in them using your higher level of understanding to pave your way.

Anyway, the kid was working away at finding factors using her Cuisenaire rods (and working quite happily, I noted), when she began to name factors without having to use the Cuisenaire rods. I don't quite know how she was doing it, since we haven't even begun to memorize the multiplication table, and we've barely begun to memorize skip counting--repeat addition done mentally, perhaps? Visualization of the rods? Perhaps, as with reading, she unlocked the pattern subconsciously?--but there they were, all correct. I said to her (and yes, I've read enough parenting books to know that many of you are going to be horrified at my positive reinforcement), "Clever girl!" and it was as if a roller shade rolled up behind her little eyes, and suddenly I could hear her thinking, "Why, I AM a clever girl at math!"

The next school day was the much-dreaded Worksheet Thursday, for which I handed the older kid two pages of review problems on multi-digit addition (Drill! Drill! Drill!). Before I really knew that she'd even begun, because, of course, I hadn't been required to tell her multiple times to begin and reprimand her multiple times for not beginning, she was handing me the first page of completed problems with, for the love of all that is good and holy, a SMILE!!! on her face! They were all correct, and I complimented her on having a completed page with zero errors, because she's never done that before, and sent her off to complete the next page.

Several minutes later, she handed the second page over to me, just as happy, and again the problems were all correct. I said, "[Child], this is your best math ever!", then told her to go put it on my desk.

Later that night, as I was collecting the day's work to date stamp and file away, I found her page of problems--written across the sheet, in the distinctive hand of my little lefty, were the words "[Child]'s Best Math Ever."

And that's how my kid loves math! (at least this week...)

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