Beginning the 50 States Project

We're off and away into our 50 States Project, even though I'm still not sure how we'll continue.

We'll call it a work in progress, then, I suppose!

I know that I want the girls to be able to pick out each state on a map of the U.S., and identify each state by its outline alone, so one day Willow and I printed out and assembled a giant United States map and duct taped it to a wall in the kitchen. When we begin a new state, the kiddos find that state on the big map and color it to match our Montessori map set:

When the girls have more states under their belts, we can add in weekly memory drills with flash cards, our Montessori puzzle map, our Montessori pin flag set, and Stack the States.

I want the girls to memorize the capital of each state, so they mark that on the map, as well, and add it to their weekly memory work. Willow LOVES the other assorted trivia of each state--state nickname, postal code, state flower, state bird, etc.--so they've been noting down that information, doing a couple of themed coloring pages, and adding that info to their memory work, as well, but I'm not really invested in all that extra info, so we can easily drop it if the girls tire of it.

Where I'm sticking a little bit is in the fact that I REALLY like to include "living" sources for our studies--books, videos, music, etc.--and enrichment activities, but studying a different state each week makes for a lot of prep work if I want to include those things, and a lot of kid work, considering that we're only actively studying our state one day each week. I got around it the other week by having the girls make these Philly cheesesteak sandwiches with Matt over the weekend (yum!)--

--but I may have to resign myself to spending TWO weeks on each state, one week for the facts and one week for an enrichment activity. But even then, we didn't even get into the Pennsylvania Dutch, or Crayolas or Hershey bars, or the Liberty Bell or Ben Franklin.

A month on each state, spending almost four years to get through the country?

Or maybe I'll just plan according to what interests us? A month on Pennsylvania, a day on Nebraska? More time on states that we're visiting, less time on states that we're not? Skip around from Pennsylvania to Connecticut and back to Pennsylvania to revisit Hershey bars and Crayolas?

Maybe one day for the basics, and then if anything intrigues us we'll stay with that state, and if nothing strikes our fancy we'll move on.

And don't even get me started about how I SO want to take a field trip to each state, because I also love field trips, and also I'm crazy.

Building Big Numbers: Take Two!

As Willow moves into multiplication, Sydney is moving into multi-digit addition, and thus I find myself, almost exactly one year to the date that I last wrote about this activity, again writing about building big numbers, Montessori-style.

Building big numbers, an activity so successful and so enjoyed, has evolved a little since that first mention. Now, instead of stating a number to be built, I have Sydney first lay out each grouping of Base Ten cards--the thousands in one stack, the hundreds in another, the tens in a third, and the units at the last. She lays out each stack so that it's in the correct sequence, with the thousand stack all the way to the left and the unit stack all the way to the right.

The cards aren't sequenced in order within each stack, so that next, when Sydney chooses the top card from each stack, she has a completely random number. She lays each card out in correct Base Ten order on the rug, then builds that number with the Base Ten blocks:


When the number is built, Sydney writes the number down (if she gets stuck, remember that she can stack the Base Ten number cards, thousands on the bottom to units on the top, to see the correct number), then uses our Base Ten block stamps to record how it was built:

It's not uncommon, of course, for her to stop in the middle of building a number to build, well, something else:

That's what Syd's doing right now, in fact--building and recording big numbers while Will reviews multi-digit addition using workbook pages (Yes, I still have a fever today, and a cough, and a runny nose, and a feeling of general lousiness, and yes, I do regret not getting a flu shot--this illness has been miserable!). I had to stop writing just a second ago and go over to the rug, because Sydney said to me, conversationally, "Forty tens make 40!"

"Oops!" I thought. When I sat down with her, however, I saw that Syd had really just mixed up her wording--when the kids are making big discoveries or otherwise thinking hard, their grammar, vocabulary, and handwriting all regress, because their brains are busy elsewhere. What she was doing was comparing the tiny unit to the ten bar and again noticing that each ten bar measured exactly ten units. She already knows this, of course, but something else was clearly going on in her head that turned this familiar concept brand-new. And when I reminded her that this one is one unit and this one is a ten bar, she immediately said, "Forty UNITS make 40!"

So now off I go to see how much of a thousand cube we can build with all the units that we have on hand.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Puzzles!

a round-up of crafts for orphaned puzzle pieces

and a puzzle piece Valentine craft of our very own

In other news, I am in my fourth day of the flu, or whatever coughing, aching, sneezing, feverish, breathless, respiratory virus that is indistinguishable from the flu. I'm past the phase of lying like a slug in misery, past the acute phase of wondering if I was going to add to Indiana's viral mortality rate this year, past that one evening when I crawled out of bed (literally crawled), then decided that crawling back into bed was too much effort and instead dragged some blankets down on top of me on the floor.

Now I'm in that phase of feeling too lousy to get back to my life, but too restless to keep lying here while the children bicker over math worksheets and making their own lunch in another room. I'm bored by Netflix instant, bored by my Buffy Season Eight graphic novel collection from the library, bored by Doctor Who fanfiction, completely out of Baked Lay's and orange juice back here in the "sick room" that Matt, on the advice of, I kid you not, www.flu.gov, has deemed is my designated area. 

If you've already had the flu this season, you should come over and entertain me. I'll let you read to me if you promise to do all the voices, and I also really like show tunes.

Drawing Dinosaurs

How-to-draw books have been big over here lately. I know it's not process-oriented *real* art, but the kids love them and they're great for advancing fine motor skills, especially for Will, who doesn't often choose to do a lot of that type of work.

For handwriting once a week, when the girls don't have any letters to answer (which I always refer to, to them, as "catching up on your correspondence"--cracks me up!), they've been choosing a page from the Draw Write Now series, and Will, especially, has gotten really into drawing and coloring fantastical creatures (she specifically requested that I inter-library loan her this how-to-draw dragons book). Sydney's big passion, however, is the iLuv Drawing Dinosaurs app that she was given by Three Girls Media. It's a step-by-step drawing app that shows each step in the process with visible lines, but when you trace over the lines,  you're the one who's making the drawing:

For my kid who loves to get everything "right" the first time, it's very peaceful and comforting entertainment, and VERY satisfying for her.

Don't believe me? Look what I dumped off of the ipad this morning:

 

Narrations

I buy into a lot of Susan Wise Bauer's reasoning in The Well-Trained Mind, but I also do not buy into a lot of her reasoning. We do both think that the ability to summarize well is important even for young children, but I think that I see it more directly as an analytical skill than Bauer does, and Bauer sees it more directly as a composition skill than I do. We'll meet up again in several years with our emphases on composition AND critical analysis, but I've seen Bauer's curriculum vitae and I can guarantee that we've both had the experience of teaching college students who, bless their hearts, could not come up with an analytical idea nor effectively express it if they had it to save their lives, and we want nothing like that intellectual hobbling for our own children.

Narrating is a prerequisite to summarizing; narration is simply a reading comprehension exercise, but a summary is also analytical. Willow and Sydney narrate, to encourage them to understand and remember the entire work in detail. When they're older, they'll be required to prioritize and organize the work, sorting through for a logical progression of ideas under an overarching theme.

For now, though, they get to use puppets!


Funny fonts are also encouraged:

Willow dictated this to me while I typed it, and then she printed it in a funny font of her choosing and added it to our Egyptian Gods and Goddesses book, which we're liking a lot these days.

That book is going to contain a LOT of narrations before it's bound!

My Latest over at CAGW: Seed Starting and Dish Refurbishing

a round-up of food scrap containers good for seed starting (think eggshells and orange peels)

and a tutorial for embellishing thrifted dishes using ceramics markers

We first started doing this with some medium-sized thrifted white plates, because the girls' appetites had outgrown their IKEA lunch plates and the Fiestaware that I collect as our family dishes doesn't make a good "medium-sized kid lunch plate" size. 

However, I've been LOVING how these turn out, and the ease of collecting cheap-o white dishes second-hand, combined with the difficulty of collecting Fiestaware at discount prices (people even inflate the price of Fiestaware at GARAGE SALES here!!!), has made me think that perhaps I should start collecting/embellishing these white dishes as our regular stock, and set the Fiestaware aside for the most part.

Except for coffee mugs. You'll pry my giant Fiestaware coffee mug out of my cold, dead, rigor mortised hands.

Sydney behind the Lens: January 2013

Although both girls have cameras of their own, my camera is better, and everyone knows it.

It doesn't surprise me, then, when I dump my camera's photos into my photo editing software, to find, here and there, photographs that I didn't take. It's generally easy to use context to determine the photographer, and in this particular case, I'm confident that these photos were taken by Sydney:

a stack of the fresh strawberries that Sydney requested from the grocery store

Gracie and Sydney's favorite stuffed animal watching kitty TV together

the video that Sydney checked out from the library last week

Like me, the girl photographs what she loves!