My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Guitar Picks and Body Glitter

a review of a punch for making DIY guitar picks

and a tutorial for making body glitter

Yes, the girls are deep into makeup play again. Syd and I are immersed in Trashion/Refashion Show design right now, which is probably what inspired it, but nonetheless, the weekend found us at the drugstore, picking out brand-new batches of eyeshadow, blush, and lipstick.

The girls still don't associate makeup with conventional gender norms (I don't wear makeup, and for the fashion show, both men and women applied it and wore it, and yesterday, on our way to our weekly volunteer gig, Willow's makeup application consisted of grey smudged all the way around her eyes like a raccoon and a stripe of red body glitter applied in a straight line between her eyes down to the tip of her nose), and my big assignment right now (along with, of course, the fashion show garment, a big bean bag order, revamping our homeschool group's membership application procedure, and other such nonsense) is to free them from conventional color norms, as well. The makeup at the drugstore all seemed to revolve around the same color palette, and we found neither the blue lipstick nor the red blush that Sydney specifically wanted. To keep the emphasis on makeup as a playful, expressive craft, it's really important to me to find a varied palette for all the basics, ideally including the rainbow colors. 

So off I go to browse the online supplies lists of cosmetology schools! With kids like these, there's no danger that I'm going to get locked into my comfort zone, that's for sure.

Rainbow Beeswax Stacked Heart

New in my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, a stacked heart in rainbow colors:

Stacked, they make a sturdier decoration in our nature basket, but to us, they're far more entrancing separated. They girls want to make them into Valentines, but they're actually a little too difficult for them to punch out by themselves, and I am NOT going to be the one to punch out a beeswax heart for every kid at the Valentine's Day party (I'm thinking of handing them a sheet of beeswax, a sharp pencil, and an x-acto knife for freehand heart-making, so I'll let you know how that goes, with full disclosure of Band-aids used), but I will punch out a few sets for family use, and I'm already really excited about the future bunting that will be. 

Singing along to Song School Latin

Willow's been studying Latin for a while now. We started off with Minimus, which Willow LOVES, but after the first couple of chapters it quickly grew too difficult, requiring far too much contextual knowledge and inferences to understand the Latin for even my highly literate seven-year-old. I then created a Latin study just for Willow, and while that was perfectly at her level, and she liked it, it was a lot of work to put together every week. Mind you, I do love creating my own curricula, but I've discovered that creating my own curriculum for EVERY subject is too much work for me!

I'd previously dismissed Song School Latin as too young for Willow, but when Sydney said that she, too, wanted to learn Latin, I checked it out again from the public library and decided that it actually would probably do just fine for the both of them. Yes, it is a little young, and no, it's not a companion to a formal grammar study, but it is an excellent introduction to the language, and a huge self-confidence builder for a future formal study.

So setting aside conjugations and declensions for a while, Willow and Sydney are both deep into the playful songs, conversational vocabulary, and tiny bit of cognate recognition of Song School Latin:


We cover one chapter a week (with a week every now and then devoted to review), with the girls adding that chapter's vocabulary to the memory work that they practice daily. Sometimes we simply drill the vocabulary, sometimes they choose to sing along with the chapter's songs for their vocabulary drill, and sometimes they just like to color in the current chapter's coloring pages while listening to songs from the entire CD.

And while they've been doing that, I've been scouring the Latin textbooks on Google Books. Because even though there isn't a wide variety of children's Latin textbooks NOW, well, children used to ALL study Latin, and there used to be lots of textbooks to teach them! And if there's one thing that I can tell you for sure, it is that the Latin language has not evolved between 1877 and now.

So although I'll probably move Sydney to a similar study of another language after we finish Song School Latin, I'm hoping that I can find an old-timey textbook with which to create a non-Momma-made formal Latin study for Willow to continue with afterwards.

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: