Magnets and Electricity and Play

What to do with a short school week following a long weekend that had both a grandparents' visit and a fashion show performance in it, and immediately prior to a ballet recital weekend?

We called this "project week," and we just went with it!

I strongly felt that both girls needed a relaxing week between two such full and stressful weekends (at least fashions shows and ballet recitals are stressful for ME!), so instead of regular school, with five subjects a day  and a list of assignments to complete and check off, every morning we took a tour through our house, and I reminded them of the [possibly absurd] number of activity books, kits, manipulatives, and games that we have everywhere, and that typically get ignored in favor of toy ponies, dolls, colored pencils, and the ipad. I asked them to fill some of their time with some of these choices, and I engaged with them while they played, helped with ready reference, pulled up related songs and videos and activities, and sometimes just hung out for the company.

Seriously, though, our ignored kids' stuff stash is ridiculous. In the living room we've got games like Settlers of Catan, Apples to Apples, Scrabble, Monopoly, and Quirkle. In the girls' bedroom they've got kits to make mosaics, model airplanes, a wooden catapult, plaster models of skeletons and volcanoes, and kid-painted toy animals. In the study there are paint-by-number sets, geography puzzles, logic puzzles, supplies for painting and sewing, how-to-draw books, and the microscope. In the basement are tennis rackets, roller blades, a rock tumbler, and woodworking tools. Outside are bicycles, jump ropes, a pogo stick, sand, gardening tools, softball equipment, and basketballs. And that's just what I pointed out on maybe one day.

Once I made it clear that we were going to settle down for a few hours with things that we didn't usually choose, it was fun to see what the girls did choose, and how much they liked it. For instance, Syd found a magnetism and electricity kit that had been a Christmas gift from her grandmother one year, and that I had actually forgotten about in favor of this other truly epic electricity kit that we also own.

But this particular little kit, although simpler, is SIMPLER, you know? Kid-friendly, and easy to put together and experiment with, and she had a fabulous time exploring with it:

We own a lot of magnets from a magnet unit that we did a while back, but it never occurred to me to mine this set for its all new-to-us magnets!

Remembering how poles work: Willow was able to explain this impromptu, but Syd needed the refresher of this play.

After Syd did this with the magnet set and her compass--

--I tried to find a Youtube video of a compass going crazy at the North Pole, but to no avail. Why are North Pole explorers and Arctic scientists not taking time out of their busy days to help me educate my child?!?

The electricity parts of the set were also simple, easy to put together, and with their lights and sirens and fans that you could hook up, they were tempting enough to lure Willow away from the internet-linked encyclopedia that she was exploring and into the play:

It was a happy morning well spent.

Winding Down

our last big to-do of the "school year":

Willow is an absolute saint who has spent a LOT of time sitting in auditoriums waiting for her sister.

a bevy of ballerinas--Syd is the fifth pair of legs from the left, next to the backwards kid

Although we school year-round, this week feels a deliciously lot like winding down for the year. With the spring recital, Saturdays are now free from ballet practice (although replaced by softball). Monday is a school holiday to celebrate a certain little girl's seventh birthday, and the day after that she'll be free to call herself a second grader. Most of the IU students will have left for the summer by then, so we'll have much of town and campus to ourselves. There will be a dinosaur party. We'll be taking a break from our long-standing Story of the World studies to do a unit on the Civil War, in preparation for seeing Gettysburg on our road trip next month.

And we'll be going on some road trips!

The summer will be filled with lots of breaks for road trips and day camps, and lots of math and science and art done en plein air, and lots of hiking and biking, some gardening and some butterfly hatching, and a ninth birthday and a dragon party. 

Are you ready? I'M ready!!!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Natural Food Coloring and Toy Charm Necklaces

a tutorial for charm necklaces made from the kids' small toys

and a review of India Tree food coloring

I'm now trying to no longer bake with our formerly dearly beloved Wilton food coloring, so it's good that Wilton has so many non-food uses, one of which turned out to be a weekend activity, as Matt and I got together in the basement to clean out the chest freezer, only to discover that one of the (many) reasons it was chock-full was that I had, months ago, set some giant ice molds in it to freeze and then forgot about them (or covered them up with whole chickens and hot dog buns). 

In other words...

It's giant colored ice mold time!

First the girls used up all the salt in the house--

--and then this happened:

It belatedly occurred to me that all that salt is probably bad for my shaggy garden. Remind me to blame this when I start complaining that nothing is growing right later this summer--it'll make for a good excuse. 

I Let My Kids Wear Makeup

Despite my own hang-ups about the outward manifestations of gender, the girls both see makeup as another form of art play, and they enjoy it as much as they used to (and still sometimes do) color on themselves with markers, only, since I never bought washable markers, makeup is much easier to wash away at bedtime.

Because I don't want the kids to associate makeup with "looking pretty," it was really important to me to find makeup in full color palettes, not just what's trendy right now. Specifically, Sydney wanted blue lipstick, which I found on etsy, and blue eyeshadow, which in itself wasn't too hard to find, but I also wanted the girls to have green eyeshadow, and orange eyeshadow, and purple and pink and black eyeshadow.

I did finally find excellent color palettes for makeup for the kids. For the eyeshadow, I ended up buying a SHANY eyeshadow palette, which yes, does have blue and green and orange and purple and pink and black. It ended up in the girls' Easter baskets, and I actually used it for the fashion show, too, blending red into pink above the black and silver glitter line that Syd's makeup artist put just above her eyelashes. I also bought the girls a set of eyeliner pencils, which turned out to be really too delicate and fussy for children to use, but I don't use makeup myself, so what do I know? Add to that one blush and all the body glitter that a kid could care to make for herself, and you've got yourself a pretty thorough makeup exploration set!

Although the kids do love to do themselves up like clowns with their makeup, I was feeling at a loss for any technique or tips to provide when they asked, since not only do I not wear makeup currently, but I've also never worn it--I don't even have the tips of a twelve-year-old self to pass on! Fortunately, one of my friends who has a teenage daughter told me that her kiddo, who is great with makeup, spends tons of time watching makeup tutorial videos on Youtube.

What the what?!?

Well, let's check it out!

Seriously, how cute is that? The kiddos do seem to enjoy copying some of the simpler tutorials, and I feel like they have, without making them feel like they have to be conventional, gotten them to have just a little bit lighter of a hand with the application:

Just a little bit, mind you.

And yes, their father and I do patiently sit for makeovers:

Yes, that IS a paintbrush. Only recently have I figured out that you have to buy special makeup brushes separately.

Considering that the girls ALSO have a thing for nail polish in funky colors--

--they are quite the colorful crew these days.

Trashion/Refashion Show 2013

It's been epic over here, y'all! Last weekend the littler kid and I finally, after rehearsals and dress rehearsals and practicing and tons of prep work, performed in the 2013 Trashion/Refashion Show. It's so hard to remember what you're supposed to be doing right as you pop onstage in front of all those lights and sounds and people, so I really encouraged the kid to practice her runway walk a LOT this year. She taped a mock runway with painter's tape right onto our living room floor, and practiced on it every single day, taking constructive criticism and Momma suggestions like a champ, and creating almost entirely by herself a perfect routine that involved her showing off the best features of her dress, holding her marks for the proper time, and memorizing the announcer's cues, all while staying energetic and happy toward the audience.

Seriously, that kid worked HARD.

I think she could see how well it paid off, though, as yep, she always knew her cues, and she always knew where to go and what to do there, and that kind of confidence feels good.

Perhaps partly because of all the practice, and partly because her grandparents had flown in from California to visit us that weekend, this is the year that the kid really seemed to grasp what a lot of work goes into being a runway model, and part of a major show like this. Not only did she miss her Science Fair for a dress rehearsal, but on the day of the show, while her grandparents, Matt, and the bigger kid built model rockets and launched them at the park, this littler kid and I were getting her hair and makeup done:

While the grandparents, Matt, and Willow hit golf balls on a driving range somewhere, the kid and I were waiting at the theater, doing yet another full-dress run-through, and waiting some more:

The entire time, the kid was deeply conscious of the fact that her dearly beloved grandparents were somewhere just out of reach, having loads of fun with her sister, and yet she was a great sport about it. She's got a killer game face, that kid.

One HUGE treat that made that weary time of waiting around at the theater a lot more bearable was the Bloomington Flight Club, which performed at the Trashion/Refashion Show and thus needed to practice their routine in that venue several times over the course of the day. I've never been to a Cirque do Soleil show, and I have NEVER seen anything like this before, and I (and everyone else hanging around in the theater!) was flat-out amazed by their performance:

It was just crazy stuff--climbing that silk, and tangling it around their feet to do some tricks, and winding it around them to do some other tricks, and then unraveling it and falling a long ways and yet still hanging on and everyone in the audience shouts "YAY!!!!" kind of stuff. Seriously, wow.

Eventually, though, we were backstage for real, with me trying to touch-up the kid's makeup and her being super picky about how she wanted it to look (Thank god for baby wipes!), and me putting my foot down about her definitely wearing the ton of red body glitter that we'd made together for the show and her changing her mind about wanting it and surreptitiously trying to wipe it off when I wasn't looking and me saying, "Dude, I can SEE the cloud of glitter at your feet," and her smiling and being like, "What?":

Meanwhile, in the audience:

The Skullduggery Pleasant love is VERY real!

The official Trashion/Refashion Show video will come out later (and will be shown off and on all year on local access TV, which makes me super happy, because back when we had cable a million years ago, local access was my favorite channel), but until then, I woo you with home videos of the event:

my favorite of the two Flight Club performances:

the runway walk:

As per usual, my kid was calm, cool, and collected, and I was so nervous for her that I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd had a heart attack or a stroke or something (well, maybe a *little* surprised, because I've been working hard on my health lately, but you get the idea). As I stood near the back of the theater, waiting to make sure that she made it safely up one aisle of the audience, then to meet her in the lobby and escort her back down the other aisle and through the stage door and backstage again, I experienced her runway walk completely differently. Also, completely incorrectly. When she first walked out onstage, I experienced her standing at her first mark FOREVER. I was sure that she'd missed her cue and was going to stand there like a rock the entire time! Foolishly, I even lost my head and began to wave "Come on!" gestures from the BACK of the DARKENED theater. I let out a deep breath when she finally began to move forward, and felt light-headed from apparently holding my breath for the entire time that she'd just stood there.

Yeah, that didn't happen at all the way that I experienced it. Even if you don't want to watch her entire walk, watch, like, the first five seconds, because that's all it takes for her to walk onstage, hit her first mark, wait for her cue, and then skip forward. That's also exactly how long it was supposed to take.

This is why she's the runway model, not me.

It was a great night, of course, but also a long night, and for the first time ever, the kid didn't want to stay through intermission and watch the second half of the show. She wanted to collect her congratulations--

--to change her clothes, to get the heck home, to take a shower, and to get into her jammies.

Interestingly, the kid's been saying that she might not want to do the fashion show next year. She thinks she might try roller derby when the bigger kid tries it in September, and is also considering not taking ballet again next year (although the fact that this is recital weekend, with MORE dress rehearsals and stage makeup and fancy hair and stress over missing uniform parts and a missed practice that was hidden on page 20 of a 25-page recital handout--seriously, WHO gives out a 25-page recital handout for a children's recital?). She's been saying that she's tired of going to ballet class on Saturdays, when she could be playing instead, and although that's kind of rich from a homeschooled six-year-old who spends the vast majority of each day in active, immersive, imaginary play, it's still her experience, and if that's how she feels, then that's how she feels.

Of course, the kid's not planning to quit all her previously cherished activities in order to go and live under a rock next year. It took about five minutes after we were all back home from the fashion show for each kid to ask me if they could learn how to do what they saw the Flight Club do. I did some research, and why, yes, the Flight Club DOES offer children's classes!

So after this horseback riding session, and after the softball season, and after the kids and I take a road trip to Connecticut and back, I promised them that I would sign them up for aerial silks classes. Perhaps next year, BOTH kids will be at the Trashion/Refashion Show--if not on the stage, then maybe 30 feet above it.

Animal Classification Using Crayon and Paint Wash Skeletons

The girls and I have been wending our way down to human biology (we actually wended to horses, but we started off intending to study humans) through the order of classification. My main goals for studying the order of classification as thoroughly as we have so far are to have the girls understand that each level of the order tells something important about the living thing (whether or not we quite understand what that thing is--order Perissodactyla, or the Odd-Toed Ungulates, for instance, has given me and Willow fits trying to figure it out: odd number of toes? Per limb or total? Oddly-shaped toes? Odd that they're called toes? The research continues!), and to have them memorize some key classification terms and what they mean--the class Mammalia, for instance, and knowing what a mammal is, or the infraclass Marsupialia, and what that means.

Hands-on learning always makes memorization easier (which is probably why the girls are having to work so hard to get their Latin vocabulary to stick), and so before completely settling down with horses for a while, I had the girls do a couple of research projects involving the classification of other animals.

We own a set of animal x-rays, and now we own a giant lightbox upon which we can look at them!

Willow and I placed a bunch of our animal x-rays on the lightbox at random, and then put a sheet of tracing paper over the entire lightbox, taping it snugly at the sides. I gave each of the girls a white crayon, and they used it to trace the skeletons of each of the animals:

You can see the white crayon if you look carefully.

On a different day, Sydney watered down some black BioColor paint, and the girls painted a black wash over the skeletons on the tracing paper. This made the skeletons stand out really well, although it took a couple of tries to get the paint to the right consistency--too thin, and it just soaks through the paper without leaving much color; too thick, and it covers the paper and the crayon, too.

I hung the giant painting out on the laundry line (and then on the shower curtain rod when it started to rain) to dry, and on a different day we used it to inspire a research project.

I had the girls choose their favorite skeleton from the painting, cut it out, and spray mount it to a large piece of construction paper:

Spray mount is FUN!

The animal x-rays set also includes photos of the living animal that each skeleton belongs to, and its name, so next the kiddos matched their skeleton to its animal, drew the animal--




--and then researched its classification. Normally, I encourage the girls to use Encyclopedia Britannica for their reference questions, but Wikipedia has this great feature of including the entire order of classification for each living creature that has an article about it on their site:

Each level also includes a link, so it's pretty amazing. The girls copied the order of classification for their animal--

--and then together we went through that order, clicking on each level in Wikipedia to learn more about that type. Kingdom Animalia and Order Chordata are reviews, because we've already studied what makes an animal and what a spinal cord does, but it was fun to see what Class Reptilia comprises, and then narrow it down to Order Squamata, which is just the lizards and the snakes, and then we go down to Family Iguanidae, which is just the iguanas, and so on and so on:

Although the girls LOVED this activity, and I thought that it had a lot of value in improving their understanding of animal classification, we actually didn't do this for the horses that we're now studying, simply because we don't have any horse x-rays!

What we DO have, however, are the real-live Cody and Lola, the horses that Syd and Will ride during their weekly horseback riding lessons. And though there aren't as many hands-on projects for studying horse anatomy as there are for, say, human anatomy, it turns out that having a real-live horse buddy to think about when memorizing parts, or talking about classification, is just about the best thing ever.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Cupcake Flags and Earth Day Crafts

a round-up of kid-friendly, no-prep, stash-only Earth Day crafts

and a tutorial for making re-usable scrap fabric cupcake flags:

Yes, there is a dinosaur-themed party in our future. Sydney has decided that she wants her seventh birthday party to be a dinosaur party (AND a surprise party, which I had expected, since she's never stopped talking about her half-birthday surprise party of a year and a half ago).

I've got a Dinosaur Party Pinboard up, and I'm continually updating it with ever-more-ambitious projects--volcano cupcakes! Miniature watermelon dinosaur eggs!--as well as some brand-new ideas that I'd have to be crazy to attempt. Could I REALLY prepare ten plaster of Paris volcanoes for children to paint and erupt as a party activity? Should I REALLY conceal each child's party invitation in a papier mache dinosaur egg that must be cracked open to get to it? 

Do I REALLY have that much time, not to mention silliness, to expend in the next few weeks? I suppose we'll find out...