History of the Video Game Unit Study: LEGO Marble Mazes

The girls and I are at the very beginning stages of our History of the Video Game unit study.

We're so early into it that we haven't even started studying video games yet!

The pre-history of video games involves portable tabletop games--primarily bagatelle, a sort of mini pool table with obstacles. That game was turned into a game of chance called baffle ball by tilting it and adding a plunger, and letting the balls fall into various pockets. Games of chance, however, are also easily made into games of gambling, and to sidestep the backlash against gambling, baffle ball added flippers, turning it into a game of skill called pinball.

Also involved in the prehistory are jukeboxes and the invention of the computer, but for now, we're beginning at the beginning: tabletop games of skill and/or chance.

So we built one!

Using a LEGO base plate as the base of the maze, first build up a wall of LEGOs around the perimeter of the plate, and then create a maze for a marble to navigate:

It's the simplest of projects, and the girls were enthralled:

Both of them re-built their maze over and over, re-running the marble through it to explore different layouts and strategies, and Sydney has come back to it daily over the past week or so. She's discovered that a maze might be simple going one direction and difficult going the reverse direction, she's discovered that you can amp up the challenge by adding two marbles, and she's gotten out our drilled wooden marble maze blocks to explore different ways that gravity can move marbles through a path.

I must make a note to take her to the Wonderlab this week--they have an inclined LEGO base plate and a big bucket of LEGOs set up in their water exploration area so that you can run water down the base plate and dam it up or make channels for it with LEGOs. I admit that I'VE spent plenty of time playing with that brilliant toy!

DIY Clay Rings from The Sparkle Factory

Futzing around with clay is a big pastime around here. The girls like it enough that I've occasionally considered signing them up for a pottery class, but ugh--scheduling! I HATE scheduling extracurriculars! I can't believe that I used to actually gripe that my kids never wanted to try anything new; now they want to try ALL. THE. THINGS, and I gripe about having to either deny them opportunities or overschedule our precious free time.

Anyway...

We were talking about futzing with clay. A publicist sent me a free copy of The Sparkle Factory, and the girls and I have spent a surprising amount of time in the last week playing with the surprisingly addictive process of making clay rings, using the tutorial from the book.

It looks a little like this:

And then you have this!

My ring is pretty sedate--

--but the girls' rings are AMAZING! 

Sydney's ring has a top embellished with clay discs.

Willow's ring has an embedded crinoid fossil!

The project has inspired us, as we've since crafted bracelets, pendants, beads, and other little trinkets, all from our Sculpey stash. I have plans to see if our cat paw prints that we usually do in salt dough would work equally well in this medium, too.

Would the chickens tolerate having their footprints made in clay, I wonder?

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Winners and Chair Covers

the winner of the Soaps to Live by giveaway

and a tutorial for DIY chair covers

otherwise known as the cat's new favorite place to sleep

Ideally, I'll make two sets of these--one to wash and one to wear. This project, of course, joins the to-do list of imaginary things that will never be completed, such as just one more set of cloth napkins, a guest set of cloth napkins, a guest set of felted wool Mason jar cozies, the second set of mattress pads...

Backyard Archery

Will's Lil' Banshee bow only has an 18lb draw, but it's just about too much for her.

Thank goodness for a patient Daddy!

He helps her draw her bow Every. Single. Time, and has an attention span for it that's at least 20 minutes longer than mine.

Because we need more weird things to do in our yard? I guess the hay bale target can live next to the chicken tractor and the DIY aerial silks rig.

The Prismacolor Completist

Yes, this is crazy:

We really, REALLY like Prismacolor colored pencils and markers. Even though the girls and I, at least, aren't the professional artists that they're marketed to, we quickly stole for ourselves and rarely let Matt use the complete sets of each that we bought for him several holidays ago.

Well, they *used* to be complete sets...

The girls are reasonably careful about where they use our really quality art supplies, but they do get taken outside, they do get dropped, they do get forgotten mid-project and abandoned with caps left off markers, etc., and so our supplies have dwindled. Since we're going to be putting a special emphasis on art instruction this semester, however, and since Drawing With Children emphasizes quality art materials, I downloaded coloring pages of the complete sets of the Prismacolor markers and colored pencils, and then went through our stock, testing all the markers, sharpening all the colored pencils, recording each one on its page, and then re-purchasing the missing, too-short, or dried-out ones.

We've already got a great set of chalk pastels, we love our Crayola and Stockmar crayons, I need to re-stock the acrylic paints but Drawing with Children doesn't use them so it's not an emergency, and we've got plenty of cardstock and drawing paper and watercolor paper and Bristol board and newsprint.

I think we're all set!

Hamster Study

The section of the girls' animal biology portfolio inspired by hamsters (this sweet Russian dwarf hamster, in particular) has been more challenging to put together than, say, our sections on butterflies or frogs or horses. I'd assumed that since hamsters are fairly popular classroom pets there would be tons of children's material about them, but nay. There's a lot online for university students who use hamsters in science experiments (shudder), and several hobby sites, so the girls and I have done a lot of... cobbling.

For the order of classification, we always go to Wikipedia, which has each animal's complete order of classification, hyper-linked, in a sidebar at the top right of the entry. The girls and I always follow each link and discuss it all the way down--it's a terrific way, I think, to internalize the way that the order narrows down at each level so that you start, each time, with a group that includes every animal in the world and end, each time, with a group that includes only your exact one animal (unless you're interested in breeds, of course, which we discuss more with cats and chickens).

The realistic drawing of each animal is easy, too, since the girls' portfolio only includes animals that they have direct physical access to and have cared for at some point this summer:

feeding China a pea pod to lure her over

On a drawing-related tangent: We've got everything we need (thanks to a friend who regularly stalks our public library's book-sale space and scored me a copy of the book!) to start Drawing With Children! Perhaps next week?

For each girl's report on the hamster, I gave them access to the following resources:



In addition, the kids really liked these fun books as pleasure reading:



Since we didn't have China long enough to create a maze or toys for her (via my poor, dis-used hamster pinboard!), the girls' creative project for the hamster will probably be either a book report of one of these fiction books or a story of their own.

For anatomy, I combined the hamster anatomy printable from Enchanted Learning with a far better hamster drawing found on Google Images--the girls colored the better drawing, then copied the labels from the Enchanted Learning printable, then identified those parts on their real hamster. None of the anatomy is obtuse, and there's nothing to memorize (unlike with horses--geez!), but the girls had a lot of fun and said a lot of things like, "Awww, look at her teeny wittle earies!"

We didn't watch any hamster birthing videos (oh, those horse foaling videos!), and the hamster life cycle business, in general, is less involved than the creatures we studied who undergo metamorphosis, so for their hamster life cycle study, I printed all the photos of a baby hamster's day-to-day development from this hamster forum, then asked the girls to paste them to a poster and label them--it will take some creative folding to get that into their portfolios!

The girls SUPER want a hamster of their own, now, but I don't know--a hamster's lifespan is so short, and I really don't want to deal with a dead hamster two years from now.

But our animal shelter does often have pet rats... I wonder how long they live?

Aerial Silks, at School and Home

The kids who've been doing this in class this summer--

--have been doing this all summer at home:

Some of it is actual "practice" for silks class, I suppose--

--but it turns out there are lots of creative ways to channel that new confidence:

Not only are the girls growing stronger and, in Sydney's case, working through some of her perfectionism (She didn't even throw a fit after her last class!), but they've also really been inspired to experiment with the physics of bodies and fabric. That DIY swing was probably inspired by the silks, and I've grown accustomed to bringing along that one six-foot-long play silk every time we go to the park. The kids have found all-new things to tie that silk to--I've seen them thread it through the zip line and then knot it into a seat, mount it to the monkey bars and use it to swing from one end to the other, hold it at the top of the slide so that the other kid can use it to climb up, hand-over-hand, and put it to countless other very useful uses.

This one play silk is getting so much use that I've bought a few 12-foot-long play silks to dye and add to their collection--I can't wait to see what they do with all that extra length! If they stay interested in aerial silks, perhaps an entire DIY aerial silks rig is warranted...