The Recent Lack of Posts is Due to...

...this:

It had to be done. The bathroom sink was duct taped to the wall, duct tape also covered the many broken and missing tiles behind the bathtub, the floor was just sad, and as I write, our contractor is cutting out and replacing most of those boards in the lower half of the bathroom, since they're apparently waterlogged and rotted, sigh.

See that spot in the middle, though? We're going to put a window back in that spot where a window clearly originally was. I'm pretty excited, because I like a bathroom with a window, and I like anything that gets a little more natural light into our dungeon-esque home. 

In the meantime, the girls and I have been doing library school, park school, Barnes & Noble school, and school basically anywhere that we can't hear hammering and thudding and rotten boards being ripped away from their foundation. It's actually working out well, though--we're focusing on pencil-and-paper work, which is easily transported, and so the girls have been really concentrating on learning cursive, using printed lessons from my StartWrite program, and catching up to grade level on the odd neglected math subject, using print-outs from my pdf copies of Math Mammoth. I'm using the chapter reviews as pre-tests, which allows me to assign just the necessary chapters, and so we've been having an interesting time with geometric solids, areas of rectangles, types of triangles, and polygons. 

I've got some fun hands-on enrichment activities for these subjects, though, which normally I would be interspersing with the pencil-and-paper work, but that will have to wait until we're doing school back at home, back at our big table, back with endless shelves of school supplies and art materials and reference works.

I mean, this bathroom will be done sometime soon.

Right?

Demonstrating the Commutative Property of Addition Using Cuisenaire Rods

We're doing a little unit on the properties of addition, since it's one of the categories in the Splash Math 3rd Grade app that Will's trying to zoom through and finish up before I download the fourth grade app for her.

I would like the girls to be able to define and understand each property of addition, so I downloaded and printed these properties of addition flash cards for the girls to memorize, and we're also doing several hands-on activities to demonstrate each property, such as this one, in which the girls used Cuisenaire rods to "prove" the commutative property of addition:

Using centimeter-gridded graph paper and our Cuisenaire rods (which are also counted in centimeters, so they match!), each kid illustrated and wrote one addition equation--

--and then illustrated and wrote its commutation right above or below it:

Using the graph paper and Cuisenaire rods, it's easy to see that each equation is equivalent.

This wasn't a surprise to the girls, of course, but rather something that they perhaps hadn't necessarily spent time thinking out for themselves, so they were happy enough to write out a few examples. I've got a couple more hands-on activities to demonstrate the property, and then we'll add the flash card to our Memory Work Binder, to be quizzed on and recited from a couple of times a week until it's old, old news.

Cursive

Willow learned to print at her Montessori school, and I didn't pay a lick of attention to the process--neither did anyone else, apparently, because even after years of practice her handwriting is still pretty miserable, with several letters constructed non-traditionally. My stubborn girl would never let me re-train her to print correctly now, but fortunately cursive is a fresh start for all of us:

In the school system, Will would have learned cursive last year, as a third grader, but I really, really hoped that an extra year of practice would give her tidy and lovely print handwriting. Haven given up that dream, however, we're starting off this year with the cursive lessons from our Startwrite software program for both kids-- 

Syd, a second grader, has lovely print handwriting, and is ready to learn cursive, too.

--focusing just as much on reading cursive as writing it, but now that we've gotten a few letters done, I can use the program to create copy pages for them, too.

I have to admit, it's giving me hope that Willow could have tidy and lovely cursive handwriting, at least!

Ground

My mother bought us this small, hand-operated wheat grinder for Christmas, and we're still figuring out what's fun to do with it:

Hand-ground gomasio makes for a good start!

Our Favorite Games Report: August 2013

Wanting some logic training for the girls but not finding anything packaged that I like, I've begun to consciously incorporate all kinds of puzzles and games into our days. Of course, we've always played puzzles and games, but bringing them also into our "work hours," not just our free time, has let us start playing together MUCH more often, as well as allowed the girls to feel free to explore more than just their very favorites.

Here's what we've been playing this month:

online Quiddler and Set

There's a new puzzle every day, and although Will and I don't play every single day, we do play most days.

Apples to Apples Junior

(Now that we've got the junior version, I can put the sexy cards back in the adult version that we've been using!)

The Settlers of Catan

We haven't gotten the hang of this game yet, but we're sticking with it.

 Now What?

(SUCH a great game for creativity and logic!)

Sorry

Although the rest of the family is so over this one, Sorry is ALWAYS Syd's choice!

 Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?

This one is a recent love. We tried playing it back when I first bought it around Christmastime, but it was too hard to hold the girls' attention. Since it had all its pieces, however, and since there's no price like a Goodwill price, I held onto it. 

At some point this month, on a nice afternoon when our plan was to take a couple of board games and Pandora radio on the ipad out to the picnic table by the chickens, Will chose this game again, probably because she'd forgotten how frustrated she'd been with it just a few months ago. She and I played it while Sydney watched and drew and fed stuff to the chickens, and this time, she loved it!

Key to the experience is that this time she was actually able to answer a couple of the questions--

"What city holds the Liberty Bell?"

"In what city did both the Second Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention convene?"

--and, since we had the ipad right there, whenever she was curious about a piece of trivia, we just looked it up! We looked up the details of and circumstances surrounding the United States' purchase of Alaska ("How can you just BUY a state?!?" she asked), and the Louisiana Purchase, and we watched several scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind so that both girls could see Devil's Tower--I think we'll also be able to see that one in person this summer on our dino dig road trip.

Some games are becoming a little tricky right now, because Will is growing interested in more complicated, multi-player games, like Settlers of Cataan and Axis and Allies, that just don't hold Syd's attention, but having the three of us play an hours-long game while leaving Syd out is also pretty impossible. We have tentative future plans with another family who has kids around the same ages as ours to have a dinner and game night, so that the older kids and at least a couple of the adults can try out a free kiddie D&D game that I found. If that works out well, perhaps it can become some sort of monthly family board game club!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Book Page Prints and a Lemonade Stand

a tutorial for crafting greeting cards using vintage book pages and bilateral symmetry

and a tutorial for making re-usable chalkboard signs

most particularly to use with the girls' now pimped-out lemonade stand

I'm not actually sure what they'll be selling--beaded necklaces, popcorn, and tries on their pegboard and metal screw Plinko game have all been considered--but they'll be open for business this weekend!

Quill Pens from Chicken Feathers

We have goose feathers and ink bottles in our homeschool/art supplies, and the girls play with them every so often. When Will asked to do quill pens this weekend, though, it was with one key difference. Syd wrote with a quill pen made from a goose feather--

--and Will wrote with a quill pen made from Fluffball, her chicken:

When Will asked to make a quill pen from one of Fluffball's glorious feathers that she'd found, I knew it would work, but I didn't realize how difficult it would be to create. I had anticipated teaching Will how to make the quill pen herself with her pocket knife, but the chicken feather had a far narrower, and thus stronger, interior channel, and thicker walls, it seemed, and I had to use a lot of force just to make the pen myself.

The final product, however, although more clumsily made than usual, worked just fine! Syd wrote a letter to a friend using her goose feather pen, and Will wrote out all her vital information--full name, birthday, age, grade, etc.--with her chicken feather pen.

Remember how I've told you on numerous occasions that my children have an absurdly poor memory for their vital information? Just this weekend, on their way to audition for the roles of the No-Neck Monsters in an IU student production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," (clearly a tale for another day!), we were going over audition etiquette and I said to them, "And what would you say if the director asks what grade you're in?", and they were both all, "I don't know." Well, they come by that poor memory honestly, because as they were working, Will asked me a question, and, only paying half attention as I replied while doing my own work, I said something about "since you're eight years old, blah blah blah." Several minutes later, a new thought occurred to me and I suddenly shouted, "Gah! You're NINE!!!" and hugged that protesting baby to my bosom in both joy and grief.

And that's what school is likely to look like at our house!