My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: T-shirts!

a tutorial for altering a T-shirt to make it smaller

and a tutorial for altering the neckline of a T-shirt

After a long winter in which I felt particularly unwell much of the time, I started, this spring, to work towards getting healthier. Most of my efforts have involve getting more exercise and losing weight; I'm not particularly vain, nor am I size-conscious, but I just wasn't feeling good, and it's not rocket surgery to blame the 50 pounds that I've gained since my first pregnancy.

I've been tracking my food using MyFitnessPal and my exercise using BodyMedia, because I don't do well with guesswork, and I've been able to lose 23 pounds so far without actually that much stress or fuss; I wonder if I would have started getting healthier sooner if I'd known how different the options are from that first crash diet that I was put on back in the sixth grade. That first experience is the one that makes me feel kind of panicky and upset still if I get too hungry 25 years later, so there's absolutely none of that nonsense now. No tiny little kitchen scale, no tuna, no English muffins--Weight Watchers in the 1980s was a piece of work, I'll tell you that.

My major focus, though, is the amount of healthy exercise that I'm trying to get each day. I wear a BodyMedia armband that tracks it, which is often the main thing that gets me back on the treadmill for another fifteen minutes after dinner, because I want to meet my activity goals, or gets me to that Wednesday morning cardio class, because my armband reads it as "vigorous" activity. I'm teaching myself to run, even though I don't love it and I am definitely the slowest runner on the planet, and I've finally gotten the girls used to the idea that every trip to the park must also include the .8-mile trek AROUND the park, as well.

And so now I have a bunch of clothes that don't fit! I actually am not in love with that fact, because I don't like to shop, and when I do shop, I like to shop second-hand. And second-hand is NOT the way to go when you need a new wardrobe of pants right this minute. I actually had to go to Target last weekend to buy a pair of pants. I am looking forward to altering, modding, and reworking all my T-shirts, though.

But the big question... Yes, I feel SO much better today than I did six months ago. Just in general, I feel so much better! How great is that?

Star Wars at the Indiana State Museum

A few weeks ago, we trekked up to the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis to get our nerd on at their traveling exhibit, Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination:

It featured actual props and costumes used in the films.

Squee.

Darth Vader is choking them with his mind, you see.

 

There were also detailed models that were filmed super-close-up as the real, giant ships:

Sydney is bigger than a Jawa!

I am NOT as big as a sand person:

Shudder.

I'm also not as big as a Wookie--

--but that's okay. They like me anyway.

Yoda likes me a lot, too:

The science aspects of the exhibit came through a series of hands-on stations, from stuff that we'd done before but were happy to do again, such as traveling on compressed air--

--("It's pneumatic!" she said!), to amazing experiences that we had never before had. I'm a hands-on museum aficionado, I tell you, and these activities floored me. The kids interacted with computers and real-life manipulatives to create virtual spaces:

They compiled robots from parts and put them through various scenarios to evaluate their performances. They built models to succeed in challenging structural conditions. And, coolest of all, they used LEGOs to build electromagnetically powered hover cars:

Remember how museums never stock what I want to buy? I'd have bought myself one of those hovercar kits, that's for damn sure.

I've been really thinking about encouraging the maths and hard sciences with my girls this year, thanks in no small part to this exhibit. Now that Syd's older, I think that this would be a great year to accelerate their math and get them going on some engineering, physics, and programming projects.

Perhaps we WILL be making electromagnetic hovercars...

Pill Bugs under the Microscope

Did you know that pill bugs aren't insects?

I didn't know that, not until we covered pill bug anatomy for the kids' summer animal portfolio unit.

Say what you will about pill bugs, they're an easy, accessible, sturdy critter to catch and study and release. Butterflies are so much lovelier, but you've got to be so gentle with them, or take their tattered wings upon your soul. You've got to be gentle with pill bugs, too, of course, but anything that will roll up into a ball and let you roll it around in the palm of your hand is alright by me!

To study pill bug anatomy, I printed out an anatomical diagram of pill bugs from Enchanted Learning for the kids to color--

--and then I sent them outside to collect some lucky pill bugs, so that we could match the diagram to their real, live anatomy. I swear, this Brock Magiscope is one of my absolute favorite homeschool supplies:

The Magiscope works really well with both flat and 3D specimens, so we can just set a pill bug up on top of a slide, and let it hang out and crawl around while we find its jointed legs and uropods and cephalothorax and all that good stuff:

This pill bug is fine--a kid tipped it upside-down to get a look at its jointed legs.

No pill bugs were harmed during this science project, although a great many were annoyed.

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

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!