Spooky Windows

We've got a little bit of Halloween zest going on at last:

Ignore the dirty windows, because that's all on the outside, and I just do not have the desire to haul my butt up on a stepladder with a spray bottle and a squeegee so I can show you cute windows (also, the last time I did that, the girls somehow had the windows smudged within the hour, and it broke my heart). Anyway, our decorations consist of kite paper papel picado from The Toymaker (printed onto cardstock at 1/4 size, then traced and cut out), kirigami spiderwebs from Omiyage Blogs, and bats from our own imagination, crafted with bilateral symmetry in mind. 

Here we've got more bats, a hand-colored cardstock papel picado pennant, and a kite paper spider from Green Baby Guide.

And now, as I write this, Will has twice mentioned that she'd be happy to wash the outside windows for me. Of course, this means that I have to drag the ladder out of the garage and over to the front windows, set it up, collect the gear and set it out, do the top panes of the windows myself since she can't reach them even with the ladder, then drag that ladder back to the garage when she's done, but the result, whether or not I feel like throwing a bag of sandwich bread at the girls for dinner and then passing out when I'm done, will be clean front windows...

... at least for an hour.

Work Plans for the Week of October 14

It's a week busy with non-school stuff, and so a more boring, but nevertheless productive, school week:


MONDAY: Nothing too new in memory work this week--the girls are on H/I in cursive, spelling will continue through our homeschool group's Spelling Bee (after which I might drop it for a few months, since we're pushing it so hard now), they've just begun to memorize the multiplication tables, and last week's Drawing with Children work was so frustrating for Will that we're going to keep doing that same work this week instead of moving on with the next lesson. But we're starting back up with the Song School Latin book this week, at least, with a review of the previous chapters that we've studied--next week we get a new chapter!

I've got a lot of useful, fun hands-on math activities planned, but this week is SO hectic that I'm not doing them; instead, the kiddos are just going to plug away at their Math Mammoth, a work that they can do here at home, or at the library (where we'll be at least three times this week), or at the doctor's office (once), or at the dentist (once). Well, instead of Math Mammoth on Monday, Syd's got a cute clock book to put together--maximizing those early reading skills, doncha know?--but other than that, it's away they plug! At least they'll be plugging away when they're not at a public library nature craft program or our weekly volunteer gig, both of which we'll also be doing on Monday.

TUESDAY: Not only do we have a hectic week planned, but Matt was gone for about half a week at some sort of conference for graphic designers at university alumni magazines (Hunh, that sounds totally fake now that I'm writing it down...), so we've been a little off kilter and stressed for a few days now, and to alleviate that the girls and I have done a TON of craft projects! Seriously, we've rolled beeswax candles, and cut Halloween decorations out of kite paper, and painted glass jar luminaries, and decoupaged tissue paper squares onto more glass jars, and colored, and sketched onto scratch paper, and that's just like a day and a half worth of projects. So for one of our Tuesday schoolworks, I'm going to hand off to the girls a cool book that I was given to review, half journal and half paper crafts book, to see if anything strikes their fancy. Actually, Will might learn a magic trick instead of working with this book, since she asked me if she could do magic for school this week but I forgot to put it on the schedule, so just consider this spot the place for some hands-on extra-curricular activity.

Science is staying on track, however. We're finally ready to start human biology, and we're beginning with our traditional starting point--a sketch and an order of classification.

WEDNESDAY: I've planned for the girls to spend most of the day with a friend, mostly to score some free babysitting so I can get to the dentist for a cleaning and check-up, so it's just math, memory work, a couple of fun things, and aerial silks for Will.

THURSDAY: Thursday seems to be the day we've settled on as good for our ongoing projects--Will's History of Video Games unit study, Syd's cookbook project, etc. The girls just spent the past several Saturdays at a fabulous science program run by the IU School of Education, and I'd like to incorporate some more enrichment in the subjects that they studied into our week. Will's class studied light and sound, which is why we've been playing with pinhole cameras and doing 3D drawings; hopefully next week I'll also be able to incorporate some activities from Syd's classroom studies of the earth and sky.

That will have to be the morning's work, however; Thursday afternoons belong to our homeschool group's park playgroup, and Thursday evening is the long-anticipated, much prepared for Biography Fair. I'm sure the girls' presentations on Jules Verne and Harry Potter will be just masterful.

FRIDAY: The girls have some correspondence to catch up on, which is always good for practicing their handwriting and composition skills, and they've also got some scrapbooking to do, this time of our trip to The Crayola Experience in Easton, Pennsylvania. We'll listen again to the audio chapters that we've covered in Story of the World, and go over the quiz questions again, hopefully to start a new chapter next week.

Will caught a peek at my Halloween Pinterest board, and is VERY interested in making the candy corn cake that she saw there, so we'll set aside some time on Friday to make a few different Halloween-themed treats, all measured and mixed and baked by the girls. Nothing like baked goods as a bribe to master fractions!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I am going to REST next weekend, after working my butt off without Matt around THIS weekend! I am definitely sending him and the girls to Read to a Dog and chess club without me, and at this rate, I may send them to the apple orchard without me as well. They can spend the day there and take pictures and play on the hay bales and bring me my bushel of apples and the kids' Jack-o-lanterns and the pie pumpkins without me, and I just may stay in the bath all day, a hard cider in one hand and a Doctor Who novel in the other.

Drawing with Children

We've begun! I've been wanting to start Drawing With Children with the kiddos for a VERY long time now, and we're all really excited about it. We've been doing it for a few weeks now, but are moving sloooowly, trying to build up Will's confidence (I don't know why, but she's convinced herself that her sister is the "artist" between the two of them, and has no patience for her own work yet). We spent one day testing out every paper and marker in the house to decide what we'd be working with--

We've chosen Blick newsprint, black fine point Sharpies, and Prismacolor double-ended markers.

 --another day copying and practicing the five shape families--

--and now we're going to spend a few weeks doing the recommended warm-up exercises as part of our daily mental work, until we're very familiar with using the materials and copying and creating the five shape families; I download and print endless copies of these blank masters of the warm-up exercises (Thank you, Mama Jenn!) for us to use. Through this week, I had been asking Matt to create the key for each of the exercises, but even with him trying to keep it simple, Will got pretty frustrated (her sister's work was BETTER, she insisted, despite my repeated reminders there is no self-loathing nor judgmentalism in Drawing with Children).

So for next week, I think that I'll have each child create the key figure for her sister's pages. Despite what Will thinks, they're both at the same skill level, so they shouldn't be able to over-challenge each other, and then they'll be doing different work, so there's no direct comparison necessary.

And once they can each do a week of warm-ups without tears, perhaps we can move on to an actual lesson!

I Don't Know...

...nor do I want to know, really.

At least they're not rolling in the dirt punching each other.

McCormick's Creek, and our New Spinal Cord

Whichever way you leave our town, you'll probably be passing a state park before too long.

That makes it awfully convenient, whether you're coming or going, to take a little detour, wave your parks pass, and play for an hour or two (or three. Or four...).

That's how, on our way back from the Exotic Feline Rescue Center last week, we passed right by the entrance to McCormick's Creek State Park, figured, "Well, while we're here...", and soon found ourselves hiking down to the waterfall:

The children SWEAR they spotted a beaver (although I'm pretty sure it was actually a groundhog), but they definitely found a spinal cord:

You know we took that bad boy home!

Of course, a state park is always a place to get your nerd on and do some learnin':

We are well-acquainted with our history as prehistoric inland sea, and the exact types of fossils that you do and don't find when you used to be one.

 We did some bird-watching (or not...)--

--and we found some!

Hmmm, should this count in our Year of Zoos?

I didn't bring enough food for a big cat tour AND a half-day of woodsin', so we hit the McCormick's Creek playground for a few minutes, then hauled back home for sandwiches and applesauce and veggies n' rice.

Next time: Wolf Cave, definitely. The Fire Tower. The Habitat Hike!

Homeschool Math: Time-Telling Addition and Recording Activity

Will LOVES dice (In her free time, she and I roll D&D characters for her, so yeah... dice), so to help her learn those pesky time-telling skills that seem so non-intuitive in this age when analog clocks are NOT ubiquitous, I created this activity in which she can "roll" a time the way she rolls a D&D character:

You will need:

• a blank six-sided die
• a 12-sided die
• (optional) a 10-sided die or a 20-sided die
• some blank clock face pages

On the blank six-sided die, I took a black Sharpie and wrote the following times:

1. :00
2. :10
3. :20
4. :30
5. :40
6. :50

OPTIONAL: To make this easier, make yourself a blank four-sided die (you could print a triangular pyramid net onto cardstock, then assemble it), and label it like this:

1. :00
2. :15
3. :30
4. :45

The easiest way to have a kid roll a time is to give her the 12-sided die and the six-sided die. Let her roll both at the same time, and use the 12-sided die to record the hour and the six-sided die to record the minutes.

To practice telling time to the minute, roll a 12-sided die, a six-sided die, and a 10-sided die. Use the 12-sided die to record the hour, then add the 10-sided die to the six-sided die to record the minutes.

To practice telling time to the minute AND mental two-digit arithmetic, roll a 12-sided die, a six-sided die, and a 20-sided die:

Use the 12-sided die to record the hour, then add the 20-sided die to the six-sided die to record the minutes:

To practice calculating elapsed time, do this twice, then figure out the elapsed time between the two.

Then, to see if you REALLY learned it, teach Daddy! 

Will can do all of this pretty handily now, and it actually is paying off, in that she can tell the time at the public library and our weekly volunteer gig, the only two places that we visit that have analog clocks on display. 

I guess I'm now on the lookout for a secondhand analog clock!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Homemade Crackers and Halloween

a round-up of recycled Halloween crafts

and a tutorial for my favorite multi-seed dehydrated crackers

I made two trays of these yesterday, incorporating the raw pumpkin seeds from a pie pumpkin that I chopped up and baked in the crock pot. Today, I'm going to puree that pumpkin, freeze it into two-cup portions, and thus begins the season of autumn baking!