My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Paper Boats and Handmade Cards

a review of Uncommon Cards and the get-well-soon card that I made

and a tutorial for waterproofing origami boats using melted beeswax 

That crock pot of beeswax has been on and off all week so far, with no sign that I'll be able to sneak it away and pack it up anytime soon. But with the scent of that beeswax from the living room and the apples cooking down into applesauce in the kitchen, autumn is smelling yummy right now!

Work Plans for the Week of November 11, 2013: Project Week!

Identical work plans for both kids:
And the list of projects!

We have reached a critical build-up of checked out library materials, disastrously close to a cross-country trip to California that we're planning later this month. Combine that with a bunch of projects that the girls kept coming up with last week ("Momma, can I learn to sew sometime soon?" "Momma, I wish that I knew how to solder."), and we've got a project week this week!

In perfect sneaky Montessori-style, there are kid picks and Momma picks for each day--the kid picks are how I'm apparently going to teach Will to solder this week (Wish me luck!) and trace out a simple fleece pants pattern to walk Syd through (No hemming!) and supervise the making of chocolate mousse meringue pie (Yum!!!), and the Momma picks are how we're finally going to get those animal biology portfolios bound, and that record album clock numbered, and those get-well-soon cards written before Mr. Dale does, in fact, get well.

Another project I'll be interested in seeing if they choose is this bird bath business. We have a gorgeous blue sink in the garage, one that I bullied Matt into picking up off of the side of the road YEARS ago so that "we can make a bird bath with it!" Every now and then one of the kids will bring up that stinkin' sink and gripe that we haven't made our bird bath yet, so when Will brought it up yet again at our family meeting on Sunday, I put the dang thing on the project list. Just between you and me, I am completely over any plans that I once had to build an upcycled sink bird bath, but if a kid picks it off the list, then a bird bath we will build!

We'll be keeping up our same memory work this week, and I'm sneaking in a bunch of extra Math Mammoth as a break from all the hands-on projects. I'm also going to be processing the couple of bushels of apples in our kitchen, and hopefully getting some Crafting a Green World posts scheduled before our trip.

And by this time next week, we'll be back on schedule with our last full week of school before Thanksgiving vacation, happy with a pared-down to-do list and a reasonably populated library shelf.

Pattern Block Math Play

I like to make one of our math units each week involve some concept that we're not currently studying. Sometimes it's a cool, big project, sometimes it's a small game or puzzle, sometimes it's something that connects to some OTHER subject that we're studying  (Ancient Egypt is great for math!), and sometimes it's simply something that involves one of our school materials that we haven't pulled out in a while.

For the past few weeks, for instance, that unit has been all about the pattern blocks:

We all love pattern blocks--they're so colorful and pretty and fun to play with!--but until recently, I never really had the variety of uses for them that would cause them to regularly appear in our school work. I mean, with Cuisenaire rods and Base 10 blocks and number tiles you can do addition and subtraction and multiplication and division and fractions and so on, but we only ever pulled out pattern blocks for patterning, symmetry, and fun.

But now that I've focused in on pattern blocks, I've discovered that there are PLENTY of other mathy uses for them. Most of the resources that I've been using come from our university's education library--

--in particular, this pattern blocks logic/math book that we've settled into:

The kids have been practicing some really great logic and problem solving skills using the activities in this book, especially Will, who's not naturally a visual learner:

This task in particular, which required them to fill each shape with exactly seven pattern blocks, frustrated and stumped her long after Syd had blithely breezed through it:

I know I shouldn't have helped her at all, because it was well within her capabilities, but I did suggest just once that perhaps that bigger block could be made up from two smaller blocks to increase the number of total blocks, and I was frankly amazed when she actually took my suggestion with good grace, and then ran with it, zipping through the remaining shapes. Perhaps that success will give her better stamina for the next project, so that I won't even feel tempted to help her.

At some point I splurged on paper pattern blocks and a set of pattern block stencils, so to finish up each activity I always ask the girls to either paste their solution on or trace and copy it on--they like it, and it makes it look nice for their math portfolio.

Fortunately, the IU Libraries have LONG check-out periods, so if the girls seem bored with pattern blocks in a few weeks we can take a break and still keep the book for when they seem fun again. I've also got a couple of DIY projects in mind for patterny block manipulatives, and I put a bunch of pattern block ideas into my Homeschool Math: Geometry pinboard. Next up, though: we're doing fractions in Math Mammoth right now, and it turns out that pattern blocks also make great fraction manipulatives!

A Child's First Comment Card

My kids have opinions. They have opinions about local, state, national, and international politics. They have opinions about city infrastructure.They have opinions about how people should behave. They have many, many, many opinions about their parenting.

It's important to me that the kids feel like active citizens, and that their opinions have weight in the ongoing conversation (even when I later talk them out of them, as when Will decided for a while that she was a Libertarian), so I've been encouraging them to participate. Will, for instance, has MANY opinions about the parking meters that were recently installed our downtown.

Negative opinions. She hates them. Loathes them, primarily because paid downtown parking has severely curbed our "Let's just stop by the public library for a bit!" habit, since Matt and I have a game going to see how long we can go before feeding a downtown parking meter with quarter #1. To be fair, the library does have a small free lot attached to it, and there is IU parking a few blocks away that we can use, AND we only live a mile from the library so we can walk or bike to it easily, but nevertheless, the first time that we swung by the library after horseback riding, couldn't find a spot in the free lot, didn't have our parking tag for the IU lot, and I drove us on home instead, Will was OVER the parking meters.

Since that incident, Will got into the habit of reading the articles concerning the parking meters, and even more so the often hilarious and/or vituperative letters to the editor, in our local newspaper. She decided to blame the whole thing on the mayor, Mark Kruzan, and began to refer to him derisively as Mayor Croissant to insult him. AND she began to shout things like, "I'm going to toast, butter, and eat that Mayor Croissant for this!" whenever we couldn't find free downtown parking.

We live in a small-ish town, and I began to frankly fear that we'd run into the mayor socially, and Will would insult him to his face and possibly terroristically threaten to toast and eat him, so I decided to offer her another outlet, one that requires socially acceptable language (debatable, but still...) and certain polite conventions (VERY debatable, but still...).

And that's how Will wrote her first letter to the editor of our paper.

It was a great letter. She worked super hard on it, especially for a kid who despises writing by hand, and wrote the entire thing actually legibly and correctly spelled on a sheet of yellow legal pad, which I dutifully mailed in. She unfortunately name-dropped ME as the person who won't pay a single quarter to park downtown, and even more unfortunately spun out her personal conspiracy theory that Mayor Kruzan (whom she thankfully referred to by his real name) only instigated the parking meters because his pet parking garage project turned out to be a money sink (this may have some truth in it, but I do not know how she figured it out), but all-in-all, it was an excellent argument with a clear chain of reasoning and logical conclusions.

If only the stinkin' paper had published it! I don't know if they couldn't decipher her handwriting, or don't publish the opinions of children, but I was pretty pissed for Will's sake that it never appeared. Ah, well...

Syd, now--Will's opinions are generally pretty political in nature, but Syd's more concerned with keeping the trains running on time. This girl loves to figure out how things should work better, and it was all her idea to snag a comment card from the public library and explain to them what their next project should be:

At least this is a sign that she finally knows how to tell time, right?

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Comic Book Wallpaper and Felt Wizard Hats and Pumpkin Projects and My Bra

As a testament to how busy we've been over the past couple of weeks, I've been totally forgetting to show off to you what I've been up to with my other writing gig, so here's the catch-up:

I used comic books as wallpaper

I collected Thanksgiving-friendly ideas for leftover Halloween pumpkins

My kid and I made her a witch hat out of felt

And I altered my bra to fit better

I'm particularly proud of that last project, since a great-fitting bra is VERY important to me, and also very hard to keep up with during my slow but steady weight loss. This alteration should keep this particular bra working well for a while longer, although I am eventually going to need to buy a bra with a smaller cup size.

Poor Matt is horrified.

Halloween 2013

We may have celebrated a day late (the mayor postponed our entire city's trick-or-treating hours because it was storming, complete with tornado watches and flood warnings, on the Big Day), but it was, nevertheless, just as wonderful a celebration as any little kids, particularly ones costumed as a witch and a cat, could want:

The girls received an absurd amount of candy from our generous neighbors (and, as is obligatory this many years in, they managed AGAIN to trick-or-treat at one house of college students who'd forgotten to buy candy. They instead received PopTarts!):

As of right now, Will has eaten all of that ridiculous amount of candy (well, her father and I helped a LOT, but she doesn't know that...), and Syd finally got sick of it last night and asked if the Switch Witch could take it. She did, and replaced the remains of the stash with some Hot Wheels, which have become VERY popular around here of late.

(Nota bene: I told the kids about the Switch Witch as a joke, as we were driving home from Will's ice skating class on Halloween, the kids absolutely vibrating with excitement as they could already see costumed children on the streets. I was SHOCKED when Syd requested it last night, and even more shocked when she said that she might want to do the Switch Witch on Halloween night next year! If she does do that, I must remember to have a larger present than four Hot Wheels cars on hand...)

So we are now, officially, once again candy-free! I'm pretty thrilled, since the weeks of Halloween festivities were not kind to my healthy eating plans (I'm 30 lbs down from April, if you don't count the last two weeks, which I don't), and now I can get my head back in the game...

...at least until Thanksgiving.

Work Plans for the Week of November 4, 2013

MONDAY: We possibly over-extended ourselves today, since I assigned our usual amount of work even though we're not just volunteering, but sending Will to aerial silks and spending a late evening at the library, to boot. At least Monday is not normally too project-focused; neither Latin nor math (I'm really liking Communicating Mathematics with Pattern Blocks for building logic skills and mathematical thinking, so we'll be spending several Mondays with this book) nor reading (Syd's got a computer game to try for reading enrichment, and Will knows that she's welcome to read her book and write her book report over the course of a few days) nor music ("Star-Spangled Banner" for voice for one, and "It's Raining, It's Pouring" for recorder for the other) really *need* to take a long time, although you shouldn't underestimate the insanely long amount of time that my kids can drag work out into. Seriously, Syd's been doing her math for the entire time that I've been writing this post, and yes, she's technically working, but she's also drawing pictures and and eating Halloween candy and chatting her head off about everything under the sun--happy as a clam, she is, but happy as a clam spending over an hour on ten minutes of work.

TUESDAY: Math Mammoth is still going great, and I'm still really liking its content, mostly. My kids are way ahead on computational skills, but have spent less time with fractions and geometry (and the clock, which we are STILL working on mastery of, ugh!), so it's a good combination of zipping ahead with review and settling in with new content--keeps them interested, I think. The chemistry set, on the other hand, is less meaty with definitions and explanations than I'd prefer, so I'm having to spend more time than I'd anticipated in looking up terms and such to use as memory work. I'm particularly surprised that, although the girls are working with acids and bases, the set's manual hasn't actually brought up the terms "acid" or "base," instead using the demonstrations to illustrate only types of chemical reactions. I may have to plan my own lesson on acids and bases next week, just to get the vocabulary into play.

I've decided that this month our craft time will revolve around Thanksgiving crafts, and include some historical/geographical study of Thanksgiving, as well. Fortunately, we've got some cool materials from our visit to Plimoth Plantation a few years ago, and I managed to request most of the Thanksgiving-themed library materials that I wanted before the other parents got to them, so we'll have plenty of content along with our crafts.

For grammar, we're still working through a combination of the Words are CATegorical series and First Language Lessons, although every day that I work with that latter book, I cool on it even more. I think that this week I'm going to interlibrary loan the third volume of that series, and see if I just want to move both girls right into it or perhaps find something else altogether for grammar. My main requirement for a grammar curriculum is that it emphasize sentence diagramming, so good luck with that, right?

WEDNESDAY: Our field trip day was terrific last week, but we'll probably stay home this week. Syd has a friend or two that she might invite over, and they'll both have LEGO Club at the library.

THURSDAY: Someday Syd will get sick of raisin bread, I'm sure, and then we'll move on to a different recipe, but not this week! Will and I are interrupting the history part of our History of the Video Game study for a mini unit on physics, since most video games (and pinball!) rely on realistic physics.

Drawing With Children is also still going well. Will seems less frustrated with it lately, but I'm still trying to go VERY slowly to keep her feeling confident. The memory work for Drawing with Children this week is essentially a daily repetition of last week's lesson in using the shape families to draw simple realistic pictures, and for this week's lesson, instead of moving on, I'm going to have the children draw the shape families onto several of our building blocks to make "art dice," and then we'll play with them!

FRIDAY: I may have to move some of these subjects to different days next week--Friday is awfully project-based, which pretty much guarantees spillover into the weekend. Math, at least, is just another computer game--I dearly hope that they find it too easy for them, because I am OVER fussing about telling time!--and the mapwork lesson for SOTW is generally pretty cut-and-dry, but last week it was Sunday before both girls had really finished their scrapbook pages, and honestly, I think that Will *still* has to finish up last week's letter.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: A Lowe's Build-and-Grow clinic and chess club are our only scheduled activities, which will be a lovely change of pace after the multi-week craziness of Halloween festivities. We might manage a trip to the apple orchard, or the mountain biking park, or a state park to watch the leaves change...

...or we might not!