The Comic Creator, and the PBS Kids Writers Contest Runaround

We've been doing a lot of writing lately, in this late winter season just before we can restart all of our wonderful, hands-on, OUTDOOR learning. Essays and biographies, stories and poems, letters and book reports, and also comics:

This astronaut is enjoying a lovely spacewalk, until his rocket unexpectedly powers up and crashes him onto the moon--yikes!!!

In late winter, I also always seem to arrive at the theory that everything is more trouble than its worth. Case in point: my attempts to enter a story by Syd in the nationwide PBS Kids Writers Contest. Back in early February, I went to the PBS Kids Writers Contest web site, saw that I needed to enter through my local PBS station, WTIU, found the correct contact info and link, and clicked on the link.

Yeah, that's the link for the WTIU home page. No writers contest entry forms there.

So I emailed the contact person, telling her the issue and asking for the correct information.

Crickets.

And thus, for sixteen days, "enter Syd into the PBS Kids Writers Contest" remained on my to-do list. I do NOT like things to live, uncrossed-off, on my to-do list. It's a thing of mine. Everybody gets to have a thing. So sixteen days later, again seeing this darned uncrossed-off chore, I filled out one of those Have a Question? contact forms on the WTIU web site, telling them the issue and asking for the correct information.

Happily, I was emailed within the hour by WTIU's station manager himself! Unhappily, his sentence-long email simply referred me back to the PBS Kids Writers Contest web site. You know, the one that refers me back to WTIU to obtain the entry form?

So I immediately replied to him, telling him the issue with even more specificity and asking for the correct information.

Crickets.

Seriously, am I crazy, or is that legitimately super annoying? Actually, it's fine to tell me that I'm crazy, as long as you also tell me that it's legitimately super annoying.

And maybe it's late winter, when EVERYTHING is super annoying, talking, but this brings me to one of my Homeschooling Pet Peeves:

It is so much more annoying to have to schedule every single thing yourself, and organize every single thing yourself, and figure out every single thing yourself, when you homeschool. If I want a spelling bee, or a pinewood derby, or a field trip to the art museum, or an entry for my kid into a writing contest, I figure it out, organize it, and schedule it myself. Sometimes, as with the field trip to the IU Art Museum that we're taking next week, I find myself dealing with amazingly organized, competent, knowledgeable people. Sometimes, as with the spelling bee, I find myself working with people who may not know any more than I do, but they're willing to work with me and help out. And sometimes, as with this stinkin' writers contest, I find myself working with people who don't have the thing organized, don't seem to know what's going on, and don't actually seem to care.

Okay, ugly rant over. And to be fair, I do have solutions! Matt suggested that I visit another PBS station's site, get the entry form for them, and just overwrite it with the correct information for my PBS station. My own idea is that since the outreach coordinator who's listed as the contact person for this contest has a campus office, and campus is in walking distance for us, we just walk to her office one nice day and ask her in person. And today, actually, is already a very nice day. The sun is shining, the temperature is [barely] above freezing, and right now the children are outside cleaning out the chicken coop and tidying the yard that's finally free of most of its snow. I have the pants for Syd's fashion show garment figured out, and merely have to sew them. The kids have lots of activities in the next three days, giving me plenty of time to myself to get all my work done, stress-free. Matt and I have our weekly ballroom dance class tonight. I really, really, REALLY like the novel that I'm reading right now. I have a new idea for a short story. And I'm going to take a nice, deeeep breath right now... there. Better.

Also, I think I'll go eat breakfast. I find myself much less grumpy after I've eaten. At least everybody has *that* particular thing, right?

A Liberal Trying to Liberate More than the Law Allows

The kids are VERY into comic books and graphic novels of all kinds. Our public library has a large collection of juvenile graphic novels in the children's department, and since the graphic novel section is also where we station ourselves when we spend time there (big round table, relatively more quiet than the part of the department that has the play room and train table and board books, near the door to the program room so we can easily see when it's time to go to whatever we've signed up for), the kids early on discovered the joys of browsing and reading and checking out the graphic novels.

Now that both kids are such voracious readers, I also don't do as thorough of a job checking out their reading material as I used to do--now I mostly skim something or read a page or two of one of their books as I'm picking up after them. The other day, Syd had gotten a bunch of Archie comics from the library, then left them lying around after reading them. As I was picking them up to put them away, I flipped open one of them to check out a random page:

Um.... yeah. Archie comics probably aren't appropriate reading material for the seven-year-old.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Refashion

the kid's T-shirt refashion

and a bunch, bunch, bunch more clothing refashion projects

I would dearly like for Syd and I to finish the pants for her Trashion/Refashion Show outfit this week, so that next week I can watch out for a nice day to do her photo shoot. I think I've decided to sacrifice my frumpy old thrifted green coat, the one that I haven't worn since Christmas 2012 (when Matt bought me an awesome biker coat, complete with elbow and back pads to keep me safe when I fall off my Harley or get shot at), to the pants cause, hopefully re-using the coat's hardware for the pants fastenings, and then *maybe* using a couple of old green T-shirts for the bell bottoms that Syd dearly desires. Syd also dearly desires green sequins, but I just do not think that we're going to be able to score anything with green sequins to upcycle into the garment.

Seriously, there has been nothing with green sequins in any of the thrift stores for WEEKS. Are people with green sequined clothing finding them so justifiably hideous that they're choosing to burn them instead of donate them?

Yeah, I probably would.

DIY Montessori Pin Flag Storage

As you probably guessed during my tutorial for setting up Montessori pin flags of all the Olympic nations, at some point or other Will and I have constructed ALL the pin flags.

Every flag.

Every nation.

Every state.

Every province.

Every continent.

It was a ton of work, spread out over many days, and I did not want to risk misplacing or flat-out losing any of these pin flags that we worked so hard on, so I created this manically organized storage system for them:

I store the pin flags in a three-ring binder, pinned into pieces of felt that I've cut to 8.5"x11" and hole punched to fit in the binder. The flags are alphabetized by continent and country, and before each set I've included a key, with each flag's name listed in order. The key is printed on cardstock, to give some structure for the felt pages.

Behind each key the flags are pinned in the same order, and this makes it easy to remove some for a special project, such as a pin flag map of the Olympic nations:

I can easily see which flags are missing, and see where they belong when it's time to put them back.

After each project, I tediously reorganize the flags back into their felt places, repairing any that were damaged, and then double-checking that all were returned and remaking any that are lost forever. It's not a super fun activity, but I do appreciate the order the next time I need to prepare another pin flag project.

Which will be next week. The Olympic nations are going away, and I think I'll set the United States up.

This post was shared with Keep Calm Craft on over at Frontier Dreams.

Work Plans for the Week of February 17, 2014: Birds, Biathlons, and a Biography

Right now, it's 47 minutes past the time that I intended to start school for the day, but the kids are wildly romping together so happily--I believe that one of them is a dog trainer and the other is a disobedient dog--that there's no way I'm going to disturb them. One of the main reasons why I started homeschooling, after all, is that I realized one day, years ago, that even though my kids' Montessori boasted three-year classrooms, so that my kindergartner and my youngest grouper could go to school together every day, the next year would mean that not only would my older kid move up to SEVEN hours of school a day, but also my kids would be in separate classrooms for the next two years.

My six-year-old didn't need seven hours of school every day.

My six-year-old and four-year-old didn't need to spend the majority of every day apart from each other.

I pulled the kids out of private school and into homeschooling for many academic and social and political reasons, but I never let myself forget that among those reasons is the opportunity for these sisters to be together, and so when they're playing together (and miraculously not screaming at or kicking each other!), I let them play.

So here's what we WILL do when they're tired out and their game is through, or when they start screaming at or kicking each other, which is as good a time as any to pause play:

MONDAY: The kids and their father participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count yesterday, and had a marvelous time, so for today they'll be filling out one of these journal pages for a more in-depth study of one of the birds that they spotted. We haven't studied birds (other than chickens, of course!) in a lot of detail yet, so I'm curious to see if the kids would like to learn more. Bird watching is such a rewarding hobby that I'd be happy to see the kids develop a love of it.

The kiddos are still progressing at a rate of one unit a day, three days a week, in Math Mammoth, but I noticed this weekend that Syd seemed to have trouble remembering how to subtract with borrowing, so we'll be playing Clear the Mat for our hands-on math enrichment activity this week. Syd loves to play games over and over and over again, so I foresee plenty of reinforcement in her future!

Will's reluctance to learn her current song prompted me to ask her if she'd lost interest in the recorder, but her replies that she LOOOOOVES the recorder were loud and fervent, so perhaps that will inspire her to finally get that darn song learned! Syd really loves her Youtube keyboard lessons, so much so that figuring out how to progress after they're finished is a constant worry. A piano plus piano lessons is too much of an investment for our budget this year (dinosaur digs and horseback riding lessons are pricey, alas...), so I'll need to figure out a way to soldier on without. Unfortunately, Matt, who is the only one of us who actually took piano lessons as a child, is claiming 100% ignorance and refusing to be of any help whatsoever (Thanks, Matt!), so you may find me teaching myself keyboard so that I can teach my kid. Don't worry, though--I do stuff like that a lot.

The kids are bringing their chicken skeleton into our weekly volunteer gig today, because they're pretty sure that everyone who stops by is really going to want to see it. Will plans to station herself next to the skeleton on display so that she can answer all those eager questions that are sure to come her way. We even did some role-playing, with me playing the curious person asking questions, and Will answering them in her best pedantic tone (She used to come with me sometimes to my classes when I taught freshman comp at the university, and I REALLY hope that she did not pick up that tone from me!). How I hope that someone is genuinely interested and wants to ask her questions!

TUESDAY: We're back to our volunteer gig on this day, since the girls have an actual "meeting" about their Girl Scout service project. I can't wait to see how this is going to go.

We've been casually enjoying the Olympics, mostly watching it streaming online as we go about our daily business, but the Olympic athlete profile and Olympic nation profile in this Olympics unit study will let the kids focus in on it academically one more time before it's over. There's so much curriculum material available that you really could study nothing but the Olympics for the entire two weeks, but I tried to zero in on the activities that required the kids to practice the concrete academic skills that I'm wanting them to practice right now (here, research methods!), and otherwise we're just spectators.

There are a few children's academic contests going on this time of year. Some, such as a local playwriting contest and a poster-making contest, I passed over for this year (although I did start researching and writing a History of the Theater unit study...), but others, such as a local contest asking for a biography of an African-American inventor, and the PBS Kids writer's contest, I'm definitely going to have them enter. Academic research and creative writing? You bet!

WEDNESDAY: I'm a little afraid, especially with that meeting in the morning, that there might be too much work scheduled for Tuesday, so I'm planning that we can finish any leftovers on Wednesday, along with horseback riding class and aerial silks. Otherwise, there's plenty of time for playing dog trainer and disobedient dog!

THURSDAY: I think the kids will be pleased to discover, on the other hand, that this day is light even for a light day! They're going to enjoy their endangered species art project (part of another contest), which will also segue nicely into the beginning of our study of Indiana, since the endangered animal must be local. I wish, now, though, that I'd put this project off for a couple of weeks--I deleted the kids' independent studies from the schedule to accommodate it, but Syd and I actually really need to keep working on her fashion show garment! This is the last week that we can keep goofing around with thrift stores, and then we have GOT to get sewing, whether Syd finds the perfect green sequined fabric or not.

FRIDAY: We've studied Indiana before, but we're going to refresh our memories about our home state, and add some more context (state history, probably, and definitely Native Americans) before we move on to Arkansas and then the west.

We mostly listen to podcasts just for fun, but since Syd often asks to listen to fairy tales or audiobooks while we work on projects, I finally got the idea to pull up a relevant podcast for us to listen to while we work on a  project. The particular podcast that we'll be listening to while the kids make Sumerian seals (we saw some of these at the Rosicrucian Museum, and I am excited to have the kids try their hands at making their own) is from What You Missed in History Class. It only mentions necrophilia obliquely.

I think the kids will enjoy this winter sports sudoku, and they're eager to write to their grandmother, if perhaps only because they want her to send them more film for the cameras that she gave them for Christmas.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: This weekend is going to be a busy one! There's a Girl Scout event each day, and Will has both chess club and rehearsal for her Spring Ice Show. But IF the weather warms up like it's supposed to, it should be a wonderful weekend for shuttling kids around and otherwise playing outside in the sun!

Timeline When You're Not Tipsy

This is Timeline, a game that the kiddos' grandmother gave them for Christmas:

Will and I have played several rounds of this game this week--it's fast-paced, which I like, and it's got a great combination of trivia and logic, both of which Will loves. Many of the cards are hard enough to stump anyone, and most of them are quite hard, but there are plenty of cards that even a kid Will's age could know (lots of ancient history stuff), and plenty that she could figure out by using the historical events that she DOES know. The game also gets harder as you go on and more dates are put on the timeline, so there's some good strategy involved. Don't know when the saxophone was invented? Better get it on the timeline early when the only other dates you've got to fit it into are the invention of writing and the invention of the smartcard!

This is the Inventions version (there are a few more versions of the Timeline game that I want to collect eventually). It involves drawing cards at random and ordering them into a single timeline, discarding your card and drawing again if you've placed it incorrectly:

Here are some of the cards that I drew.

Here's Will figuring out where to place one of her cards into the timeline.

Until Will recently re-discovered this game and wanted to play it over and over again, we'd most recently played it on Christmas Day, at my Aunt Pam's house after our big, delicious, decadent Christmas lunch. Will beat me soundly in every round on that day, and was very much surprised to discover that my game play was much improved since then. Why, I was actually winning! How can that be?

Hmmm, maybe it was the slush punch that I drank on Christmas morning? And then the wine with lunch? And then a little more slush punch?

The fact that I actually had a half-full wineglass in my other hand as I played her on that day probably didn't hurt.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: The Kids are Sewing

a tutorial for setting up kids to sew

See our Olympic nations Montessori map, before the kids got started on it?

and a big round-up of projects that kids can sew independently

Even though I may, personally, be feeling the late-winter blahs, I have to say that this may be the busiest Project Week I have ever witnessed. The kids have put together our entire set of Montessori puzzle maps and made their valentines for our big party tomorrow. Syd has drawn, worked on a model of the Statue of Liberty, finished her California vacation scrapbook, and built bizarre stuffed animal/toy car contraptions, all while listening to a never-ending selection of audiobooks. Will has built, painted, and mounted a birdfeeder; built, painted, and tested a pinewood derby car; built a model covered wagon, and helped me complete our set of Montessori pin flags. They've been to math class, been swimming, worked at our volunteer gig, and right now they're in the arena next to me happily trotting around on Cody and Lola. And it's only Wednesday!

I'd like to say that the early part of the week has been more restful for *me*, at least, but with the new plans running through my brain for a children's woodworking area and a homeschool pinewood derby competition, I just don't know...