Small Town Famous

Even though I made Matt promise to not let me enroll the children in ANY OTHER SUMMER CAMPS this year (sleep-away camp and our big road trip seem like plenty of adventure/expenditure this summer), there are always so many cute and cool and interesting and enriching summer camps on offer--rock climbing camp! horseback riding camp! acting camp! Humane Society camp! archaeology camp! golf camp!--that I nevertheless pored through our local summer camp book that came in the newspaper a few weeks ago, exclaiming over and then having to remind myself not to book every single camp.

As I was carefully reading the entries on one page, trying to decide if maybe I could make an exception for art museum camp, I found my eyes repeatedly drawn to one particular image, and yet it took more than a minute of glancing at it, reading some more, then glancing at it again--

--before I realized, "Oh! We're IN that photo!" It must have been taken in the fall, while Matt was away at a conference. The kids were sad that he'd missed their horseback riding show, so even though I didn't feel like getting out of the house and into the car again, to cheer them up I took them to a children's event at the IU Art Museum.

I had clearly forgotten all about that trip, since I distinctly remember late this winter beating myself up about completely neglecting art history and art appreciation in the children's education. Ah, well... that at least spurred me into redemption; I scheduled what turned out to be a AMAZING field trip for my homeschool group to that very art museum a few weeks ago, and this weekend our whole family is spending the day at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (a place that I have not taken the children since, shockingly, 2009!), including watching an aerial silks show!

With an aerial silks show, make-and-take art projects, a family-friendly tour, and a quick couple of hours spent afterwards at the nearby children's museum, this trip to the art museum will be a raging success.

I may have been gritting my teeth while I wrote that last part.

Cake and Ice Cream and Calorie Expenditure

Last week, we celebrated the 102nd anniversary of the Girl Scouts by making cake and ice cream from scratch. The kids and I made our go-to, super easy, mix-in-the-pan chocolate sheetcake (for icing, Will took the blogger's advice to scatter chocolate chips over the warm cake, let them melt, then spread them--YUM!). The kids and Matt made ice cream in our ice cream ball--


--and then we all sat down in a circle for 20 minutes or so and rolled it back and forth to each other:

It weighs something like a medicine ball when it's filled with the ice cream ingredients, salt, and ice, and I guess rolling it around is a pretty good workout for a kid, because later, after the kids had eaten some cake and ice cream, and before I put them to bed, I found Will like this:

All tuckered out, the little lamb.

I also, because it's too chilly to climb onto my house and shout it from the rooftop, am going to tell you that I weighed myself yesterday, and after eleven months of studiously working to change the way I exercise and eat (I use a BodyMedia armband to keep track of my activity, and My Fitness Pal to keep track of my calories and nutrients), I now weigh what I weighed when I got pregnant with Syd, for the first time since that particular weigh-in. That's 35 pounds that I've lost since the middle of last April. I can also run a mile without stopping, for the first time EVER. I run the slowest mile ever, but I'm gradually ramping up my speed, and right now my slowest mile ever is almost three full minutes faster than I ran it when I accomplished my first mile run. 

Here are the other activities that I'm also working on:

• I want to keep increasing the speed at which I run my mile. I want to run with other adult humans one day, and they're not going to want to run this slowly.
• I'm teaching myself how to pogo using Will's stunt pogo stick. When I first began working to change the way I exercised and ate, I was heavier than the stick's maximum weight allowance. Now I'm fifteen pounds under it!
• I'm teaching myself how to shoot a basket. Matt teases me because I only shoot granny style, and only from the free throw line, but I'm convinced that eventually my muscle memory will let me shoot flawlessly from that exact spot, and then I'll pick another spot to work on.
• I'm working on doing a pull-up. We bought a pull-up bar for our kitchen doorway a few weeks ago, and now everybody practices on it off and on all day, every day. Will's the most dedicated, and she's improved massively!

Anybody got any other good zero-cost, zero-pressure, active challenges I could take on? 

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Cool Math Games

We are all multiplication tables all the time lately. I am ready for this multiplication table memorization to happen already, so I've taken the kids to full immersion learning.

Want to know what we've got for breakfast? Well, what's 4x8?

Going somewhere in the car? Let's recite multiplication tables the whole way there!

Lied to me about brushing your teeth? That's a 6x table offense, kiddo.

We play multiplication games, such as Roll 'n Multiply, multiplication dominoes, and this awesome-fun DIY Multiplication Touch game that you can make yourself (I've also got a round-up of other DIY math games and manipulatives this week):

We've completed art projects, such as the entire village of "multiplication houses" that Syd and I made on Monday, and dot marker arrays.

The kids each wrote a full, loooooooong factor chart on butcher paper.

I've yet to finish making the hands-on decanomial square for them to assemble, but mat board is 30% off at Hobby Lobby this week!

I've yet to wield flash cards at them, but I have an entire set printed and waiting to be cut out. They're coming!

And if Will's not fully adept by next week, when her math curriculum moves into a place in which she must be adept in order to continue (she can calculate in her head so quickly and easily that she's never bothered with memorizing the multiplication tables, but that extra couple of seconds to figure out 6x8=48 is going to start to seriously add up now that she's moving into more complicated, multi-step calculations), then I'm going to make her do Kumon multiplication drills every day instead of Math Mammoth; it's very much the stick rather than carrot, but I bet it'll get it done!

But for today, at least, math, other than my random questions and forced recitations, is finished. Will has since played Zoo Tycoon, and built a real-life Zoo Tycoon out of building blocks in the middle of our main walking path, and is currently immersed in Day #2 of the observational training required for her Girl Scout Detective badge. Syd got drawn into zoo play for a while, and is now sitting down in front of a stellar late breakfast of an orange, strawberry yogurt, and tapioca pudding. After that I need to corral her for the grammar that Will and I did yesterday while she was in the bathroom making an aquarium for her toy animals. After that, the park if it's not raining (it's going to rain). After that, fingerprinting. After that, Stage Fright on a Summer Night. After that, homemade pizza!

It's looking to be another wonderful day!

Drawing with Children: Draw Me a Lion

The kids are well-used to the instructional style in Drawing With Children by now, so it's a simple thing for them to get set up and settle down to a lesson.

In this lesson, we were to follow the author's written and illustrated instructions for drawing a simplified lion, and then place it into a scene of our choice, including embellishments and creative details, and filling the page.

Syd and I got started on the lesson first (Will was outside reading, but promised that she'd join us later). I gave Syd a photocopy of the completed lion to refer to, but asked her to listen to me read each step aloud before she began it:

I used the book, itself, for my drawing (which I can't believe I didn't get a photo of, as I was really pleased with it), and then Will came in, ready to draw, just as I was finishing the lion part, so I gave her the book to read as she drew, while I worked on my scene:

I can't get over how much Will's attitude has improved since we've begun these lessons. Before we started Drawing with Children, she rarely drew, and would readily tell us that Sydney was the "artist" and she wasn't. I just knew that if she kept that up, she'd stop drawing completely before too long, and grow up telling herself that she couldn't draw.

When we first started Drawing with Children, Will fought me over the lessons. She cried, she pouted, she didn't want to put forth any effort, and she had a terrible attitude. I made some modifications to the lessons (letting her read the instructions herself rather than listening to me read them, letting her start a drawing over when she thought she'd made a mistake rather than "making it work," etc.), but mostly just encouraged her and forbade her to judge or compare anyone's art.

Now, Will is happy to complete these lessons. She comes to the table without fuss, works contentedly and with focus, adds detail and embellishment to her work without having to be prompted, and is proud of the results. Below, for instance, she's created a stylized lion, in front of a background made to resemble zebra stripes:

Syd drew a realistic lion on a sunny savanna--the sun's direct rays are brighter than the blue sky background:

Will still doesn't do any drawing in her free time, but she will frequently paint on a Buddha board if I leave it out temptingly on the coffee table. As we move into a more casual spring and summer schedule, and as Will perhaps moves into a more kid-led, independent method of free schooling, I hope to strew more art activities of all kinds around her, and encourage her to once again become as comfortable with creating art as she was when she was just little.

P.S. After we've done our lessons, I like to check out others' experiences with the same lesson. Here are some other interesting takes on the lion lesson:

• The Artful Parent
• Life on a Canadian Island
• The Bottomsup Blog
• Three Marcus Boys
• Teaching Stars

Work Plans for the Week of March 17: Wild

Will's week of free schooling actually worked out wonderfully, with but a few reservations, the most important of which being her two-day tantrum when she realized bright and early on Saturday morning that the five days of math that I had been telling her would not complete themselves did not, in fact, complete themselves.

So that sucked, but the ordeal did prompt Will to ask me to remind her about her math as soon as I got up each morning so that she could do it. This morning I got up, reminded Will about her math, and glory be, she sat down and did it. Here's to four more days of that!

Will also did choose to join in on almost all of Syd's activities last week, playing multiplication games with us, taking her drawing lesson, listening to Story of the World and Pippi Longstocking, helping celebrate Girl Scout Week, etc. In turn, Syd joined in with much of Will's work--Will taught both herself and Syd how to geocache! They did that a LOT last week, and rode bikes, and played basketball, and worked on the bookshelf that they built for the food pantry where we volunteer. It was a busy and productive, happy and engaging week, and so I didn't stress when Syd and I didn't complete some assignments on her work plans--I just kept them on for this week!

MONDAY: One of my favorite podcasts, "A Way with Words," included a segment in a recent episode on the Pope's Latin tweets, so for Latin today we listened to that podcast while coloring, then looked at the tweets in Latin. Will spent much of the morning searching Zoo Tycoon forums and trying to figure out how to download and install user-created content (could this be her gateway into computer programming?), and we had a happy and useful shift at our volunteer gig, with the kids installing their bookshelf and setting up the book donations we solicited.

Currently, we're on our lunch break, during which the kids are being bottomless pits of bread and apples and oatmeal and cereal with milk, and then Syd and I (I'm betting Will won't be interested in this) are going to make a village of these cute multiplication houses, have a keyboard lesson, and write a letter to Pippi Longstocking, whose book we read AND whose play we saw last week:

I gave the kids Pippi hair before the play.

TUESDAY: We didn't get around to making the fossil casts on the couple of nice days last week, so I hope that we can do it this week. I want to take a nature hike and find real animal tracks to cast, and Will wants to organize a multi-cache geocache adventure--can we meet both of our goals at once? Time will tell.

The kids also didn't finish their Girl Scout Week activities last week (We did the movie marathon, comparing the animation of the first Toy Story to the later ones, and made cake and ice cream from scratch together, but missed most of the other required tasks), but they want that patch, so they agreed to make them up this week. We also didn't get the birdwatching session done, although we did learn to identify the black capped chickadee, but the birdfeeders around our property badly need a refill, so hopefully that will make the cut this week.

Both kids LOVE First Language Lessons. We did last week's lesson at the park; I wonder where we'll do this week's?

WEDNESDAY: We're in between horseback riding sessions, and Will crushed her thumb when a rock wall at the park partially collapsed on her, so she's out of aerial silks classes for a bit. That makes this day happily free, other than the Magic Tree House Club meeting which we MUST attend, since it's the last one of the month.

THURSDAY: The kids have a wildlife program at the library on this day--I hope they'll have some completed animal track casts to share! The nanosecond project is leftover from last week, although the pottery book is new. Math Mammoth is tooling right along--Syd's working on measurement this week, and Will's working through the last bit of multiplication that she can do before I sit her down next week and make her finish memorizing the multiplication table.

And I mean business this time. I printed out flash cards!

FRIDAY: Last Friday, we only completed math, history, and art, so those are the only new assignments here. Math class is on sabbatical for the week, so I'm looking forward to this extra hands-on math day to make something with Syd that I've been wanting for years--a skip counting board!

I did decide to just move on from the Bible story chapter in The Story of the World, so now we're onto Hammurabi. I don't know how long we'll stay here, either, since the kids already know him well--last Friday, over dinner, Will went into this long rant about Hammurabi and the whole "eye for an eye" business; she's convinced that a good judicial system has a much more nuanced system of justice than that. But this week, at least, we'll take another listen and do the quiz questions; if nothing else, we can at least do the map work on this one next week before moving on.

Drawing With Children should be fun this week; we're meant to look through magazines and catalogues and begin to develop a collection of images and graphics to copy and embellish to create our own art.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I want to take a day trip to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, although we might do a fossils workshop at one of the local state parks, instead. Will has chess club. I have some shopping to do. And wouldn't it be nice to get started with the spring planting!

Happy Pi Day!

Don't forget to eat pie for dinner!

Our In-Home Branch of the Public Library

What I'm about to show you is embarrassing, I'm told. I don't personally think it's embarrassing, because I have zero sense of personal shame, but I do recognize that you are probably going to think that this is very, very weird.

Okay, here it is. This is an entire bookshelf in our home. Ninety-nine percent of this bookshelf holds materials from our town's public library and our university's libraries. We call it the Library Bookshelf:

At the top left there, you see some undergrad chemistry textbooks that I've checked out from the IU library. I was studying biology through the MIT OpenCourse system, but kept running into a bunch of chemistry that I didn't know, so I switched to chemistry. Of course, now that I'm studying chemistry, I keep running into a bunch of electricity stuff that I don't know.

When Will was researching for her Biography Fair project, way back in the fall, we all got really into Jules Verne. Now, most nights of the week, Matt reads aloud to us a chapter of The Mysterious Island before the kids go to bed. We keep having to return it to the public library and check it out again, because it's something like the longest book ever.

I got interested in Lewis and Clark after Syd chose a documentary on them to watch as a family some time ago. A friend suggested the historical fiction of James Alexander Thom, all of which was clogging up the library bookshelf for a while before I decided that I would save them all as a treat to read on our big road trip this summer, but in the meantime I also got interested in the Native Americans of that time, especially the ones who lived in what is now Indiana, and will be incorporating a lot of that material into our Indiana study.

I always have a ton of teaching materials checked out from the IU School of Education library. They give me a LOT of help in teaching math, especially, but they also have manipulatives, textbooks, board games, and children's books, and their lending period is immense. The kids' Latin textbook actually belongs to the School of Ed, and I think that we've only had to return it and check it out again once in the past year. Most of those Latin books on the shelf (though not all) are from the IU libraries, actually, as well as that whole Saxon Math collection--I like Math Mammoth, but I always have my eye out for alternatives.

The magazines belong to us. I don't know why, but I can never seem to sit down and read a magazine unless I'm on a road trip, so I save them up.

Will wants to learn to solder. I feel doubts about this.

Those entomology books are also all from the IU libraries. I've finally decided on a humane-ish killing jar, but I still can't figure out where to buy the chemicals to charge it.

Homemade pizza is a staple in our house.

We always have a lot of materials that support our Story of the World studies on our shelves. I really should return the rest of our Ancient Egypt materials, since we'll be coming back to Ancient Egypt again in a few chapters. We completed the Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (or something like that) chapter this morning, and I think that instead of bothering with spending another week doing mapwork for fictional characters, we'll move straight on to Hammurabi next. Looks like I'll be doing another library search!

Yes, I am very interested in post-apocalyptic fiction. Anything will do, although I love zombies the most. Matt keeps most of his pleasure reading in the car, since he likes to hide out there to read during his lunch hour at work, so imagine another big stack of graphic novels and histories there.

Syd's earning her Potter badge right now in Girl Scouts, so we've got some pottery and ceramics books on the shelves. Will's interested in woodworking, which explains those books, but just decided this morning to start earning her Geocaching badge, so expect a bunch of geocaching books on the shelves in a couple of days.

Both girls read non-fiction books about animals, comic books, joke books, and trivia books. I just replenished Syd's stack of easy readers, so there are about twenty more on the shelves than there were in this photo.

Will's also really into fantasy, and also novels about kids who rescue pets, or girls who help ponies, etc. Those titles come and go at lightening speed, however, so the specific ones are pretty hard to pin down. I do know that right now she's reading Tom Sawyer, a book that we own, but only because she came up out of nowhere one day and asked, "Why can't I understand what Jim is saying?"

I paused, closed my eyes, and contemplated all possible contexts, before my library science and liberal arts training pinged and led me to the correct conclusion: Jim, whose speech is written in dialect, friend of Huck Finn but also of Tom Sawyer, whose book I know we own. Will and I then had a lovely conversation about why it's tacky to write in dialect, what such writing is trying to show, and why black men of that time might not have learned, or be comfortable speaking with, correct grammar and pronunciation.

I need to move us into a dinosaur unit, so that we're all experts for our summer dino dig. I'm still unsure of exactly where to start, however, since we've studied dinosaurs so often before.

I'm hoping that we'll stay with the bird study, as we focus more on Indiana-specific wildlife.

The kids' monthly day-long nature class has an emphasis on survival skills; they find that kind of disaster-prep reading fascinating.

We've backed off a bit on Will's history of video games study, just because we've had so much else going on. I need to check in to see if it's still an interest, and if it is, we need to get back in it.

Soooo... yeah. That's our bookshelf. Sometimes people come over, happen to see it, start to browse, then ask, with horrified fascination, "Are all those... LIBRARY BOOKS?!?"

Um, yes. Yes, they are. So if you've ever been at the library trying to check something out, only to realize, frustrated, that ALL the DK biographies are missing, or ALL the James Alexander Thom novels, or ALL the children's books on pottery, then you'll know:

I have them, and I'm not giving them back until they're three days overdue.