My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Bookshelves (and, Inadvertently, a Long Rant about Educational Equity)

a round-up of upcycled bookshelf projects

and our own decoupaged bookshelf that we made for our local food pantry

I don't have the photography skills to make the bookshelf look as cute as it does in real life, but the kids and I are really pleased with it, and it looks even better sitting in the children's area of the food pantry, chock-full of donated books, with kids sitting around it in their kid-sized chairs reading happily. There's so much for kids to do at the pantry now--books, crayons and paper, a construction set, some sidewalk chalk that we brought over on our latest work day, afternoon drop-in kids' gardening classes--and the Youth Outreach Coordinator has a ton more planned for after school hours and in the summer. I'm really excited about it!

We had asparagus in the pantry this week, and the week before we had arugula, and Will, both weeks, has seemed really struck by finally noticing that there are plenty of people in our community who can't identify these two vegetables, don't know how to prepare them, have never tasted them, and are nervous about doing so. I'd imagine this isn't super uncommon anywhere, and Will's seen this over and over again for years--one of my happiest memories is cutting open pomegranates for kids, encouraging them to try it by telling them that it tastes like candy, and then watching their little faces when they realize that I don't lie--but watching me answer questions, helping me photocopy preparation instructions, and tasting veggies in front of people to show them that they're good are experiences that she's brought up several times in the past couple of weeks. 

It's a lot of growing this kid must be doing, trying to figure out that other people's experiences are different from hers. The privilege of knowledge is something that we've been talking about for a while now, since the kids' global education unit study that they completed for their Girl Scout World Thinking Day badge. In a lot of circumstances, education is a luxury, I keep saying to her, over and over. You have to have time to spend. You often have to have money to spend. You have to have mental energy available to spend. If you have to work all day in a factory sewing cheap clothes for Americans to buy, you don't have time to learn to read. If you don't have extra money in your budget, you can't buy asparagus just to see if you happen to like it--you're going to buy apples every single time, because you already know you like them. If you're always worried about if you're going to earn enough money to pay your rent and electricity and water bills each month, you're not going to feel like sitting down at your table every night and studying for a college degree.

I remind her of the time that we spent $15 on a jackfruit just to see if we liked it--and we didn't like it! If we'd really, truly needed that $15 for food that week, then we would have had to eat that entire jackfruit anyway, and that wouldn't have been fun (seriously, it weighed something like eight pounds). If we'd really needed to eat using that $15, we would have been better off buying rice and beans and hamburger and spinach, even though we eat that all the time, because we know we like it and we know it will fill our tummies up nice and comfy.

That's why it's so important to make opportunities for people to educate themselves without risk. There have to be places where all kinds of new experiences are free, so that people don't have to spend their money to try or taste. There has to be enough money for every person to allow everyone to have some leisure time to explore, and there have to be courses of study--all kinds, in every possible field--that people can try at their leisure, also for free.

That's why public schools are worth improving, even if you don't have kids who go there. That's why open courseware is worth funding, even if you don't use it. And it's why your local food pantry is worth supporting, even if you don't shop there.

*steps off soapbox, turns off microphone, wanders off to eat a cup of noodles and read the next chapter in her book*

Girl Scout Detective Badge: Make a Decoder Wheel

Earning the Girl Scout Detective Badge has been super fun for Will so far, and it's involved lots of great science, logic, and reading comprehension activities for both kids. Some of the activities that Will has done, and often gotten her sister to do with her, have included:

• reading about fingerprinting, fingerprinting the family, and analyzing the patterns of our prints
• reading mysteries, noting the clues, and trying to solve the mystery before the main characters do
• reading a LOT of books about forensics, detective skills, spies, and codes
• playing online spot-the-difference games
• "spying" on the neighborhood every day (sketchy, I know, but it gets her to write without complaint!)
• exploring the science of black lights and invisible ink pens

The kids also made a really easy, really fun decoder wheel that our entire family now uses to write secret messages to each other practically every day. Here's how:

You will need:

• two sheets of cardstock (I had the kids choose colored cardstock to help them tell them apart later, but that's not necessary)
• printer
• brad--Matt and I had a fun argument in the strip mall about brads, concerning the fact that I wanted to buy a package of twenty-five brads from the craft supplies store, and Matt wanted to buy an only slightly more expensive package of one hundred brads from the office supplies store. I tried explaining to him that in a decade of crafting, this is the first time that I've ever needed brads, and even now I only needed two of them, but the per-brad price was too compelling to him, so now he's in charge of of finding 98 other uses for brads in our lives. Won't that be fun for him!

1. Visit this DIY pie charts templates page, and print out two copies of the circle divided into 26 equal parts on your cardstock. 

2. Around the outer edge of one of the circles, instruct your kiddo to write the alphabet in order, one letter per circle segment. I'm ashamed to tell you that each of my fully literate children had trouble with this task. They each sang the alphabet song many times, sometimes incorrectly (Eff you, Eleminopee!), and Syd freaked out because she all of a sudden couldn't remember which was lowercase b and which was lowercase d. Just so you feel even better about your parenting compared to mine, here are other things that my children do not know: their address, Matt's and my phone numbers, which grandmother is which, the months in order, and what month it is today (I nearly disowned Will outside the public library yesterday. They have a sundial embedded in the pavement, so if you stand on the correct month then your shadow tells the time, and Will was standing there looking at it, shouting over to me REALLY loudly, "What month is it? August? January?"). They can FINALLY tell you their ages, birthdays, home states, and grades, though, so... yay, I guess?

3. Have the kiddo find a dish that's about an inch smaller in diameter than the circles, center it on the blank circle, and trace around it:

4. Cut out both circles:

5. Write the alphabet again around the second, smaller circle.

6. Align both circles so that they're centered with the smaller circle on top, then use an awl to punch a hole large enough that the top circle can rotate after you've got the brad in.

7. Insert and fold down the brad, and you're done!

You can create a secret code by rotating the top circle until the alphabets are misaligned, and then "translating" each letter of your message from one circle to the other circle. Include a key to translation in your message--you can even hide the key in the middle of the message to make it trickier to solve, or arrange a secret family code inside a code to hide the key in plain sight in the message.

Both kids LOVE to write and solve codes using this decoder. If a kid asks me a question and the answer's not urgent (such as "What should I have for breakfast?" I HATE that question!), I'll sometimes write the answer in code ("Leftover butternut squash pasta or oatmeal or an egg salad sandwich" sounds much more fun when translated from nonsense), or if I have something fun to tell them, such as a surprise meet-up later in the day with friends, I'll write it in code and make them solve the mystery:

As a super-secret big surprise for Will's Detective badge sometime soon, Matt's planning a major mystery for the kids to solve together. I don't know if it will involve solving a crime or searching for hidden treasure, but there will be fingerprinting, code breaking, witness interviews, clues, and invisible ink messages involved.

If I take lots of photos, perhaps that will quench my urge to be all, "Oooh, a secret message!" and bump the kids aside to solve the mystery all by myself. Because doesn't it sound fun?

Okay, now I'm going to go tell Matt to make me a mystery, too!

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

Work Plans for the Week of March 31, 2014: Out!

Last week was knocked a little off-kilter when Syd came down with a fever on Tuesday. Fortunately, she was feeling all better the next day, but by the end of the week, *I* had a cold, and, of course, I still have it. But nevertheless, there was a lot of building and playing and cooking and balloon animal making and hiking and reading and a respectable amount of schoolwork done for the week, so whatever we didn't get done, I kept on the schedule for this week!

MONDAY: I don't know what's not appealing about building the skip counting board--I have all the materials temptingly out and ready, AND both kids spent most of Thursday morning with the woodworking tools, building swords out of PVC pipes for themselves and a friend's birthday, so clearly the concept is a winner, but it still hasn't happened. To be fair, Syd's Math Mammoth units last week were all hands-on measurement tasks (which threw me for a loop, since I don't usually scan them ahead of time, AND I often bring them with us to do when we're out and about--not too helpful to pull it out midway through a hike, only to discover that Syd actually needs a quart jar, pint jar, and measuring cup to do her math that day, sigh...), so she was pretty full up on hands-on math enrichment and practical construction without it.

Frankly, we didn't get much done last Monday--I may have to rethink this day's schedule. We've got that two-hour volunteer gig, then when we get home we're wiped out for at least an hour, and today we're actually at the public library right now, where the kids just collected another stack of children's books for their Early Literacy Center from the library bookstore's free day, but they're reading Snoopy comics instead of doing any schoolwork because I didn't think ahead and plan anything portable-to-the-library for this day. If we don't have a productive afternoon after our volunteer gig later today, I'll have to think about what I can shift to make Mondays work better for us.

TUESDAY: I DID plan portable schoolwork for this day, because the goal is to spend what's supposed to be a gorgeous day completely out and about. Will is hoping to plan a multi-cach geocaching adventure along a popular cross-town biking and walking trail (the geocaching expert we met a few weeks ago assured us that there are many geocaches to be found there), and then we'll likely spend the rest of the day at the local hands-on science museum. Fortunately, First Language Lessons is extremely portable; I had the foresight to check Syd's Math Mammoth ahead of time and switch a couple of lessons so that her math on this day is portable; and you can memorize a Latin translation of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" anywhere.

Will is still on Kumon multiplication drills, although her memorization is coming along really quickly now that she's realized that I won't let her calculate her way out of it any longer. She's a big project planner, too, although not always a great project completer, so I've asked her to write her own lists of projects that she'd like to complete this week, as well as note any of the schoolwork that Syd and I are doing that she'd like to participate in. I'm hoping, this way, to get a little-more follow-through, and push past her "Oh, I know I said I wanted to do such-and-such, but I actually can't bear to put down my book for long enough to do it for real, and if you make me then I'll pitch a giant fit" inclinations.

WEDNESDAY: Horseback riding lessons, Magic Tree House Club, LEGO Club, and hopefully lots of time leftover for catapult building and toy dinosaur taming and tire swinging (and playroom cleaning?).

THURSDAY: Syd's almost finished earning her Potter badge! This day's task is to make some art pieces; I think that we're going to try forming beads around paper clips. Last Thursday, the whole day was spent making swords, playing at our homeschool group's playgroup, and then dropping Will off at the library for several hours, so the rest of Thursday's activities are leftovers from last week. There are supposed to be thunderstorms THIS Thursday, though, so we'll either be super productive because of the rainy day, or spend the day in the basement watching movies to distract the kids from tornado sirens. Coin flip!

Hopefully, the storms won't spoil the kids' first 4H meeting on this night. I have a feeling that Will might really like to be on the Hippology Bowl team. ( I know, right? Hippology Bowl!)

FRIDAY: Math class is always a big hit (On the way home from last week's class, Will said, dismissively, "I understand negative numbers quite well"), and last week it turned out that A History of US was a big hit, too! I'm really liking it, as well, and I think it's going to be very useful for our Indiana study and the studies of the states that we'll be visiting on our big road trip this summer.

Syd's been planning to bake the cats a treat from a cat food cookbook that we own, but hasn't gotten around to it, so I put it on this day's work plan as a pleasant surprise. I'm also planning on having her start some more regular creative writing, and I'm hoping to tempt Will to join us. Incidentally, I'm researching non-writing methods of storytelling--videotape? Tape recorder? Stop-action film?

I really like the clip art in the Eyewitness books--they're great for timeline images!--so as Hammurabi's last hurrah, I think that Syd will really like choosing images from Eyewitness Mesopotamia to put on our big timeline.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: A Girl Scout program, perhaps a roller derby game, and Syd's first Trashion/Refashion Show rehearsal are all on the schedule, but this last weekend was so hectic (Birthday party! Nature class! Earth Hour! World Cultures Festival! My terrible, horrible, no good, very bad COLD!!!) that I may insist that when we're not with the Girl Scouts, or at the roller derby, or on the runway, we all just sit quietly on our butts on the couch.

And I better NOT be still sick!

At the Indianapolis Museum of Art

With temperatures in Indy in the low 40s instead of the forecasted low 50s, it wasn't the best day to explore the Indianapolis Museum of Art and its expansive outdoor park and gardens, but there was a children's tour I wanted to attend and an aerial silks performance art piece (outdoors, of COURSE) that I'd already bought tickets for, so we all just girded our loins and muscled ahead.

It's always, fortunately, a great day to explore the indoor museum:

Matt and I usually practice a man-on-man defense in museums, which is why I only have photos of one kid OR the other, and none of Matt. He was there, just mostly with Will while I was with Syd. We'd pass each other between galleries and I'd say, "There's a Matisse over there!", or we'd find ourselves in the same gallery and spend a minute all together with the Georgia O'Keefes before I had to take Syd to the bathroom, and as a reward for sitting in the foyer with Will (who threw a fit because there were too many babies and toddlers on the children's tour--she disdains babies and toddlers) while I went on the children's tour with Syd, he got to look around all by himself(!) for half an hour or so while I hung out in the hands-on art room with both kids:

They both stay in the same place pretty well when there's art to be made.

We also huddled together as a family--Syd tucked onto Matt's lap with his arms around her, Will squished between the two of us with one of my arms over the top of her--through the performance art piece, which everyone liked, although we all would have liked it a lot better if we hadn't been so uncomfortably cold:

So walking the grounds didn't happen, and the picnic didn't happen, and the portable art set for making art en plein air that I brought didn't leave the car, but we saw the silks, some of us took the tour, the kids now have postcards featuring Georgia O'Keefe paintings on the walls by their beds, and we'll go back again for all the rest when it's actually sunny and springlike and warm.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Eco-Friendly Easter

True story: I thought that Easter was this Sunday. A company actually wanted to host a giveaway over at Crafting a Green World this week, and I deterred their rep because the timing would be too tight. Because I thought Easter was this Sunday.

Even more embarrassing: it took a trip to Wal-mart (where I desperately needed to buy the kids chocolate rabbits for their Easter baskets, since I thought Easter was this Sunday) to teach me the actual date of Easter this year, because they had signs up everywhere. Yep, classy all around, I am.

Anyway, now you at least have plenty of time to check out my roundup of tons of eco-friendly Easter egg tutorials (my favorite are the wooden, felted wool, and papier mache eggs)--

--and my review of Natural Earth Paint's natural egg dye kit, which we LOVED:

Yes, her hands are filthy, but that thumbnail is an injury entitled Willow vs. 20lb Rock.

I actually really like Easter crafting, so I'm excited that we've got a few more weeks to do it! I *think* we're going to decoupage tissue paper onto wooden eggs today, but right now the kids are downstairs building three swords out of PVC pipes, and then they're probably going to want to get started on the catapults, so the sweet little afternoon of decoupaging Easter eggs and listening to the Easter Parade soundtrack may not happen.

Siege warfare and hand-to-hand combat, however? That's looking like a given!

Evil Zoo Tycoon

Will hasn't touched her computer this week, but last week she spent much of her time VERY into her very beloved, very retro copy of Zoo Tycoon. She's long been able to use her long list of cheat codes to make her Zoo Tycoon experience into exactly what she wants it to be (think giant sandbox with unlimited resources), but at some point she discovered the existence of user-created content, so I found a Zoo Tycoon Wiki, and that led me to sign up for a couple of the Zoo Tycoon forums that Will likes to lurk on, and those taught me how to find and download user-created content, so I in turn taught Will, and away she went!

These forums also teach you how to make user-created content yourself, and it would be very cool if Will got interested in doing that, but last week she was mostly interested in downloading and installing all of the most bizarre animals that she could find, and then apparently setting them free to wreak havoc:

One night in particular, Matt took the camera to both photograph Syd helping me watch my *very* interesting MIT OpenCourse lecture on the wave/particle duality of matter--

--and to document Will's most evil Zoo Tycoon machinations, resulting in much loss of life and the probable destruction of civilization as we know it:

I don't know if you can tell, but not only are the aforementioned dragons still there, but also a terrifying wolf/unicorn hybrid, several massive tarantulas, and some mutant bears, all running free out of the broken fences in their habitats. 

They've clearly already killed all the zoo visitors, and are preparing to jump the walls and destroy everyone in the city outside of the zoo, and NOW the National Organization of Zoos is concerned? About a PANDA?!? And their punishment is that Will can't add anymore monsters until it's happy?!?!

To be fair, though, the panda probably won't be happy until there are no more monsters running rampant in its zoo.

Work Plans for the Week of March 24, 2014: Play

Syd spent much of last week learning how to make and break codes and edit Zoo Tycoon with Will, so whatever we didn't get to last week, I just left in place for this week!

MONDAY: Latin is one of the subjects that Will always chooses to do with Syd--somehow, those workbook pages that were such agony when required don't merit a peep of protest when they're chosen. Syd's keyboard lesson is again from Hoffman Academy, who, I am thrilled to see, has added more video lessons. I'm pretty stoked that we can learn more at home before I have to make a decision about formal classes. Syd also ADORES Mr. Hoffman and his lessons, so she loves keyboard. Will, on the other hand, hasn't picked up the recorder since the day that I stopped giving her work plans; we need to have a conversation about this, to see where she wants to go with music, because I do want her to study some instrument.

We didn't get to the skip counting board last Friday (but Syd did spend a LONG time creating and translating "secret" codes on that day, so there's her math enrichment and logic skill building), so I put it down again for Monday. I also read another Pippi book to Syd, and then had her write a letter to Pippi Longstocking, care of the theater where we saw her play a couple of weeks ago. Syd LOVED this project, and it turned out super cute, too--she asked Pippi what her real name was, told her all the things that she liked to pretend to be, described in detail her favorite part of the play (a scene that didn't actually include Pippi--oops!), and wrote the names of our three cats in every possible order for her ("My cats' names are Ballantine and Gracie and Spots or Ballantine and Spots and Gracie or Gracie and Ballantine and Spots or...). I'm curious to see if the theater passes the letter on to the actress and if she writes back--hopefully she's not *too* overwhelmed with fan mail?

Both kids also seriously worked their butts off at our volunteer gig on Monday--I have NEVER seen them work so hard! They stocked cans and granola bars and frozen meat and milk and yogurt and produce, including a ton of really heavy stuff. They helped repackage pasta (some stuff comes in giant bulk bags, and we split it into smaller portions to serve more people). They organized their bookshelf and stocked more books (someone brought in even more books last week!). Syd read to a little boy. They normally do all that, but with plenty of time spent reading quietly or coloring or playing together, but yesterday they hardly even took a break. It was wonderful to watch them so dedicated and focused, and I felt really proud of them.

TUESDAY: The kids have a playdate for this entire morning (right now they're playing hide-and-seek downstairs, with a gentleman's agreement that no one will hide in the closet where we keep the litterbox), so nothing will get accomplished until afternoon, but then we've got First Language Lessons, which both kids LOVE, and math, which Syd is fine with and Will tolerates much better these days (even though she IS spending the week doing the long-threatened Kumon multiplication drill workbook), and that documentary on natural Indiana that's been on the work plans for weeks--surprising, since the kids usually adore documentaries, and I actually want to add more of them to our days, but they've been so involved in active play and their own busy plans recently that I just don't think they want to sit down long enough to watch this. It's also snowing right now, which means that we're not going to make casts of animal tracks today, either, but on a family hike this weekend--without the supplies to make casts, of COURSE--we saw some good animal tracks, so on the first nice day this week we'll head back there, plaster of Paris in our backpacks, and finally make that project happen.

One thing that I like about homeschooling is that I get to put what are essentially chores on the schoolwork plans, instead of rushing to try to do them after school and extracurriculars, so today I also want the kids to figure out their birthday presents for a buddy's birthday party this weekend. I have kind of strict rules for birthday party presents--You can either make your friend a gift, buy your friend a gift with your own money, or give your friend something of your own--so making/buying/figuring out what to sacrifice does take enough time and effort to justify being a "work" for the day.

WEDNESDAY: Horseback riding lessons begin again! The kids couldn't be more stoked. I also *may* put Will back in aerial silks class, because she says her thumb isn't sore anymore, but I'm terrified that she'll accidentally rip off a big scab or her entire thumbnail during class and cause an "incident," so we'll see...

THURSDAY: Oh, my goodness, this last Girl Scout Birthday Week project seems like it will never get done! I may have to wave the Birthday Week patches temptingly in front of the children on this day, because I know they want them deeply. To be fair, Will worked on other Girl Scout badges for I can't even tell you how many hours last week--she's simultaneously earning her Animal Tracks, Detective, Inside Government, and Geocaching badges--and Syd worked on her Potter badge, so Girl Scouts is still leading them into some really enriching, engaging learning experiences, but I know that regular sense of completion and accomplishment goes a long way towards making it as fun as they find it to be.

Since we just had a Bible chapter in The Story of the World, and since Easter and Passover are coming up, I thought we'd spend some time in the next few weeks exploring some myths from world religions. We're reading about Creation myths this week, and then we might focus in on Jewish and Christian myths related to the upcoming holidays. I'll tell you one thing about children's religious education: it includes a LOT of crafts! Fortunately, Syd enjoys crafting, so I think this will be a lot of fun for her. Will doesn't always enjoy crafting, so I think she'll appreciate the ability to choose her own level of participation.

FRIDAY: Last Friday was a beautiful day, so the kids just played and played and we didn't get much of our formal schoolwork accomplished. This Friday may end up being just as beautiful, especially after being so chilly earlier in the week, so we'll just see what ends up getting done. I'd like us to begin Indiana history, after spending some time studying natural Indiana, so we're starting A History of US, which I'm pretty excited about. I "think" I'm going to skip around to the chapters that relate directly to Indiana, but if we like the book as much as I hope we're going to, I may just add it wholemeal to our curriculum. Anyway, on this day we begin with the Bering Land Bridge, and we'll be using a cool ipad app that allows us to see historical geography to research what the Bering Land Bridge actually must have looked like.

For our regular history, we'll be doing the mapwork in The Story of the World Activity Book for chapter seven, but we've actually spent so much time exploring Mesopotamia in earlier chapters that I'm already researching for chapter eight. Perhaps this is how we'll eventually begin to move faster through the book--we'll just, at some point, have done all the cool projects that there are to do! Math class is back this week, and the couple of leftover assignments from last Friday should finish off our day... if I can get the kids to come inside long enough to do them, which I'm not counting on.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: It's going to be a busy Saturday, with an all-day nature class for the kids followed immediately by a birthday party for a buddy. So even though I'd like to plan hiking or rock climbing or some such family adventure on Sunday, we may just goof around and play at home, with a few breaks for enforced yardwork.