My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Toys, Transformations, and Thanksgiving

I've been lax about showing you what I've been doing over at Crafting a Green World lately--I'm there as much as I am here already, and writing about there when I'm over here makes me feel like I'm still there, you know?

Nevertheless, I'm tippety-tapping my pretty fingers to the bone over there three times a week (and several times a day on Facebook), and so here's an update on what I've done most recently!

a round-up of Thanksgiving crafts that use natural materials

a tutorial for striped rolled beeswax candles

a tutorial for lengthening kids' pants with ruffles

--and, my favorite of my recent projects, a tutorial for transforming the PlanToys toy chest (which PlanToys gave me for free to mod to my heart's desire) into a portable LEGO table with storage:

I monogrammed each toy chest so that the kids can't fight over them. They will anyway!

Cutting LEGO plates with my scroll saw=heaven

The project also included large drawstring bags, monogrammed with freezer paper stencils:

These go inside the LEGO play tables, but can be removed, taking all the LEGOs with them. They keep stray pieces much more safely contained!

I've been working with the kids to reorganize their belongings, in the mad hope that this will help them keep things tidier, and this LEGO storage has, surprisingly, made a world of difference. My ultimate dream is for a system in which storage is coded by color and size, but for now, that's way more fussy than the children want or would keep nice. Really, all that matters for now is that the LEGOS are contained, and that I don't have to step on them every single time I walk across the floor barefoot.

I still want a separate storage system for individual LEGO sets, and one for our LEGO train system, but until then, three cheers for chaos contained!

Hawaii with Kids: Surfing on Oahu

We went to Oahu undecided about surfing lessons. I thought that the kids would enjoy it, but didn't want to sacrifice half of a precious day in Hawaii to it. Matt thought we could wait and book them the next time we were in California visiting family. The kids had no opinion.

On Oahu, however, everything changed. Everyone surfs on Oahu, and this had Will, at least, eager to try it (it had the opposite effect on Syd--she saw all the people surfing and decided that this was perhaps not the sport for her at this moment). Numerous surfing schools took place on the beach just a few blocks from our hotel, so we often saw those, in particular, in operation, and could therefore check out their prices and how they operated. And since we were there at that beach so often, anyway, AND Will wanted to take a lesson, well...

Off they go! 

I was happy to stay on the beach with Syd, as I'm not a confident swimmer and it would be pure foolishness to put me out there in the waves with only a surfboard as a flotation device. Matt still laughs about the time in our early twenties when I panicked in ten inches of water during a tubing trip and he had to wade over and rescue me, although I stoutly maintain that I WAS ABOUT TO DROWN.

Instead, I documented their adventure with the help of my handy-dandy telephoto lens. After a lesson on the beach and a paddle out to the waves, the instructor set them up--

--pushed them off-- 

--and off they went! Well, off Matt went, more or less:

This girl, however, turned out to be actually kind of a natural:

Matt's instructor was hilariously frustrated with him the entire time. Matt reports that every time he fell, the instructor would yell at him. I actually heard him a couple of times from the beach!

Will, however, has excellent posture, don't you think?

Oh, look! There's another kid that I'm supposed to be supervising!

Will came away from her lesson very happy, very confident, and with some experience of the very rudiments of surfing. It was perfect:

Oh, and she's also eating sushi for breakfast. On the beach. Because we are in paradise.

 Of course, our brand-new surfers simply must pose with Duke Kahanamoku:

On another day, we drove up the North Shore so that the children could watch some surfers REALLY surf.

Obviously, there was shave ice involved:

The kids were dutifully impressed by the big waves, and the brave souls who rode them:

And Will is still definitely taking more surfing lessons the next time she's in California!

Work Plans for the Week of November 15, 2015: Thanksgiving!

I cannot WAIT for next week! School was successful last week, but it felt like a lot of work--halfway through the week, we had a Come to Jesus/major crackdown on screen time, and at the same time I began to make sure that my children were feeding themselves a good breakfast and lunch, primarily by preparing it myself. For years, the kids have mostly been on their own for those two meals (unless I had some leftovers to use up!), and had been perfectly content and successful with that, but recently Will has been both subsisting on slices of bread and/or homemade cookies and/or nothing at all for those meals AND living her life with a raging bad attitude.

That same kid is so independent that it's easy to just let her go and do her own thing, but her overall mood has markedly improved with this structure. I swear, parenting a tween is shockingly similar to parenting a toddler!

Anyway, one more school week and then we'll enjoy our well-earned vacation.

Memory work this week consists of spelling words, Mandarin vocabulary, a page of cursive practice, and, for Syd, review of her Nutcracker choreography. Books of the Day include a couple of chapter books that I hope Syd will enjoy (she prefers to read comics), a children's encyclopedia on rocks and gems that Will has already read this morning and loved so much that I now have planning an entire unit on my to-do list, and some non-fiction and living fiction on various Native American peoples.

And here's the rest of our week!

MONDAY: We got started off on the wrong foot with last week's essay assignment, as instead of following my gold-standard essay writing system, I let one kid skive off of her brainstorming and the other skive off of her outline. The results were... unsatisfactory. This week we're doing the whole assignment over again--the right way, this time!

The kids are just about done with their fractions and multi-digit multiplication units in Math Mammoth. I've peeked at their next units, and hopefully they'll be as trouble-free as these have mostly been!

As we do every year, we're completing a brief Thanksgiving unit this week--I love holidays with a historical basis! I'm in the planning stages of a Revolutionary War unit for next semester, so this unit is actually a good prequel for our later studies, or perhaps I'll just decide to continue on from here, since we've previously studied North American prehistory, ancient Native Americans, and Christopher Columbus. This day's activity is the Scholastic website on the first Thanksgiving; it's a good overview, with some engaging video and audio clips, and is plenty to remind the kids of the basic facts so that we can do some enrichment later this week.

We've got our regular volunteer gig with the food pantry today--we missed it last week, since we went on a field trip, instead, and we might miss it again next week, so we'll make sure to work extra hard today!

TUESDAY: I regret buying the entire set of Draw Write Now, simply because I don't think we use it enough to justify the cost, but Book 3 does have a unit on the first Thanksgiving, so I might as well whip it on out! Both of the kids enjoy step-by-step drawing instruction like this, and it's an excellent fine motor activity and confidence builder.

I always look forward to our weekly homeschool play group. There's a group of little girls there who are just right for Syd, and even Will can be tempted into looking up from her book and playing with the other children. Here, as well, I've finally found a supportive group of friendly parents. I'd been bullied by just a couple of people in our previous group for years, and I accepted it quietly for the sake of the children's enjoyment of the park days together with their friends, but now that I finally put in the effort to switch groups, I've found that it's a much better fit for all of us, and I can't believe that I stayed in such a toxic situation for so long. I'm more than a little embarrassed at myself, you know? Anyway, nobody is mean to me at this playgroup or on its message board, so yay!

WEDNESDAY: Today's math enrichment activity is really just a plan to indulge in more sweets. Making the batch of rice krispy treats in a couple of 9"x13" pans, however, will allow the children to do a lot of exploring with equivalent fractions and unlike fractional parts, so it IS quite educational, you see. Ahem.

After Syd's ballet class, we'll probably all kick around campus for a while, then I'm dragging everyone to a choir concert with pieces based on the poetry of Walt Whitman. I'm super excited, and I'm hoping everyone else enjoys it, too.

THURSDAY: Will's horseback riding instructor has to take a brief hiatus from lessons, so that leaves space for one more academic assignment on this day--mwa-ha-ha! That allows us to finish up our Thanksgiving unit with the Plimoth Plantation web site and a project making a model Mayflower and a model wetu. We'll be using this paper Mayflower template for the one, and Google Images, pipe cleaners, and brown paper bags for the other.

FRIDAY: A "clue hunt" is the final activity for the Girl Scout Junior Detective badge--I'm hoping the kids will enjoy setting this up for each other and won't fight over it. I'm even planning to provide treasure at the end!

It's been a while since we've had Friday Fossil Prep. It doesn't replace a more organized science unit, of course (what should we do next--astronomy, rocks and minerals, or chemistry?), but our fossil prep skills are valuable, and this is a great way to keep them up. Besides, nobody is going to clean, organize, and display our own fossils if we don't!

Will still adores her podcasting workshops. This may be the last one, and then at some point, ideally the children will have a real podcast to share with us!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Will has ice skating class, but all other lessons and classes are on hiatus for Thanksgiving, which means that by noon on Saturday, we'll be on vacation!

Which day of vacation am I looking forward to the most? Sushi Buffet for Lunch Day? Star Wars Movie Marathon Day? Sit around the House and Eat Yummy Food Day? Day Trip Day?

There's also Yard Work Day, but nobody's clamoring to have that one as their favorite.

Hawaii with Kids: Sightseeing on Oahu

We didn't have as much time on Oahu as we did the Big Island, and out of the loving embrace of my in-laws our too-expensive hotel was also kind of crummy, so during this leg of our trip we were quite happy to be out and about every single second!

Although I love the planning stage of a vacation almost as much as I love the actual trip, on both islands my favorite activity is actually to simply hop in the car, decide which way round we're going, and then to simply drive along the coast. There are beautiful vistas and engaging stopping points practically every mile, so the biggest challenge is deciding which stops to skip so that you can actually make some headway.

My advice: don't skip any of the stops!

This is Koko Crater. Will was so afraid that I'd insist on actually hiking up the 1,048 steps to its summit that she wouldn't even leave the car when we stopped to look at it. And yes, if she had gotten out, I may very well have dragged us there.

 We were lucky to see Halona Blowhole in action, as the conditions aren't always right for it:

Something that I know that I've mentioned a few times already, but haven't really shown you, is our family obsession with shave ice. We had it a few times on the Big Island, and it was yummy and all, but here on Oahu, it. Was. Exceptional.

At a roadside stand not far from Makapu'u Beach, we ate the best shave ice of our entire trip. This, my friends, is rainbow shave ice with a "snowcap," sweetened condensed milk that's drizzled on top. It's astoundingly delicious:

The rest of the family likes their shave ice pretty well, too!

At Makapu'u Beach (that's a seabird sanctuary there in the distance), the big entertainment was Will finding a coconut, tossing it into the ocean, and then the rest of us watching it forever to see where it would go.

See the coconut?

We didn't visit any restaurants in Oahu, although we tried to go to Treetops twice, only to be thwarted each time by the fact that their website misrepresents their hours and the Hawaiian buffet brunch that we kept wanting attend was never ready when the website said it would be. We did, however, visit a Japanese cafe and I ordered a drink called a "jelly coffee." 

I regret that decision still.

On another day, we intended to briefly check out the Bishop Museum, to which we get free entry as both it and our hometown museum both participate in the ASTC Passport Program, but somehow, unsurprisingly, we managed to stay all day:

Aquaponics in a fish tank! I have several more detailed photos of this setup in my drive, and the entry "Figure out fish tank aquaponics" in my planner.

The surfing lesson that I wasn't sure would happen? It happened! Will really wanted it, so we set it up for her, and then were really excited when later that same morning, we found this big exhibit on Duke Kahanamoku. I've now got a couple more reading and watching activities based on him set up in our school to-do list.

We saw several full-sized replicas of a heiau on the Big Island, but this model actually makes the complete set-up easier to understand:

Will is in LOVE with koa wood and shark tooth weaponry. There are a few reasonably priced replicas available online...

Much of their day is spent in this type of interaction:

Thanks to the information on this display, I now also have "Research atlas beetles as pets" on my to-do list. Sigh...

The kids and I normally focus our art collections around fanart and uber-contemporary pop culture response pieces, but now I'm seriously looking for some volcano art to add:

The Bishop Museum was also great if you're studying Hawaiian cosmology or the monarchy, because it has extensive collections on both. I spent the most time in those two places, while Matt supervised the children in the science building. 

On our way to that building for the first time, we were walking directly behind another couple, there with a larger group of people. The guy said something to his partner that I didn't hear, and in response she barked QUITE loudly enough for ALL of us to hear, "Well, if you don't change your attitude then we might as well return those laser light show tickets!"

For the rest of the trip, any instances of misbehavior on the part of any family member was met with the threat of losing their laser light show tickets.