I want the kids to learn algorithms without losing the number sense of what's going on behind them, so I LOVE using models, even for more complicated algorithms.
LOVE it!
I was super stoked a few weeks ago to figure out how to model multiplying and dividing fractions (I'll show you that another time!), but it took a Google search and this guy to teach me how to model long division.
I read his post on modeling long division probably 50 times, and watched his video maybe 50 more before I got it, but now I got it! And you should get it, too--it makes so much sense. It's so logical. You can SEE how the algorithm works.
And it's easy!
Although you really need to go check out that post for yourself and see the magic, I'll walk you through a couple of problems that will clear up the parts that I was confused about for a while, and you can see how it works for a big kid who's in the process of learning the long division algorithm.
The biggest thing that I had to wrap my head around is the way that you set up the model. I did NOT want to set it up this way, and it took a loooong time before I understood why it's best. You start by laying out your Cuisenaire rods in a rectangle, and then you put the long division sign over it, to show that you're measuring these sides of your rectangle:
Here's what I didn't like at first:
Can you see what I don't like?
In area and perimeter models, and any type of measurement, the number on one side illustrates the measurement of THAT SIDE. So in the problem above, I want the 3 and the 4 to be reversed.
But that's NOT how the model works. The 3 measures across, as the arrow shows, and the 4 measures down. You put the arrows there to help you remember.
You have to do it that way because of the way that you model the algorithm. Say that you're starting out with a model that looks like this:
Always build the model with the hundred flats first, then add the ten bars to the right and bottom ONLY, then fill in the last rectangle at the bottom right with Cuisenaire rods.
Have the kid count the total (good reinforcement of counting strategies and skip counting!) and the number of units across, then set up the algorithm so that it's next to, but a little higher than, the bottom of those hundred flats. Don't forget the arrow!
Your kid is going to want to immediately just count down to find the quotient, especially if she's calculated area before, but keep her focused on the fact that with this model, you're going to count how many 34s are contained within this number by subtracting out groups of 34.
The first thing that the kid does is count down to see how many whole tens there are of 34s, then separate them out. We'll count them first:
Syd has separated out the whole tens by moving the rest of the model down, and I've drawn a line under the whole tens to model that we're counting those first. See how the line extends to the algorithm? It's beautiful how much sense that makes!
The kid now counts how many whole tens there are. There are 30. Review place value, and review that 30 is the same thing as three 10s. We can write 30, and just replace the zero when we know how many units' worth we'll have, or we can just write 3 in the tens column. We've done it both ways:
After she knows that there are thirty 34s within the number we've separated, she needs to count the total number of units. Again, more skip counting and adding big numbers! Syd likes to count the hundreds and write the answer down, then the tens, then the units, and then add on paper.
That answer, of course, gets plugged into the algorithm. If you've got an older kid like Syd, you can ask her to double-check the model with calculations, if she seems game. It's a way to reinforce the calculations that she'll actually have to do when she's only got the algorithm, not the model. It reinforces that they both work exactly the same way.
Next, the kid counts the total number of units left below the line in the model, and plugs that number below the line in the algorithm--that's the number still left to divide. She can double-check the algorithm to see that subtraction will give her that answer there, as well.
The only limit to this is how many blocks you have to build models with!
It's fun to have the kid build models of her own to solve--
--but I'll also give her problems with the dividend and divisor, and she gets to figure out how to build the rectangle and then calculate the quotient.
Mind you, Syd does NOT love these lessons, which we've been doing all week. This is NOT play-based learning. However, each day that we've sat down together for no more than half an hour to work these models and do the calculations together, I can see not just how her understanding of how long division works growing, but also her overall number sense. Putting your hands on math, having to group it and count it and keep track of it and organize it, AND having to regroup it and count it and subtract it and count it again, AS WELL AS having to organize and note that on paper, is some hard-core math to do on a typical Tuesday morning.
School has been going so well, y'all! I have figured out The Secret to getting the kids to complete their schoolwork without a giant power struggle.
I bribe them.
Will is the WORST about doing her schoolwork, because she only ever wants to do what she wants to do, and that is read. Of course, being such an avid reader means that she always needs something new to read, which means that she always, always, always wants to go to the library.
Our deal: Each morning, I highlight the required schoolwork and chores that must be done before I will take her to the library, and I tell her when they must be done in order to get to go on that day. For instance, today we're leaving the house at 11:40 for our volunteer shift, and I'm not making two trips into town, so if she wants to go to the library today (and she does!), then she needs to complete her math, cursive, Book of the Day, and dishwasher work by 11:40. If she does all this, then she goes to the library. If she doesn't, then tomorrow's train to town leaves at approximately 1:00 pm, and to get that train to make a stop at the library after playgroup, she'll have to have completed ALL of Monday's work AND Tuesday's highlighted work.
And let me tell you, if she didn't go to the library on Monday, she is BURNING to go on Tuesday!
Friends, this has worked for two solid weeks of school so far. Nothing has EVER worked to get Will to do her school for two weeks in a row before!
I have long suspected, however, that the children meet together often in private to decide which of them will play the role of the Good Kid and which the Bad Kid on any given day, so it will not surprise you to learn that in this same period of time in which Will has done her schoolwork excellently, Syd, who is normally my reliable worker, has been a total pain about getting her work done!
Here's what she's been doing instead:
It's my policy that I don't disturb a kid who's happily engaged, but she also doesn't get her screen time if she doesn't finish her school. This is usually incentive enough, considering that she's My Little Pony's biggest fangirl, but the lack of screens wasn't seeming to bother her at all, so yesterday, when Syd was starting to look seriously bummed at the big pile of schoolwork that she still had to complete, I pointed out the Barbie movie that she'd checked out of the library the day before and said, "When you finish all of your schoolwork, you can watch the entire movie."
The normal amount of screentime that one earns by finishing schoolwork is one hour, so an entire two-hour movie? And a BARBIE MOVIE?!? She was zoned out in front of it by early afternoon.
Hopefully, schoolwork will go smoothly this week, as well. Books of the Day include a couple of leftover books on the Salem witch trials, some living picture books of the Colonial and Revolutionary War times, and a couple of science trivia books--I introduced the children to Trivial Pursuit last week, and Will, in particular, finds trivia intoxicatingly fun. Our Sensory Material of the Week is our set of good old pattern blocks. I'd never get rid of them, as I'm sure we'll have further academic use of them one day, but it's been a while since we've worked with them--time for them to come out and play!
And here's what we're doing with the rest of our week!
MONDAY: Syd fussed and pouted all last week about long division. She can do it, but she doesn't like to, and anyway, I know that the algorithm isn't making a lot of empirical sense to her, so all this week, we're just going to back up and learn long division again, this time with manipulatives. You actually CAN physically do long division using Base Ten blocks and Cuisenaire rods--I learned most of it from this guy! Syd and I did many, many long division problems by hand this morning, and we'll do more tomorrow. Maybe she'll move back into Math Mammoth after that, or maybe I'll have her dividing by hand all week--we'll see!
Either way, it's a SUPER cool way to divide. I'll show you more about it some other time.
Last week, the kids completed all the grammar activities in their Wordly Wise chapters, so this week's task is to memorize the spelling of those words. The kids will practice them daily, as well as their Mandarin vocabulary and their cursive:
They'll also be working on their STEM Fair projects every day, and their Gracie and Spots documentary project. Lots of dailies this week!
We've got our regular volunteer gig at the food pantry today, and tonight's big plan is to eat pizza and Easter candy while watching the third film of The Hobbit series. Dream big, Friends!
TUESDAY: In Math Mammoth, Will is still zipping along with integers, although she has moved into the tricky bit of adding and subtracting negative numbers. We speak of it as "an absence of cupcakes," as in "You have three cupcakes. I am taking away an absence of two cupcakes. How many cupcakes do you have now?"
I am SUPER excited about our art lesson for today. I have an entire series of first- through seventh-grade art lessons that I haven't yet used, but I like the way that they combine art history with guided viewing, discussion questions, and several suggestions for extension activities. That's just the way that I like a lesson to go! Starting with the first grade unit, I've just been looking through them to find any works that might be relevant to our other current studies, and so how awesome is it that there's an entire lesson on the Lincoln Memorial? I printed a couple of photos of the Lincoln Memorial, and so we'll be studying and discussing those, then completing an activity that replicates the way that the sculptor, Danial Chester French, worked to create this sculpture.
An afternoon at the park with our homeschooled friends will complete this wonderful day!
WEDNESDAY: Okay, I am now officially obsessed with Benjamin Franklin. I have extended the Philadelphia leg of our summer road trip so that I can spend more time fangirling over him, and instead of zipping through several chapters of Making Thirteen Colonies, our prequel text to the Revolutionary War, we'll just listen to the chapter of Benjamin Franklin on this day, the better to discuss him at length and ad nauseum.
The kids got distracted from their newspaper late last semester, but perhaps a little encouragement is all that's needed to finish up the last bits... in honor of Ben Franklin!
In other news, I need to add Geography as an additional subject in our school week, perhaps starting next week, so that we can focus just on the geography of New England, the thirteen colonies, and the Revolutionary War. Here's Syd coloring in the thirteen colonies as she listens to Making Thirteen Colonies--how cute is that?
I'm also in the market for a couple of coloring books on the Colonial and Revolutionary War periods, the better to entertain us as we listen to audiobooks. Anyone know any especially good ones? We've finished the first chapter of our earth sciences unit, Composition of Earth--here's Will's investigation of the Ph levels of various liquids:
I want to make sure that they've memorized the main points of the chapter before we move on, so I've written a "study guide" for them to fill in, and then, yes, I WILL be giving them a test!
The NaNoWriMo Young Writer's workbook is still very much uninspiring and unpleasant for both kids, although I know of plenty of other kids who've loved this curriculum. They're working through it with so little enthusiasm that I despair of it being of any use in writing a story, for either of them, but when I asked each child, separately, what they'd rather be writing--poetry? A movie script? A journal?--they both just sort of shrugged, so we're sticking with this workbook for now.
Election 2016, now--we LOVE this text! The kids had a fabulous time last week searching YouTube for interviews and advertisements, etc. This week they learn about polls, and then I'm going to have them create their own poll that they'll then administer and record the results of on the following week.
A science experiment is our last activity for human reproduction. We'll be messing around with pads and tampons, discussing how they absorb menstrual fluid and measuring their absorbency. I asked the children what body system we should move onto next, so I can get started researching it. Will's request?
The spleen. I mean, I'm sure there are just loads of super-fun enrichment activities for exploring the spleen!
SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Saturday is back to business as usual, now that our university's Spring Break is over. It's a good day for me to work at home, while Matt shuttles the kids back and forth to ballet and Mandarin and back to ballet. We're actually going to the ballet this weekend, as well, and then on Sunday we'll eat lots of candy and maybe I'll finally get someone to help me in the garden!
Here's a super simple way to get some extra fractions enrichment into your kids' day:
Make anything that's round or square--pizza, cake, pie, quiche, or Rice Krispy treats. Nom!
You get bonus points, of course, if your selection is a treat.
Next you give your kid a big ole knife, and challenge her to cut her treat into specific fractions. Cut it in half. Take a half, and make fourths. Eighths. Can you make sixteenths?
With a Rice Krispy Treat, you can!
Put the pieces back together in various combinations and determine their fraction.
Find all the equivalent fractions. Calculate 1/2 of 1/2 of the Rice Krispy Treat. Copy that equation down onto paper, and take a picture of the Rice Krispy Treat piece to go with it. Give a kid 1/4 of the Rice Krispy Treat, then take away 1/2 of that--what does she have left?
Even if you're doing a rigorous math curriculum, as we are, casual, simple explorations like this are crucial to a kid's math understanding. Math needs to be conversational--a kid isn't going to "get" math if the only time she encounters it is in a textbook. Math needs to be practical--what kid DOESN'T understand the need to divide a treat perfectly equally? Giving her four pieces of a treat and telling her they need to be divided among three people is the sneakiest way to get her to an understanding of adding, subtracting, and equivalent fractions that I've ever found!
Most of all, though, math needs to be hands-on and sensorial, even for these "big" kids of the ripe old ages of nine and eleven, even with something as simple as composing and decomposing fractions at those ripe old ages. Pattern building is one of the cornerstones of intelligence, and in order to build a reliable mental conception of what fractions ARE, we need to see them in all shapes and sizes and combinations so that we can build that pattern. We need to see 1/4 not just in a textbook, but in pattern blocks, Base Ten blocks, apples, game boards, measuring cups, gas tanks, bottles of milk, pieces of pie, trips around the block, and so much more, all the time, as much as possible, as naturally as possible. If you can see what 1/2 of 1/4 looks like in your head, whether you're visualizing a Rice Krispy Treat or a glass of water or your Cuisenaire rods, then you're well able to understand the algorithm that lets you calculate it, which means that it's easier to memorize and it's easier to perform and it's easier to apply.
And down I step off of my soapbox, primarily because if I continue to rant on, I won't have enough time to make egg sandwiches and prep the school table for today's work before the kids wander in and start begging for just half an hour of screen time before we get started, AND I forgot to make a big batch of salt dough yesterday, so I need to do that right after I get the kids settled in with cursive and Books of the Day. AND if I want them to help me in the garden--and I do!--I need to get them through their school quickly so that I can pretend to Will like the gardening is the work that we have to get done before I can take her to the library.
However, if you've got more time to browse the internet than I do this morning, here are some of my other favorite activities for fraction enrichment:
edible chessboard: Fractions up to 1/64, and you can play chess and checkers on it!
fraction art: The fun part is making the art; recording the fractions of each color is not fun, but IS a great illustration of what fractions look like, especially if you've got more than one person doing the activity.
spiraling decimals: This is a fun game, and it's tricky! Convert the decimal cards into fractions, of course, before you play.
Roll a Whole: When we play this one, we usually play up to something like five wholes, and then I have the kids draw their results.
fraction flags: You can use these, or homemade decorations and frosting, to record the fractions on your treat.
FYI, that Fair Trade study still comes up, as the kids are fond of researching the "grade" of companies that we patronize. We did that just last week, when Will urgently needed some new clothes (the kid grows something like an inch a month--she always urgently needs new clothes!), and Syd was in charge of figuring out the best store to shop in. We finally settled on H&M, although with much discussion about the fact that the store's C grade isn't great, and that really, if clothing is that cheap, there's probably something unethical going on somewhere down the line, because otherwise how could a person have been paid a living wage to make it?
I bet I've also mentioned before the fact that I LOATHE shopping!
This year, our troop gave an excellent presentation on China at the Girl Scout celebration. I was too distracted to take many photos, but each child was in charge of an informational display on some topic (Will covered the Girl Guides of Hong Kong, and Syd covered Mandarin), they took turns manning the activities (Mandarin writing on a Buddha board, stamping passports, and using chopsticks to transfer beans)--
--and they performed a version of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" with the animal names sung in Mandarin, and of course there were costumes. And a dragon that chased away the other animals at the end.
It. Was. MARVELOUS!
That work on the Geography Fair was actually enough for Syd, a Junior, to earn her World Thinking Day badge, but Will, a Cadette, had to do an additional activity to help her more deeply understand our privileged access to a connected society: she had to go an entire 24 hours without electronics, mwa-ha-ha!
The entire family, of course, joined her in her electronics fast out of solidarity (except that when the kids were at the library, I raced back home and snuck in some work on the computer--don't tell!), and I tried particularly to make it a fun experience for them. I wanted the kids to feel the loss of their screens somewhat, because I wanted them to understand that lack of access to technology isn't fair, but I also wanted them to understand that choosing to avoid access to technology also opens one up to enriching connections in other ways. So even though I did make them do school--
--we listened to records all day instead of CDs and Spotify, I got the kids (mostly Will, with Syd fluttering around and pretending like she was helping when she actually wasn't) to help me get a ton of tedious and tiring yardwork done, and we played a LOT of games:
I was pleased to see that Will was drawn into games that she normally wouldn't be, such as these Story Cubes.
Timeline, however, is the favorite game of both of us.
Well, even Matt had trouble, even after we convinced him to stand on top of a dictionary on top of a bar stool:
"Stand on top of two dictionaries on top of the bar stool!" we encouraged him, as he protested that he did not want to do such a thing.
"What could possibly go wrong?" we countered.
Oh, just the inevitable...
"Connect" was this year's World Thinking Day theme, and it truly played out in this experience. It's easy, in the pattern of our days, to gradually disconnect from each other, to find ourselves spending our days with me working, Syd playing with her toys in the next room, Will on the couch reading, and our evenings eating take-away in front of a movie with Matt--it's together, yes, but it's not necessarily connected. Since then, however, I've made a conscious effort every day, several times a day, to take a break from my work and connect with each child. I've sat down on the floor and played more times in the past week than I have in the past month. I've initiated more games. I've offered more treats. And it's been wonderful, of course, especially to see a kid's face light up when I sit down next to her on the floor and say that yes, I absolutely want to build a new house for her village, and to eventually lure a kid who is sulking at having to sit at the dinner table into staying there long after her sister has left to tell us all about Skulduggery Pleasant and the arcane rules behind naming in his world, and to make fun of what I decided is my "taken" name--Panther Zephyrino.
Please call me Panther Zephyrino from now on, Friends, and do not use my given name to mind control me.
I am SO excited to get back to our weekly work plans! For all of February and the first half of March, I did daily plans, written on a dry erase board each morning for each kid. Daily plans are great for zipping through our math curriculum and progressing on projects like our big World Thinking Day presentation on China, but for the more thoughtful, project-based learning that I prefer for the kids, it's really best to plan a week at a time ahead of time, with my unit study lesson plans at hand.
I've dialed back on the assigned chores a little bit this week, just to see if I can get a little less pushback, that way, when I ask the kids to help me with something on the fly, rather than their typical response of "Help you clean the living room? That's not on my work plan!" I also don't have a Project of the Week assigned--the younger kid, especially, LOVES the Project of the Week, but it adds significant chaos to the schedule, so I thought that I'd just give us a week to get settled back into our routine, maybe get some extra work done on STEM Fair projects first. It's also our school district's Spring Break, so we'll enjoy a little vacation from most of our extracurriculars--I appreciate the break!
I don't have to temptingly strew a sensory material this week, either, as the younger kid got extremely invested in Kapla block play late last week, and has done a good job strewing those around our big family room, herself, and of drawing everyone else into her play. I anticipate gingerly picking my way around her Kapla block village for the entirety of this week.
This week's memory work consists of the vocabulary words from Wordly Wise and Mandarin vocabulary from the kids' Mandarin class. Books of the Day are pretty widespread in topic this week, with selections including a couple about puberty, a couple about China, one on global water issues, a couple about random animals, and a couple on the American Revolution. I assign them as randomly as I select them, as they're just books that I think that the children should read and/or might like, with no other overarching reason for reading them.
And here's the rest of our week!
MONDAY: Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, the kids are still asleep. They also may be sleeping in because of last night's "incident:" The older kid was displeased that Matt took her tablet away from her at the end of screen-time yesterday, so to get revenge she programmed it to go off with an alarm at 1 am, knowing that we generally keep all confiscated electronics on the table next to our bed, the better to thwart children who try to sneak them back. When the alarm went off, I bolted awake with my heart in my mouth, as did Matt. Unfortunately, he could not figure out how to turn off the damned thing, so he marched it into the kids' bedroom, woke up the older kid, and demanded that she turn it off. Extra unfortunately, the older kid had not only set some sort of password to access the alarm, which she groggily had to try to remember while it blared, but apparently she'd also set the alarm so that you could only turn it off by completing a math problem, which she then had to try to do while it continued blaring. She couldn't solve the problem, so she tried to Google it, still with blaring. The entire incident took so long that across the house, I kept drowsing off, then waking up again to the blaring alarm, then drowsing off again, etc.
It was not our family's finest moment.
Anyway, when the kids do finally wake up, I'll make them egg sandwiches, then we'll settle in for Wordly Wise, cursive, and hopefully History of Us before our volunteer shift at the local food pantry today. History of Us is the spine that I'm using for our American Revolution unit study, although we're zooming through the book on the founding of the colonies first, for context. I've told you that I'm very project-focused, so you won't be surprised that even zooming comes with projects. I plan to visit Salem on our American Revolution road trip, and although I doubt that I'll take the children to any witch-related tourist traps there, I would like to take them to the real Gallows Hill, Old Burying Point, and the memorial to the victims of the witch trials, and I'd like them to understand the context.
And, fine, we might find a gift shop and buy a little bit of witch-themed crap.
Each kid has a composition book that I'm hoping she'll use as a combination notebook for our unit study and travel journal during our trip. I also had the kids make notebooks for our World War 2 unit, but I was disappointed at how they came out, as I think they're far too messy for the kids to be able to meaningfully refer to them or add to them the next time we study World War 2. I'm planning to provide more guidance this time, so we'll see! I printed out this Salem Witch Trials lapbook, and the kids will complete it and put it in their notebooks. The plan is that they'll leave space to also journal about our trip to Salem when we're on the road, and afterwards can add in any souvenirs and pamphlets, and the photos that we take while we're there.
The kids are still completing a page a day of cursive, the younger kid from the secular version of New American Cursive II and the older kid from Teach Yourself Cursive. I see improvement from them both every day, but it's still VERY slow going, so I plan to buy them both this cursive copybook with literary quotes to do after these books. The kids also have some correspondence to catch up on this month, mostly thank-you notes to cookie customers and relatives who sent Christmas gifts (yikes!), but the younger kid also has a couple of pen pals to whom she writes.
Our family "parties" are generally just excuses to eat stuff, and today's Pi Day party is no different. There will be homemade pizza and homemade apple pie, the viewing of a math documentary (probably the first episode of The Story of Maths), and the singing of the first 25 digits of Pi:
TUESDAY: In Math Mammoth, the younger kid is slogging unhappily through long division, and the older kid was supposed to be briefly reviewing geometry before moving on to ratios, but she somehow managed to confuse herself so greatly with angle measurement (she's making it harder than it is) that I'm making her spend an extra day measuring angles before she moves on. If two long pages of angle measuring does not clear up, once and for all, the difference between acute and obtuse, then I don't know what I'm going to do with her!
This documentary about Gracie and Spots, our two cats, is meant to be part of a larger Girl Scout project that the younger kid proposed, but speaking of making things harder than they are... I just can't seem to get it off the ground! I'm telling you, though: March is the month! These kids are going to get this damned documentary filmed, present it to the rest of the troop, and make some toys to donate to the local animal shelter if it is the last thing that I do!
Ahem...
Lesson 3 in the Your Kids: Cooking curriculum is tamale pie, but it just doesn't sound appetizing, so I'm putting it off for another week and instead having the kids review their first lesson, French toast. Any excuse to have breakfast for dinner!
Our homeschool playgroup is the highlight of my school week. Last week, we went to a park that has a creek, and the parents chatted all afternoon while the kids ran back and forth between playground and water. At one point, the younger kid complained about being thirsty, because the city hasn't turned the water fountains on for the season yet. I jokingly suggested that she find the park's water cut-off valve, break into it, and turn it on for herself, which led to a discussion among several kids and parents about where such a thing might be located and how it might work, which led to me giving the younger kid my Swiss Army knife to unscrew the panel underneath the water fountain. I immediately forgot all about it until another mom looked over a VERY long time later to find an entire crowd of children around the water fountain, all attempting to investigate its plumbing and how it might be sabotaged. They did manage to unscrew a couple of panels, although they put them back, but they never did figure out how to turn the water fountain on.
WEDNESDAY: The lack of extracurriculars this week allows me to assign more schoolwork, which means that we can delve in more depth into the documentary project (which WILL be done!!!) and our history curriculum. We'll slow down a lot once we get into the next History of Us book, but for now... zoom!
We can also delve more deeply into our science unit. The spine is an eighth-grade digital textbook on earth sciences; I expect the younger kid to understand less than I expect the older kid to, and I add in projects to enhance understanding. This day's lesson is on acidity, so the kids can use Ph strips to test various substances--always a good time! Thursday's lesson is on states of matter, and since the younger kid has been curious about clouds lately, as well, it's a good time to ask them to make a working model of the water cycle that shows evaporation and condensation and rain--more on that later!
THURSDAY: We're still working through the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Program workbook, although I'm still waiting for it to click with the kids and get them inspired. At least both kids are excited about our upcoming homeschool group's STEM Fair! The older kid is making an augmented reality sandbox, and the younger kid wants to design a website--I'm thinking that I'll have her use Wordpress. We'll get started with that, and with installing Linux to an old desktop computer so that it can run the sandbox programming, on this day.
FRIDAY: Both kids are really enjoying this election campaign. Can you see our Candidates Wall behind the older kid in this photo?
The kids especially enjoy marking out each failed candidate with a big, red Sharpie.
I let the younger kid watch this John Oliver segment on Donald Trump with me, and now she enjoys correcting us when we speak his name--"It's DRUMPF!!!" I like the way that this Election 2016 curriculum explains the entire process of the campaign and defines its components, so that applying it to the current election is easy. This particular lesson covers all the media components of a campaign, so we'll be searching YouTube for examples of each one.
The kids are kind of over learning about puberty, so I probably won't do all of the activities that I'd planned for with them during this unit, but I insist that they memorize their own anatomy, so we'll go over it again by making and labeling salt dough models. I also for sure want them to experiment with the absorbency of various pads and tampons, but after that I may show mercy and let us all move on to the skeletal system or something.
The kids had so much fun with our Spirograph last week that I thought that they might also enjoy pendulum painting. The younger kid also wants me to re-rig our aerial silks rig back from the hammock set-up that it's in now, and if this is the last time that we'll have an aerial hammock for a while, then we might as well do some whole-body pendulum painting!
SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I both want to go on a day trip to one of our local national parks AND want to spend the entire weekend planting and landscaping in the yard. I could say that I'll do one on one day and one on the other day, but the reality is that I may well just end up laying in the backyard hammock all of BOTH days, reading and eating cookies. Tough life, I know.
Will wouldn't let me take too many photos of it, nor would she let me do her hair cute or go without the torn leggings underneath or put on her boots instead of her old sneakers, so yes, I count myself lucky to have gotten these two pictures of the dress that I sewed for her this week:
My design and construction notes are all here in the Crafting a Green Post that I wrote for it, but the tl;dr is that it's the Chambray Dress, size medium, from Handmade Style. It's not something that I'd sew for myself, because I prefer a top with better drape, ideally something stretchy, but it's a good look on Will, and she seems to like it well enough.
I did get Will's buy-in on both the dress pattern and fabric before I sewed it, but it's clear now that she'll always want to wear leggings or bicycle shorts underneath it. And that's how my new project has become finding a good leggings/bicycle shorts pattern!
Like, seriously, SO sick. The kind of sick that makes you rethink your life choices. The kind of sick that you can't even really explain to people even after you feel better, on account of the tale is too horrifying.
I am going to be traumatized for a long time by how sick I was, but I'll just tell you that I got sick on a Friday, and I did not feel better until I woke up on a Monday TEN DAYS LATER. This year's flu is no joke, my Friends.
It's a little funny, though, because I made no secret that February was a stressful month for me. I complained all the time about cookie selling and Syd's fashion show garment and all the big etsy orders that I kept getting because I refused to close my shop while I was so busy. Is it really any wonder, then, that I got laid flat by a virus? Oh, and I somehow, probably at a cookie booth, managed to catch hand, foot, and mouth disease, as well, so that happened.
Anyway, on the last day that I still felt really unwell, I nevertheless put on a bra AND a pair of button-waisted pants--my first in over a week!--and was bundled off to the ice arena, to watch this amazing kid of mine show off another season of ice skating instruction.
Rehearsals for this particular performance had been a little shaky, as the show runner had made both the dicey decision to have the kids skate to a hee-haw sounding country song AND to have them wear their pajamas while doing it. A few of the skaters were too young to take offence, but those who were well ensconced in the tween demographic, my own skater included, were not best pleased. I'm told that one child actually defected to skate in a younger level's performance instead.
Nevertheless, my own kid sucked it up and put on her wolf pajamas, and when, once we'd gotten there, I voiced the sudden panicked thought that perhaps all the other children had revolted and my kid would be the only one in jammies, Will assured me that she'd seen one of the other kids in her group already, and she was rocking a pair of cheetah-print jammies.
Thank you, Cheetah Jammies!
Here, then, are all the kids, rocking their jammies and their hee-haw song and showing off their awesome skating skills:
During the first half of the show, a little tot skater finished her performance, then somehow escaped her teacher (I would NOT have been pleased if it had been my kid) and managed to march her way all the way around the rink in her little tot skates and over to her mother in the bleachers. Her mother was sitting next to me, so I lifted the kid up to her, but I couldn't help both asking the kid, "Does your teacher know where you are?" and telling the mother, "They're going to want her for the finale." The kid stayed in the bleachers, however, and sure enough, during the finale, when all her little classmates marched and shuffled and were tugged out for their final bow, the kid began to wail. The mother said to me, in a break from comforting her kid and ceaselessly explaining to her that it was too late to go join her group on the ice, "I think you've done this before!"
And that's when it hit me: yeah, I have. Will's such a low-key kid about her activities that it can be hard to realize, sometimes, that yes, this kid has been skating every winter since 2008. She's been riding since 2013, and actually has her first Pony Club test, for the D-1 level, later today. Back in 2010, when she was holding her peaceful protest against Sport Shorties, I don't know if I believed that this kid would ever find one sport to call her own, much less two.
And I haven't even told you about the mother/daughter fencing that we've been doing all fall and winter. Another time!
