The Nutcracker 2016: Mommy's Little Soldier

Syd earned a promotion this year at her Nutcracker audition. No longer an angel, bringing light back to the world, this year she joined the ranks of the tin soldiers who fight in the Nutcracker Prince's army in the battle against the mice.

Not only did this mean more stage time, but it's also a more interesting role, with varied choreography and an actual plot to uphold and interaction with the adult dancers. It was a lot more responsibility, but a really fun role for a kid.

Never one to slack off in her preparation, Syd soon developed a background for her character, who she decided is a hardened veteran of many battles against the mice:



Just between us, the soldier's costume is also MUCH cuter than the angel costume, even with its wings and halo. Soldiers wear navy shirts, white pants with suspenders, black spandex leggings that they pull up over their pants to look like boots, navy jackets with gold details, and cardboard hats with straps under the chin and shiny silver starbursts on the front:

during the fitting in the costume shop

and in the dressing room, waiting for the call! I'm about to fix her leggings so they match.

I also took a more active role this year. Last year, there was a sexual assault case concerning the college student dancers and one of their dance instructors that occurred during Nutcracker rehearsals, and although it didn't go anywhere near the world of the child dancers, it opened my eyes to the vulnerable position of children in the performance industry, relinquished by their parents for hours at a time, weeks at a time, during rehearsals. Whatever else I know about myself, I know for sure that I can keep track of multiple kids for as long as I need to, and get them ready to go and where they need to be exactly when they need to be there, so whenever I wasn't at fencing or watching the show, myself, I volunteered backstage with the soldiers, knew where all of them were at all times, forced them all to go pee before their call time, hairsprayed all of their fly-aways into perfectly neat soldier buns, fixed all of their little jackets so that the gold stripes lined up just so, refused to let them sit down after they'd put on their white trousers, let the most nervous among them dry off her clammy hands on my T-shirt seconds before showtime, and, surprisingly, really, really, really enjoyed myself quite a lot. I have no desire to dance onstage, myself, but I can see why Syd likes it!

Will and I share fencing, so volunteering backstage is my chance to share Syd's world, and enjoy it with her.

Ballet dancers have a lot of crap! You've got your costume, your hair stuff, your street clothes, tons of food, a book or two, and card games. Lots of card games. There were MANY Uno and Spot It! tournaments during the long waits backstage, fulfilling the stereotype of soldiers and their card games.

Here Syd is, reading Wonder for the billionth time. This is also my only good photo of her soldier bun, which is just like the angel bun, only it has to be on the smack top of one's head.

 But what do you think the little dancers like doing most of all?

Watching the livestream of the show! It always began about 35 minutes before our own call time, and as soon as the curtain opened, all the soldiers would crowd around to watch. And yes, they danced along, because they're just that adorable.

 One of the cutest parts of the show, however--and there are MANY cute parts--is that during intermission, some of the costumed children are chosen to mill around the lobby for photo ops. I prepped my soldiers by telling them that it was going to be like being Mickey Mouse at Disney World, and it was seriously adorable to watch people mobbing them for photos:

Syd, of course, had a wonderful time, danced her heart out, enjoyed the hours of downtime spent with her friends, liked having me there, and got so much of value from the experience. And I have to say that I, too, had a wonderful time. I loved watching Syd dance her heart out from the darkness, just a few feet away (while keeping a weather eye out for that one curtain that had a lot of potential to clock a soldier in the top of the head as it fell). I took pleasure in watching her play around with her friends and eavesdropping on all of their kid conversations. I could not have been more thrilled to finally get to see her up close in her costume and take pictures to my heart's content, even if they were on my crappy camera phone. I came home absolutely exhausted from the stress and the human interaction and all the running around every single night, but that chance to spend time with Syd in her world?

Totally worth it.

Work Plans for the Week of December 12, 2016: Cooking and Christmas and Lots of Science!

After two weeks of a lighter schedule that helped get our little soldier through Nutcracker season, we are back for two more weeks of a full work load before we take another week off for the holidays. I kept the kids focused on the basics for the past couple of weeks--math, typing, keyboard, grammar, vocabulary, SAT prep for Will--and that turned out to be a good thing, in that the lighter schedule may have helped get Syd through the slacker phase that has made getting her to do her schoolwork just about impossible.

Let's see if it holds this week!

Interspersed with the lighter academics, I used our extra time last week to make the kids help me FINALLY put the garden to bed (newspaper covering the plant rows, an entire yard full of leaves raked and put on top of them), to go through their winter clothes (this year I finally remembered to have them do this BEFORE I take a look at their near-empty clothing bins and go panic shopping at Goodwill--they're full to bursting now!), and, of course, to do some Christmas crafting with them. Check out these beaded ornament hangers that we make every year because I'm too cheap to go buy any!

Super pretty, right? And all they're made of is stash jewelry wire and beads that I'm dying to get rid of, anyway.

Memory Work for the week will be a lot of review, as it wasn't a focus for the past two weeks. Books of the Day are mostly taken from the 2015-2016 Banned Books List (when this comes out every year, I immediately request them all from our public library, and suggest the purchase of the few that the library doesn't have), so Will is reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and This Book is Gay; I'm reading City of Thieves and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Will and I are both reading Looking for Alaska, and both kids are reading the picture books I am Jazz, My Princess Boy, This Day in June, and King and King (plus its sequel). I'm also pre-reading Just One Day to see if it would be a good fit for Will.

Daily work for both kids this week includes Analytical Grammar for Will and Junior Analytical Grammar for Syd, Wordly Wise (or a word ladder for Syd; she loathes her Wordly Wise, and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about that yet), ten minutes a day of journaling or imaginative writing, typing practice, keyboard practice or a Hoffman Academy lesson, SAT prep on Khan Academy for Will, and the last week of their current events journal.

And here's the rest of our week!

MONDAY: We're not ready to start a new poem this week, and I don't have another literature unit that I'm ready to implement, so the kids can work on their MENSA reading lists some more. I try to keep several books from this list--in both written and audio formats--on our library shelves, so choosing the next selection should be easy.

Both kids are actually in just about the same subject in their Math Mammoth units, with Will studying positive and negative integers and applying that to the coordinate plane, and Syd learning how to graph on the coordinate plane and then moving into other types of graphs. This will play well into our later hands-on math enrichment!

The Animal Behavior MOOC is much more dry than the Sharks one, so I've been having trouble keeping Syd's attention on it. Fortunately, this week they're covering inherited vs. learned behaviors, and there are lots of hands-on activities to help cement those concepts. On this day, after watching videos on how animals learn, the kids will be challenged to make a puzzle toy for one of their pets, and then encouraged to observe the pet as it uses it. I think that Syd will really enjoy this one!

There's a lot that can be done with Story of Science, but I don't want to still be doing it into 2018, so I'm having to be a little more selective with the hands-on activities that we do than I've often been--this is why we've actually been finishing units of study this year! This week, we'll be covering chapters 4 and five, and the Quest Book activities are simple question-and-answer worksheets that will make sure the kids have a solid grasp of the content before we move into the fun activities.

I assigned Hephaestus a couple of weeks ago, but Syd was so busy with The Nutcracker that she didn't get to it, so this assignment is mainly for her. Will never finished her Hades trading card, however, so she, too, can do some catch-up during this time.

Syd is finished with ballet for the semester, and Will with Chinese, but Will and I have one last week of fencing, and she has one last week of ice skating, so we'll still be out and about with extracurriculars this week.

TUESDAY: I plan to blow the kids' minds on this day, by showing them how to measure the height of something really tall (in this case, the drive-in movie screen next door) using ratios. If we're not freezing our booties off, I'll then show them how to do it with trigonometry, and we can compare results.

This day's Animal Behavior MOOC video on inherited vs. learned behavior also lends itself to a couple of fun activities to illustrate how these traits affect us. The kids were supposed to have done self-portraits in their art lesson with Matt this weekend, and were then going to label them with their own inherited and learned behaviors, but I don't know what happened to Sunday, but it wasn't art! We'll table that to the weekend, I suppose.

Playgroup and fencing will take us through much of the rest of the day.

WEDNESDAY: Some of the rest of this week in the Animal Behavior MOOC is too difficult for Syd, so Will has some extra work to complete on this day. With her critical reading skills, she should be able to handle reading abstracts of scientific papers to evaluate their rigor. Both kids, however, should be able to handle the reading comprehension activity from this Understanding by Design curriculum. The curriculum is written for the fourth grade, but I've had no problem adapting it for my fifth- and seventh-graders this week. 

I've got a bit of cooking for others to do this week, so in true homeschooler style, I'm turning it into a Home Ec assignment and making the kids help me! On this day, I've volunteered us to contribute a meal to a family in our homeschool circle who've just had a new baby. I've (gratefully!) received one too many casserole/pasta bake in my time, so my own rule of thumb for a meal train is a large cheese pizza from our favorite local pizza shop, plus a homemade fruit salad and a home-baked treat. For this family, I think we'll bake brownies!

I need to set aside some time to focus on Syd's Girl Scout goals, since she'll be bridging next year, but for now, I'll let her pick a new badge to get started on while Will and I focus on her Cadette Breath Journey and the Leader in Action Award that she's hoping to earn. For this award, she has to lead a meeting for Brownie Girl Scouts--what a happy coincidence that we happen to be part of a multi-level troop and have our very own Brownies! There are going to be LOTS of valuable skills to be learned from leading a meeting for younger girls.

THURSDAY: I can't let a week in December go by without some sort of holiday craft, so we're going to be sneakily practicing symmetry and regular polygons by making large-scale popsicle stick snowflakes to hang from our high ceilings.

One more activity and the Module Exam for Will, and that's Module 2 of the Animal Behavior MOOC done and done! 

Just between us, I'm hoping that Will's horseback riding gets cancelled for cold temps, because I am ready to have this semester's extracurriculars also done and done!

FRIDAY: We are out and about for much of the day on this day, especially poor Will, the most introverted among us. We're attending a school matinee of the local theater's holiday show in the morning, and then the afternoon brings Will's last ice skating class of the session and a holiday party for her Pony Club. You'll never guess what I'm bringing to the party...

Fruit salad and dessert! I SUPER want to make these horse-themed cupcakes, so that's what the kids and I will do during our brief interval of at-home time. Hmmm.... perhaps we should make the cupcakes the night before.

The other work for the day should be independent and efficient--there's a coordinate grid foldable to cement the vocabulary, and a research project, again from that Understanding Design unit, that asks the kids to figure out what inherited and learned behaviors allow different animals to thrive in different habitats.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Gingerbread houses! The New Star Wars! Housecleaning! Yardwork!

And then one more week until Christmas break!

Homeschool Math: Zometool Geometry

We've been using Will's recent geometry unit in Math Mammoth to do a lot of enrichment with Zometools, which are a practically perfect geometry modeling manipulative.

Although I loved geometry as a kid, the modeling of two-dimensional and three-dimensional figures is clearly a place where my own education was lacking, so I've been relying on other Zometool resources to mentor us all.

Zome Geometry gets very quickly out of our depth, as there's very little of the hand-holding that I've come to expect in most teacher's manuals (in fact, when paging through it I feel like young scholars of old must have felt upon being handed an edition of Euclid's geometry and told, "There you go! Read up!"), but the beginning units are well suitable for doing some interesting modeling of two- and three-dimensional figures.

So that's what we did!

We're first meant to make these stars and calculate the interior angles. After you've done a few of those, it's easy to create your own formula for calculating the interior angles of a circle.

Now we're trying to use the star models to make regular polygons. This only works for some of them, and for others, you have to delete some of the spokes.

Will got involved in her own extension activity.

It turned out really cool!

On another day, we were asked to use our polygons to construct both prisms--easy!--and antiprisms--SUPER hard, as we didn't have any hand-holding!

I struggled and struggled and struggled to construct an antiprism from my pentagon model. I found many interesting symmetrical constructions, but no antiprisms!

Will struggled and struggled and struggled as well, first to create antiprisms from her squares, and then, after she gave up on that, to contruct antiprisms from triangles.

She got really frustrated before she finished, but finally...

And this girl mostly did her own thing, but at least she was at the table with us! I have come to believe that the ten-year-old schoolwork stubborn streak is a REAL thing, now that my second kid has it, too.

We're playing around with Zometool geometry some more today, but now that Will has moved on in her Math Mammoth to integers and Syd to graphing, our math enrichment will look very different next week.

Life-sized Battleship, perhaps?

Christmas Craft: Paint-Filled Clear Ornaments

Last week, I wrote a round-up of clear ornament crafts for CAGW, primarily because I scored a couple dozen clear ornaments from a Joann's doorbuster and needed ideas for what to do with them.

My favorite, and the one that seemed the most kid-friendly (and the cheapest!), was the one that's all over Pinterest this year, with people everywhere filling their clear ornaments with acrylic paint, swirling it around, and then pouring out the excess.

It really is kid-friendly, super cheap (if you have some craft acrylics), and SUPER fun!

And it really is just that easy. You squeeze craft acrylic paint into a clear ornament--

--swirl and shake it around--

--and then set the ornament upside-down back on top of the paint bottle to drain back out:

I discovered in the process that I had some mostly-empty paints that I had bought more of but hadn't yet replaced. This is how you get out all the last dregs!

Oh, just making sure that I don't waste a single smidge of that almost-empty paint, even though I bought new ones...
Posted by Crafting a Green World on Tuesday, December 6, 2016

When Syd came to join us later (she'd been busy baking cherry bread with her grandmother), she did even more experimenting. She played around with our artist's acrylics, although she quickly discovered that it was too thick to work on its own. It did work better when she squeezed it in with a couple of colors of craft acrylics; the craft acrylics seemed to thin the artist's acrylics down enough to give it some flow, and that's how she got such lovely golds and silvers into her ornaments:

She even played with putting in glitter, and it worked great!

Although the results are gorgeous, this is actually a quite process-oriented work, and both kids (and I!) worked contentedly at it for a long time. It was very nice to swirl the colors around and watch them flow! 

We left the mixed-color ornaments to rest upside-down on top of the plastic carton that they'd come in, since of course we couldn't pour the paint back into the bottle all mixed up. After the excess had drained out, we did have to put a second coat into a couple of the ornaments, as too much paint had drained out and left empty streaks.

These ornaments also probably aren't suited to being hung in direct sunlight; the paint isn't uniformly thick, and although our ornaments all look great in our lit room, I noticed as I was taking photos that if I held them in direct sunlight, I could sort of see through some parts of some of them.

That being said, when hung on our tree they look fabulous, as if they're enameled:

Christmas colors annoy me, so I indulged myself by making several ornaments in black and grey and navy blue. You can't just go out and buy colors like that in the store!

Pattern Blocks for Older Kids: Symmetry and Similar Figures

I've been thinking, lately, about which of our math manipulatives have stood the test of time and which haven't, and working on creating even more valuable ways to use our current manipulatives with my now older children.

It's easy to use manipulatives (or anything, really) for counting and making basic patterns and calculating simple addition and subtraction and figuring out one half, but when you're able to use those same manipulatives to demonstrate long division or multiplying decimals or more sophisticated geometry--that's when you've got a manipulative that was worth its purchase price and its decade of inclusion on your shelves!

Pattern blocks are one manipulative that I sometimes struggle with. I *know* they're useful, and the kids love it whenever I bring them out, but I feel like I'm occasionally grasping for a non-babyish way to use them in our very non-babyish math these days. It's recently occurred to me, however, that their real value is as a two-dimensional geometry modeling tool--whenever our math turns to geometry, it seems that there's always an opening to genuinely include pattern blocks in a way that adds value to the lesson.

If you want to test whether your kid *really* understands symmetry, for instance, challenge her to create a symmetrical design using as many pattern blocks as possible:

This piece is no longer perfectly symmetrical, as the Roomba tried to eat it. I had to fish a few green triangles out of its belly!

 Bigger kids like bigger projects, so using as many blocks as possible makes it more fun for them. It also gives you a chance to delve more deeply into conversations about what is meant by symmetry. With this figure alone, we discussed whether the definition of symmetry would allow the rotating line of symmetry present in the hexagons formed by two trapezoids, and the differing shades of the green triangles.

That makes a fun review, but symmetry should be pretty old news to a bigger kid. Similar figures, however, are likely new news!

It can be tricky for an upper elementary or middle school kid to draw similar figures; it's easy for human error to measure out the ratio incorrectly, so a kid who understands similar figures and how they work could easily draw a figure that didn't look correct, but she wouldn't know what she did wrong. That's good in some ways, of course, because it's self-correcting--she knows she did *something* wrong, so she has to figure it out--but it's not good for reinforcing in a kid that intrinsic knowledge of similar figures.

Pattern blocks, however are perfect, because when they're right, they look exactly right, and when they're wrong, they look very wrong. There's no getting your measurement off by 2 cm and thinking that it doesn't look quite right but just going with it because your ruler says it's pretty close.

To make similar figures with pattern blocks, you simply choose one pattern block, then try to build it larger:

This is a great way to reinforce what a kid truly understands about similar figures. For instance, in the image below, Will's trapezoid is NOT correct. She made *a* trapezoid, yes, but she did not make a trapezoid similar to the single pattern bock trapezoid, because her ratios are off. The ratio of the single pattern block trapezoid is 1:1 base:height, but her large trapezoid construction is 7:8. 

Do you see how it's so much easier to explain what's wrong with that trapezoid with these pattern block models? The models make it perfectly clear.

Here's a better similar figure!

Here's the construction of a similar equilateral triangle:

Again, you can easily check and measure it by comparing those three trapezoids at the base to the other two sides: will three trapezoids also line up the same way?

Here's one good parallelogram:

And here's the creation of another!

At this point, the kids started to get a little punchy with the fun of sitting on the carpet and playing with blocks like toddlers.

One might say that they even started to behave like toddlers...

No, no, Will! Don't eat the pattern block!

Sigh...

 And I don't even really know what was going on here, just that I had pretty much lost control of the proceedings (assuming that I had some in the first place, which I probably didn't):







And yet, even after that, these similar hexagons were created!

Notice how both children chose to make their similar hexagons symmetrical?

And boom! We're back to symmetry!

I love the interconnectedness of everything.

Homeschool Book Review: Three-Dimensional Art Adventures

You might have noticed that I don't often have art as a subject in our weekly lesson plans. Primarily, that's because Matt has an art degree and he gives the children an art lesson every weekend. I consider them to be private art lessons, thriftily outsourced!

I do like to do art with the kids, but I don't consider myself skilled enough to prepare my own lessons, so I really appreciate packaged lessons that include study of an artwork and a hands-on extension. I have several of those kinds of resources in my Homeschool: The Arts pinboard, my favorite of which is this site with leveled art history studies. I especially like to incorporate those lessons into our other studies--we used the lesson on Daniel French, for instance, in our study of the Lincoln Memorial.

The other way that I like to use art lessons, if I don't have an academic context to put them in, is as a fun weekend activity to do with the kids. We spend a ton of time together during the school week doing projects, so you'd think that the last thing that we'd want to do on a weekend is sit down for another project, but it seems new and different, somehow, when it's not also a task to be checked off of a work plan.

That *kind of* explains why I received Three-Dimensional Art Adventures for free from a publicist back in July, and I'm only just now ready to write about it. I made note of the most promising activities, then put the book in with my other resources, and when the time was right for a particular activity, there it was, ready and waiting for us!

I think the kids' favorite of the activities that we tried is the "trick hand." The lesson began with a study of From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes, which the kids found fascinating, then guided us through the creation of our own "tricky" piece:

I can't tell which one, but underneath Will's drawing is for sure one of those LEGO books I was telling you about yesterday!

Does it annoy you to try to draw or write on a picnic table? We do it all summer, and it bugs the crap out of me! Painting boards are on my long-term to-do list.

This is when the magic happens!

Everyone's turned out really well, although we all figured out ways to make the effect even better next time (use a ruler to draw the straight lines, elaborate the curve on the curvy lines, make the lines as close together as we can, etc.), so it's still an activity that's repeatable.

Another week, during our shark unit, the kids became fascinated with the clean, streamlined silhouette of the shark, and so I took that opportunity to introduce the "Capturing Simplicity" lesson. It began with a study of a sculpture from Ancient Greece (and now I'm putting that down in my Greek mythology lesson plans to look at again when we study Hermes!), and continued with our own simple, sculpted silhouettes:

I don't know why I didn't photograph Will's, but she did her first initial. It looks really cool!

The tutorial calls for air-dry clay and paint, but we used Sculpey, and it worked perfectly.

I've often wanted to create some sort of cataloging and indexing system for myself, to use with my homeschooling resources. I have tons of print and digital resources, and when I create unit studies, I'm always flipping through every single thing, adding a reading from here and an activity from there. I mean, just in this book alone, the artwork studied ranges from Ancient Greece to modern, geographically circles the world, covers a huge variety of themes, and uses materials from nuts and bolts to pen and paper to fabric to floral wire.

Next on my to-do list from the book: the collage lesson, just because it's been ages since the kids and I have done collages together (and I have a bunch of random materials that I've been saving up and would love to get used up!), and the lesson on sculpting movement using floral wire as the medium.

Because Hermes!

Our Favorite Kids' Books of 2016

As a family, we have read thousands of books this year. To be fair, the older kid, who reads several multi-chapter books every single day, has pulled most of the weight in getting us to this number, but the rest of us are no book-reading slouches, either!

That being said, I actually feel a lot more confident in giving out our favorite book recommendations for 2016. I mean, we played with a few toys in 2016, but we read a LOT of books.

• Wonder
• Auggie & Me
• 365 Days of Wonder

We came to this late in the year--I'd read Wonder before, but the kids just read it last month for a library book club meeting. It was, however, a revelation for them, one of those instances when someone reads the perfect book at the perfect time. The older kid, who normally prefers books that take place in imaginary realms or at least star talking animals, even loved the book, and the younger kid listened to it once, read it once, listened to the Playaway of the Wonder stories SEVEN times, read pretty much all of Mr. Brown's Book of Precepts out loud, and recently requested the Wonder Playaway again so that she could listen to it some more. It's a beautiful book about a kid dealing with a really big difference, and all the other kids in his life who have to learn how to accept really big differences.

And if you read it, you MUST read the Wonder stories next. Julian's chapter touched me more than the entire first book.

• Percy Jackson and the Olympians 5-book set
• The Heroes of Olympus set

Percy Jackson has been another absolute phenomenon this year, at least in the younger kid's world. The older kid and I have read them all, but the younger kid? Oh, my gosh, she LIVED in them. For months. Still does. She talks about Percy and Annabeth like they are friends who live in the next town over, and knows just as much about their god and goddess parents. This obsession was the inspiration for our current Greek mythology unit study, which has been just as big of a hit with both kids.

The younger kid likes Riordan's other series, as well, but that's nothing in comparison to how deeply she feels for Percy.

• Skulduggery Pleasant complete set

Normally, the older kid has a "love 'em and leave 'em" attitude towards the dozens of books that she blows through every week, but Skulduggery Pleasant has stuck with her. The books are witty, gothic but not spooky, and full of adventure and intrigue, She is smitten by the idea of "taken names," and is desperately into the intricate plot of the series of books.

• Assassination! The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents
• Brick Greek Myths: The Stories of Heracles, Athena, Pandora, Poseidon, and Other Ancient Heroes of Mount Olympus
• Brick Shakespeare: Four Tragedies & Four Comedies

We all really like these books of famous events and stories retold in LEGO, but the older kid especially loves them, and has discovered new genres of literature and new events in history. The assassinations book isn't completely kid-friendly (although... why would you assume a book about assassinations would be?), as one of the highlights of the story of Boston Corbett (the guy who killed John Wilkes Booth), is that he was a religious fanatic who castrated himself before dinner one evening because he was upset at having been tempted by some prostitutes during his walk home.

And yeah, there's a LEGO illustration for that. Anyway, the older kid was totally titillated by this tale, so much so that we conducted more research on Corbett, and even found some photos of the hole that he spent the latter part of his life in---yes, a hole. The older kid REALLY wants to make a pilgrimage there one day.

• Phoebe and Her Unicorn v. 1
• Unicorn on a Roll
• Unicorn vs. Goblins

We read a LOT of comics and graphic novels in our family, but many of them aren't kid-friendly. The older kid can read whatever she wants, but the younger kid is my baby, so it's nice to have graphic novels that everyone can enjoy, but that she, especially really likes. Phoebe and Her Unicorn is super kid-friendly, but it's not baby-ish--the unicorn has an attitude, and the banter between the two is witty and engaging. Phoebe and Her Unicorn is actually a comic strip, and it's my dream that one day it will run in our newspaper, perhaps instead of For Better or For Worse, which I abhor.

• Drama
• Ghosts
• Kristy's Great Idea

 And speaking of graphic novels that the younger kid loves... she has spent the entire year worshiping Raina Telgemeier. First, she fell in love with her Babysitter's Club adaptations--and I even tried to give her the novels, but she didn't like them, just Telgemeier's graphic novels of them--then she discovered her original works, and has eagerly read all of them several times. I also really like her work, which has the kind of drama that many tweens like, but isn't schlocky. Her newest novel, Ghosts, has only been out for a couple of months, so it's still possible that you could happily surprise a kid who hasn't read it yet.

• The Hobbit
• The Fellowship of the Ring
• The Two Towers

I've mentioned a few times before that we have a Family Read-Aloud. Now that the kids are older and their evening extracurriculars run later, we don't do this as often as we used to, but at least two or three nights a week, we come together as a family and my partner reads us the next chapter of our current book. The kids and I braid each other's hair, or color in our Tolkien coloring book, or just sit under a blanket and listen. For over a year now, it's been Tolkien, first The Hobbit, and now we're well into The Lord of the Rings--it'll probably take us another year, at least, to finish! I am very adamant that the kids do not see film adaptations of books until they've read the books, so although we've watched the Hobbit films as a family (with MUCH criticism), we're saving the wonderful Lord of the Rings movies until after we've finished the entire book. It's even better that way, as our world-building can take place entirely in our heads. We talk about it a lot, reference it to each other, the kids and I have been known to invent Lord of the Rings fanfiction, and basically it's just given us a very large common reference point in interests and conversation. I highly recommend it as a family read-aloud.

• Mr. Wuffles!
• Flotsam

The younger kid recently re-introduced us to David Wiesner, when she brought home Mr. Wuffles and my partner and I basically snatched it out of her hands so that we could read it, too. If you have kids, you probably read him a lot when your kids were little, but then forgot about him when you stopped browsing the picture book aisles at every library visit. Well, he's still awesome, and still fun even for older kids and adults (I'd argue that he's even MORE fun for older kids and adults, because we get his sense of humor better).

• Warriors: Power of Three set
• Warriors: The Ultimate Guide
• Warriors: The New Prophecy set

Probably every kid in America has read the Warrior Cats series, which is fine, because they're awesome. They're another of the few books that the older kid still re-reads and still talks about after she's read them, so out of the thousands of books that she's read this year, you know they must be very, VERY good! This is also a good series if you've got a voracious reader, as not only are there a billion books in the series, but there are also manga and field guides, etc.

I could seriously give you dozens upon dozens more recommendations of books that we've read and enjoyed--I didn't even tell you about the Al Capone series that we love, or the Dark is Rising series that we're currently listening to in the car, or the more mature graphic novels that we let the older read with us--so feel free to comment if you want even more recommendations or something more specific. And also feel free to comment with your own and your kids' own favorites of the year, because we can ALWAYS use something new to read!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!