January Snow Days

The constant watching of the radar and the wishing for snow starts in mid-November, but it's rare that we get a good snowfall until January. Occasionally, we've had a good December snow, but mostly, we don't see the season's first big snow until the next year.

Sometimes it doesn't even show up until February, which is... oh, my gosh.

Fortunately, we didn't have to wait quite that long this year:

None of us can get over this doggy's inexplicable love of the snow. In this video we're all marveling, because we've never seen her play with a toy before--she's THAT excited!

That first snow was the best we've ever had for snowballs and snow people, but it went straight from rain to snowstorm to rain again. Thankfully we had another snowstorm that later led into a beautiful, sunny day!

And it's even a weekend, so Matt doesn't have to abandon us and then feel guilty about it.

In case you hadn't heard the news that kids love sensory materials, here is one kid army crawling through the snow, the other kid tossing it and pouring it and throwing it into her mouth, and the army crawling kid got caught lapping snow up from the ground like an animal...

I do miss how easy it used to be to walk across the street to the city park on snow days, but there's also a LOT to be said about our own private field for playing in:

And Matt even got pictures of ME. I'm wearing his novelty twinkle light print onesie under my snow gear, by the way. MY onesie has a life-sized skeleton on it:

If you look carefully, you can see that Will is in this photo, too!

The one tragedy is that with all of this snow, we never did actually get any good sledding done. So we still have plenty of big wishing to do, and fortunately it's not even February yet. One year, we didn't even get our first big snow until the middle of February!

Hera Jones and the Megalodon: Earning the Girl Scout Cadette Screenwriter Badge

The Girl Scout Cadette Screenwriter badge has so far been the easiest Girl Scout badge for a girl to earn independently. It's a terrific creative writing experience, and one that I felt very little need to add extra enrichment activities to. Syd enjoys writing, and so she read the badge activities herself and followed along, doing the necessary research along the way to come up with a pretty authentic-looking screenplay.

I should have suspected what was to come when, during Step #1: Decide What Makes a Good Script Good, Syd chose to watch the Jurassic Park movies for the activity "Watch one movie or three shows in your favorite genre." To be fair, though, our whole family loves dinosaur movies, AND loves killer giant animal movies (we've also all seen all of the Jaws movies together, even the super terrible ones), so it's pretty typical for us to watch one or another of the Jurassic Park or Jurassic World movies for funsies.

Dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets are generally not optional. We're classy like that.

After that one step completed all together, Syd insisted on working on the rest of her screenplay alone. I wasn't allowed to read any of it until it was finished. Much as I love making sure all those participles don't dangle and those plurals form themselves correctly (oh, the frustration of that tricky "y"!), I love it even more when I get such a pure, unadulterated look inside my child's big, big, BIG imagination.

Let's all look together at excerpts from Hera Jones and the Megalodon, shall we?

Just for fun, we begin with a little bit of sexism and some good ole divorce humor...

 

And then there's a little bit about the assistant, whom Hera Jones HATES, although that could possibly be because the assistant is competent and Hera Jones is the kind of woman who breaks science like it's a brittle, 65 million year-old T. Rex skull.

That last aside, you guys? THAT'S what you call foreshadowing.

What, by the way, IS Hera's job? At this point I still have no idea, other than that it may involve "fossil research" and, as we're about to learn, it includes tools and a boat.

Okay, now we're going to learn why Hera hates the assistant, Miss Kraken--she's super weird and kind of crazy and really mean.

Miss Kraken, though, right?!? Great name!

Okay, still don't know what Hera Jones' job is and where it's located, but this boat ride is pretty long, and now they're apparently, I'm told (that dratted tricky "y"!), sailing through a storm.

In case you're wondering: yes, this level of snark IS modeled in our family on a daily basis. Also, things are about to get exciting.

I skipped a page that consisted solely of Hera and a professor sniping at each other, but I guess that I shouldn't have, because here he is again!

Okay, they're researching and island! And here they are! Yay! And Hera rescued Professor Plimple but she still seems to low-key hate him.

So they're walking around in a cave now. We'll just assume they can see. 

We're going to have to figure out some kind of filming technique to represent the passing of time. Actually, it looks like we're about to have to up the special effects budget by a LOT.

Well, the good news is we'll be able to stop paying the actor playing Professor Plimple...

Also, I haven't played D&D with Syd before, but I'm clearly going to have to introduce her to the Chaotic Neutral alignment, because Hera... hmmm.

Ah, here are where Hera's fossil research skills are going to come into play!

Action scene!

I love Hera's assessment about what it takes to succeed in the fossil research business. I do know a few paleontologists, though, and I must say that yeah, showing up riding a megalodon probably would be a sure-fire way to get noticed.


And... back to work!

You'd think Hera would want to get a little rest before going off on her next adventure, but she did promise the Head Researcher that she would do a good job, you know.

Syd has also never seen Knight Rider, but we're a little bit in Knight Rider territory here, what with all of her adventures taking place conveniently in or near bodies of salt water. 

Whatever. Everyone loves a big-budget fight scene, regardless of how much sense it makes.

So I'm a little confused about what's going on here--I think she's just riding the megalodon around the open ocean?--but I highly approve of the addition of the US Navy to the proceedings:

Okay, you guys, I'm going to warn you: to earn the Screenwriter badge, a Cadette has to write a 12-page screenplay. And we are about to reach the end of page 12...

And now we're on page 13. How many tweens do YOU know who will willingly write more than the required number of pages? Prepare yourself, Friends.




And thus end the adventures of Hera Jones and the Megalodon.

I think that was a Girl Scout badge well earned, don't you? Syd learned how to compare/contrast films within a single genre, she researched and then utilized the writing conventions of a screenplay (which is great practice, by the way, for writing anything with structured requirements, from a business letter to an answer for an essay question to a public speech), and she wrote a complete piece of creative writing, juggling multiple characters with different personalities, incorporating plot and a story arc, and using necessary details to convey scene changes and action. She visibly grew in confidence during this process, and she and I are both quite pleased with her accomplishment.

Often, the Cadette Screenwriting badge is paired with the Cadette Digital Movie Maker badge; Syd hasn't shown much interest in this, but don't you think that Hera Jones and the Megalodon would make an awesome animated short film?!?

I do!!!

I'm going to encourage Syd to consider that, but regardless of her choice, we'll definitely be doing a couple of visual art extensions of this project. I love this tutorial for creating a movie poster, and I'll be using it for Syd's art lesson one week. For another art lesson, we'll discuss and look at storyboards and Syd can storyboard a couple of her scenes.

We didn't use many additional resources for this badge, but here are three that I found helpful:


I definitely recommend looking at some real screenplays to give your writer a visual example of what she's meant to be doing.

And now, onto the Cadette Marketing and Robotics badges and the Think Like a Programmer Journey!

Homeschool Biology: Make a Biome World Map

I love it when we cycle back to something that we've previously studied. Even though we don't specifically review, it's always clear to see what the children have retained, and even if they don't specifically have something retained, it's clear to see by how quickly they re-learn it that it was, indeed, still in there somewhere. So it's easy, then to be able to add depth and complexity and more interesting, sophisticated projects, which makes the topic of study even more fun than it was the first time!

This time it's biomes. We studied biomes back when each girl, in turn, was earning her Girl Scout Junior Animal Habitats badge, and again three or so years ago when they were studying California. And now we're cruising through biomes again as part of the CK-12 Biology curriculum.

The biome world map that I had the kids create together for this chapter is an extension of the biome pin flag map that each kid did for her Animal Habitats badge. This time, however, instead of using pin flags, I asked the girls to manually color the world map to illustrate the biomes.

And, for the very first time, I made them assemble the Megamap all by themselves, too. That is one tedious job that I am SO happy to hand over!

Along with the map, I asked the kids to annotate the legend with a one-sentence definition of each of the biomes. For now, the map and legend live on the wall behind our family computer station, and it's my sneaky hope that the kids might accidentally catch a glimpse of it every time they can tear themselves away from Minecraft:

P.S. If you need a simpler biome mapping project, check out this color-by-number biome map!

We Planned a Pretty Great Girl Scout Cookie Rally, If I Do Say So Myself

My troop was asked to help plan our Service Unit's Girl Scout Cookie Rally this year. It's the first Service Unit event that I've helped plan, and the biggest event that I've helped plan.

Good thing that it turned out so great, then!

My troop handled the programming for the rally, and so I got to leave all the infrastructure issues, such as venue and registration and sign-in and such, to the other leader in charge. This was VERY fine by me, because while I feel pretty good about lesson planning (which is all this was, really), I feel pretty NOT good about figuring out all that other stuff.

So if you need to know how to get girls to sign up for a Cookie Rally, or how to find and reserve a venue, or the most efficient way to register them, I can't tell you that. What I CAN tell you is what we did for programming, how we organized it, and how it went.

And it went so awesome.

I wanted the Cookie Rally to be fun--I mean, of COURSE!--but I also wanted the girls who attended to come away with a standard level of knowledge and confidence so that they could enter the cookie-selling season feeling skillful and prepared. There's a lot to learn, especially if it's your first year! You have to know how to speak to strange adults, which is something that, if you're small, you likely rarely do. You have to know how to present yourself and a product that you're selling. You have facts to memorize and confidently repeat. You have to know principles of advertising and marketing. You have to do math. You have to know the rules for playing fair and staying safe.

Fortunately, Girl Scouts of the USA has broken all of this down into five skills:

1. Goal Setting
2. Decision Making
3. Money Management
4. People Skills
5. Business Ethics

I added a sixth skill, which is to have fun, and boom! There are the six stations that attendees can rotate through at the Cookie Rally. Now all I had to do was come up with an activity for each station that related to its theme.

Since I wanted my troop to take ownership of the Cookie Rally and help plan and run it (it's a terrific experience for them, and the Juniors can use it to work toward their Junior Aide award and the Cadettes and Seniors their Service To Girl Scouting bar), we had two planning meetings for this. At the first meeting, I presented the girls with a long list of a ton of possible station activities and briefly described each one to them. I displayed a giant paper with each of the six stations listed, and the girls voted not only by choosing their favorite activities, but also assigning each of those favorites to the station that she thought most appropriate. When they were finished, all I had to do was tally the votes for each station and once again it was boom! There are our six stations all assigned.

Before our next planning meeting I roughed out the winning stations, and at our second meeting we beta tested them, made modifications, and then the girls chose which station they wanted to run. Here are our winning stations:

GOAL SETTING

For the Decision Making station, our facilitators (one of my troop's Girl Scouts and one adult), led the girls through a discussion of how much profit our local troops earn from each box of cookies sold (here, it's 75 cents per $5 box), and how much money various troop expenditures might cost. They discussed how much uniforms cost, how much a fun activity might cost, how much a service or Take Action Project might cost, and how much a big trip might cost. The facilitators helped the girls calculate how much each expenditure might represent in terms of boxes sold for one girl, and then boxes sold for a troop of ten girls. 

Afterwards, the facilitators passed out green printer paper trefoils, and the girls had a chance to make their own goal for something that they might like their troop to their cookie profits for, and then they could write down or draw their goal on the trefoil and embellish it. The facilitators encouraged the girls to use the trefoils as decorations at their cookie booths or during their personal sales.

DECISION MAKING

For the Decision Making station, Matt, our resident graphic designer, facilitated, with the help of one of my troop's Girl Scouts, a workshop teaching girls how to use the principles of good design to create effective and attractive signage. He showed them various examples of good and bad design using these principles, then each girl received a 1/4-sized poster board and started working on her own sign. Again, the girls were encouraged to use their sign at their own cookie booths or during their own personal sales.

MONEY MANAGEMENT

For the Money Management station, our facilitators (two of my troop's Girl Scouts and one adult) organized a booth makeover activity. When girls arrived at this station, there was a "bad" cookie booth already set up, and girls got to watch as a customer attempted to shop at that booth and was treated poorly and the transaction mishandled.

The girls were encouraged to talk about what was wrong with the booth and the customer service, and then they were divided into teams and had a few minutes to create their own good cookie booth, using some miscellaneous supplies that we had on hand for them. Finally, I was justified in hoarding all those empty cookie boxes!

After the time was up, the facilitators found things to praise about each team's cookie booth and pretended to shop using pretend money, so that the girls also got to practice handling money. We have new prices this year, so it's especially important!

PEOPLE SKILLS

For the People Skills station, our facilitators (three of my troop's Girl Scouts and one adult) had the girls do role play with cookie selling scenarios. I'd previously organized the scenarios into Easy, Medium, and Hard, so that they could give Daisies and Brownies scenarios like, "A customer asks you what your favorite cookie is," or "A customer asks you to come into her house while she gets your money," and Juniors and Cadettes scenarios like, "A customer says that palm oil contributes to deforestation and destroys orangutan habitats" or "How are these cookies any different than the ones I can buy in the grocery store?"

So that girls didn't feel like they were put on the spot if they didn't know how to answer, my Girl Scouts could go first and give a TERRIBLE answer that all the girls could then pick apart, and then they could discuss what a good answer might be before the girl had to try it out herself.

BUSINESS ETHICS

For the Business Ethics station, I asked our local police department if they could provide a police officer (female, if possible) to discuss with the girls how to keep themselves safe during cookie season. And the officer who came was AMAZING!!!! The girls all warmed up to her immediately, and she gathered each group around and they all talked to each other, completely engrossed, for the entire station's rotation. It was perfect. I also didn't have to use any troop girls or adults for this station, so it was an excellent use of our limited resources!

And yes, of course I had a Plan B if she didn't show up. I'm very glad, though, that I didn't have to pull out Safety Charades, because I don't think it would have been nearly as fun as the officer's visit was.

FUN

For the Fun station, our facilitators (two of my troop's Girl Scouts and one adult) ran a game of Cookie Twister. For the game mat, I printed three full-page color images of each of our eight Girl Scout cookie types, then laminated them. The facilitators used clear packing tape and taped them into a 6x4 array right onto the floor of our venue. As you can tell, I did not take a single photo during the Cookie Rally--I was busy!--but here's a photo of the game mat set up at our second planning meeting, after the girls beta tested it, informed me that I apparently actually don't know the rules of Twister, and advised me to rotate all of the images 90 degrees. It does, indeed, look and perform much better like this:

I provided the station with a four-sided die and an eight-sided die and a sheet on which I'd keyed each roll of the four-sided die to a limb, and each roll of the eight-sided die to a cookie. To play, the facilitators divided the girls into teams, then rolled the dice to call out each move. I left it up to them to arrange turn-taking and game order so that they could make sure that all the girls had a chance to play before the station's time was up.

This station masqueraded as fun, and the girls all seemed to really enjoy it, but its true purpose was to make sure that Daisies and Brownies could identify the eight types of Girl Scout cookies by name and look and box color. Mwa-ha-ha!

At the second planning meeting, I had each of the girls sign up for some scut work to complete at home and bring to the rally, all of which was meant to be pretty quick and simple. I handed out large-format paper so that girls could make a sign for each station; printed play money to be cut out; trefoils to cut out; and pictures of good booths and a large posterboard to make an inspiration board. All the girls did just what I asked them to and brought everything back just like they were supposed to!

After we'd hashed everything out to our satisfaction at the second planning meeting and the girls had chosen the stations they wanted to run, I wrote very detailed step-by-step instructions for each station (with the proviso that the facilitators did NOT have to follow my instructions and were welcome to organize the station the way that they thought best), and then invited the adults to choose the stations that they wanted to help at. When we arrived for set-up I handed out the station supplies to the appropriate facilitators, gave them a little guidance about where their station should be located, and left them to be in charge. One adult took charge of the cookies and milk for afterward, and one adult was a floater who handled whatever needed to be handled, everything from door security to giving a facilitator a bathroom break.

As the attendees arrived at the Cookie Rally, the other leader in charge handled sign-in and payment and gave them a name tag that had already been colored with one of six colors. The groups weren't completely even, as, of course, some girls want to be together, etc., but we didn't do too badly at allocating them. Our programming lasted for one hour, so each station got ten minutes, with me playing time keeper. After all of the rotations, the other leader stepped back in and did a drawing for a few prizes that the council had sent us to use with the Cookie Rally, and then organized all of the girls lining up for milk and Girl Scout cookie samples. She got everything distributed and all the girls reseated, and then did a countdown and got them all to dunk a cookie into milk simultaneously for a Great Cookie Dunk.

Thanks to my awesome girl and adult leaders, the programming ran like absolute clockwork. Everyone knew their responsibility and handled it completely independently. I had, if you can believe this, NO fires to put out!

You guys, the Cookie Rally could not have gone better. Everyone, both facilitators and attendees, seemed happy. Everything was organized and ran exactly as it was supposed to. And somehow, I managed to find and accomplish the one thing that actually makes the beginning of cookie selling seem a lot less stressful by comparison!

At least until the initial order deadline. And booth signup. And our first big deposit. And the first Hot-Spot booth weekend...

P.S. It's time to figure out what Girl Scout cookie recipe Syd and I are going to try this year! Mini cheesecakes were amazing, but I'm kind of leaning towards the Do-Si-Do icebox pie...

P.P.S. Want to stay checked in with all my kid-friendly plans and projects? You should be following my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Pattern Review: T-Shirt Panties from the Kid's Scrundlewear Pattern

The kids tie-dye T-shirts at every single Girl Scout camp, and I (secretly) never think they come out cute, but it turns out that cutting it down into underwear actually makes the tie-dye look a lot nicer.

The younger kid needed more underwear, and why should I spend an hour going to the store and back to buy them when I could instead spend an hour researching underwear patterns, buy one for the approximate cost of a ten-pack, and then spend another five hours sewing seven pairs on my home sewing machine?

I don't know. Why do I do anything?

Well, the fit is better, for one. The prints are cuter, and just what the kid likes. I don't have to worry about some other little kid in a sweatshop laboring 14 hours a day making them; I'm in my 40s, and I only sew when I feel like it. I can use up my stash fabric sewing these, so that's pretty cool.

Also, I hate shopping, but I like to sew. Case closed!

For this project, I bought the Kids' Scrundlewear pattern from Stitch Upon a Time. It might not have been the best economical decision, because my kid is in the top size for this pattern, but I liked it the best of all of the digital patterns that I browsed and I think I'll get my eight dollars' worth from it.

Actually, I think I already did!

I have a ridiculous stash of T-shirts for crafting. Most are T-shirts that the kids have outgrown or that are damaged beyond repair, some are shirts that were given to me specifically for crafting with, and few are ones that I thrifted because they fit somebody's passionate obsession and surely will come in handy for something.

Such as this adult-sized My Little Pony T-shirt that I bought for a dollar several months ago:

Excuse the awful lighting in all of these photos. It is never not raining, and it is, to the children's great sadness, seemingly never going to snow.

Yep, all seven of the kid's new pairs of underwear are sewn from T-shirts. I mixed and matched the waist- and leg-bands from other shirts, and came up with some really cute combinations, I think:

Both kids love sharks, and the younger kid wore this shirt, a gift from her grandparents, until she could no longer squeeze into it. Now she can wear it again!

 One thing that I'm pretty proud of is my ability to sew with knits, no starch or stabilizer necessary. If a piece gets fiddly I will starch it, but all of these came together quite quickly and easily:

The Scrundlewear pattern also doesn't call for any elastic, which is nice because I then didn't have to buy a single other thing to make all this underwear. And I could have made the kid twenty pairs, what with all the T-shirts in my stash, but I started to get bored with sewing multiples of the same thing and decided that I'd see how she does with seven pairs for now:

I like the pairs with the T-shirt graphics the best, but the kid's favorites are these striped pairs.

The kid reports that they're super comfy, they wash well, and although I was worried that she'd think them too bulky, since T-shirt fabric is thicker than underwear fabric, she hasn't complained and so I'm certainly not going to bring it up!

Next up: I bought this adult underwear pattern, and so now it's time to attempt to sew something that will meet the approval of the REALLY picky kid...

P.S. I sew LOTS of things, usually pretty weird. Want to see it all? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page!