Wildflowers of Ohio: The Perfect Summer Study

The kids and I completed this fun--and lovely!--wildflowers study back in the summer. It was primarily an enrichment for our CK-12 Biology chapters on plants, but I also tied it into our geography/history study of Ohio by having the kids earn the Girl Scout Wildflowers of Ohio fun patch, and using those patch requirements as our spine for this little unit.

We incorporated some art and some handwork, took a road trip, and had a magical time becoming wildflower specialists!

Here are the requirements to earn the Wildflowers of Ohio fun patch:

Wildflower Basics

1. Make a diagram of parts of a flower. 

The prerequisite for all of these steps is Chapter 15, covering plant evolution and classification, of CK-12's high school Biology 1 textbook. Ideally, you'll also be reading through Chapter 16, explicitly about plant biology, as you go. In addition, you'll want to swing back and review Chapter 4, which is when photosynthesis was covered.

I didn't end up taking photos of this activity, because flower dissection is something we've done a few times over the years. Even though this is a wildflower study, I bought a grocery store bouquet for the dissection, because their flowers are nice and large! To add interest and rigor, I required the children to make their own poster, hand-drawn or digitally created, that displayed the information from their flower dissection. They were to photograph each flower part twice, once with no magnification and once magnified using our USB microscope. We bought our USB microscope way back in 2015 (and it still works great!), but it looks pretty much identical to this one:



Here are some thumbnails of the kids' microscopic portraits:

 

If your kids are younger or need some scaffolding for the project, I really like this walk-through of a daffodil's dissection. It includes observational notes, ideas to direct a kid's interest, good spots to stop and draw, and supplementary resources.

If you want to do the flower dissection as a more directed activity, or with a group, I really like the way that this lift-the-flap diagram is presented.

And here's how you'd set up flower dissection Montessori-style!

And obviously, if you're not reading every single Gail Gibbons book about plants as you go, you're studying flowers wrong! This one is particularly relevant, as it has an annotated flower diagram:



Gail Gibbons picture books, especially, always have a lot more information than you'd expect in a picture book, and they're completely appropriate to use as a resource even for older kids like mine. We often read picture books first, and then move into more complicated material.

2. Start a wildflower journal. 

I've been using journals a lot with the kids this year, and I think it was this wildflowers study that inspired it! We treat the journals more as portfolios, and they're a good way to keep all of the kids' work in one place and show off the scope of their study and their mastery of it.

If I had this step to do again, I'd have the kids create journals especially to use here (as I did with their tree journals for later in CK-12 Biology Chapter 16!), but instead, they used their nature journals, and they worked fine.

As part of preparing for our Ohio road trip, we spent some time looking through this AWESOME guide to nature journaling, and we got lots of lovely ideas and bits of inspiration from it:



It gives you tips not just about drawing, but also ideas for interesting perspectives and new ways to annotate what you see. It makes nature journaling a much more meaningful and thoughtful activity.

 2. Learn about photosynthesis!

For this step, the kids reviewed the chapter on photosynthesis in CK-12 Biology. That chapter came so early in the book that they needed to review it as they started the chapter on plants, anyway, so this was a convenient step!

Here's all the work we did for Chapter 4, and any of those activities would make a good enrichment or review of how photosynthesis works. In fact, I'd fully planned to repeat the experiment on carbon dioxide uptake in water plants by having the kids collect some from a nearby wetland, but we didn't get to it before winter, so we probably will do it in the spring, instead, and thereby remind ourselves about photosynthesis all over again!

It's a really fun experiment!

The kids did, however, redo the modeling of photosynthesis project, and this time they figured exactly how to put together glucose:

Discover Ohio Wildflowers

Here's where we had the most fun with our study!

1. Go on a wildflower hike! Visit a Girl Scout Camp, local park, forest, or a field by your troop meeting site. Bring a simple field guides to learn about what you see. Or, bring a camera, take pictures, and try to identify the flowers later using books, doing online research, or ask an expert. 

As part of our Ohio road trip, we spent a day at Hueston Woods State Park, swimming with Luna, finding fossils, and sketching and identifying wildflowers:

2. Be able to identify 5-10 wildflowers by sight and add these flowers to your flower journal! Make drawings, cut out photos, and devote a page to each new flower you learn about. Be sure to answer these questions about the wildflowers: 
• What is its name? 
• Tell about an interesting feature. 
• What type of landscape does it grow in? (Forest, fields, roadsides, wet ground?) 
• What time of year can you find this flower blooming? (Spring, Summer, Autumn?)

Here are the guidebooks that we brought along to ready-reference our flowers:



I've always found using identification guidebooks challenging, but we've gotten quite a bit of practice this year, what with all the time we've spent studying growing things out in the wild.

Nevertheless, I love the question marks that Will put after her possible identifications:



It's very bothersome not to know for certain!

3. Wildflower fun!

We did NOT take any wildflowers during our hike, because we were in a state park. Instead, on another day when we were back in town, we took one of my very favorite local hikes:

The first part of the hike is NOT Luna's favorite. Stairs are scary!

It's much more fun to tromp around the waterfalls!

 

This spot is technically a city park, so it's perfectly alright to pick flowers--and the occasional robin's eggshell!

Will is holding a filthy Mason jar because we were also collecting water for a separate project. Homeschooling is all about multi-tasking!

Will and a friend once carried a giant snapping turtle all the way from beyond the farthest vista up to where the kid's mom and I sat together on the dock from which I took this photo. They showed the turtle to us, we admired it, and then they hauled it all the way back to where they found it.

The spot we're facing here used to be a wetland, then was a reservoir, and is now a wetland again.

 Here are the flowers we collected:

And here's what we did with them!

I'm only bummed that I didn't learn how to make these until the tag end of summer--next summer, I'll make pressed flower bookmarks every day!

Plant a seed! Share what you learned about wildflowers. 

For this activity, the kids modified Syd's Take Action Project from her Cadette Outdoor Journey. For that project, she researched the appropriate wildflower seeds for our location, perfected a seed bomb recipe, and taught other Girl Scouts how to make seed bombs.

As we were finishing up this wildflowers study, we were also prepping for our Girl Scout troop's Bridging ceremony, so the kids created seed bomb kits to give out as party favors. Syd designed a tutorial, and they included information about how wildflowers are important to our ecosystem:



The little kits turned out very cute, and will hopefully spread awareness--and wildflowers!

This was a really fun little unit of study that was simple to organize, but I think it had a big impact. It's easy to see something even as concrete as biology as abstract if all you do is read about it and take tests over it. Instead, if you can find every excuse possible to get out into nature and study biology wherever it is, and especially if you get to do some really fun, really active, really creative things, then your study means that much more.

When my kids think about studying biology, I want those memories to be joyful!

Here are some of the other wildflower resources that we used in this study:



P.S. If you like the weird, exciting, totally random stuff that I do with my kids, and you want to see more of it, check out my Craft Knife Facebook page! I'm on there kind of all the time, sharing resources, griping about stuff, and planning new adventures.

Reviewing the Molecular Model of Photosynthesis with Zometools

I first had the kids make molecular models of photosynthesis back in 2017.

Look how wee and smol they were!

Both kids love biology, and it's one of the numerous science subjects that we're constantly studying (current science studies also include psychology, environmental science, geology, and meteorology). So it shouldn't be too surprising that this summer, during a study of wildflowers and trees, I wanted to review photosynthesis.

Fortunately, an activity that was awesome and fun two years ago is still awesome and fun, and kids who are two years older are can take that fun activity and make it even more sophisticated and instructive.

So out again came the Zometools, and once again the kids modeled the process of photosynthesis!

Here are the sets of Zometools that I own. I've had the Creator set for several years, and I bought the molecular modeling kit in 2016, Amazon helpfully informs me:


We use both of these kits often, often instead of various other types of modeling kits that we now don't have to buy.

Here, again, is the chemical formula of photosynthesis:

6CO₂ + 6H₂O + sunlight ------> C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

Very simply (as in, there's lots more to it, but here's what you can easily model), carbon dioxide and water combine with sunlight to create glucose and oxygen. Here are the six carbon dioxide and the six water molecules:

In this production of photosynthesis, the role of sunlight will be played by a young Indiana Jones:

Our favorite little murderbrat also used to be so smol and wee!

Always destructive, though:

Seriously, that cat is DESIGNED for destruction!

Once you get the murderbrat distracted trying to murder something else, then you can take apart your carbon dioxide and water, and challenge yourself to reform it into glucose, with an oxygen remainder:

I love how much more complicated the glucose molecule is than the components that created it:

And look! Syd is also so impressed by how beautiful a glucose molecule looks in three dimensions that she's keeled over!

Either that, or Jones was busy murdering her...

How To Earn the Girl Scout Buckeye Stops Here IP Patch: It's an Ohio Unit Study for Teenagers!

I mention a lot that when I travel with the kids, one of my favorite things to do is help them earn related council's own fun patches and badges or retired IP patches. Having a project to complete on our trip encourages us all to do and experience things we wouldn't have chosen on our own, and having a goal in mind makes exploring historical, natural, and cultural sites more fun.

And since we homeschool, any one of these is a terrific spine for turning something into a miniature unit study. For the younger kid, this Ohio study for the purpose of earning the Council's Own Buckeye Stops Here IP patch was part of a US historical, cultural, and geographical study for eighth grade. For the older kid, it's the same, but her study is more comprehensive and long-term and will eventually count as part of one high school course that we're currently calling "America's Best Idea": A Multi-Disciplinary Study of the US and Its National Parks.

Pretentious-sounding high school class names are my specialty!

Tangentially, many of these retired badges and IP patches can be challenging to find, and you'll pretty much never find them in a council store. The Girl Scout buy/sell/trade community is HUGE, however, and you can find just about anything in one of these spots if you search and ask and lurk and be ready to pounce when something is offered:

• GS Treasure Hunters
• Girl Scouts Stuff for Sale/Trade
• Badge Fairy (for Cadette badges that have the same graphic as Junior badges)
• GS Interest Project Page

I don't remember which of those Facebook groups these physical IP patches were offered on, but it was for sure one of them! I claimed two as soon as I saw the listing, paid the seller via Paypal, and had them in my hands within the week.

Here's what we did to complete the seven requirements for the kids to earn this IP patch:

Skill Builders #1

Ohio is known as the “State of Eight” for having 8 U.S. Presidents call Ohio home. Find at least ten references (street names, cities, parks, libraries, schools, highways, etc.) in your area which commemorate these 8 Presidents. If you are working as a group, your group could put all the girls’ lists together and see how many different ways your area is carrying on the legacy of the “State of Eight”. 

This step was in some ways a bust, but was actually really fun to try, and it encouraged the kids to be very observant and inspired a lot of discussion. Before we went on our Ohio road trip in the summer of 2019, I had the kids research and record the names of these eight US presidents who called Ohio home.

Then they forgot my instruction to pack the list.

So for that entire road trip, they observantly noted the names of streets, cities, parks, libraries, schools, and highways as we passed them, and kept saying a lot of things like, "Columbus! That's a famous name! Is that a president? ...wait, no. Oops!" and "Montserrat St... surely that's SOMEONE famous!" and "Indian Hill. That seems kind of racist, no?", etc. We had a lot of interesting discussions about why public spaces get named the way that they do (I horrified them by telling them about the KFC Yum! Center, bless its heart), what it means to leave your name as a legacy (did you know that the Wilder Medal, named for and first presented to Laura Ingalls Wilder, was recently-ish renamed because it's an unfortunate fact that Laura, though awesome in lots of ways, was also low-key racist?), and why the word "Indian," like all other exonyms, is problematic in certain ways.

We did NOT find ten discrete references to the eight presidents, but nevertheless, I called this step completed and well worth the effort.

Skill Builders #3

Learn about a “tragedy” in Ohio history from a book or website—maybe a school history book! Create a dramatic skit, poem, story, or song about it and share it with families or a class or another group. 

This step was such a bummer! We cut this one short because during the research stage, the younger kid basically IMMEDIATELY discovered Jeffrey Dahmer, who, it turns out, lived off and on in Ohio!

... awesome.

She started screaming, eyes glued to the laptop screen, and I essentially ripped it out of her hands and then gave the children a VERY elided summary of his Wikipedia page. 

Like, seriously, have you READ Jeffrey Dahmer's Wikipedia page? That whole story is BONKERS! Yikes, you guys. And I hope that those police officers who dismissed bystanders' concerns and literally gave an injured, kidnapped child back to his kidnapper to be tortured and murdered haven't had a good night's sleep since, because that was some epic workplace incompetence there, fellas.

The children did not include Jeffrey Dahmer in their Slides presentation on Ohio, and for Pete's sake they certainly did NOT create a skit or song about him and share it with anyone! But they can both name one cannibal serial killer now, so... that's pretty cool.

Technology #1

Every state has their famous inventors, including Ohio! Find out what inventions have been “born” in Ohio—are they still being used today or have they been replaced with more “modern” versions? 

For some of these steps, I asked the kids to combine the information that they were researching and prepare a final Google Slides presentation of their complete project. Thanks to previous visits to Dayton, the kids know quite a lot about one particular Ohio invention--

--and used plenty of library resources to find out about others. I especially like children's non-fiction books because they're an easy jumping-off point for further research.

The kids now know that it was an Ohio native who kind of invented the hot dog in the US, and I feel like they have successfully worked that tidbit into every single conversation that we've had since that discovery.

Technology #3

Collect 10 Ohio history facts (you could have these facts from school studies in history or civics). Create a timeline of the events and present the time line using one of the following methods: Poster, Scrapbook, Hyperstudio, Power Point. etc. 

The kids worked on this requirement at the same time that they worked on the list of inventions. I actually gave them each a checklist that asked them to note 10 important inventions or inventors and 10 interesting facts or historical events, so not everything in their presentation was a historical fact.

Service Projects #7

“Beautiful Ohio” and “Hang on Sloopy” are not the only songs associated with or written by Ohioans. Make a list of “Ohio Songs”, learn to sing or play them, and present a special “Ohio in Song” program for a group of senior citizens—bet they’ll sing along!

I think the kids liked this step the most of all! Spoiler alert: they did NOT present a program of Ohio songs for any of our Hoosier senior citizens. Instead, they created a shareable Spotify playlist of Ohio songs. And during this process, they discovered our collective FAVORITE SONG EVER.

The kids did this step before I'd started listening to Dolly Parton's America, or I would have recognized this song immediately, and immediately known its sub-genre:

That song, my Friends, is what's known as a murder ballad! There's a great analysis of murder ballads in the first episode of Dolly Parton's America, but when we first heard it, the kids and I were just like, "WUT."

And then we rewound it and played it again. Still crazy!!!

"On the Banks of the Ohio" was the finale song for their Ohio presentation, because of COURSE it was.

Career Exploration #1

Interview, shadow or research a female politician from Ohio. Find out what interested her about politics, what is interesting about her job, preparation she had for her office and aspirations she has about her role in changing the world for the better. 

Instead of this exact step, I asked the children to research the life of Victoria Woodhull for inclusion into their presentation. You might know her by the claim to fame that she's the first woman to run for the US presidency (years before women obtained suffrage, even!), but the kids also made the astounding discoveries that she super wanted people to live in communes and practice free love, she was jailed for publishing a lot of dirt on Reverend Henry Ward Beecher's alleged affair, and, alas, she thought eugenics was a great idea.

Damnit, Victoria! All you had to do was, you know, NOT THINK THAT THE CONTROLLED BREEDING OF LITERAL HUMAN BEINGS WAS AN AWESOME IDEA, BECAUSE IT WAS NOT AN AWESOME IDEA.

And as a kid she traveled in a family medicine show and did psychic readings on the rubes. Good times!

Career Exploration #3

Local newspapers are published in many communities. Some are daily, but most are weekly or even monthly in smaller communities. Locate a local newspaper reporter and interview him/her about their favorite stories about your community or invite them to attend your troop meeting to speak about their favorite local news stories. Maybe your troop could even get “in the paper”!

The kids have already done a few interviews and tours, etc., with TV and print journalists, so for this step I had them instead check out online newspapers from Ohio. 

Here's the Columbus Dispatch!

And the Akron Beacon Journal!

And the Brookville Star!

It's surprisingly interesting to browse through some random town's random local news. Their headlines are simultaneously slightly exotic and as mundane as ever. 

And just like that, there's seven activities completed and one IP patch earned! I was actually quite surprised at how many interesting things the kids found out, and how widely they ranged, intellectually, in pursuit of this patch. We learned about exonyms and eugenics, cannibal serial killers and murder ballads.

And hot dogs. DON'T forget about the hot dogs!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Logic Games and Puzzles That Teens Genuinely Like

Logic is something that I have been griping about since the beginning of our homeschool. I kept feeling, for years, like I wanted something "systematic," A baby debate club, perhaps, or a Socratic reasoning curriculum. Something!

I don't know why I felt this way, because otherwise, most of our homeschool years have been very much anti-packaged curricula. Following someone else's instructions or sequential study very rarely fit in with what, and how, my kids wanted to learn. So I just keep feeling like maybe I did want a formal sequence but also didn't want anyone else prescribing it for us but also didn't want to do it myself.

Instead, I regularly offered the kids logic games and puzzles.

And that's what I still do, now that they're teenagers, and honestly, it works great! It turns out that the kids practice plenty of logical reasoning with the essays they write and the presentations they create and the discussions that we have. If they ever want to engage in the systematic study of the form of arguments, they're well set up to do that. What I'm mostly interested in doing with them is the kind of logical reasoning that doesn't necessarily build up your formal knowledge of the form of arguments, but your deductive, critical thinking, analytical, and pattern-making skills.

And that's exactly the kinds of skills that you improve when you regularly play logic games and work logic puzzles!

Even better is that lots of logic games and puzzles are super cheap or free. Most of ours come from thrift stores, yard sales, and our local libraries.

Even EVEN better is that they can take as little or as much time as you need. The kids and I can while away a full hour on a school day, or just a few minutes.

Even even EVEN better is that they're really fun! We do logic games and puzzles every week, but the kids don't always notice that they're part of school, because sometimes we do them in the evenings or on the weekends as part of our family time.

Here, then, are our favorite logic games and puzzles. We don't cycle through them with any sort of system--rather, often we'll get super invested in one particular type of puzzle or game and do it a LOT, then move onto something else, or I'll pull out something that the kids haven't worked with in a long time and they'll fall in love with it all over again, etc. The list below, though, are the ones that we return to most often:

New York Times crossword

Matt and I work the New York Times crossword daily in our newspaper, saving them to work later if we don't have time to do them that day. This year, we started setting aside the Monday crossword for the kids, which means that on some evenings, we can all sit at the kitchen table, wine in a couple of glasses, and trade the crossword around. 

Matt and I switch off when one of us is stuck, and when a kid gets stuck, she'll hand her crossword to one of us and we'll solve a few before handing it back to her for another go.

For larger sets, I bought Matt a couple of the New York Times crossword omnibuses--particularly Thursday, which is always the "tricky" puzzle!

The puzzles increase in difficulty throughout the week, so you can buy an omnibus of just the Monday puzzles and have a whole set that's perfect for a young teenager:

every single ThinkFun game

Every single time I see a ThinkFun game at a thrift store or yard sale, I buy it, and I have never been disappointed. The kids' favorite ThinkFun game, by FAR is this one:

We don't own it, but every couple of years I check it out of the library, the younger kid zones into it until she solves every single puzzle, and I return it and check it out a couple of years later when it's brand-new again. As a matter of fact, guess what's waiting for Matt to pick up from our local university's library right this minute (along with two different botany ID kits, a portable weather station for an APES microclimate project, and a human body model that I want to check out as a possible resource for our biology study)?

One thing that I DON'T like about these games is that they're all plastic, and lots of it. I like to think that we somewhat mitigate that by buying them secondhand, and keeping them in good condition so that we can pass them on again someday.

Here are the ThinkFun games that the kids have played and that I know they love!



And here are the ones that are still on my wishlist to try out someday!

Sudoku

The younger kid and I are the ones who super love Sudoku, but the older kid is pretty game to try one out if I put it in front of her. Sudoku also comes in our newspaper every day, and the younger kid can handle the Monday and Tuesday games pretty handily. I've also got a gameboard version of Sudoku that I don't adore and won't live through our next purge, but it's a different setup and so feels novel to the kids whenever we pull it out:

I don't own this Colorku game, but it's been on my Amazon wishlist for the kids for practically their whole lives, lol, and if I can ever find THAT at a thrift store or yard sale, I'd replace our current Suduko game board with it in a hot minute. I like that is more lovely, has a much smaller profile, and divorces the reasoning skill from the number system:

manipulatives

The kids have grown out of their childhood love of pattern blocks, but our love of tangrams is nine years strong by now! Miraculously, we STILL have all of the pieces of that tangram-a-day calendar, and it still gets played with.

Our love of pentominoes is more recent, but they remain a favorite, as well.

Similar to these is one of the younger kid's favorite games: 

I bought it for her for Christmas a couple of years ago, and she loves it so much that I've been on the lookout for other Brainwright games, but nothing has come on the secondhand market for me to try, alas.

games

I don't think we're social enough, because as a family, we don't really enjoy a lot of whole-family games. The kids went through the odd obsession with a particular game as they grew, most notably that year that I think we played Sorry! several times a day, every single day, but now whenever I suggest a game, if I don't agree to Cards against Humanity both kids lose interest and instead just humor me... with a varying amount of good humor. 

But occasionally, if I ask just one of them, I can get them to play happily with just me. I managed to get the younger kid as into Blokus as I am for quite a while, and that was AWESOME. We prefer this two-person travel game setup, and at one point I actually managed to find a second set of pieces being sold in a bag in a thrift store, so now we have enough pieces to have pentominoes, too! The younger kid and I also like to play SET together, although frankly, she prefers to play the online version by herself, humph!

The older kid has been my chess buddy for nigh upon a decade by now, and she'll also happily play Scrabble with me whenever I want. But honestly, we'd all prefer to play solitaire games or puzzles while in the same room, chatting occasionally and listening to music. Shrug!

puzzle books from The Critical Thinking Company

When I was a kid in pull-out gifted classes in my local public school system, Mind Benders were my FAVORITE thing. I devoured them, and if I'd known that they came in real puzzle books that you could buy, and not just in mimeographed hand-outs given to me by my teacher whenever I looked especially bored, I would have been asking for them for every Christmas and birthday. 

Neither of the kids love Mind Benders quite as much as I still do, but they still like to work them occasionally. What the kids really like, though, is for me to lay out a whole assortment of puzzle books from The Critical Thinking Company, including my favorite Mind Benders, so they can choose whatever style of logic puzzle they feel like working right that second. I get out a whole pile of puzzle books and put on some music, and it's a lovely way to spend an afternoon!

Here are our favorites, although don't necessarily use these specific levels as your guide:



To me, the variety is the best part; I like to see what types of puzzles each kid is drawn to, and it might lead me to sneakily assign more of that, or specifically something else, at a later date.

Especially now that the kids are getting so grown up and ever more ready to go off on their own, I think that doing puzzles and logic games is a nice habit to enforce, completely apart from the goal of advancing their logical reasoning and deduction skills. Brain games like these will keep their brains strong as they grow old, you know, when I'm not around to remind them to eat blueberries and wear helmets when they ski and memorize poetry.

Hopefully, Matt and I will keep remembering to do all that stuff as WE grow old, too!

It's Possible to Have an Entire Nutcracker-Themed Homeschool Semester (Ask Me How I Know This...)

Because #nutcrackerlife, amiright?

Seriously, all fall and into the winter, when the kid wasn't doing this--

--she was thinking about it.

How do you get a homeschooling kid to think about something that's not her right-this-minute passion?

Friends, you don't. Instead you just... lean into it. That's the phrase we're using these days for just giving into what you've gotta do instead of griping about it, right?

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to sneakily sneak real-world study skills, handwork, knowledge-building, and practical life activities into a kid's Nutcracker obsession, whether she's a tiny angel bringing light back into the world, a tin soldier hardened from a lifetime of fighting in the mouse wars, a deadly assassin/Baroque-costumed child of the Creature Known Only as Mother Ginger, or a young party guest/spy attending a Christmas party and low-key planning to steal a certain magical nutcracker that turns into a real person and controls an army of ensorceled children and fights giant mice for you.

First step: read the book:



It's plenty weird, and there's a LOT to talk about. There's a ton of plot that's completely different from any staging of the ballet that you've ever seen, so you can use it as a reference to compare to all of the further picture book and theatrical productions that you feel like watching.

Because you should read and watch as many different versions of the Nutcracker as your kid can stand! Syd has gotten progressively more interested in this as she's gotten older, and this year I swear we watched the first act and at least the overture and Mother Ginger scenes from the second act in every Nutcracker ballet available on YouTube--even the desperately amateur productions, bless their hearts. There are a lot of interesting aspects of how different productions are choreographed and staged, and once you've seen a few so that you've got a baseline of a typical Nutcracker production, the ones that have made atypical choices are really fun to find! Did you know that the Bolshoi Ballet casts an actual kid as the Nutcracker doll? There's also a production somewhere in which the mouse soldiers are small children, and some of them get killed during the battle, fall over dead onto their backs on stage, and are then dragged off stage by their fellow mice! It's BONKERS!!!

There's also a production in which the soldiers, including Fritz, LOSE THE BATTLE and are carted off stage in an actual cage. Later during the second act, when the Arabian dance begins, the dancing couple come on stage dragging Fritz by a chain that's attached to a collar around his neck! Because apparently the child soldiers who were captured were SOLD INTO SLAVERY?!?!?!?!?

See? Fascinating stuff!

I also really like these other retellings of the Nutcracker story or the Nutcracker ballet:



Most of those are picture books with beautiful art, and wonderful inspiration to draw your own  magical Nutcracker scenes--or perhaps create your own picture book/stop-motion film/shoebox diorama/puppet show/live reenactment?

There are also a ton of backstage, behind-the-scenes resources that can fascinate kids. Syd's absolute favorite ballet book is this one--



--about a kid cast as Clara in the NYC production of The Nutcracker. If your kid actually dances ballet, though, you do NOT want to feed her only on books about the kids who are cast as the lead roles, because only a couple of kids a year get those roles and it's already going to suck bad enough when it's not your kid. Therefore, MY favorite backstage Nutcracker book is this one:



It's about a kid who gets the lousiest part in the whole production, feels lousy about it forever, and then doubles-down into it and learns to find its magic. It's a far more realistic version of what it's like to dance in the Nutcracker, with a healthy, wholesome message.

That being said, it is really fun to watch backstage documentaries. Most do follow the kids cast as Clara, but documentaries often give a more well-rounded picture of the production, so they're not as focused on how great it is to get the great roles. Syd and I watch all of the Royal Ballet videos:



Boston has some crazy sets, so this one is fun!



Here's a video all about the Mouse King, who should obviously be everyone's favorite character!



We also liked this series focused on Nutcracker auditions:



It's related to a bunch of other audition and ballet school and rehearsal videos that Syd also likes. There are a lot of interesting Russian ballet behind-the-scenes videos!

So you've got the story to study, you've got the dance to study... and you've got the music! If you think that the Nutcracker is not playing constantly in our house from October through December, then you... well, you are wrong, because it is playing constantly in our house from October through December. Honestly, it's playing for a good portion of August and September, too, if you count audition prep.

Syd sometimes lets me jazz it up by playing Duke Ellington's version, instead:



Kid-friendly composer studies can actually be challenging to find, because most children's studies don't include classical music. Charlotte Mason DOES, fortunately, so there are some resources around. Here's a good template for a composer study, complete with lots of free handouts, that includes Tchaikovsky.

This video is also interesting, because it takes one song and shows you the main instrument playing at each moment:



This CD doesn't tell you a ton ABOUT Tchaikovsky, but it includes a lot of his music and it's really fun!



So now your kid has studied the story, the dance, the music... but what's the weirdest part of the Nutcracker?

The NUTCRACKER!!!

Seriously, it's a ballet about a NUTCRACKER. My kid doesn't even like nuts, and yet she owns something like sixteen nutcrackers by now.

Mind you, none of them are functional, but there you go.

We like this How It's Made video about the traditional nutcracker form:



And this is an interesting video on the history of the nutcracker and how it all got wrapped up in Christmas, anyway:



And, of course, you know that this would not be a kid-friendly unit in MY homeschool if it did not include a very impractical video of something over-the-top. We are NOT going to be building this giant nutcracker that can crack coconuts for us:



Instead, here are some nutcracker crafts that you CAN build while watching ballet videos or listening to Tchaikovsky!

• stenciled banner. I like the idea of a nutcracker banner as holiday decor, and I'm thinking that felt (which I have a ton of) would be just as nice of a penant material as the burlap that the tutorial calls for. You can find lots of nutcracker-related stencils online (I think one that featured a timeline of Syd's participation would be really cute!), but a good art project would be teaching the kids how to make stencils and then getting them to freehand some for this banner.
• real nutcracker. We do not have the equipment for this, but if I can ever access it, this is going to be one of the first projects that the kids and I make together!
• popsicle stick nutcracker. If you don't have the miniature popsicle sticks that this project calls for, you can cut the larger ones to size. 
• nutcracker cube critter. These little dudes remind me of the LEGO brickheads, but you cut and assemble them from cardstock. 
• clay nutcracker and angel. This is a very accessible tutorial, but if you're an able crafter and want to use polymer clay, you can search for some very intricate and elaborate tutorials on YouTube. Or just wing it!
• clothespin soldiers. You can reenact the entire battle scene!
• guided drawing with nutcrackers. I love this art activity! You can make it as simple or as in-depth as suits you.

If you're attending the ballet, I like a lot of the activities from this educator's guide to the Nutcracker. This one, though, has activities that you can print-out--maybe you can use it to keep a kid entertained before the show starts?

It's strange to think of what a small part of Syd's entire life these childhood Nutcracker seasons will be, considering what a large part of her life they take up right now. Ballet isn't really one of my own big interests, but I never regret the time that it takes, or how deeply I have to dive, myself, to help a kid dive deeper into her passions.

Anyway, now that Nutcracker is over for a few months, it's time for Syd to immerse herself into her designs for our town's big Trashion/Refashion Show. No regrets on this project, either, but just between us, I like Nutcracker more than I like fashion design!

P.S. If you like study resources and weird videos of people making giant nutcrackers and cracking coconuts with them, you'd like my Craft Knife Facebook page!