How-to: Kid-Made Fire Starters

 This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

Want your kids to be calm and confident in the outdoors? Then you've got to teach them all the skills that LET them be calm and confident! 

In Girl Scouts, I work with all kinds of girls, with all kinds of different life experiences. Some girls are avid campers already; some girls are afraid to leave their houses in the summer because of bugs. I'm not around to bully terrified children out into the woods, but I am there to give them positive outdoor experiences that let them feel capable in all kinds of natural environments. When they're happy and confident outside, peeing in the woods and sleeping in a tent will come in time. 

 But if there is a kid who's scared of the outdoors, who doesn't like the feeling of grass on her feet or dirt on her hands, then I have two words that are my magic words in turning all of that around:

 Campfire. S'mores. 

 Kids love campfires. Kids love s'mores. And when they're sitting around that campfire, nomming up s'mores as fast as they can make them, they're also outside. At night. With the bugs. And the darkness. And the sticks. And they're eating something delicious and poking at the fire, so it all adds up to a great experience. Sneak in a lesson on how to build and maintain a campfire, and there you go--a happy kid who's that much more confident outside, and is one step closer to an enjoyable camping experience.

 These kid-made fire starters are another sure-fire, super fun thing. Kids LOVE playing with melted wax. Seriously, they love it. I've never met a kid who doesn't. And kids will find it very tempting to learn how to start a campfire, even if they're scared of camping and scared of sticks and scared of fire, if they get to use a fire starter that they made themselves while playing with melted wax. 

Want to try it for yourself? Here's all that you'll need: 

 cardboard egg cartons. Don't buy the styrofoam egg cartons, obviously! You just need the bottom half with the cups in it, so you might even be able to score post-Easter by finding a friend who bought an entire flat of eggs and will give you that large-scale bottom piece with lots and lots of egg cups on it.

  dryer lint. The fire starters work best with cotton-only dryer lint, but who can manage that?!? We've got a lot of cotton in our laundry, sure, but we've also got loads of fleece blankets, and when we made the first batch of fire starters since we got our dog, I noticed that our dryer lint was absolutely packed with dog hair. Lovely, right? It might make a difference if you used these in your indoor fireplace--I mean, who doesn't adore the smell of burning hair?--but these particular fire starters are intended for campfires, so a few non-natural fibers are nbd. 

  wax. Don't buy paraffin for this project, even if that's what you used back when you, yourself were a little Girl Scout making fire starters with her troop. Instead, use up all of your candle stubs and scraps. I make a LOT of rolled beeswax candles, so you can see in my photos that my kiddo is using scraps from those projects. We have the most colorful fire starters in the service unit! 

  crock pot or double-boiler. I know that all I do is harp on how much you need a crafts-only crock pot, but Friends--this crock pot that I'm using was $4.50 at Goodwill, and I've used it for years for all of my wax projects, and I couldn't be happier with it.

1. Stuff the bottom of an egg carton with dryer lint. Cut off the lid of the carton, and then stuff the cups full of lint, pushing it down to make sure that each cup will really hold a lot. This is your flammable material, so you want enough to really give your fledgling fire a lift! 

  2. Pour wax over the lint. My kid melts wax in the crock pot (after first sorting it by color, because I swear she is even more anal than I am!)-- 

 --then pours it into each of the egg cups to cover the lint. We do this outside, because it IS messy. The crock pot bowl is a little unwieldy, and yes, she struggles some and loses some wax, but pouring from unwieldy containers is part of life, and wax is cheap. 

You never end up melting as much wax as you think you do, so the kiddo did end up melting more wax for these particular fire starters--in a different color, because of course. I like the kids to cover the lint completely with wax, because I think it both looks and is cleaner, and the wax is what gives your fire starter longevity. Not enough wax, and your lint will flare and then go out after a couple of seconds. You might as well have not even gone to the trouble of making a fire starter, if you're just going to get five seconds of flame out of it. 

 3. Cut the egg cartons apart. I like the kids to cut the egg cartons into single cups. The fire should start small, so a single cup should be enough to get it going. If it's not, no harm, because the kid can just set it up again and light a new one. You learn the most by failing! I wanted to show you how you can use these to start an actual campfire, but it was raining the night that I wanted to do the photo shoot, so instead I made the kid come and sit out on the driveway with me and just light the fire starter. So in that top photo, where the fire starter is blazing away? It's blazing that strongly IN THE RAIN. You could hear it sizzling as the rain drops hit it, but nevertheless, it burned happily for almost ten minutes. In the rain. 

 These fire starters make good gifts for campers or those with a fireplace (check out how to package them with a cute, burnable bow!), but once you've tried them with your outdoor campfire, you will no longer be that jerk who has to use lighter fluid to get a good blaze going. And you can thank your kid for that!

My Girl Scout Troop Earned a Totally Made-Up Badge: Introducing the "Troop's Own" Percy Jackson Badge

 

Thank goodness that there's no such thing as the badge police! One of my favorite things about Girl Scouts is their emphasis on the kid-led experience, which to me is far preferable to a regimented set of practices. Girl Scouts are encouraged to explore their interests and make their own decisions, and they can move even the official badges in directions that aren't directly specified. 

Once upon a time, troops often made up their own badges, including the requirements to earn them. Although this is no longer a common practice, it's a terrific way for a group of kids to direct their own learning. So when I saw that this particular company makes a badge that could work as a Percy Jackson badge, I remembered that several kids in my Girl Scout troop are Percy Jackson fans, and I asked the troop if anyone would like to create a "Troop's Own" Percy Jackson badge.

It turns out that some of my Girl Scouts WOULD like that, as a matter of fact!

The requirements to earn this Percy Jackson badge were kid-created, and decided upon by committee. There were a lot of suggestions in our Percy Jackson badge planning doc that we didn't end up doing--we didn't learn to read Greek and make Greek puzzles for each other, we didn't make book recommendations for people who like Percy Jackson, we didn't wood burn book quotes onto plaques, etc., but it was fun to see what the kids did vote to do, and which activities they ended up liking best. 

Battle a Monster Piñata

For this activity, I gave each kid the name of another kid in our troop. Each kid, then, was to shop for a gift for their particular kid (they had a small budget of troop money for this), and then put that gift inside a monster piñata that they were to make from scratch. 

Here are some good piñata tutorials:

• piñata with a cardboard and tape structure
• piñata from a balloon
• how to add appendages using cardboard and tape
• adding appendages made from streamers

At the meeting, each kid got to battle the monster created especially for them, and when they had conquered that monster, inside its belly was a prize!

Which God/Goddess are You Descended from?

During the meeting, I pulled up Rick Riordan's own quiz on my laptop, and let each kid take it so they could learn who they were descendants of. Hades and Poseidon, mostly!

Blue Foods

Just for fun, Syd and I made a feast of blue foods for the troop meeting. Alas, blue chocolate chip cookies only look BLUE blue if you underbake them, but the blue Jello, blueberries, and blue tortilla chips were blue enough to make up for it. Blue Gatorade was also a bit iffy--Syd tells me that it tastes like batteries, although how she knows this I will not question.

Cards Against Mythology

You know how much the kids and I love Cards Against Humanity, and apparently we could not rest until we had brought an inoffensive version to the Girl Scout troop. 

Since this was for personal use only, we cribbed pretty hard off of legit Cards Against Humanity for our own troop game. Matt made black and white card templates in a Google Doc, and the troop kids and I filled them in with our own ideas. We went for anything mythology, Percy Jackson, or Girl Scouts, as well as whatever other random stuff any of us could come up with. 

Oh, my gosh, but this game was SO FUN. The kids who'd never played before picked up the rules almost immediately, and the kids who had played before thought that our DIY version was nearly as seamless as the store-bought decks. We'd all put in not just funny Percy Jackson and Girl Scout references, but a bunch of inside jokes from past troop adventures, and they were hilarious every single time they came up. Here are some of our combos:

We played twice in a row, and decided that we'd keep adding to the deck and then play it again at next month's camping trip.

Percy Jackson Crafts

All the kids wanted to do one or two crafts, but there was no real consensus, so I just laid out a lot of options, and we spent the last hour of the meeting each working on the craft of our choosing while listening to the Lightening Thief soundtrack:

• Camp Half-Blood Beads: unfinished wood beads embellished with paint and paint pens
• Mythomagic Trading Cards: Artist Trading Cards made to look like mythology-themed trading cards
• Greek Alphabet Blocks: these Greek alphabet blocks, with kids figuring out how to spell their name in Greek and making the blocks for those letters

And that was our Percy Jackson badge! The kids learned some mythology, designed and built their own piñatas, shopped on a budget, tried new foods, experimented with grammatical structures, learned a new game, listened to new-to-them music, played with the Greek alphabet, did some art, and got some social time in with their friends. The badge they did all that for may not be the "official-est" of official badges, but it was earned with plenty of Girl Scout spirit, and I hope the kids wear it with plenty of Girl Scout pride. 

Homeschool Science: Build a Paper Model of a Telescope

The high school kid and I have been ambling along her astronomy study at a very leisurely pace, which is... not terribly clever of us, as we'd have been much better off doing night sky observations during those clear, early winter nights than we will all summer in the middle of the freaking night trying to look through heat distortion, sigh.

The fact that it was overcast the entirety of February didn't help, but whatever. Leisurely-paced science studies are our specialty, it seems!

That being said, it is really just the observations that are hanging us up, as the high school kid is totally caught up on the readings and we've done tons of interesting non-observation hands-on activities, including this project of creating a paper model of a telescope.

Big telescopes are fascinating evidence of the progression of scientific knowledge. They're cutting edge when they're created, but because they're used as long as possible, they're often outmoded well before they're retired. The high school kid and I have enjoyed learning the history of several big telescopes around the world; interestingly, we were actually studying this at the time of Arecibo's collapse, so we got to watch history happening while we were learning about it!

Building a paper model of a telescope isn't intrinsically necessary for learning about big telescopes and how they work, but it is a fun hands-on activity that invites deeper exploration of how the parts of one specific telescope work, and how it comes together into a whole. 

The high school kid built a model of an ALMA 12-Meter Antenna:

And I think it turned out really well!

Of course, to be perfectly accurate, she'd need to build 65 more just like this one, because the ALMA is actually a 66-antenna array.

Along with her model, the high school kid researched and wrote a detailed history of the telescope and explanation of how and why it works. The project obviously has pride of place on our family room shelves, now, because I'm never going to recycle something this awesome!

It would be interesting to visit a working observatory one day. The kids and I visited Lowell Observatory back when they were small, but honestly, they mostly just remember the hotel pools from that trip...

Here are some other paper telescope models:

• NASA paper telescope models. There are so many paper telescope models to choose from here!
• NAOJ paper telescope models. The high school kid's ALMA telescope came from here! This site is fun because as well as telescopes, you can also build their control buildings or transporters. You know, for your entire model telescope world!
• Subaru telescope. This paper model is on the printables site for Canon, so it's worth exploring all the other interesting paper models they've got, too. I wish I'd seen the ones for the moving Copernican and Ptolemaic systems when we were studying them!
• working telescope model. This isn't a model of a big telescope, but instead an actual working telescope. Younger students can use it to learn how telescopes work.

And if you just want to draw some cool telescopes, check this book out. 

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!

Camping Hack: Make a Handwashing Station

 This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

You don't get to have filthy hands even while you're camping, not unless you want to hike all day back to your car while suffering from the norovirus. 

 Pro tip: you don't want that. 

 Instead, make this DIY handwashing station that is so easy to assemble, a child can--and did!--do it. If you're not much of a camper, you can use this exact same handwashing station in the garden, or even by the back door, so that muddy hands NEVER make it into your house. 

 You will need: 

  empty plastic gallon jug. A gallon jug of water is the easiest to use, since you won't have to wash it.

  ripped tights. You'll need one intact leg, with no holes so large that a piece of soap could fall out.

  carabiner and rope (optional). You can get by without hanging your handwashing station, but it'll be a lot easier to operate when hung from a nearby tree limb. 

  twine. Yarn or other narrow cording are acceptable substitutes. 

  golf tee. Feel free to look for substitutes for this, because not everyone has a golf tee at hand. You're looking for a peg with a tapered end, sturdy enough not to snap and solid enough to serve as a drain stopper. 

  1. Poke a small hole in the bottom of the plastic jug. Poke it near the edge, on the side opposite the handle. Push the golf tee into the hole--it should fit snugly, ideally no more than halfway up the tee. Over time and many uses, the hole will naturally widen, but the golf tee should fit it for a very long time. When you're out camping and you finally see that you're pushing the golf tee all the way in to fit, make a mental note that upon your return, you need to make yourself a new handwashing station. 

  2. Tie a length of twine between the golf tee and the jug handle. This is so you don't lose the tee while you're washing your hands. You might want to secure the twine to the tee with glue. 

  3. Attach the soap. Cut off one leg of the tights. Push a bar of soap down to the foot, then tie the open end of the tights around the jug's handle. The soap should dangle down past the jug, giving you enough room to soap up your hands at the handwashing station. 

  4. Attach a carabiner or piece of rope. This handwashing station will work when sat at the edge of a table, but it's best used when tied by the handle to hang from a tree limb. Attach a carabiner to the handle, and loop on a long piece of rope that you can toss over a tree limb at your campsite. To use the handwashing station, fill it with water and either set it on the edge of a table, with the golf tee hanging over, or tie it by the handle to hang from a tree limb. Pull the tee to wet your hands: 

 Put the tee back in and soap your hands: 

 Pull the tee again to rinse. Rinsing your hands does take a little while, so if that bothers you feel free to experiment with a larger hole and stopper, although I personally would find refilling the handwashing station after every use far more annoying than I do rubbing my hands vigorously under a narrow stream of water. Either way, no norovirus for you!

Prints and Patterns Rainbow Fibonacci Placemats for Pumpkin+Bear

 

Because you know I can't leave well enough alone, nor make one single iteration of a project when fourteen different iterations would be more obsessive.

I LOVE my solid color rainbow Fibonacci placemats, and use them every day. But I couldn't get the idea out of my head of the same placemat done in rainbow prints and patterns, or rather, multiples of the same placemat, all with a different combination of prints and patterns.

It satisfies my love of chaos without nearly as much assault on the eyeballs as usually occurs when I get hold of more than two colors at the same time. It also pings that spot in my brain that's obsessed with mathematical patterns, now that the kids are both so busy studying for end-of-year exams that they've got little time to do weird and involved math projects with me.

I LOVE how these placemats look!

I love them in combination with each other--

--and in combination with my solid color rainbow Fibonacci placemats:

Spots likes them, too, so much so that she even helped me with my photo shoot!

These made-to-order prints and patterns rainbow Fibonacci placemats are now listed in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop. You order them, and I'll sew them up for you with your very own, unique combination of rainbow prints and patterns!

I think I'm going to make a rainbow Fibonacci quilt next!

Homeschooling Girl Scouts: Earning the Uniting Members of Joint Ancestry Fun Patch

Even big kids like earning badges and patches, and well into her high school career, my own big kid still gets a lot of value from incorporating Girl Scout badges and fun patches into her studies. 

The biggest advantage is the way that Girl Scout badges and fun patches add context by encouraging my big kid to explore in different directions than her high school curriculum might suggest, but as the homeschool mentor/mom I also appreciate the ability to customize all the requirements to earn each patch or badge. Most importantly, I can add academic rigor, but it's also nice to be able to substitute field trips or opportunities close to home, or to allow the kid to engage with subjects that strike her fancy...

...as we did with this UMOJA fun patch, which turned the kid into a Debbie Allen fan!

I got the Uniting Members of Joint Ancestry fun patch and requirements from Girl Scouts of Nassau County last year as something a little extra to do along with the kid's African Studies class at our local university. She LOVED that class and everything about it, and it was a great time to add in some low-stakes, high-interest depth and breadth, as well as the types of hands-on enrichment that university Liberal Arts classes, especially in the middle of a global pandemic, don't have the infinite time for that I do.

The kid's class took care of all the requirements related to studying the continent of Africa, so we concentrated on exploring African-American culture. 

For us, always and eternally, that means food! Here are some of the cookbooks we browsed through so she could choose a few dishes to make:

• The North African Cookbook
• An African American Cookbook: Traditional and Other Favorite Recipes
• Addy's Cookbook: A Peek at Dining in the Past with Meals You Can Cook Today
• Cool African Cooking: Fun and Tasty Recipes for Kids
• Saka Saka: Adventures in African Cooking, South of the Sahara

I would have LOVED to take the kid to Indy to my favorite Ethiopian restaurant (one of my favorite Mac memories is the time he road-tripped to visit when the kids were super small. I answered the door looking, I imagined, wrecked as hell. Mac said, "Get your coat," I handed a shrieking toddler to my bemused husband and did so, and Mac took me to eat Ethiopian food in Indianapolis), but, alas, coronavirus. 

To satisfy the requirement to learn more about Black History month in America, I had the kid enter our city's Black History Month essay contest--and she won first prize!!! She worked very hard researching and writing her essay on The Chicago Defender, and had, I thought, some insightful comments about the importance of news media, especially media created by and serving BIPOC individuals. The city had a whole virtual ceremony for the award-winning kids, and a local bank donated a pretty awesome prize. As a homeschooler, I'm so super used to doing everything all by myself that when the community steps in to encourage my kid with interesting academic opportunities and then to reward her in fun ways for her effort... well, I find that actually overwhelming, it's so awesome.

Out of all the activities that the kid completed to earn the UMOJA fun patch, though, she had the most fun with--surprisingly to me!--the ones that asked her to learn more about African-American dance and dancers. I have been wanting to get this kid interested in dance all her life! I've taken her to ballets and musicals and choreography projects and percussive dance shows and put her in creative moment and hip-hop classes, and never got a hit. 

My mistake was that I didn't have Debbie Allen dance for her! 

To be honest, I was mostly excited that the kid was interested in Debbie Allen because I could manipulate her into watching a couple of episodes of Grey's Anatomy with me ("Oh, c'mon, Kid! Debbie Allen is on the show ALL THE TIME! I mean, she's not dancing in it, but she's THERE!), and I almost ruined the whole thing because the kid wanted to watch Debbie Allen in Fame but I didn't know what I was doing so I checked out the movie for us instead of the TV series, and the movie is absolutely, bafflingly odd and plot-less, but once I stopped being weird she and I had a fine old time binging all of Debbie Allen's best dance performances that YouTube had to offer.

Here are some of our favorites!

I think she choreographed this, as well as performing it?

How lucky we are that even in 1986, somehow people were managing to bootleg Broadway performances!

Here's the non-profit dance academy that she founded in 2001. It looks absolutely magical!

Ms. Allen isn't in this one, but since she produced and directed the first season, it was my excuse to re-watch a little bit of A Different World. I watched SO MUCH TV as a kid!

The Debbie Allen Dance Academy Nutcracker looks so freaking magical, too. Look at all the cool moves they get to do!

Here's the kid's timeline of African-influenced dance in America:

All of these also make for good YouTube searches until live performances get back in gear. 

This fun patch turned out to be a really nice companion to the kid's African Studies class. I can't not regret that we couldn't let it take us to museums and live performances and in-person workshops, but thank goodness for library cookbooks, city essay contests, and YouTube!

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!

How to Make a Ribbon Wand

 This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

Have a dowel? Have a ribbon? 

 You can make a ribbon wand! 

 Kids love these sweet, floaty wands made for dancing and leaping and running. You'll mostly find them in the hands of the preschool set, but my eleven-year-old rediscovered the ribbon wand during a recent trip to a local children's museum, and rather than buy her the lovely but expensive one in the museum gift shop, I promised her that I'd help her make one of her own when we got home. 

 And so I did, and so can you! 

 To make your own ribbon wand, you will need: 

  dowel. We always have some dowel or other in our garage, left over from some project or other, but if you don't, just go to the hardware store and find one that feels good in your kid's hand--around 1/4" should do. You can stain or paint it (my kid painted hers gold), or leave it plain. Cut it to a good size for your kid, and put the rest of the dowel back in your garage for another project.

  screw eyes. If you've got one in your garage, use that one; otherwise, buy the smallest that you can find. Ours are 15/32", and they were super cheap.

  barrel swivel. This one you can likely get for free if you know anybody who fishes, but again, they're cheap. Ours are size 10, and they work great with the 15/32" screw eyes. 

  ribbon. We used stash 1/2" silk ribbon, and my kiddo vat dyed it pink. I like silk because it floats so well; satin would be another good choice. My eleven-year-old put six feet of ribbon on her wand, but if you do have someone in the preschool set, you'll probably want to start with a shorter length, or resign yourself to untangling ribbon every two minutes. 

 1. Assemble the ribbon wand hardware. Using needle nose pliers, slightly open the eye of the screw eye, and insert one end of the barrel swivel. Tie one end of the ribbon to the other end of the barrel swivel. Check out the above pic to see the set-up. 

  2. Attach the hardware to the dowel. I had thought that I was going to have to use an awl to get the screw eye started, but my kiddo just twisted it right into one end of the dowel. It's so secure that we didn't even need to use glue, although you certainly could secure it with a good epoxy glue. Use the pic below as a reference: 

 These ribbon wands are so quick and easy that older kids can make them completely independently. They'd make a great kid-made birthday gift for another kid, or a simple project for a group of kids to make together. If you've got a group of kids marching in a parade this summer, they'd all look super cute waving matching ribbon wands as they marched!