Homeschool Astronomy: Investigating Prisms

Just try your best to ignore her dirty fingernails, sigh. If it makes you feel better, after looking at the entire reel of these photos I put a couple of nail brushes in my Amazon cart.

The spectroscopy units in the big kid's Astronomy study made me realize that I've never let the kids do much exploring with prisms, gasp! 

Fortunately, there's still enough time to fix that gaping hole in their education before they go off to college. Can't have the kids trying to make their way in the world with no experiential education regarding prisms, can we?

I bought this set of four different prisms and set up a viewing station by covering a large square of cardboard in white paper, taping it to my camera tripod to make it adjustable, then taping two pieces of Styrofoam scavenged from the recycling bin upright on the cardboard with a very narrow gap between them.

It worked great!

First, the big kid spent a ton of time simply playing with each prism--yay! She discovered all the positions in which each prism would produce a rainbow, and at what angle the rainbow would appear in relation to the prism's face and the ray of sunlight, and which colors in the rainbow were absent or most evident:

If she'd wanted to be scientific, she could have measured these various angles, and she might go back and do that for her Astronomy Lab Notebook, but for now this was pretty much just play:

It was harder to make rainbows with the other prism shapes:

And she never did manage to make a rainbow using the sphere, which I personally find weird because raindrops are the prisms through which rainbows are formed. Are raindrops not perfect spheres, or should we have also set up some white paper walls to better catch the dispersion?

There was a break time to cuddle Luna, who WILL NOT STOP CHEWING HER TAIL.

Finally, the big kid was curious to see how colored light might affect a prism's dispersion, so she set up an experiment using colored cellophane:

That one DID go into the Astronomy Lab Notebook!

All the play with prisms made me long for one in every single sunny window of our house, sooo... high school astronomy can have the occasional craft project associated with it, right?

Ooh, and the little kid's back to homeschooling, which means that I need to find some enrichment and contextualization and hands-on activities for Geometry. Time to break out the Zometools, then absolutely repeat this activity with a protractor at hand!

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!

July Favorites: Hockey, Horror, and Check Fraud

 

This is our shelf of books waiting to be put in Will's Little Free Library... although I'm about to go steal that Bullfinch's Mythology for myself!

I read SO MANY BOOKS during our last full month of summer vacation! We homeschool year-round, but even so, July is our least rigorous month by far. We did some Girl Scout-related unit studies, Will continued her slog through Pre-Calculus (finishing it up just in time to start Calculus at the local community college on Wednesday!), and Syd did some sewing, but for much of that you could find me kicked back nearby, a book in my face.

Early July found me reading a slew of hockey books during the commercial breaks in the Stanley Cup Play-offs (when I wasn't browsing the NHL's online store for the weirdest jerseys to put on my wish list...). I read this book hoping to find a thorough primer on hockey, particularly how to watch it and what to watch for, etc.--

---but even though I still think the book was meant to be read by novice fans, most of it was way above my head. I got enough out of it to improve the quality of my viewing, but I'm still very much a novice and very much don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for most of the time. I did learn that watching hockey on TV is far inferior to watching it in person, though, so come fall you can find me in the stands as one of the Indy Fuel's newest fans!

Just because there's not a ton of hockey non-fiction out there, I also read both of these youth hockey parent memoirs:

They were both interesting, in that they both wrote about a world that I know nothing about--not youth hockey, not youth travel sports, not youth competitive sports in general!--but they didn't make me wish that my kids had played competitive travel sports, either! Although I DO wish either of my kids had been interested in playing youth hockey, because it looks cute.

What I did gather from these memoirs is that youth hockey, in particular, is wildly expensive, and as one of the youth sports in which a kid really does need to get the earliest possible start if they want a chance to play professionally, this makes it mostly exclusive to upper class kids. Charity or scholarship-sponsored hockey programs designed to introduce lower-income kids to the game might be fine for increasing future spectatorship, but they're not going to give those kids access to playing professional hockey one day, either because they start the kids too late or because they don't continue to pay their fees and provide their gear past that one session. 

When I'm a billionaire, I'm going to start an extracurriculars scholarship foundation for disenfranchised kids. It will start funding them when they're preschoolers, and will pay all their costs for whatever extracurriculars they want, for as long as they want them, until they graduate high school. We're talking hockey gear, riding helmets, audition fees, summer camp tuition--all that crap that we well-off parents put into our budgets to support our kids trying new activities or diving deep into their passions. It's gross how much access to money affects the opportunities that kids get.

I liked/was terrified by The Hot Zone so much that I was very eager to read the novel informed by it--

--and I was not disappointed! Mind you, it's probably too soon to be reading realistic pandemic fiction that vividly reminds us of how scary our current pandemic already is and how much scarier it could be, but if you're of a mind to freak yourself out, feel free to go for it!

I read this book while I was in Chicago with Matt, and therefore didn't have a ton of time for obsessive side research--

--otherwise, I might still be deep-diving into the weird world of tying historically accurate flies using the feathers of extinct birds. It is so weird.

Seriously, it is SO WEIRD!!!

And of COURSE the criminal who committed his crimes because of his obsessive interest in an esoteric hobby is a homeschooler. 

Lastly, here's some really good fiction that I read in July:

Coincidentally, I read The Last Days of Jack Sparks while also staying in a supposedly haunted hotel! I didn't know at the time that our hotel was supposed to be haunted, dang it, or many more hijinks would have ensued. The frightening conceit of Nothing to See Here integrates into the plot and character relationships so well that it stops feeling scary, which makes the reactions of other characters more interesting, and Convenience Store Woman has the same kind of vibe, in which while all the other characters attempt to diagnose the heroine, you become much more invested in figuring out what's wrong with THEM that they can't leave her in peace!

In other news, Will and I recently took that magical trip to Indiana Dunes National Park with Luna, and it was everything that I could have ever wanted from our trip! And honestly, not the least of our pleasures was booking an AirBnB with SO MANY TV CHANNELS. It was heaven! Not only did we watch a full season and a half of Schitt's Creek (in... ahem... four days) and spend a rainy morning watching Luca, but I also showed Will Catch Me If You Can, and now Frank Abagnale, Jr., is her hero. 

This kid is the last kid whose hero needs to be a con man, but at least he's redeemed himself, I guess! 

Scrapbook Paper Stationery Sets

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World in 2016. 

 Whether you need a quick and easy handmade gift or you would rather not hit up the store just so you can send some thank-you notes, you'll find that it is super simple to make your own personalized, handmade stationery, entirely from your favorite scrapbook paper. 

 You will need: 

  scrapbook paper. I'm using 8.5"x11" scrapbook paper for the stationery in these photos, and I had very little waste left over. You can also, of course, use typing paper of the same size (perhaps with children's artwork on one side?), or even wrapping paper or thin cardboard food packaging, but keep in mind that your paper needs to be sturdy enough to be mailed, and if you choose something very thick, you'll need to account for that in your measuring. 

  measuring and cutting tools. I'm using a self-healing cutting mat, clear plastic ruler, and the same rotary craft knife that I almost cut off a chunk of my left forefinger with. 

  glue stick. It's basic, but really is the best supply for this job. 

 1. Make custom envelopes. If you have a size in mind for your notepaper, you can make custom envelopes that will fit the notepaper perfectly. Otherwise, there are loads of good envelope templates online. The envelopes that I'm making from my 8.5"x11" scrapbook paper are 4"x6", not including the flap. 

  2. Cut down a second piece of scrapbook paper to fit the envelopes. The matching notepaper should be twice the height of your envelope, and approximately 1/4" less in width. For my own pieces of notepaper, I cut 1/2" off of the width of my scrapbook paper, and then cut the remaining piece in half, giving me two pieces of notepaper that are 5.5"x8". 

 3. Fold each piece of notepaper in half. You can stack them together and insert them into your envelope, or make a second envelope to accommodate the second piece of notepaper. 

 To address your envelopes, put a white mailing label on the front of each envelope and write on that. Alternately, fold your envelopes so that the scrapbook paper is on the inside and the white side is facing out. If you buy a book of scrapbook paper, you'll find that it includes both similar patterns in different colorways and different patterns in the same colorway; either option would make a lovely, large set of handmade stationery to give as a gift.

Creeks and Fossils: Earning the Girl Scout Cadette Eco Trekker, Senior Eco Explorer, and Ambassador Water Badges

With a multi-level Girl Scout troop, activities tend to snowball. I'm absolutely of the mindset that not everybody has to earn a badge for everything, but... to be honest, I'm actually not so much of that mindset in practice, not with my older Girl Scouts. It was different when they were Brownies and Juniors, we met up more often, and they were all eager beavers who could be counted on to also earn a ton of badges outside of meetings. 

Now that they're all big kids, we don't meet up as often for badgework. The kids are all too busy with all their other kid stuff! Combine that with the fact that older Girl Scout badges are more work and take longer to earn, and these busy kids don't really earn them on their own at home, anymore, either. 

So when we do make the time to meet together, in an activity that the kids have chosen and are enthusiastic about, then yeah, I want them all to be able to earn a badge for their work.

And because they're at three different levels, that means three different badges.

For this meeting, the activity that the kids were enthusiastic about was finding fossils in our local creek. One of our troop co-leaders is an expert in local fossils and spends much of her free time looking for them in the many creeks around town, so she and her Girl Scout took charge of the fossil activities. I added in water activities to fill in most of the rest of the steps to earn the Cadette Eco Trekker, Senior Eco Explorer, and Ambassador Water badges, and the kids collaborated on the activity for Step 5 for each badge.

Field Trip to a Local Creek: Cadette Eco Trekker Badge Step 1

I didn't discover creek stomping until I moved to this little Indiana town, but now it's one of my favorite activities. When my kids were small, I'd put them into their swim trunks and we'd all go down to our favorite creek. We probably never walked more than half a mile in either direction down the creek, but still we could stay there for most of the day, me reading on a bank while the kids splashed and fought and caught crawdads and minnows and filled their pockets with fossils and geodes.  

It turns out that going to the creek with teenagers is much the same!

Lesson on Fossils and Geodes: Senior Eco Explorer Badge Steps 1-2, Ambassador Water Badge Step 1

My co-leader gave the kids a lecture on crinoids, the main fossil that we find locally. She showed them images of what crinoids looked like when they were alive and examples of fossils from her extensive collection. She can look at a fossil and tell you exactly what part of a crinoid it is, which is a super cool superpower!

Afterwards, the kids played in the creek and hunted for fossils and geodes:

I'm really glad that I remembered to bring my rock hammer, because it was a hit (ba-dum-dum!)! Everybody likes bashing open a geode and seeing what magic is inside.

Stream Health Assessment and Water Quality Testing: Cadette Eco Trekker Badge Steps 3-4, Senior Eco Explorer Badge Steps 3-4, Ambassador Water Badge Steps 3-4

I get bored with the similar structure of Girl Scout badges, but it sure does help with a multi-level troop! Steps 3 and 4 of each badge ask the Girl Scout to explore and work on an ecosystem issue; for the Ambassadors, the issue must be water-related.

To complete these steps, I taught the troop how to conduct a visual stream assessment, combining this worksheet with this contextual information. We talked about floodplains, channelizing, banks and erosion, and habitats for macroinvertebrates. Our town just experienced a major flood, and its impact on numerous local businesses has been in the news, so we also discussed how proper stream management is crucial not just for the sake of the natural environment, but also for urban infrastructure. One of the flooded businesses is located directly on the floodplain of a creek, and our entire downtown, which flooded so quickly that patrons were trapped in bars and restaurants, sits directly on top of another creek that was closed in and covered by a heavily-trafficked street. The flash flooding was a big disaster, with one person dead and one business still closed due to the damage; if the city had respected the creek's floodplain and maintained its riparian buffer zone, it likely wouldn't have been so dangerous or caused so much damage.

If you want to add more context, particularly regarding your area's overall watershed, these topographic maps are a great resource. 

A visual assessment is a great way to monitor a stream's overall health, but you can't get the whole picture with just your eyes alone. I wanted the kids to get some experience conducting chemical analyses, so I walked them all through how to collect water samples, then we reconvened under a nearby picnic shelter and I taught them how to do several of the tests from my favorite water monitoring kit:

With the supplies that I had left after Will's APES labs, the kids were able to test for dissolved oxygen, fecal coliform, nitrate, and pH. While we did the tests, we discussed the importance of dissolved oxygen, the fine line that is nitrate, and how fertilizer and sewage runoff are so dangerous partly because they're so nutritious for bacteria and algae, which will consume all the dissolved oxygen if they grow too much, and that will suffocate all the rest of the life in the stream. 

Both the dissolved oxygen and nitrate results for our stream were shockingly low, and I am VERY curious about that!

Make an Art Project: Ambassador Water Badge Step 2

Fortunately, my co-leader is also an artist who works with fossils, and so she was able to set the kids up to make absolutely beautiful collages with some of their fossils and cool rocks:

The kids had a fabulous time with this activity as they explored aesthetically-pleasing ways to display their collections. Some kids made collages in pendants, some made collages in frames, and some organized their collections in little bottles. They all turned out so cute!

Share What You Learned: Cadette Eco Trekker Step 5, Senior Eco Explorer Step 5, and Ambassador Water Badge Step 5

All the badges we covered have, for their final step, an activity that encourages the kids to pass on their knowledge, teach someone, educate, inspire, etc. Girl Scouts really encourages kids to find their voices, and older kids, especially, are often asked to try their hands at mentoring or teaching.

The kids in my troop each completed this final step independently, although we talked about possible avenues for sharing while they worked on their art projects, and they edited a Google Doc of ideas and possible scripts together. We brainstormed possibilities like writing a letter to our local Parks and Recreation Department informing them of the results of our water quality testing, writing a letter to the newspaper, making a flyer or brochure and displaying it or passing it around, writing a Google Maps review of the park with our water quality test results included, and other ideas. When we meet again, they can share what they shared!

When I teach kids, I always wonder if the info stuck. Did they learn anything, or were they just along for the ride? Did they understand the importance of dissolved oxygen and nitrates, or were they just dropping tablets into water and looking at the pretty colors? After all, I know well that a polite, biddable kid can act like they're 100% with you, doing everything you ask, with their eyes glazed over and cartoons playing in their head.

HOWEVER... this morning, my kids and I spent a couple of hours at a local park, hanging out with friends while Will completed a science lab (nectar guides for the win!). On the walk back to the car, we went across a pedestrian bridge over one of our town's many, many creeks. I stopped to look down at the water, and the kids stopped with me.

"Hmmm," one said. "This creek has definitely been channelized. And it doesn't have a very good riparian buffer zone."

"It's got fish, though, so it must have some habitat for macroinvertebrates."

"It could just be a hardy species."

"Look at that bank erosion!"

Yeah, I think they earned that Girl Scout badge!

DIY Mason Jar Hanging Light Fixture

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2017.

 I am a hipster cliche. Because Mason jar lights? They found me. They called to me. They spoke in my ear, and I heard, "Julie! You need some lighting to go above your new handmade headboard! You could put that light... in a Mason jar!" 

 And I said, "Why, yes. Yes, I could!" 

 To be fair, it's not like I don't already have a ton of Mason jars just lying around. I mean, we drink out of them. I do actually can things, on occasion. So actually, sticking a light bulb in a Mason jar is just about the cheapest and most efficient lighting solution. I didn't have to buy a shade or drill out a tea cup bottom or whatever else the cool people are doing (I won't even Google it, lest I then want to do it, too).

 And it looks awesome!

How to Make Hanging Mason Jar Lights

Here's what we needed to make our hanging Mason jar light: 

  hanging lamp cord kit. The kind that you need will have a lip that screws off and allows you to put a lampshade on it. Most kits that are intended to be decorative and not, like, a shop light will have this, because most people don't want to hang naked bulbs from their ceiling. 

  LED Edison bulb. I know you love the look of the Edison bulb. I do, too! But conventional Edison bulbs are huge energy hogs, even hotter and more inefficient than old conventional bulbs. They're so hot that I don't even know if it would be totally safe to put one in a Mason jar and then light it up. Use an LED Edison bulb and go frown at all of those hipster restaurants that don't--they're heating up our planet! 

  Mason jar. I used a new wide-mouthed pint-and-a-half Mason jar from my canning stash, and an old lid and ring from my non-canning stash. 

  shelf brackets. These are what you screw into your wall to hold a flat shelf from underneath. We found a couple of matching ones in our garage, but if we hadn't, I'd have checked our local ReStore or Freecycle. 

  tools. Obviously. The only weird tools that you'll need are things that can make a hole in a Mason jar lid. For that, my husband used a screwdriver, a hammer, and pliers, although I really wanted him to use my tin snips or even my Dremel. 

1. Make a hole in the Mason jar lid and insert the pendant light fitting. See, doesn't it look messy when you don't use tin snips or a Dremel? Of course, you're not going to actually be able to see any of those untidy bits when you've put the mounting lip in the hole-- 

 --but still! It would have been tidier if it had been done with tin snips or a Dremel.

  2. Screw everything together. Now you should be able to add the ring for the Mason jar, the socket for the light, and then screw the light into the socket and the Mason jar onto the ring. 

3. Mount the wall bracket. This can go wherever you want your light to hang from, mounted just the way that you would if you were actually going to put a shelf on it. 

 4. Hang the light. Our particular shelf bracket had a groove in the bottom that worked nicely to hide the cord, but really we just wrapped the cord around the end, adjusted it so that the Mason jar pendant light hung where we wanted it to, and then fastened the cord in place using the magic of zip ties. 

 It's not a super polished look, but we aren't a super polished people, and it meets my dual purposes of giving off enough light to read by and looking pretty great. 

 Oh, and it makes me happy.

Seven New Masks for Syd

I know that officially, Syd's first year of public school was last year.

Last year, when we knew that she'd be learning online. Last year, when she started the school year with cocoa and buttered toast at the family room table every morning, and ended the school year by sitting up in bed and opening the computer just as first period started every morning. Second period was for making her way to the kitchen and making herself some iced coffee, and third period was back to bed.

This year, we actually went shopping for school clothes. This year, I bought Syd a new lunchbox and messenger bag, earbuds and socks. This year, we had an honest-to-god orientation at the high school, and got to walk real-live hallways looking for her real, live, in-person classrooms.

This year, I'm finally feeling what it's like to send the precious kid that I homeschooled for nine years off to public school. Just between us... I kind of don't like it? Syd is more or less my pandemic pet, and I doubt that there was a more codependent mother-and-daughter pair than us in all of online/virtual/digital school last year. Like, how am I going to know what she's studying if I'm not sitting next to her while she's studying it? How am I going to know if her teachers are doing a good job if I'm not literally watching them teach?

Do you think they'd all continue to livestream all their classes just for me?

Along with buying Syd pants from Hot Topic and shirts from Goodwill and highlighters, notebooks, and mechanical pencils from Target, about all the codependent parenting that I get to do this year is make my kid TOO MANY MASKS from fabric that I took her to Joann's to pick out. Surprisingly, if you remember my baby from back when she was three years old and insisted on wearing only the elaborate velvet and silk and lace party dresses that I hit up every thrift store in town to score for her, and unsurprisingly, if you've possibly experienced a year-long pandemic with a teenager of your own, all of her fabric choices were black:

The half-and-half look was an accident based on me not knowing how to read a simple, one-piece pattern, but Syd liked it, so I mix-and-matched several of her masks that way:

And check me out with the new pattern! Matt and Will still prefer the masks with ties, but Syd and I like the ones with elastic better, so I bought 1/8" elastic, adjustable metal nose strips, and silicone cord locks. I felt a little foolish buying all that when everyone in our family had just gotten vaccinated, because how long were we even going to need to wear masks after that, anyway? 

The answer: possibly forever. The first half of this school year, for sure!

So now my kid's all stocked up on masks. That, along with figuring out what breakfast foods I can force-feed her before she heads out the door each morning and texting my long-distance favorite friend a bunch of questions about whether or not kids in high school carry water bottles and still spread lice and if she thinks the student handbook is really serious when it says they have to go to the nurse to get Tylenol, is about all the prep work I can do for this school year. It's very different from the writing lesson plans and requesting library books and planning field trips that I like to do. But if Syd likes it, I'll be so happy for her, and if she manages to learn anything, I'll be even happier!

And just between us, if the whole state isn't back to online-only school by winter break, I'll be shocked.