Memory Work is WORK!

Memory work is useful, yes, but easy it is absolutely NOT! As I've added more memory work to our weekly schedule, I've found that it's really necessary to keep finding different ways to review the same material every day. Too many flashcards, and too much straight copywork, and the kiddos' brains just tune out. They'll be able to quickly give the correct response in that same format, but ask them the same question in a different way, and they suddenly can't remember a single Latin word that they've been reviewing daily for a month, sigh.

Therefore, mostly for my own reference, but for yours, too, if you care about such things, I've compiled below my list of all the varied ways that I can think of to review memory work, everything from spelling words to math facts, timeline dates to state capitals, poetry to sight words, vocabulary to Latin translations...you get the idea:

Copy in alphabetical order. This works for spelling/vocabulary words and the kids' Latin words--it's regular old copywork, but you have to use your brain a bit more, and it makes sure that you're not studying the words in the same order every time.

Write it on the window with dry erase markers or the sidewalk with chalk. The kiddos ALWAYS like to do this, but it does take a ton of time, since if you've given them dry erase markers or chalk and fun things to draw on, you've obviously got to let them draw:

Speed race! This would give Sydney a heart attack, but it's been working really well with Willow and multiplication. Simply memorizing her multiplication table is a fail, because she can calculate so quickly that she can work any fact out in her head in a few seconds, and then you're left wondering, "Is she trying to remember, or counting by eights in her head?". I've been using these multiplication matching puzzles, however, timing Willow as she races to complete them, and encouraging her to beat the previous day's time. If it looks like she's starting to memorize the positions of the answers as well as the answers, I skip to different tables for a few days, and then go back to the earlier ones for a fresh look and a review.

Songs. Will is our star at memorizing facts through song (her recitation of all the countries of Africa still gives me pridey feelings inside), but Syd is quickly catching her up, with her love of the Song School Latin CD. It takes a lot of curating, though, because many educational songs are crap. I use my free Spotify app to search for and then stream songs for just about every subject--they're not all for memorizing, of course (the girls always want to listen to the state song of whatever state they're studying, for instance), but you'd be surprised how happily you can bop along to the multiplication table when it's sung by a good voice to a catchy tune. Our favorite, by FAR, is Victor Johnson's Multiplication and Skip Counting Songs, although there's also a super annoying song ("The Pi Song," by Bryant Oden) that I'm using to memorize pi:

"They said 'Would you like some pi?' I said, 'Yes, I would!' I forgot they majored in math. I would undo it if I could! They said, '3.1415926535897932384626433.'" Yep, that's from memory! Don't all congratulate me at once.

DIY Dry Erase. The girls actually DON'T like this too much, because it takes a lot more elbow grease to erase than a conventional dry erase board, but for things like parts labeling or their spelling words, I like to laminate the document to use as a dry erase:

I've also heard that page protectors and CD cases work well as dry erase boards, but I haven't tried them yet. One more thing for my to-do list!

Tape yourself. The girls love doing this for poetry and spelling words. Not only does the taping require a lot of thoughtful interaction with their memory work, but it also really encourages repetition--I think they just like to listen to themselves! I let them record these on my ipod, which they're allowed to use, too--

--but if a certain little someone receives an ipod touch for her birthday (assuming that Craigslist/local pawn shops cooperate), then they can start recording on that, instead. 

DIY flash cards. They like their flash cards better if they help me make them. This works especially well for Latin, since we use these coloring pages that correspond to all the vocabulary in Song School Latin. I print them four to a page, the girls color them, then (sloppily) cut them out and (even more sloppily) laminate them, all by themselves. Big fun, and impossible for them to say that they hate later on.

So that's what I've got so far. I need WAY more ideas, though! I'd like to have twenty or so possibilities, to support a full month of memory work without repetition. But I also need ideas that don't require a ton of prep work--I do NOT want to be creating a Montessori-style three-part card for every subject every week, for instance--or use a ton of expensive or disposable materials. 

Help?

A Quill Pen and George Washington

Our studies this summer have taken a turn for the schizophrenic--in science, we've been working on botany AND the brain; in geography, we've been working on Africa AND the United States; for literature, Will has been working on grammar AND Latin AND Tom Sawyer; and for history, we've been working on SOTW ancient history AND pioneer life AND the first presidents!

It's kind of like unit studies, but unit studies have started to feel claustrophobic, so here we are.

A day's requirement in a subject generally boils down to a book + a memory piece + a hands-on, contextual activity. For history the other day, then, I read the girls a picture book about George Washington (I'll put a list of my favorites at the bottom of this post), asked the girls to memorize the dates of his presidency (Sydney also memorized the fact that he was our first president; Willow already knows all of the presidents in order), and then let them play around again with quill pens:

It's been a year, almost exactly, since we last played with quill pens, and it was interesting to see that they still remembered it, and fun to see that they still enjoyed it: 

The big difference this time is that instead of making our own ink, earlier this year I took the girls to the little indie art supplies shop near campus and let them each pick out a color of real bottled ink. What a difference the quality of that one art supply makes! I noticed that both girls did a lot of exploring with line width and shading and color saturation, far beyond just exploring the feel of working with a quill pen, which I think was their main occupation last time.

It also increased the impact of that activity when I later brought out our copy of the Declaration of Independence--the girls were all, "They wrote like THAT with quill pens?!?" They were MUCH more impressed with the document than they otherwise would have been.

A calligraphy pen is clearly on my school supplies wish list these days.

Here are some of our favorite George Washington resources (so far):

Our Indiana State Swap Package

This US State Culture Swap has led us away from the geography study that had previously fascinated us (out of Africa, in other words), but it's always a good time for a United States unit study!

We put a lot of work into the four care packages that we sent to our swap partners in Tennessee, Utah, New York, and Virginia. To prepare them, we went creek stomping, up north to the Indiana State Museum, and across town to the Wonderlab on its special local local limestone evening. We read, we wrote, we recited, we organized everything into groups of four.

And here's what we came up with!

crinoid fossils collected from Jackson Creek

geodes, also from the creek

depending on the composition of minerals, geodes can look quite different inside

chunk of limestone from a local quarry

map traced by the children--each kid did two

coloring pages of various other Indiana sites and facts

Willow-written report

Happily, both girls leaped right into Indiana research, they've adored opening all their swap packages so far, and Will (my rote-memory girl) has been taking a lot of pleasure in memorizing and quizzing us on state nicknames. We're a bit flush on "special subjects" just at the moment--the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, complete with pioneer crafts; Martin Luther King, Jr., including having Willow memorize his "I Have a Dream" speech; and ballet--but as soon as we finish Little House and the Big Woods and Willow decides for sure whether or not she wants to join her sister in the IU Pre-College Ballet Program in the fall (I suspect not, which is why we've been doing a lot of ballet stuff this summer, so that she can make an informed decision), we're buckling down with our friend Martin, the US states, and human anatomy.

Oh, and some Walt Disney world geekery, because it's--gasp!--less than a month now until we go meet Mickey!

Montessori Mapwork, Now Poster-Sized!

How do you make a good thing better?

Supersize it!

The girls enjoy doing Montessori mapwork projects regularly, but in order to get a little more context into the activity, I upgraded the size of our canvas:

Each kid still colors a map of her chosen area, but then I give her a poster-sized sheet of Strathmore drawing paper and a glue stick, and she gets to glue her map onto the poster, and then add on other images around it to provide context. Some of the images, like the Ancient Egypt labels that Willow's placing onto her mapwork of Egypt, are from printables that I've collected online here and there (remind me someday to show you my organized library of homeschool printables, stored on my external hard drive), other images are from my stash of cutter texts--old National Geographics, out-dated travel guidebooks, etc.--and some images the kiddo draws for herself, such as the Great Pyramid of Khufu that Will is putting onto her poster, sand brick by painstaking sand brick:

I also show the girls where their chosen area is on our globe, and I do expect them to remember it (Will more so than Sydney, obviously), and when the girls have finished their posters, we always hang them up in a prominent position in the living room for a while:

Will actually references her Egypt poster occasionally, since Ancient Egypt is one of her current areas of interest and so she's always playing some online game or other (always gotten to from my Little Pumpkinbear Links) in which she needs to know the sons of Horus or what was contained in which coptic jar or whatever. Even Syd, who can't yet pick out any of her locations on the globe independently, can tell you all kinds of things about which animals live in Africa, and Indiana, and South America.

So there you go.

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!

Driving to Disney World

Finally, our long-awaited, much anticipated, and well-deserved vacation to Florida commenced!

I'm not ashamed to tell you that I spent a full year planning and saving for this trip. Seriously, I was checking prices a year ago this September to get an idea of what things would cost, I paid in full for the tickets to Walt Disney World in February, and the condo that we'd be staying at not long after. I paid for our character breakfast in Cinderella's castle about six months before the trip, made reservations at the couple of other Disney restaurants that we wanted to visit, and paid for a condo on the island off of the Gulf Coast of Florida that I had my heart set on visiting for a few days after Disney.

And then I started saving money for our actual trip.

I knew that I wanted to visit Walt Disney World in the off-season, but I wanted to go when it was still hot, so that we'd enjoy our few days at the beach afterwards. My friend Jenny suggested that the first week in September after Labor Day would be good, because nearly all schoolchildren would be back in school by then, and even parents who would pull their kids out of school for a vacation probably wouldn't do so at the start of the school year. The parks still had a good contingent of international families, perhaps because of the weather, so it wasn't completely dead--I've heard, though, that in times when the parks ARE really dead, like late January and February, a lot of rides get taken down for maintenance, so I'm pretty confident that we went to Walt Disney World at just about the best time of the year for a homeschooling family to go.

The tickets that I bought are through Disney's YES Program--highly educational, and sold at a deep discount  from traditional tickets. To be eligible for the tickets, the girls and I signed up for a class for 5-8-year-olds to be taken one morning inside the Magic Kingdom. The flip side to the YES Program tickets is that they don't work with Disney's Magic Your Way packages--you can buy a room at the Disney resorts, for instance, without purchasing a package, but you can't buy a dining plan, nor are you eligible for the Free Dining promotions that Disney offers during these off-seasons. This threw me for a while, because I'd had it in my head that we'd do the dining program and then use all our table service credits for character meals, an extravagance that I otherwise wouldn't choose.

However, as I was shopping around online, I discovered that giant resort-type condos, with full kitchens to cook in, separate bedrooms for the kids, giant swimming pools, and locations minutes from Walt Disney World were available at this time of year for rates less than the cheapest Walt Disney World resort rooms. Considering that we could cook for ourselves for basically the cost of our regular grocery budget (it turned out to be a little more, since I chose only quick-to-cook and easy to clean up meals, but not much more), and that honestly, most days we all prefer quick and easy homecooked food to sitting down in a restaurant, we ended up being a lot more comfortable in our accommodations outside of Walt Disney World than we'd have been inside, and for less money, and the deep discount on our YES Program tickets more than made up for missing out on the free dining promotion. I also budgeted in paying for parking every day at Walt Disney World (even with this, the outside accommodations were cheaper), and that was us all set!

The other moms in my homeschool Park Day group spent many Thursday afternoons helping me plan my grocery list for the trip. My friend Betsy convinced me to take our cooler again--I took it on our Florida trip last year, but with just me and my girls it was a lot of extra work just to have refrigerated food--since Matt would be on the trip to help, so we shopped a couple of weeks before the trip for granola bars, cereal, disposable dinnerware (ugh, I know--but SO easy!), chips, juice boxes, peanut butter, jelly, and the energy drinks that Matt feels like he can't do a road trip without (I've never tasted one, but they smell like cough medicine), and then a couple of days before the trip for fruit, fresh veggies, sliced cheese, lunchmeat, yogurt cups, sandwich bread, guacamole, and deli cookies for the road trip.

And so we ate sandwiches for two days! The kids didn't give a flip--they're used to eating nothing but sandwiches and fruit while traveling cross-country with me--and Matt, who otherwise can be really picky about mealtimes, was encouraged by my pep talks about how much time and money we were saving over fast food, and comforted by nobody saying a peep about his giant sandwiches stuffed full with a ridiculous amount of lunch meat (normally I tease him, because seriously, who needs to eat a solid inch of turkey in a sandwich?).

We ate sandwiches, listened to audiobooks (Peter and the Starcatchers and Longitude) and podcasts (Freakanomics and This American Life), let the girls watch Magic School Bus on my laptop (I used my homeschool budget to buy the complete set, and I've been thrilled with it on this road trip), and posed with freaky coin-operated rides outside of gas stations:

Seriously, that thing is crazy, right? And you'll never guess who it's supposed to be:

Casper the Friendly Ghost!

We drove as far as we could in one day, stayed in a hotel that we got a coupon for out of one of those coupon books that you get from visitor's centers at the borders of states (I LOVE those places--we always stop at them, and the girls and I collect dozens of brochures to pore over in longing to visit the Cabbage Patch Museum, or the Coca-Cola factory, or some Six Flags or other), swam and ate the hotel's free continental breakfast in the morning and were STILL out of there by 10:00 am, and were safely checked into our condo in Orlando by 2:30 pm.

I'd planned this early afternoon arrival so that we'd have plenty of time to grocery shop, pick up our park tickets, and get to bed nice and early, but since the girls and I had spent so much time studying Africa last spring, one of the things that I'd REALLY wanted to do and so reserved a table and budgeted for was to eat at Boma, the African-themed restaurant at the Animal Kingdom Lodge on the WDW property. There isn't an African-themed restaurant in our hometown (there IS one in Indianapolis, an Ethiopian restaurant, but I'm the only one in the family who's eaten there), so this was kind of the last remaining thing to do on my list of unit study activities for Africa.

The Animal Kingdom Lodge itself is also nice to sightsee in on a day when you can't go to Disney, because it's immense, full of African museum pieces, has docents and interpreters and demonstrations and hands-on tables, and has a backyard that abuts a savanna of herbivores--we spied ostriches, and giraffes, and zebras, and various other hoofed little guys while walking around and stretching our legs, waiting for our reservation. The girls ran and ran and ran around, barely able to take anything in because of their excitement, and that still counted as good behavior in this place just full of families.

We had the earliest dinner reservation in Boma, so although we had to wait a bit for the restaurant to open (in both of the other restaurants that we ate at in WDW, we were seated early when we arrived early), we entered the restaurant through a line of drummers on one side and clapping waitstaff on the other side--it was both super-cool, and over after just a few minutes, so that only the first few families got to experience it.

As I write about our days in WDW, I am going to constantly bemoan the indoor lighting--it's unilaterally dim, and in some popular places seems designed so that only the WDW Photopass photographers, with their extra-bright on-camera flashes, get good photos--and because the rotten lighting often turned me off I was surprised that I came home with fewer photos than I'd anticipated. I bemoan the lighting here, as well, but the food was so amazing that I took photos of it anyway.

Boma is set up as a buffet--good for picky eaters, and also good for tasting every single thing on the menu, nearly none of which I'd ever tasted before. Here we have watermelon rind salad, salad with jicama and apples, fruit, curried pasta salad, couscous with raisins and apples, and, my new most favorite food ever, coconut rice:

Here we have fufu, bobotie, salmon with pistachios, flatbread with two different kinds of hummus, veggies, more coconut rice (NOM!), and in the background to the left, a zebra dome containing rum-soaked cake:

It probably wasn't the perfect day to visit a buffet restaurant--I tasted a lot, and got super-excited over our paper straws, but after two days of sitting in the car I wasn't really hungry, and I don't know if the girls ate ten bites between them (fortunately, although I have MANY flaws, one of my gifts as a parent is that I don't care what/if my kids eat, as long as they're offered healthy foods at conventional mealtimes)--but it was the only day that worked into our schedule, and Matt and I had a ball, anyway. As our WDW days went by, I did become extra grateful that I didn't pay for or try to finagle my way into a Disney Dining Plan, since because of the hot days and, I suppose, nonintuitively because of how tired we always were from all the walking, none of us had much of an appetite, and I can't imagine that we'd have made use of all the food that the dining plan gives you. Picking at sandwiches, eating up all our chips, and enjoying a mid-afternoon ice cream was plenty for us on our park days.

At a Publix on the way back to the condo, we bought frozen pizzas, Hot Pockets (I can't stand them, but Matt and the girls just adore them, ick, and they did turn out to be a much more practical breakfast choice than the cereal and oatmeal that I'd brought, since they could be eaten in the car on the way to the parks), frozen margarita pouches (ahem) and frozen fries and chicken strips. Then we swam, put the kids to bed, soaked in our jetted tub, watched cable, and went to bed early with the alarm set for our day in Hollywood Studios!

Mapwork: Haiti

Along with sewing sundresses for Haitian orphans, the girls and I did a few more activities to round out a brief unit study of Haiti, one meant mostly to contextualize their understanding of their service project.

I've been surprised since we began homeschooling to learn how much I value, and therefore emphasize (and therefore assign!) memory work. It's far from the former mental picture of public schools in which everything was learned by rote and nothing internalized by doing, but I certainly have seen that in the large days of work and play and study and rest that homeschooling allows us, there is plenty of room for plenty of memory work. And thus we memorize poetry, and spelling words, and Latin and Spanish vocabulary words, and math facts, and geographical locations.

Mapwork goes along with whatever other study we're doing of a location. Along with their sewing project on Haiti, for instance, I showed the girls the location of Haiti on the globe and asked them to memorize it so that we could play the "globe spinning game." In the globe spinning game I spin the globe, and when it stops I ask the girls to find a location. Each girl can now find Haiti consistently on the globe, no matter their starting point.

I also think that map labeling is a valuable activity--it's all about context! Instead of a country-specific map, I usually choose a more regional map from Megamaps, so that the girls can color and label not just their country, but the countries and surrounding oceans:

Each girl also has a one-page world map (also from Megamaps) in her geography folder. As each country (or state, or ocean, or continent) comes along, she colors and labels it on that world map. We reuse the same map until there's an overlap (Africa, for instance, and then Egypt), and then I print them a new map to start on.

Labeling the maps and initially memorizing the geographic location takes...hmm, less than half an hour? Maybe around that, depending on the complexity of the location. After that, reinforcing the location on the globe by playing the globe spinning game takes probably 30 seconds every now and then, certainly not a significant time-suck for such a valuable piece of memory work.

Now, when they're older, I'm going to print them a giant world map, and then we're all going to start learning how to draw in countries freehand. An entirely freehand map of the world is an accomplishment that I'm quite looking forward to.

In our study of Haiti, we also used:

Works Plans for the Week of January 6, 2014: Back in the Game

It's another week when it's easier to be a homeschooler than not--our part of the country is stymied under record, dangerously low temperatures, and our city has basically shut down and ordered everyone to stay home and snuggle up. Public schools are out--and will be out tomorrow, too--but it's probably not so much a novelty for those kiddos coming on the back of their two-week break, and I think they're going to have to make these days up at the end of the year, anyway--yuck (Ooh, I just discovered that Indiana schools are NOT going to make up this snow day, but it will result in them not meeting their flat-out minimum 180 days of instruction this year. Interesting...)! For us, though, it's business as usual (minus our volunteer gig and aerial silks class, both having been cancelled), and the children, having had enough of vacation and staycation in the past two weeks, are happy to get back in the game.

MONDAY: I knew ahead of time that our outside activities would be cancelled today, so I snuck in an extra subject--and the kids didn't notice, whee! Our pattern blocks activity today was focused on square numbers, which ties nicely in to our current memory work of memorizing the multiplication table (Will's late to this, which doesn't bug me, and Syd's early to it... which also doesn't bug me!). In Latin, we're onto animal names, which the kids are finding super easy to memorize--a refreshing change from the struggle to keep those darned tricky words in their heads! I found some good Youtube piano lessons that are making Syd's keyboard time much easier; Will threw a fit over having to practice her recorder piece until she actually got it right, but then was stoked at having gotten it right, so there you go.

Our big project this week has to do with the kiddos' first Girl Scouts badge! We are just at the beginning of this journey, I know, but already we are all so excited about all the opportunities that come with being a Girl Scout. I registered the kids as Juliettes, which means that we can work independently and with our friends who are also Girl Scout Juliettes, but they can still attend all the TONS of Girl Scout activities and workshops and camps and classes in our area. The badge activities are excellent, too--I like that there are choices, and that they're all so cross-curricular, and the kids like that they're all so hands-on and varied.

The first badge that we're working on is the one for World Thinking Day, which is coming up next month. I love this one, as it's focused on the issue of childhood education and access to it. We've already had some great conversations about education as a right and responsibility versus education as a privilege, and how that affects children's attitudes about their education (Ahem!!!). Among other activities, both girls will be comparing girls' educations in other countries (namely India and in Africa) to their own education, and planning and executing the creation of a children's literacy corner in the local food pantry where we volunteer. For this latter project, they'll need to write to the volunteer coordinator and ask permission, design the spot to fit into the cramped area already set aside for children there, source and obtain all the supplies, set it up, and maintain it weekly. Today we talked through some of the planning, and then Will watched a video about a little schoolgirl in India and wrote a rough draft of her comparison/contrast list, and Syd created a storyboard for a photo diary that she's going to create about her typical school day.

TUESDAY: I want to start Science Fair prep as soon as possible--can you believe that it's next month?!?--but until our library books are ready for us to pick up (and the library is closed today AND tomorrow, probably, sigh), we can finish up our acids and bases study with a few more of the experiments from the kids' chemistry set. I'm back to scheduling grammar only once a week, leaving time for more projects, and I think that I'll keep the kids with word ladders for logic until after the Spelling Bee--every minute of practice counts!

WEDNESDAY: I still don't know what the weather will be like on this day, frankly, and if we'll even get out to aerial silks. Free days aren't quite as fun when the temperature is so dangerously low that your friends can't even come over for a playdate, and you can't meet them for sledding.

THURSDAY: Surely we'll be able to go ice skating with friends by then... although it is supposed to snow again on Thursday. Otherwise, we'll keep ourselves busy with chemistry experiments and drawing lessons. Will is going to master the first videogame ever, and Syd is going to sketch out some plans for her Trashion/Refashion Show design. I really hope that she designs something that she can sew for herself this year!

FRIDAY: We didn't finish the California facts during our last week of school last year, so we'll finish them now. We'll probably do a few geography-based projects next week--the vacation scrapbooks, California lapbooks, etc. I also need to remember to do the prep work this week so that we can work on some bigger Ancient Egypt projects next week, but especially after we saw those real-live versions at the Rosicrucian Museum, I think the kids will have a lot of fun creating their own model sarcophogi in cardboard.

Over break, we listened to audiobooks of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and saw the play and movie versions of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, AND made chocolate from scratch. I wanted to bring the topic back around to our summer studies of Hershey before we moved on, so I've got a documentary on Hershey for us to watch, and then the kids are going to design their own chocolate factories on large-format drawing paper. I wonder if their factories will be more Wonka-esque or Hershey-esque in nature?

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Nature class, chess club, and lots of playing in the snow and swimming at the Y, is my guess.

Willow's New and Improved Handwriting

Handwriting practice has been added so seamlessly to the Daily Schoolwork List (which does not get completed anywhere close to "daily," but more on that another time), that it's really a pleasure to watch the girls consistently working on it. I like to think that the kiddos take pleasure, too, in handwriting that has so steadily and vastly improved that it has to be as obvious to them as it is to me.

A dear friend, whose homeschooled son has beautiful handwriting, suggested that I show Willow examples of all the different styles of handwriting and ask her to select which she'd like to learn--it gives her ownership over the process, and allows her to learn a style that she'll find lovely. Willow's choice: the Palmer Method. It makes me crack up, because I feel like a 1950s kindergarten teacher, but Palmer handwriting really is nice.

I purchased, using my monthly homeschool budget that I fund through my paid writing and my etsy sales, Startwrite 6.0 so that I could create handwriting copywork that was consistent in method and relevant to the girls' other studies. Although the user interface is a little wonky and non-intuitive, it does have everything that you'd ever need to customize a handwriting sheet. Because Willow has formerly shown no attention to the details of letter formation or placement, and doesn't always form each letter the most efficient way, we go whole hog on her sheets--lined pages, an outline of each letter to help her stay within normal parameters, dots along each letter's path that she can aim for, arrows and numbers to remind her where and when her pencil needs to go, and a free space after each word so that she can practice:

 Syd's handwriting is pretty great, although she still likes to play fast and loose with placement on the line, and she prefers her handwriting pages with just the outline:

Even beyond the ability to customize the same page for each child, I'm loving the ability to write handwriting sheets that are relevant to what the kiddos are actually doing each day. Here, Will is writing the definition of Anastasia's Mate, a good endgame trap that she learned in chess:

And here she's writing the ingredients list for the rainbow play dough that we sell in our pumpkinbear etsy shop, to include with the order that we ship to the customer:

We've also done the names of the presidents in order (which Will is in the process of memorizing), geography labels that get cut out and pasted onto big maps that they're making (Africa, currently), short letters to the grandmas, and reading/spelling words. I like stuff that can work double-duty!

With the model, and the lines, and the arrows, and the dots, Will has a better method for completing her handwriting systematically, and although Syd finds all that information overwhelming (which is why she does without it), I think it all helps to remind Willow to slow down and write methodically. I never thought to videotape the slapdash method that she used to use to crank out her former illegible handwriting, but it's vastly different from how she works now:

Along with coloring pages and drawing lessons to practice fine motor skills in general (not to mention lots of play with power tools and taking stuff apart with screwdrivers, etc.), regular copywork practice is really, obviously working.

Yay!

Poetry Speaks: A Tricky Trick for Memorizing the U.S. Presidents in Chronological Order

Will has a real knack for memorizing. To be honest, I have a real knack for memorizing, too, but I primarily use my knack to memorize TV theme songs and jingles and pop music, prompting my poor Matt, who often has to listen to me show him how I can still sing "Ice, Ice Baby" in its entirety, to regularly ask me why I can't ever memorize anything normal and useful, like the directions to the Indianapolis Children's Museum, or my mother's birthday.

Knowing something about the benefits of a good memory, therefore, and seeing how Willow genuinely finds recitation from memory pleasurable, we've actually been doing quite a bit of classical-esque education around here lately. Of course, being a medieval scholar, I can't quite call the modern interpretation of classical education simply that with a straight face, but there you go, do with it what you will. In these early elementary years, the movement is all about rote memorization, and Willow enjoys rote memorization, so we're going with it a bit for now.

For math, we've been memorizing skip counting (which I lately got sick of, and moved Willow into coin arithmetic, which I'm happy to report she's proving quite adept at, thanks to the skip counting!); for geography, we're memorizing the countries of Africa (a nearly futile exercise, I know, as they keep changing); for grammar, we're about to start English and Latin grammar concurrently; for science, we're still doing mostly hands-on stuff; for handwriting, we're doing copywork of relevant facts from the other subjects; and for history, we're doing both Ancient history (through Story of the World) and U.S. history at the same time.

As a scaffold to U.S. history, I asked Willow to memorize the names of all the U.S. presidents in order--later, of course, we can do biographies and relevant dates for each president, but even just their names are important contextually, since, for example, in our study of Martin Luther King Jr. that we just finished up for now, Willow can pin him up historically with John F. Kennedy, since she knows that they were acquainted. That's extremely useful, because she also knows MLK's connection to segregation, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Civil Rights, so whenever she memorizes the dates of any one of those, she'll have approximate dates for all of them.

As a child, I memorized this poem of the presidents--the original, from A Young People's Speaker, ends with Grover Cleveland's first term. Some enterprising teacher, perhaps local to the Ft. Smith area, since the blogger who quotes the more recent rendition is also from my hometown, keeps adding to it. As a little kid, I memorized through Reagan. My little kid, however, gets to take it all the way to Obama:



It's a little devoid of affect, probably because she ends up miserable with a high fever later that evening, but you should see the kid when she really gets into it, standing on a chair and bellowing out her lines at the top of her lungs (which she thinks, correctly, is really funny).

And if you ever find yourselves at the same cocktail party, you'll know what party trick to ask her for--either that, or balloon animals!

Homeschool AP Human Geography: DIY Large-Format Maps for Reference

I wasn't super excited when Will chose to study AP Human Geography this year, but it is actually a fascinating subject, and now I'm stoked that we get to learn it!

When Will decides what she wants to study, I generally go into research mode so that I can at least figure out a spine and a logical progression of knowledge/skills. It's more involved when it's an AP course, because we know she'll be tested on a specific knowledge/skill set, but still, this basic research method works. 

As I was reading through other instructors' AP Human Geography syllabi, I came across a reference map project that I shamelessly stole.

In this project, the instructor has her students print outline maps of various regions of the world, and then label them according to her criteria. Not only can these maps then serve as reference and study material, added to when necessary, but also, a kid is going to memorize a LOT of that information just through the acts of researching it and then labeling the maps with it. Will, especially, learns very well through this kind of activity.

Although the instructor had her students use 8.5"x 11" outline maps, you all know that I have my own personal free, custom-sized map-printing website with which I am unashamedly obsessed. Obviously, then, I printed 4x4 maps of all the regions using Megamaps.

And then Will and I spread out across the floor and assembled them!

I have the perfect method to assemble these maps so that they stay together but there's no tape on the front. You don't want your maps to fall apart, but you also want to be able to write and draw on them! What you do is first glue them together with a glue stick on their overlapping edges, and then immediately flip each one over and run Scotch tape along all the seams on the back. It is THE perfect method, and I expect you to do it only this way from now on.

When we had all the maps assembled, Will spent a few days labeling each one:

So excited to label them that we couldn't even unpack from our camping trip first!

I think these maps turned out to be absolute masterpieces:

They're not as perfect as a ready-made reference map, of course, but they're plenty accurate enough to serve Will's purpose of studying AP Human Geography, and I love the thoughtful care that she put into her work:

That's a lot of geography learning that took place during this one project! I'm especially excited about the Africa map, as that one can do double-duty for Will's African Studies class that she takes at our local university.

While I was printing these maps, I did print the giant-sized world map to replace the giant kid-made map of Europe that's been on our wall since Will took AP European History. I'm probably going to hold off on assembling, mounting, and having Will label it, though, because surely the kid is sick of map labeling at the moment. Better to hold off until the spring, perhaps, and then use it as a review before the actual AP exam.

OR should I pay Syd to paint us a world map mural, and then we can label that? A Syd-created map mural might have an unwholesome amount of dragons and sea beasts, of course, but that just improves a map's overall accuracy, you know.

P.S. Want to see more dragons and sea beasts and maps and murals? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page, where I post resources, WIPs, DIYs, and pictures of my cat.