Earning the Girl Guides of South Africa Tourism Badge

Yes, you can wear a Girl Guide badge as a Girl Scout. But no, you cannot wear that badge on the front of your Girl Scout uniform. Even though both you and the Girl Guides of South Africa are members of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS, lol), you are not a member of the Girl Guides of South Africa.

Fortunately, Girl Scout uniforms have just the place for a "non-official" patch: the back! And that's how Will's brand-new Tourism badge from the Girl Guides of South Africa is now happily ensconced between her voting fun patch and the patch she earned for donating some of her fall product prizes to the sloths at the Indianapolis Zoo, instead, and on top of that Wildflowers of Ohio patch that we had so much fun earning back before the world went nuts.

I miss road trips!

I own a few Girl Guides of South Africa badges, but this is the first one that Will has worked through. I really love the different perspectives that another country's Girl Guide badges offer: the South Africa paddling badge is SO hard-core that I don't know how on earth I'm going to help Will earn it, and their baking badge, which the kids worked on this summer, required them to memorize enough terms to discernibly improve their cookbook literacy. 

The Tourism badge is one of the most interesting. It makes sense, because I'm sure that a LOT of tourists to South Africa take guided tours in some capacity during their visit, and when we were in Greece, our tour guide there, Militsa, told us just some of the strenuous education and certification required to be a Greek tour guide. It's an impressive career option if you live in a place with a thriving tourism industry, and it's just so interesting to me that it's a career that doesn't really exist in the same capacity, or nearly the same frequency, in the US. 

I rewrote the Tourism badge requirements a bit, but I couldn't decide if I wanted to treat the badge as a study of the way that international travelers view the United States, or as a useful primer on planning international travel of one's own... so I sort of did both. Here's my take on the badge:

GIRL GUIDES OF SOUTH AFRICA TOURISM BADGE

1. Browse through 2-3 US guide books marketed to visitors from outside the US (hint: search Overdrive for USA guide books!).

2. Make a list of qualities/characteristics/areas of expertise that a visitor from outside the US should look for in a tour guide.

3. Read and be prepared to discuss the following article: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/welcome-to-america-please-be-on-time-what-guide-books-tell-foreign-visitors-to-the-us/257993/

4. Research at least three tour companies and the group or guided tours that they offer. For each company, choose one tour that YOU would like to go on.
5. Create a chart that compares/contrasts the following information about each tour/tour company:

1. Cost of tour vs. value of tour (YOU determine what makes the tour a good value!)

2. Type of tour/quality of tour (eco tour, luxury tour, adventure tour, etc. Give each tour a category that you create!)

3. Tour amenities, evaluated on a scale that YOU determine based on what is important to YOU

4. sites/activities/adventures on each tour

5. Additional costs--is travel insurance included? Airfare? All meals or just some? Extra visas required?

6. You are a tour guide and have a visitor from overseas. Plan a 2-day trip around your state showing off its natural beauty, history, and culture.

• This trip should include several highlights and places to visit, including iconic sites, engaging activities, and interesting places to eat.

1. Sites to see and what they cost (eg. entrance fees)

2. Transportation and cost (are you driving and will need gas? Taking a bus or train? Uber?)

3. Restaurants and copies of their menus, if possible

4. Photos of places being visited, with appropriate attribution

5. Accommodations, their amenities, and costs

6. Itinerary/timetable for the trip, including accurate transportation times

1. Research a 10-day African tour for our Girl Scout troop.

• Include travel dates, costs, accommodation, modes of transport, destinations, etc.
• Write a complete and detailed itinerary, including the same information from Step 2.

1. Research the different types of passports and their costs.

• What information is required to apply for a passport?
• What countries might one travel to that have additional requirements?
• Find your own passport and examine it. When do you need to renew it?

For the comparison of tour companies, I was interested to see that Will chose to compare Greece tours. Very sensible, as the only time that we've taken a guided group tour was our trip to Greece! Here's some of her work:

PRICE vs. VALUE

1. Odysseys Unlimited Ancient Greece
• $385.15 per night. Meals included. 12 nights in fancy accommodations. Small group size. Many interesting sites. Good value.
• Athens monuments and museums, Delphi, ancient Corinth, Mycenae, Nafplion, Hydra, Heraklion, palace of Knossos, olive farm, Santorini town and sites.
2. Cosmos Greece and Aegean Islands Cruise
• $166.67 per night. Meals included. 14 nights in fancy accommodations. Unknown group size. Many standard sites. Good value. 
• Athens, Mycenae, Citadel of Mystra, Olympia, Delphi, Meteora, Aegean cruise, Ephesus, Patmos monastery, Rhodes, Heraklion.
3. Expat Explore Best of Greece
1. $163.75 per night. Meals included. 12 nights in acceptable accommodation. Large group size. Many standard sites. Neutral value.
2. Athens, traditional art workshop, Kalambaka, Delphi, Trizonia, Olympia, Mycenae, Nafplion, Mykonos, Santorini.

This turned out to be a useful project, because price vs. value is entirely dependent on your own priorities. Do you prefer to make your own way through a country, figuring things out on your own, or do you prefer having your itinerary and the details of travel arranged for you? What budget do you need to set, and what would you rather give up to meet that budget? What do you absolutely have to see, and what do you not give a flip about seeing?

Even though I always feel like I include the kids in my travel planning, I definitely make all of those price vs. value decisions for us, and I probably never even told them that we were deliberately staying in lousy hotels and eating packed groceries to save our budget for sightseeing, and we were wearing all our clothes and carrying just backpacks onto planes because the hundred bucks that we don't spend on checked luggage is the hundred bucks that we CAN spend on experiences. So it was interesting to see what Will prioritized--she seems to care more about hotels and meals than I do, but I was glad to note that what you get to see and do, and not just how comfy you are while you see and do them, is also important to her.

After that practice researching and evaluating other group tours, it was time to ask Will to create her own. Here's half of Will's 10-day African tour for a Girl Scout troop. We're going to explore Namibia!

Day 1:

10:00  Fly into Windhoek

           Rent a car

           Drive 30 minutes

11:00  Check into UrbanCamp.net

11:30  Visit National Museum of Namibia

           Eat at rooftop restaurant

           Drive 20 minutes

7:00  Have dinner at Xwama

         Drive back

Day 2:

9:00  Go to Lemon Tree for breakfast

         Drive 30 minutes

10:30 Go to Namibia Craft Center

           Drive 20 minutes

1:00  Horseback tour with Equitrails Namibia

         Drive 15 minutes

7:30  Dinner at Joes Beerhouse

Day 3: 

9:00  Check out

         Breakfast at Royal Kitchen and Take Away

         Drive 3 hours

1:00  Visit the Cheetah Conservation Fund

         Drive 40 minutes

7:30  Eat dinner at Crocodile Ranch

9:30  Check in to Out of Africa

Day 4:

9:30  Go to Bean Tree Cafe for breakfast

         Drive 2 hours

11:30  Erindi Private Game Reserve

2:30  Lunch at Camp Elephant

4:30  Erindi guided safari

7:00  Dinner at Camp Elephant

Day 5: 

9:00 Packed breakfast

11:30Drive back to Windhoek

Packed lunch

7:00 Take flight to next destination

I love that we're going to spend half the time glamping, and that we get to go horseback riding. It's a very whirlwind visit to Namibia, but I think it would work well combined with visits to at least one or two other countries in Africa--I mean, you're going to spend all that time just getting to Africa; might as well stay for a while!

This ended up being an interesting and unique badge to earn, with some practical, real-world activities that Will hadn't ever tried out before. You could argue that this Tourism badge, or at least the way that I rewrote it, is similar to the Senior Traveler badge, but I'd argue that while the purpose of the Senior Traveler badge is to plan an actual trip for the Senior Girl Scout to actually go on, this badge was a way for Will to dream big and research trips anywhere in the world, and in particular places that we definitely aren't going to anytime soon.

Although, to be fair, at this point in the pandemic we aren't even in the position to take that two-day tour of Indiana that Will planned for Step 4... One day, when we're all four vaccinated and safe to travel, may I never again take for granted our ability to actually go on the trips that we plan!

Here are some of the resources that we used for this badge:

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.

We Drank Beverly and We Lived To Tell About It

You see all these photos of us in our coats on this trip? That's because it was FREEZING in Atlanta! In the middle of freaking MARCH! My hopes of spending Spring Break in the warm sunshine were dashed every single day of our trip, but at least we weren't back home, where it snowed that week.

Twice.

My hopes were dashed again on this final day in Atlanta, when the temperature made it clear that the afternoon that I'd wanted to spend at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, romping around and earning Junior Ranger badges, was just not going to fly. We'd muscled our way through an unseasonably cold national park experience before, and that is an experience that I NEVER want to repeat.

With the original plan of the morning at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and the afternoon on the Chattahoochee, leaving from there to head southeast to Savannah, in shambles, we decided to instead sightsee in walking distance of our hotel for the morning, then pick up the car, spend the afternoon with Reverend King, and leave from his house for Savannah.

Next problem: what to see? My vote was stoutly towards the Center for Civil and Human Rights. Ties in perfectly with our visit to Martin Luther King Jr., and it's super educational! As a plan B, I reckoned that we could maybe do the CNN Studio Tour. But on the way home from the aquarium the night before, we had walked past a place that looked like a candy-colored wonderland to the children, and they and Matt had their hearts set on it. I was vastly overruled.

And so we went to the World of Coca-Cola.

I admit that I had kind of wanted to go to this when I was planning our trip, but the same things that turned the kids on about the place turned me off. I mean, yes, I knew it was going to be basically a Coke commercial, but wow. This place was really, really, REALLY a Coke commercial!

Ah, well. Mustn't spoil the children's fun.

When we arrived, the first thing they did was hand us a souvenir Coke, and then give us a lecture on the history of Coke, and then make us watch a really long Coke commercial in which a soldier's homecoming and some frat boys' successful Spring Break stunt, among other life events, are tied to Coca-Cola.

OMG, I just found the trailer for it! It even has the bros!!! We reference those bros often.

And then we were given permission to enter the museum:


The museum's high production values were used to mask the reality that there was little content. The galleries that showed off Coca-Cola artifacts and told the history of its production were interesting, but the many interactive displays were just silly games, not hands-on opportunities to add enrichment to the experience, and there were a lot of even sillier hoops, such as a pretend security screening or a Kinect-style wall projection game, to jump through to access different galleries.



The bottling factory display was pretty cool, until I spoiled it for the whole family by pointing out how the freshly bottled bottles get taken along a conveyor belt at ceiling height back to the front of the exhibit, where the soda is dumped out and they're re-used.

We declined to get our pictures taken with the Coca-Cola polar bear, or to sit in the movie theater and watch Coke commercials, but we spent ages at one one redeeming feature of the entire World of Coca-Cola, the one thing that made the visit worthwhile, the one reason why I didn't simply wait outside while the rest of the family went in:

The sampling gallery!











Oh, my gosh, this room was so fun! I'm putting more of my images at full size than the unflattering lighting in them deserves, just so you can see the varieties of soda up for tasting. The gimmick is that it's a selection of Coca-Cola products from most of the continents of the world, and you get a little plastic up and free reign to taste them.

Reader, I tasted them ALL!


Asia and Africa had most of my favorites, with South America having some dicier flavors and most of the North American flavors being WAY too sweet for my taste:









And Europe? What the heck is WRONG with you, Europe?!? I guess I'd drink that lingonberry-flavored soda again, but all of those teas were nasty, and do you see there on the far right of the below photo, mostly cut off? The drink that came out of that dispenser comes straight from the hellmouth.



Seriously, Beverly was SO bad that I thought that there was something wrong with it, like the syrup had gone rotten. There was a group of tweens there on a field trip (what on earth kind of school field trip takes you to the World of Coca-Cola? Marketing class? Home ec? Georgia history?), and they were playing an elaborate game whose rules mainly consisted of tricking each other into tasting Beverly, and then videotaping it.

This drink was so bad that we later Googled it, and discovered that yes, it's officially bad.

The tasting gallery is set at the very end of the museum, right before the exit through the gift shop, but I was so excited about it (and only it) that I insisted on doing it before most of the other activities.

This was a HUGE mistake, because our next activity?

A movement-based 3D film:



I did not vomit up my stomach full of high fructose corn syrup, food dye, and caffeine only because I closed my eyes. And it wasn't just me, because Matt also agrees that the film wasn't correctly focused and that the chairs were crazy bumpy, and Will says that the glasses didn't fit her face well, either. Sydney was fine, though, which was crazy, because she was the one who'd been making suicides of all the drinks of an entire continent and then downing it. That kid has an iron stomach.

Still, though, the movie gave us hours of fun making fun of it for the rest of our vacation, and we still will turn to each other, apropos of nothing, and say, "Hey, you know what the fourth "u" is? YOU!!!"

 OMG, I just found a bootleg copy of it on Youtube! It's soooooo bad!!!

I was still slightly nauseated as we finally, FINALLY left World of Coca-Cola, hiked back to our hotel, picked up the car, and wended our way through downtown traffic to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. And of course my tummy was completely forgotten as soon as we got there, because it was exactly where I wanted to be and there was no need to sulk!







I really liked this museum's explanations of segregation. It thoroughly answered the question, both for kids and for potential non-believers, of why exactly segregation was so harmful, and why separate simply cannot be equal.

The birthplace was closed for tours due to some renovation work--good thing that we've toured it before, then!--so we were only able to hike over and see it from the outside:



And then I took a photo of my kids standing in the same spot, with the house taking up the same space in the background, as they were in the photo that I took of them here five years ago:



To get their heads in the right spot this year, I had to have them stand two steps lower than they stood back in 2012. They were only just beginning to learn about Civil Rights then, and I like to think that now, five years later, they're coming back to the same site with so much more understanding of Reverend King's legacy, with so much more history and context and so many more insights to bring to the experience.

Even if we did go to the World of Coca-Cola instead of the Center for Civil and Human Rights...

Work Plans for the Week of October 19, 2015: World War 2 and Indiana

I'd actually decided to forgo posting my work plans for this week, our first week back after our three-week holiday, because I have so much that I'd rather say about Hawaii, but I've found that I miss referring to it! Apparently I review these posts a lot during the week to remind myself of my lesson plans and resources. I also outline specific lessons on the back of a hard copy of these work plans, and I note the supplies that I'll need on a given day in my planner, but writing out this online version of my plans, with links to my resources, also seems to be essential to my flow.

Memory work for this week consists of fraction terminology, the spelling words from chapter 2 of each kid's Wordly Wise, one page a day from their cursive workbooks, and Mandarin vocabulary for Will and ballet for Syd (Syd had to drop Mandarin for the rest of this semester, as one of her weekly Nutcracker rehearsals overlaps it). Books of the Day include some books on light aircraft for Will (she's currently on an airplane kick), the Magic School Bus book on volcanoes and Who Was Christopher Columbus? for Syd, a random children's biography of the Unsinkable Molly Brown for Will, and a few more books on volcanoes and Hawaii, as I plan to complete that unit study in the next couple of weeks, sigh.

I miss Hawaii!

And here's the rest of our week!

MONDAY: We were happy to see our fellow volunteers at our weekly shift at the local food pantry on this day! I got to tell loads of stories about our vacation in Hawaii, and the kids spent most of the shift putting address stickers on envelopes while listening to another worker tell about her time living in Africa ("Fruit bats would come to a fruit tree right outside her house! And did you know that if you see a lone hippo you should stay away from him, because he's probably an aggressive older male that's been kicked out of his group?").

The kids were not thrilled, unfortunately, to get back to Math Mammoth and cursive and other written work. Will has a handle on her fractions unit, at least, and so will eventually muscle through it, but as much as Syd loathes rounding, she loathes even more this current lesson that's asking her to round one or both factors in a multiplication problem in order to estimate an answer. I *think* it's the "guesswork" that bothers her, as she'd rather simply work the problem, but being able to estimate an answer IS important, so estimate I am making her, hour-long tantrums be damned. At least after my thorough rounding lessons she CAN round--she just doesn't want to!

On one of my homeschool group boards, another parent posted a link to an essay contest for fourth graders, on the topic of Indiana's upcoming bicentennial. The deadline is this Friday, but we've studied Indiana as a state enough that it's actually pretty do-able to bust this essay out as a review. I'm also requiring both kids to write an essay, although, of course, I'll only actually submit my fourth-grader's--mwa-ha-ha! On Monday, the children brainstormed the topic, on Tuesday, they outlined their essays, today they'll write them, tomorrow they'll revise them, and then I'll mail Syd's on Friday, exactly on the deadline!

We've been doing our World War 2 lessons in the evening, while Matt is home, to great success. I can provide a well-researched lecture on a World War 2 topic but Matt, who minored in history and for whom it's also a passion, always has more insight to add and knows all the best details to engage a child. This lesson on World War 2 propaganda went particularly well. We discussed propaganda and its purposes (to instill fear, to dehumanize the enemy, etc.), analyzed numerous examples, and then I had the children use this site to rewrite several propaganda posters. I'll talk more about this another time, and tell you all about how it eventually devolved, as everything does in this family, into a bunch of butt jokes, but for now, I'll just share with you one of Will's that's at least relevant to the war:

She's brought out the subtext of the poster quite well, don't you think?

TUESDAY: Tuesday's World War 2 lesson was meant to expand on our visit to the Pacific Aviation Museum in Hawaii. Matt discussed the evolution of aircraft in war, its uses, the different types of aircraft, and showed them how they were identified using spotter cards. We have one actual spotter card that was actually used during the war, and the activity book for Story of the World volume 4 has an entire sheet of recreations that you can use for matching and playing Memory.

Again, that took place in the evening, as we spent most of the afternoon at a homeschool group's playgroup, with me chatting happily about Hawaii and Girl Scouts and kids, and the actual kids playing in the leaves and on the playground with friends. Happy autumn days!

WEDNESDAY: This morning I only have Will here with me at the table right now, completing her page of cursive; Syd is having the worst time adjusting back to the Eastern Time Zone, poor kid. I've been waking her up around 9 am, but she's got ballet tonight, so I want her to be well-rested. 

We use these World War 2 timeline cards for our unit; today, not only will the kids be gluing the couple of 1942 dates into their notebooks, but I'll also be asking them to work together to pick out the most important dates from those we've studied so far--we've now got too many dates to ask the kids to keep memorizing them all, so they'll select the most relevant to focus on.

THURSDAY: As well as finishing their Indiana Bicentennial essays, the kids will have a lesson on the soldiers of World War 2--their differing characteristics in different countries, the branches of service, ranks, etc.--and I've got some paper dolls that show off the different uniforms that they can make.

While Will has horseback riding class, Syd and I will probably work some more on her dollhouse--the stairs apparently need stair runners made of red felt!

FRIDAY: This WAS going to be our day at home this week, but then I learned that Will has a podcast taping at the library and Syd has an extra Nutcracker rehearsal on this afternoon... oh, well! The kids will finish with their timelines through 1944 on this day--we'll have their lectures for these dates over the weekend--and hopefully we'll have time for most of the fun projects that I'd planned. We'll have a brief review of skeletal anatomy, then the kids will make this tape resist skeleton project--I plan to have them press their tape against a towel first, and hopefully that will take enough of the sticky off that it won't tear as much as it apparently did in the original project.

We never did get to the fruit decay observation that I'd wanted to do last month, but I know that Syd wants her Detective badge--just don't let me forget to take the kids to the store on Thursday and have them pick out fruit to observe!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: On Saturday, we've got our local university's Science Fest, which is a HUGE favorite of the kids, and then there's just a string of ice skating, ballet, Mandarin, and ballet again before we can collapse back at home, play with the chickens, then eat take-out pizza and watch a movie. Lilo and Stitch, perhaps?

On Sunday, I want the family to go to the apple orchard, but they may want to just stay home all day and play with the chickens. That will be okay, too!

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.