A Big Map of Africa

Lisa over at 5 Orange Potatoes got us WAY hooked on Africam. It's a set of 24-hour webcams located at watering holes in South Africa--our favorite is located at Tembe National Elephant Park.

The first thing that I do in the morning is set up one of our laptops to the Tembe camera, where it sits all day on the living room table; the last thing that Matt does at night is shut that laptop down. In between times, birds and bats and animals of all sizes come to visit us through the camera--someone is forever and always shouting out "Giraffe!!!" or "Elephants!!!" or "Hurry, lion!", and we'll all run over to see. We've seen a lazy lion lounging on the dirt like a giant kittycat, and a baby wildebeest tromping along behind its Momma, and once, late at night after the girls had gone to bad, Matt and I totally saw two elephants have sex.

As such things always do, the Africam has inspired an educational foray into all things Africa. We checked out lots of African animal encyclopedias, because we wanted to identify the animals at the watering hole, and we checked out some children's atlases, because we wanted to see where the watering holes were located, and then, since we already know Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and thus already have a little context for Africa, I decided to go whole-hog into an Africa study.

For that, you need a map. A BIG map.

I'm forever going on about Megamaps, I know (it's because they're really GOOD!), and this is another shameless plug for their free site, since our big Africa map is a 4x4 map printed straight from their site. Willow put it together like a puzzle--

--I taped all the joints from the back side, and then we duct taped it right to the wall, because I'm from Arkansas and I duct tape EVERYTHING.

I asked Willow to color in Egypt and draw the Nile River, but she was so excited that she colored all the countries right then, matching the colors to our children's atlas:

She also drew the Nile in wrong, so we'll have to fix that tomorrow. Oops! I needed to do some fact-checking, anyway, to make sure all the countries and their borders are still accurate.

Syd had the job of painting the oceans:

 I imagine that we'll keep our big map up for at least two months (it'll be a handy ready-made project for our homeschool group's International Fair later this Spring--yay!), and I have lots of ideas of other things that we can add to it, if the girls are willing:

• Fertile Crescent and other locations from The Story of the World volume 1, which we're also studying
• all the locations from our Ancient Egypt studies
• the locations of the Africam web cams
• images of the typical animals found in various locations
• thumbnail-sized images of the picture books that we'll be reading that are set in Africa
• thumbnail-sized images of the chapter books that Willow reads that are set in Africa
• labels of all the countries (which is good handwriting copywork!)
• copies of the short book reports that the girls are beginning to learn how to do
• the Great Rift Valley, and images/info of the best finds from that area

Okay...we may have this map up longer than two months!

Salt Dough Maps of Egypt

First, you have to mix up the salt dough, with as much singing and spilling and inefficient measuring and getting flour and salt everywhere as you can manage:

Our local, most favorite pizza shop, Pizza X, gave us two small pizza boxes free for the asking, and pizza boxes are PERFECT for salt dough maps. They're cardboard, so they can withstand the low oven temperatures for drying the salt dough, they're sturdy, so they can withstand the wet dough itself, you can paint them, they have a lid, they're stackable, and you can use the extra surface of that inside lid for those miniature lapbook books that are all the craze right now.

I printed and cut out a map of Egypt on 8.5"x11" paper--it was just a tad small for the pizza box, so we were able to add the context of the surrounding area. If we ever wanted to use a bigger map in a bigger pizza box, I'd print the map on an overhead transparency and let the girls trace it directly onto the bottom of the box. As it is, the girls glued their cut-out map directly to the bottom of the box, painted the surrounding areas (we're going to do that again when we paint the salt dough, on account of both girls appear to have forgotten the Mediterranean Sea!), and then pressed the salt dough down onto the cut-out map:

Don't worry--there was also ample time set aside for the making of long-legged ballerinas from the extra salt dough:


And then they dance:


The girls used maps to place the Nile River and Nile River Delta:

You can put a lot of relief detail  into the salt dough, and Willow sculpted in the elevation change from the Upper Nile to the Lower Nile, and also added in a couple of pyramids and a Sphinx: 

If you want to do flags and labels, you can stick toothpicks into the right parts as you're sculpting the salt dough. They'll dry firmly in place, and you can make and glue on the paper labels later. I considered this, and also considered having the girls model tiny pyramids and monuments from FIMO to glue on later...but, eh. The salt dough was engaging enough as-is, and the girls learned a LOT about the Nile from it. Later we might put together a giant paper map of Ancient Egypt (Megamaps will let you print maps that are over six feet long!) and label that more elaborately with all the pyramids and such, Kushites and what-have-you).

Next, we oven-dry the salt dough, and then we paint!

The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gingerbread Cuneiform: Studying Mesopotamia

My teenager's combination World History/Art History study (that I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to record on her high school transcript...) is a TON of fun. We read the history and the art history, study the major artworks, read some literature or mythology, do something immersive, and write about it. I love it, and so far it seems pretty teenager-friendly, too!

My favorite parts of her Mesopotamia unit were listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh (the teenager ships Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and I can't say that she's wrong), envisioning the Ishtar Gate (not to be confused with the Gates of Ishtar, a Swedish metal band), figuring out the Sumerian genealogy of gods and goddesses (always a hit with my mythology-obsessed kid), and making this gingerbread cuneiform.

The idea--and the gingerbread recipe!--come from this Edible Archaeology post. We also followed the author's suggestion to use a disposable bamboo chopstick as a stylus, which led to a whole adventure of eating at several local Asian restaurants over the course of a couple of weeks, since every restaurant we went to happened to have the separated chopsticks with round ends, not the snap-apart ones with square ends!

Finally, we were met with success--and absolutely DELICIOUS ramen--at this little place tucked into an apartment complex behind the grocery store near the mall:

With the proper bamboo chopsticks and a batch of gingerbread dough, we were ready to write!

We did not follow the author's highly ambitious example of copying a large cuneiform tablet, because WHOAH. Instead, we cut small squares, then used the stylus to copy some of the examples from my teenager's world history textbook:

A chopstick makes a PERFECT stylus!

Baked, the impressions still showed perfectly!

Cuneiform sign meaning "god" or "sky"

Cuneiform sign meaning "day" or "sun"

The student scribe takes an art break!

older Cuneiform sign meaning "barley." Doesn't it look like barley?

Since we did this project right before Christmas, we went ahead and used this dough to also make gingerbread cookies, and the kids made their gingerbread houses. Eleven years into this beloved tradition, I'm now a devotee of melted sugar as glue, and I still think the houses look messy and gross, but nevertheless, they bring me joy:

A lot of hands-on history projects are just fun little craft projects that don't teach a ton about history; if you want your hands-on history project to be valuable for history, and not just a thematically-related activity, you do have to be vigilant. When the kids were very little, for instance, letting them build Egyptian pyramids out of sugar cubes didn't teach them anything about the history of Egypt, but it was a good STEM project and they loved it. But having them create salt dough maps of Egypt and paint and label them was also fun, and reinforced some useful information about Egypt that we still know, such as the fact that Upper Egypt was south and Lower Egypt was north because that's the way the Nile flows, and that the Delta is shaped the same as the Greek letter. 

There's nothing wrong with doing thematically-related but non-valuable projects, even with older homeschoolers--my teenager created this gingerbread Stonehenge during her Astronomy study, learning little about Stonehenge but a decent amount about gingerbread construction and hand-building, and it was fun! But this gingerbread cuneiform, we found, taught us a LOT about cuneiform, and therefore about Mesopotamia. We were all surprised to see how exactly the square stylus recreated the cuneiform, and how well the imprints stayed when baked. You wouldn't be able to recreate that nearly so easily by drawing the figures, but you could get a LOT of cuneiform onto even a hand-sized piece of clay, and that clay would be portable, durable, and virtually immortal. 

That's a lot of knowledge gained for oneself while also decorating cookies, drinking eggnog, and listening to Christmas music!

We've spiraled through history throughout our homeschool years, or done interest-led unit studies non-chronologically, so I've built up a lot of Mesopotamia resources. Here are some of what we've enjoyed over the past dozen years:

• irrigation activity. Irrigation was critical to the development of Mesopotamian agriculture! Here's an idea for how to model an irrigation system. I think it would be cool to use chia seeds so you could build an actual working model!
• map of known ziggurats. Research these via YouTube or Google Images, place them in your salt dough map, glue thumbnail images to a wall map, flyover them in Google Earth, etc.
• Mesopotamia flashcards. Use these flashcards for matching or memory work. 
• popsicle stick war machines. If you read Story of the World (which you should!), you'll encounter Sargon the Great. You can use popsicle sticks to model some of the war machines that he used.
• Royal Game of Ur. You can't study Mesopotamia without playing this game found in a tomb in Ur!
• sexagesimal system. Mesopotamians counted in Base 60, something that you can still see reflected today in activities like measuring time (60 seconds, 60 minutes) and circles (360 degrees). Here's a starting point for researching the sexagesimal system, but I've found some great activities in books over the years that I pull out occasionally for math enrichment.
• Treasures of the UCLA Library: Cuneiform Tablets. My teenager and I watched this short video before beginning our side-hustle as cuneiform scribes. 
• write your name in cuneiform. This is a fun way to get just a taste of cuneiform writing
• Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors: An Activity Guide. This book has a good recipe for sebetu bread. Read more about sebetu and Mesopotamian recipes here. 
• The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Eyewitness Mesopotamia. Eyewitness books and Smithsonian Handbooks were the kids' JAM when they were little!
• The Lifeboat that Saved the World. The author is one of the Mesopotamia curators at the British Museum!
• Story of the World, Volume 1. You must listen to the audiobook of this, because Jim Weiss!

And the beloved spines of our current World History/Art History study:

• Archaeology: The Essential Guide to Our Human Past
• Duiker's World History
• Gardner's Art through the Ages
• and lots and lots of images found via Google Images or downloaded from museum digital databases

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!

The Mummy, the Carousel, and the Dinosaur Eggs: I Took a VERY Deep Dive into the History of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

2008

 I've started to get really interested in really deep dives into really specific topics. Disassociating by immersing oneself into a research project is such a pleasant feeling!

The history of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis is one of my recent small obsessions. It's long been a special place for me and the kids, and it's been interesting to see how some of my favorite parts of the museum, such as its deep respect for children and its integration into the neighborhood in which it's placed, has manifested over the course of its existence. 

I found this 1982 museum-published history in my local university's library (along with some old speeches, guides to extinct galleries, and other interesting documents that I checked out and pored over), and I was riveted by the attention to small, vivid details that it brought to enliven what could have been an extremely dry museum history:

Most of the kids' favorite parts of the museum, such as their holiday celebration and dinosaur exhibit, are too recent to be in the book, but some, such as that carousel we ride every time we visit and the mummy we used to pay our respects to before Chicago took it back, are just as old.

2011

The story of the carousel is particularly interesting, and is a good example of the vivid details that I love most, the ones that would be completely lost to history without the work of journalists, anthropologists, and other historians who take an interest in first-person storytelling. The Broad Ripple Carousel dates to 1917, and operated in a local park until 1956, when the roof finally collapsed and destroyed it. By that time, the animals had been falling apart for a while, as well, getting no more than hasty, non-professional repairs. 

In 1965, the current director of the Children's Museum, Mildred Compton, tried to track down where these worn, broken, beloved 50-year-old carousel animals might have gotten to. This was back in the days when telephone tag apparently hadn't even been invented yet, because each check-in required her to take a physical trip to the physical office of the city's Parks and Recreation department. And because it's local government, mostly nobody had any idea what she was talking about. They'd sort of promise to look into it, but then whenever she'd check back in to pester whomever she'd wheedled that sort-of promise from, she'd find out that they'd left the department, someone new was in charge, and she had to ask them all over again, hear again that they had no idea what she was talking about, and again wheedle a new promise out of them to check into it.

2015

Eventually, Compton got the Parks and Recreation department to reckon that maybe they did have a few of the carousel animals in storage, and okay, fine, she could borrow two of them. They gave her two horses in godawful condition, and she got a local acquaintance to refinish them. He could do the sanding and oiling and repainting work okay, but he couldn't replace the tails, which had been real horse tails.

Did you know that as recently as the late 1960s there was a literal slaughterhouse in DOWNTOWN INDIANAPOLIS?!? And... it apparently regularly slaughtered horses, so much so that when Compton went down there to ask if she could maybe have a horsetail or two, they just showed her into a room where there lay a huge, bloody pile of horsetails??? She rifled through the pile until she found some that she thought might match the horses, then soaked and cleaned them herself in her own home.

2015

A few years passed, then in 1969, thanks to some excellent networking, Compton scored a promise from the Parks and Recreation department that the Children's Museum could have ALL of their carousel animals. Compton and a coworker went to the storage building to collect them, but the animals were in such terrible shape that they essentially ended up crawling around on the floor, trying to snag all the little broken-off pieces of body parts that were strewn around from over a decade of neglect. Even on the intact parts of the animals, the wood was split and warped, and the museum spent years sending the animals out a couple a time to professional restoration artists in Cincinnati. 

The original idea had been just to display the animals, because even though it was a children's museum, most of the museum exhibits weren't interactive yet, or really even hands-on. But then Compton went to a carousel convention (lol!), and the carousel enthusiasts convinced her that what she really ought to do is buy a vintage carousel mechanism and turn her restoration into a living, working carousel again.

2020

Which would be so cool! Except, the museum didn't have the complete set of original animals from that Broad Ripple carousel. There were supposed to be three leaping stags in among all the other prancing animals, but they hadn't been in that storage building. When Compton checked in about it, a staffer told her flat out that they had disintegrated, but that felt... suspicious.

So the museum literally got the local newspaper to run a column asking for the public's help to provide any information about these long-missing stags. And one day, an anonymous informant called the museum. He was all, "The Parks and Rec department has your stags. Go to this year's Christmas show and see."

2022

And wouldn't you know it, but when the Parks and Rec department put on the 1973 Christmas show, guess who was on the float pulling Santa's sleigh?

Three. Wooden. Stags.

Compton marched herself back to the Parks and Recreation department and gave them a lecture entitled "Did you NOT tell me that I could have ALL the carousel animals?"

2010, with a broken leg, riding a stag

And that's how the museum came to have a working 1917 carousel, stags and all, on the top floor! Fortunately, the carousel idea came around as the museum was working on plans to demolish the historic house they'd been operating out of and build a brand-new museum building in its place. The plans had to be altered to allow for the size and weight of the carousel, and it's on the top floor of the museum because that's the only place they could make those adjustments without having to pretty much start over from scratch.

2019, just having come from the temporary exhibit of Greek antiquities, riding a stag

I think the museum's emphasis on dinosaurs must have gotten started in the early 1970s, when that magical Mildred Compton convinced the owner of some of the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, found in the Gobi Desert from 1922-1923. The donor was the widow of Roy Chapman Andrews, the expedition leader of the group that discovered the eggs. Others of these eggs are at the American Museum of Natural History, and I'm not totally sure how he got some in his personal possession? I've actually got the book he wrote about this expedition, as well as some other books about him, on hold for me at the local university library, so I'm sure I'll know soon!

2010, taking the skin off a model T-rex so we can see its guts

Another long-time museum artifact that the kids don't remember--but I do!!!--is Wenuhotep, the mummy that the Children's Museum had on display from 1959 until the Art Institute of Chicago demanded it back in 2007. I remember there being some hard feelings about that return, because the museum had actually been permanently given the mummy by the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and they didn't know that the institute had only, itself, been borrowing that mummy from the Art Institute and therefore didn't have permission to give it away?!? So it was bittersweet to be reading about that titular mummy in this Children's Museum history, seeing how they built it a special exhibit when they remodeled and had it X-rayed so they could offer a more nuanced depiction of it to their visitors.

2011, during a homeschool class about Ancient Egypt

The kids and I did see Wenuhotep on exhibit a few years later at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it looks like in 2014 they did do some interesting studies of it, but it's been off exhibit there for quite a while. 

2013, in the Ancient Egypt exhibit (there's now a model mummy that kids can interact with)

It sure as heck wouldn't be off exhibit at the Children's Museum, is all I'm saying...

As happens with all the best deep dives, I now have a huge stack of books on adjacent topics to deep dive into--the Gobi Desert dinosaur finds! The ethics of displaying mummies in museums!--and a list of exceedingly tedious questions to ask the next time the kids and I volunteer at the museum--"Say, you wouldn't happen to have that 1920s model of the scene from Goldilocks and the Three Bears that your first museum curator made out of trash because the museum had so few exhibits handy for me to look at, would you? Um, and maybe can I also see the original museum logo, the giant wooden seahorse, that Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s dad commissioned? And maybe that arrowhead that was plucked from the corpse of a pioneer child, too?"

Here's to continuing to hide from all of my problems snugged up safely in the womb of academe!

Math We've Been Loving

In this season, this week, this moment, we've been loving:

puzzles

Base 10 blocks and stamps

magnetic Fractiles (thank you, Santa!)

answering prompts and recording work in the girlies' math journals (thank goodness that they love these, because they've been incredibly effective!)

anything ipad app or CD-Rom. Anything.

doing chores to earn more money to buy more ipad apps (I'm a mean Momma, and I make them do the math to figure out how much tax they have to pay me back for each app, too)

computation--addition and subtraction and math facts up to ten!

computation--triple-digit addition and subtraction with borrowing and regrouping!

Khan Academy--finally I understand the concepts of borrowing and regrouping!

LEGOs

making recipes, almost always involving delicious sweetness (because who doesn't need a little more sugar in their diet?)

calendars--what's the day? What's the date? Is it still January? Will it be Spring tomorrow? No? Why not?

pogo stick and jump rope, and the oh-so-important Counting of the Jumps

Sometimes my girlies' minds are fairly quiet and restful--lots of quiet pretend play, lots of lounging with a lovey and listening to audiobooks, lots of looking at books and picture books and relaxing sorts of stuff. Lately, though, it's like both their little brains are exploding into new stuff all at once--it's lots of math, Ancient Egypt AND Ancient China AND Paleolithic peoples, Magic Tree House and Tales of the Frog Princess being played on two different CD players in two different rooms while one child also reads a different Tale of the Frog Princess and the other child works at a Dr. Seuss Kindgergarten CD-Rom, hiking and walking and hiking some more, swimming and ice skating and gymnastics and ballet, a playdate in the morning and a playdate in the afternoon, a documentary on the Great Pyramid before bedtime, the little one learning to read, the bigger one learning to borrow and regroup, making clay terra-cotta warriors and salt dough maps of the Fertile Crescent, chess club, and they both seem to have grown inches in days, so that all their brand-new fleece pants are just almost too short, sigh.

It's thrilling, and a privilege, a little startling, and a teeny-tiny little bit sad (where have my babies gone?) to watch these minds at work.

That Time I Made Everyone Play Senet With Me

The set we're playing is from the university library (because of course it is, lol!), but this is it.

This might have been my quickest speed-run through a Special Interest yet, but for a very little while my entire mind was fixed on learning how to play Senet, teaching everyone else how to play Senet, and then wheedling those people into playing Senet with me.

It was fed by a couple of other low-key Special Interests, that of Historic Games and of Reskinning/Redesigning Games. I just think it would be really cool to pick a historic game like Senet, reskin it to look more like something that would be a family interest or family joke, and then construct it and give it out for, like, Christmas or something.

Part of that is that I like the historical time periods of my favorite games, Ancient Egypt for Senet and Mesopotamia for the Royal Game of Ur, for instance, but also they're always so pretty! Look at some of the beautiful Senet games in the Met!

I also like how generally simple the games are to learn, and how satisfying they are to play. Do you, too, get weary of trying to learn new games with a billion fiddly rules? Senet is SO much simpler to learn, but there are all kinds of interesting strategies to figure out. Also, we don't really know the actual rules, so my family and I like to make up our own rules. 

Playing Senet in 2013 at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, and DEFINITELY making up our own rules!

Here's the most accepted way to play Senet, with a bonus link to a printable Senet board and instructions.

Here are some DIY Senet board games:

• 3D Senet. This one is the biggest score! This public library's website links to a pdf for a cut, color, and assemble cardstock Senet game. It's got the graphics printed on it, as well as helpful fingers pointing the directions you're meant to go at every turn. If you didn't want all that detail, you could use the pattern as a template and draw your own designs.
• cardboard and painted figurines. Cardboard is my favorite, most accessible crafting supply! I love the use of miniature figurines, all of which you could probably find in your nearest toybox or thrift store.
• chessboard Senet. This is such a clever idea! I LOATHE using the Dollar Store as a source of craft supplies, but a thrift store would be just as cheap and easy.
• kid-made Senet. I don't think the fabric worked out great, but otherwise it's a lovely example of how even younger kids can DIY board games. And they're all so creative!

I think I'd want to make one on a nice sheet of wood, perhaps woodburned and watercolor stained or full-on painted in acrylics. The traditional game only has a few decorated panels but I think it would be fun to decorate every panel, maybe keeping to a storytelling theme like illustrating the progress of our England family vacation or the travels of Frodo Baggins.

I also kind of want to make a 3D one, box and all, out of Perler beads, though. Or maybe a quilted one that could also work as a placemat? How about one that masquerades as a book until you open it to see the game, with room to store the pieces inside?

Brainstorming a project is my favorite part!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, homeschool projects, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Masterpieces of Art in Historical Context

Or rather, color print-outs of artwork cut out, glued in the right(-ish) spot on our big basement timeline, and then painted over again with glitter Mod Podge:

After a brief foray into a library copy of the computer game Masterpiece Mansion, Willow decided that she wanted to learn more art history. All of our print-outs have so far come from The Worldwide Art Gallery, although this will also be a great subject to have in mind the next time that we attend one of those used book clearance sales that happen here pretty frequently--can't you imagine how perfect a five-cent used art history textbook would be for this project?

I still have much to do to figure out other points in an art history unit study, especially since Will has also asked to learn about Ancient Egypt, and we're still doing projects about China, dinosaurs, ballet, Independence Day, cooking, and geometry, but just from our brief study so far, Willow has already achieved the hallmark of cocktail party conversation material, in that she now has a favorite artist.

Hieronymus Bosch. Oh, dear.

Work Plans for the Week of January 13, 2014: So Much Science!

MONDAY: Our homeschool Science Fair is in three weeks, so it is time to get cracking! Ideally, I'd like the kids to get most of their research done this week (hence all the research and reports on the work plans), and their big project done next week, leaving that last week for them to have plenty of time to finish up their work and prepare their oral presentation and display board.

So science will be a big part of three days this week--fortunately, our other work for today is fairly cut-and-dry. The kids LOVED Roll 'n Multiply (and don't tell them, but I *may* let them play it for their multiplication table memory work this week, instead of the plain old tedious study that I made them do last week), Will once again balked at learning one more new line in "It's Raining, It's Pouring" but found it simple to do once she focused (when she begins to have the self-awareness to realize this pattern and cease it, I swear I will buy her a present!), and we are all eagerly anticipating heading back to our weekly volunteer gig in an hour or so, after our long holiday hiatus (as was exclaimed over breakfast this morning, "We haven't been to the Hub since LAST YEAR!!!).

TUESDAY: For their Science Fair project, the kids need to research paleontology, the skeletal system, and chicken anatomy, so on this day they're going to use our human skeleton model kit to create a plaster of Paris model of the human skeleton, glue it to a cardboard base, then use paint or embroidery thread--we'll see what they prefer--to key its bones to the identical bones on a diagram of a chicken skeleton. Both humans and chickens have mandibles, and femurs, and clavicles, etc.

That big project, plus a continuation of the work for the Girl Scout World Thinking Day badge (Will still needs to research another country's educational system, Syd still needs to watch a couple of international Sesame Street episodes and compare them to the US version, and they both need to begin their big service project), should intersperse nicely with the book work that they've got for math, grammar, and logic, leading to a pretty nice, if full, school day.

WEDNESDAY: Finally, we're horseback riding again! The kids are so excited to get back on their horses. I'm sure Cody and Lola have missed them terribly, too!

THURSDAY: We're going to move ahead to the next chapter of The Story of the World next week (mental note to ME to request library books and get the prep work done for that!), so we're working on the last two mummy and pyramids projects that I wanted us to complete first. For this day, there are SO many great interactive games about Ancient Egypt online, and the kids are going to think it's a real treat to get to explore them all for school. On the next day, they're going to transform Mason jars into canopic jars--I'm really eager to see how that project turns out!

Last week, Will loved using Scratch to play Spacewar, and spent more time goofing around on Scratch afterwards, even finding some games based on some of her favorite books (she's a big fangirl over the Warriors series, just so you know). She mentioned that she might like to try programming something of her own, but then never got around to it, so I put it on her schoolwork as encouragement. Syd also had a blast planning her fashion show design last week, and claims that she's going to sew it completely by herself this year (YES!!!), so I may have her sew a muslin of a shirt pattern that I think will be easy enough for her to use. Of course, I thought I had a pants pattern that was easy enough for her to use, but I sewed the muslin for her myself, and she didn't care for the style, so it's back to research for me! Maybe if she has to sew her own muslins she won't be so picky...

As a side note, Syd plans to use the following types of fabric for her garment:

• orange jersey knit--We're talking orange T-shirts here, or orange graphics on T-shirts, or even orange notions to embellish the garment.
• green formal fabric with sequins--Wish me major luck here, because who on earth would have a formal gown made out of green sequined fabric?!?
• green bottomweight--I'm tacking this one on myself, because I plan to STRONGLY encourage Syd to piece the inner thigh portion of the green sequined pants that she's planning on making with a regular green bottomweight fabric. I mean, walking the runway with sequins between your thighs--can you imagine?

So if you have any orange T-shirts, green curtains, or green sequined prom gowns that you're dying to get rid of, send them over to our house! 

FRIDAY: This may end up being more work than we can do on this day--I'm still playing with how to incorporate the kids' math class into their schedule--but if everyone can get focused, we *should* be able to create lapbooks based on G is for Golden: A California Alphabet (I LOVE the Discover America State-by-State series, as well as the lesson plans that go with the books), sculpt canopic jars, make some progress on the World Thinking Day badges, and write a report on chickens, chicken anatomy, and the life cycle of the chicken. I'm curious to see how these reports go, actually--I'm going to ask the kiddos to collaborate on each of their reports this week, instead of writing two separate reports. Will they realize that this makes the project much quicker and easier to complete, or will they fight the whole time and make it take ten times longer?

We'll see!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY/MONDAY: Here's to another holiday, another long weekend, and another short work week to come! I'm pretty excited that we have NOTHING scheduled for Saturday or Sunday; I hope the weather will allow us to take a long hike or go mountain biking. On Monday, I'll be doing our regular volunteer gig by myself while Matt takes the girls and some friends to a different volunteer gig with the Girl Scouts.

Also in the plans: yeah, they'll probably be boiling down a whole chicken carcass, bleaching the bones, and then beginning to re-articulate the skeleton.

Yay, science!

Work Plans for the Week of March 3: Latin and Libraries

I'm pretty well over the way that the Box widget that embeds my work plans always insists on scrolling immediately to them when my blog loads, and the way that Box has completely ignored my question about this, so at some point I'm going to have to make the time to research other document embedding systems, sigh. Until then, however...

MONDAY: While the local schoolchildren are suffering through yet another snow day here, it's business as usual for us--it looks like even our local volunteer gig will be open today, so add "De-ice the car" to my to-do list! Syd's working on her factor chart (I got the idea from an old elementary Montessori manual--I'll tell you about it another time, if it turns out well) right now, while Will, who's finished part of her reading work, is heating up some French bread for our breakfast.

We've got chapter 19 of Song School Latin today (more body parts), instrument lessons--and I am REALLY going to have to kick their butts on these, because it's been a while since they've really focused on regular practice--and we'll be able to spend a few weeks doing some regular creative writing, since our local PBS station finally got their butts in gear about the PBS Kids Writers Contest.

TUESDAY: The kids have both Math Mammoth and First Language Lessons today, which I always appreciate during lesson planning since they're so blessedly easy to schedule. A playdate and baking a king cake to celebrate Mardi Gras will use up most of the rest of the day, but we'll also be working on the kids' Girl Scout service project. They need to provide a bookshelf as part of this project, and at first I thought that we might get it donated, but the dimensions required are pretty specific to fit into a limited space, AND Will has expressed so much interest in woodworking lately, that I've finally decided that we'll just make the bookshelf. It's still a little cold for woodwork outdoors, so we may find ourselves with lumber, the portable work bench, and the circular saw in the living room, but I think it's going to be a great beginning woodworking project for the kids, and one that they're guaranteed to see in use every week at our regular volunteer gig.

WEDNESDAY: Will's big Spring Ice Show performance is this night--wish her luck!

THURSDAY: We've still got a couple of chemistry experiments centered on acids and bases to perform, but I didn't get around to getting all the materials for those yet, so I'm moving us on to the paleontology that we'll be studying off and on as we lead up to our dinosaur dig this summer. I imagine that we'll be interspersing this paleontology study with seasonal studies, like botany and animal biology, and kid-led interests, but for now, I'll be grounding the kids' understanding, and sneaking in a little more Latin!

I think the kids are also ready to start interspersing Drawing With Children lessons with other types of hands-on art, so we'll be trying out this copy of The Color Book that I was sent to review (ooh, I just saw that it hasn't been officially released yet--how fun to have it in our paint-covered little hands!)--it's focused on exploring color through a variety of activities, so it should be a fun integration into our week.

FRIDAY: We're soundly into our Indiana study, but I wasn't quite prepared to move into the next chapter of The Story of the World (nor am I quite sure, yet, how I'm going to handle that chapter, since it highlights one of the book's few flaws, Bible stories treated as history--we may end up just listening to the chapter one week and then moving on, but first I need a little more time to decide if there's anything really historically relevant there), so fortunately, there's ALWAYS something more to do with Ancient Egypt!

The kids get in moods in which they seem to forget about formerly favorite pastimes, sometimes, so this week's logic is a board game of each kid's choice, to remind them that they like to play board games! That, combined with a library program, should round out our school week on a VERY fun note.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We might go to the Indianapolis Museum of Art as a family, or we might send the kids to a pottery class and claim some grown-up time. We might go hiking, if the weather warms, or we might drag the bikes out and get them ready for a season of riding. We *might* order a couple more chicks from a local hatchery, although every time you ask me that one, my answer changes.