WIP Wednesday: Felt and Fences

It's the middle of the week, and here are the projects that I'm in the middle of!

Felt Moveable Alphabet

I saw this TikTok the other day--

--and immediately decided that a felt moveable alphabet would be the perfect next big gift for my toddler niece, AND it would also work to accomplish one of my favorite long-term goals, which is to use up my ridiculously large felt stash!

Here's where I am on that project today:

Cutting and sewing by hand is VERY slow going for me, so it's good that I'm not in a hurry to finish this project. The letters are looking super cute, though, exactly the way I'd hoped, and I love how tactile and sensorial they're going to be with the color and the heft and the stitching and the texture. I'm also considering making some command cards with short words on them in the same font, sized so that my niece can set these felt letters directly on them to spell the words. 

Front Yard Fence

I've been able to read the writing on the wall for years now, with my college-bound kid and the dog she takes on two walks a day.

Gee, I wonder who's going to pick up that slack when she goes off to college?

I've been bitching my head off for years about our need for a fenced-in yard, and I'm not even going to go into how I would have freaking LOVED to have had it when the kids were young enough that I didn't like them playing out there, just one roll down the hill from a road with a high speed limit. 

But oh, well. I will also love it when I can substitute one walk a day for letting Luna out to frolic in what will soon be our fenced front yard!

And crap. Here's me just now noticing, after the fence guys have been out there all morning so I know that part of the fence is mostly done by now, that the gate isn't lined up with the sidewalk?!?

Whatever. I'll just sit planters on that sidewalk, I guess.

Eco-Friendly Kid Craft Book Reviews

I wrote 50% of this article last week, and another 40% of it on Monday, and now I'm just waiting for the public library to give me the last book I need. Hopefully I'm able to pick it up in the next couple of days, or I'll have to come up with a completely different topic and write an entirely new article for Crafting a Green World this week!

Novel and Non-Fiction

Here are the books that I'm currently in the middle of:

Please note that neither of these are the many books in my house that are overdue--those I'm probably going to have to just return and check out again, ahem. 

Deliberately Divided is a study of what little can be known so far about the unethical human experimentation done in New York City by deliberating separating twins and triplets surrendered for adoption, never telling them or their families what had been done, and regularly testing and observing the children for several years afterwards, to what purpose we don't know, because the experimenters never published their results and instead insisted that all records of their actions be sealed until 2065. To me, the idea of separating newborn siblings for no other reason than to study them feels like an unconscionable human rights violation, and I think I'm progressing so slowly through this book partly because it makes me feel so sad.

The Book of Accidents seems, so far, to be a horror novel about a haunted house and maybe a ghostly serial killer? I'm not sold on it yet, but I do usually love horror, so I'll give it a few more chapters before I decide to DNR it.

Teenager's Bedroom

The house I grew up in had paneling on all the walls, and I still really don't know a ton about painting rooms. But I DO know that I hate priming these bookshelves the most!

I'm pretending like someone is going to help me prime the whole top half of the shelves that are too tall for me, and the top half of the walls, too, but in reality I'm going to have to go get the ladder from the garage, unfortunately.

But check out how much whiter the primer is than those nasty walls that I did kind of already know were nasty, but did think were white?!?

And nope, I don't have drop cloths down, because we've booked a company to come and tear up that nasty carpet, fix the floors so that they're actually level, and then install wood flooring. I'm trying to figure out if I should definitely paint the baseboards and door frames now, or see if I can paint them when the workers take them off to do the floors, or do it after they've finished and just hope I'm more careful in here than I was when I painted the walls in the family room, ahem.

Here's to my fond hope that by this time next week, all of these WIPs will be finished and I'll be in the middle of all-new WIPs!

Other than that alphabet, of course. That alphabet is going to take me months to finish...

We Built an In-Home Ballet Studio for our Young Ballerina

The genesis of this project/home remodel was the PVC pipe ballet barre that Matt and the older kid made for the younger kid for Christmas last year. I suggested it as a present because I thought that she would love it, and she did, but...

...apparently, if you give a ballerina a ballet barre, she'll ask for a full-length, wall-mounted mirror to go with it.

It took me a few months to casually suss out the logistics, but finally, in consultation with the younger kid and Matt, we decided that--well, remember those wall-mounted shelves that Matt made?

I'd insisted that the shelves shouldn't go all the way to the adjacent wall because we have yet another door to the outside there (we have FIVE doors to the outside in our strange, not-really-that-large house) and I thought it would be weird if the door knocked into the shelves when it opened.

Well, it turns out that if you actually don't care about that at all, you've given yourself another full six feet of wall to work with!

BUT you're going to have to empty those shelves--

--unscrew them from the floor and wall, and move them.

They're maybe a teensy bit wobbly now, but don't tell Matt.

I was excited about emptying the shelves, because that's where we keep board games, puzzles, and floor toys, and now that I've got these great, big girls, I expected that I'd be able to get rid of just absolute loads of games and toys. After all, these big girls don't still play Secret Garden and Professor Noggin, do they?

They do.

They don't still want Lincoln Logs and Kapla blocks and marble runs readily accessible, do they?

They do.

They're not still interested in building race car tracks and zipping their Darda cars through them, are they?

Actually, they're not, they say, and so I have it on my to-do list to ebay that giant Rubbermaid bin full of Darda tracks, but even those got one last huzzah:

We bought two of these 60"x36" mirrors, and with much terror and uncertainty about the quality of our walls, Matt mounted them in our brand-new swath of wall space:

He's got my stash cushion foam there to pad the mirrors while we were fiddling with them. I really should use up the rest of that cushion foam and free up some closet space, but then what would we do if we wanted to mount more giant mirrors?

 

When they were mounted, all we had to do was move the kid's ballet barre in front of it, and she's all set!

It's a great place to pester Jones, the world's crankiest kitten:

And it's also a good spot for some impromptu ballet practice, because of course technique class and jazz class aren't nearly enough dancing for one Saturday!

I'd like to add some framed prints and signed programs to the kid's studio area, but I'm hesitant to put anything above the mirror that could even remotely be nudged off of the wall by pounding ballerina feet, and there's not enough room on either side of the mirror, darn it.

Perhaps a couple of posters could go above the mirror, or a stenciled quote...

Let me know if you think of something suitable!

The Kid and Cat Photo Shoot, or, How to Royally Piss off a Cat

Here's a thing: I have Christmas issues.

We had really big Christmases when I was a kid, with lots of relatives and lots of presents and a huge feast, and it was awesome and I felt really special and loved. I'm the youngest in my nuclear family by far, though, raised by my grandparents, and so you know how it is with families--cousins grow up and have their own Christmases, and the aunts and uncles go to their houses, instead, and Christmas gets smaller, and the grandparents grow older and don't have the energy to make a big fuss. Life moves on.

I mean, it moves on for regular people, not me. I insisted on going back to my grandparents' house for Christmas every year, even after Matt and I were married, even after we had kids. We never had Christmas in our own house, but instead drove screaming babies and bored toddlers ten hours down and ten hours back every single year. It was kind of stressful and kind of sad, because I had, like, this visible reminder every year of how my Pappa's health was declining, but what was I going to do? Not go, and possibly miss the last Christmas with my Pappa?

I had that last Christmas with my Pappa a couple of years ago, and he died six days later, on New Year's Eve. People get over it at some point, right? Someday? Asking for a friend.

So anyway, I've always tried to buy the kids and Matt nice presents for Christmas, and when the kids were little it was easy--what little kid doesn't love toys? Presents were a huge part of my childhood Christmases, a big part of why I felt so special and loved. And that's possibly because I'm shallow, because I still like stuff. I can tell you, off of the top of my head, 100 presents that I would genuinely love to get right now, and none of them are those "experience" gifts that non-consumers are always into--none of that "a surprise dinner out" or "a spa day" stuff for me--I want Dalek cookie cutters and those adult fleece romper pajamas and that awesome toaster that will also cook you an egg and warm your Canadian bacon!

But Matt is NOT like that. He wants for nothing. And as the kids have grown older, they've gotten like that, too! Yay, of course, for them, but they are SO hard to buy for. They like getting presents, sure, and they're grateful and it's nice, but even presents that wow them? They don't really play with them. Syd plays with her American Girl stuff and her My Little Pony stuff, and otherwise she listens to audiobooks from the library, draws and colors and messes with craft supplies, bakes weird recipes. And she's got all the craft supplies and baking supplies that she needs, and when she needs something else, I go out and buy it for her from my homeschool budget.

Will reads. That's it. She reads real books, and ebooks, and messes about online and reads stuff there. When she's not reading, she's playing old-school computer games. If I bought her new computer games, she'd play them, but she gets plenty of screen time, as it is. If I bought her new books, she'd read those, but then they'd get put on our shelves and she'd go read something else.

So every year I kind of agonize over what to buy the kids and Matt that they'll really love, that will make them feel special, and I buy them, and they open them on Christmas, and they love them and say thank you and use whatever it is for a while, but then they move on with their lives and stuff sits on shelves and it seriously bums me out.

At the same time, though--AT THE EXACT SAME TIME--I have entire Pinboards and planners absolutely full of projects that I'd love to make for every single member of my family, if I just had time between school and work and family. Stuff that I want to make for Matt. Stuff that I want to make for Will. Stuff that I want to make for Syd. Just sitting there in my plans, never made because I can't scrounge up the time.

This, then, is my Christmas revelation: handmade gifts for my very own family.

Sure, I've got a couple of things bought for the family already and set aside already, so there will be a couple of store-bought gifts in the mix, but mostly, I'm going to make for them the things that I've been dreaming about making for them, and give them to them at Christmas. I've got so many ideas!

I'm going to tell you these ideas, but I'm going to trust you not to spill them to my kids, who, I assure you, do not read my blog because it's boring.

Here's one project in the making: formal portraits of Syd and her best friend, her cat, Gracie.

The first photo shoot, on a picnic blanket in our sunny backyard, went amazingly well:

Seriously, how cute are they? And you can tell--the cat was super into it!

The next set that I wanted to do was a Hogwarts photo shoot. You can bring an owl, a cat, or a toad (also apparently a rat, but not a rabbit) to Hogwarts, so I wanted a shoot in which Syd was going off to Hogwarts, with Gracie as her familiar.

I should have ironed the sheet that I duct taped to my garage door. Also... Gracie was not super into being photographed this time:

She kind of did okay, but you can tell that she's trying to get down in that last photo, and when she looks at me it's only to give me the stink-eye.

I  thought that this shoot would go better. Instead of standing on the sunny driveway, after all, Gracie was already hanging out in Syd's comfy bed with her when I spotted them and said, "Ooh, photo shoot time!" Gracie didn't have to do anything extra, and so at first it was cool:

And then she spotted the camera.

 Commence with the stink-eye:

They still turned out really cute, but I'm wondering if I should ditch the last photo shoot that I had planned for the drive-in. I also can't yet decide how I'm going to present these photos, although I'm leaning towards making her a photo book of them, as well as a large prints of my favorite shots to put on the wall by her bed.

I'll tell you something, though--putting this together is obviously taking hours upon hours longer than it would to click through Amazon to find some stuff to put under the tree, but it's so much more awesome to do. I've been wanting to take these photos forever, so making the time to do it is an actual relief, and I have no doubt in my mind that my kid is going to LOVE them, and in fact is going to cherish them forever. Hell, I'M going to cherish these forever, as well as the memories of making them.

Next up, a Choc-ola candle for Will, and fleece mermaid tail lap blankets for all three of us (well, one of them may actually be a shark...)

P.S. I share weird and wonderful crafting and homeschooling stuff all day on my Craft Knife Facebook page, because work/life separation is hard for me.

Work Plans for the Week of December 19, 2016: Food Crafting, Lots of Science, and CHRISTMAS!!!

Yes, these work plans are late. We had a day trip on Monday to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and day trips always throws off my blogging schedule, as I can only find the time to write on my personal blog on the days that I'm not doing my paid writing for CAGW.

These work plans are also a bit of a repeat. School last week went okay, but I seriously underestimated how much a business trip of Matt's would affect us. It was quite an eye-opener to realize how much I depend on my partner to get that second load of dishes done and that second load of laundry and haul the kids around to their evening activities and supervise the completion of their last bits of school so I can veg out and even turn off the TV after I fall asleep. Nothing like waking up at 3:30 am because YouTube randomly switched from my livestream of the ISS to a video on the hollow Earth conspiracy theory, not being able to get back to sleep, and then spending the entire day either chauffeuring kids or madly scrambling to make party food that we need THAT DAY and etsy orders that have to be shipped THAT DAY and checking my email to confirm the address of Will's Pony Club party and discovering that not only does it start half an hour before I thought it did, but that there's a GIFT EXCHANGE!!!

I donated a publicist's review copy of a cookie decorating book and kit to the cause. Not only can the publicist apparently just hold her breath and wait for that review that now isn't coming, but dang it, it was also going to be a Santa gift for Syd!

AND I get there to drop Will off and a co-hostess expresses (maybe slightly passive-aggressive) surprise that I'm not staying, because apparently all the other parents are staying, even though there was nothing said in any of the emails about parents being expected to or even welcome to stay. And she's the first kid there, because maybe it really does start half an hour later but there was a mistake on the email? Or I'm just really prompt? I never figured that out. And then Syd and I get home so I can make a play dough etsy order real quick and find that the dog has pooped on the rug by the door, maybe because she wasn't feeling well or maybe because we'd been in and out of the damn house all damn day and hadn't had time to play with her. And then Syd and I spend all of Will's party time making and packaging my play dough order--

I couldn't have gotten it done without my play dough chef!

--then haul the dog into the car with us (because I'm sure as hell not leaving her alone again!) to run back to get Will 15 minutes early from her party so I can go in and pretend like I'm a good, attentive mom, only to find her alone with the hostess AGAIN because all the other guests and their good, attentive moms randomly left fifteen minutes before THAT.

We drive back, get the dog in the door, and are greeted by Matt, who FINALLY got home, after a delayed flight, from his trip. I am just a teeny bit ashamed to say that I walked straight into his arms and burst into tears.

And that, Friends, is why that Friday's schoolwork became Tuesday's schoolwork, completed on Tuesday without manic energy or fuss of any kind.

Memory Work this week is mostly spelling words, because I can't make Syd do her Wordly Wise at home so we're doing it in the car, where she can't get away, instead. Books of the Day are more books from the Banned Books list and some pre-reading for the Black History Month essay contests that the kids usually enter. Other daily work includes typing practice through Typing.com, keyboard with Hoffman Academy lessons, journaling or story prompts with me, Wordly Wise for Will and Word Ladders for Syd, their current events journal (it wasn't meant to be a long-term project, but I keep extending it because I'm so pleased with how it's going), and for Will, SAT prep through Khan Academy.

Tangent: If anyone is interested in our prep plans to get Will ready to take the SAT in the spring, as a seventh grader, just ask!

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: We spent the day at the Children's Museum!

TUESDAY: Both kids are almost done with their respective semesters of Math Mammoth, with Syd finishing her final review next Monday (because yes, I am making the kids do math next week so that they can finish their respective semesters by year's end) and Will doubling up math lessons next week and finishing on Friday. They're both doing coordinate planes still, although Will's math adds in integer calculations and Syd's math adds in graphing with different types of graphs.

That's one reason why the coordinate grid foldable, although it's not as hands-on as I usually like my hands-on math to be, is so useful; the kids retain their calculating ability but often lose the terminology, so after they labeled this coordinate plane I had them put it in their school folders to keep as a reference tool.

The kids do one lesson a day in their Analytical Grammar (for Will)/Junior Analytical Grammar (for Syd); Will is currently studying adverbs, and Syd is studying prepositions. In February, after essay contest season and the National Mythology Exam, I'd like to start a packaged writing/literature unit with both kids (I'm a little embarrassed that I don't want to create my own curriculum, as that's exactly what I used to do for years as a freshman comp instructor at our local university... but I don't!), so hopefully we'll have reached a good pause point for Analytical Grammar by then.

There are so many fun activities to explore the difference between inherited and learned behavior, but we did just one more to cement the concept before moving on: the Animal Survival Scenario worksheets from this unit. I required the children to answer in complete sentences and to provide a video example to flesh out one of their claims. Will used this gorgeous video from Planet Earth to flesh out her claim that swimming is a learned behavior in polar bears.

Aphrodite and Ares are our subjects in Greek mythology this week; interestingly, D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths does not tell us the story of Aphrodite's origins, so Will helpfully read it to us from The Myths of Greece and Rome. We prefer Guerber's edition to the Bullfinch, just so you know. The trading cards are also coming along well, with the kids drawing thoughtful images on the front and writing relevant facts on the back of each.

I had thought that I would change our our literature activities by the week, but the kids are really enjoying reading and checking books off of their MENSA reading lists, so we're just going to keep running with it. I'm looking forward to graduating Will up to the next list, because she's been complaining lately that she's read everything in the children's department and most everything on the young adult shelves--and she has! I walk the adult fiction shelves with her and help her choose books sometimes, but of course mom recommendations are always suspect, so more reading lists with more books that she hasn't read are ALWAYS welcome!

WEDNESDAY: The current module in our Animal Behavior MOOC is animal communication, and after watching the introduction to the module, this day's assignment asks the kids to interact for ten minutes with a pet, then write an essay describing the animal's communication during that interaction.

Will has always been a reluctant writer, so I'm thrilled that Syd loves it so much. She's taken to the Junior Scribe badge activities with gusto, completing them all independently, although I do have vague plans to perhaps encourage her to illustrate her work and then get it printed and bound into a book... we'll see. Fortunately, Will seems surprisingly enthusiastic about earning her Leader in Action award, which requires leading an entire Girl Scout troop meeting--and if there was ever proof that Girl Scouts encourages kids to stretch themselves out of their comfort zones, this is it! She has several possibilities for activities related to the Brownie World of Water Journey, including making polymer clay raindrops, edible aquifers, seashell crabs, and terrariums, We'll be making everything except the terrariums (I forgot to buy activated charcoal) today, so that Will can evaluate each in regards to how difficult it is to make, how difficult it might be to teach, how consistent the results might be, and if it seems fun!

I continually wish that I was doing more with Story of Science, as one reading comprehension activity and one hands-on activity don't seem like enough to distill all of the interesting content from the chapters, but I also bought those Quest Books so that I could save myself the lesson prep time... Perhaps I'll sit down over our Christmas break and research more activities, or perhaps I'll learn to let it go. Regardless, we're sticking to the Quest Book for this week, so this day's activity is answering reading comprehension questions for chapters 6-7.

THURSDAY: This day's Animal Behavior MOOC videos are on signals and information and modes of communication. After watching the videos, the kids will explore the Animal Communication Project to learn more about various animals, and also research video examples that provide evidence of the claims made in the Animal Communication Project readings.

Our Story of Science demonstration on this day is changing the acidity of water, using bromothymol blue as an indicator. In order to do this demonstration, however, my good friend has to dig through all of her stuff to find her bromothymol blue that she's going to let me borrow (because doesn't everyone have lab chemicals in their pantry that they're willing to lend out like a cup of sugar?), so if it doesn't turn up, we'll put off the demonstration until it does.

My kids don't exactly realize that not everyone receives random craft kits in the mail like magic, so they're never quite as excited to review them as I am, but even they're pretty revved up about this Star Wars felt kit that we're going to test out and write about. I'm thinking we'll turn them into ornaments!

FRIDAY: As with all other instructors on the last day of school before Christmas, I don't expect to get much done today. If they can get their daily assignments and a trading card for Ares completed, then we're going to spend the rest of the day making gingerbread houses while drinking hot chocolate (mine with bourbon) and listening to Christmas music.

And then it will be Christmas!

Work Plans for the Week of December 12, 2016: Cooking and Christmas and Lots of Science!

After two weeks of a lighter schedule that helped get our little soldier through Nutcracker season, we are back for two more weeks of a full work load before we take another week off for the holidays. I kept the kids focused on the basics for the past couple of weeks--math, typing, keyboard, grammar, vocabulary, SAT prep for Will--and that turned out to be a good thing, in that the lighter schedule may have helped get Syd through the slacker phase that has made getting her to do her schoolwork just about impossible.

Let's see if it holds this week!

Interspersed with the lighter academics, I used our extra time last week to make the kids help me FINALLY put the garden to bed (newspaper covering the plant rows, an entire yard full of leaves raked and put on top of them), to go through their winter clothes (this year I finally remembered to have them do this BEFORE I take a look at their near-empty clothing bins and go panic shopping at Goodwill--they're full to bursting now!), and, of course, to do some Christmas crafting with them. Check out these beaded ornament hangers that we make every year because I'm too cheap to go buy any!

Super pretty, right? And all they're made of is stash jewelry wire and beads that I'm dying to get rid of, anyway.

Memory Work for the week will be a lot of review, as it wasn't a focus for the past two weeks. Books of the Day are mostly taken from the 2015-2016 Banned Books List (when this comes out every year, I immediately request them all from our public library, and suggest the purchase of the few that the library doesn't have), so Will is reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and This Book is Gay; I'm reading City of Thieves and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Will and I are both reading Looking for Alaska, and both kids are reading the picture books I am Jazz, My Princess Boy, This Day in June, and King and King (plus its sequel). I'm also pre-reading Just One Day to see if it would be a good fit for Will.

Daily work for both kids this week includes Analytical Grammar for Will and Junior Analytical Grammar for Syd, Wordly Wise (or a word ladder for Syd; she loathes her Wordly Wise, and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about that yet), ten minutes a day of journaling or imaginative writing, typing practice, keyboard practice or a Hoffman Academy lesson, SAT prep on Khan Academy for Will, and the last week of their current events journal.

And here's the rest of our week!

MONDAY: We're not ready to start a new poem this week, and I don't have another literature unit that I'm ready to implement, so the kids can work on their MENSA reading lists some more. I try to keep several books from this list--in both written and audio formats--on our library shelves, so choosing the next selection should be easy.

Both kids are actually in just about the same subject in their Math Mammoth units, with Will studying positive and negative integers and applying that to the coordinate plane, and Syd learning how to graph on the coordinate plane and then moving into other types of graphs. This will play well into our later hands-on math enrichment!

The Animal Behavior MOOC is much more dry than the Sharks one, so I've been having trouble keeping Syd's attention on it. Fortunately, this week they're covering inherited vs. learned behaviors, and there are lots of hands-on activities to help cement those concepts. On this day, after watching videos on how animals learn, the kids will be challenged to make a puzzle toy for one of their pets, and then encouraged to observe the pet as it uses it. I think that Syd will really enjoy this one!

There's a lot that can be done with Story of Science, but I don't want to still be doing it into 2018, so I'm having to be a little more selective with the hands-on activities that we do than I've often been--this is why we've actually been finishing units of study this year! This week, we'll be covering chapters 4 and five, and the Quest Book activities are simple question-and-answer worksheets that will make sure the kids have a solid grasp of the content before we move into the fun activities.

I assigned Hephaestus a couple of weeks ago, but Syd was so busy with The Nutcracker that she didn't get to it, so this assignment is mainly for her. Will never finished her Hades trading card, however, so she, too, can do some catch-up during this time.

Syd is finished with ballet for the semester, and Will with Chinese, but Will and I have one last week of fencing, and she has one last week of ice skating, so we'll still be out and about with extracurriculars this week.

TUESDAY: I plan to blow the kids' minds on this day, by showing them how to measure the height of something really tall (in this case, the drive-in movie screen next door) using ratios. If we're not freezing our booties off, I'll then show them how to do it with trigonometry, and we can compare results.

This day's Animal Behavior MOOC video on inherited vs. learned behavior also lends itself to a couple of fun activities to illustrate how these traits affect us. The kids were supposed to have done self-portraits in their art lesson with Matt this weekend, and were then going to label them with their own inherited and learned behaviors, but I don't know what happened to Sunday, but it wasn't art! We'll table that to the weekend, I suppose.

Playgroup and fencing will take us through much of the rest of the day.

WEDNESDAY: Some of the rest of this week in the Animal Behavior MOOC is too difficult for Syd, so Will has some extra work to complete on this day. With her critical reading skills, she should be able to handle reading abstracts of scientific papers to evaluate their rigor. Both kids, however, should be able to handle the reading comprehension activity from this Understanding by Design curriculum. The curriculum is written for the fourth grade, but I've had no problem adapting it for my fifth- and seventh-graders this week. 

I've got a bit of cooking for others to do this week, so in true homeschooler style, I'm turning it into a Home Ec assignment and making the kids help me! On this day, I've volunteered us to contribute a meal to a family in our homeschool circle who've just had a new baby. I've (gratefully!) received one too many casserole/pasta bake in my time, so my own rule of thumb for a meal train is a large cheese pizza from our favorite local pizza shop, plus a homemade fruit salad and a home-baked treat. For this family, I think we'll bake brownies!

I need to set aside some time to focus on Syd's Girl Scout goals, since she'll be bridging next year, but for now, I'll let her pick a new badge to get started on while Will and I focus on her Cadette Breath Journey and the Leader in Action Award that she's hoping to earn. For this award, she has to lead a meeting for Brownie Girl Scouts--what a happy coincidence that we happen to be part of a multi-level troop and have our very own Brownies! There are going to be LOTS of valuable skills to be learned from leading a meeting for younger girls.

THURSDAY: I can't let a week in December go by without some sort of holiday craft, so we're going to be sneakily practicing symmetry and regular polygons by making large-scale popsicle stick snowflakes to hang from our high ceilings.

One more activity and the Module Exam for Will, and that's Module 2 of the Animal Behavior MOOC done and done! 

Just between us, I'm hoping that Will's horseback riding gets cancelled for cold temps, because I am ready to have this semester's extracurriculars also done and done!

FRIDAY: We are out and about for much of the day on this day, especially poor Will, the most introverted among us. We're attending a school matinee of the local theater's holiday show in the morning, and then the afternoon brings Will's last ice skating class of the session and a holiday party for her Pony Club. You'll never guess what I'm bringing to the party...

Fruit salad and dessert! I SUPER want to make these horse-themed cupcakes, so that's what the kids and I will do during our brief interval of at-home time. Hmmm.... perhaps we should make the cupcakes the night before.

The other work for the day should be independent and efficient--there's a coordinate grid foldable to cement the vocabulary, and a research project, again from that Understanding Design unit, that asks the kids to figure out what inherited and learned behaviors allow different animals to thrive in different habitats.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Gingerbread houses! The New Star Wars! Housecleaning! Yardwork!

And then one more week until Christmas break!

Homeschool STEM Fair 2016: The Kid Built a Table

The main reason why I wanted to host a STEM Fair for our homeschool group, rather than a Science Fair, is the options. Kids could do a typical science project, but they could also do something with engineering, technology, or math. I already encourage the kids to interpret the theme as broadly as they'd like, in order to make the fair as accessible as possible to the wide variety of homeschooling kids who we have in our community, and so when Syd said that she wanted to build a table as her STEM Fair project, I didn't even blink.

You probably know by now that when this kid makes a plan, she makes a PLAN! There is a detailed vision behind everything that she creates, whether it's a four-page itinerary for her birthday party or a full-color, multi-sketch mock-up of a dress design. You shouldn't be surprised, then, that Syd's table design was impeccable. I'll let her tell you about it, but be assured, before you hear her build notes, that she came up with this design completely on her own, and built it, other than asking for some assistance with figuring out the drill, completely on her own:



And yes, I DID carry that table back and forth from the car, across the library, weaving my way carefully through the security gate, and into the conference room where the STEM Fair was held.

But back to the kid--isn't that table incredible? I let her pick out exactly the lumber that she wanted from the hardware store, and her speech doesn't lie--she knew exactly what she wanted, in exactly those lengths, and she sat there on the garage floor and fiddled around with layout until she discovered, completely on her own, how to screw the table planks onto the end supports and then the table legs onto that. It was cold outside, though, so I let her do the actually construction in the family room:

I mean, we still have sawdust everywhere from the construction of the built-in shelves, so why not?

This table now stands outside on the back deck, and is a crucial component of Syd's mud kitchen. I had myself a perfect moment yesterday, as I was on my way across the room with a mug of green tea spiked with honey and lemon, and I spotted Syd through the sliding glass door, deeply immersed in her mud kitchen play. She had a couple of toy ponies out there, and she was talking to them, or making them talk, as she patted down a moss-covered mud pie into a metal tin that I'd bought her specifically for mud pie making from Goodwill a couple of weeks ago. I looked at her, looked at my mug of tea, thought about my other kid on her way with her father to go clean tack at the stables with some other Pony Club kids, and thought, "Hey, I'm doing this right!"

There's a lot of self-doubt involved in parenting, and a LOT of self-doubt involved in homeschooling, but for that one moment, watching a kid play at a table that she built herself, everything, including me, was perfect.

Work Plans for the Week of January 19, 2016

I LOVE Monday holidays! You get that three-day weekend to look forward to the entire week before, then you get a three-day weekend, and THEN you get a short work week! It's like a bonus holiday!

And that's why I'm pretty stoked to be starting this week already at Tuesday. Last week's school week was a little hairy; the kids had been away from a regular school schedule for quite a while, and I'm definitely putting more work on their schedules now than I was in the last couple of weeks before that break. I know that it's an appropriate amount of work for them IF they focus, but wow, did they struggle with focus last week! We didn't actually get everything from last week's work plan finished until yesterday, so this week's goal is for sure to get all their daily work finished on the day that it is assigned. If nothing else, their Momma needs a homework-free weekend to recover!

Books of the Day this week include a few living picture books about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust (the older kid has a field trip coming up to hear from a Holocaust survivor, so I'm trying to prepare her for this), a couple of books on habitats and ecosystems (the younger kid is working on her Animal Habitats Girl Scout badge), a Cynthia Rylant novel for the younger kid and a Dolores Huerta biography for the older kid, and a couple of collections of comic strips that hopefully will expand the children's horizons beyond the VERY well-worn, Garfield, Foxtrot, and Calvin and Hobbes.

The younger kid's Project of the Week is to do more baking (or, rather, to do more decorating, as it's pretty clear that covering sweet treats with icing and candy is her real goal). The older kid's Project of the Week is to finish setting up her online Girl Scout cookie store (she can ship across the US! And take donations of Girl Scout cookies for US soldiers! Message me with your email address if you'd like her to add you to her invitation list!), and to explore more marketing opportunities for her cookies. She actually checked out a couple of business books from the library this weekend, and initiated a conversation with me about how she could "empower" the younger kid to sell more cookies--clearly she's also reading those books!

I may have mentioned last week that in these dark winter days, I'm feeling the need to add more sensory experiences to the children's environment, so last week I got out the kinetic sand and left it enticingly on the table:

I'm still vacuuming kinetic sand off the floor, however, so this week I'm simply setting out our Mason jar of homemade waxed yarn. Maybe I'll keep alternating a week of a messy sensory experience with a week of a non-messy one?

And here's the rest of our week!


TUESDAY: The older kid just has a little more fraction conversion work to do in her Math Mammoth before she can review and move on, while the younger kid will spend the week measuring length in her Math Mammoth. Usually, I like to spend the first lesson of the week with some hands-on math enrichment, but first I need the kids to get back into the habit of working well on their math curriculum without all the stalling and complaints and plain-old tantrums that I got last week, ugh.

I'm attempting to guide each kid through earning a Girl Scout badge each month--they're both WAY into earning Girl Scout badges, but still need some mentoring to help them finish badge work. This month, we're working on the Junior Animal Habitats badge and the Cadette Animal Helpers badge. For the Animal Helpers badge, we'll be watching the PBS Nature series that explores the evolution of the dog as a human companion, and for the Animal Habitats badge, the children will be making a to-do list of everything that they need to do to make an appropriate habitat for a pet dog.

Yes, Friends, this *may* be the Year of the Pet Dog!

The kids both loved the first lesson in the Your Kids: Cooking curriculum that we started last week. The Your Kids: Cooking website has a set of free extension recipes for this lesson, so the kids can choose some of them to create this week. We'll be eating blintzes and Monte Cristos for dinner all week, hopefully--yum!

Today, we have both our weekly homeschool group's playgroup, AND the older kid and I have our first fencing class! I didn't make room for it in our weekly work plans the way that I usually do, because taking Monday off means that the rest of our week's schedule needs to be somewhat strict, but I feel that the rest of our day is light enough that the children should still have plenty of free time.

Daily work this week includes a page of cursive, daily review of "No Man is an Island," with the goal of finishing its memorization this week, and daily chores. We've been busy enough that I deleted any "special" chores this week; I'd forgotten, when I wrote last week's work plans, that the kids are also spending a good hour every day selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. I just need to resign myself to the fact that our house will be made of chaos until cookie season is finished.

WEDNESDAY: I've decided to use Joy Hakim's History of Us as a spine for our American Revolution unit. It not only covers the American Revolution in excellent detail, but, by moving more quickly through the books that come immediately before and after the one on American Revolution, we'll also be able to put the war into historical context. So, for now, we're moving quickly through Making Thirteen Colonies, reading the first four chapters on this day, and then zooming in on the makeup of a colonial town. We won't be visiting Jamestown on our American Revolution road trip this summer, alas, as I don't think that we'll be going as far south as Virginia, but there's both an online game and a free downloadable paper model that should give the kids a good idea of what it, and a typical town of the era, looked like.

The younger kid's ballet starts up again on this evening--she's thrilled to get back on the dance floor! Mental note to myself: is her uniform clean? Surely not...

THURSDAY: Although we really are just studying this particular chapter of our science textbook in order to get the background information about atoms and molecules that the kids will need to understand the molecular structure of rocks and minerals, I'm going to devote one more week to the atoms and elements lesson. Last week, we studied atoms, and this week, we'll study the Periodic Table of Elements. I want the children to be able to read and decipher the table, so we'll be playing this free downloadable card game, with a couple of modifications, to help them become more familiar with it.

Instead of a STEM activity at home, on this afternoon I'll be giving the kids the run of our local hands-on museum. They can explore and learn, my friend and I can chit-chat--win and WIN!

I've been thinking for a while now that Will would LOVE to join our local chapter of Pony Club, but a kid can only have so many extracurriculars, you know? Nevertheless, this semester may finally be the semester, even if she has to drop Mandarin class for it, sigh. Either way, I'll at least send her to the planning meeting to suss it out.

FRIDAY: The older kid, at least, really loves our study of the 2016 presidential election. She is interested in all things government and politics, and has already expressed the desire to be a lawyer (Matt and I think that her real dream job is dictator to a small island nation, but you almost have to be born into that job). On this day, the kids will continue their reading to learn about what makes a politician liberal and conservative, and then they'll have to research each of the presidential candidates to discover which are which. They'll also have to point to primary source evidence--not just a third person's opinion!--to prove each evaluation.

I think that I have just about completed my lesson plans for our female reproductive system study! On this day, we'll be memorizing the anatomy of the female and female reproductive systems, both with diagrams that are also coloring pages, and by watching the Crash Course episodes on the female reproductive system and the male reproductive system. I previewed both videos, of course, and while there are a couple of visuals that are *maybe* a little bluer than I'd prefer, the information in these videos is by far the most thorough.

FYI: Every time that I say that we're reading something or watching something for our lesson, you can assume that there's also a lecture/discussion on that material. A discussion requires that the children engage with the material in a way that reading or watching doesn't, and a lecture, even if it's just me explaining the same concept in different words, will always inspire the kids to ask questions and become curious about things that they simply don't when only watching or reading.

Finally, on this day we'll be completing the second lesson in the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Program. I still don't totally know if I'll actually have the children write "novels," but this lesson requires a child to form opinions, backed up with textual evidence, about books that they've read, and that's a great skill to master!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Ballet, ice skating, chess club, shilling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. Playing in the snow, if the forecast is correct. Watching The Martian on DVD and eating pizza, if I have my way!

As for me, I'll spend this week organizing a LOT of Girl Scout stuff--it's a busy season for Girl Scouts!--completing a few writing assignments, working on a quilt, and seriously contemplating moving my work bench and circular saw indoors so that I can make some shelves. Is that crazy? All the sawdust!

Still.... shelves!!!!!!!

My Latest: Poop and Libraries (and the Antique Furniture Hiding in My Outbuildings)

for Insteading, a discussion of humanure composting and wastewater gardening

and for Crafting a Green World, an article about a little kid forced to shut down his Little Free Library

Here on the home front, there's not as much unpacking going on as you'd think--can't really put things away when there's nothing to put stuff ON, or IN, you know--but I've got a dresser half-painted in the garage and my lockers half-painted on the driveway, and the card catalogue also out there waiting its turn, and tomorrow evening, perhaps, before we walk across our yard to go watch the new Transformers movie at the drive-in (I'm torn about letting the kids watch this one--on the one hand, I think it'll will be too scary and too long for them, but on the other hand, I didn't let them watch X-Men with us last weekend, and you can't let kids live next door to a drive-in and not let them go to ANY of the movies!!!), I'm going to take Matt on a tour of the old garage and the even older general store, and point out to him all of the antique, unfinished wooden storage units that I want him to move inside for me. 

Namely these--

behind the egregious photo of my stove--toy shelves for the living room and children's bedroom?

MASSIVE dresser with tons of these little drawers that just sit on the shelves--wants to live in my bedroom and hold my pretty things?

feed bin? Super gross right now, but could hold a hell of a lot of fabric all nicely folded and out of sight

display shelves from the general store--maybe these would be better toy/treasure shelves, given the kids' insistence on displaying ALL THE THINGS

And I haven't even been into the attic yet! It requires bringing a ladder in from the garage, which I'm not up for, but the kids and Matt did it once. The kids tell me that there's a fire truck up there, and Matt says that there are Christmas decorations from who knows when. 

I'll check it out when I've got the downstairs sorted...

Meet our New House

It finally happened.

I feel like I've probably been going on for years about our off-and-on, more-casual-than-not house search. We've always loved our current location, even if we don't love our current house, so for any house to ever match the convenience and joy of living across the street from the park and a mile from downtown, it would have to be just about perfect. It would have to have some acreage, partly grass and partly wooded. It should have extra space for ranging beyond our property lines. It must have privacy. It would have to have, if not necessarily more square footage, more open areas for living. It should have personality, although hopefully not a wonky and spiteful one.

It would basically have to be the house that we just agreed to buy.

I was too excited, and the kids were too wild, for me to take great pictures of our recent visit to the house that we're buying, but, for what it's worth, here are some of my favorite parts of it:

The property has woods, albeit a sort of brambly, overgrown woods that no one has tromped in for decades:

The kids and I explored some of these woods on one morning of our visit, however, and even picking our way around thorns and through brush, we already found so many treasures--a sinkhole, a creek, a jack in the pulpit, a tree growing out of the bottom of an overturned, rusted-through metal washtub.

I've assigned the kids to trail-blazing after we move in, and they've made their own plans for a secret fort where they can spend the night, and a secondary clubhouse, and also a tree house--basically their own little primeval village.

The property has fields, and a substantial amount of them, enough for a giant garden next year:

The current owner says that this field used to be fenced, and horses and cows lived there, so the ground should be very fertile. My dream for it this summer is to fence in an area for a garden next year, then set the chickens free to roam inside and do all my tilling and fertilizing for me.

The property has several odd little buildings on it, including a garage, an actual smokehouse (perhaps next year's chicken coop?), an actual root cellar--

I have no idea what we'll do with this. Do you?

--and a just-about-to-fall-down 1930s general store:

Yes, I'm serious. If it stays standing this year, we can hopefully budget to get it renovated next year--or at least get the floor stabilized enough to be able to walk inside without probably having the whole building collapse on you.

We have a goodly amount of space between us and our next-door neighbors on one side, but on the other side, we do have a neighbor pretty close:

Yes, I'm serious about this one, too. The current owners of the house had owned this drive-in since 1955. They recently sold it to another family, who plans to open it again this month. Matt and I have taken the kids to this drive-in ever since they were born--when they were babies and toddlers, they'd actually fall asleep on the drive TO the drive-in, and then Matt and I would feel like we were dating all over again, sitting on lawn chairs watching a movie with our kids sound asleep in the car behind us. 

My main goal the second that we've moved in is to somehow convince the owners of the drive-in that it would be an excellent idea to let us drag our lawn chairs over to watch movies for free anytime we want. Doesn't that seem like something that you would want to let us do if you owned a drive-in?

Okay, if you're still lingering, rubbernecking our insanity, then now you get to see the actual house!

This is the foyer: 

It goes across the entire back of the house, both the 1980s addition that doubles the square footage, and the original 1940s portion. It opens up to the main door from the driveway AND the back deck, and has two doors leading from it to other parts of the house. I had been hoping to set up an aerial silks rig for the kids (it's the biggest item on their wish list) across one of those beams, but it turns out they're just decorative. Maybe that beam up top will bear weight, or maybe we're just destined to have an aerial silks rig in the living room. The washer and dryer are on the main level in this house--yay!--so the kids can start doing their own laundry, ideally. We also have room for a bench by the front door, and the plan is to set up a system to neatly store shoes and other outerwear here.

From this foyer, there are honest-to-gawd windows that look into the 1940s part of the house:

I guarantee that my kids will never use a door to get from one room to the other.

The kitchen has its own table!

Think of it--a table, just for eating, right in the kitchen! AND there's room for another table in the living room:

The video game stuff that Matt and the kids like could go in here, and I don't know what else. It would be nice to have a place to watch family movies, and certainly some of the children's toys will need to be stored in here. I'm not in love with the carpet, so perhaps this is the place to put the table for messy art activities, with a cheap rug underneath. This is also likely where we'll install the aerial silks rig, if it doesn't work in the foyer. When the girls are older, though, we might give this room more over just to them, so they can have a more private place to socialize with their friends.

The kids' new bedroom is a little smaller than their current one, but it has a big closet, and won't need so many shelves as they have now, because our dream is to shelve the entire family's books together in the big family room. It does have sunny windows--

--one of which leads to a concrete patio where they can play and we can have a container garden.

The kids will also have their own bathroom, thank goodness:

On the other side of the bathroom is another room just that size that I would like to use as my study/studio space. See the skylight?

I'll also need to upgrade that lighting fixture at some point, because that other window looks out onto the foyer, not the outside. I'd love to not store our homeschooling materials in this room, because that's what takes up the majority of my current study/studio, but I'm not sure where else they'd go. This house does have two humongous walk-in closets, so perhaps one closet *could* be dedicated to homeschool materials, with materials currently in use stored elsewhere?

Perhaps here, in the big family room?

We'd like to put a permanent space for the children's computer and our printer here, perhaps underneath a loft bed that we already own, with a reading space on top and large bookshelves on each side. My dream is to shelve the entire family's books together, organized and alphabetized like a library. The space is also big enough that I'd like to score a huge conference table from our university's surplus equipment store, large enough that we could have a couple of projects going at once AND have space for schoolwork. Our big dorm couch can go here, and our record cabinet. I'd also like to attractively store our large collection of games and puzzles here , and the children's creative, large-format toys that love to have space and that the adults love to jump in and play with, too--building blocks, racecar tracks, etc. The room also looks out onto a large back deck:

It will be a friendly space to live our days on in nice weather.

Matt and I plan to upgrade to a king-sized bed in our humongous master bedroom:

We'll actually have room for nightstands to hold our books, and my treadmill could go here and not be squashed for space.

This room has its own big bathroom, with a giant walk-in handicapped shower (that wants to be renovated into a large jetted tub, perhaps?) and TWO giant, walk-in closets.

So that's our house! Our hope is to be settled in by the end of May, so we can start stressing about who on earth will want to buy our current house.

Ideally, someone who really wants a hallway with handmade comic book wallpaper, and a basement that has a giant timeline on it, and kid-painted rainbows on many surfaces...