Her Bi-Weekly Book Collection

We go to the public library usually twice a week. Before we leave, I ask Willow to sort through her chapter books and stack the ones that she's read by the door. Here's her stack for today, about the same size as usual:

Will does read many books cover to cover in one sitting, but she also has an assortment of half-read books all over the house, picked up and reshelved by any passing parent, and she doesn't seem to mind losing track of and then re-finding and re-finding her place in books, either, so any particular book in the stack may have been read in hours or weeks.

Returning books to the library is generally one of Matt's homeschool chores, as is picking up held items from the library's drive-up window. You can go online and request that any library item be held for you to pick up at the library drive-up, so this is generally how I choose all of our non-fiction and homeschool books, from dinosaurs to Pompeii to how peanut butter is made, as well as related software programs and audiobooks and music CDs and DVDS, as well as my own novels and cookbooks and craft books and parenting books and homeschooling idea books, as well as all of Matt's stuff. Just this morning I taught Willow how to use the online catalogue, too, sooooo.... Yeah, it's Matt's chore.

At the library, Syd picks her own picture books, and she's permitted to choose one DVD, too, and I might check out some of the magazines that I've grabbed to read while the girls play, and Will and I both work to choose her next huge stack of books. She looks through the shelves of first chapter books while I look in the regular juvenile fiction section for longer books. It's a challenge, often, to find regular juvenile fiction that's appropriate for a six-year-old--just because she can read a more sophisticated book doesn't mean that she's interested in (or ready for!) more sophisticated themes. We've had good luck with Nancy Drew so far, and the Black Stallion series, and the Misty of Chincoteague series, and the Little House series, and the Moffetts series, and sometimes the Boxcar Children books, although those get a bit repetitive (the number of times that the children speak the word "boxcar" really gets on my nerves). So far Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, and E.B. White are no-gos. Someday soon, we'll all have the pleasure of their company, I hope.



Right this second, Sydney is already in bed, listening to a Magic Tree House audiobook. It's later than usual, so it sounds like Matt skipped the night-night books and poetry in favor of just getting the kids in bed with their eyes closed, but she and I had an extra-long time this morning with Magic School Bus and That's Good! That's Bad! and Robert Frost and Eyewitness Skeleton, not to mention the Readable Feasts program at the library this evening in which Ms. Janet read books about Alaska to the children and then they all made baked Alaska together, so Syd's happy to simply lie down for a change. As I write this, Matt's telling Willow, for the fifth time, to put down her book and get into bed, and his voice just got lower, which means that firm speaking is afoot.

After the girls are in bed I'll sew for a while (I'd like to get Will's pants patched with their heart appliques tonight, because I know she'd like to wear them to our tour of the fire station tomorrow morning), and then I'll close up shop, turn out the lights in the study, hop into bed, and read for a while.

Runs in the family, this book thing.

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...

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.