Work Plans for the Week of March 24, 2014: Play

Syd spent much of last week learning how to make and break codes and edit Zoo Tycoon with Will, so whatever we didn't get to last week, I just left in place for this week!

MONDAY: Latin is one of the subjects that Will always chooses to do with Syd--somehow, those workbook pages that were such agony when required don't merit a peep of protest when they're chosen. Syd's keyboard lesson is again from Hoffman Academy, who, I am thrilled to see, has added more video lessons. I'm pretty stoked that we can learn more at home before I have to make a decision about formal classes. Syd also ADORES Mr. Hoffman and his lessons, so she loves keyboard. Will, on the other hand, hasn't picked up the recorder since the day that I stopped giving her work plans; we need to have a conversation about this, to see where she wants to go with music, because I do want her to study some instrument.

We didn't get to the skip counting board last Friday (but Syd did spend a LONG time creating and translating "secret" codes on that day, so there's her math enrichment and logic skill building), so I put it down again for Monday. I also read another Pippi book to Syd, and then had her write a letter to Pippi Longstocking, care of the theater where we saw her play a couple of weeks ago. Syd LOVED this project, and it turned out super cute, too--she asked Pippi what her real name was, told her all the things that she liked to pretend to be, described in detail her favorite part of the play (a scene that didn't actually include Pippi--oops!), and wrote the names of our three cats in every possible order for her ("My cats' names are Ballantine and Gracie and Spots or Ballantine and Spots and Gracie or Gracie and Ballantine and Spots or...). I'm curious to see if the theater passes the letter on to the actress and if she writes back--hopefully she's not *too* overwhelmed with fan mail?

Both kids also seriously worked their butts off at our volunteer gig on Monday--I have NEVER seen them work so hard! They stocked cans and granola bars and frozen meat and milk and yogurt and produce, including a ton of really heavy stuff. They helped repackage pasta (some stuff comes in giant bulk bags, and we split it into smaller portions to serve more people). They organized their bookshelf and stocked more books (someone brought in even more books last week!). Syd read to a little boy. They normally do all that, but with plenty of time spent reading quietly or coloring or playing together, but yesterday they hardly even took a break. It was wonderful to watch them so dedicated and focused, and I felt really proud of them.

TUESDAY: The kids have a playdate for this entire morning (right now they're playing hide-and-seek downstairs, with a gentleman's agreement that no one will hide in the closet where we keep the litterbox), so nothing will get accomplished until afternoon, but then we've got First Language Lessons, which both kids LOVE, and math, which Syd is fine with and Will tolerates much better these days (even though she IS spending the week doing the long-threatened Kumon multiplication drill workbook), and that documentary on natural Indiana that's been on the work plans for weeks--surprising, since the kids usually adore documentaries, and I actually want to add more of them to our days, but they've been so involved in active play and their own busy plans recently that I just don't think they want to sit down long enough to watch this. It's also snowing right now, which means that we're not going to make casts of animal tracks today, either, but on a family hike this weekend--without the supplies to make casts, of COURSE--we saw some good animal tracks, so on the first nice day this week we'll head back there, plaster of Paris in our backpacks, and finally make that project happen.

One thing that I like about homeschooling is that I get to put what are essentially chores on the schoolwork plans, instead of rushing to try to do them after school and extracurriculars, so today I also want the kids to figure out their birthday presents for a buddy's birthday party this weekend. I have kind of strict rules for birthday party presents--You can either make your friend a gift, buy your friend a gift with your own money, or give your friend something of your own--so making/buying/figuring out what to sacrifice does take enough time and effort to justify being a "work" for the day.

WEDNESDAY: Horseback riding lessons begin again! The kids couldn't be more stoked. I also *may* put Will back in aerial silks class, because she says her thumb isn't sore anymore, but I'm terrified that she'll accidentally rip off a big scab or her entire thumbnail during class and cause an "incident," so we'll see...

THURSDAY: Oh, my goodness, this last Girl Scout Birthday Week project seems like it will never get done! I may have to wave the Birthday Week patches temptingly in front of the children on this day, because I know they want them deeply. To be fair, Will worked on other Girl Scout badges for I can't even tell you how many hours last week--she's simultaneously earning her Animal Tracks, Detective, Inside Government, and Geocaching badges--and Syd worked on her Potter badge, so Girl Scouts is still leading them into some really enriching, engaging learning experiences, but I know that regular sense of completion and accomplishment goes a long way towards making it as fun as they find it to be.

Since we just had a Bible chapter in The Story of the World, and since Easter and Passover are coming up, I thought we'd spend some time in the next few weeks exploring some myths from world religions. We're reading about Creation myths this week, and then we might focus in on Jewish and Christian myths related to the upcoming holidays. I'll tell you one thing about children's religious education: it includes a LOT of crafts! Fortunately, Syd enjoys crafting, so I think this will be a lot of fun for her. Will doesn't always enjoy crafting, so I think she'll appreciate the ability to choose her own level of participation.

FRIDAY: Last Friday was a beautiful day, so the kids just played and played and we didn't get much of our formal schoolwork accomplished. This Friday may end up being just as beautiful, especially after being so chilly earlier in the week, so we'll just see what ends up getting done. I'd like us to begin Indiana history, after spending some time studying natural Indiana, so we're starting A History of US, which I'm pretty excited about. I "think" I'm going to skip around to the chapters that relate directly to Indiana, but if we like the book as much as I hope we're going to, I may just add it wholemeal to our curriculum. Anyway, on this day we begin with the Bering Land Bridge, and we'll be using a cool ipad app that allows us to see historical geography to research what the Bering Land Bridge actually must have looked like.

For our regular history, we'll be doing the mapwork in The Story of the World Activity Book for chapter seven, but we've actually spent so much time exploring Mesopotamia in earlier chapters that I'm already researching for chapter eight. Perhaps this is how we'll eventually begin to move faster through the book--we'll just, at some point, have done all the cool projects that there are to do! Math class is back this week, and the couple of leftover assignments from last Friday should finish off our day... if I can get the kids to come inside long enough to do them, which I'm not counting on.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: It's going to be a busy Saturday, with an all-day nature class for the kids followed immediately by a birthday party for a buddy. So even though I'd like to plan hiking or rock climbing or some such family adventure on Sunday, we may just goof around and play at home, with a few breaks for enforced yardwork.

Small Town Famous

Even though I made Matt promise to not let me enroll the children in ANY OTHER SUMMER CAMPS this year (sleep-away camp and our big road trip seem like plenty of adventure/expenditure this summer), there are always so many cute and cool and interesting and enriching summer camps on offer--rock climbing camp! horseback riding camp! acting camp! Humane Society camp! archaeology camp! golf camp!--that I nevertheless pored through our local summer camp book that came in the newspaper a few weeks ago, exclaiming over and then having to remind myself not to book every single camp.

As I was carefully reading the entries on one page, trying to decide if maybe I could make an exception for art museum camp, I found my eyes repeatedly drawn to one particular image, and yet it took more than a minute of glancing at it, reading some more, then glancing at it again--

--before I realized, "Oh! We're IN that photo!" It must have been taken in the fall, while Matt was away at a conference. The kids were sad that he'd missed their horseback riding show, so even though I didn't feel like getting out of the house and into the car again, to cheer them up I took them to a children's event at the IU Art Museum.

I had clearly forgotten all about that trip, since I distinctly remember late this winter beating myself up about completely neglecting art history and art appreciation in the children's education. Ah, well... that at least spurred me into redemption; I scheduled what turned out to be a AMAZING field trip for my homeschool group to that very art museum a few weeks ago, and this weekend our whole family is spending the day at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (a place that I have not taken the children since, shockingly, 2009!), including watching an aerial silks show!

With an aerial silks show, make-and-take art projects, a family-friendly tour, and a quick couple of hours spent afterwards at the nearby children's museum, this trip to the art museum will be a raging success.

I may have been gritting my teeth while I wrote that last part.

Cake and Ice Cream and Calorie Expenditure

Last week, we celebrated the 102nd anniversary of the Girl Scouts by making cake and ice cream from scratch. The kids and I made our go-to, super easy, mix-in-the-pan chocolate sheetcake (for icing, Will took the blogger's advice to scatter chocolate chips over the warm cake, let them melt, then spread them--YUM!). The kids and Matt made ice cream in our ice cream ball--


--and then we all sat down in a circle for 20 minutes or so and rolled it back and forth to each other:

It weighs something like a medicine ball when it's filled with the ice cream ingredients, salt, and ice, and I guess rolling it around is a pretty good workout for a kid, because later, after the kids had eaten some cake and ice cream, and before I put them to bed, I found Will like this:

All tuckered out, the little lamb.

I also, because it's too chilly to climb onto my house and shout it from the rooftop, am going to tell you that I weighed myself yesterday, and after eleven months of studiously working to change the way I exercise and eat (I use a BodyMedia armband to keep track of my activity, and My Fitness Pal to keep track of my calories and nutrients), I now weigh what I weighed when I got pregnant with Syd, for the first time since that particular weigh-in. That's 35 pounds that I've lost since the middle of last April. I can also run a mile without stopping, for the first time EVER. I run the slowest mile ever, but I'm gradually ramping up my speed, and right now my slowest mile ever is almost three full minutes faster than I ran it when I accomplished my first mile run. 

Here are the other activities that I'm also working on:

• I want to keep increasing the speed at which I run my mile. I want to run with other adult humans one day, and they're not going to want to run this slowly.
• I'm teaching myself how to pogo using Will's stunt pogo stick. When I first began working to change the way I exercised and ate, I was heavier than the stick's maximum weight allowance. Now I'm fifteen pounds under it!
• I'm teaching myself how to shoot a basket. Matt teases me because I only shoot granny style, and only from the free throw line, but I'm convinced that eventually my muscle memory will let me shoot flawlessly from that exact spot, and then I'll pick another spot to work on.
• I'm working on doing a pull-up. We bought a pull-up bar for our kitchen doorway a few weeks ago, and now everybody practices on it off and on all day, every day. Will's the most dedicated, and she's improved massively!

Anybody got any other good zero-cost, zero-pressure, active challenges I could take on? 

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Cool Math Games

We are all multiplication tables all the time lately. I am ready for this multiplication table memorization to happen already, so I've taken the kids to full immersion learning.

Want to know what we've got for breakfast? Well, what's 4x8?

Going somewhere in the car? Let's recite multiplication tables the whole way there!

Lied to me about brushing your teeth? That's a 6x table offense, kiddo.

We play multiplication games, such as Roll 'n Multiply, multiplication dominoes, and this awesome-fun DIY Multiplication Touch game that you can make yourself (I've also got a round-up of other DIY math games and manipulatives this week):

We've completed art projects, such as the entire village of "multiplication houses" that Syd and I made on Monday, and dot marker arrays.

The kids each wrote a full, loooooooong factor chart on butcher paper.

I've yet to finish making the hands-on decanomial square for them to assemble, but mat board is 30% off at Hobby Lobby this week!

I've yet to wield flash cards at them, but I have an entire set printed and waiting to be cut out. They're coming!

And if Will's not fully adept by next week, when her math curriculum moves into a place in which she must be adept in order to continue (she can calculate in her head so quickly and easily that she's never bothered with memorizing the multiplication tables, but that extra couple of seconds to figure out 6x8=48 is going to start to seriously add up now that she's moving into more complicated, multi-step calculations), then I'm going to make her do Kumon multiplication drills every day instead of Math Mammoth; it's very much the stick rather than carrot, but I bet it'll get it done!

But for today, at least, math, other than my random questions and forced recitations, is finished. Will has since played Zoo Tycoon, and built a real-life Zoo Tycoon out of building blocks in the middle of our main walking path, and is currently immersed in Day #2 of the observational training required for her Girl Scout Detective badge. Syd got drawn into zoo play for a while, and is now sitting down in front of a stellar late breakfast of an orange, strawberry yogurt, and tapioca pudding. After that I need to corral her for the grammar that Will and I did yesterday while she was in the bathroom making an aquarium for her toy animals. After that, the park if it's not raining (it's going to rain). After that, fingerprinting. After that, Stage Fright on a Summer Night. After that, homemade pizza!

It's looking to be another wonderful day!

Drawing with Children: Draw Me a Lion

The kids are well-used to the instructional style in Drawing With Children by now, so it's a simple thing for them to get set up and settle down to a lesson.

In this lesson, we were to follow the author's written and illustrated instructions for drawing a simplified lion, and then place it into a scene of our choice, including embellishments and creative details, and filling the page.

Syd and I got started on the lesson first (Will was outside reading, but promised that she'd join us later). I gave Syd a photocopy of the completed lion to refer to, but asked her to listen to me read each step aloud before she began it:

I used the book, itself, for my drawing (which I can't believe I didn't get a photo of, as I was really pleased with it), and then Will came in, ready to draw, just as I was finishing the lion part, so I gave her the book to read as she drew, while I worked on my scene:

I can't get over how much Will's attitude has improved since we've begun these lessons. Before we started Drawing with Children, she rarely drew, and would readily tell us that Sydney was the "artist" and she wasn't. I just knew that if she kept that up, she'd stop drawing completely before too long, and grow up telling herself that she couldn't draw.

When we first started Drawing with Children, Will fought me over the lessons. She cried, she pouted, she didn't want to put forth any effort, and she had a terrible attitude. I made some modifications to the lessons (letting her read the instructions herself rather than listening to me read them, letting her start a drawing over when she thought she'd made a mistake rather than "making it work," etc.), but mostly just encouraged her and forbade her to judge or compare anyone's art.

Now, Will is happy to complete these lessons. She comes to the table without fuss, works contentedly and with focus, adds detail and embellishment to her work without having to be prompted, and is proud of the results. Below, for instance, she's created a stylized lion, in front of a background made to resemble zebra stripes:

Syd drew a realistic lion on a sunny savanna--the sun's direct rays are brighter than the blue sky background:

Will still doesn't do any drawing in her free time, but she will frequently paint on a Buddha board if I leave it out temptingly on the coffee table. As we move into a more casual spring and summer schedule, and as Will perhaps moves into a more kid-led, independent method of free schooling, I hope to strew more art activities of all kinds around her, and encourage her to once again become as comfortable with creating art as she was when she was just little.

P.S. After we've done our lessons, I like to check out others' experiences with the same lesson. Here are some other interesting takes on the lion lesson:

• The Artful Parent
• Life on a Canadian Island
• The Bottomsup Blog
• Three Marcus Boys
• Teaching Stars

Work Plans for the Week of March 17: Wild

Will's week of free schooling actually worked out wonderfully, with but a few reservations, the most important of which being her two-day tantrum when she realized bright and early on Saturday morning that the five days of math that I had been telling her would not complete themselves did not, in fact, complete themselves.

So that sucked, but the ordeal did prompt Will to ask me to remind her about her math as soon as I got up each morning so that she could do it. This morning I got up, reminded Will about her math, and glory be, she sat down and did it. Here's to four more days of that!

Will also did choose to join in on almost all of Syd's activities last week, playing multiplication games with us, taking her drawing lesson, listening to Story of the World and Pippi Longstocking, helping celebrate Girl Scout Week, etc. In turn, Syd joined in with much of Will's work--Will taught both herself and Syd how to geocache! They did that a LOT last week, and rode bikes, and played basketball, and worked on the bookshelf that they built for the food pantry where we volunteer. It was a busy and productive, happy and engaging week, and so I didn't stress when Syd and I didn't complete some assignments on her work plans--I just kept them on for this week!

MONDAY: One of my favorite podcasts, "A Way with Words," included a segment in a recent episode on the Pope's Latin tweets, so for Latin today we listened to that podcast while coloring, then looked at the tweets in Latin. Will spent much of the morning searching Zoo Tycoon forums and trying to figure out how to download and install user-created content (could this be her gateway into computer programming?), and we had a happy and useful shift at our volunteer gig, with the kids installing their bookshelf and setting up the book donations we solicited.

Currently, we're on our lunch break, during which the kids are being bottomless pits of bread and apples and oatmeal and cereal with milk, and then Syd and I (I'm betting Will won't be interested in this) are going to make a village of these cute multiplication houses, have a keyboard lesson, and write a letter to Pippi Longstocking, whose book we read AND whose play we saw last week:

I gave the kids Pippi hair before the play.

TUESDAY: We didn't get around to making the fossil casts on the couple of nice days last week, so I hope that we can do it this week. I want to take a nature hike and find real animal tracks to cast, and Will wants to organize a multi-cache geocache adventure--can we meet both of our goals at once? Time will tell.

The kids also didn't finish their Girl Scout Week activities last week (We did the movie marathon, comparing the animation of the first Toy Story to the later ones, and made cake and ice cream from scratch together, but missed most of the other required tasks), but they want that patch, so they agreed to make them up this week. We also didn't get the birdwatching session done, although we did learn to identify the black capped chickadee, but the birdfeeders around our property badly need a refill, so hopefully that will make the cut this week.

Both kids LOVE First Language Lessons. We did last week's lesson at the park; I wonder where we'll do this week's?

WEDNESDAY: We're in between horseback riding sessions, and Will crushed her thumb when a rock wall at the park partially collapsed on her, so she's out of aerial silks classes for a bit. That makes this day happily free, other than the Magic Tree House Club meeting which we MUST attend, since it's the last one of the month.

THURSDAY: The kids have a wildlife program at the library on this day--I hope they'll have some completed animal track casts to share! The nanosecond project is leftover from last week, although the pottery book is new. Math Mammoth is tooling right along--Syd's working on measurement this week, and Will's working through the last bit of multiplication that she can do before I sit her down next week and make her finish memorizing the multiplication table.

And I mean business this time. I printed out flash cards!

FRIDAY: Last Friday, we only completed math, history, and art, so those are the only new assignments here. Math class is on sabbatical for the week, so I'm looking forward to this extra hands-on math day to make something with Syd that I've been wanting for years--a skip counting board!

I did decide to just move on from the Bible story chapter in The Story of the World, so now we're onto Hammurabi. I don't know how long we'll stay here, either, since the kids already know him well--last Friday, over dinner, Will went into this long rant about Hammurabi and the whole "eye for an eye" business; she's convinced that a good judicial system has a much more nuanced system of justice than that. But this week, at least, we'll take another listen and do the quiz questions; if nothing else, we can at least do the map work on this one next week before moving on.

Drawing With Children should be fun this week; we're meant to look through magazines and catalogues and begin to develop a collection of images and graphics to copy and embellish to create our own art.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I want to take a day trip to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, although we might do a fossils workshop at one of the local state parks, instead. Will has chess club. I have some shopping to do. And wouldn't it be nice to get started with the spring planting!

Happy Pi Day!

Don't forget to eat pie for dinner!

Our In-Home Branch of the Public Library

What I'm about to show you is embarrassing, I'm told. I don't personally think it's embarrassing, because I have zero sense of personal shame, but I do recognize that you are probably going to think that this is very, very weird.

Okay, here it is. This is an entire bookshelf in our home. Ninety-nine percent of this bookshelf holds materials from our town's public library and our university's libraries. We call it the Library Bookshelf:

At the top left there, you see some undergrad chemistry textbooks that I've checked out from the IU library. I was studying biology through the MIT OpenCourse system, but kept running into a bunch of chemistry that I didn't know, so I switched to chemistry. Of course, now that I'm studying chemistry, I keep running into a bunch of electricity stuff that I don't know.

When Will was researching for her Biography Fair project, way back in the fall, we all got really into Jules Verne. Now, most nights of the week, Matt reads aloud to us a chapter of The Mysterious Island before the kids go to bed. We keep having to return it to the public library and check it out again, because it's something like the longest book ever.

I got interested in Lewis and Clark after Syd chose a documentary on them to watch as a family some time ago. A friend suggested the historical fiction of James Alexander Thom, all of which was clogging up the library bookshelf for a while before I decided that I would save them all as a treat to read on our big road trip this summer, but in the meantime I also got interested in the Native Americans of that time, especially the ones who lived in what is now Indiana, and will be incorporating a lot of that material into our Indiana study.

I always have a ton of teaching materials checked out from the IU School of Education library. They give me a LOT of help in teaching math, especially, but they also have manipulatives, textbooks, board games, and children's books, and their lending period is immense. The kids' Latin textbook actually belongs to the School of Ed, and I think that we've only had to return it and check it out again once in the past year. Most of those Latin books on the shelf (though not all) are from the IU libraries, actually, as well as that whole Saxon Math collection--I like Math Mammoth, but I always have my eye out for alternatives.

The magazines belong to us. I don't know why, but I can never seem to sit down and read a magazine unless I'm on a road trip, so I save them up.

Will wants to learn to solder. I feel doubts about this.

Those entomology books are also all from the IU libraries. I've finally decided on a humane-ish killing jar, but I still can't figure out where to buy the chemicals to charge it.

Homemade pizza is a staple in our house.

We always have a lot of materials that support our Story of the World studies on our shelves. I really should return the rest of our Ancient Egypt materials, since we'll be coming back to Ancient Egypt again in a few chapters. We completed the Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (or something like that) chapter this morning, and I think that instead of bothering with spending another week doing mapwork for fictional characters, we'll move straight on to Hammurabi next. Looks like I'll be doing another library search!

Yes, I am very interested in post-apocalyptic fiction. Anything will do, although I love zombies the most. Matt keeps most of his pleasure reading in the car, since he likes to hide out there to read during his lunch hour at work, so imagine another big stack of graphic novels and histories there.

Syd's earning her Potter badge right now in Girl Scouts, so we've got some pottery and ceramics books on the shelves. Will's interested in woodworking, which explains those books, but just decided this morning to start earning her Geocaching badge, so expect a bunch of geocaching books on the shelves in a couple of days.

Both girls read non-fiction books about animals, comic books, joke books, and trivia books. I just replenished Syd's stack of easy readers, so there are about twenty more on the shelves than there were in this photo.

Will's also really into fantasy, and also novels about kids who rescue pets, or girls who help ponies, etc. Those titles come and go at lightening speed, however, so the specific ones are pretty hard to pin down. I do know that right now she's reading Tom Sawyer, a book that we own, but only because she came up out of nowhere one day and asked, "Why can't I understand what Jim is saying?"

I paused, closed my eyes, and contemplated all possible contexts, before my library science and liberal arts training pinged and led me to the correct conclusion: Jim, whose speech is written in dialect, friend of Huck Finn but also of Tom Sawyer, whose book I know we own. Will and I then had a lovely conversation about why it's tacky to write in dialect, what such writing is trying to show, and why black men of that time might not have learned, or be comfortable speaking with, correct grammar and pronunciation.

I need to move us into a dinosaur unit, so that we're all experts for our summer dino dig. I'm still unsure of exactly where to start, however, since we've studied dinosaurs so often before.

I'm hoping that we'll stay with the bird study, as we focus more on Indiana-specific wildlife.

The kids' monthly day-long nature class has an emphasis on survival skills; they find that kind of disaster-prep reading fascinating.

We've backed off a bit on Will's history of video games study, just because we've had so much else going on. I need to check in to see if it's still an interest, and if it is, we need to get back in it.

Soooo... yeah. That's our bookshelf. Sometimes people come over, happen to see it, start to browse, then ask, with horrified fascination, "Are all those... LIBRARY BOOKS?!?"

Um, yes. Yes, they are. So if you've ever been at the library trying to check something out, only to realize, frustrated, that ALL the DK biographies are missing, or ALL the James Alexander Thom novels, or ALL the children's books on pottery, then you'll know:

I have them, and I'm not giving them back until they're three days overdue.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Prom Dress Refashions

Prom dress refashioning projects

and Syd's Prom dress pants, the final piece in our 2014 Trashion/Refashion Show entry

For me, it's hard to top the sweetness, prettiness, and innocence of last year's Rose Dress, but I have to say that I really, really, REALLY like this year's outfit, which Syd named Upside-Down Orange (it's colored like an orange on a green stem, only upside-down, see? I know, I know--just don't think about it). Perhaps it's because this outfit, although less sweet, is awesomely fun, it's not gendered super feminine (and if you've known Syd for the long haul, you'll realize that's something that I, at one time, thought would NEVER happen in her personality), and for the first time, this year Syd was really able to help me sew it. I love this outfit, and Syd loves this outfit, and I think it shows:

You know who else is in love? The camera, with this kid. It's a running joke between me and Matt, because we're both hilariously unphotogenic. Matt, in particular, is rarely in a photo in which he's not in the middle of a blink, preferably with his eyelids unevenly closing, and ideally with his mouth open weird. And yet when I'm editing photos of this kid, in all other aspects his younger, female clone, I'm all like, "Gee, which of 100 almost identically beautiful shots of her should I keep?"

Holy smokes, it's 5:00 already! Syd's next to me at the table, working on her math, and Will's at the library, where she asked to be dropped off after horseback riding class (Guess we'll do Magic Tree House Club next Wednesday!), and now I'm off to head into the kitchen, turn on "All Things Considered," and make caramelized onion French bread pizza and chocolate cake. It's a carby dinner, yes, but when Matt comes home with Will, they're also going to bring with them the ingredients to make homemade ice cream, so we'll have plenty of sugar to even things out.

Work Plans for the Week of March 10, 2014: Sydney School

Just as we finally hashed out in our Family Meeting on Sunday, this week I only wrote lesson plans for Syd. Will has a math packet with a full five days of math, and she is welcome to join in with whatever lessons Syd and I are doing, but otherwise she has no requirements beyond our everyday outside activities and chores.

Will has always regularly protested her schoolwork, no matter how much I change my methods to suit her. And considering that this is a kid who reads nearly constantly, who watches documentaries for fun, who, for computer time, usually chooses something from my Educational Links page, and who is a precocious, quick learner, I'm willing to try out letting her manage her own education, to an extent. Syd, on the other hand, has no limit to her capacity for soaking in my attention, and thrives with my lessons and hands-on activities.

If this week is a success, I would like to put a little more structure into Will's studies, such as giving her book lists on specific subjects, having her write summaries of the books that she reads, guiding her to regularly write those research reports that I'm so fond of, and to complete the odd project. I also expect her to join in with most of the lessons that I do with Syd, knowing that quite a bit of her pig-headedness Independent Thinker with Leadership Potential-ness has to do with her automatic rejection of anything that anyone in authority would like her to do, and being invited and welcomed is a whole different animal from being required.

So with that preface, here's what Syd and I (and sometimes Will) are up to this week:

MONDAY: This is Birthday Week for the Girl Scouts, with Wednesday marking the organization's 102nd anniversary. Every day includes a special activity that a girl can complete in order to earn the Birthday Week patch. In our council, most of these activities this year focus on computers and animation--an odd focus, if you ask me, but we've got to sneak in those STEM skills, I guess! Yesterday, both Syd and Will worked for over an hour on that day's activity, that of creating a Google Doodle for the Doodle4Google contest. I can't help but add that Will was focused on her work and thoughtful with her design, simply after being invited to work with me and Syd. If I'd required it, there's the strong chance that she would have thrown a fit, then put in the minimum amount of effort required to meet my most minimal standards.

Syd worked on her keyboard lessons, we spent a furiously busy two hours at our weekly volunteer gig (some of the other volunteers didn't show up, so I was run off my feet--yay for good healthy activity!), there was a multiplication game and a Latin unit, and just like that, fuss-free, the kids were able to spend the rest of the day in play, and the day was actually nice enough that we could all head to the park after dinner, the kids to run around like maniacs (the wall that partly fell on Will yesterday, crushing her thumb, was now completely fallen down. I felt sick when I saw it, and wished that I'd had Matt pull it down in the first place; it could DEFINITELY have killed a kid) and Matt and I to unashamedly play bad basketball on the courts.

TUESDAY: We're eating apple pie oatmeal and leftover quiche right now, listening to "Morning Edition" while Will plays Minecraft on the computer, but in exactly three minutes, Syd and I are going to work through her Math Mammoth packet, read Pippi Longstocking out loud together, complete her next grammar unit, and get ready for a season full of bird watching (I plan to use my salary from last month for Indiana and US guidebooks for plants and animals--we're going to be naturalists this year!). I bet the kids will get into a big fight while learning how to play Pong together, but it's also another gorgeous day for playing outside, and later this afternoon Matt is taking them and a couple of their friends to something called a Girl Scout Songfest.

WEDNESDAY: I'm already worried about this horseback riding class that can't be rescheduled--Will's thumb is still awfully gory and swollen--but that's something that her instructors are just going to have to figure out. We're also going to watch a children's theatre production of Pippi Longstocking, and Syd's going to read Stage Fright on a Summer Night--all by herself!--so that both kids can attend Magic Tree House Club that afternoon.

We are also, although I haven't told the children this on account of I do not want them hysterical with excitement all freakin' day, going to make cake and ice cream from scratch in order to celebrate the 102nd anniversary of the Girl Scouts.

THURSDAY: I'd like to go on a nature walk and find animal tracks to make our plaster of Paris casts from, but it's supposed to snow again on Wednesday, so if all else fails, there's always clay and cats and seashells. There's an excellent, kid-friendly pottery book that we're going to look through together as part of Syd's Potter badge, and then there's an interesting nanosecond project to complete.

And if it *doesn't* snow, maybe our homeschool group will be able to have our first Park Day of the year. I will be SO happy to get out of that dang gymnasium!

Friday: We'll be doing some natural history of Indiana, before we starting learning about the Native Americans. There's a great video to watch, and those guidebooks that I'm going to purchase, and we'll have the whole weekend for our nice, long nature hike.

I finally decided that we'll listen to the Bible chapter of SOTW, and do the mapwork, and color in a Bible coloring book to get a little better of a handle on the stories. I've also made a mental note to introduce some interesting stories from other religions at a later time.

The kids' drawing skills have been improving just a ton lately, so I'm excited for us to do the next lesson in Drawing With Children, and a word ladder should quickly finish up the day with a little logical thinking.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I think I will send the kids to that drop-in pottery class this weekend--Syd's Potter badge isn't going to earn itself!--and we have a giant, three-movie Toy Story marathon to enjoy to round off Girl Scout Birthday Week. We might go rock climbing. We might take another hike. We need to build a better gate into the chicken yard. We need to have a Family Meeting to figure out if we're going to buy those couple of Easter Egger chicks that Will wants.

AND, speaking of Family Meetings, we'll need to see if Will's school week went well, or if it's back to the drawing board for that.

A Week's Accomplishments

In some ways, this week did not feel very satisfying.

On Monday, at our volunteer gig, I fell on a patch of ice and hurt my butt.

I waited eagerly to hear if Syd's outfit had been chosen for the 2014 Trashion/Refashion Show, only to be told--one day AFTER the results were supposed to come out--that they'd decided to push the entry deadline back another week.

Our Intermediate Ballroom Dancing instructor has only two new students--me and Matt--in this new session, along with all her other students from last session who are repeating the class, so she's teaching as if this session is a continuation of the other students' class, not a repeat. Matt and I have NOT learned all those fancy cha-cha steps that she begins every class with, and it's pissing me off!

Will, who is an independent thinker with leadership potential (this is what I'm going to say now instead of "pig-headed") was in full schoolwork rebellion for practically the entire week. This kid does not realize how easy she has it!

We discovered holes knocked with a hammer into the back of a rarely-used door, and it appears, after much separate questioning of the two resident suspects, that it happened during a playdate a few WEEKS ago. I don't know why, but I have the worst time getting kids to not destroy my house on playdates!

I hate Daylight Savings. Geographically, we ought to be in the Central Time Zone, so the Eastern Time Zone does not match well with our sunrise and sunset times. Daylight Savings does not help much.

So now, in order that I might have a productive Sunday, let me focus on what I DID accomplish:

I improved my slow mile by a full minute and a half.

This kid had an amazing Spring Ice Show--

--and says that she wants to be in the figure skating club next season. 

During Family Meeting this morning, we slogged through Will's school-related Independent Thinking with Leadership Potential-ness, and decided that for this week, I will only be writing lesson plans for Syd. Will shall be responsible for math only, but will be welcomed into any of the lessons that Syd and I are doing. I'm curious to see if Will participates more if it's not a requirement (she loathes requirements), and I'm also open to the possibility that I may just need to create a book list of every subject for her, and allow her to omit most of the hands-on lessons. Either way, she's getting old enough that she needs to be figuring out how SHE wants to learn, and not how to exercise her Independent Thinking with Leadership Potential-ness to get out of schoolwork.

I'm looking forward to a week with no fighting about schoolwork!

Other accomplishments included the kids playing well and creatively together--

--so that if I could have mustered the energy after fighting about schoolwork all morning, I *could* have accomplished many things! I'm counting that as a win.

Matt and the girls built the bookshelf that the girls need for their Girl Scout service project. I'm counting this as my accomplishment because I told them to do it. The kids are going to put a quick coat of paint and some paper collage on it today, and then we're going to install it and start stocking it next week!

I didn't even manage to make dinner most days (thank goodness for pasta, smoothies, and the rice cooker!), but these kids managed to make king cakes from scratch, all by themselves--

--and this kid and I played with our natural food coloring and made colorful, braided challah: 

There! That makes the week sound much better, doesn't it? Next weeks's accomplishments will include the following:

1. Toy Story movie marathon
2. completing and mailing off a labor-intensive etsy order
3. warm weather and sunshine
4. ---

Wouldn't you know that I wouldn't even be able to get a *list* of accomplishments written? As I was about to write an ambitious #4, one of the kids came in bloody and screaming, so we went to the emergency room instead.

P.S. Kid's okay, more or less. What do you even need a thumbnail for, anyhow?