What Have We Learned This Year?

I generally count our year-round school year as August-July, but since this week marked the end of our local public school's school year (and today we're going to the open house for the kids' sleep-away camp next month, and tomorrow the younger kid starts her Summer Intensive ballet program!!!), it made me curious to review what we've learned so far this year. Here are just a few of our larger themes:

(Note: I put in a few links and photos, but you'd want to search my blog for the full curriculum plans that I used and all of our other activities and resources)

Art

color theory

drawing

Durer

fashion design (for the younger kid)

flower arranging

limestone carving (for the older kid)

pottery

Foreign Languages

Latin

Mandarin Chinese

Spanish

History

Ancient China

Civil Rights

Civil War

Western Expansion and the pioneers

Math

area

decimals (just the older kid)

fractions

long division (just the older kid)

multi-digit multiplication (both kids!)

subtraction with borrowing (for the younger kid)

PE

aerial silks

ballet (for the younger kid)

horseback riding

ice skating

Practical Life

Girl Scout cookie sales

cooking

woodworking

Reading and Writing

fiction writing

infographics

NaNoWriMo

research papers

Science

aquatic ecosystems

botany

how to identify, clean, and prepare dinosaur fossils

Robotics (for the older kid)

Although the kids are in and out of all kinds of interests, all the time (lately, for instance, they are OBSESSED with density, and we've been doing tons of density experiments/demonstrations together), these listed are the main ones, the ones that have seemed to find their way into our studies all year. The older kid used area calculations to figure out the layout of her butterfly garden last week. The younger kid made me a lovely arrangement of peonies for the table yesterday. As part of her school this month, the older kid is reading a college paleontology textbook, which she can understand because she's studied so much paleontology.

Our days are sometimes hard, and they sometimes feel too long, and they sometimes seem too short, and sometimes nobody wants to do their math or their grammar or their chores--including me! But looking back through the year, seeing that a kid who couldn't subtract with borrowing in August can now calculate multi-digit multiplication problems, that a kid who was so nervous that she forgot her silks routine in December just walked a fashion show runway in front of a full auditorium in April... well, that's encouraging. It's inspiring.

Frankly, it's a large part of why we homeschool.

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

I Let My Kids Drive the Lawnmower

Which I already know quite well that I am not supposed to do, so consider this one of my frequent "don't try this at home" posts.

But look how HAPPY it makes them!

This one may not have been as desperate to drive as her sister, but she certainly was NOT going to be left out. This child, left out of something? No, sir, no way. She'll take her turn driving as soon as she can get it, thank you very much, and her turn had just better be just as long as her sister's:

Will actually weighs enough to trigger the dead man's switch (when did my baby grow up?!?), and so now has ongoing permission to drive the lawnmower all by herself in the flat part of our backyard property, as long as she wears her bicycle helmet (fat lot of good that will probably do, but it makes me feel better to know that at least she's avoiding catastrophic head trauma) and I'm out there to supervise.

And yes, yesterday we DID discuss what kind of car she was getting for her sixteenth birthday. My answer?

Partial ownership of the family minivan, duh.

But what she doesn't know yet is that I drove my parents' old Lincoln Towncar when I was a teen, and I can tell you that as a teenager, having a roomy car is the BEST. THING. EVER.

Get your minds out of the gutter, Friends. It was so I could take all my friends to Sonic!

At least, that's where I told Mammaw and Pappaw that I was going...

Our Magical Metal Detector

Will has owned this metal detector for a while now--

--after she asked for one as a Christmas gift. She'd played around with it off and on in our old yard, my parents' yard, and the park, but never really found anything much, so when she brought it to me a couple of weeks ago and asked for new batteries for it so that she could play with it here, I didn't think much of it.

But oh, my gosh. Our yard is a TREASURE FIELD!

Or junk field. Whichever term you prefer.

Based on the old general store on our property, which I was told is from 1910, and the blue Mason jars that I sometimes find at the old dump site out in our woods, I knew that the property was pretty old, and I'm always discovering interesting things about it that reveal how it's aged--when I tried to dig up and move some daffodils that were in the way of my proposed chicken yard this spring, I found out that the bulbs were all about two feet down by now, and every now and then I uncover another one or two of these limestone blocks laid out nice and flat:

Obviously, every time that happens, I worry that I've uncovered a grave marker, but in reality, they're probably marking garden paths, or the placement of long-demolished outbuildings.

Anyway, it turns out that a 100+ years-old property, originally owned by people who just left things like general stores and paving stones and Mason jars lying about when they were done with them, is a magical place to play with a metal detector. You walk into the yard, anywhere you want to begin, start gently swinging it back and forth--

Yes, a child-sized metal detector is the perfect height for me. I am very short.

 --and within a dozen steps you have a hit. Sometimes, yes, it's old wire, or a rusted tuna can, or other piece of modern-ish trash, all of which I'm fine to discover, as I consider it important to our property clean-up to dig up the trash for proper disposal.

Other times, however...

I *think* that these are nails with a machined shank but hand-forged heads.

Horseshoe!!! We. Were. THRILLED! Horseshoes are hard to date, but this one doesn't have calkins or a toe clip. I plan to clean it and then mount it above our doorway.

 

This part is so exciting that Gracie can't bear to look.

For a while you just dig, occasionally reapplying the metal detector to make sure that you're still in the correct spot, sometimes readjusting when it's clear that your hole is shifting in the wrong direction.

When you start to see something that's metal (it'll probably be red from rust), you then have to start digging around it, often with your bare hands, to expose it without putting pressure on it. It would be tragic to break something awesome out of carelessness and haste!

gratuitous photo of pretty kitty

Found it!

Matt's theory, which seems solid, is that it's a meter of some sort. There's a glass front, and through the broken glass you can see that there are gears of some sort inside. I want to clean it, identify it, and then maybe take it apart if it's not valuable.

 Now that we're actually finding cool things more often than not, metal detecting has turned into an exciting hobby. The metal detector sits by the door now, and sometimes, when I've just finished a burdensome chore and know that another is next on my list, I think, "I'll just go out and find one thing first."

And then I do, and then the cooking/cleaning/sewing 50 drawstring bags for an etsy order isn't so lame, what with all the thinking I can do about what I found and how I'm going to identify it and the best way to clean it.

My Latest: Flowers and Cardboard and Fish and Fruit

Happy Holiday Weekend! We are happily in the middle of our Memorial Day weekend over here, made perfect with plenty of fried egg sandwiches, reading, watching a capella videos on YouTube (seriously, check out the Vanderbilt Melodores. I may have to cosplay as that Sweater Weather dude at Gen Con next month), playing with the metal detector in the yard (you are not going to BELIEVE the stuff we found!!! I'll post on it later), watching movies at the drive-in, working in the yard, etc.

I still have a giant wholesale candle order to finish fulfilling, but somehow I've convinced myself this weekend that I should also make more bendy yarn, and try my hand at sewing myself a shirt (a first! I rarely sew for myself, which I have recently decided is silly, right?), and make bookmarks so that each of our home bookshelves can have a jar of them ready for reading. Now that I've done all that, what can I distract myself with today to avoid sewing 50 drawstring bags, cutting 350 4" wicks, and rolling 350 candles?

Painting a water cycle diagram on the rain barrel, probably. Shopping for milkweed seedlings. Sewing a grocery tote out of a bag that once held 50 pounds of kidney beans.

Related to none of those fun projects, here is a catch-up of all my latest posts over at Crafting a Green World. Click over to read them in full, and if any of the ads strike your fancy for also clicking on, well... ad revenue is the necessary evil behind how I get paid:

review of the book Recycled Hexie Quilts

an explanation of why you shouldn't keep a betta in a vase (or other weensy bowl)

an opinion piece about the Strange Folk scandal

a SUPER yummy fruit pizza recipe

a round-up of candy wrapper craft projects

a tutorial for tissue paper decoupaged glass bottles

a review of The Gnome Project

 a tutorial for making giant dice

a round-up of DIY lawn games

and a tutorial for making a kid-sized life-sized gingerbread house

Wow, that was a LOT! I'm currently working on tutes that use chalk ink and tutes that use a blowtorch (squee!), tutes that involve my rain barrel, and tutes that involve play silks and Easter egg dye, so stay tuned!

P.S. Here I am on Facebook, where I sometimes post embarrassing photos and tell you about the weird things that the kids just said.

Shopping in Chicago: American Science and Surplus

We are not big shoppers (which is a good thing, as over a year into our "new" house, we have still not completely unpacked!), but I knew that during our trip to Chicago, there were exactly two stores that I wanted to visit.

The first is American Science and Surplus, a store that sells hard-core scientific equipment AND totally random surplus. I shop online from them every now and then, and I've gotten chemistry equipment, glass jars and test tubes and beakers and such, surplus restaurant crayons for when I was making crayon rocket pops for craft fairs, surplus science and craft and building kits for my secret present bin in the top of my bedroom closet (Santa often pulls from this bin, as does the Easter Bunny and sometimes the Tooth Fairy), and a hundred other just totally random things.

It's one of those stores where you can't go looking for exactly what you need, but if you go looking, you'll find tons of things that are exactly what you want.

The physical store location was just as fun and chaotic as I'd hoped, with lots of really cool finds on display and plenty of things for the kids to look at under Matt's supervision while I enjoyed myself shopping. I tried to contain myself--I didn't buy 10 of the specimen mounts as I still think that I should have, nor did I buy the gas mask like I TOTALLY should have, nor nearly as many beakers as I wanted--but here's what I came home with, for a little less than a hundred dollars:

• microscope slide storage case--I've been researching how to create permanent slides. This is where I can store them!
• specimen mounts--You use these to store and display fossils and other finds. These mounts are exactly the same as the ones that I buy from Carolina Biological Supply Company, only five bucks cheaper and sans shipping (although sales tax is really expensive!). I would have bought more than two, because I NEED more than two, but I still hold a previous vow to myself to figure out how to DIY these, so I held myself in check.
• cello sheets--The kids have a lot of fun with these for craft and science projects. We need to make more color viewers, in particular.
• owl pellet--just one, because the kids have both dissected owl pellets before. I'll keep it with my other homeschool supplies until something comes up that inspires its dissection. 
• pipettes--Can't have too many of these! I buy a few whenever I see them cheaply. Most recently, the kids used them as part of their soda bottle Cartesian divers.
• giant mercury thermometer--I'm hoping this will come in handy with hands-on math and science.
• Methyl blue--Making our own slides!
• measured syringes--I only bought a couple for experimentation, but hopefully they'll come in handy for math, science, and crafts.
• magnets--these were pretty strong, and they've each got two holes in them, to make it easy to tie them to something or use them in a project. I bought two.
• Erlenmeyer flask--You can use these with a flame, so they're very useful. I only bought one, to make sure that the quality is what I expect (it will fail if it explodes all over me while I'm holding it over a heat source), but if it is, I'll probably order more from them online.
• shrink plastic--I LOVE shrinky dinks!
• cat toys, random bottle, giant rubber band--This is stuff that the kids picked out. The giant rubber band, in particular, has been super fun.
• dentistry tools--You also use these for fossil prep, so I was stoked to find them.
• giant weather balloon--I have no idea. But one day its purpose will become clear, I know.
• Revolutionary War battlefield map--I actually don't remember picking this out. Matt or one of the kids must have.
• adding machine tape--This stuff is actually dead useful for homeschooling. Think timelines and number lines.
• solar cell. Will is interested in robotics and machines, and learning how to support this is one of my summer goals.
• build an engine kit--Same thing. We'll build an engine!
• stethoscope--We definitely used to have one, but I think it disappeared in the move.
• test tube brush--Finally, we can clean our test tubes!

I skipped all of the tempting science kits, because I'm trying to limit my random purchases these days to things that count as tools or supplies--like rock hammer over geology kit, that kind of thing. I got rid of tons of preschool homeschool stuff during the move, most of which hadn't been a great deal of use during preschool at home, and that made me realize that tools are much more versatile than kits or finished items, and will be more useful over the total number of years that I want to spend homeschooling with the kids.

However, if I lived near an American Science and Surplus... I'd have a huge problem. Our house would be collapsing under the weight of all of my surplus Soviet military gear and my random electronics components and my crazy-cheap beakers. 

We Went to Chicago: Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore

Although we had been warned about what the weather would probably be like (Thanks, Cheryl! I wish I'd taken your advice!), I was snookered by a mild forecast and did NOT pack appropriate clothing for our detour home through Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, one of the three national parks in Indiana and the first national park that we've visited in our home state.

Our hoodies were adequate for damp, windy, foggy Chicago, but at Indiana Dunes, cold rain was added to the mix. I should have packed rain gear.

Nevertheless, as you can see in the photo below Syd clutching her Junior Ranger book, we toughed it out and saw all the things so that the kids could earn those coveted badges:

The kids did manage to run around and play and have fun--they're made of much sterner stuff than their parents are!

I'm feeling a lot of mom guilt, though, because Will has SUPER wanted to come to this specific national park for a year now, and for a year I'd been putting her off, only to then turn around and say, "Sure I'll take you, Kid! I'll take you, alright, but only on a miserable, cold, rainy day! Have fun!"

Here are some of the resources that I wanted to use, if we could have spent the whole day trotting around and making magical discoveries of the natural world like I'd wanted, sigh:

• Nature Walks in the Indiana Dunes
• Diana of the Dunes: The True Story of Alice Gray
• Wildflowers of the Indiana Dunes National Park

We're clearly going back to Indiana Dunes one hot day this summer.