Have a Merry Christmas (Bunting)

After we set up and decorated our Christmas tree, I thought that there was kind of a weird space between it and the rest of the window that it sits in front of.

Obviously, the ONLY viable solution was to spend a couple of hours creating and sewing a brand-new bunting to fill the space:

And then I liked it so much that I decided to make another one for my pumpkin+bear etsy shop!

Of course, an etsy shop update requires a photo shoot, in which many amusing and odd antics tend to occur.

I said, "Just smile at each other. Look like you like each other!"

In our family, you really can't have a photo shoot without including a chicken:

I can't actually believe that I spent the time to make an entire holiday decoration just for me, frankly, as today alone I have three etsy orders to make and put in the mail (not to mention today's schoolwork to complete, tonight's Girl Scout meeting to prep for, a unit that I'm creating on simplifying fractions to edit, and if I could squirrel away a little time to bake cookies, I'd be pretty stoked), but I'm trying to remember, as we all well know, that making time to do things just because I enjoy them is also very, very important.

Remind me of that on Christmas Eve, when I'm weeping and wrapping presents and trying to figure out what to make for everyone at the last minute and helping the kids make cookies for Santa at 11 pm, because I spent too much of December making buntings for myself and drinking wine while reading.

Work Plans for the Week of December 07, 2015: A Kid-Made Newspaper

We've had quite a bit of a break from formal school around here! We took the entirety of Thanksgiving week off, spending our time not pushing through Math Mammoth or practicing cursive, but instead doing things like this:

We always have an epic puzzle project going on during vacations. This periodic table of the elements puzzle was a doozie!

The kids have long done loads of laundry independently, but as part of an activity for Syd's Girl Scout Junior Independence badge, I taught them about it for real, temperatures and color sorting and everything. And then I made them do all this laundry all by themselves, mwa-ha-ha!

The children both want curtains around their bunk beds. We did Syd's during this week, and I've started Will's today, actually.

How much time can you spend lying on the bed, watching episodes of How the Earth was Made and coloring? ALL THE TIME!!!

After we finished the puzzle, we somehow got on another huge Perler bead kick, so much so that our family read-aloud activity actually changed from hair braiding to Perler beads for a time.

This kid loves herself a good board game.

Yes, I DO like to put our Christmas tree up the weekend after Thanksgiving! It gives you the most time to enjoy it!

And, of course, it wouldn't be our homeschool if there wasn't ample time to sit around and read and pet kitties.

 Last week, Will was back in the groove somewhat, at least doing math every day, but really, our entire family revolved around Syd's Nutcracker schedule. Hours of time spent at ballet rehearsals and performances every single day for a solid week meant that it was important to me that the rest of her time be as unscheduled and calming as possible. Therefore, we did a lot of these things:

Perler beads remained big, but the Geomags also got rediscovered, and the kids have again been playing with them for hours, doing all kinds of creative things with them.

Willow and I are very into BOINC, which utilizes your computer's unoccupied time to work on huge projects. I tend to stay with SETI@Home, because I am SUCH a big dork, but Will is very fond of a project that has her computer attempting to model proteins that can help treat disease. Here she's modeling proteins by hand, just for fun. That kid.

On another day, the kids did a virtual field trip to the great forests of China through the Nature Conservancy. They didn't love it--in fact, Will declared that the host's sincere yet very heavy-handed plea for environmental conservation sounded like propaganda (leading to a discussion of the use of propaganda for good)--but I finally understand the Greenhouse Effect, so there you go.

The young chickens had grown so wild that I told the children that if they couldn't tame them, they'd never be prepared for a dog. Um, now at least two of them are SO tame that when you open a door, they try to run past you into the house.

This hair. I have now become able to spend less than 20 minutes creating the required Angel Performance Bun, so of course next year I'll probably have to instead learn the Soldier French Braid.

We only attended one of Syd's FIVE performances, but our university livestreams all of their productions, and so I was able to watch Syd every single time she was onstage! It was beyond wonderful. Here she is in a photo taken of the television, in her role of the third angel from the left. 

Here she is at center left, sharing her light with the world.

And again, here she is third from the left. Isn't it magical? She also really wants some dry ice of her own now.

After such a long break, I'm pretty stoked to get back to business as usual this week. I can't say that the kids are exactly as excited, especially since Will is sitting next to me having a quiet tantrum about the math lesson that I spent the entirety of Sunday morning creating for her. Nevertheless, back to business as usual we are!

One particularly exciting event has colored our studies for the week--a reporter and photographer are coming to interview us about homeschooling! Will we acquit ourselves well? Will we give homeschooling and all homeschoolers a bad name? Will everyone discover how deeply weird I am? Will I be unable to quell my urge to blurt out wildly inappropriate things when under pressure? Stay tuned and see!

Anyway, this upcoming interview has gotten the children interested in newspapers and journalism, and when I suggested that they might like to create their own newspaper this week, they enthusiastically agreed. So you'll notice that much of our time this week will be spent in that project.

Mandarin is over for the semester, so memory work includes only spelling, cursive practice, and World War 2 review questions; Books of the Day include some lovely picture books designed to help children understand just a little bit about the consequences of the Holocaust, some books on newspapers, and, just for fun, a couple of novels about paperboys. I think that Syd is really going to like Henry Huggins!

And here's the rest of our week!

MONDAY: The children both struggled with their most recent Math Mammoth lesson--Will's on simplifying and multiplying fractions, and Syd's on solving multi-step word problems using multiplication, division, and charts. I spend part of Sunday breaking down each lesson into its step-by-step components and including manipulatives that make it clear how each math problem is working. Syd adored her lesson and is now happily reading Henry Huggins, while Will is currently throwing a giant hormonal fit about her lesson, so much so that I may deny her the pleasure of going to the library later for the coding workshop that I've scheduled the children for. The lesson couldn't be clearer, so I can't fathom what the kid is so appalled by, and when I attempted to ask her calmly, she did the thing where she answers me by moving her lips soundlessly, and inside my head I fantasized about slapping her, so I'd say that could have gone better.

Ah, she just threw a pencil across the room. I hope that you're having a lovely afternoon, as well!

Yesterday at the library, Matt, the kids, and I camped out at a long table with several different newspapers and compared them in order to agree upon a general anatomy of the newspaper. Today, the children and I will do the same with several newspaper articles in order to reach the same type of consensus. I'll then discuss with them the inverted pyramid of newspaper writing, and we'll dissect some articles to find it. We're also big fans of Brainpop, so we actually began the day with a Brainpop movie on newspapers. I require that the kids watch the movie and pass the quiz, but then I generally let them tool around and watch more movies and play more games on the site. Will is a major fan, in particular of Do I Have a Right, Supreme Decision, and Court Quest.

Our work at the food pantry today was all about eggs! The kids repackaged giant crates full of eggs into smaller cartons until they were totally over it, and then continued to repackage them for another hour. I discovered that the Beatles station on Pandora is the perfect mix of the perfect kind of classic rock n' roll that I want to share with the children, and so I happily sang all the words to every single Beatles, Elton John, and Billy Joel song that came on, until another volunteer came in who wanted to listen to the station with music from Disney movies, and then I sang all the words to all of those songs, instead.

Random tidbit: Will was fascinated by "American Pie" and asked about the lyrics, so I told her that my college roommate, John, used to talk about his high school project in which he'd annotated "American Pie," and that he could tell you the meaning behind every verse. As I was telling that story, though, it occurred to me--the internet exists now! I can do that, too! And that is what leads me to tell you that this seems to be one of the older and most extensive interpretations of "American Pie" on the internet. You're welcome!

TUESDAY: I've got another math lesson for each kid to break down the concepts that they were struggling with before we move on in Math Mammoth. I'm sure Will is going to be just thrilled! Hopefully, however, she'll cheer up when we discuss the children's newspaper, in particular. They've already been talking about the kinds of stories that they want to write, so I'm hoping that they both have plenty of ideas for this brainstorming and story assignment session.

We've got our homeschool group's playgroup on this day, and I always enjoy the chance to talk to other friendly, supportive adults. I just cannot overstate the importance of a good homeschool group filled with welcoming people!

We are almost finished with our World War 2 study! Can you believe it--it's been over half a year of steady study on this! This week we're reviewing the war as a whole, and although I do have a couple more enrichment activities that I'd like to cover--a field trip to the Terre Haute CANDLES museum, the biography of Sadako Sasaki and folding paper cranes to remember the innocent victims of World War 2--these aren't activities that have to be completed in any particular time period.

Soon we'll be on to our 2016 study of the American Revolution!

WEDNESDAY: We're back to Math Mammoth on this day, hopefully with a better grounding that will make each of their next lessons easier to understand. The kids will work more on their newspaper, and for our culminating mapwork of our World War 2 study, I have the wild idea that we will draw a giant chalk map of the world on our giant driveway and replay the war. I can't decide yet if I want to use chalk or chalk paint, but either way, I think it will turn out to be a very interesting, if very bizarre use of our time.

After the intensity of The Nutcracker, Syd and I are both a little relieved that this is her last week of ballet class for the semester. We'll have a nice, long break before she dances again in January.

THURSDAY: This is the day of our newspaper interview! I want to make cookies for it but Matt says that this is over the top. Is it? Would you like me more if you came to interview me and I had cookies for you?

The reporter who's interviewing us also agreed to be interviewed, herself, by the children. I think it'll be a feature story in their newspaper!

FRIDAY: Happy Fossil Prep Friday! Prepping fossils is slow work, so we still have plenty of edmontosaurus fossils to clean and display. Mental note: buy superglue!

Syd is almost done with another Girl Scout badge, but Will seems to be lacking inspiration for any badge in particular, so I'm hoping that I can help her find one that she wants to pursue. The kids also have a Girl Scout meeting on this night, centered around another kid's Brownie badge, so they'll have a happy time reviewing pinch pots while I sit on my couch and read for two hours. Yay!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Mandarin is over for the semester, but we still have ice skating, ballet, and chess club.  I actually appreciate these weekend extracurriculars, as they represent some time that I get to take to work at home while Matt plays kid chauffeur.

As for me, this week I'll be cleaning house (nothing like an upcoming interview to make you realize that your house is a mess and your kitchen floor is sticky!), sewing curtains for Will's bed, prepping for Girl Scout cookie season, doing a ton of writing, and figuring out what I'm going to make people for Christmas.

It's going to be a great week!

Look at My Mosaic Light Switch Cover

LOOK AT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You love it, right? I LOVE it. I am IN love with it.

I didn't make it, obviously. Syd helped me pick it out at a local craft fair from the bits&pieces booth. Its creator doesn't have an online presence, which is a bummer, because now I kind of feel like every one of my light switches should also be a mosaic?

These are the kinds of things that I love to buy at craft fairs. I can do most sewing projects, can figure out how to hack or DIY a lot of things myself, but pieces like these, pieces in which the crafter's artistry and expertise and 10,000x10,000 hours practicing her craft shine through, well, those are the pieces that I buy.

And then I start figuring that craft out for myself!

Well, not so much "figuring out" as playing with, I suppose--the kids and I have explored mosaic-making a fair amount, and while our pieces don't attain the artistry of my beautiful light switch cover, of course, mosaic-making is actually quite an accessible craft. Here are some of the mosaics that we've done:

colored bean mosaics in a clear CD case

This is a nice way to practice mosaic-making without having to worry about grout. If you'd like a larger color range, you can work with buttons instead.

sailor's valentine

Here's another one where you don't have to worry about grout, but using the little shells allows the mosaic to be more detailed and more of a test for one's fine motor skills.

concrete poured mosaic

This project gives you the finished look of a mosaic, but again without having to grout around tiles. Since you pour the concrete and then set the tiles, however, it is time sensitive, so I suggest first laying out the mosaic on a template, then simply transferring it, piece by piece, to the poured concrete in its mold.

mosaic tile coaster

Finally, here's a REAL mosaic project, grout and all! You can actually use any upcycled tile or sheet of wood as a base--our local Restore has LOADS of random tiles to be had on the cheap.

I have visions of more involved mosaic projects, but those are pretty far back on my to-do list. Right now I'm focused on finishing up our World War 2 study and helping the older kid master all of her spelling bee words, and the kids are focused on Geomags and Perler beads. Our December dance card is full!

Homeschool History: Our Christopher Columbus Unit Study, and the Chickens Who Helped Us

I'm not a fan of Christopher Columbus (I mean, of course. Everybody knows, by now, that he was a monster), but he's an iconic figure in American culture, and for that alone is necessary to study. A unit on his history is, as well, an opportunity to fill in another gap in our US history study--we've spent much time on the prehistory of the United States, including that of its native peoples, and since this Columbus study we also covered the Mayflower and the pilgrims; we'll go from there through the American Revolution by the end of our big 2016 road trip.

Columbus' history is important, as well, for the opportunity that it gives me to demonstrate to the children how important context is. We talk about how different Columbus' journey might seem if one didn't also study the people who lived there before him, or didn't also learn that he and his crew gravely mistreated many of those people. We talk about colonialism, and the excuse that religion often makes for grave crimes against humanity. History often requires that one explore this wider context in order to truly understand what one is studying.

This workbook was our main textbook for this Columbus study. Its activities were a little young for my two, and it's light on Columbus' misdeeds, but since I didn't want to spend more than a week or so on this unit, it served as a good spine. The workbook also doesn't deify Columbus, does mention the Taino people by name, and does at least refer to their abduction. That latter fact is better explained to children the ages of my two in conversation, anyway. Less formally, we listened to relevant chapters from A History of US and Story of the World, and the older kid read selections from Howard Zinn's excellent A Young People's History of the United States.

The best activity of this unit, by far, was our visit to tour real-live recreations of the Nina and Pinta. They were so small! Details like this are what really make history come alive, and therefore make it memorable. I will likely have to remind the children many times in the future of the name of the Taino people, and the itinerary of the ships, and perhaps even of 1492, itself, but that these men traveled across the Atlantic Ocean on these tiny, tiny ships... well, I don't know how you could ever forget that fact after you've seen it for yourself.

After seeing these recreations, then, we made our own. We used the template from this cardboard boat tutorial, and here's how we made them distinctively the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

And then, of course, since we had models of all three ships, we had to recreate their journey! This activity was a lot more fun for the younger kid than I'd expected it to be, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's got three model ships and access to a large space of asphalt.

Here you can see the younger kid sort of semi-accurately drawing Central and South America (okay, it's not at all accurate, but she's got the gist!) and the islands to their east:

I drew Europe on the other side of the driveway, and you don't need to see my sort of semi-accurate drawing of that.

Before we sailed the ships across, the kid wanted to sail on her scooter. I agreed that this was an excellent idea:

Do not let me forget that some nice day we'll have Matt, who has much better than sort of semi-accurate drawing skills, draw us an entire world map on this driveway to scoot over and around.

Narrating as she went, the kid sailed her ships from Portugal to San Salvador:

A chicken came over to investigate, and that gave her another brilliant idea!

In this performance, the role of the Santa Maria will be played by the kid:

 

 I'd forgotten that we were also playing Sea Shanties on Spotify, but we were. Did you notice, though, that the kid had turned the cardboard Santa Maria upside-down and took off her sails to make her into the fort, La Navidad? Clever kiddo!

Seriously, though, didn't that activity turn out great?!? That kind of hands-on, whole-body, immersive learning is my Holy Grail of Homeschooling, and every once in a while, I manage to find it. Right here, I 100% found it!

On another evening, just because we love themed dinners, we had a Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria dinner. We made up a giant glass bowl of blue Jello with gummy fish swimming inside, and sailed clementine ships with toothpick masts across it. Matt carved us a watermelon caravel, and we ate baked potatoes cut in half and the fixings piled on top, and goldfish crackers, and yet another caravel carved from brownies (alas, but we love our sweets!).

The feast marked the end of our brief unit on Columbus. We'll of course study him again, when the children are older and can better appreciate the plight of those that he wronged. For our current purposes, however, his arrival spells the beginning of colonialism in the Americas, and we then turn to the most famous group of colonizers, the pilgrims from the Mayflower...

Here are some other resources that we utilized during this unit on Christopher Columbus. In particular, if you've never read Pastwatch, I highly recommend it:

Homeschool Science: Diagramming Bees

I know that Monday is usually the day that I share our homeschool's work plans for the week with you, but THIS week is Nutcracker week! I'm trying to get the kids to do some math and spelling each day, but really our family's primary goal this week is to support Syd, keeping her fed and hydrated and rested, making sure she has plenty of free time and fresh air, and getting her where she's supposed to be when she's supposed to be there with the correct hair, makeup, clothing, and various snacks, water bottles, bobby pins, decks of playing cards, etc.

And later this week? We get to watch our little angel dance!

So today, instead of telling you my plans, I'll tell you about something awesome that we did earlier this year. Remember the kids' obsession with bees this summer? Well, really it began with a deep love for Syd's Mexican sunflower, then an interest in the butterflies that frequented it.

And then we were given, by a publicist, a copy of this book:


And that's how the obsession with bees began. The kids studied bees and bee habitats, and participated in the Bumble Bee Watch program. And they pored over this book. Heck, *I* pored over this book! There are seriously some amazing bees in the world!

To demonstrate their knowledge of bee anatomy and prove their ability to apply it to a variety of bee types, I tasked the children with diagramming several of the bees from this book. Here are examples of their work:

Seriously, that iridescent green and yellow bee?!? Are you KIDDING me?!? I freaking adore it.

Entomology is a seasonal study that I'm sure we'll pick up again in the spring, or perhaps sooner, if I can convince the children that the mealworm farm that I want them to start is the good moneymaking opportunity that *I* think it is. Until then, here are some of the other resources that we enjoyed in our brief summer unit on bees:

• Insect Anatomy online book
• How to Make Toilet Paper Tube Hexagons

World War 2 Study: DIY Propaganda Posters

Other than our trip to Pearl Harbor or the live-action trench warfare from our preparatory study of World War 1, I'm reasonably confident that making their own propaganda posters has been both children's favorite activity of our World War 2 unit study.

We began, of course, with a discussion of propaganda, and the viewing of other propaganda materials--Google Image is a great one for this. Note together, as you go through the propaganda, the overarching themes, themes such as self-denial on the home front being equated with bravery on the battlefront, or the tendency to animalize the enemy, or the portrayal of the victimization of women and children as the likely consequence for one's failure. This is a great time to discuss what racism does to a society, as racism is rife in propaganda posters.

After we had defined propaganda, and analyzed propaganda, I really wanted the children to create their own propaganda. Luckily, I didn't have to completely invent that activity--here is an incredibly cool online program that allows you to do just that! You choose from a selection of existing World War 2 posters, delete the text, and write your own:

Fangirl is one of my current favorite novels. I am currently waiting VERY impatiently for my turn in the library hold queue for its follow-up, Carry on.

The kids LOVED this activity! I had planned on asking them to each create a couple of posters, so that they could get the general idea of constructing propaganda, but they both spent most of the evening on this, making a poster, asking for a parent to read/admire/laugh at their effort, and then repeating the entire process again, to great happiness and hilarity.

On the whole, Syd's efforts remained sincere and focused on my original prompt, although their creation still brought her great pleasure. They were freaking adorable, as well, and showed excellent understanding of how propaganda works, as well as how to rewrite a slogan in her own words. Alas, she worked on the oft-wonky children's computer, and if she saved them, I can't figure out where she put them. The ether, undoubtedly, or someone's email inbox whose name is one letter off from my own, perhaps. Maybe she'll make me some more sometime, if I ask her nicely.

Will's posters, now... Well... Do you ever read my words about this feral, willful, impossible child and wonder what she's like when she's not stubbornly refusing to do her math, or put on pants, or look up from her book? If so, I can assure you. 

THIS is exactly what she's like:

It's meant to continue with "local crime board," I believe. The text box only supports a certain number of characters, and both children sometimes struggled with that.

Some of her posters were just random funniness, of course, but, as both her history and her rhetoric instructor, I also noted a pleasing mix of humor made from unpacking the connotation of a piece of propaganda and rending it overt, and the use of irreverence to replace the usual sincerity that propaganda pretends, again highlighting propaganda's inherent half-truths.

The following piece, however, hit my funny bone so hard that I laughed for minutes. I cried. Hell, I practically peed myself! I still crack up about it (get it? Crack?), and every now and then, when we're someplace where we're supposed to be serious, like in the line at the bank or waiting for a concert to start, I'll lean over and whisper the following slogan softly into her ear:

Here is the follow-up campaign:


Seriously, I can't even. It's too funny.

One of the worrisome benefits of homeschooling is that it gives you a nearly unopposed license to espouse your own worldview to your children. I find it unfortunate that this is so often used to espouse worldviews that I personally don't approve of--Creationism, for example, or the Young Earth myth--but I feel that I must tell you that one of the main points that I emphasized in this lesson is that we must be watchful for propaganda in our daily lives, and we must be highly suspicious of any organization that uses it for any reason. Product manufacturers, of course, but also our military. Also our government. I instruct my children that whenever we recognize a piece of propaganda, we must ask ourselves, "Why are they trying to manipulate us? What are they not telling us?"

And now you need never wonder why my feral, impossible, willful child is also prone to making off-the-cuff belligerent political rants. She comes by it honestly, at least.

If you're interested in also raising children who are prone to political rants, embarrassingly often in public, here are most of the other resources that we used and enjoyed during this unit on World War 2 propaganda. I highly suggest that you preview, in its entirety, every single item before you give it to your children, and even then permit them to explore it only with you there to provide context and discuss its moral and ethical concerns--I also used only isolated excerpts of many of these items, and many aren't suitable for younger kids at all:

World War 2 propaganda poster examples