Homeschool Math: Rice Krispy Treat Fractions

Here's a super simple way to get some extra fractions enrichment into your kids' day:

Make anything that's round or square--pizza, cake, pie, quiche, or Rice Krispy treats. Nom!

You get bonus points, of course, if your selection is a treat.

Next you give your kid a big ole knife, and challenge her to cut her treat into specific fractions. Cut it in half. Take a half, and make fourths. Eighths. Can you make sixteenths?

With a Rice Krispy Treat, you can!

Put the pieces back together in various combinations and determine their fraction.

Find all the equivalent fractions. Calculate 1/2 of 1/2 of the Rice Krispy Treat. Copy that equation down onto paper, and take a picture of the Rice Krispy Treat piece to go with it. Give a kid 1/4 of the Rice Krispy Treat, then take away 1/2 of that--what does she have left?

Even if you're doing a rigorous math curriculum, as we are, casual, simple explorations like this are crucial to a kid's math understanding. Math needs to be conversational--a kid isn't going to "get" math if the only time she encounters it is in a textbook. Math needs to be practical--what kid DOESN'T understand the need to divide a treat perfectly equally? Giving her four pieces of a treat and telling her they need to be divided among three people is the sneakiest way to get her to an understanding of adding, subtracting, and equivalent fractions that I've ever found!

Most of all, though, math needs to be hands-on and sensorial, even for these "big" kids of the ripe old ages of nine and eleven, even with something as simple as composing and decomposing fractions at those ripe old ages. Pattern building is one of the cornerstones of intelligence, and in order to build a reliable mental conception of what fractions ARE, we need to see them in all shapes and sizes and combinations so that we can build that pattern. We need to see 1/4 not just in a textbook, but in pattern blocks, Base Ten blocks, apples, game boards, measuring cups, gas tanks, bottles of milk, pieces of pie, trips around the block, and so much more, all the time, as much as possible, as naturally as possible. If you can see what 1/2 of 1/4 looks like in your head, whether you're visualizing a Rice Krispy Treat or a glass of water or your Cuisenaire rods, then you're well able to understand the algorithm that lets you calculate it, which means that it's easier to memorize and it's easier to perform and it's easier to apply.

And down I step off of my soapbox, primarily because if I continue to rant on, I won't have enough time to make egg sandwiches and prep the school table for today's work before the kids wander in and start begging for just half an hour of screen time before we get started, AND I forgot to make a big batch of salt dough yesterday, so I need to do that right after I get the kids settled in with cursive and Books of the Day. AND if I want them to help me in the garden--and I do!--I need to get them through their school quickly so that I can pretend to Will like the gardening is the work that we have to get done before I can take her to the library.

However, if you've got more time to browse the internet than I do this morning, here are some of my other favorite activities for fraction enrichment:

• edible chessboard: Fractions up to 1/64, and you can play chess and checkers on it!
• fraction art: The fun part is making the art; recording the fractions of each color is not fun, but IS a great illustration of what fractions look like, especially if you've got more than one person doing the activity. 
• spiraling decimals: This is a fun game, and it's tricky! Convert the decimal cards into fractions, of course, before you play.
• Roll a Whole: When we play this one, we usually play up to something like five wholes, and then I have the kids draw their results.
• fraction flags: You can use these, or homemade decorations and frosting, to record the fractions on your treat.

World Thinking Day 2016: A Trip to China, and an Electronics Fast

I've mentioned before that World Thinking Day is one of my favorite Girl Scout celebrations, a Girl Scout Geography Fair and a global issues unit study combined. Two years ago, the kids simply attended the Geography Fair without presenting their own country, and we studied the global issue of education rights. Last year, our troop gave an excellent presentation on Mongolia at the Geography Fair, and we studied Fair Trade.

FYI, that Fair Trade study still comes up, as the kids are fond of researching the "grade" of companies that we patronize. We did that just last week, when Will urgently needed some new clothes (the kid grows something like an inch a month--she always urgently needs new clothes!), and Syd was in charge of figuring out the best store to shop in. We finally settled on H&M, although with much discussion about the fact that the store's C grade isn't great, and that really, if clothing is that cheap, there's probably something unethical going on somewhere down the line, because otherwise how could a person have been paid a living wage to make it?

I bet I've also mentioned before the fact that I LOATHE shopping!

This year, our troop gave an excellent presentation on China at the Girl Scout celebration. I was too distracted to take many photos, but each child was in charge of an informational display on some topic (Will covered the Girl Guides of Hong Kong, and Syd covered Mandarin), they took turns manning the activities (Mandarin writing on a Buddha board, stamping passports, and using chopsticks to transfer beans)--

--and they performed a version of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" with the animal names sung in Mandarin, and of course there were costumes. And a dragon that chased away the other animals at the end.

It. Was. MARVELOUS!

That work on the Geography Fair was actually enough for Syd, a Junior, to earn her World Thinking Day badge, but Will, a Cadette, had to do an additional activity to help her more deeply understand our privileged access to a connected society: she had to go an entire 24 hours without electronics, mwa-ha-ha!

The entire family, of course, joined her in her electronics fast out of solidarity (except that when the kids were at the library, I raced back home and snuck in some work on the computer--don't tell!), and I tried particularly to make it a fun experience for them. I wanted the kids to feel the loss of their screens somewhat, because I wanted them to understand that lack of access to technology isn't fair, but I also wanted them to understand that choosing to avoid access to technology also opens one up to enriching connections in other ways. So even though I did make them do school--

--we listened to records all day instead of CDs and Spotify, I got the kids (mostly Will, with Syd fluttering around and pretending like she was helping when she actually wasn't) to help me get a ton of tedious and tiring yardwork done, and we played a LOT of games:

I was pleased to see that Will was drawn into games that she normally wouldn't be, such as these Story Cubes.

Timeline, however, is the favorite game of both of us.

 This is also how the current Kapla block obsession began, an obsession that still continues, as the Kapla block city that's taking up most of the walking space in our big family room can attest. Before the city came to be, there was the usual challenge of "Let's build a tower tall enough to touch the ceiling!"

In our old house, this was a do-able feat, and often accomplished. In this house, however, with its vaulted ceilings tall enough to host an aerial silks rig...

Well, even Matt had trouble, even after we convinced him to stand on top of a dictionary on top of a bar stool:

"Stand on top of two dictionaries on top of the bar stool!" we encouraged him, as he protested that he did not want to do such a thing.

"What could possibly go wrong?" we countered.

Oh, just the inevitable...


"Connect" was this year's World Thinking Day theme, and it truly played out in this experience. It's easy, in the pattern of our days, to gradually disconnect from each other, to find ourselves spending our days with me working, Syd playing with her toys in the next room, Will on the couch reading, and our evenings eating take-away in front of a movie with Matt--it's together, yes, but it's not necessarily connected. Since then, however, I've made a conscious effort every day, several times a day, to take a break from my work and connect with each child. I've sat down on the floor and played more times in the past week than I have in the past month. I've initiated more games. I've offered more treats. And it's been wonderful, of course, especially to see a kid's face light up when I sit down next to her on the floor and say that yes, I absolutely want to build a new house for her village, and to eventually lure a kid who is sulking at having to sit at the dinner table into staying there long after her sister has left to tell us all about Skulduggery Pleasant and the arcane rules behind naming in his world, and to make fun of what I decided is my "taken" name--Panther Zephyrino.

Please call me Panther Zephyrino from now on, Friends, and do not use my given name to mind control me.

Work Plans for the Week of March 14, 2016: Pi Day and Projects

I am SO excited to get back to our weekly work plans! For all of February and the first half of March, I did daily plans, written on a dry erase board each morning for each kid. Daily plans are great for zipping through our math curriculum and progressing on projects like our big World Thinking Day presentation on China, but for the more thoughtful, project-based learning that I prefer for the kids, it's really best to plan a week at a time ahead of time, with my unit study lesson plans at hand.

I've dialed back on the assigned chores a little bit this week, just to see if I can get a little less pushback, that way, when I ask the kids to help me with something on the fly, rather than their typical response of "Help you clean the living room? That's not on my work plan!" I also don't have a Project of the Week assigned--the younger kid, especially, LOVES the Project of the Week, but it adds significant chaos to the schedule, so I thought that I'd just give us a week to get settled back into our routine, maybe get some extra work done on STEM Fair projects first. It's also our school district's Spring Break, so we'll enjoy a little vacation from most of our extracurriculars--I appreciate the break!

I don't have to temptingly strew a sensory material this week, either, as the younger kid got extremely invested in Kapla block play late last week, and has done a good job strewing those around our big family room, herself, and of drawing everyone else into her play. I anticipate gingerly picking my way around her Kapla block village for the entirety of this week.

This week's memory work consists of the vocabulary words from Wordly Wise and Mandarin vocabulary from the kids' Mandarin class. Books of the Day are pretty widespread in topic this week, with selections including a couple about puberty, a couple about China, one on global water issues, a couple about random animals, and a couple on the American Revolution. I assign them as randomly as I select them, as they're just books that I think that the children should read and/or might like, with no other overarching reason for reading them.

And here's the rest of our week!


MONDAY: Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, the kids are still asleep. They also may be sleeping in because of last night's "incident:" The older kid was displeased that Matt took her tablet away from her at the end of screen-time yesterday, so to get revenge she programmed it to go off with an alarm at 1 am, knowing that we generally keep all confiscated electronics on the table next to our bed, the better to thwart children who try to sneak them back. When the alarm went off, I bolted awake with my heart in my mouth, as did Matt. Unfortunately, he could not figure out how to turn off the damned thing, so he marched it into the kids' bedroom, woke up the older kid, and demanded that she turn it off. Extra unfortunately, the older kid had not only set some sort of password to access the alarm, which she groggily had to try to remember while it blared, but apparently she'd also set the alarm so that you could only turn it off by completing a math problem, which she then had to try to do while it continued blaring. She couldn't solve the problem, so she tried to Google it, still with blaring. The entire incident took so long that across the house, I kept drowsing off, then waking up again to the blaring alarm, then drowsing off again, etc.

It was not our family's finest moment.

Anyway, when the kids do finally wake up, I'll make them egg sandwiches, then we'll settle in for Wordly Wise, cursive, and hopefully History of Us before our volunteer shift at the local food pantry today. History of Us is the spine that I'm using for our American Revolution unit study, although we're zooming through the book on the founding of the colonies first, for context. I've told you that I'm very project-focused, so you won't be surprised that even zooming comes with projects. I plan to visit Salem on our American Revolution road trip, and although I doubt that I'll take the children to any witch-related tourist traps there, I would like to take them to the real Gallows Hill, Old Burying Point, and the memorial to the victims of the witch trials, and I'd like them to understand the context.

And, fine, we might find a gift shop and buy a little bit of witch-themed crap.

Each kid has a composition book that I'm hoping she'll use as a combination notebook for our unit study and travel journal during our trip. I also had the kids make notebooks for our World War 2 unit, but I was disappointed at how they came out, as I think they're far too messy for the kids to be able to meaningfully refer to them or add to them the next time we study World War 2. I'm planning to provide more guidance this time, so we'll see! I printed out this Salem Witch Trials lapbook, and the kids will complete it and put it in their notebooks. The plan is that they'll leave space to also journal about our trip to Salem when we're on the road, and afterwards can add in any souvenirs and pamphlets, and the photos that we take while we're there.

The kids are still completing a page a day of cursive, the younger kid from the secular version of New American Cursive II and the older kid from Teach Yourself Cursive. I see improvement from them both every day, but it's still VERY slow going, so I plan to buy them both this cursive copybook with literary quotes to do after these books. The kids also have some correspondence to catch up on this month, mostly thank-you notes to cookie customers and relatives who sent Christmas gifts (yikes!), but the younger kid also has a couple of pen pals to whom she writes.

Our family "parties" are generally just excuses to eat stuff, and today's Pi Day party is no different. There will be homemade pizza and homemade apple pie, the viewing of a math documentary (probably the first episode of The Story of Maths), and the singing of the first 25 digits of Pi:

It's a cover of "The Pi Song," by Bryant Oden, for those of you playing the home game.

TUESDAY: In Math Mammoth, the younger kid is slogging unhappily through long division, and the older kid was supposed to be briefly reviewing geometry before moving on to ratios, but she somehow managed to confuse herself so greatly with angle measurement (she's making it harder than it is) that I'm making her spend an extra day measuring angles before she moves on. If two long pages of angle measuring does not clear up, once and for all, the difference between acute and obtuse, then I don't know what I'm going to do with her!

This documentary about Gracie and Spots, our two cats, is meant to be part of a larger Girl Scout project that the younger kid proposed, but speaking of making things harder than they are... I just can't seem to get it off the ground! I'm telling you, though: March is the month! These kids are going to get this damned documentary filmed, present it to the rest of the troop, and make some toys to donate to the local animal shelter if it is the last thing that I do!

Ahem...

Lesson 3 in the Your Kids: Cooking curriculum is tamale pie, but it just doesn't sound appetizing, so I'm putting it off for another week and instead having the kids review their first lesson, French toast. Any excuse to have breakfast for dinner!

Our homeschool playgroup is the highlight of my school week. Last week, we went to a park that has a creek, and the parents chatted all afternoon while the kids ran back and forth between playground and water. At one point, the younger kid complained about being thirsty, because the city hasn't turned the water fountains on for the season yet. I jokingly suggested that she find the park's water cut-off valve, break into it, and turn it on for herself, which led to a discussion among several kids and parents about where such a thing might be located and how it might work, which led to me giving the younger kid my Swiss Army knife to unscrew the panel underneath the water fountain. I immediately forgot all about it until another mom looked over a VERY long time later to find an entire crowd of children around the water fountain, all attempting to investigate its plumbing and how it might be sabotaged. They did manage to unscrew a couple of panels, although they put them back, but they never did figure out how to turn the water fountain on.

WEDNESDAY: The lack of extracurriculars this week allows me to assign more schoolwork, which means that we can delve in more depth into the documentary project (which WILL be done!!!) and our history curriculum. We'll slow down a lot once we get into the next History of Us book, but for now... zoom!

We can also delve more deeply into our science unit. The spine is an eighth-grade digital textbook on earth sciences; I expect the younger kid to understand less than I expect the older kid to, and I add in projects to enhance understanding. This day's lesson is on acidity, so the kids can use Ph strips to test various substances--always a good time! Thursday's lesson is on states of matter, and since the younger kid has been curious about clouds lately, as well, it's a good time to ask them to make a working model of the water cycle that shows evaporation and condensation and rain--more on that later!

THURSDAY: We're still working through the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Program workbook, although I'm still waiting for it to click with the kids and get them inspired. At least both kids are excited about our upcoming homeschool group's STEM Fair! The older kid is making an augmented reality sandbox, and the younger kid wants to design a website--I'm thinking that I'll have her use Wordpress. We'll get started with that, and with installing Linux to an old desktop computer so that it can run the sandbox programming, on this day.

FRIDAY: Both kids are really enjoying this election campaign. Can you see our Candidates Wall behind the older kid in this photo?

The kids especially enjoy marking out each failed candidate with a big, red Sharpie.

I let the younger kid watch this John Oliver segment on Donald Trump with me, and now she enjoys correcting us when we speak his name--"It's DRUMPF!!!" I like the way that this Election 2016 curriculum explains the entire process of the campaign and defines its components, so that applying it to the current election is easy. This particular lesson covers all the media components of a campaign, so we'll be searching YouTube for examples of each one.

The kids are kind of over learning about puberty, so I probably won't do all of the activities that I'd planned for with them during this unit, but I insist that they memorize their own anatomy, so we'll go over it again by making and labeling salt dough models. I also for sure want them to experiment with the absorbency of various pads and tampons, but after that I may show mercy and let us all move on to the skeletal system or something.

The kids had so much fun with our Spirograph last week that I thought that they might also enjoy pendulum painting. The younger kid also wants me to re-rig our aerial silks rig back from the hammock set-up that it's in now, and if this is the last time that we'll have an aerial hammock for a while, then we might as well do some whole-body pendulum painting!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I both want to go on a day trip to one of our local national parks AND want to spend the entire weekend planting and landscaping in the yard. I could say that I'll do one on one day and one on the other day, but the reality is that I may well just end up laying in the backyard hammock all of BOTH days, reading and eating cookies. Tough life, I know.

Her New Dress

Will wouldn't let me take too many photos of it, nor would she let me do her hair cute or go without the torn leggings underneath or put on her boots instead of her old sneakers, so yes, I count myself lucky to have gotten these two pictures of the dress that I sewed for her this week:

My design and construction notes are all here in the Crafting a Green Post that I wrote for it, but the tl;dr is that it's the Chambray Dress, size medium, from Handmade Style. It's not something that I'd sew for myself, because I prefer a top with better drape, ideally something stretchy, but it's a good look on Will, and she seems to like it well enough.

I did get Will's buy-in on both the dress pattern and fabric before I sewed it, but it's clear now that she'll always want to wear leggings or bicycle shorts underneath it. And that's how my new project has become finding a good leggings/bicycle shorts pattern!

Do you know of one?

The Kid Can Skate! The 2016 Spring Ice Show

Y'all, I have been SO. SICK.

Like, seriously, SO sick. The kind of sick that makes you rethink your life choices. The kind of sick that you can't even really explain to people even after you feel better, on account of the tale is too horrifying.

I am going to be traumatized for a long time by how sick I was, but I'll just tell you that I got sick on a Friday, and I did not feel better until I woke up on a Monday TEN DAYS LATER. This year's flu is no joke, my Friends.

It's a little funny, though, because I made no secret that February was a stressful month for me. I complained all the time about cookie selling and Syd's fashion show garment and all the big etsy orders that I kept getting because I refused to close my shop while I was so busy. Is it really any wonder, then, that I got laid flat by a virus? Oh, and I somehow, probably at a cookie booth, managed to catch hand, foot, and mouth disease, as well, so that happened.

Anyway, on the last day that I still felt really unwell, I nevertheless put on a bra AND a pair of button-waisted pants--my first in over a week!--and was bundled off to the ice arena, to watch this amazing kid of mine show off another season of ice skating instruction.

Rehearsals for this particular performance had been a little shaky, as the show runner had made both the dicey decision to have the kids skate to a hee-haw sounding country song AND to have them wear their pajamas while doing it. A few of the skaters were too young to take offence, but those who were well ensconced in the tween demographic, my own skater included, were not best pleased. I'm told that one child actually defected to skate in a younger level's performance instead.

Nevertheless, my own kid sucked it up and put on her wolf pajamas, and when, once we'd gotten there, I voiced the sudden panicked thought that perhaps all the other children had revolted and my kid would be the only one in jammies, Will assured me that she'd seen one of the other kids in her group already, and she was rocking a pair of cheetah-print jammies.

Thank you, Cheetah Jammies!

Here, then, are all the kids, rocking their jammies and their hee-haw song and showing off their awesome skating skills:


During the first half of the show, a little tot skater finished her performance, then somehow escaped her teacher (I would NOT have been pleased if it had been my kid) and managed to march her way all the way around the rink in her little tot skates and over to her mother in the bleachers. Her mother was sitting next to me, so I lifted the kid up to her, but I couldn't help both asking the kid, "Does your teacher know where you are?" and telling the mother, "They're going to want her for the finale." The kid stayed in the bleachers, however, and sure enough, during the finale, when all her little classmates marched and shuffled and were tugged out for their final bow, the kid began to wail. The mother said to me, in a break from comforting her kid and ceaselessly explaining to her that it was too late to go join her group on the ice, "I think you've done this before!"

And that's when it hit me: yeah, I have. Will's such a low-key kid about her activities that it can be hard to realize, sometimes, that yes, this kid has been skating every winter since 2008. She's been riding since 2013, and actually has her first Pony Club test, for the D-1 level, later today. Back in 2010, when she was holding her peaceful protest against Sport Shorties, I don't know if I believed that this kid would ever find one sport to call her own, much less two.

And I haven't even told you about the mother/daughter fencing that we've been doing all fall and winter. Another time!

Homeschool Field Trip: Geo Fest at the Indiana State Museum

There are many things that I have to do this month:

Girl Scout cookies. Seriously, Friends. My children have been selling ALL THE COOKIES! I am doing my darnedest to support the little lambs in their endeavors, but the fact that this requires, me, as well, to pretty much sell all the cookies... it's exhausting. We're talking keeping track of inventory. We're talking door-to-door sales, in tow behind the kids. We're talking hours upon hours of cookie booths at different locations, including set-up and tear-down. Bank deposits. Different bank deposits to cover the council's cut. Organizing the orders and inventory for the other kids in the troop. Helping with their marketing. Stressing over the inventory that I'm pretty sure isn't going to get sold. Stressing over the money that has to add up right. It's worth it, because rarely do I see my children so visibly growing in confidence and quantifiable skills as they do during this intense couple of months of cookie season. And yet... exhausted.

Trashion/Refashion Show. Yes, it IS that time again. In my free time between cookie booths, I've been busting my butt over Syd's design for this year, The Phoenix. I've finished the complete muslin, sourced what I hope will be enough supplies, last night I dyed the bodice--it didn't turn out great, since who knew that khaki overdyed with yellow becomes mostly green?--and I have until Monday to finish designing and sewing the dang thing. 

World Thinking Day. It's like a Girl Scout Geography Fair. I led my troop in our display and presentation this year, and let me just say that the kids' performance of "Farmer Liang Had a Farm," with all the animal names sung in Mandarin, AND a costume for each kid, AND a solo for each animal, was masterful. They're brilliant, the lot of them.

Etsy. I am always happy to have etsy orders, since that's how I pay for birthday presents and craft supplies, among other, more boring, things, but working on them in between cookie business and fashion show designing and planning our China booth? Yep! Exhausting.

So of COURSE with all of this stuff that I HAVE to get done this month, I took an entire day to take the kids to the 2016 Geo Fest at the Indiana State Museum. 

I mean, come on. Fossils! Rocks! Sand! Dirt! It's pretty much a must-do.

To illustrate how off my game I am in the overabundance of activity this month, I didn't take pictures of half of what I want to tell you about. I should, for instance, absolutely have photographed for you the flourescent rocks, on account of they were freaking amazing. A volunteer had a table of them, lit with a black light, of course, and a chart. You'd admire a rock, ask him what it was, and he'd look at his chart and tell you about it. 

Ummm.... I asked him about so many rocks that finally he just gave me the chart and let me look them up for myself.

One of the coolest specimens was a piece of coal with little lines of some kind of impurity running through it. Under the black light, the coal looked blacker than black, but those lines glowed! Later in the day, at the table with the geophysicists, they were showing us specimen after specimen of core samples, and telling us what each thing was--"This one is limestone, and this is a different kind of limestone. Here is silt, but this one is sandstone," etc. One of the geophysicists pointed to one of the samples, said, "This one is coal," and I said, "Ooh, it's got lines of impurities! Do you know if they fluoresce?"

The geophysicists were like, "What?!?" and I was like, "Dude, fluorescence!", and told them all about the guy with the black light on Level 1. As we departed to go learn about groundwater from another table, the geophysicists were making plans to go check him and his coal out.

Have I ever told you that Syd is mortally offended by the atl-atl?

There's a story there, I swear it.

The coolest things about Geo Fest, in my opinion, are the activity tables. On both levels, and in the galleries, are various tables set up with exhibits to explore, crafts to do, little activities or quizzes, and THE BEST PRIZES IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE:

That mastodon bone fragment was a prize. As was the rock that the kids made into necklaces. And some mica at another table.

 You can see one of the tables in the background here, although I actually WAS taking a super nerdy picture of this trilobyte:

And yep, the kids got to keep the microfossils that they discovered and sorted. It was awesome.

Okay, so now I have to tell you about The. Coolest. THING. EVER!!! Some guy had a sandbox up on a rolling cart. Above the sandbox, he'd rigged a Kinect camera and a digital projector. The image projected onto the sandbox was a topographical map of the actual terrain of the sandbox, and as the kids played, moving sand and shoveling and digging, the map image changed in real-time to reflect what the kids were doing!

Oh, and there was also a water table algorithm, so if a kid dug down, the hole would fill with virtual water, and you could hold a fist up as a cloud to make it rain, and water would flow, etc.

It. Was. AWESOME!!!

Will says that she wants to make one of these augmented reality sandboxes for her STEM fair project, and we actually own all of the hardware except for the digital projector, which is something that I've wanted forever, anyway. Stay tuned!

We did some of the actual exhibits in the museum--

--although I was bummed to discover that the rocks and minerals gallery, which I was super excited to steer the kids into after we'd seen some of the Geo Fest stuff, is actually off-exhibit right now for some reconstruction. Dang it!

On the way home from the museum, because I am insane, I had the kids and I scheduled to do a three-hour cookie booth outside a Wal-mart. It was kind of a windy day, so we'd decided not to use the big backdrop that the kids had made, at least, so we only had to deal with unloading and transporting the table and tablecloth and donation boxes and cases of cookies.

We got everything unloaded and moved and started setting up outside the Wal-mart entrance, and it was great. People were so excited, they were trying to buy cookies before we even had anything out. I had a couple at my table, another guy standing in line, the kids racing to finish getting all the boxes set up, when all of a sudden, the wind goes CRAZY. It starts blowing like there's a tornado coming or something, and it flips the cookie table and blows every single thing, cookies and donation boxes and the little prizes that the kids had made for customers, directly into the busy parking lot. The lid falls off of the Operation Cookie Drop donation box, and now bills are flying all over. Both kids start to bolt for the money flying around the parking lot. I scream for them to stop, and they do, but every time a new bill blows by they forget and start to bolt again and I scream at them again. A bunch of total strangers start picking up cookies from the parking lot, with cars weaving around them. I put the table back on its feet, and it immediately blows over again. I let go of it, and it starts to blow into the kids. I grab it again, look right into the face of a horrified total stranger, and just say to her, in a conversational tone, "I don't know what to do."

That woman and her husband help me fold up the table and drag it around the corner of the building, where there's enough of a break from the wind that it will at least stop trying to blow away on its own. Other total strangers bring me boxes of cookies that they've picked up for me, and help me pack them haphazardly back into the grocery carts; we can't set anything down, because if we take our hands off of it, it blows away again. The employee in charge of fetching shopping carts from the parking lot finds a couple of bills and brings them to me, then buys a box of Do-Si-Dos and lets me keep the change after I tell him about more money blowing away underneath a chain-link fence.

We got everything back into the car eventually, then we all climbed in and just sort of sat there, dazed. People are walking past us to and fro into the store, leaning against the wind, their hair blowing wildly. Finally, I said, "Did you notice, Kids? Total disaster struck us and immediately, every single person in sight stopped what they were doing and helped us. We could never have fixed all of that by ourselves. We had all the help that we needed, as much of it as we needed, and we didn't know a single person here."

That's the main lesson that I hope that the children carry with them away from this crazy cookie season. They've learned how to set a goal, how to work as hard as they can to achieve that goal, and how much more work it will take next year to try again to achieve it (despite their best efforts, they're not going to sell 1,000 cookies each this year). They've learned how to market the less-popular cookies. They've learned how to work as a team. Syd has learned how to handle cash transactions. Will has learned how to use the credit card reader.

But more importantly, they've learned that there are people in this world who will ask a Girl Scout what her favorite kind of cookie is, buy that cookie, then hand the box to her to keep. There are people in this world who will tell a kid that they've already bought five boxes of cookies from a neighbor kid, then, after she says to them, "Thank you for supporting Girl Scouts!" (I taught them that!), will turn back around and buy another five boxes of cookies from them, too, just because they're polite. There are people in this world who will ask a Girl Scout a question, stand patiently smiling while she works out her answer, stay there while another child figures out the change, continue to stay while a third kid is reminded of what to say at the end of a transaction and then still leave with a smile, several minutes later. There are people in this world who will buy cookies for soldiers whom they'll never meet.

And there are especially people in this world, a lot of people, who will, when walking into a busy store on a busy afternoon after a long day at work, see the cookie booth of a woman and two Girl Scouts practically explode in the wind, stuff fly everywhere, and will pick up all that stuff in a parking lot, around the wheels of cars, and bring it right back to her. Including cookies. Including money.

I hope that I'm that kind of person. I hope that my kids will grow up to be that kind of person, too.

The Catalytic Decomposition of Hydrogen Peroxide--Bust and Boom!

Please don't call it elephant's toothpaste.

The kids have been studying atoms and how they combine into molecules, and exploring chemical reactions is an excellent way to expand upon and enrich that study. Chemical reactions take molecules and make them into different molecules or break them down into atoms, and you can see that microscopic process with your very own eyes!

Science is amazing, isn't it?

One of the most accessible chemical reactions with a great wow factor is the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. It's become common to refer to this demonstration as "elephant's toothpaste," and I have to admit that I just don't get that. Yes, it's a cute name. No, it doesn't relate to anything about the process or the science behind it. Yes, kids like cute names. No, it doesn't do kids any good to expose them to the demonstration without any explanation, as if it's simply a fun magic trick. SCIENCE is the magic here, my Friends! Let your kids know that this is SCIENCE!

*steps down off soapbox*

Ahem... anyway, there are several different ways to force the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, but as we learned for ourselves, some are less user-friendly than others.

We first tried forcing the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide using yeast as a catalyst:

It was a total bust. I doubt that it worked any more quickly than simply exposing the hydrogen peroxide to the sun would. We played around with it, had to leave for an activity, came back hours later, and were like, "Oh, it finally foamed up... yay."

Another day, we tried the demonstration again with proper supplies, and it worked like a dream.

Instead of jacking around with household supplies, I bought the actual proper ingredients, both 20-volume hydrogen peroxide and 40-volume hydrogen peroxide (for an interesting comparison) and potassium iodide.

I bought the powdered form of potassium iodide, because it's simple to make it into a saturated solution--just 1 gram of potassium iodide powder in 1 ml of water, shaken well:

You also need some sort of wide-bodied container with a small opening. When we tried this demonstration outside, we used a plastic soda bottle, hoping for an explosive exit by the oxygen, but on this day, the temperature was in the teens, and I instead chose an Erlenmeyer flask for our indoors demo. 

For the first demonstration, I poured 1/8 cup of hydrogen peroxide into the Erlenmeyer flask, then added the saturated solution of potassium iodide. The result is not, like, amazingly exciting, but does give you a clear view of the oxygen atoms being released from the hydrogen peroxide molecules:

Don't forget to touch the outside of the flask while you're observing the chemical reaction. This is an exothermic reaction, so you'll feel the warmth! 

The chemical reaction becomes more exciting when you add something for the oxygen molecules to cling to as they escape. A big squirt of dishwashing detergent should do nicely:



One of the especially fun things about this demonstration, as I'm sure you can see, is that the byproduct is entirely heat, oxygen, and bubbles. It's perfectly safe to play with:

This is the face that a kid should make when doing science!

This is also a great time to review the structure of molecules. We use this Zometools Molecular Mania kit:

With it, the kids modeled both hydrogen peroxide and water. See that extra oxygen atom in the hydrogen peroxide model? That's what we were playing with!

Finally, I asked the children to repeat the demonstration on their own. Here's Will making her saturated solution of potassium iodide:

Success!

This was one seriously fun demonstration, and I can't imagine a better way to make that information on atoms, molecules, and chemical reactions stick.

Just wait until we get to do this again outside! And yes, when I promised the kids that we could make it into a "bomb," I meant it.

An Ode to Gracie

Will deeply desires a dog of her own, and we're hoping to make that happen this summer, but this particular spoiled grey tabby of ours is pretty much Sydney's best friend and soulmate:

She is to be found wherever the children are, often sleeping inconveniently exactly where you'd rather be, but under Syd's dictate, you are not permitted to disturb her, lest that make her uncomfy:

In warm weather, she insists upon being outside with the children, and will even follow us on hikes: 

When the children go outside to play in poor weather, however, Gracie stands at the window and watches them, meowing plaintively. It's pretty pathetic.

Mostly, however, you'll find her somewhere like this:

And yes, she will let Syd dress her up. Here, she's serving as the mascot for Syd's online Girl Scout cookie shop (which you should ask me for the link for, so that you can buy some cookies from her. She takes credit cards! And ships across the US!):

And, yes, she even has her own theme song:

We WILL launch our Hunt for the Best Dog Ever this summer, because I promised the kid, and it's something that she wants very much, and frankly, it's probably something that she needs very much, as well, but I'm nervous about it on several fronts. Will we find a dog that won't eat the chickens? Will we successfully train it not to pee in the house? Will its existence be a giant pain in the ass?

But also... will it, could it, how could it ever possibly be as perfect, as deeply loved, as integral a part of our family as our beloved Spots and Gracie are?

Although I do look forward to one day hearing Will make up and sing a theme song to her dog...

An Ode to Coloring

That's another thing that the kids have been doing for hours lately! Syd especially, but also often Will, seem deeply content to spend much of an entire day simply listening to audiobooks and coloring. When they were small, I despised coloring books, as I felt that they deprived the children of their creativity, and the kids do often make their own drawings--

--but I have since come to suspect, as has most of the world, if the rise in popularity of adult coloring books can be trusted, that there is something particularly satisfying, in an almost meditative way, about just... coloring.

And that's why we often spend our time exactly here, doing exactly this:

I tend to sneakily saturate our coloring and listening with educational selections. Fortunately, the audio version of Joy Hakim's The History of Us is quite well done, so much so that Syd, my main listener/colorer, will usually choose to keep feeding discs into the stereo in order to listen to the entire book, if I start her off with it. She also just finished listening to Harriet the Spy on CD, and right this second, actually, is sitting in the playroom windowseat, petting the cat, and listening to the Land of Stories series on Playaways.

Note: I will tolerate her telling me the entire plot of Land of Stories, even though that probably takes longer than it would just to listen to them, but I require her to listen to Land of Stories on headphones, because I. Cannot. STAND. THEM!!!!!!!!!

Ahem...

Syd is as voracious a consumer of audiobooks as Will is of print books, so I should probably stop right here and share with admit to you all of the audiobooks that we currently have checked out from the library for her:

  

Yes, that list is for real. Mind you, some of those titles are ones that she chose for herself, and some are titles that I'm strewing for her to find. And that doesn't count the audiobooks that I have for myself, of course--something dry on Jamestown and an alternate history of the American Revolution. Super fun, right?

The kids are also quite tolerant of my sneaky stacking of their coloring book collection with educational titles. Here's their shelf of coloring and puzzle books:

And yep, 99.9% of those are educational. My favorite publishers are Dover, Bellerophon, and Peterson, and if I ever find a clean copy of one of those books at a second-hand shop--you'd be surprised how often that happens!--I will buy it, no matter its subject. Dover and Bellerophon are especially nice, since they have coloring books on fictional themes, but with a factual background. For instance, Will is super into dragons, and still colors from this Dover coloring book on dragons that I bought her in 2012 (Pro tip: I make my kids photocopy the page that they want to color. They can choose regular paper or cardstock, but they color that copy, leaving the coloring book clean for unlimited use!). It's got a different picture of a dragon on every page, WITH text that describes that dragon's place in mythology or culture. It's dragons AND learning! This Bellerophon coloring book of unicorns (which Amazon tells me that I bought on the same day as I bought the dragons one) is formatted identically.

Will also really likes the Color Yourself Smart book of dinosaurs, although unfortunately none of the other titles in that series are anywhere near that exciting. Get some more books on animals, medieval history, and astronomy, Color Yourself Smart!

Beyond the purely educational coloring books, the kids and I are also drawn to the often abstract, often VERY highly detailed "adult" coloring books. The kids' grandmothers have given them several of the Creative Haven coloring books, and I think that Syd and I are both working on one here:

 Oh, and I JUST finished this page from the Color Me Cluttered coloring book (which I actually received for free from a publicist--how fun is that, getting supplied with coloring books just for being me?):

I've actually got a few coloring pages that I'm working on. I tend to sit down to join the kids with whatever they're doing, so if they're coloring with markers, I work on my paisley page--

--and if they're working with colored pencils, I have my Harry Potter coloring book that I just started: 

I started it on the road, as it was a Christmas gift from my aunt and I started coloring in it about ten minutes after she gave it to me. That's why I'm coloring this page IN the book. From now on, I'll copy the page that I want to color, just like everyone else.

Of course, one mustn't forget the internet as a source of coloring material. Syd is a BIG fan of doing a Google image search for coloring pages, because that's just about the only way that the poor little lamb can color her pop culture loves, whether it's superheroes or Barbie or My Little Pony. Will sometimes jumps in for more dragon coloring pages, but mostly it's Syd and a million different versions of Pinkie Pie's Cupcake Party or whatever.

Okay, enough about coloring. While Syd is listening to audiobooks and Will is lying on the floor reading, I need to go make a database of Girl Scout cookie booth sign-ups, organize cookie deliveries for this afternoon, wash Syd's ballet leotard, find a base pattern for her fashion show garment, start on a massive birthday candle order that I've been procrastinating on for a solid week now, steam mop the kitchen floor, and start an altered book page greeting card tute for Crafting a Green World.

I said that the kids would have a restful week this week, NOT me.