Yet Another Day at the Children's Museum

I know that by now you must be bored of me posting about our visits to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis--oh, gee, another photo of the water clock! Hey, there they are goofing around in Dinosphere again!

Well, if you think that, then I fooled you, because I did NOT take a photo of the water clock this time! Instead, here we are goofing around in Dinosphere!

We were playing a game entitled Carry On a Casual Conversation While Gesturing with a T-Rex Tooth. It's a super fun game!

Our Leonardo, the Mummified Dinosaur is famous. Remember we even got asked about him after we played Stump the Docent at the Field Museum?

They're pretending to be T-rexes. I mean, obviously.

We have a lot of favorites in the permanent collection--here is where I *should* be showing you a photo of the water clock!--

Seriously, how many hundred times has this one compared her hand, ever growing, but still ever too small, to this polar bear print?

 --but we always check in with the traveling exhibits, too:

I have long complained about the museum's penchant for booking branded exhibits, but I have to admit that this Hot Wheels exhibit did include a lot of good information about how cars work.

We are doing our best Despotic Monarch faces in the Pirates and Princesses exhibit.

I think my face is really good!

 I think that everyone's favorite exhibit, however, is the Wonders of the World playground just outside the museum:

It's not a playground of THE Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, because that's just focused on the Mediterranean area, did you know? Leaves out loads of glorious stuff.

Like the Taj Mahal!

And the Great Wall of China!

Not even the Sphinx is on that list, because it hadn't been rediscovered at the time.

Part of the reason why we were there was to formalize our volunteer plans, so when July comes around, alas, you'll be seeing even more of the Children's Museum from us, as we devote a couple of Friday afternoons a month to cleaning and preparing fossils down in the Paleo Lab.

I have mentioned before that we're the coolest, right?!?

Homeschool Geometry: Zometool Stellations

Y'all probably know by now that I think it's VERY important that math be hands-on, manipulative-heavy. And yet, if you've got kids the ages that I do (10 and 11, how the time flies!), y'all probably also know by now that a kid doesn't have to get very old at all before the hands-on component in any store-bought math curriculum seriously tapers off.

I mean, sure, when they're studying division of single digits, a curriculum might show you how to model that with Cuisenaire rods, but those rods are nowhere to be seen when it's teaching long division--and yet you CAN model long division with Cuisenaire rods and Base Ten blocks! Sure, a math curriculum will put in some simple models of multiplying fractions, but for the kids to really understand the concept beyond the basics I had to make my own fraction models in Adobe InDesign.

A kid of these ages shouldn't be expected to apply her understanding of a simple model to a sophisticated calculation, not when it's so possible to also model those sophisticated calculations until she truly, deeply understands.

And oh, my gosh, I am on a tangent!

*steps down off of soapbox*

ANYWAY... tl;dr: I include a hands-on math work into every school week. Last week, as a corollary to Syd's Math Mammoth lesson on identifying and measuring angles (and as a secret build-up to this week's project on building crystal models by hand, mwa-ha-ha!), the kids and I explored stellations, which is the process of extending the line segments that make up a polygon. What you come up with looks like a star!

I could tell right away that this was a useful activity, because the kids at first had trouble understanding what it meant to "extend the lines." They wanted to put posts in however they wanted to, which is fine if they wanted to explore, but I told them that those weren't stellations, and guided them until they understood the concept.

For this particular activity, we worked on building regular 2D shapes to stellate, and we figured out several!

Stellation of a Triangle

Stellation of a Square

Almost a Stellation of a Pentagon!

You can tell that we didn't get this stellation quite right (and I think that *I* was the one in charge of the pentagon--oops!) because the lines extending from the pentagon are crooked. If you do it correctly, you'll see that this is the most iconic star, the one that you can learn how to draw without picking up your pencil. If you put a circle around a correctly-drawn pentagon stellation, you've got a pentagram.

Stellation of a Hexagon

Will immediately noticed that this stellation makes a Star of David, so yay for our World War 2 studies! We had a brief discussion of why two of our first four stellations might have been taken by religious groups as their icons, and that's how my kids now know what Satanism is...

We have had these Zometools for YEARS, by the way, and this exact exploration is the absolute first time that the kids have gotten really into them, wanting to play with them and build beyond just our guided activity. But on this occasion, both kids got really into making these "pincushions" of various sizes:

Zometools are so sophisticated, though, that the kids will be able to use them for the rest of their academic careers--through grad school and into professorship, if they so desire! They're also somewhat multi-disciplinary, in that this week, we just started using them in science, as well, to model crystal structures. In fact, I got myself so enmeshed in a complicated crystal structure that the entire family has been having to help me figure out how to keep it going, with all its crazy-ass interwoven struts and mysteriously enlarging pentagons--I started out with a two-dimensional kite!

That crazy structure is still in progress. I'll show it to you another time, if it doesn't break my brain.

Book Review: Fingerprint Princesses and Fairies

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Just don't be surprised if I say something insane or you turn around and I've shaved my head or I disappear for a week because I've spontaneously bought a plane ticket to London so that I can sit out on the lawn of the British National Gallery all night and cry. I am still taking consecutive breaths. I am still functioning.

ANYWAY, remember that I told you last week that I was going to spike the latter half of our school week with some lighter, craftier projects to give us more brain breaks from all of our hard-core academics? That worked a dream. Just popping a nifty little craft book into the work plans seemed to refresh everyone, and it served as such a change of pace that everyone seemed to enjoy it, even my usually craft-adverse Will.

As a crafty invitation, I set out Fingerprint Princesses and Fairies (which I'm almost positive that I got free from a marketer, but I can't find the email for nothing--oh, well!) and our collection of ink pads, my favorite being this fingerprint stamp palette thingy. Here's what the kids did with it all:

I really like this concept of doodling all the little details onto the fingerprints. Both kids got REALLY into this, and added loads of details.

It was a little challenging to keep the stamp pads clean, so finally I busted out the wet wipes that I keep in my backpack, to help them clean their fingers between each color.

Normally Will moans about her lack of artistic skills, but she was happy as a clam copying pictures from this book. I think the fingerprint + doodling technique was a sneakily accessible way to get her creating.

Syd was more into the actual princesses and fairies, but there were plenty of other fantasy figures for the kids to create.

This is my favorite of their creations. Look how cutely Syd drew the dog's muzzle!

Every weekend, now, Matt has also been giving the kids an art lesson, often from something that I've incorporated into our school plans (this weekend, he helped them draw the animals for their animal poster projects--Syd the harp seal, and Will the majestic tuna), and I can very much tell how those skills and that confidence are bleeding into their everyday activities. Will is much happier to sit down for a bit and draw, I think because she now has some of that structure that she likes for *how* to draw, and Syd's drawings always seem to contain details that I can't believe that she noticed, or techniques that I can't believe that she can do. She, in particular, is VERY observant...

Gotta watch what you do and say around that kid!

Okay, I am going to talk about it. My brilliant plan of not talking about it AT ALL in order to pretend that it didn't happen is a complete failure, and if nothing else, I feel like I have to explain why I am in general not okay or sane or any state of being approaching okay or sane for the foreseeable future.

To understand (or not. Whichever is okay), you should probably recall the best friend that I've mentioned off and on throughout the years. I met him at university, on the second floor balcony of the university library, the one that belongs to the special collections department, where we both had student jobs. The photocopier lived on that balcony, and I don't remember what I was copying, but I do remember that Mac was photocopying something from the Speaker Jim Wright Collection, which was his department, and before we left the balcony that day, our photocopies in hand, not only had we been chastised by one of our bosses for talking so loudly that the research librarian on the floor below had complained about us, but I had scored invitations to both come check out the Jim Wright gavel collection in the basement vault sometime, and to drive to Dallas together sometime to buy blue hair dye.

This was, obviously, a time when blue hair dye was SO cool that you could only get it in the coolest part of Dallas. You couldn't get it at all in Ft. Worth. Also, online shopping hadn't been invented yet.

That was also obviously the very moment that Mac and I began to fit each other into all the big and little spaces in our lives. He did take me to see the gavel collection (and you should go check it out, too, whenever you're in Ft. Worth--it's CRAZY). We did drive together to Dallas, and I did dye my hair. We studied together and read together and listened to a lot of music while smoking a lot of pot together. He taught me some Russian, primarily "please," "thank you," and "Get into the kitchen!", and gave me a cassette tape of probably the worst female punk band ever, and then was kind of appalled when I fell in love with it and insisted on playing it over and over again all. The. Time (I'm listening to them right now and I stand by my assertion--they're freaking amazing). I took him to visit my family, they fed him biscuits, and he liked it so much that from then on he continually threatened to go visit them without me. We thought each other's friends were okay, sure, and they all thought that we were okay, but for my friends, he was the weird guy that I was always hanging out with when I wasn't with them, and for his friends, I was the weird chick with whom he did the same. Our truest friends didn't even try to figure it out.

College is like that, though, you know? You meet people whom you never even knew existed before, and through them, you learn parts of yourself that you never knew existed before, either. Mac had probably never before seen a brilliant, literate redneck chick with zero social skills and more sense of adventure than sense before, and I sure as hell had never seen a brilliant, literate burnout Kentucky guy who knew exactly who he was, accepted everyone else exactly the way that they were, had that same sense of adventure, just about as little sense, and also a pretty big helping of troublemaking before, either. We were made to be friends.

Mac, though, was in a completely different category from everyone, even from Matt, for whom my love is as deep and boundless as the ocean and all that, but who has never known a time in our relationship in which there isn't a Mac on the couch of my college apartment every single second, or on the phone with me so that I'm not helping put the babies to bed, or coming by the house every few months and sweeping me off to eat Ethiopian food, or getting me and the kids press passes to the Creation Museum and we all think it's going to suck but instead it's AWESOME, or calling every few weeks and letting me tell him all my random gossip and calling all the right people really, really terrible names. Around the time of our wedding, I even had the suspicion that my Pappa, who was hard of hearing, and who would sometimes see me come to visit for the weekend with Matt, and sometimes with Mac, and who saw them both come for my wedding, and both put on tuxedos (Matt as my groom, and Mac as my Man of Honor), wasn't quite sure exactly which boy I'd be marrying until he saw which one I gave the ring to.

There's simply not a category for the way that I feel about Mac. Platonic life partner? Possibly, but we didn't exactly spend our lives together. Best friends? Definitely at times, but not always. It's easier just to say that, since the day that I met him, he's always been my favorite person. He gets me. He accepts me. He makes me tell him the stuff that I don't want to tell anyone, and then he tells me that stuff is okay.

He is THE truest friend, and he's always been that way with everyone, kind and thoughtful and generous to a fault, in the way that you can never fully reciprocate, because you just aren't that kind and thoughtful and generous. He NEVER misses a birthday, and always calls, even though everyone else in the world hates talking on the phone. He wrote letters for probably a decade after everyone else in the world started texting instead, and still sends postcards when he travels. When Willow was born--and she's named after him, by the way--his baby gift to her was a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera. When he called me a year ago and I told him that I couldn't talk because I'd had my wisdom teeth out and I was in a lot of pain but the pain meds made me dizzy, four days later I received a mysterious package in the mail with a fake return address and chock-full of marijuana edibles.

The thing is, you know how life moves on and you lose touch with your dearest friends because you just don't make the time to call and write and think of them? So that happened to me, and I didn't call and write and make enough time for him. I didn't think about him enough, and appreciate him enough. That never happened to him, though. He calls and writes and makes time for everyone. He has hundreds of friends, all over the world, and they all love him as much as I do, because he's just that great.

So what I haven't told you is that he's been battling brain tumors off and on for the past twelve years--I can tell you exactly where I was and exactly what I was doing every single time he called me to tell me that he had a new one, or that one was growing again. And what I have to tell you is that he died this week. His latest brain tumor was bad, but he didn't tell me that it was going to kill him. Instead, he told me that he was "optimistic," which I know now I should have taken as the code word for bad, and I should have bought a fucking plane ticket as soon as I got off the phone with him, but I believed him, because Pappa JUST died on New Year's Eve, and nobody else that I love is going to die this year, because I'm already grieving and sad and insane and that would just be too much. So instead of going to fucking see my fucking favorite person on the planet like anyone else would have done, I instead called him every week and texted him every now and then, sent him a care package with cookies and pictures drawn by the kids and a Golden Girls activity book, didn't think anything of it when I called for a couple of weeks straight and only got his voicemail, because chemo and radiation are hard, yo, and he probably didn't feel like talking, and I left cheerful voicemails with all the good gossip, and then he died.

All the grief things? I'm doing all the grief things, in all the wrong order, and all messed up. I'm mad and I'm in denial and there are a million things that I think that I should have done differently and I'm so, so sad and I try to distract myself by holding a Girl Scout meeting, or having a campfire with friends, or going to a movie, or working in my garden, thinking that I can have a break from feeling all the terrible feelings but I literally cannot have a break from this. It's just so pointless, and so stupid, and so not fair. Why couldn't Donald Trump have the brain tumors? I hate Donald Trump, and it would be awesome if he'd died instead. Or that guy who shot Trayvon Martin, and now is trying to, like, ebay the murder weapon. He's the one who needs to die from a brain tumor, not Mac. There is just nothing stupider, more wrong, or more fucked up than Mac, who had just absolutely the best brain, dying from a brain tumor. That's what I keep surprising myself with, every single second. I have a second where I'm thinking about pizza or something, or petting the cat, and then all of a sudden I'm like, "Mac died," and even though I just thought that a second ago, it's still a painful surprise when I think it again, every single time.

So, yeah. That's what's been going on with me. I'm grieving. Again. Still. I'm functioning, managing to continue to take consecutive breaths most of the time, haven't thrown anything, almost cut all my hair off but didn't do it (I still might...). Trying to over-schedule my life to stay busy and distracted didn't work with Pappa, and in fact I'm pretty sure that's why I got the flu so bad, so next week I'm going to do my utmost to chill, do some stuff that I like. This, you should know, is practically antithetical to my nature, but it was something that Mac could always, always get me to do--why study when you could instead drive to Dallas for Ethiopian food and a gender-swapped production of Hair? Why go to that meeting when you could instead get high, eat iced animal cookies, and listen to the Pixies? Why go to work when you could instead bum around Europe for a month?

So I'll try it for Mac. I'll make a vegan peanut butter icebox pie, because he loved those. I'll take the kids to the Children's Museum one day, and I told them that while we were in Indy I'd buy them some dry ice, because why not? I'll watch some really bad movies, and some really good music videos. I'll take the kids to get ice cream as a good surprise, because Mac loved ice cream, too--well, I mean, who doesn't? And don't judge me if while I'm doing all of that, I'm secretly pretending that Mac is around, and it's just been a while since we've talked. Because while I'm hopefully going to be better at grieving this time around, I still haven't figured out how to be okay with the thought that my favorite person on the planet is no longer on this planet with me.

Ballet, or, All's Well that Ends

Remember Monday's post, when I told you that I had been insanely busy last week? It's because not only was I planning Syd's birthday party for that Friday (you will not be surprised to learn that Syd plans VERY elaborate birthday parties), but I'd also finally heeded the increasingly desperate mass emails from the director of Syd's ballet program and volunteered to help backstage at the dress rehearsals and the performance of the spring recital--a rendition of Coppelia, of all things.

I'd volunteered to help the littlest dancers, ages 3-7, so that I wouldn't be backstage while Syd was dancing, but wow--little kids and their parents! The kids have to be dropped off with the volunteers, as we've got background checks and the parents don't, and there are never enough volunteers, so for two hours at a time we're signing kids in, getting their costume pieces on, taking them to the bathroom, keeping them entertained, taking them to the bathroom, getting up two stories to backstage, trying not to lose them in the dark, getting them to their places, getting them back down to the dressing room without losing them, taking them to the bathroom, divesting them of their costume pieces, taking them to the bathroom, and getting them back to their parents.

And those parents! The first-time parents! The fretful parents! The confused parents! And those kids! The kids who always had to pee! The kid who kept hitting her ballet teacher in the boobs! The kid who, as we were sitting backstage, waiting for his turn to dance, turned to me and said, contemplatively, "You know, I thought that I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but I actually don't."

I explained to him that after Sunday afternoon, he could absolutely not be a ballet dancer anymore, if he so chose, but right now, he was 100% a ballet dancer, so scoot out onto that stage, Buddy!

And while we're on the subject, let's just pause right here to give a special shout-out to the parents who brought a tray of sticky chocolate candies as a "treat" for the small children on recital day.

The small children who wear white leotards with white skirts. Half of them are probably allergic to whatever is in the candy. The other half probably aren't allowed to have sugar.

I'm not even ashamed to tell you that those treats?

I hid them behind the piano.

Anyway, although it was an adventure and I was glad to be backstage in Syd's world for a bit, I did not expect how utterly exhausted and brain-dead I would be after corralling small children and handling their parents every night, and that is why the thing that I am about to tell you about happened.

It was Thursday evening. Syd and I had been in ballet rehearsal since 5:30, and we were finally done at 8:30. We drove home, discussing along the way what still needed to be done for her birthday party the next evening (short answer: everything). As I pulled into the driveway at 8:57, I noted that all the lights in the house were off, and thought, "Huh. Where's Willow?"

And then I remembered. She was at the library. Which closes at 9:00. A twenty-minute drive from here. And I WAS SUPPOSED TO PICK HER UP.

I'd dropped her off with Matt at 5:00, for him to take to horseback riding, and he was going to let her go to the library after that while he did some last-minute party shopping, and I was going to pick her up after ballet rehearsal, since I drove right by the library on the way home!

Oh, and my phone is basically non-functioning.

I debated peeling out and racing for the library right then, but instead decided to race inside first, to my computer, and message my friend who's always online. She immediately replied that she'd call Matt for me, and that she, too, would race for the library, since she lives closer than I do. That done, I bolted back to the car and DID peel out, and sped at a shocking speed back into town. Frankly, I was hoping that a police car would pull me over, so that I could explain where my kid was and get them to send a patrol car over to the library.

Would you like to know what was going through my mind as I drove back to the library? Here are a few topics: We live in a college town, so every now and then a young woman goes missing and/or is murdered. Could Will outrun a murderer? No. We live in a college town, so every now and then a young man rapes a young woman. Could Will outrun a rapist? No. Or perhaps a librarian discovered her before a murderer/rapist could. Would they call the police and tell them that someone had abandoned their child? Would the police give her back to me if they did so? Damn it, when I told Will the name of my friend who's a foster parent, and instructed her to have that person called to come get her if she was ever snatched by Social Services, I'd been kidding! But at least then she wouldn't be murdered!

I ended up tearing into the parking lot just behind the minivan driven by my friend. We both threw open our car doors, called out for Will, and then that very kid, who was kicked back casually against the limestone wall of the library, next to the door, a stack of books at her feet, looked up from the book she'd been reading and was all like, "Oh, hey!"

Not. Fussed. At. All.

As I forcibly embraced Will, who was frowning because I had lost her place in her book, and began to thank my friend, a SECOND friend came peeling up. My first friend had thought to call her because this second friend drives Uber and was possibly downtown. I thanked them all very sincerely, and then took my kid back home, occasionally reaching behind my seat to clutch her leg and make sure that she was still there.

I asked Will, "What would you have done if it had been a long time later and I still hadn't shown up?"

She replied, "I had six books with me. Someone would have remembered me eventually."

I don't doubt this is true. But I don't *think* that I was overreacting. I mean, right? Although she is almost twelve. Can twelve-year-olds hang out alone? I haven't thought about it. If we'd still been living in our old neighborhood, I'd have been letting her walk alone to the library and back for over a year now. But loitering in an empty parking lot is totally different from moving with purpose down a sidewalk. BUT when I was twelve, I definitely remember loitering in empty parking lots with my friends. But *I* didn't have enough supervision.

But clearly neither does she...

Regardless, from now on when I'm busy and distracted AND have to pick a kid up from somewhere, I'm writing myself a note on my hand!

Fortunately, there were no more forgotten kids for the entire rest of the week. No kids were lost at Syd's birthday party, which went really, really, REALLY well, and no kids were lost during the ballet recital, although I did have to hold the hands of a couple of children and walk them onto the stage, because as soon as they caught sight of the audience, they basically began backing against my knees, saying, "No, no, no, no!" I was all, "Nope! Too late now!" and towed them onstage.

They were fine.

And here's my own little dancer!

Sneaky action photography in a darkened auditorium is hard, yo!

After the recital, it's become my tradition to have a photo shoot on campus, mostly of the ballet dancer, because she's the one who likes it the most, but I'll also snap as many pictures as I can of anyone else who'll let me.

This one let me a little bit.

But mostly it was this one who wanted to be photographed.

I'm dressed like a stage hand, not a bank robber!

Matt snapped this photo. It's pretty typical--all of us with our mouths open, talking at the same time, and one of us frowning and possibly about to throw a fit.

I keep expecting the ballet director to finally realize that MY child is clearly the most talented and special child in the program.

I mean obviously, right?

I know very little about ballet, but even I can see how deeply talented she is!

Don't tell anyone that I said so, but she's also the cutest one in the program.

All right, we'll let Matt get in some photos, too!

When I wrote the title of this post, I thought that ballet had ended for the year, but now I hear that Syd actually wants to do the Summer Intensive session, as well...

Look for another set of post-performance portraits in a month or so, I guess!

Work Plans for the Week of May 9, 2016: Girl Scouts and Marine Life

Oh, my goodness, that was a busy week that's behind us now! Even for a four-day school week, I for sure scheduled too much, considering that we had a big birthday party to prep and that Syd and I had hours of dress rehearsals for her ballet recital almost every day.

Since I was apparently INSANE for most of the school-week (more on that later...), I'm a little surprised that everything got accomplished, but accomplished everything did get! Mind you, Syd wrote her book review and did her last math lesson and both kids did the Spanish galleon lesson all on Sunday afternoon, but heck, even kids who got all their schoolwork done at school probably had homework over the weekend. And now that Monday has rolled around again, Syd can identify angles, Will can calculate ratios, they're both on their way to memorizing the thirteen colonies--

Here's Will putting together the pin flag map of the colonies.

 --we've looked at crystals through the microscope and identified their structure, we've built LEGO models of coastal geography and tested them with wind and water, we got the Lite Brite working--

--the kids progressed in Wordly Wise and their cursive--

Here, Syd is copying the poem from the preface of From Colonies to Country.

 --and there were finally entire days in a row of sunshine!

She's destroying my daylilies while pretending to be a cat.

They're glorying in the glory of a brand-new-to-them Giant Box!

Books of the Week this week include some factual books on crystals and ocean life, some fiction for each child that's outside of her typical range of interests, and a comic strip collection that I dearly hope that Will hasn't discovered on her own yet, because I deeply want to score the win for having introduced Will to Marlys!

There's no Project of the Week this week, as we're hosting a Girl Scout meeting on Friday that the kids need to help me prep for, and our Open-Ended Material of the Week is Sculpey, primarily because I have been DYING to make Sculpey charms with the help of YouTube tutorials, and this is as good of an excuse as any.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Oh, my word, Syd is CRANKY this morning! I have fed her eggs and cantaloupe, watched CNN Student News with her, and yet right now she is sitting at the table next to me and outraged--outraged, I tell you!--that I would possibly expect her to actually read her math lesson in order to understand how to measure angles. Don't I understand that she can't read the math lesson? It's too hard to read it! She never reads it! Don't I understand that her measurements are not incorrect? They are clearly all correct! Also, I HAVE to tell her how to do the lesson! She does NOT have to read the lesson herself! And she will NOT learn to spell her spelling words! She has already told me that she can't spell!

Anyway...

IF Syd ever gets over her fit, we've also got the first chapter of From Colonies to Country to read today. It's about a landmark trial that highlights the importance of both the freedom of the press AND trial by jury, and it's based on a New York newspaper in the 1730s that pissed off the corrupt governor of New York by writing about what a corrupt governor he was.

Just for fun, I researched, found, and scanned copies of several issues of this newspaper, including articles in which, indeed, there's some trash talk concerning the governor of New York! I'm hoping the kids will have fun looking through these newspapers, and will also absorb some interesting local color of the time (one issue also includes a For Sale ad for slaves--yikes!).

Oh, Syd is also pitching a fit about the thank-you notes that I'm requiring that she and Will write today. I kind of got distracted after Pappa died and I don't think that we ever got the kids' Christmas thank-you notes out, so we're at least going to finish up the cookie season thank-you notes today, and Syd is also going to write the thank-you notes for her birthday presents, or she will never play Minecraft or watch My Little Pony again, by gawd!

Last week's unit on the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park was more fun than I thought that coastal geography and the history of shipping would be, and I think that this week's unit on the Monterey Bay Aquarium is going to be even more fun. Fortunately, the kids already did some work with the Oceans biome for Syd's Girl Scout Junior Animal Habitats badge, so we can delve more deeply into that work this week, rather than start from scratch. We've studied the Order of Classification off and on for years, covering it again every time we study a plant or animal, so I don't expect that today's project of organizing animals (Pappa gave Will a year-long subscription of Wildlife Explorer cards a few years ago, and so now she has quite a good collection of animal fact sheets) will be challenging, but I hope that it will be interesting and surprising and inspire the kids into further inquiry.

This week's cursive copywork is a list of scientist definitions from the Monterey Bay Aquarium educational materials, and a shift at our local food pantry will finish off the school day!

TUESDAY: We've got playgroup on this day, IF it stops raining for long enough, and Will and I have fencing this evening, and the kids will also be working on their Young Writer's Workbook.

This is the perfect time of year for backpacking and camping, IF it stops raining for long enough, and so I'm hoping that both kids can complete their Girl Scout badges--Camper for Syd and Trailblazing for Will--before Girl Scout day camp starts at the end of June. Technically, Syd has completed all of the activities for her Camper badge, but she's excited to learn more campfire recipes and to organize a camping trip that Matt can come along with us to, so I'll officially award her the badge after she's done those things. Will's badge work involves planning a backpacking and camping trip for likely just the three of us, likely just overnight, but nevertheless a very big adventure for us!

Syd got very into the biome brochure that we finished last week, enough that I think she'd enjoy doing something similar, and Will ... well, I learned that I need to give Will some clearer, more specific requirements, because in HER brochure, land-sharks featured prominently. We'll see if she likes making a poster better? In preparation for their Monterey Bay Aquarium field trip, I want the children to understand the basic anatomy and types of external features of fish and aquatic mammals, and I want them to be accustomed to looking for those details in the animals that they'll see there. My requirements for this poster will have them researching the anatomy and external features of a specific animal in the Oceans biome, as well as illustrating the abiotic and other biotic components of its habitat. And just for fun, we'll throw Matt's weekly drawing lesson into the mix, too!

WEDNESDAY: I'm experimenting with packing more of the hard-core academics into the first half of the week, when we all have more energy and enthusiasm. Both wane as the week goes on, so I've deliberately spiced the latter half of the week up with more craft projects and less brainy work, to see if that keeps everyone happier through to Saturday. That's why we're finishing up our Monterey Bay Aquarium unit with an ocean animal craft and some webcam watching on this day, although I expect that the kids will be working on that poster assignment throughout the rest of the week, as well.

Both kids really enjoyed applying the Elections 2016 curriculum to their own animal candidate--Will, in fact, absolutely leapt on the idea, and created a VERY specific candidate with a VERY specific campaign. This weekend, Matt even taught her how to use Photoshop, just so they could create the perfect image of her candidate.

It's a cat with Donald Trump's toupee and Adolf Hitler's mustache. Its name is HitlerTrumpCat, and you do NOT want it to win the election.

Last week, the kids created campaign posters for their candidates (yes, there IS a campaign poster for HitlerTrumpCat. Sigh...). This week, then, they'll be making actual video commercials for those candidates.

Do I already regret this?

Does HitlerTrumpCat want to build a wall around everyone and then kill them?

The answer to both questions is yes. In fact, the answer to that second question is, according to Will, HitlerTrumpCat's main campaign promise.

Last week's math enrichment was a bust, as apparently the website for Euclid: The Game went offline in the three days between when I previewed it and when I assigned it. Big bummer! This week, then, our geometry enrichment is purely hands-on: we'll be exploring stellations with our Zome Tools, and while we do, I'll be sneakily pointing out acute, obtuse, right, and complementary, angles!

THURSDAY: More mineral science! By now, the kids understand that mineral crystals have a specific atomic structure that leads to a specific geometric shape, and so this week, we'll be discussing the fact that they have a specific chemical composition, as well--good thing that we spent all that time with elements and molecules a few weeks ago! As part of this lesson, we'll be making and playing Make Five. Will LOVES the PTOE game on this same website, so I think that this one will be fun, too.

Clean water is one of Syd's interests, and since it's also a discussion in Will's Girl Scout Cadette Trailblazing badge, it's a good time to review the importance of clean water and learn how to purify it--we'll at least boil it, but we might also make a charcoal filter, depending on the kids' enthusiasm level. For now, though, the plan is to take water from the creek behind our house, look at it under the microscope and catalogue the teensy critters present, then boil the heck out of it and try again. I'll add to that a discussion of water-borne illness.

I've got a couple of books on my list of ones to review that I thought would be fun for the kids to help me out with, so that's why we'll be fabric painting on our pants on this day and fingerprinting princesses and fairies on the next. There's nothing like a good old craft project when you need a brain break!

FRIDAY: We have a short school day on this day, since most of the afternoon and evening will be taken up with a Girl Scout meeting and a campfire with friends afterwards. When we began our study on biomes, however, it occurred to me that the children have NEVER made a diorama--gasp! I'm not sure how it will go, and I'm willing to drop it if they hate the idea, but still... they know enough about biomes by now to perhaps be intrigued by the idea of creating a diorama of one. We'll see!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Syd has an archaeology program on Saturday and both kids have a gardening workshop on Sunday, but ballet is finished--yay for the extra free time! Also? I really, really, REALLY need it to stop raining so that I can get my leggy plant starts into the ground already!!!

All of Our Favorite Things for May

This isn't, like, one of those recurring list things, or at least, I don't think it is. I just have a bunch of random favorites that I've been wanting to tell you about!

Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson

Our university's theatre department did a production of this, and Matt and I went to it. If you're into Hamilton, or politics, or punk, or emo, or you don't understand what the deal is with Donald Trump, then you totally have to find a way to see this. Andrew Jackson actually makes quite a convincing emo rock star, but unlike Hamilton, he's not actually redeemable, so there's an extra tension running throughout the entire show.

Parasitology

I actually started this series on audiobook over a year ago, then had to return it to the library but couldn't forget about it, so when I was browsing the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves a few weeks ago to help Will find books (have I mentioned yet that Will is now choosing books from the adult section of the library? She's read everything in the children and teen sections already!), I snatched all three and then didn't put them down until I'd finished.

Without spoiling what happens, I'll just tell you that the books take place in the near future, where people have realized that our society's obsession with germs and hygiene has destroyed our immune systems. To solve this problem, a company creates a genetically-altered tapeworm that will both correct this and can be also administer long-term medications for problems like diabetes or high blood pressure.

What could possibly go wrong?

And that's about where chapter one begins.

Minecraft servers

Syd has discovered them, and they're apparently pretty great. Her favorite server is Planet Minecraft, with its minigames, and she will often spend her precious screentime after school helping Team Frost to victory in paintball, or that weird jumping game, or all those other games whose rules I can't figure out.

I was impressed that Syd managed to figure out how to get herself onto these servers all by herself (thank you, Instructables!), since she often uses helplessness as a defense mechanism when she doesn't want to do something, ie. "Oh, subtraction! But I can't subtract! I can't subtract a single thing! Is nine minus five sixty-seven? See, I just can't do it! It's impossible," and on and on and on. I've also started checking out some Minecraft manuals for her from the library, things like how to do mods or images of notable constructions, and she's begun to talk about these great engineery things, like how to program Redstone to make a trapdoor that will drop you into lava, and how to booby-trap your treasure chest. 

Spoiler alert: it involves more lava.

CNN Student News

I have wanted to find a kid-friendly current events for YEARS. I was all about News-O-Matic for a little while, but it just wasn't updated often enough, and it didn't have enough NEWS news, if that makes sense. Basically, I wanted news that didn't cover rapes and murders and other scary things, but did cover politics and wars and international affairs. I just couldn't seem to find the perfect combination, until I happened upon CNN Student News. Every weekday, they post a ten-minute news video that's kid-friendly, but does cover politics and wars and international affairs. They've got science features, and human interest stories, and interesting tech updates, and the host ends every video with something ridiculous, like a million puns based on the last news clip. He cracks us up every. Single. Time.

VERY bizarre Youtube channel

So fair warning--Matt HATES this Youtube channel, but for some reason I cannot stop watching this woman! I was drinking wine and surfing Youtube one night--you know, as you do--and somehow I ended up watching a twenty-minute video of a woman sitting on her kitchen floor, bawling her eyes out, and explaining all about how her boyfriend had broken up with her. Friends, I could not look away! Also, she said ALL the things. So many details. So much awkward. And sometimes, she would just stop talking and just sob openly into the camera for minutes at at time. It was one of the craziest things that I have ever seen on Youtube, and that's including the fact that every single time I'm on Youtube, I end up watching videos about the Illuminati or aliens. Seriously, I'll start off by searching for cat videos and end up learning about how they're a conspiracy by the Illuminati to send messages to our alien overlords. And still, this Youtube channel is crazier.

Anyway, she later deleted this specific video, but it turns out that she's somewhat of a thing on Youtube, and you can find OTHER people making OTHER videos that discuss that one and try to dissect the truth behind it... you know, like if it was maybe aliens or Illuminati. Something like that. And she posts, like every day, a ten-minute video of her babbling on while she's driving in her car, or these awkward dance performances, or a round-up of her various "routines," which all seem to involve a lot of Starbucks and Red Vines and professional make-up artists. She's definitely not for kids, and based on the fact that she also has a channel of videos of her eating stuff that I'm 100% sure is something sexual, she's really probably not for most adults, either, but somehow watching her makes me feel better. The past year or so had been hard for me in a lot of ways--in fact, I've had the kind of year that's often like a kick to the stomach, and that has me deeply questioning whether or not I have the emotional coping skills to deal with it, and while watching this chick is not, I'd say, emotionally healthy by any means, it is somehow very comforting to watch this cheerful, peppy, duck-lipped woman just go ahead and fly her freak flag every single day like it ain't no thang.

Vat 19

Will is obsessed with this Youtube channel, which is really just a series of commercials for the online store, but man, are they clever commercials! Again, they are not for little kids, as this very disturbing/very funny commercial for a toy gummy bear anatomy kit can attest, but the entire family will often get sucked into watching them with Will, and now we're all in research mode for how to make our own giant gummies.

Okay, enough randomness! The cat is putting muddy pawprints onto the paperwork on my desk, the kids need me to cook them egg sandwiches and dial up CNN Student News, and I have an, I kid you not, 21-item to-do list for Syd's Minecraft birthday party on Friday, and I just decided to add another couple of items to it, as I suddenly thought that wouldn't it be even cuter if the spawn eggs in the Spawn Egg Hunt were actually cascarones, and then the kids could have a cascarone fight afterwards!

I'll be sure to let you know how that, and the cardboard box Creeper pinata, and the Minecraft cake, and Zombie Tag, and the paint-your-own-Minecraft-sword station turn out!

Work Plans for the Week of May 2, 2016: Minecraft, Ballet, and the Bay

For all the griping that I did about the fact that last week was soooooo busy, you'd think that I'd have learned my lesson this week.

But nope. We're busy this week, too. Or, at least, one little kid in particular is very, very, VERY busy this week, and the rest of us are simply going to be pulled along in her wake. Our Syd, you see, has a big ballet recital this weekend, which means that she has big ballet rehearsals almost every night this week. Our Syd also has a big birthday this week--double digits!

And our Syd ALSO has a big birthday PARTY this week!!!

Fortunately, as busy as we were last week, we also had a fine time together, getting all the scheduled schoolwork done, having plenty of time to relax and play, and getting plenty of play-time with friends in. The kids really embraced their Projects of the Week (Syd worked hard on a painting of a horse, and Will drew a different dragon every single day--I think they're liking their weekend art lessons with their father!)--

--they made a quiche that nobody would eat but the chickens (have to try that particular cooking lesson again...), they made some pretty great paper models of crystal formations, we completed our unit on Alcatraz so that we're ready to start learning about the California coastline this week (also? Our Escape from Alcatraz LARPing was awesome!!!), and we finished Making Thirteen Colonies (below, Syd is making a map of the slave trade route)--

--so that this week, we are officially beginning the Revolutionary War part of our Revolutionary War study.

Instead of a Project of the Week, I'll be asking the kids to help me get ready for Syd's birthday party every day--there's so much to be done, from making the pinata and the cake to tidying up the yard to inventing some party games to setting up the crafts to making party favors. The Open-Ended Play Material of the Week last week, the Lite Brite, had a missing bulb, so we're trying that again this week, now that it's nice and bright again. Books of the Week include some colonial and Revolutionary War-era fiction, a couple of books about monuments we'll likely see in Washington, DC, and a couple of books on California, which the kids are visiting this summer but I'm not, and Alaska, which I'm visiting this summer but they're not! In particular, Syd really likes A-Z Mysteries, so I was excited to assign her Operation Orca, which takes place in Alaska.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Will blew through the end of her Math Mammoth unit last week, so this week she's starting ratios. Syd, although she had mastered all of the work in her Math Mammoth unit, totally bombed the review, mostly because if she couldn't remember right away how to work a particular problem, rather than think about it she instead pitched an hour-long fit. So she's got a couple of drill worksheets on the Order of Operations on this day, to help her remember that it's NOT "multiplication and addition, then division and subtraction."

I don't know exactly what the kids will see and do in California, but we're making a list together of all the things that they'd like to see and do--the list, of course, is FAR longer than they can ever possibly complete while there--and on that list is the Junior Ranger badges for all the national parks within driving distance of their grandparents' home. I've developed week-long studies for each site, and as part of the national park studies, I'm having the kids complete what they can of each Junior Ranger book at home. They'll bring the half-completed books with them to California, and complete them at any national parks that they visit. What they don't complete, they can bring home, finish using the national parks' websites, and then mail in. On this day, then, they're working on the Junior Ranger books for the San Francisco Maritime National Park.

We're finally starting our Revolutionary War textbook spine this week! The kids still haven't completely memorized the thirteen original colonies, so we'll read just the preface to From Colonies to Country on this day, and then I expect them to get those darn colonies down! Also in the preface is an allegorical poem about the Boston Tea Party, and copying that poem every day is both kids' cursive work for the week, with a small cash prize for also memorizing the poem.

At our volunteer gig at the local food pantry today, do not let me forget to scavenge ALL THE BOXES! We've still got to make a Minecraft pinata, AND the Minecraft swords for the sword-painting station, and surely something else--you can never have enough cardboard at a birthday party!

I lost track last week with the kids' Wordly Wise, so I'm not sure who needs to spend another week on spelling, and who's ready to move on to the next chapter. I'll figure that out on this day, and then a library workshop and an evening ballet rehearsal complete the day!

TUESDAY: I couldn't find any good worksheets for drilling fractional parts problems for Syd, so I made one for her. Will, though, will be tooling along as usual in Math Mammoth. In the biome brochure project, though, it's Syd who's flying through and Will who's struggling, primarily because she doesn't see art as her strong suit, so she'd like to do a half-assed job and then get back to her book. The kids worked on their brochures some over the weekend, as part of their art lesson with Matt, so really just need to add some more research and a few final touches on this day. And Will needs to maybe delete the parts that she put in about "land sharks" on her Ocean biome brochure. I say maybe, though, because the land shark parts are funny!

Both kids read SO much, but Will, especially, rarely discusses the books that she reads with me. She flies through them, piles them up, and flies through some more, all in a single day, so much so that I can tell where she's been by the piles of books that she leaves behind her like scat in the woods. On this day, then, I'm going to pry out of her a detailed review of at least one book that she's read lately! The plan is to let the kids watch some episodes of Reading Rainbow (or at least Syd, since I think she's the one who's really going to enjoy that), and then have them compose a book review of their own. The emphasis is on composition, here, so they can choose to dictate the review to me, if they wish.

I am REALLY excited about our California coastline lesson on this day! All of the lessons in this week's unit are adapted from the curriculum materials on the site. We'll be reading and discussing the various geographical features of a coastline, and then the kids will be researching, writing definitions for, and modeling four of those geographical features. They're going to model them using LEGOs, and on Wednesday, we're going to put the models into water and explore how sailors might have experienced them. In other words, we're going to float corks, make waves, and blow on the water through straws. It's going to be a good time for all.

Our homeschool group's playgroup on this day, and ballet rehearsal for Syd, and fencing class for me and Will should round things out nicely. Oh, and I have to vote!

WEDNESDAY: The poll that the kids administered for their election unit ("What's your favorite animal?") went so well that I'm going to go back and have the kids review our previous lessons using this topic. We've already explored campaign advertisements, so on this day, the kids will create some campaign advertisements for their preferred animal. Campaign posters first, and then we might do video ads in a couple of weeks, as there will be a bit of a lag in our election study after all the primaries are finished.

Syd is starting a geometry unit on this day, and although Euclid: The Game might be too hard for her, she often surprises me with her engineer's mind. Hopefully, Will will take to it, as well--if they both do, they'll have quite the geometry education under their belts before they know it!

Syd and I BOTH have ballet rehearsal on this night--Syd for herself, of course, but me as a parent volunteer for the littlest dancers. Syd has already informed me that they are "very naughty," sigh...

THURSDAY: I'd thought that we would examine and classify our completed crystals last week, but the paper models took a really long time for the kids to construct, so we'll be examining them on this day, instead. And I might have us spend another couple of weeks on mineral crystals, as well, before we move on, just because now that we're finally in the rocks and minerals part of our rocks and minerals unit, might as well stay here and enjoy ourselves, you know?

The kids seem to be more into the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Notebook these days, or at least they both completed the next lesson without complaint, and Will even happily shared hers with me. Their stories are shaping up to be VERY creative!

Our last lesson for our San Francisco Maritime National Park unit is the anatomy of the Spanish galleon. The curriculum materials include a pretty detailed illustration of a Spanish galleon that I'm going to print onto cardstock, then have the kids color, assemble, and label. We'll discuss it, and likely watch some Youtube videos of galleons in action. The kids will see more, of course, if they get to the park during their California trip. We haven't *really* explored the history of shipping and sailing on its own, but thanks to our study of Columbus and his ships in the fall, after this lesson we'll know about Spanish caravels, carracks, AND galleons! And I know that we'll be studying more ships for our New England trip this fall, as well.

FRIDAY: This day is Syd's birthday! Normally, the birthday kid gets to plan all of our meals and activities for the day, but since Syd's birthday party is also on this day, we'll of course have to curtail that somewhat in order to prepare for the party. Mean, sneaky Momma to get all this birthday business out of the way all in a single day, mwa-ha-ha!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Our weekend is mostly ballet-centric, culminating in Syd's big spring ballet recital on Sunday. And after that, our most time-intensive extracurricular will be over until September!!!!!!! Now we can start planning some weekend camping trips!

What do YOU have planned for this week?