Montessori Pink Tower Extensions for a Sixth Grader

As we have been playing a lot with exponents lately, I finally hit the big red button and purchased a Montessori pink tower.

Well, actually I specifically purchased an unpainted one, so I guess it's a "pink" tower. FYI: I've bought a few Montessori materials over the years, and I've always found the best prices at Alison's Montessori. That stuff is still spendy, though, so let me know if you ever find a cheaper place!

The kids first used the pink tower with the tower of squares that they'd previously made:

To make that tower of squares, you need a looooong roll of butcher paper and several sheets of cm-gridded paper. The kids are to make a tower by cutting squares from the cm-gridded paper, going from 1cm^2 to 20cm^2. They're to arrange it nicely on the paper to make a tower (it's dealer's choice if the tower is centered or aligned at one edge), and then they are to annotate each square with its exponent (2^2), its exponent in long form (2x2), and its total units (4). Keep it forever, as you'll be pulling it out for extension work forever, as you can see above!

In the activity above, the kids matched each cube to its square footprint (it became immediately clear that our cm grids weren't perfect centimeters, so there was a bit of averaging). There were cubes for the first ten squares on their chart. Then they put the same information--exponent, long form, and total units--on index cards, and matched them to the cubes. It was a quite informative visualization!

Even though it was still valuable for Will to engage in the work, and have her hands on those exponents, this activity was really more at Syd's sixth grade level, which became clear when as soon as the project was complete Will abandoned it to go do something else, and Syd continued to fool around with the tower. I was amused to see that she built it several times as perfectly as possible, just like a good Montessori schoolgirl, but she did quickly move on to exploring extension ideas:

After I saw that, I researched pink tower extensions, and printed out this set of pink tower extension cards for Syd to explore.

I think she liked them!

I've watched the kids as Montessori preschoolers, so it was especially interesting for me to see this new work presented to them. Both kids were interested and engaged in the exponents work, but Will had no interest in sensorial exploration with the blocks beyond that. Syd had a great interest in further sensorial exploration, and concentrated on the blocks quite deeply for a while. Just as a preschooler would, she started by building the tower, but whereas a preschooler would possibly do this dozens upon dozens of times, Syd got all she needed from doing it just a few times, and then seamlessly moved into exploring other patterns. She was deeply engaged for a while in making these patterns, and then she and I invented some patterns that also used Cuisenaire rods (I'll show those to you another time), and then, just like that, she was done. The tower is still sitting in a pile in the playroom, untouched for a week now, so this weekend I'll have her put it away.

But think of that process--Syd was just as engaged as a preschooler would be in this sensory material, and her experience was no less valuable just because she moved through the entire process in a week rather than three years, and no less valuable just because she's eleven, and not four. It clearly fed something in her, and I don't need to key it to state academic standards to know that, and I don't even need to know what, exactly, she took from the exploration--she took something, was engaged and happy and productive, and therefore it was a great school day.

How to Make Miniature Book Girl Scout SWAPS

I've been ALL about the Girl Scout SWAPS for a few weeks now. You'd think that since they're crafty I'd have been all over them from the beginning of our Scouting experience, but I dunno... SWAPS aren't a huge deal in our council like they are in some, and a lot of them are... kind of cutesy? I'm really not a crafter of cutesy things. Ducks in bonnets aren't really my jam.

But then I joined this Facebook group of Girl Scout troop leaders and volunteers across the country, and they're super into it and not all of them are into the cutesy nonsense, either, and THEN I made plans for the kids and I to go to the Girl Scout National Convention, where not only do adults also exchange SWAPS but you've also got to bring your A game because there are also people from across the country there...

...and yeah. SWAPS are a thing now.

ANYWAY... I'm taking my Girl Scout troop to an event soon where there will be SWAPS to exchange, so I've been doing a lot of prepwork and encouragement lately (the one bad thing about SWAPS is that you have to make a LOT of them, because what? You want to go somewhere and exchange just one SWAP with just one person? No! You want to exchange just one SWAP with every person! At the event we're going to, that's 40-50 SWAPS!), and setting up a lot of invitations to make a lot of different SWAPS, because my kids, at least, don't really have the interest to make 50 of the exact same thing; they'd rather make five of something, get bored, make 10 of something else, find it tedious, then come gripe to me, etc.

Here, then, is a pretty quick-and-easy tute that I made to make miniature books. Stick a safety pin in them and they're SWAPS. Don't stick a safety pin in them and the kids can use them in their doll house or with their Barbies.

You will need:

• thumbnail-sized book cover images. Google your kid's favorite book and you'll find plenty of small images of that book's cover. Save it to your computer, paste it into your favorite word processor or graphic design program, and do it again until you've got a page full of book cover thumbnails.
• colored copy paper. You'll be using this for the rest of the book's cover, so you can match the color to the book cover image or not. I let the kids pull whatever paper they wanted from our paper stash.
• old book pages. You want writing on the inside of your book, but it doesn't have to match what the book's about--here is where you use resources wisely! I pulled an old, torn paperback out of my books-as-crafts stash, and we used that. It just happened to be an Old Sweet Valley High book, and so now I have to request some of those from the library, as the children were FASCINATED. I guess I hadn't noticed that Sweet Valley High isn't a thing anymore!
• scissors, glue stick, stapler, pen, safety pin

1. Cut out the thumbnail book cover. Use that as a template to cut out one piece of colored copy paper twice the width of that book cover, then use THAT as a template to cut out two pieces from the old book page:

When you're done, you'll have the following pieces of your book:

See how all the other pages are twice as wide as the book cover?

2. Glue the book cover to the right side of the colored paper:

3. Stack the two book pages behind it and fold in half:

4. Staple exactly on the fold. To make a SWAP, put a safety pin through the fold near the top:

And they look amazing!!!

You need to include a little information with your SWAP to identify your location and to make it clear, if it isn't already, how the SWAP is Girl Scout-related. We include our troop number and city/state, and the kids wrote Book Artist on these, because they're a call-out to the Book Artist badge that they're currently working on. Inside the front cover or on the back would be good places to include this information.

Syd liked these so much that she managed to make 30 before she got bored and wanted to try a different SWAP idea. Will only made five or six, but she's not really into crafts. 

Rather, she's not into paper crafts, because I firmly believe that there's a hands-on creation for everyone. With that in mind, I bought a bunch of dog tag blanks and played around with metal stamping them, and later today I'm going to see if a kid who isn't into paper and glue so much might be into metal and hammers...

I think maybe yes!

A Girl and Her Dog Photo Shoot

I know that I just wrote about this girl and this dog, but that was before we decided to throw a birthday party for the dog next month.

Stop laughing. I'm serious!

It turns out that my older kid, who hasn't wanted a birthday party for herself since she was... eight, I think?...is super revved up about the idea of having a birthday party for her dog. Yes, we're going to invite real people. Yes, we're going to have a craft project (metal stamping dog tags). Yes, we're going to have food (hot dog bar, because of course), and yes, we're going to make a cake just for the dog. I even showed Will photos of first birthday smash cakes for inspiration.

The people will have a cake, too. I've already found the tutorial for cutting a cake into a giant 4. We reckon Luna is turning four, maybe?

Anyway, we needed a photo of Luna for the invitations, so so that's what inspired this photo shoot. The kid brushed her hair, collected the dog, and off we trotted

literally

 --to my favorite photo shoot location, the drive-in next door. I had some shots planned out--some, like the one that I wanted of Luna's paw in Will's hand, went bust, and others, like the one below, I'm really, really happy with:

But the best shots that I got were after I just sat back in the grass, a little exasperated that the dog wouldn't sit where I wanted or stay sitting once I'd gotten her there or put her paw at just the right angle, etc. I sat back, sweaty and frustrated, and just took a break for a minute while the kid and dog goofed off.

Except that I actually sat back intending to take a break, then saw what the kid and dog were actually doing as they goofed off, and I put my camera back to my eye as surreptitiously as possible and got this:

And this.

After a couple of minutes of that I told Will that we were all done, and sent them off to play:

A dog who can put that specific look on that specific kid's face? Of COURSE that dog is getting a birthday party.

A Day in Cincinnati, and the William Howard Taft National Historic Site Junior Ranger Program

Here's our trip to Ohio so far:

We spent the first day at the Girl Scout National Convention in Columbus.
We spent the second day touring Native American mounds near Chillicothe.
We spent the third day sightseeing aviation history in Dayton.

And we spent the last day of our trip in Cincinnati!

Syd's ballet schedule this semester allowed us to spend just one more day on fall break, and we chose to go back to Cincinnati, where we'd had so much fun on an overnight with our Girl Scout troop a couple of months ago. Unlike that troop trip, during which the weather was so beautiful that we did all outdoor experiences, on this day it was still pretty wet and gross, and Syd was still pretty sniffly, so we stuck to indoor activities.

Such as the William Howard Taft National Historic Site! I didn't actually have the kids do any prep work on any of the places we'd be visiting on this trip, so their only experience with William Howard Taft is that time that I had Will memorize all of the presidents in order (I'd consider having them memorize this again, as Will has forgotten it and Syd never learned it, but we're currently memorizing exponent rules and The Fifth of November, so we're full up on memory work).

Fortunately, there's nothing better for giving a thorough biography of a person than a National Park visitor center and introductory film:



And even better when there's a house tour!

Fun fact: William Howard Taft didn't really have ambitions to be president--his dream was to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His second wife, however, always had her eye on the White House, and consistently pushed him there until he was elected:

But in May of that same year, she suffered from a stroke, and had a long, hard recovery. She wasn't able to do any of the fun hostessing duties anymore, and Taft no longer had her help with decision-making. And since she was the power behind the throne, as you say, his next election--

--did not go well:

The good news, though, is that guess who eventually became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?!?

YAY for Taft!

And here's a fun fact that illustrates term limits: Washington established the first Supreme Court. We know that from Washington to Trump (sigh), there have been 45 presidents of the United States. Want to guess how many Chief Justices of the Supreme Court there have been in that exact same time?

Seventeen. It's a lifetime appointment.

So even though we knew nothing about this site before we got there, and the kids weren't super enthused about going, we found it to be a fascinating house--

--and a fascinating man:

After becoming the William Howard Taft National Historic Site's newest Junior Rangers, there was only one single thing that the kids wanted to do before going back home to see their much-missed pets: 

Just last night, we watched Goosbumps for Family Movie Night and ate some of the international treats we bought there: sweet basil potato chips from Thailand, cappuccino cream-filled cookies from Italy, dinosaur-shaped corn puffs also from Thailand (that country has great snacks!), Jammie Dodgers from Great Britain, and lemon cookies from Canada!

We're saving the horror-themed sodas from the US for another night.

The Newest Junior Rangers of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park

Following along on our fall break field trip to Ohio?

We spent the first day at the Girl Scout National Convention in Columbus.
We spent the second day touring Native American mounds near Chillicothe.

And on this day we were in Dayton, seeing all the things related to the Wright Brothers and the first airplanes!

We saw the actual Wright Flyer in the Smithsonian, so these are mock-ups:

This is a dresser built by Wilbur and Orville Wright when they were CHILDREN. I'm starting to feel like the Girl Scout Woodworking badge isn't quite cutting it now...

Here's a model of the first working engine on a Wright Flyer.

And here's a model of the first working propeller system, an innovative design!

There was also an exhibit on parachutes, because parachutes are pretty important in the history of airplanes!

I don't normally love Junior Ranger badge books that can be completed solely in the visitor's center, but the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park is kind of different, in that in incorporates sites around the city. Each small site has its own special Junior Ranger badge, the first of which the kids earned in the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center, whose Park Ranger swore the children to an oath that will serve me well through the rest of their childhoods:



I'm a mean mom in that when I travel with the kids, we might have one special meal or two, but otherwise, we eat our packed food or we go hungry! The downside is that I may not eat another sandwich until the NEXT time we travel, but the upside is that our picnic spots often include something quite worth exploring--such as this Little Free Library behind the visitor center!

The books were all a little damp (it rained all night, and it's going to pour again later on this day, you'll see), but I found a copy of Glass Castle that I encouraged Will to take, so score!

Also on the subject of travel food: as part of a Girl Scout badge, and because doing all the travel prep work myself is tiring, I required each kid to research and create one main dish or snack item for this trip. The older kid learned that making trail mix that includes anything chocolate is a BAD idea if the food will be anywhere above room temperature, such as in a car on a 90-degree day in Chillicothe, but the younger kid found an epic recipe that she's already planning to use again on a Girl Scout overnight later this month. Seriously, it SAVED our meals on this trip!

Although later we'd have to drive to Huffman Prairie, Google Maps told me that our next stop, Paul Lawrence Dunbar's house, was only .8 of a mile from where we were right then, so of COURSE we walked it.

Maybe we shouldn't have, because the younger kid exclaimed in delight at all the deflated balloons she saw along the side of the road... but anyway, it gave us a chance to check out on the way THE building where the Wright Brothers did all of their inventing and designing--

--so there you go.

Here's what they did in that building during the daytime!

The Paul Lawrence Dunbar House was a compelling biography of an author I hadn't before heard of. He wrote some of his work in the Southern black dialect of the time, so that started some interesting conversations with the kids. We discussed the difference between using dialect to be racist and using it to be realistic, and I explained to the kids that without writers who took care to represent dialogue the way it's really said, people in the future would have little idea of how people actually spoke in the days before everything was video-recorded. For that reason alone, Dunbar's work is priceless.

AND he's the first person to explain to me why my persimmons are always so late to fall off the tree!

He's also an example of a person who became addicted to prescription drugs, and this is as good of an explanation as any I've seen for how that happens:

Such an interesting, complicated, brilliant person:

Our final stop in Dayton on this day was Huffman Prairie, where it was now POURING. First, the Memorial to the Wright brothers--

This vista is a beautiful tribute to the brothers whose work have allowed us to see so many more beautiful vistas than we'd otherwise be able to.

--and as we were meandering around, a child suddenly shouted, "Mom! MOUNDS!!!"

Indeed, we had wandered into another Native American mound-builder site!

And do you know what the sign said about not climbing on these mounds?

NOTHING!!!!!!!

 

Now, through the rain to the visitor center--

--through the visitor center to earn the Junior Ranger badge--

--and then down the winding, vacant, wet country roads to Huffman Prairie itself:

Her face? It's because somehow it is raining EVEN HARDER.

 It is absolutely pouring on us by now, but there is no way that we are going to be AT Huffman Prairie itself, THE place where manned, motorized flight first happened, and not run around it:

Rather, there's no way we're not going to run around it WHILE PRETENDING TO BE AIRPLANES!!!

And then a trudge back to the car--

--and down the rainy highway, made kind of dangerous and stressful because of COURSE it was rife with road construction, to Cincinnati. We got out of our cold, wet clothes and into our jammies, and had a nice night in, as the younger kid was feeling a little run-down after all the excitement and running around in the variable weather.

Good thing we had two more doughnuts left over from Dayton, then! Good thing we had the last half of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to watch!