Bath Bombs for the Girl Scout Cadette MEdia Journey, Plus 8 More Bath Bomb Recipes

I am not alone in not loving the Girl Scout Journeys. They're overengineered, all over the place instead of tightly themed, and there is inevitably a disconnect between the girl book and the leader book.

Nevertheless, Girl Scouts who are Juniors and above must complete one Journey before they can begin earning the Higher Award at each level, and there is a special award that a girl can earn for completing three Journeys at her level.

And guess who wants to earn that Summit Award before she Bridges to Senior in the fall?

Sigh...

The kids earned the Breathe Journey last summer, we've been slowly working our way through the MEdia Journey all school year, and this summer we're simultaneously working through the badges that represent the Outdoor Journey. Syd will end up earning the Summit Award, too, simply because she might as well if Will is already doing it.

The Cadette MEdia Journey is an awkward juxtaposition of semiotics, comparative media studies/writing, gender studies, and self-improvement seminar. For instance, girls are asked to collect and analyze ads for their portrayal of women, make a healthy, honey-sweetened strawberry lemon sorbet, and play Taboo using only female celebrities--all in the same meeting! And only that first activity actually counts towards their Journey. The rest is just filler pretending to be enrichment.

To adjust this Journey for my own kids, then, I deleted entirely the pop culture crap--pop culture isn't one of my own kids' areas of interest, and they don't know celebrities and aren't much interested in hit songs, etc. I bumped up the semiotics so that we're spending most of our time doing critical analysis of pop culture media, which actually works much better since the kids aren't invested in pop culture media. And I kept the self-care aspect, because I agree that's important for tweens and teens to learn (although we didn't make that sorbet...).

This session, then, was all about self-care! Syd has been wanting to make bath bombs, so we tied it into the MEdia Journey girl book, pages 48-49, entitled "Your Body, Your Friend." In this passage, girls are encouraged to check in with themselves and notice how they're feeling physically and emotionally, and to care for themselves the way they'd care for another. I explained the aspect of taking a bath as a kind of Self-Care Relaxing Me Time, and we made bath bombs.

We made these LUSH-inspired bath bombs, substituting Vitamin E oil for the coconut oil called for in the recipe, and using liquid watercolors instead of food coloring (you only need a very small amount, and it doesn't stain skin or the bathtub):

I had thought that the kids would work together, but each preferred to make her very own batch just the way she wanted it. I made myself a batch, too!

The recipe uses a lot of essential oil, and that's the most expensive ingredient, by far. There are some recipes that skip the essential oil, but I have a fair collection, so I let the kids choose whatever they liked:

I have one set of spherical ice cube molds, so the kids each got to make one sphere, and we put the rest into silicon molds. I tried shaping a couple by hand and setting them to dry on newspaper, but they immediately began to collapse and so I had to put them in molds, too:

Surprisingly, the bath bombs in the molds puffed up as they dried. I really like the ones that we put into the heart-shaped molds; I think they look like cupcakes!

Overall, we all preferred the look of the traditional spherical bath bombs, so if you're doing this for an entire troop, you could save money by using molds or muffin tins, but I think you should splash out on some cheap plastic bath bomb molds. The result is worth it, especially for kids who are familiar with the ridiculously expensive bath bombs that they sell in the mall.

Syd did some more experimenting (of course!) and made several more bath bombs, and each kid has enjoyed doing some self-care by taking a relaxing bath with some of her bath bombs.

Want to play with even more bath bomb recipes? Here are other ones that I want to try:

1. Syd really wanted to make bath bombs with Epsom salts, so I found this recipe for us to try soon.
2. This recipe uses cornstarch. I'm not sure why it's needed, which is why I want to try it.
3. Syd thinks that these geode bath bombs look great, but I am extremely dubious--one, about what the coconut oil will do to our drains (mainly, clog them?!?), and two, about what the lustre dust will do in the bath (mainly, sit on top of the water and cling to one's skin).
4. I LOVE the idea of hiding a small treat inside of a bath bomb. I think that this would make such a cute party favor or gift for a kid.
5. We have some of this mica pigment for Syd's slime-making hobby, so we could make these pearl bath bombs!
6. A hidden color inside a bath bomb sounds really fun, and I have activated charcoal on hand.
7. Ooh, here's another bath bomb with activated charcoal in it! I might be obsessed now.
8. I will never not love anything galaxy-themed, and I like the look of this particular galaxy bath bomb recipe the most.

Did you know that bath bombs are also excellent science? They're a terrific demonstration of an acid-base reaction that utilizes a catalyst. A few years ago, I wrote about some great acid-base chemistry experiments that the kids and I did (including the exact one that you use to make bath bombs!), and suggestions for further exploration.

P.S. Want more in-the-moment hands-on homeschooling projects? Follow my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Adventures in Bullet Journaling

I am very much the person who writes things down, if you haven't already noticed, ahem. I have, after all, apparently been keeping very detailed--and very odd--to-do lists for upwards of twenty years, and they've always included other bits and bobs, such as story ideas, lesson plans, diagrams of weird things I want to build, itineraries for trips I haven't (yet) taken, etc.

So why on earth add one more blank book to my backpack?

To keep my book list in one place.
To have a place to plan my garden.
To track my hikes.
Travel journaling!
Noting something nice, or something important, that happens each day.
Tracking all the cities, states, and countries I've visited.
Movie reviews.

I've been using Beyond Bullets (which I received free from a publicist) to give me inspiration, and this Grids and Guides book (which I also received free from a publicist, but that was literally back in 2016 so I don't think it counts anymore--oops!). I really like both of these--Beyond Bullets is better than just looking through Instagram for inspiration, because it has more hand-holding, and a LOT more ideas to look at all at once, and the Grids and Guides journal has several different types of page grids so that you can do some really different layouts, or just experiment with all of them to see what you prefer.

I've been working on my bullet journal for about three months now, and here's what I have so far--and what's working and what is absolutely NOT!

Here's my list of books that I've read, and the date that I completed each one. I do NOT love how it looks:

I wanted it to look like a bookshelf, with the book titles looking like books, something like this bullet journal or this book tracker, or this one. I didn't do it right, though--it turns out that if you try to draw books as if they were rectangles then they look like rectangles, not books. I also wanted to be able to include a sentence to remind me about each book, but I don't have room to do that with every book using this format.

BUT I really like the look of the bookshelf!

I'm going to continue filling this page out the way that I started, but I'll hopefully have come up with a better idea by the time the page is full.

I took this calendar format from Beyond Bullets, and I LOVE it!



This was a big win, because it's exactly what I wanted to be able to record, and it came out looking great, too. I wanted a way to keep notes when I travel, but there's no space for that in my planner. This calendar format is really good for it, however--I still have to be thoughtful about what to include, so it keeps it to the highlights. I kept this travel journal partly during our Spring Break trip to Nashville, finishing writing up the last couple of days at home.

I also really like this travel journal with the route marked, and this one with the photos. The kids own that instant camera, but aren't in the habit of taking it on trips. I do not need one more thing (or to pack one more thing!), but I super want one of those travel photo printers.

I often look back at my planners from previous years to see when a particular event usually takes place, but I like the idea of keeping these seasonal calendars to keep track of overarching activities:

I'm going to have to move that Girl Scout outdoor badgework to April or early May next year, though--in the space of a week in mid-May, the temperatures went from the 40s to the upper 80s, and I'm not sure they're coming back down until the fall. Sigh...

I wanted to keep track of the fun things that we do as a family, and I saw several cute "quilts" for that in Beyond Bullets and in other journals on Instagram, but I don't think it's going to work for me:

I don't think I'm going to use the bullet journal for things that I have to keep track of every day, although there are things that I would like to track every day. Ah, well...

Here's another useful layout that I've made, though--my garden!

It's a work in progress as my garden comes together, so I've only got down what I've actually got placed and planted so far. The penciled squares represent some perennial herbs that I don't want to move (and can't identify...), so I'll likely build more rows aligned with them when I plant the rest of my veggies. I want to include information and instructions, but I can already tell I won't have room, so perhaps I can tape seed packets to the facing page, as well.

I expect this page to be super helpful, because by the next year I've forgotten much of what I did in the garden the previous year--I'm sure, for instance, that last year I knew the names of those herbs!

I'm tentatively color-coding the garden plants, but I like this garden journal that uses a key, and this one with a nice and tidy layout, and this one that has a calendar and to-do list with it.

Here's another layout idea that I got from Beyond Bullets, and it is my favorite thing ever:



It's a map of all the states that I've visited! I printed a one-page map of the US from Megamaps (I have used that site all the freaking time since the kids were toddlers!), and used my graphite pencil transfer method to transfer the map to a double-page spread in my bullet journal. Then I used Prismacolor watercolor pencils to color in all the states that I've visited. I only count states if I actually did some sightseeing in them, and I don't count them if they were just drive-through states, so that's why there are some weird gaps. I've definitely been in Idaho and Nebraska, but I didn't stop unless it was at a gas station or motel, so they don't count.

I'll be coloring Maine in later this summer!

I also want to add a map of the world where I can color in countries I've visited, and maybe one of North America where I can draw in roads and highways, because I think it would be interesting to see my various vacation routes over the years.

I have a ton more pages in my journal, and a few ideas for more pages to add. I like this layout for movies that I've watched, and this menstrual cycle tracker, and a bullet journal-sized circular perpetual calendar where I can put birthdays and holidays. I'm also in a Facebook group for parents who use bullet journals for homeschooling, but I haven't actually thought of any way to do that for myself, yet.

Got anymore ideas for me?

Indiana Comic Con: Where Dreams Come True (Especially if Your Dream is To Own a Print of Wonder Woman as a Cat)

We LOVE Comic Con, where you're free to be as weird as you are! Even Will, who does not engage much with pop culture, has plenty to get excited about, with every third person she passes dressed as an elf with a dragon on their shoulder, etc. There are also plenty of booksellers and comic book writers and artists, and literally, I swear to you LITERALLY, we were all walking through the exhibition hall together when some random guy sitting at a table caught Will's eye, said to her, "Hey, what's your favorite type of fantasy book?", and like a kid promised candy if she'd just get into the nice stranger's windowless white van and help him find his lost puppy, Will peeled off from us and spent the next ten minutes discussing... I don't even know what. Something about Tamora Pierce, I think?... with him.

Our Will. Voluntarily shot the poop with a stranger. Wonders never cease.

We later set the kids free to roam the exhibition hall on their own while we went to more panels, but we did make them get some pop culture education with us. Here we are listening to Jim Swearingen, who designed the original Star Wars toys that were later featured in the documentary, The Toys That Made Us:

As he spoke about the designs he'd made for existing creations, I became curious if he'd ever been interested in doing any original toy designs, so I asked him. He said that he and a friend had made one original prototype once, an extremely spicy lollipop with a personal fan attached so that you could cool yourself while you licked it.

Oh. Okay.

His Star Wars toy designs are brilliant.

Here we are enjoying Matt fanboy over Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman in the 1990s cartoons:

We're cosplaying as the Hogwarts Comparative Muggle/Wizard Literature Professor and her partner, the Quidditch Coach and Flying Instructor, taking two of our students on a field trip.

Even if I'm not personally that familiar with a speaker, there's always an interesting take-away. Conroy, for instance, spent some time talking about his audition for the Batman role, and he explained to us that when auditioning, an actor has to make a choice about how to portray their character. The casting director may give them some guidance, but it may or may not be that accurate compared to what they're actually looking for, and that's not their fault, because what's in someone's mind is so subjective. But an actor who auditions has to make the choice right then, and that choice, how they're portraying the character, is what gets them hired or not. Probably they could have given the character the tone that the director wanted, but if they didn't make that choice but someone else did, then it's that other person's good luck, and if they're the one who happened to make the choice that got them the part, then that's their own good luck, but luck it is.

Fascinating, and I'm not even interested in acting!

Here are Matt and I listening to Timothy Zahn speak, while the kids were off playing retro video games in the exhibition hall:

 And here we are playing retro video games in the exhibition hall!

They had Crazy Taxi. I was basically in heaven.

Optimus Prime made an appearance:

You might remember that I collect fan art, and Will's into dragons, and Matt's into comic books, and Syd's into My Little Pony and comic strips, so we always spend plenty of time browsing the exhibition hall when we go to Comic Cons. I'm kind of pissed about it this year, because to keep myself from buying ALL THE THINGS, I like to check everything out, and then check out the artists' websites later and maybe buy what I really want, but this year, the organizers deleted the exhibitor list from their app and website basically as soon as the weekend was over, and NOW I AM NEVER GOING TO FIND THAT GUY WHO LASER CUT PUZZLE BOXES AND PUT TEA LIGHTS IN THEM.

I am really sad about that.

Here, at least, is Will's favorite artist. She collects original dragon art, and for the last two Comic Cons where she's been allowed to choose a souvenir, she's chosen one of this guy's pieces. Feel free to buy her something from him for her birthday!

The kids and I were also SUPER interested in this guy, and I'm definitely going to buy them some things from his shop for Christmas. I mean, he sculpts both cats AND dragons! And door knockers, which I really, really want. And steampunk goggles. It was pretty cute to watch Syd seeing all these people cosplaying in steampunk and all of these steampunk accessories in booths and fall in love with all of it in the course of about eight hours.

I have promised to score her a bunch of clock parts and leather scraps if she'll do steampunk for the next Trashion/Refashion Show.

Matt met and bought some art from Ty Templeton, whom he's really into, and I became deeply obsessed with a woman who draws characters as if they were cats. I bought a print of Cat Wonder Woman, but I didn't get her business card, and when I try to Google her there are actually, um, a lot of people who draw characters as cats. Huh.

OMG OMG OMG you guys! I just found THE TEA LIGHT GUY!!!!!!! I was tidying my desk, because I suspected there was some grammar that I hadn't marked somewhere in the pile of clutter (there was), and I found exactly four business cards that I remembered to take from booths that interested me, out of the approximately four hundred booths that interested me.

Lesson for me: remember to take business cards, because sometimes people will delete their exhibitor list right after Comic Con, dang it.

Lesson for exhibitors: put your business cards front and center so I can remember to take one!

I'm probably gonna go buy a bunch of tea lights now, and also about fifteen clocks.

Okay, so here is where the magic happened. Syd's favorite comic strip, by a landslide, is Foxtrot. She's read every strip, and reads the collections over and over. She talks about it when we're hanging out. She retells entire comic strip runs. She references it any time we're doing something relevant, like eating food or doing math or touching a computer. LOVES. IT.

Hey, you know who was one of the guest artists at Comic Con this year?

We bought her a print of her favorite comic strip, and he signed it for her, and drew her a little Sharpie Quincy. She was starstruck and so happy.

It was magical.

And we get to do it all again in June, with more business cards this time, when Indy hosts the Pop Con!

How to Make a No-Sew Personalized Girl Scout Binder... AND How to Run a Girl Scout Troop Budget Meeting

I knew that our Girl Scout troop's budget meeting would be pretty intense. I planned to walk nine 9-13-year-olds (most of them closer to 9 than 13...) through last year's troop spending, and guide them through creating this year's troop budget. I had LOTS of pie charts and calculation worksheets and columns of addition and subtraction to go through with them. I had NO idea how well it would go.

To sweeten the experience, then, and to sneakily make sure that all of my several pages of information stayed in the exact order that I wanted it to, for every single girl, I made each girl in my troop her own personalized binder. Early this year I bought myself several yards of Girl Scout-themed fabric to use as I saw fit, and at some point, long ago (before our last move, perhaps!), I found binders sold by the case at a Container Store somewhere and bought a whole case.

I now have a whole case-sized space free in the garage, and I still have enough Girl Scout fabric left to make each girl in my troop a pencil case, IF I piece the backs from more stash fabric. It's a craft hoarder's win!

Personalizing a binder is super easy, and even though this project uses fabric, you don't have to sew a stitch.

You will need:

• binders, any size. I had exactly nine binders on hand, but the ones that I used are similar to these binders.
• cardstock, 8.5x11". This won't be visible, so you could also use thin cardboard. I'd suggest something acid-free, though!
• fabric of your choice. I'm using Girl Scout fabric from Joann's.
• Stencils and fabric paint. My fabric paint of choice for several years now is Jacquard Neopaque. Their Lumiere line has gotten expensive lately, but it's their line of metallic colors, and is just as good. I custom cut stencils from my original model Cricut, which is still hanging in there (even though I have to tell the software program that works with it to pretend that it's running in a version of Windows about five years outdated...)!
• hot glue gun and hot glue.

1. Iron your fabric, then cut it a half-inch wider on all sides than a piece of 8.5x11" cardstock.

2. Place the cardstock centered on the fabric, then fold each side over against the cardstock and iron it again to crease it. Be mindful to hold the fabric steady when you do this; cardstock is slippery, and the fabric is easy to shift.

3.  Hot glue each fold against the cardstock:

4. Stencil the front of the fabric-covered cardstock to personalize it.

I don't have a lot of pictures of the process, because I didn't want to show you any other girl's name, but as you read through it, I think you can see that it's easy-peasy!

Before I handed the binders out to the girls, I made sure that all of the papers in them were in exactly the order that I wanted them, and I added several pages of blank notebook paper so they could take notes. And then I took a deep breath, and we did the budget!

The first page of the binder was our troop's budget for the 2017-2018 Girl Scout year. I made a pie chart that showed how the girls had voted to set aside all of their money--some to pay re-registrations, some to pay for badges and uniform components, some set aside as savings for troop travel and other Girl Scout experiences, some to pay for running meetings and badge-earning opportunities, some to pay for fun adventures for the girls to have together, and some to be used for various service projects and other charitable activities.

The next page was another pie chart, this time showing how the troop actually spent their money this year. Some of it was VERY different! 

Barely anything was spent on meetings and badge-earning, for instance, although this is primarily because we run everything co-op style, and parents who ran meetings and badge-earning opportunities have been neglecting to submit their receipts for reimbursement. This is a good thing for the troop finances, I guess, but I want our troop's budget to be a model for how a girl can create her own budget when she's an adult,so I explained to the girls why they want to be self-supporting with their own money, and that we should try harder this year.

On the other hand, the girls spent a LOT more on "Troop Fun" than they'd budgeted for. Our troop has started traveling, and had a trip last summer and one planned for this summer, both from this 2017-2018 budget. A couple of the girls felt really anxious about going over the budget for this category, and I had to show them a few times that even though they went over that particular category's budget, overall they were under budget by more than $500. 

So of course the next item on the agenda was for a couple of the girls to present proposals for spending that money! Our 2017-2018 finances are now nicely accounted for.

The next page in the binder was a calculator--you can see a girl's work on it below--

--for creating the troop's working budget for the 2018-2019 year. First, they had to vote on paying girl registrations, so we could set that money aside. Next, they had to agree upon how much the troop wanted to spend on badge and uniform supplies. This took quite a bit of active discussion, as I'd told them that everyone needed to come to a consensus on every decision--the rule is that you should never spend your money in a way that makes you  uncomfortable, so everyone has to be comfortable with how the money is spent.

Even if that means that you debate for 20 minutes over $25.

Finally, they had to decide how much they wanted to set aside for girls to use for individual Girl Scout programs and travel. There was more debate on that, but when they'd finished, and after subtracting all those totals from their cookie profits, they had arrived at their working budget for the 2018-2019 year!

Time for more debate! On the next page, I ran them through some quick calculations so that they could write down what 10%, 25%, 40%, etc. of their working budget was, to help them visualize the amounts they'd be working with. I also, on separate pages, provided a breakdown of exactly what we'd spent, and on what, in each budget category last year, and I gave them a page of beginning brainstorming ideas for each category:

I did have to give the girls a lot more guidance on this part, because the ideas were pretty abstract--they mostly wanted to talk about more ideas for how to spend the money, and not so much how much to set aside--but using the pie chart of how we'd spent last year's money, and a few ideas of what they wanted to accomplish this year, they finally got all of the money allocated.

Don't get me wrong--the experience was just as intense as I'd thought it would be, and when we were done all I wanted to do was go home to lie down in the dark with a cold, wet washcloth on my forehead. But I was thrilled at how much interest the girls took in the process, and how valuable of an activity it turned out to be. The girls had the experience of dividing their budget between wants and needs, necessities and luxuries, fun activities and operational expenses. They had to disagree with other girls and then compromise with them, stick up for their own ideas and change their minds, choose between different but equally enticing opportunities, and make plans for the future. It's a real-life, real-world skill, the ability to make a budget, and these girls are well on their way to being able to do it.

And if that wasn't awesome enough, since then, two different girls in my troop have shared with me pretend pie charts that they've made for fun, and each time, that girl said it was "because I know how much you love pie charts."

Children, I DO!!!

Homeschool Math: Exploring Pentominoes with Middle Schoolers

Shape puzzles are super fun and excellent for mathematical and logical thinking. I've been trying to strew more puzzles for the kids this spring, along with the sensory materials that I'm already used to offering them, and out of everything that I've offered, I think that shape puzzles have been the most popular.

And, of course, it doesn't hurt when *I* become obsessed with what I've strewn!

I happened upon pentominoes in the book Engage the Brain: Math Games, Grades 6-8. It was the first time I've seen them, and I can't get enough of them! They're diabolically simple: five squares must all share at least one side. Twelve original shapes can be made from that rule.

You can simply fiddle with them, putting them together however you like and seeing what you can make, or you can solve puzzles with them, either trying to assemble them into rectangles or squares or fit outlines that others have made. There are some easy, perfect-for-beginners puzzles out there, but we started with these more difficult ones, specifically the 6x10 rectangle with 2,339 reported solutions.

"Over two thousand solutions!" you say. "Why, that must be simple!"

I'm afraid I must disagree:

The kids and I worked and worked and worked on this! The most frustrating thing is almost solving it but for one single piece. Grr!



The younger kid developed the strategy of drawing her possible solutions rather then putting them together. Took much longer to do, but it did look lovely!

Don't tell the children, but I cheated. We were all working together at the school table, and they were so focused and intent that I didn't want to disturb them by leaving, myself, without a solution. If you homeschool, you likely know that the surest way for a child to lose interest in her work is for you to lose interest first. Go take a five-minute phone call and you'll find that the school table has mysteriously absented itself of children when you return!

I figured that the only way that I could walk away from the table without discouraging the kids is if I'd solved the puzzle, but that darn 6x10 rectangle just would not solve itself! And so I cheated. The puzzle page that I linked to earlier has its solutions diagrammed, so I began sneaking peeks at the solution, giving myself more and more pieces that were correctly placed to start with. I think I'd cheated half the puzzle before I finally managed to solve it:

And then, about ten minutes later and completely on her own, so did my thirteen-year-old.

Grr, indeed!

You can make a simple set of pentominoes using just graph paper (I'd recommend the one-inch grids), but you'll notice that we have these handy-dandy, ready-made plastic pieces:



Super-awesome pro tip: they come from our Blockus games! We own both regular Blockus and travel Blockus--AND an almost complete extra set of travel Blockus pieces--all bought from Goodwill. Blockus and Scrabble are two games that I almost always buy when I see them selling for a song at a thrift store or garage sale. I had it in my head that I really wanted to make DIY versions of pentominoes, so the younger kid and I experimented with some unfinished one-centimeter cubes that I have, and we did manage to end up with a couple of sets that I like okay:

I like that these handmade pentominoes are more tactile than a paper model, and that they're three-dimensional, so they have more utility and scope for creativity than the 2D versions. However, they're impossible to make so that they fit together as snugly as store-bought, machined pieces, and that U piece, in particular, I had to remake about four times, and after painting it I realized that I'll have to remake the purple one a fifth time--it's REALLY difficult to keep that middle space open more than a centimeter!

So in this case, I've finally resigned myself to the fact that store-bought plastic is simply better:

I had additionally been thinking that I should make a DIY magnetic version, perhaps to fit in some sort of metal tin, maybe made of Perler beads and with magnets on the backs, but then I realized: duh. I can obviously just use our TRAVEL BLOCKUS set. So that's one more problem solved!

The greatest thing about pentominoes, especially if you have gifted learners and learners at different levels, as I have both of, is how many enrichment opportunities there are with such a simple toy. There are a million ways to play with pentominoes, a million ways to structure activities, a million research projects, a million projects to solve, a million ways to incorporate them creatively into play. Here are some extension ideas and resources, some of which we've used, and some of which I've put on our to-do list for later exploration:

• Chasing Vermeer. We're listening to this right now as our car audiobook. 
• online pentominoes game. The younger kid enjoyed playing through this online game.
• lesson plan. If you need to more formally introduce the concept pentominoes, here's a full lesson plan.
• pentomino alphabet. These solutions are demonically tricky, but I think it would be really cool to cheat the solutions, then use them as templates and simply draw them and decorate them on graph paper for fun.
• printable pentomino puzzles. These didn't work great for us, because the printout diagrams didn't match the sizes of the pentominoes we already have. If you needed a quiet activity that kids could do independently, though, you could print these and the included pentomino templates. Bonus points for printing the pentominoes on magnet paper, popping it all into a metal tin, and having the travel pentomino set of my dreams!
• 3D pentomino puzzles. Here are some templates especially for pentomino sets made from blocks.

See! Now you can be obsessed with pentominoes, too!

P.S. Interested in more hands-on homeschool projects? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool History: The Berlin Wall and Political Graffiti

I haven't posted a lot of hands-on activities from our AP European History study for the sorry reason that we simply haven't done a lot of hands-on activities for that class this year. We're taking a second year to make a second run through the study, however, so that will change, at least.

Silver linings!

Here are the textbook resources for this lesson:

• For the older student
• Palmer, R. R. "Chapter 25: The International Revolt against Soviet Communism," A History of Europe in the Modern World, 11th ed.
• For the younger student
• Bauer, Susan Wise. "Chapter 41: Communism Crumbles." Story of the World Volume 4: The Modern Age

After reading these chapters, the kids and I spent time discussing the Berlin Wall, and then watched this TED-Ed video on its rise and fall:



I pointed out the examples of graffiti on the Berlin Wall, and we looked at several other examples of Berlin Wall graffiti here.

 It's important to note that this graffiti was only on the "Western" side; make sure you look at plenty of examples of what the wall looked like on the Soviet side, as well, as it's shockingly different.

We performed a close reading of all of these images, simply noticing and identifying all of the graffiti we could, marveling at some of it, enjoying the funny bits... acknowledging the dirty stuff...

As we looked, though, I encouraged the kids to point out whenever they saw graffiti that was "political" in nature, something that spoke to how people should govern or be governed, their freedoms and restrictions of behavior in their socioeconomic context, etc. There should be lots of examples! Graffiti is often a form of political speech in that it speaks to these issues, in a far more public medium than even a famous artist or politician could often hope to reach. It's also a form of speech that's culturally assigned to the individual, typically the individual with the lowest socioeconomic privilege in a particular culture, and so is often privileged to represent what "the people" really think.

As such, it's an excellent example of a primary source, visual document to analyze as part of AP European History. Here's are the specific AP European History categories that it touches:

• Analysis as a Primary Source
• Authorship
• Audience
• Format or Medium of that Source
• Assessment of the Usefulness, Reliability, and Limitations of the Source as Historical Evidence
• Historical Themes
• Poverty and Prosperity
• Objective and Subjective Visions
• Interactions with States and Other Institutions of Power
• Individual Versus Society

AP European History students should make good notes about each of these categories, and include specific examples of Berlin Wall graffiti that they could refer to in future thinking and writing. This is also a good subject for an essay!

On this day, however, there was no essay writing--instead, I wanted to combine our lesson on the Berlin Wall with a hands-on art lesson, one that inspired the children to feel the power of graffiti as an art form for themselves, as well as one that got them playing with, and feeling the possibilities of, some art supplies that we don't often use.

Although we do spray paint sometimes--a five-year-old can spray paint with liquid watercolor poured into small spray bottles, and a six-year-old can spray paint with real cans, for the strengthening of their hand muscles for writing at either age--and I do keep several colors in stock for the kids (with the new-ish rule, after Will had a friend over and they got rowdy with it, that they mustn't spray paint anything that is alive, such as OUR TREES!!!), spray paint is a supply that has much more potential than I think the kids realize.

I set the kids up with two different stations for this activity. At one station, out in the yard, they could tape large pieces of newsprint up to Syd's abandoned-while-in-progress pallet play house--

--and at another station on the back deck they made smaller-scale graffiti with our Crayola Air Marker Sprayer:

The kids were really excited to do this project. Like, REALLY excited. We'd flipped through a bunch of books on the art of graffiti before this, as well as looking at all those examples from the Berlin Wall, and as they worked, their eyes were just alight with excitement and, dare I say, maniacal mischief-making possibility. I have designated the chicken coop (because who cares?) and the driveway (it'll wear off) as free spaces to explore more graffiti art, so we'll see if that mania takes fire and political expression comes to life on the chicken coop!

Here are some other resources that we used for this lesson:

• Global Street Art
• This is Not a Photo Opportunity: The Street Art of Banksy
• Exit through the Gift Shop
• The Wall: A World Divided
• The Other Side of the Wall

There are a TON more resources than this, however, both on the Berlin Wall and on the art of graffiti. It think it's good to include at least one live-action video on each subject, so that kids can see the process of graffiti, and you of course have to see some video of the Berlin Wall being torn down by the people whom it had been imprisoning--the power of the individual versus society, indeed!

P.S. Want more handmade homeschooling resources as I come by them? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Bought a Camera for My Microscope

We homeschool in Indiana, which offers an "accredited" high school diploma to its public school students. Practically, this means that one cannot easily switch from a homeschool to a public school in the middle of the high school years--if you did so, you simply wouldn't have enough "credits" to graduate on time.

Leaving aside all other debates about homeschool vs. public school, this means that in Indiana, if you choose to homeschool for the ninth grade year, you are essentially choosing to homeschool through high school. You can get around that by taking online classes that offer the types of credits that Indiana accepts, but that's not how we like to homeschool. If Will wants to homeschool in high school, then we're foregoing altogether the idea of an Indiana accredited diploma for her.

And Will wants to homeschool in high school!

The lack of an Indiana accredited diploma sounds dire, but it's really not. Our personal homeschool standards are higher than public school standards, so Will's diploma doesn't need to be accredited by the state of Indiana to have value--her transcript and syllabi and book lists and portfolio will tell the tale, and all will be well.

Having this conversation with Will at the beginning of her eighth grade year, and therefore knowing that we were homeschooling her through high school, I researched and bought a high quality microscope to use in our science studies. We LOVE our Brock Magiscope, and it's still the world's best field microscope, but it wasn't going to cut it for honors biology, alas.

We've been using this particular Levenhuk microscope for biology all year, and so far we love it and it works well for us. We haven't used the oil immersion lens yet, but otherwise we've done just about everything with it that you can do. The kids have gradually become comfortable using it, and it's a tool well worth the budget expenditure.

Except that in our family of near-sighted girls, squinting through the lens means constant adjustments for each person. It also gives me headaches, which isn't great. And I've been wanting the ability to take photos of what we see, because can you really say that you've seen something if you haven't made a poster of it?!?

So I bought the camera that goes with the microscope!

AND I made Will set it up for us and install the software as part of her schoolwork one day, because yep, I am just that lazy.

I'm glad that I didn't go ahead and buy the camera when I first bought the microscope, as I'd been debating doing. I don't think we'd have spent as much time learning to look through the lens ourselves, if I had, and the learning curve is just that much more for the camera than it is for the microscope alone, and that process was already pretty intimidating for the kids. But now that we're comfortable with the microscope, learning to use it with the camera wasn't such a big deal, and I LOVE what the camera adds to our abilities with the microscope. Look at all the pretty pictures we've taken so far!

ascaria eggs 

fish scale

hair follicle

mosquito

pine pollen

So awesome, right?!? The camera also takes video, and the image sizes are quite large, so we should be able to enlarge them as necessary. We'll still take the Brock Magiscope out into the field, but this Levenhuk microscope should see the kids through whatever sciences they want to take through high school and into college.

How We Earned the Girl Scout Cadette New Cuisines Badge

I know I told you over and over that the Cadette Book Artist badge is my favorite, but y'all--that's before the kids wanted to earn the Cadette New Cuisines badge! Even more than the Book Artist badge, the New Cuisines badge is perfectly set up to earn inside or outside a troop setting. It was my favorite blend of cross-curricular activities, incorporating history and geography into the concept of learning how to cook new recipes. And it lent itself well to, as you'll see, some really great family experiences. I think it's actually managed to change how our entire family approaches cooking!

Prep Work

As the first activity in earning this badge, our entire family camped out near the cookbook section of our public library, pulling every cookbook that looked interesting. The kids' job was to choose a recipe to try for each of the first four steps in the New Cuisines badge. I gave them pencils and post-it notes so that they could mark and label the recipes they'd chosen. While they did that, Matt and I looked through cookbooks, too, and I found several of my own to bring home and try out.

Step #1: Make a dish from another country.

For this step, the younger kid found a rice recipe in Flavours of Aleppo: Celebrating Syrian Cuisine. Just between us, the recipe is a pretty standard way to prepare rice, but the rice cooker that we've had ever since our wedding day finally died not too long ago, and so you'll forgive the kid if her mind is still a little blown by the idea that one can cook rice in a pot on the stove.

And now she can cook rice! I have known several young adults in my time who could not do that.

Also, I need you to know that we eat white rice, not brown. Feel free to judge me. Actually, in some conversation years ago with another mom I know, when that fact got mentioned the mom actually said, "Hmm. I'm a whole grains snob," so I've already been judged and you can take a break. 

Side note: it's a discursive trope in the area where I live for someone to humble brag about their advanced tastes by claiming that they're a "snob" about something. Every time someone says that, I'm thinking quietly inside my head that they ARE being snobby. I don't know why I needed to digress about this, but there you go.

Other members of the family also have marked Aleppo-style spicy sausages and kebobs with cherries in Flavours of Aleppo, so we'll be doing some more cooking from that book before we return it.

The older kid made rosenkuchen, a spiced cocoa pinwheel cake from Classic German Baking (you will soon note that kid mostly made sweets for these steps...). You couldn't taste the cocoa in this cake (there were only 2 tablespoons of cocoa for the whole cake), so instead it tasted like a batch of cinnamon rolls with lots of lemon in the glaze. It was VERY good.

Step #2: Create a dish from another region of the United States.

For this step, the older kid went back to her roots and learned how to make cornbread. I cooked a big pot of pinto beans to go with it, and I was taken aback when both kids exclaimed several times how good their bowl of cornbread and beans was. I can't even tell you how many times I ate a bowl of cornbread and beans as a kid--hundreds? Thousands?--and why it had never occurred to me before then to offer it to my kids, I do not know.

The younger kid made French toast casserole from 100 Days of Real Food, although she insisted on using white bread instead of the whole wheat bread that the recipe calls for. We do always eat whole grain bread, so I think she was just looking for an excuse to get that much longed-for white bread on the menu.

Step #3: Whip up a dish from another time period.

For this step, the older kid found a recipe for English trifle in The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook (side note: I have been watching Downton Abbey, and I LOVE. IT! I am obsessed. I am also most of the way through Season 2, so don't spoil it for me!). Who could possibly resist pieces of cake with sugared strawberries, blackberries, whipped cream, and pudding? It was delicious!

The younger made lemonade from The Little House Cookbook, which we've owned since the kids were very small. She said it was too much work for what you got, but that it was good, although she inevitably adds that she only "got one sip" of it because she caught her sister drinking it straight out of the jug. The older kid had to earn and pay me six dollars for the organic lemons thanks to that infraction, but jeez, Younger Kid. It's still drinkable!

Step #4: Cook a dish that makes a statement.

Both kids were uncertain about the requirements for this step, even after reading the full entry in their badge book, so I encouraged them to think of it as cooking a "makeover" recipe. 

For this step, the younger kid made the raspberry lemon gelatin from Meal in a Mug--both children were absolutely enchanted by the idea of cooking! In a mug! She and I disagree about this step, actually; she decided mid-way through making the recipe that pouring the gelatin into individual glasses was silly (I agree, but still...), so she simply made it in a bowl. I pointed out, however, that Jello in a Bowl is NOT a recipe makeover, but simply the most basic way that one makes Jello. The kid then tried to convince me that adding fruit is the makeover part. I counter that adding fruit to Jello is the second most basic way to prepare it, and she should redo this step. She disagrees. Negotiations are ongoing.

The older kid made the Melting Chocolate Cake from Meal in a Mug. She says it was excellent, but I will say that a coffee mug in which a cake has been baked is super annoying to wash. 

The older kid also marked the chicken stew with herbed dumplings in Meal in a Mug, and I'm curious to see how she likes it. I am always on the lookout for easy lunches that the kids can prepare for themselves!

Step #5: Share your dishes on a culinary tour!

Our family often makes themed meals together, so when the older kid, still inspired by The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook, suggested afternoon tea as a fun project, we all jumped on board! The kids and I each made one sweet recipe and one savory recipe. Matt made a savory sandwich and champagne cocktails for the adults, while the kids had tea, of course. The kids also helped me pick out some tea cups and plates from Goodwill, and I made a tea service from them!

As part of our research, the kids and I spent a lesson during one school day watching these YouTube videos about afternoon tea--this is where we learned that we were planning to make afternoon tea, actually. Until then, we'd been calling it "high tea!" Gasp!







The older kid made cheese and pickle sandwiches with mustard, and a lemon tart. The younger kid made a paste from cheese, tomato, and onion for sandwiches, and blueberry scones. I made sandwiches using the veggie cream cheese recipe from 100 Days of Real Food, and an actual Victoria sponge from Say it with Cake. The older kid unearthed our family china, and she and Matt moved the school table out onto the back deck. I think the end result is absolutely delightful:

Our champagne cocktails are blue because we were experimenting with curacao liqueur. The younger kid found a recipe for a punch that uses it, since of course the punch MUST be blue (it's for her upcoming mermaid-themed birthday party), so although we'll be substituting curacao SYRUP for the party, we just wanted to try the liqueur. It's quite tasty!

We had a fun afternoon at the table, eating too many little sandwiches, speaking to each other like proper lords and ladies, and listening to classical music from the stereo.

Even though this badge is technically finished (other than maybe the younger kid and that makeover recipe...), it's inspired us to plan some other activities. I found a tea room an hour away that does a full English breakfast and an afternoon tea, so we're planning a couple of weekend trips to eat there. The older kid found a recipe for Philadelphia Turtle Soup in The Founding Foodies, a book about the culinary experiences of our founding fathers, so Matt has promised to ask our local butcher shop, which does, on occasion order in exotic meat, if they can obtain farmed turtle meat--I assure you, this is a thing. Apparently. And I think we'll do more cooking from library cookbooks! All of us have been getting our recipes primarily from online sources for everything that we cook, but the act of researching cookbooks and cooking from them for this badge was a lot more fun than I think any of us had anticipated, and with the huge variety of cookbooks in our library, it was quick and easy to find recipes that looked novel and interesting.

Here are some other resources that we used for this badge, generally either to add depth to something that we're already doing or to bring the idea of cooking into a separate subject or activity that we're studying or planning:

• The New Camp Cookbook. We're planning several backpacking and backcountry camping excursions this summer!
• Greece: The Cookbook. It hasn't even been a year since we were in Greece! I still long for several of the foods that we ate there.
• London's Afternoon Teas. This is a travel guide to the best spots to have afternoon tea in London, with lots of lovely photos.
• Cake: A Slice of History. The history of cake is surprisingly interesting! Will is currently reading this as an enrichment to her AP European History course.
• Colonial recipes with modern instructions. For when you just can't get enough of colonial American history!
• Wartime recipes in the UK. The site includes a list of per-person rations, and recipes for what people made with them. 

P.S. Want more deets on all the fun Girl Scout and homeschooling activities that we do every day (and whether or not they work or are disastrous)? Check out my Craft Knife facebook page!