We Went to Canada! (But First We Stopped at Lowell National Historical Park)

Once again, what I thought would be just a pit stop at a convenient point along our route turned out to be bigger and better and WAY more fascinating!

When the kids asked me what Lowell National Historical Park was about, I was all, like, "I don't know. Factories?"

Indeed. Factories!

But also navigable canals that were built to divert water to power the factories:

And a super-fun trolley to ride around on to see everything while a park ranger sat up front and told us all about it:

The girls and I got the most enjoyment out of a large exhibit on the mill girls, the young women who left the countryside and their family farms to come live and work independently, living in boarding houses with other women from all over:



 The kids and I had a lot of discussions about the trap that this was--of course the wages and opportunities looked amazing to someone just arriving with hay still in their hair, but over time they'd eventually have to see that the wages were barely livable, the workload and hours and tasks completely unsustainable. But what could they do? Even if they quit, there were plenty more young women arriving every day with hay in their hair, gazing around in wonder at the big salaries and full shops.

The exhibit covered what they DID do, which was all kinds of peaceful protests until finally the sea change of labor laws was attained. Sort of, more or less, but that's the subject for many, many more exhibits!

Here's Will in the kids' area, happily weaving on the exact same loom that she takes no interest in at home.

Jack Kerouac was from Lowell, but I was struck by this excerpt from his memoir not because of that, but because he mentions the Anzio beach head, where my Pappa also stormed.

You should always know the location of your local fallout shelter!

 When we were finished seeing all there was to see (for free), the kids earned their Junior Ranger badges--

--back we went to the car for sandwiches and then 5+ hours of the WORST traffic that I have ever driven in. New England highways were just not built to support the number of vehicles that they were seeing on this day in August. First of all, everybody was on vacation, in their overstuffed cars so they couldn't see out the back window, bicycles and kayaks strapped on every which way, or in their giant RVS careening around every curve, driving too slowly and towing cars and forgetting their turn signals. Everybody else was in a semi, taking up acres of lane, inching up every hill and then speeding back down, not letting anyone so much as relax into their cruise control for a full minute. Zipping around all this mess were the locals of every area, cutting people off and changing lanes with no warning and honking their frustration at their regional highway system.

And that's when traffic was actually moving. Mostly it was stalled, or crawling along, because of course everybody has to run their road construction projects during the height of tourist season.

I am completely OVER Massachusetts. And New Hampshire. And great swaths of Pennsylvania and New York. By the time I was finally safely in our cottage in Bar Harbor I was just about beside myself, the closest that I have ever come to a panic attack while alone with the girls. It was... not great.

But our cottage was adorable, run by a lovely old couple. The sandwiches were sauced with the happy tang of being able to eat them while laying on a comfy bed and reading the next book in the Young Wizards series, which Will has gotten me hooked on. And little did I know it, but I was going to be okay, because the traffic would never be that bad again...

...until Toronto, that is, but that's another story for another day!

We Went to Canada! (But First We Stopped at Steamtown National Historic Site)

We're baaaaaaaack!

There were so many firsts and brand-new-to-us experiences in our Great Canada Road Trip!

1. This is the longest trip the kids and I have taken together--sixteen days of travel!
2. This was the longest time that Syd has been away from her father--he joined us in Quebec City, after ten days of travel without him.
3. This was the longest that I've traveled without Matt, with something like 40 hours of driving before he joined us. Frankly, it was too much for me, especially the long drives that I had to schedule to get us halfway across the dang country and back. Lesson freaking LEARNED.
4. This was our first visit to Maine! It was also the kids' first drive through New Hampshire, but I'm not counting that as a "new state" for them, because all we did was drive through it. We don't count states unless we do something in them!
5. This was the girls' first trip to Canada, and only my second. It was their first border crossing by car, and my first time driving in Canada.
6. It was my first time driving in a French-language area! I am NOT functionally literate in French...

Even though I wanted our road trip to focus on Canada, we saw several US sites on the way there and back, primarily because it takes SO long to get where I wanted in Canada--over 20 hours of driving! I broke it down into 3-ish days, with the idea on the first day we'd drive 10.5 hours and get it over with, and then for the next days we could spend the morning somewhere interesting, and spend the afternoon and early evening driving to our next stop. 

So here we are bright and early, the day after a 10.5-hour drive into Pennsylvania, checking out the Steamtown National Historic Site:

By now you likely know that we visit these widely varied national park sites entirely because the children are obsessed with earning Junior Ranger badges, and we will go to ANY national park site that has one on offer. I am always surprised, however, how even the most dull-looking site (sorry, Steamtown!), one that I'd never consider visiting without the motivation of a Junior Ranger badge to earn, is always so much more than it seems--so much more interesting, so much more to do, so much more fun!

And so it was with Steamtown. Chosen solely because it lay directly in my path a good day's drive from our hometown, it was actually absolutely fascinating. It had tons of real TRAINS!

This, we learned, is a roundhouse, and when we saw one later in Toronto, Will and I were able to immediately recognize and identify it:

You can approach nearly all of the trains:

Notice the exhaust vent above each train's chimney in the repair area. Clever!

And explore inside several:

Can you see a tiny Syd? She's in there ringing the bell.

mail train

creeper outside of a dining car

The museum also had loads of interesting artifacts from the heyday of commercial train travel:

There's always something on-point when applied to current affairs. Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it...

The kids had a happy time earning their Junior Ranger badges and exploring the site--

Will's bemused expression is because Syd and I were standing on a balcony overlooking the first floor and quietly calling her name only until she heard us and looked around. Then we'd stand still until she thought she was imagining things and went back to her business, and then we'd call for her again. It took sooooooo long before it occurred to her to look up, and even then it was likely only because Syd and I were cracking up too hard to stay properly quiet.

Afterwards, I was even able to have some time to myself at a picnic table with an apple and a book while the kids geocached two or three caches that were in the area--bliss!

Of course, after THAT I tried to leave town and discovered that every single exit to the turnpike in Scranton was closed with no warning and no marked detours. We circled the city endlessly, griping about how Scranton was never going to let us leave, until I finally gave up and calculated an alternate, longer route to Lowell, Massachusetts. I was able to find an on-ramp for THAT path, until, safely out of city limits, joy of joys, there was again a sign for the turnpike! I took the exit, thrilled that I was back on track, could save myself that extra hour+ of driving, and maybe even make up all the time I'd lost wandering around Scranton.

Until several minutes later, when we recognized a billboard and realized that the path to the turnpike was doing nothing but leading us back to Scranton, where every on-ramp to the turnpike was blocked...

Welcome to driving in New England!

Homeschool Physics: We Made Paper Roller Coasters

You know that nothing is fun unless you study for it, right?

It's perfectly natural, then, that I would tack on an entire, though short, physics of roller coasters unit study to our summer, as a prelude to the family trip that we take to Holiday World (made possible because two tickets to a theme park is one of the high-level prizes in our council's Girl Scout cookie sale!) every summer.

I mean, come on. I'm the mean mom who signed her kids up for a ride physics class AT DISNEY WORLD (it was an awesome class, and if you ever get a chance to go to Disney through the YES program, you should do it!). You know I'm not above making them study for a day trip to Holiday World.

I'll tell you about the physics of roller coasters unit as a whole another time, but by far the coolest part of it was making paper roller coasters.

We used these paper roller coaster templates, and they were absolutely perfect. I had to refer to the instructions the first time I tried to assemble each component, but after that the process was straightforward and easy to remember.

The kids measured and cut the cardboard base for each paper roller coaster using old pizza boxes (we eat a LOT of take-out pizza...), and did all the design and assembly themselves--

--but I often sat with them and did grunt construction work, as there's a LOT of cutting and taping to be done to construct every single piece. Normally, kids would create these in groups, but my kids each wanted to create their own--I mean, wouldn't YOU want your very own roller coaster?--so they definitely needed some unskilled labor to help ensure this wasn't a project that took all year.

Since we did this over summer weeks that were often broken up by day trips and long weekend trips and camps, I was pretty chill about my expectations for how much time they put into creating their roller coasters. Each kid for sure put in several hours, and the younger kid spent a lot of time while the older kid was at Space Camp working on hers, so you'll notice that it's more elaborate than the older kid's:

I love looking at all those little details!

The kids did a LOT of problem-solving and troubleshooting as they worked, and it's exactly the type of work that I like to see my perfectionist one and my academically gifted one do, and it's why hands-on learning is so important. One thing that I could have required, but didn't, is that their paper roller coaster be consistent--it's what's required in a real roller coaster, after all. Can't have a real roller coaster that only works one out of every five times, and that only after you've fiddled a little more with it every time!

They'd already put so much time and work into their roller coasters by the time they each had a design that felt complete, though, that I didn't feel like adding more to the project. They'd also had so much fun that I didn't really feel like bringing them down by making them continue working after they felt done, and honestly, our summer has been so whirlwind that I was pretty happy to be able to film them doing one good run and then call it an ending.



Here's the older kid's paper roller coaster:

You can see that there's less to it than the younger kid's, but it's also a faster and more exhilarating ride!



I need to remember to include more of these short units into our homeschooling. We did so many of these when the kids were younger, of the type like, "Hey, you kids are super into fruit--let's spend a week learning everything about fruit!", but as they get older, we've ended up in much more involved, longer studies. They're great for really mastering a subject, but there are so many things to know and explore! And never enough time in the day!

Thankfully, though, we set aside the time for this. And when we go to Holiday World and spend the day riding terrifying roller coaster after terrifying roller coaster, it will be with the comfy knowledge that we now know quite a lot about the physics of roller coasters.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Adventures in Geocaching with the Girl Scout Junior Geocacher Badge--And Beyond!

I've now taken two sets of Girl Scouts through the Junior Geocacher badge, and every time it gets more fun!

This is also one of those Girl Scout badges that goes way beyond the badge, opening kids up to a new life skill and a fun new hobby. The first time we geocached, it was so that Will could earn her Junior Geocacher badge, and though the kids forget about it for months at a time sometimes, we've never really stopped geocaching in the years that have gone by between then, and Syd earning hers, and our newest crop of Juniors earning theirs.

But check this out--the first time we geocached, back when Will was ten and Syd was eight, I didn't even have a smartphone! There we were using a Garmin GPS receiver that the kids' grandfather gave them, and if I wanted to be able to read the clues for each geocache, I'd have had to print them before I left.

It's a LOT simpler these days, with the Geocaching app on my smartphone--when I knew I needed to take the whole troop out geocaching a few weeks ago, I even sprang for a month of the premium membership, and Friends, I think I'm going to keep it!

And geocaching, I should add, is the PERFECT activity to do with kids. They are way better at finding the actual caches than I am, probably because they're closer to the ground or something, I don't know, and it's a great way to have them burn off excess energy, as you not only have to hike to the spot where the cache is hidden, but then wander all around that spot with your eagle eyes on to actually find it.

It's also a great activity to do with tweens and teens. Kids this age--or at least girls, since that's who I've worked with--can start to get more squeamish, more reluctant to get dirty, more hesitant to turn over strange sticks and see what's underneath. That's a detriment to their lifelong physical activity level and to their courage and sense of adventure and stoicism and ability to enjoy nature. I was out on a trail hike with a group of girls recently, teaching them to geocache. Each girl in turn was the leader, in charge of the clues and the GPS receiver, but all the girls were meant to be looking for each cache. However, some of the girls were practically diving into the woods to look, wading through the underbrush and turning over sticks, getting wet and muddy, while other girls were "looking" by standing on the trail and sort of gazing around helplessly. After a few caches had been discovered, a couple of the stand-and-gazers complained that the same girls were always finding the caches. It was true, and so I pointed out to them that they should observe those girls who were always finding the caches. Where were those girls right now? Off in the underbrush, squatting to examine rocks and poking around the bases of trees. Where were the girls who weren't finding any caches? Standing right there and not committing to the search.

At our next geocache stop, I observed that every girl was engaged in the activity--yay! After all, I told them, you don't know that you even had fun if you don't come home dirty, sweaty, and with one to three small injuries!

Mostly, though, I geocache alone with my own kiddos:

We get sweaty and dirty and always come home with at LEAST one to three small injuries, but that's a small price to pay for the experience of finding and then rehiding treasures, like this Mason jar covered in camo duct tape!

Here, then, are a couple of my pro tips for geocaching with kids--Junior Girl Scouts, especially, because those are my specialty, but really just any kids.

1. Check out the activity log for the geocache before you begin. You'll see this in the Geocaching app, and you'll want to click on it to see a timeline of who's searched for that particular cache and found it vs. who's searched for it and hasn't. Warning signs consist of either no recent activity or recent activity in which the cache has been marked "DNF" (Did Not Find). You don't have to abandon this cache before you begin if you see these warning signs, but you should at least point them out to the kids, tell them to manage their expectations, and set a time limit for hunting for the cache before you, too, mark it "DNF."
2. Privilege the caches that involve a nice walk or some nature activity vs. the "quick grab" caches. The latter are fine, especially if you're already in the area, but kids are less amenable to getting in and out of the car over and over if you're making an afternoon of geocaching, and in my mind, the more nature and the more physical activity the better--hence my preference of the nice walk outdoors over the hopping in and out of the car. Kids don't realize what good a walk in the outdoors does to their mood, and the more chances they have to get distracted by trees and wildlife and the beautiful environment, the more chances they have to associate being outside and active with feeling happy and well.
3. Try travel bugs. They're not always successful, but if they do take off, then it's absolutely thrilling to a kid to follow their journeys. I bought this set of travel bugs for my Girl Scout troop, and they're perfect.
4. Make your swag by hand, and always have it with you. Not all geocaches have swag containers, but the ones that do are always the most fun for the kids! Shrinky dinks and painted rocks make awesome swag, in my opinion, but when I've earned the Junior Geocacher badge with a troop, I've encouraged the girls to make Girl Scout SWAPS for it. Hand-stamped dog tags with cute geocaching-themed phrases on them would also be treasured by their finders.
5. If you don't have a smartphone, try letterboxing. It's a LOT more old-school than geocaching, and so a lot of letterboxes have gone dormant, but many are still around, and there are still some good communities for it. Additionally, it's still a Girl Scout Brownie badge, so if there's a Brownie troop near you, then kids are for sure letterboxing!
6. If it's possible to bring a dog, then bring a dog!

Now, here are some geocaching activities that the kids and I are still hoping to try!

1. We've never geocached while we've traveled before. Most of our upcoming road trip will be just me and the girls, and I'm hoping that we'll find plenty of free time to try geocaching. Perhaps on the nights when we get to our motel at a reasonable time, we can have an after-dinner adventure!
2. Travel bugs aren't super spendy, but the cost adds up, especially when most of them get absconded with by some scrub out on their third ever cache. I LOVE the idea of making our own homemade travel bugs with codes that we didn't have to pay for.
3. When we find a swag cache, I let each kid who has something to put in also take something out, which means that the kids are gradually collecting lots of little trinkets and treasures. Honestly, the only thing that makes those objects NOT crap is the fact that they were found in a geocache, so wouldn't it be cute to make the kids each one of these geocaching shadow boxes to store their swag and get it out of my way?

I'm going to swing for the year's premium membership to the geocaching app, which means that we'll be out and about geocaching even more, and I think I'm more excited about it than the kids. If you've got more good tips or know of any super geocaches in Nova Scotia or on Prince Edward Island, let me know. I'd freak out if I found an Anne of Green Gables-themed geocache!!!

How I Organized Our Polymer Clay (And Prismacolor Pencils!)

Syd is my crafting soulmate. She loves working with her hands even more than I do, and she's got the added benefit of some serious artistic talent to work with.

She's also got her fingers in a lot of crafting pies! Here's what I've seen her engaged in, just in July so far: making digital art, creating endless batches of original slime recipes, sketching, repainting Monster High dolls, baking and decorating cupcakes and homemade ice cream sandwiches, and sculpting with polymer clay, and that doesn't even count the crafts that she and I have done together, or what she's done at the pick-up art classes that I've been taking her to.

Art-making is also mess-making, at least here in our home, so one of my major projects this summer is to organize and store some of the most popular and commonly-used tools and supplies. I want our playroom table and floor (and my study table and floor, and the family room table and floor!) back, and I want everything that Syd uses most to be in her space, the playroom, because although she always has access to our family storage spaces, she tends to leave them looking like a crafting hurricane swept through and she manages to thoroughly disappear whenever I come looking for her to tidy up.

I've got a couple of big pegboards in progress that I'm using to organize and store most of these craft supplies, but even the categories themselves, just the slime supplies, for instance, or just the Perler bead supplies, need to be better organized so that we can use them better and store them more neatly.

I don't have slime or Perler beads completely under control yet, but I HAVE conquered polymer clay and Prismacolor pencils!

For polymer clay organizing, I used this YouTube video as my inspiration:



I took all of the old, grody, unsorted clay that's all mixed up together, put it into like batches, and ran each batch through my pasta machine umpteen times--

See all that grody clay in the bin back there? That's what I started with!

--until it came out pretty and nice and new! All the clay stored in the bin below started out grody and mixed up, and now it's clean and tidy and Syd has already been into it:

All of our polymer clay and our few clay tools fit easily into two of these exact plastic organizers. Taking another crafter's advice, I covered the bottom of each organizer with waxed paper to keep the clay from reacting with the plastic. Each organizer has a plastic hanging loop at one end, so I can hang it on our giant pegboard, and with the addition of a shelf to set the pasta machine on, that will be the polymer clay all stored and organized!

I might add another, smaller plastic bin to hold polymer clay that's been sculpted but not yet baked, as it's kind of killing my soul to keep turning on the oven so that the kids can bake, like, two things. I'm imagining, instead, storing them and baking them in batches, kind of like a kiln-firing. Maybe? We'll see...

Prismacolor colored pencils were a lot simpler to organize, even though there's a lot more of them. Our big family set of colored pencils now lives in this big, 72-pencil colored pencil roll:

I even put all the pencils in rainbow order so that the kids can easily find the color that they want, and since every space is filled, it *should* be obvious where each pencil goes back. This pencil roll now lives in a basket on the pegboard.

Will has her own personal set of Prismacolor pencils that stay in their tin and live wherever she wants them, and each kid has her own personal small set of Prismacolor watercolor pencils that stay in their tins in their work trays and that they use with their schoolwork (they work fine as regular colored pencils, too!). Syd uses this larger family set of Prismacolor watercolor pencils--

--on the Monster High dolls that she alters, so those, too, will likely live on the pegboard. Syd also informed me that she's used up the black in both this set and her own personal set, so I guess I'll be doing a little back-to-school shopping this week.

We school year-round, and thus don't really have a particular day that feels like the beginning of a school year. Nevertheless, summer, when the kids are often gone for their various camps, does feel like more of a break, and it feels especially nice to be able to spend the time that they're away refreshing and renewing things for them, sharpening their pencils and sorting their supplies, making things look different and temptingly fun. 

Kind of like walking into a familiar classroom for a new school year, don't you think?

8 Grammar Extension Activities for Late Elementary and Middle School Kids

What a fun title, right?

Except that grammar IS fun, or at least there are plenty of games and activities that can make it fun.

The point of adding grammar extension activities even to a packaged grammar curriculum is that it's unfortunately easy for a kid to master the format of the way that grammar exercises are presented in their curriculum, but not be able to translate that to "real" sentences in the real world. That's why I dropped First Language Lessons--the kids could easily complete the exercises in the books, but couldn't diagram the simplest sentence that I wrote for them if it didn't follow the formulaic pattern that it always did in the book. Analytical Grammar is working MUCH better, fortunately!

These grammar extension activities, then, are (mostly) fun, but most importantly, they get a kid to think about grammar in different contexts, with different types of sentences in different situations, than they tend to see while doing their regular grammar work. The kids like it because they get to do something different, and it generally brings some other skills and activities, like creative writing or problem solving, into the mix.

I don't have as many of these activities as I do, say, for math enrichment, because I tend to offer these grammar extension activities more like monthly rather than weekly, but most of these have more playability, too, so we can do them over and over rather than finding something different every single time, like I also do with math. But here are some of the kids' favorites:

Compound Sentences Against Humanity

I made my own Cards Against Humanity-type game by writing a series of independent clause cards and coordinating conjunction cards. To play, as a group we draw one independent clause card and one coordinating conjunction card, and then we each complete the sentence with our own made-up independent clause.

It practices the grammar of compound sentences, as well as handwriting and creative writing, and it's the most fun of all of our grammar extension activities!

Grammar Board Games

This particular board game, Grammar Scramble, is out of print, but there are actually a ton of grammar board games around that you can try out.

 Grammar Scramble works well because it provides some scaffolding to build basic sentences, but you can also extend them in a ton of ways to earn yourself more points, so there's built-in incentive to unlock the patterns of grammar.

Daily Twitter Grammar Exercises

These Daily Grammar Workouts on Twitter are fun because the results are compiled via poll, so you can participate or just check back later to see if you agree with the winning answer. The topics vary, too, so you might find a review of something previously learned, or something all-new to discuss.

Grammar Quidditch

Homeschooling doesn't mean that you can't play group games! If you're part of a co-op or just know some other kids who are at the same grammar level as your kids, you can get them together and play this fun grammar-themed version of Quidditch!

Popsicle Stick Parts of Speech

I really like the idea of these popsicle sticks, because they're manipulatives that you could use for several years over several levels. Kids could self-generate words for the sticks, or write their current spelling words. You could label them, or build sentences. There are so many ways to use a controlld vocabulary!

Mad Libs

Oh, my gosh, there are so many Mad Libs books and games, and the best part is that kids choose these themselves, as leisure time activities, because they're fun! We did Mad Libs both to and from Dayton, Ohio, last month, as Syd's choice of activity, and the only quibble that I had with it is that every time Syd would say "word ending in -ing," I would correct her with "gerund. It's a gerund. Why can't they just say 'gerund?'"

Word Dominoes

The basic set-up is very simple, but the beauty of these dominoes is that you can add parts of speech and word examples to extend the game. 

Linking Verb Chain

I don't normally think that you need to memorize all the words of a certain part of speech, but if a kid is feeling really not confident about a particular part of speech, it can help! Here's an example of memorizing linking verbs, and in our homeschool, I had the kids memorize prepositions a few years ago. They've lost it now, but at the time it was valuable for them to have all the examples memorized when they were having trouble using logic to identify prepositions. Now they can identify prepositions using contextual clues, so don't need to have them memorized.

Most grammar activities are basic and geared for the very young learner, so I'm always on the lookout for activities like these, that explore more advanced concepts and are fun for older kids. If you know of anymore great ones, pretty please let me know!

P.S. Want a ton more homeschooling resources and ideas? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!