Wednesday, October 11, 2017

We Went to the Girl Scout National Convention

I have so many words about GIRL 2017, the Girl Scout National Convention that the kids and I went to last week, but the vast majority of those words are so Girl Scout nerd-centric that I'll save them for the Girl Scout leaders message board that I'm a part of, okay? You probably don't need to know about the SWAP celebrity that I met, or the controversies over the Macy's booth and the taser display, or an in-depth comparison/contrast of the experience of delegates vs. attendees.

You might be interested to know, however, that there was both a dive tank in which girls were receiving SCUBA lessons, and NASA scientists letting girls try out NASA training simulators. There was a real-time service project going on in the back of the hall. Will met a park ranger who gave her the contact information of another ranger who could help her with her Silver Award project. I met the founder of the Little Free Library program, and was too starstruck to ask if I could take my picture with him.

Here's what else we did!


Soooooo many SWAPS were made and exchanged! I'll tell you more about SWAPS another time--especially because I have some SWAP tutorials to share with you!--but here's just a little bit about them. Adults get into them, too, so I made my own SWAPS to share. Except then I gave my SWAPS to Will so that she'd have something to exchange when she realized that she left her Girl Scout bag, with all her SWAPS in it, at home.

Fun fact: Will also forgot her shoes (she wore the Crocs that she slipped on early that morning to go do the chicken chores for the whole road trip), her pajamas, and her surf shirt (she had to wear a T-shirt in the hotel pools, instead). Sigh...

Instead of trading my own SWAPS, then, I took pictures of other SWAPS that I liked--

--and I enjoyed watching the kids share their (and my) SWAPS!
This is one of Syd's.
 We were only doing the Hall of Experiences, not the full convention, and I worried that there wouldn't be enough for the kids to do, but there was actually SO MUCH to do that we didn't get to everything in the long day that we were there! Nearly every booth had one, and often several, activities for the kids:
They're making noisemaking flyers at a booth for a company that hosts STEM enrichment parties for children.
Both kids spent ages at the Makerbot booth!


Syd designed a 3D-printable bunny.

Syd designed a parachute at the COSI booth and tested it in a wind tunnel.

Both kids programmed robots, also at the COSI booth.

The American Electric Power booth had snap circuits.

At the Joann's booth, you could make your own cape!
Chalk of the Town had chalk art.

They made star viewers at one of the NASA booths.
 Okay, here's one Girl Scout nerd thing that I'll share with you: new badges in the making!
I just wish they wouldn't take so long to come out. Will will Bridge to Senior before the Cadette badge comes out, alas.
 Here's another super nerdy Girl Scout thing: there are two companies in the US that make Girl Scout cookies. Their names are Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Bakers, and they make some different cookies. Our region is a Little Brownie Bakers region, and I've never tasted an ABC Bakers Girl Scout cookie, so of course as soon as I saw the ABC Bakers booth I went straight there, told them that I was a Little Brownie Bakers Girl Scout, and the guy running the booth hooked me right up with the ABC Bakers special cookies:
Here you see Thanks-a-Lot and Lemonades. Not shown is Smores, which I think I already ate.
 Of course, that didn't stop us from also visiting the Little Brownie Bakers booth and eating a lot of Samoas and Thin Mints:


more SWAP-making






The Columbus Zoo was there, which is why I have a thousand pictures of my children petting a kangaroo: 



Taking a painting break, and crap! I just remembered that I didn't pick up their paintings at the end of the day--oops!

 

Does she look worn out yet? I was!!!
It was a wonderful day, and both kids came away inspired to do more, learn more, and be of service more. I came away with lots of leader ideas, and information and ideas for even more adventures that the girls could have.

And then we got BACK in the car, because the 3.5 hours that I'd driven early that morning to get to Columbus clearly hadn't been enough. I fought traffic to drive past the Ohio Statehouse so that we could say that we'd seen it (we saw it!), and then another nearly two hours down south,  nearly to the Kentucky border.

We ate sandwiches, swam, watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on my laptop, and then went to bed early, ready for Native American mound viewing on the next day!

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Thank-You Notes from Color and Create Greeting Cards

You can probably guess this about me, but I don't buy store-bought greeting cards. I mean, we've got card stock and pens, so why not save the money for sushi and/or doughnuts instead?

Will's getting old enough that she doesn't love making her own cards anymore, so I might stock her up with some stationery cards sometime, if I ever see any with dragonriders or howling wolves or a catalog of medieval swords on the front, but Syd is still my go-to girl for cardmaking. She'll probably draw a fat unicorn on the front of your card, whatever the occasion, but homemade it is!

I received a copy of Color and Create Greeting Cards free for review the other day, though, and it's been kind of that perfect bridge between store-bought and homemade, great for those times when you want to make a handmade card but you're not feeling especially crafty. It's basically adult coloring pages in greeting card form. You can do one whenever the occasion arises, or you can fill them in whenever you like, listening to music and drinking wine, and then just pop one out, ready to go, when it's needed.

Syd and I have been living our lives listening to Story of the World v. 2 in order to keep up with the frantic timeline of Will's AP European History class, so we've been coloring a LOT while the audiobook plays. Although in this pic, it looks like Syd is actually secretly listening to her new obsession, Mr. Terrupt:

Yep, I knew it--Story of the World doesn't come in playaway!


You can fancy these cards up even more, if you're minded to, as I discovered when Will spilled her tea on the edge of the card I was coloring. I let it dry and colored over it on the front, but then Will cut around the design, making the edges more interesting (and cutting off some of that tea stain...) and I used double-sided tape to line the inside with colored paper, hiding the rest of the tea stain and making the card look different and interesting:

You should probably also do this if you insist on coloring your card with permanent markers, as permanent markers will bleed through a little bit, but I think my kids are the only ones who insist on using our permanent markers for Every. Single. Thing.

Using permanent markers for every single thing means that when you misspell something, you have to draw a giant star to cover it up:

And that's our first round of thank-you cards finished and mailed! If you've purchased something from the kids during their Girl Scout fall product sale, you can expect to receive a thank-you note, too! If you haven't purchased anything from them, but you long to support exciting adventures and girl-led experiences by buying nuts and candy, you can click through to the nuts and candy shop that Will created.

If you subscribe to magazines, you can renew your subscription through the magazine shop that Will created, and part of your subscription money goes to the troop.

Next month, our Girl Scout troop is going to spend the night at the Indiana Motor Speedway and ride our bikes around the track! For those of you following along on Girl Scout adventures, that's after we go to the Girl Scout national convention and before we spend the night at the City Museum in St. Louis. It'll probably be after we make shoeboxes for hurricane relief (if you make them when there's not a hurricane, then the non-profit can send them off right away after the next one) and certainly before the Christmas shoeboxes. It may be after our primitive camping adventure, depending on the late October weather, but who knows? The weather has been weird this year.

Friday, September 29, 2017

This is How She Trains Her Dog (and How Her Dog Trains Her)

We've had Luna for almost eleven months now, but she's really only been working on being trained for the past five or so, when the basic obedience course offered by the closest doggy daycare finally fit into our schedule. Seriously, it's not as if we could have gotten anything else done on a Saturday morning during the ballet year!

Matt and Will went through the basic obedience course with Luna once, and then were supposed to work with her one-on-one to cement the commands they'd covered before they enroll her for the next level.

And... they're still working on that.

Luna is probably around four years old now, and she came to us having had a litter and a bad case of heartworms. She's the sweetest dog that I've ever met, so clearly somebody treated her right, but equally clearly that never consisted of ever asking her to do anything. Ever. Which is so weird to me, because I've known plenty of people who are lazy dog owners, and their dogs will still shake hands or "beg" for a treat or something. Anything. Something stupid, probably, but something.

But our Luna came to us not even not knowing any commands, but not knowing how to play at all, and with seemingly no understanding that human language and gestures have meaning, or that she should look to humans for communication. The first thing that Matt and Will were taught was to hold a treat at their forehead to get Luna's attention, and then to give her the treat so that she learned to associate paying attention with a reward, and this step took FOREVER. Honestly, I think Luna still forgets, and Will still drills her on this sometimes.

In addition to the "watch" command, Will trains Luna daily on "sit," "down," "come," and "touch," which is the prerequisite to "heel." Luna can do those commands now, but not consistently. Still, it's better than she did for months upon months, when Will had to physically move Luna's body into position after every command.

I, personally, would have gotten sick of this after the first week, and Will has had her moments of frustration, but for the most part, she is more consistent and patient with her dog than I have ever seen her be before:


She finally watches!




Here's a good down, and Luna isn't jumping up immediately for a change, so it's a VERY good down!
The good down was probably mostly a fluke...



Will usually rewards Luna with bits of hot dog, but I think that's bad for her arteries, and so every now and then I talk her into making a batch of homemade, healthy dog treats. Luna really likes these honey dog treats, but these particular ones are the same no-bake, pumpkin and oat dog treats that my Girl Scout troop taught Brownies to make at a Pets Badge workshop last month, and we have tested them on MANY animals, and every single animal has adored them:


Luna loves them so much that when Will accidentally spills them, life kind of becomes chaos:



Back to work!


Will still puts a treat on her forehead to remind Luna to "watch."

She also has Luna "touch" to encourage her to go weird places, because Luna is scared to go weird places. She avoids our kitchen because she's scared of the slippery floor there, bless her heart.
This dog has given this kid so much more than we have given this dog. We've only given Luna food, shelter, walks, training, fun experiences, and unconditional love and affection. But she has given our older daughter gifts she wouldn't otherwise have. Learning comes easily to Will, so easily that she barely notices that it's happening most times. It's so easy for her to learn new things that it's also easy for her not to understand that learning isn't this easy for most people. I've seen many, many clever children (and adults!) who are disdainful, contemptuous of others who learn more slowly than they, annoyed by people who take a while to think, who ask questions about something that's already been covered, who need material repeated for them, who need to repeat the material over and over again. It's a disgusting state of mind, and I won't permit Will to voice it at another, but I can tell that she thinks it sometimes. Who wouldn't be tempted, when they see someone inexplicably struggling with something so EASY? It's easy to lose your compassion that way, to think that your quick learning makes you better, when really it's nothing to your credit--you were simply born that way. But if you think that it makes you better, then you think that those who can't duplicate your quick wit are worse than you, and perhaps they deserve their bad breaks, and you don't notice all the good breaks that you've been given just because you happen to be such a clever girl.

But then here comes this dog. You love her the most, and she loves you the most, and you'd do anything for her, and you know that she'd do just anything in her power to please you. But boy, is she a slow learner. You tell her the same things over and over and over again, and you know she wants to do what you say; you can see by her head tilt and her wriggling butt and the uncertain lifting of her front paw that she desperately wants to do what you say, but she just. Doesn't. Get it. You have to patiently demonstrate the same thing over and over again, watching her so eager, watching her not get it, and you get so frustrated, but how can you be mad at her? You can see how much she wants to do your thing. You can see that if willpower would make her learn the thing, she would have learned the thing long ago. It's clearly not her fault, because she's absolutely the best dog, but being the best dog in the world does not mean that she's the fastest learner. She may, in fact, be the slowest learner.

But you don't give up, because you love your dog so much (and also because your mother won't let you, because she secretly knows what is going to happen). And very, very, VERY slowly, what your mother secretly knows will happen does, indeed, start to happen. One day she points out to you that you used to have to push your dog's butt down to get her to sit every single time, over and over again, but now you only have to do it sometimes. And then hardly ever. You used to have to say, "Down," and then physically pull your dog's feet out from under her to lay her down, but now you only have to put the treat down there and she remembers. She IS learning. It IS happening. And whereas you take your own learning for granted, as if everyone can spell a word aloud once a day for four days and then have that spelling memorized, and can read a whole book an hour, every hour, you are absolutely thrilled at every very small advance that your dog makes in understanding. Every time she remembers to sit, you celebrate. You're more patient. You're learning to be more encouraging. You're becoming a better person every time that former shelter dog looks in your face, her ears up, and wills herself to learn for you.

That's of far more value than anything that we could possibly ever give to this dog of ours.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Sun and the Solar Eclipse Study: The Phases of the Moon


Here's what I've showed you of our Sun and the Solar Eclipse study so far:
If you're using the NASA Eclipse Activity Guide as a spine (and you should, even if there's not an eclipse near you--it makes an EXCELLENT spine for a study of the Solar System!), then this is Lesson 10: Waxing and Waning. Here is where you learn about the moon's orbit, the visible phases of the moon, and you preview how eclipses work, although you'll cover this in more detail in a future lesson.

The NASA Eclipse Activity Guide has a big build for the phases of the moon demo--foamboard, TWENTY balls and TWENTY skewers, etc.--but I'm going to tell you what you actually need:
  1. lamp
  2. human
  3. ball that's around baseball/tennis ball-sized, painted half-black and half-white
The younger kid painted a glass Christmas ornament from my holiday crafting stash half black and half white, and when we were done with this demo I put it back in the stash. We can still paint it something cute for Christmas.

To demonstrate the phases of the moon, first set up your lamp near a wall, then put the kid several feet in front of it. You don't want it to blind her, and you want to help her remember that the distances are very vast here. Just make sure that it's warm and bright enough on her face that she can't lose track of it. The lamp is her sun.

She is the Earth.

You hold the moon, and you ALWAYS hold it so that the white side faces the wall with the lamp (don't think about facing the lamp exactly, or you'll end up tilting the moon's orbit and the demo won't work as well). You're going to orbit the kid, always with the white side of the moon facing that wall. As with the distance between the kid and the lamp, don't feel like you have to orbit the kid too closely--the closer the moon gets to her, in fact, the less she'll see the phases cleanly. Stand back a bit as you orbit.

You also need to remember that the moon's orbit is about 5 degrees off center, so the moon isn't going to go directly between the kid's face and the lamp--that would cause a solar eclipse, and we're not going to have one of those right now, except maybe to bring it up at the end.

The kid should stand still, but should turn in place so that she's always facing the moon. I like to start with the full moon. Hold the moon where it should be, make sure the kid has rotated so she's looking straight at it, and ask her what she can see--it should be the white circle of the full moon. Have her verbalize where her perspective is on earth looking at the moon, and where the sun is in relation to the earth and the moon. 

Walk the moon to a waxing quarter moon, make sure the kid is rotating with you, and have her observe the moon's phase, her perspective on the earth, and the sun in relation to the earth and the moon. Repeat this for every quarter until you're back at the beginning. 

There is no way to make moon phases any clearer.

I like the kids to hear the same information in different ways, the better to contextualize it and strengthen all those neural pathways, so we also watched two moon videos from one of my favorite YouTube channels, CrashCourse--



--and this simpler video on moon phases from BrainPOP:


For a craft/snack, the younger kid then made us a model of the phases of the moon out of Oreos, and it was delicious!

I had intended to add a one-month nightly moon observation to this, and it would have been amazing, but we just didn't keep up with it. An activity for another day, then!

Here are some more lunar activities that I'm saving for another day:
And here are some more of the reading resources that we used as daily assigned reading, family read-alouds, activity intros, or just to sit invitingly on our home shelves and tempt someone into exploring them:
P.S. Come find me on Facebook

Monday, September 25, 2017

Homeschool Biology: CK-12 Biology Chapter 1--The Tree of Life, and How to Run a Scientific Experiment

CK-12 Biology is the textbook that we're using for Honors Biology for the 6th and 8th grades. Chapter 1 of the book serves as an introduction both to biology and to the study of science, or a review of both for those who've studied biology and used the scientific method before. I treated this as a review, and so we busted through this chapter in one week (as compared to the THREE weeks that it's taken us to get through chapter 2!).

Both my 6th and 8th graders are expected to read the chapter independently, each on her own tablet, and to click through the links to watch the in-chapter videos. My 8th grader is expected to answer all of the end-of-section review questions in writing, but my 6th grader is only asked to review each section with an adult (she doesn't know this, but she answers those review questions verbally during our discussions). My 8th grader also takes the end-of-chapter test, although it's open-book, but my 6th grader does not.

Section 1.1, "Science and the Natural World," is an introduction to the field of science and methods of scientific investigation, with an emphasis on the Scientific Method. We studied the Scientific Method just last month, during our solar eclipse study, so rather than review it, per se, we looked at it in a little more depth. We watched the Khan Academy video on the Scientific Method--



--and then the witch trial scene from Monty Python, as a funny comparison/lesson on WHY we have a stated procedure for scientific inquiry:



My kids love nothing more than heckling someone else doing something incorrectly.

To practice the Scientific Method, I modified this "M&Ms in Different Temperatures" experiment. I won't buy foam plates, because I don't hate the planet, so instead I bought two identical white plates from Goodwill, for less than the price of a pack of foam plates, I assure you.

I had the kids center and trace various lids and other circular items on the plates, then measure the radius of each, right in Sharpie on the plates:

This technique worked well, except that the maximum spread of each candy during the experiment didn't reach the outer circles. I should have had the kids use a compass and draw circles to specific sizes, and there should have been smaller sizes drawn, and more of them.

I also should have purchased and prepared a third plate, so that we could have had a control, but instead Syd conducted the cold water experiment-- 

--while Will conducted the warm water experiment, with me as time keeper and each kid recording the results in her science notebook: 
See the spread of the candy coating? It eventually got as far as the third outer ring, and the experiment would have worked better with perhaps ten rings evenly spaced in that area.
 The kids compared the results of their experiments, then I challenged them to choose a different variable and repeat the experiment independently. Will chose to repeat her experiment using boiling water, and Syd chose to repeat her experiment using room-temperature vinegar:

This was my secret test to make sure that they understood how to choose a variable and conduct an experiment.

For Section 1.2, "Biology: The Study of Life," Syd is the only one who had supplemental work, as Will just took an entire intro to biology high school class at our local university this summer. Syd watched the "Six Kingdoms" video on BrainPOP, with the expectation that she'd take and pass the quiz on the video, and then played "Sortify: Tree of Life," also on BrainPOP. This little living vs. non-living activity that she and I did when she was six years old would have also fit into this chapter, but of course the book's definition of living vs. non-living was a little more sophisticated.

I really like Crash Course Kids, so as supplemental videos to this section we watched "Living Things Change"--



and "Classifying Organism":



And that's Chapter 1 of Honors Biology! Chapter 2 is already a LOT meatier--and a lot more fun!--and as lab-heavy as I'm making it, I can easily see this particular biology study carrying us well into next summer.

Ooh, and I'm buying us a new microscope this week--stay tuned!

Thursday, September 21, 2017

The Kid and Cat Photo Shoot, or, How to Royally Piss off a Cat

Here's a thing: I have Christmas issues.

We had really big Christmases when I was a kid, with lots of relatives and lots of presents and a huge feast, and it was awesome and I felt really special and loved. I'm the youngest in my nuclear family by far, though, raised by my grandparents, and so you know how it is with families--cousins grow up and have their own Christmases, and the aunts and uncles go to their houses, instead, and Christmas gets smaller, and the grandparents grow older and don't have the energy to make a big fuss. Life moves on.

I mean, it moves on for regular people, not me. I insisted on going back to my grandparents' house for Christmas every year, even after Matt and I were married, even after we had kids. We never had Christmas in our own house, but instead drove screaming babies and bored toddlers ten hours down and ten hours back every single year. It was kind of stressful and kind of sad, because I had, like, this visible reminder every year of how my Pappa's health was declining, but what was I going to do? Not go, and possibly miss the last Christmas with my Pappa?

I had that last Christmas with my Pappa a couple of years ago, and he died six days later, on New Year's Eve. People get over it at some point, right? Someday? Asking for a friend.

So anyway, I've always tried to buy the kids and Matt nice presents for Christmas, and when the kids were little it was easy--what little kid doesn't love toys? Presents were a huge part of my childhood Christmases, a big part of why I felt so special and loved. And that's possibly because I'm shallow, because I still like stuff. I can tell you, off of the top of my head, 100 presents that I would genuinely love to get right now, and none of them are those "experience" gifts that non-consumers are always into--none of that "a surprise dinner out" or "a spa day" stuff for me--I want Dalek cookie cutters and those adult fleece romper pajamas and that awesome toaster that will also cook you an egg and warm your Canadian bacon!

But Matt is NOT like that. He wants for nothing. And as the kids have grown older, they've gotten like that, too! Yay, of course, for them, but they are SO hard to buy for. They like getting presents, sure, and they're grateful and it's nice, but even presents that wow them? They don't really play with them. Syd plays with her American Girl stuff and her My Little Pony stuff, and otherwise she listens to audiobooks from the library, draws and colors and messes with craft supplies, bakes weird recipes. And she's got all the craft supplies and baking supplies that she needs, and when she needs something else, I go out and buy it for her from my homeschool budget.

Will reads. That's it. She reads real books, and ebooks, and messes about online and reads stuff there. When she's not reading, she's playing old-school computer games. If I bought her new computer games, she'd play them, but she gets plenty of screen time, as it is. If I bought her new books, she'd read those, but then they'd get put on our shelves and she'd go read something else.

So every year I kind of agonize over what to buy the kids and Matt that they'll really love, that will make them feel special, and I buy them, and they open them on Christmas, and they love them and say thank you and use whatever it is for a while, but then they move on with their lives and stuff sits on shelves and it seriously bums me out.

At the same time, though--AT THE EXACT SAME TIME--I have entire Pinboards and planners absolutely full of projects that I'd love to make for every single member of my family, if I just had time between school and work and family. Stuff that I want to make for Matt. Stuff that I want to make for Will. Stuff that I want to make for Syd. Just sitting there in my plans, never made because I can't scrounge up the time.

This, then, is my Christmas revelation: handmade gifts for my very own family.

Sure, I've got a couple of things bought for the family already and set aside already, so there will be a couple of store-bought gifts in the mix, but mostly, I'm going to make for them the things that I've been dreaming about making for them, and give them to them at Christmas. I've got so many ideas!

I'm going to tell you these ideas, but I'm going to trust you not to spill them to my kids, who, I assure you, do not read my blog because it's boring.

Here's one project in the making: formal portraits of Syd and her best friend, her cat, Gracie.

The first photo shoot, on a picnic blanket in our sunny backyard, went amazingly well:





Seriously, how cute are they? And you can tell--the cat was super into it!

The next set that I wanted to do was a Hogwarts photo shoot. You can bring an owl, a cat, or a toad (also apparently a rat, but not a rabbit) to Hogwarts, so I wanted a shoot in which Syd was going off to Hogwarts, with Gracie as her familiar.

I should have ironed the sheet that I duct taped to my garage door. Also... Gracie was not super into being photographed this time:




She kind of did okay, but you can tell that she's trying to get down in that last photo, and when she looks at me it's only to give me the stink-eye.

I  thought that this shoot would go better. Instead of standing on the sunny driveway, after all, Gracie was already hanging out in Syd's comfy bed with her when I spotted them and said, "Ooh, photo shoot time!" Gracie didn't have to do anything extra, and so at first it was cool:


And then she spotted the camera.

 Commence with the stink-eye:


They still turned out really cute, but I'm wondering if I should ditch the last photo shoot that I had planned for the drive-in. I also can't yet decide how I'm going to present these photos, although I'm leaning towards making her a photo book of them, as well as a large prints of my favorite shots to put on the wall by her bed.

I'll tell you something, though--putting this together is obviously taking hours upon hours longer than it would to click through Amazon to find some stuff to put under the tree, but it's so much more awesome to do. I've been wanting to take these photos forever, so making the time to do it is an actual relief, and I have no doubt in my mind that my kid is going to LOVE them, and in fact is going to cherish them forever. Hell, I'M going to cherish these forever, as well as the memories of making them.

Next up, a Choc-ola candle for Will, and fleece mermaid tail lap blankets for all three of us (well, one of them may actually be a shark...)

P.S. I share weird and wonderful crafting and homeschooling stuff all day on my Craft Knife Facebook page, because work/life separation is hard for me.