Celebrating the Solar Eclipse

Thanks to our impending and unexpected move, I was not as prepared as I would like to have been for the solar eclipse, but we managed to have a pretty fun day.

We had eclipse viewer glasses, but I wanted to make a pinhole viewer so I could take photos with my cell phone. I had forgotten to do that before today, though, so I had to be quick about it. I remembered seeing a picture of "2012" projected through a pinhole viewer, so I added a "2017" to mine. It was so cool, so I made more viewers with all the kids' names and my name and a heart and today's date. I only wish I'd had time to have the kids make designs.

It was neat to see how the images changed as the eclipse progressed.

While were outside viewing, my seven-year-old son and I made some observations about nature. When we first got outside, there were some ants out and about, and we received a few bites. After a little while, I noticed the ants were still around but not biting. Then the ants disappeared altogether. I sat in the grass, ant magnet that I am, and didn't see a single ant for about 45 minutes. Suddenly, they reappeared. A few minutes later, they started biting again, so we went inside, the best of the eclipse behind us. As we discussed our experience, my son pointed out that the breeze had stopped. He was right! There was no breeze a few minutes after we got out there, which I noted when I was able to stop adjusting my viewing paper because it was no longer moving. Shortly after we came inside, the breeze picked up enough to aggravate our motion-activated camera. Fascinating.

I wanted to make eclipse shirts, but I hadn't gotten to the store, so we made chalk art for the walls using cupcake liners as stencils.

When my hard-to-impress nine-year-old pulled off her stencil, she said, "COOOOOL!"

I stumbled upon an eclipse keepsake worksheet a few hours after the eclipse and had my children complete it. Nothing beats documenting their handwriting and spelling in these early years.

(I found the worksheet link in a HUGE list of resources by Life of a Homeschool Mom.)

Mikey, 7: "Geting to look at it" 

Ellie, 9: "it lookt like a fingernail moon"
(That's what she's always called a crescent moon)

Angela, 6: "See moon in front of sun"
(She wasn't the most willing participant in this.)

I wanted to do something fun and eclipse-y for dinner to finish out the day, but I didn't quite get there. Instead, we had eclipse cookies for dessert.

Overall, it was a good day for having been completely unprepared and getting less than 70% coverage. (And knowing we're moving to the path of totality in two weeks. Two weeks! How unfair is that?!)

What did you do to celebrate the eclipse? Were you in the path of totality? Did you blog about it? Share with me!

Quick Gardening with Children

My kids love gardening, but their attention spans aren't too long, especially in this triple-digit heat.  I aim to get us outside every day to do something in the yard, like pull weeds or water the edibles.  Someday that will be our reality.

Around Mother's Day, Home Depot's kids workshop project was a small planter, in which a Home Depot employee planted a bell pepper plant.

The plants were too big for the planters to begin with, and, within a couple of weeks, the roots were pushing the plants up out of the dirt.  We finally had no choice but to replant.  Ellie got bored with the dirt scooping, but Mikey would have completely buried the plant had I given him the opportunity.  That night, he told his daddy he "played with dirt!"

I let both kids place the plants in the new pots, teaching them to grab the plants by the stems close to the roots.  They both did great.  Not a leaf was lost.

Finally, we couldn't find the watering can.  It really is a great mystery.  My best guess is it somehow flew out of the yard during a windstorm, but we haven't really had that good of a storm yet.  It'll probably resurface eventually.  In the meantime, I grabbed the tugboat (or crab boat, as Ellie says) pouring toy out of the bathtub.  Sadly, it was too shallow to effectively transport water in little, shaky hands.  I ended up taking the hose to the two plants.  Ellie was long gone by this time, and Mikey was too busy trying to keep adding dirt to his to notice he didn't get to use the water.

Mikey helped me place the plants back in their spot on the patio, and, impressively, did not spill any dirt in the process.

When we got back inside, I thought it was a good time to finally bust into the $1 plants I bought at Walgreens after Easter  They are eggs with faces that have seeds that grow into hair.  (No, they're not Chia Pets.)  The top cracks off when the shell is adequately wet, revealing the seeds inside.  I decided the best way to apply the water was using a custard dish and tablespoon.  Besides minimizing the mess and improving fine motor skills, watering took longer this way, making the task more fun.

One of these days, my kids will really be able to help in the garden.  Until then, we'll keep seeking out these quick gardening projects to keep them interested and learning!

Build a Monster

I joined a busy bag exchange group on Facebook.  I decided I wanted to finally start making the cloth quiet books for my kids that I've been planning, so I made pages for all my trades.  The first one I completed was for the preschool group.  The activity is a create-a-face monster made of felt.

I sewed the monster's head onto the page.  (I used muslin, but any cotton - any fabric, really - would work.)  I backed the page with a piece of felt and another piece of muslin.  I would like to have bound the edges, but the muslin I got was ridiculously thin and was trying to disintegrate.  Instead, I did a couple of messy zigzag stitches around the edge to hold it together and minimize fraying.  I made all the monster faces out of green or dark purple felt.  I used light purple thread for contrast.  I also did not take care placing the stitches because I wanted chaos to go with the monster theme.  (I apologize to the neat and orderly monsters out there.)

Since I was going for chaos, I picked a wacky, mustard-colored, animal-print fabric for the storage bag.  I put a button on the bag to keep the pieces in and attached it to the page with a sparkly orange ribbon.  The bag holds the three eyes (well, two sets and one single eyeball), three noses and three mouths I created to stick on the monster face.

Most of the members are not making cloth quiet books, so I added one or three buttonholes, whatever their preference, so that the page could be joined with other quiet book pages of other mediums on a ring or in a three-ring binder.

I also included directions:

In case you can't read that:

MONSTER FACES!

Includes: Monster Head, 3 Eyes, 3 Noses, 3 Mouths and Attached Storage Bag

Get creative and get scary!

Optional 2-person Game:

The first person designs a face with one of each part without telling the second person what it is.  The second person creates a face, trying to guess what the first person designed.  The first person tells the second person how many parts are correct and how many are wrong.  The second person tries to guess again, and the game continues until the second person guesses the correct combination of eyes, nose and mouth, counting how many tries it took.  The players switch roles, and the player who guessed with the fewest tries wins!

Candy Canes and Christmas Trees...Fine Motor Crafting

This post has been sitting unfinished for a few weeks.  I had a hard time remembering to take pictures of our candy-cane chaos (below).  Anyway, here are some ideas for next year...

I've been wanting to have the kids do ribbon Christmas trees, like this, and paper candy canes, like this.  With a few minutes of down time today, I whipped up the materials for whenever the kids and I had the chance to start crafting.

Thinking about the candy canes, I knew that gluing the stripes onto the cane would be a challenge for Mikey, so I decided we'd glue the stripes on the paper and then cut out the cane shape.  My next thought was I needed a cane-shaped stencil, but I remembered I have a couple dozen stencils in the pantry.  ;o)  In this craft, I used the following skills: gluing, placing, tracing and cutting.

First, I glued the white stripes on the red paper.  You could, of course, do this the other way around.  Make sure you fully coat the stripes so you don't have any separation after you cut out the canes.

Second, I turned over the paper and traced the candy cane several times.  I recommend laying the cane on an angle so you get diagonal stripes across your cut-out canes.  Also, be sure to leave generous tracing borders, especially if you're using skinny candy canes, to make them easier to cut out.

Third, cut out the candy canes.

I haven't decided what to do with ours yet.  I thought about gluing them onto paper as a candy-cane collage, maybe sponge painting the paper first.  I also thought about hanging them on yarn as garland.  I decided to wad up newspaper and use watered-down white paint to make snow.  When the kids' snowstorms were dry, they glued on the candy canes.  I think it's obvious which one was done by the two-year-old ad which was done by the four-year-old.

When I decided to do the ribbon trees, I knew I didn't have any ribbon (yes, I know this is a theme with me), so I cut strips of paper in varying lengths.  Since I wanted the trees to have a little sparkle, I threw shiny star stickers into the mix.  As I started the project, I decided our trees need stars on top, so I pulled out the glitter glue.  In this craft, I used the following skills: ordering, gluing, peeling and placing, and glue drawing.

First, give the strips to the child in a pile so that they have to order them from longest to shortest or shortest to longest.  Then glue the strips to the paper with the longest at the bottom and the shortest at the top.  Second, decorate the tree with the stickers.  Finally, use glitter glue to create a star on top of the tree.  (I'm sorry I don't have a better picture.  I always wait until nighttime to take these pictures, and the lighting just doesn't work.)

Ellie decided hers needed "branches" at the top 

Mikey needed surprisingly little direction for this!

Fly, Monarch! Fly!

Let me start by saying how we came to read this book tonight, a story that illustrates what I love about unschooling.

Ellie was playing with one of her ladybug pillows when she started asking questions: "What do ladybugs turn into?  What are they before they turn into ladybugs?"  Well, as it happens, I have a book about the life cycle of a ladybug that I picked up on a recent trip to the library in search of butterfly books, another of Ellie's requests.  I thought this book was wonderful.  Here is more information about it, including my review.

After we finished that book, Ellie insisted on reading a few more library books, including Fly, Monarch!  Fly!  I really liked this book as well - I linked my review, but I like the extras the book contained, like a butterfly sandwich recipe and a craft.  Ellie, of course, was all about the craft, so we did it after dinner.

It was a simple craft: Sketch a butterfly on orange paper, color and cut out, cut out and affix antennae, and affix dots and magnet.  The sketch part was too hard for Ellie, so I outlined her butterfly, but she did the rest, short of cutting out the antennae.

Ellie's is a bit more abstract

I decided mine needed eyes

For the love of writing

I didn't enjoy writing as a child.  I hated it, actually.  Thank you notes, paragraph-long stories, what-I-want-for-Christmas compositions, every essay in school...they were agony.  I never enjoyed writing until my senior year of high school when we had mandatory free writing every day in English class.  Something about writing anything I wanted until a timer went off appealed to me.

I'm glad writing and I finally became friends, but I'd love for my children to enjoy writing from the beginning.  Tonight I read a fantastic article with great ideas for inspiring children to write.  Journaling, letter writing, emailing and postcard exchanging are ways she inspires her little girl to write.

On a related note, I believe in making children write thank you notes.  I do, however, do what I can to make them enjoyable to write so that my children don't come to resent the task.  I also keep the note writing age appropriate.  For example, for a first birthday, I might trace their hand and let them scribble a bit with a crayon.  For the second birthday, I might let them go crazy with stickers.  Actually, that's exactly what I've done with my two so far, but the next child could have different likes and skills.

Mikey just finished his thank you notes for his second birthday.  He enjoyed making them, so much so that Ellie got a little jealous, so I handed her a pile of Christmas cards, thanks to Daddy's genius.  Mikey had to get in on the Christmas card madness, too.  The only downside to all this was Ellie's disappointment that the cards we mail don't come back to us.  Somebody send this poor girl some mail!  :o)

She colored ornaments on the tree and added a star

Ellie noticed that the trees on the cards were triangles, so I gave her a bunch of foam triangle stickers and let her go to town