Kalahari Here We Come

How can I put in words all the excitement, friendships, adventures, that come out of our UWG (Unschoolers Waterpark Gathering) each year. This is our third year in a row. It exhausts me to put this trip together for the girls. But it is some of their best memories of the year.

Some things we did this year: Nerf Wars, Nintendo DS meetup, Talent show, high ropes course, zip line, Fairy Godparent gifting, Balloon animal making, juggling, the Unschoolers carnival, of course there is the waterpark. They meet up with friends they only see once a year, and feel like they didn't even skip a beat. There is a week of speakers for me, of course I never get to any of that with all my running I do with the girls.

Oh to be young and free again.

Gaige in Chicago

Finally the boy gets to the Sears Tower. He has wanted to do this for a while. Only now it is Willis Tower??? What the heck? How can they just change the name of a land mark like that? Anyway, he comes home with an idea to skip college and just move to Chicago. He really wants to move to a big city. I am suggesting moving to a big city WHILE going to college. Of course that is the more expensive way to do it. But it might be for the best. He has his sights on big free city life. Who can blame him? I had too once.

So this is the Hat.

Brenda's first Etsy online purchase. I helped her learn how to make the transaction. I guess I should have taught her how to read the item description also I suppose, because it was a purchase for a pattern not a hat. So having no experience reading a crochet pattern, I sat down with the pattern and youtube and figured out the new initials. Two days later I emerged with the hat. And Luckily I had enough black and white worsted weight yarn it didn't cost us another penny. And it everyone loves it. Her friends are always wearing it. I think a frog hat next.

It Starts Again

So a bit of a catch up. No computer yet. But Gaige is a dear! Isn't he?? Swim Team is in full swing again. MWF practice. TTH meets. And we are off... Last year Marley was the youngest swimmer. This year she has lots of friends.

BeBack SOON

Yes Technically we are HERE. All three of our computers are down. Gaige has graciously allowed me to get on his laptop a couple times a day to check emails and such. I just found out I am not a laptop kinda person. But I am thankful.

Kalahari Unschoolers Waterpark Gathering
May Girl Scout CampOut Weekend Fiasco
My new knitted monsters
Lily's GS trip to the animal shelter
Easter Pics
Big Bret and Brenda's New Archery Range in our Basement
Memorial Day Parade
Field Day homeschool style
And so much more to follow!!

As soon as my computers are fixed... See ya soon!

Water Recycling and Sanitation

So what are some ways we use water? Less than 1% of the water on Earth is fresh water that people can use for these purposes. Where does that water go? How does it come back to us clean? How can we conserve water at home?

Most water treatments have a substance added to the water to make certain kinds of particles in the water sink to the bottom. Then filtering systems are used to clean out the remaining purities. Here was the experiment.

I shaved a bar of soap with a cheese grater. We poured soap into two glasses of water and mixed it up. To one glass we added table salt. To the other we added Epsom Salt. Again we mixed them up. Then we used two new glasses with filters to filter the water. The Epsom Salted soap water came out looking clear. The Table Salt Soap Water was cloudy. Same glasses same filters same soapy water, different substance added.

Wetlands and the Water Cycle

So to go along with a trip to the sanitation district, we did a couple experiments that have to do with water. Here is the first one.

Here we see a wetlands. The sponges represent the waterlogged soil. Here is what we did. First we put a puddle of water at the bottom of the paint pan. We gave the upper land some animals and put the spongy soil inbetween the land and water. Then we poured on some pollution (hole punches and powdered cocoa). Then we let it rain. (Water falling from a watering can). The sponges held a lot of the powdered cocoa from reaching the water. AND only one hole punch got in.

Here we let half the land be wetland and half be non-wetlands. The cocoa powder all got in, along with the hole punches. You can see that the wetlands area is "less poluted" than the non wetlands however it is infiltrating into the wetlands.

What WE did...

So while the girls were off investigating "scat" Marley and I decided to do Easter decorating crafts.
We started at the dollar store. We found these great little hangable sparkle foam eggs, two little baskets, and some green plant foam. So each craft was about 3 dollars. We had hunted out some branches yesterday in the rain and set them out to dry.

Here is Marley painting the branches white.

Here she is putting the branches into their green plant foam. We set the foam in there with a couple inches short of the basket so there was room for the rocks. Also I stuffed some paper bag pieces in the sides to keep the foam and branches from moving.

And the final product. We made two. One for the dining room table and one for the family room. We put rocks over the foam and paper (found outside) and hung eggs from the branches. And wah laa. (I saw someone spell voila that way the other day and have loved the spelling ever since. lol.)

A Flutter With Activity

So spring has officially sprung. We are getting out far more. Being part of the world again.

So I set the girls up to do a park program called Nature CSI for today. We had no idea what it would be ahead of time. I guess a rabbit was killed and it was their job to find out who killed it and who ate it based on foot prints, scat, hair, etc.

Brenda's only complaint... It was cold and rainy today. She wished they didn't have so far to hike to get to the taped off crime scene. lol.

Accessorizing

News just in. Marley is an A+ accessorizor. She has THE style.

Gettin Into Everything

It is that time again. Callie is at that age where every door, drawer, space, and crevice is just a place to explore. :-)

A Day With Old Friends

We decided to make plans with an old friend we hadn't seen since the move. By old I mean that we have been friends for years, not that she is old. So we headed back to the ol' KY to enjoy a lunch, bike riding and just good olfashioned hanging out. Paula said her grandkids were getting too old for the My Little Pony castle so of course now it belongs to us!!! Marley has played with it since. She even put her tooth in there for the tooth fairy last night. I am sure the tooth fairy loved hanging out in the castle before heading out to the next house.

Invention Convention Day

H

Toward the end of the "school" year the girls start staying up later, sleeping in. So today they ended up sleeping past the time to go to today's invention convention. But we headed up there around noon to drop Bret off to spend the night with her friend. When we got there it turned out we were still in time to help set off some rockets. Pressure, air, water, vinegar, baking soda, plastic bottles, and away they went. And Marley did what she does best. She got good and muddy in the sand box. It looked to be a stormy day, but turned out to be great!

Cinnamon Bubble Rolls

Again! It took two times to download this before I got it to stick! Oh well. So is life. In our new edition of Family Fun there was a fun-looking recipe for this bubble bread (that incidentally tastes like cinnamon rolls). So I got some yeast and asked Marley if she wanted to help which of course she did.

Lately I have heard all about how the older girls get to do whatever they want and she NEVER gets to do ANYTHING she wants to do. So I have been working on just finding ways to attract her attention to other fun things.

This bubble bread was so fun! There was the issue of my yeast not leavening properly. That has been happening to me since I moved to this house. I blame the house. Anyway so we were making these balls of dough and then we were to roll them in butter and next into our sugar cinnamon mix. Finally 5 go in each cupcake tin and they rise (except mine don't) and then they cook (this is where ours finally rise lol.)

The rule was to pat your hands in flour before you role the dough pieces so they don't stick. She rolled a bunch herself then offered me to help. I started rolling them at a faster speed. Marley corrected me. "You don't need more flour, Mom. Slow and easy, Mom. Slow and easy. Then they don't stick to your hands." And when I forgot and sped up she would remind me. lol.

Little Josh

So we usually keep this sweet little kitten overnight on weekends now a days. Last Sunday, after she woke up and dressed we headed over to Papa Jim's house for a short visit on our way to pick the girls up from the cousin's sleepover birthday party. I call her Little Josh. Ignore the ponytail and dress and I would swear she is Josh. No mistaking whose baby this is.

COOKIES BE GONE

Oh when oh when will we be done??? In just a week. YAY!!

On a side note, I don't know why I am having so many problems downloading pics on blogger lately. But it is getting annoying to download pictures two and three times sometimes to get them to stick. Google, are you out there???

When Two Troops Collide

So my older girls are growing up AGAIN. They will be bridging over to Cadettes at the campout this spring. We met with a Cadette troop to learn how they run their troop. What is different, what is the same. We worked on the fashion badge together. Shared a snack. Played some Girl Scout games. I got to press the leaders for ideas on how to solve some of life's little Girl Scout problems that show up from time to time.

I came home exhasted so it must have been a successful activity.

Crafty Kids Day

Crafty Kids Day is where a bunch of home schoolers get together with their shared crafting stuff to make whatever they want. There are beads and ribbon, yarn, cardboard, paper, crayons, glue, markers, egg cartons, eyeballs, pompoms, popsicle sticks, and anything else you can think of.

Here are some puppets Brenda made.

The end of the Simple Machines Unit Study

Simple Machines day at Green Acres. So this is how we ended our study on Simple Machines. We headed over to the fabulous Green Acres to learn about the simple machines, the Green Acres way (hands on). We used screws, wheels, levers, wedges, saws. We learned about FLE 123 (Fulcrum, Leverage, and Energy. The kids lifted a horse pulled wagon. A blast of a hands on time for everyone.

Girl Scout Cookies

So you know far too many cookies have passed through my house when we are using them to cook. lol.

People have been telling us... I remember when they were $.50. And I remember when this and that. And I was a leader 35 years ago for my girls. I got a hold of an original 1920's cookie recipe from when the Girl Scouts actually baked the cookies they sold.

Time has changed since then. I remember loving Thin Mints when I was little. I don't know how much they costed at the time. They just showed up in the house I guess. Right? Anyway here is a recipe we used to make Thin Mint Chocolate Cheesecake.

Instant Cheesecake mix. I followed directions for making the crust. Instead of pressing the crust into a pie pan, I pressed it into cupcake cups. Then I made the cheesecake as directed except I used chocolate milk (since I had no white milk) and turned it into chocolate cheesecake. I topped it with crushed thin mint cookies. We all love it. Next time I will mix the cookies into the cheesecake instead of putting them on top. It will make it easier to eat.

Girl Scout day at the City Building

Every year they ask if my Girl Scouts will do Scout day, and every year I think they are too young. But finally I give it a try. Brenda's troop is 5th and 6th grade. They can read well enough to pull it off I think. And they do. They love it. Each girl gets a City Council member to be for the meeting. The city council members sit behind them and tell them what to say and when. One of our girls were missing so even Marley got to sit in as a city council member. She will tell you she got a patch for saying I (aye) twice. lol.

This week's simple machines

Today we worked on levers. True to form, Marley was only one step behind. She worked on her wheels in her maze. This she did all by herself.

After the girls were done with levers, Marley and I went on playing. Here we were checking out which made the wheel move faster and farther, the maze with blocks farther apart or closer together. I thought there would be more momentum with the blocks further away from eachother because they would fall harder. I was wrong. The maze with blocks closer together both times pushed the wheel further and faster. It was also the first maze to get to the wheel.

Pottery Day

Marley has been bugging me to take out the pottery wheel they got for Christmas from Brittany. So here it is. Messy mess mess and all! Getting their hands dirty. And the walls, and the chairs. And the table. And the floor. lol. Now our pottery is drying. Tomorrow we will paint.

Language Arts Game

So yesterday was a worksheet. Today is a game.

So here is my list of words. I cut them out and we display them in a random order next to the second paper.

So same set of groups, except we added "Possessive Nouns" to our definitions. There are 5 words for every box. Choose a word and put it in the right box.

English for the older girls

So these are all things that my girls have worked on. Plus Bret and I have been talking about classifying. I combined two in one. I had a list of words on one paper and asked them to classify each word in the right catagory. They have a notebook of definitions already so if they were to say I don't know what pronoun is, I would tell them to look it up in their notebook. They have the meaning of pronoun in their own words with applicable examples.

Don't like worksheets? Make it into a game. Write each catagory down on a big poster size paper. Then have every word on the list of words on an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and make it a human sized game.

Or take the premade game board as in the last post and make cards such as this.

"Which word is a contraction?
people try she can't"

How Marley is learning her ABC's

Iwant my girls to learn, but I want them to enjoy their learning? Is that too much to ask out of life?

So as many of you know, I used to help out with the Reads program at the local school. I would sit for half an hour, listen to a child read, look up a couple words in the dictionary, talk about what she/he read. If there was time left ver we would often play a learning game together.

This is a game board I made up from a set of games which all shared the similar board at Reads. This is just a generic board game for a multitude of games. Each plain colored spot is just a spot to land on or jump on. The holiday spots are go-agains. The rainbows are slides.

This game is one Marley made up, which works pretty much the same as mine, except that you can climb the ladder to skip all the start stepping stones. And I follow Marley to see how far I can move at any one time, since she pretty much makes up where we go and when. lol.

Here are three cards, one card of each of three different games that go with the board. One is a "Bb". This is a game where we recognize the letter. If we get the letter correct we turn the card over to see how many spaces we can move.

The next one reads "It snowed on the grass." Reading is not a requirement of this game. All we are doing is counting words. It gives her an understanding of how letters form words and how you can tell what a word looks like being separate from another word. Again, if we are correct we turn the card over to see how many spaces we can go.

The last card reads "pillow". For this game there must be at least one reader. The object of this game is to say the word and figure out how many syllables are in the word. So I would say pillow. Marley would clap pil-low and say 2. We would turn the card over. If two is the answer the card will tell her how many spaces to move ahead.

The first person to reach the end of the game wins and the exercise is over. You can do this with basically any basic english or math skill.

For a 4th grader, you might do a game using cards for affixes for example...

"Which means to pay again?
repay unpay copay"

You could use this game for times tables, or practicing addition facts. recognizing shapes, etc.

You could practice sight words.

You could work on history facts.

The list is endless how you could use a game board like this to make memorizing or learning into fun.

The library

Mr. C. would be so proud. Marley made a block library. She thought out all the things that a library needs. There is a bookshelf with books. There are two tables with computers. There is a front desk for checking out books. There are two tables with people reading. And the last thing we made was a door to come in and out. She hasn't figured out the roof issue yet, but everything else is there.

Oh yeah... The blue round blocks, those are people.

This week's word game - Compound Words

$0.25 for every 100 compound words they can find.

Brenda found a couple ideas. Googling compound words. And picking one word such as micro- and looking it up to see what other words connect to it...
microwave, microorganizm, microscope, etc.

The Shun Game

This week we played a word game. Competing for a $0.25 for who can make the most "Shun" (-tion)words. Brenda won with 45 words. Some good ones..

palpitations

dictionary

aspiration

abbreviation

declaration

fertilization

My Favorite Part

This is my favorite part of all our Service Unit activities, our huge Girl Scout circle. When we have 80+ women circling together to do our Girl Scout hand squeeze. This picture is maybe 1/4 of all the girls and women who joined to sing Taps with us and share the experience.

Thinking like a Junior/Brownie

No picture for this since I am Bret's troop leader. Maybe someone will send me a pic. But here is the letter we read from our Canadian Scout Family...

Sea Scouts
This year, C-- and I are in Sea Scouts (here, we call them Marine Scouts because we do not live near the sea)! Our Sea Scouts are for boys and girls that are between 9 and 14 years old. Sea Scouts are different from regular scouts because 75% of the program has to be related to water activities (swimming, boating, scuba diving, fishing...). In our scout association, there are only -- other Sea Scouts troops! There are two age groups for our Sea Scouts. The first one is for 9-10 year-old kids. We call that group "Louveteaux"* and their team name is Sea Lion, but in French it translates to Sea Wolf. The second group is for 11-14 year-olds. They are "Éclaireurs"* and their team name is Shipmates. C---'s in the "Louveteaux" and I'm in the "Éclaireurs" but both groups are together during the meetings. Because we're Sea Scouts, we play games like "Babord-Tribord"* that help us to practice marine vocabulary like "babord": port*, "tribord": starboard*, "poupe": aft* and "proue": fore*... Our troop has also bought a small sailboat which we will learn to sail. In a year, we have four camps: an autumn camp, a camp during which we say our oath, a winter camp and a summer camp. Sunday, the 31st January, we came back from our third camp (it was our winter camp). I slept out in a Quinzee, and C--- slept in a cottage. It was very FUN even if our mom wasn't with us (because she's in Sea Scout with us, but she couldn't come). For our first camp of the year, we slept in a cottage and went canoeing. This summer we may camp on an island. In our group, we're -- "Louveteaux", -- "Éclaireurs" and -- Scouts Leaders. That means that we're -- altogether. I know we're not that many kids but it's a new scout group... Our group is in ----, in ----, in ----, in Canada, in the world, on the Earth and in the universe! ;-)

Have a nice day, M-- and C--

* Louveteaux : Wolf Cubs
*Éclaireur : Scout (We're not sure how to translate Ééclaireur...)
*Babord-Tribord : Port-Starboard
*Babord, port: Left
*Tribord, starboard : Right
*Poupe, aft : Back
*Proue, fore : Front

(names and places have been bleeped out)

This is our Canadian scout family's troop at their parade, and in their quinzee (where they slept!!!)

Thinking Like An Older Girl Scout

Bonjour, je m'apelle Brenda. J'aime La Dame Gaga. Qui etes-vous? This was Brenda's speech for Thinking Day. Then we all sang Alluette together. Which come to find out is a song about plucking feathers from a lark.
French to english translation...
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
Je te plumerai la tete
Je te plumerai la tete
Et la tte, et la tete
Alouette, Alouette
O-o-o-o-oh
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai

Lark, nice Lark (or Lark, lovely Lark)
Lark, I am going to pluck you
I am going to pluck your head,
I am going to pluck your head,
And the head, and the head,
O-o-o-o-oh

LOL.

"Thinking" with the Little 'uns

So every year Marley sits with her dad and watches her sisters present their countries. This year she one of presenters. Her job was to say that Mexico's flower is the Dalia (she remembers Dolly then adds an "ah" to it at the end lol) and that they sometimes wear and sometimes dance around sombraros. At first she was too shy to talk, but in the end all the girls did well. Marley's first experience with public speaking. She says it was hard to get up there and talk. I say she did fine.

Simple Machines Pt 1

Inclines and wheels. Yes Marley made her own and even told me, when I tried to help her design, that she would like to do hers alone. :-) Brenda's stopped only once, Bret's twice and Marley's went all the way to the end, although she used only inclines on her maze. She was the only one to have her maze veer off in two different directions.

Marley and Her Dad

Marley conned me into taking out the lego tub this morning. So here they are playing around with the legos together. Now she and I are building a castle. It is coming along slowly but surely. :-)

Simple Machines

The project was supposed to make a marble maze using simple machines. When we got there the project was different than what we thought it was. So the girls did have fun making their mazes, but we will be working on simple machines and producing a maze that will actually use a series of simple machines to work.

Check it out...

As homeschooling has been taking care of itself lately, and I have been knitting myself into a tizzie for the fun of it... I thought why not another blog for that fun and craziness...

http://loopsntwists.blogspot.com/

Girl Scout Day at Miami University Engineering Dept

Girl Scout Engineering Day at Miami University is like no other. Earn 4 badges in one day by going from one area to another learning new topics. The program sets up one Math ,one Computer ,and two Science Badges all wrapped up in a pretty bow. I took Brenda to this activity last year and she still talked of her experience fondly when I announced that I would take Bret this year. We made paper, learned about acids and bases, learned about and made our own cookie form of asphalt; learned math tricks, worked on Geometric Shapes, used problem solving to form words on calculators; learned about simple machines, made goop, checked out our finger prints. We learned about the machines that their school uses to design programs, make cars, stretch metal. We learned to use Windows Word. Such a day like this, all kids could have every week, they would not complain about school.

Also if you remember me talking about how Bret was bullied at summer camp this last summer by some other Girl Scouts who thought no one was looking... one of those bullies were there at Girl Scout Engineering Day. Bret pointed her out to me. I told Bret let that be a lesson. If you do wrong and think no one will ever find out... Someone always remembers.