10 things we couldn't live without: Our homeschooling and unschooling must-haves

I mentioned yesterday that I have been approved to be part of the iHomeschoolNetwork - which is basically a chance for me to geek out over getting to be part of a group of ladies that I've been blog-stalking anyway.

That aside, the fun thing is, I'm in time to take part in the network's 10 * in * 10 series, on which, each Tuesday, lots of awesome homeschoolers share their "Top 10" lists on a variety of themes.

Check out more of the participants here, and read on for our take on this week's topic... 10 things we wouldn't want to be without in our homeschooling/unschooling journey! You  might remember some of these from our "Top 5 homeschooling resources list" from March, but if they've earned a repeat spot, well, you know they're good!

1. National Geographic. The whole brand, not just the magazine. Sarah loves NatGeo's website, its books, its interest in wildlife conservation, its photography... and there isn't a time when she digs in to one of their resources that it doesn't lead her to say, basically, "I want to know more." A lot of their items are a little pricey (the books sure are!) but you'd be amazed at what they offer for free on topics from civics to geography to biology and more!

2. Our local library. I've said it before, but The York County Library System is beyond phenomenal. I've gone to the same library since I was three or four years old, and Sarah has been going since she was old enough to get a library card. The summer reading program is actually paired with a hiking program, and this year's is themed to astronomy, which Sarah loves. (You read about various things related to the theme, then follow written directions to hike to a "station" about the topic, where you do a crayon rubbing.) No matter where you live, check out your library's programs. I think you'd be surprised how much they go "beyond books," but how much they can offer in that area too.


3. Our local parks, and especially the one within walking distance to our home - a former golf course turned into a walking trail! I'm totally stealing this from Aadel's list (I joke that I should sometimes have a "What Aadel Said" button), but being outdoors is a major, major factor in our learning and one of the biggest things that was missing from Sarah's days when she was in public school. For her, almost anything is better once she spends a little time outside.

4. Tape. All kinds of tape. Scrapbooking tape. Duct tape. Scotch tape. Clear tape. Masking tape. "Tape all the things" is Sarah's unofficial motto, I think! This child has received tape as a gift and been thrilled.

5. A flexible work and life arrangement. I can't discount the value of this. My change to a more flexible work-from-home career was THE deciding factor for us in being able to make the switch to homeschooling, but even my now-part-time, formerly-full-time job at the newspaper has always been flexible in many ways. (And my husband, who works at the paper full-time still, benefits from that flexibility too.) That's what allows us to go to an art museum on a Thursday... to stay up til midnight doing science experiments... and so much more. Wherever you can increase your flexibility, you will increase your happiness, whether that's in homeschooling or elsewhere.

6. Technology. Yeah, everyone says this. But everything from Wikipedia to Google Plus to Pinterest to the aforementioned National Geographic resources online to Youtube to my digital camera to my mom's iPad... these tools are a lifesaver, both for research and for my sanity.

7. Real and virtual friends. The is everyone from the iHomeschoolNetwork moms to the Christian Unschooling Facebook group... my friends who homeschool here in York County... and our friends who are still in the area's public schools who keep us "hooked in" to the goings-on! (Not to mention who are willing to share their knowledge with Sarah on everything from hairdressing to business ownership to being an EMT to collecting postcards!) Tap into the knowledge of your friends. It's amazing how much I've personally learned this way, and your kids will do the same.

8. 4-H.This program is great for everything from getting Sarah together with kids of all ages who share her interest in the outdoors to introducing her to places like a wolf sanctuary to giving her a chance to spend an hour one-on-one with a Master Gardener learning about butterflies and native plants to teaching her to make soap. 4-H isn't just livestock. I would encourage you to contact your local cooperative extension and find out more about what programs (4-H and others) they offer in your state, if you're based in the US!

9. Great local Goodwill/Rescue Mission/economy and thrift stores. You can find so many things there, from books to craft supplies to play clothes to inline skates that you can tear apart to build homemade skateboards... cheap!

10. God, my husband, my mom and my extended family. Sarah couldn't do her "learning" without all of them, and I sure couldn't take the pressure of being the only person responsible for helping her learn. Chris and my mom especially get a LOT of credit, as they're always willing to support our crazy projects (even at odd hours), and they're great about guiding Sarah so that I can get my work done as well. Whether you've got a big family or are a single parent, your support system is key to keeping both you and your kids learning and happy (and yes, I firmly believe those can co-exist!)

Today's post is also part of Top Ten {Tuesday} at Many Little Blessings. Whether you're sharing your Top 10 must-haves for homeschooling or a Top Ten list on any other topic, I'd love for you to link up and to check out the other blogs that have, too!

A look back at our week: Anniversary, lake day and demolition derby

Figured I'd use The Homeschool Mother's Journal, which I haven't participated in for a couple of weeks, to help round up some of what we've been doing! (Also linking up today to Happy Family Times.)

In my life this week…

Chris and I traveled around Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania late in the week as our celebration of our seventh wedding anniversary! We saw Luray Caverns, Ohiopyle State Park here in PA, tons of falling-down things, lots of small towns... it was great. One thing I've realized about working at home and being with Sarah all day is that even though I love my "at-home life," I miss my husband TONS while he's at work, often for long hours, much more noticeably than I did when I also worked in an office! So time with him to just talk and laugh together is the best anniversary gift I could get.

In our school at home this week…

We're "done" sixth grade, if we were following standard grade levels. I'm working hard (with Sarah's help, actually!) to finish getting her portfolio together for our meeting with our evaluator tomorrow evening!

Sarah hasn't stopped learning, but she is enjoying the idea of having "finished" something, which is kind of a neat way of having the best of both worlds!

I am inspired by…

You might have seen a promo for this pop up in my sidebar over the weekend, and if you're my in-person friend, I'm sure you've heard me talking about this.

"This" is a documentary that I've had the great privilege to help bring about. Adam Baker of Man Vs. Debt (my boss, and an all-around awesome guy), as well as his friends Grant Peelle and Dustin Koester, John Cropper, Bryan Olinger (also all awesome guys), traveled across the country for about six weeks, interviewing all sorts of people about the issue of complacency and how living the "American Dream" is oftentimes at the expense of your REAL dreams.

I'm living proof of that - I worked for years to buy a house, go to college, have an "office career," and do all these things that are expected of you, but I wasn't living the life that I always dreamed of. We had way too much debt (still do, but we're working on that!) and just generally weren't in the place in life we wanted to be, although to all appearances, we looked like we were "doing fine."

So when Baker offered me the chance to help behind the scenes of the documentary as part of my work with him, I was all in. My contributions are small - lots of details, lots of emails, lots of coordinating - but right now, Baker and "the guys" are doing a BIG thing. They're trying to raise $100,000 to finish funding the production of the documentary and get it to market.

So this is where I'm asking for help. If you're able to support us with even $5, you get a full digital copy of the documentary when it's finished. You get some pretty cool stuff if you can support us more, too!

The biggest thing you can do, though, is SHARE. Share the trailer. Tell friends about what we're doing. We really want to shine a light on the issue of complacency and we believe we can literally lead thousands of people to change their lives if we can pull this off, and that means we need to spread the word and get as many people as possible to watch the trailer (and hopefully soon the full film!)

Places we’re going and people we’re seeing...

Once Chris and I got home from our trip, we kicked "family time" into high gear. We spent a day with my best friend's family at a demolition derby, then visited with my father-in-law, my sister-in-law and her family and friends on the lake where they live. Sarah even got in the lake - which is a HUGE win! (Remember, this is the kid who barely would wade in the ocean!)

My favorite thing this week was…

Watching Chris jump in the lake, in all his clothes, because Sarah wanted to and because getting in with him would make her more comfortable.

Also, this picture, which my best friend Nina (who happens to be a professional photographer, lucky me!) took of Sarah at the demo derby. Beautiful. :)

What’s working/not working for us…

Chris and I talked a bit while we were away about how we feel like homeschooling has gone for Sarah. We're definitely not looking to send her back to public school any time soon, but we both had some areas where we feel like things are going well and some that we think we can help improve on for the coming "school year," as it were!

One big thing we're considering is how to deal with math. I'm a huge fan of a living math approach in an unschooled style like we do everything else, but Sarah has some particular challenges in this area that are making it hard for her. Not sure yet what we'll do, but you can be sure I'll be blogging on that!

Things I’m working on…

I just was accepted to join The iHomeschool Network (YAY!) and put in a proposal for a fun blog series to work on in July (HINT: It's related to something else in today's post!), so I'm starting to plan that out!

I'm also still trying to get my scrapbooking area set up at home... wish me luck.

We're reading…

We're reading "The Return of the Indian" by Lynn Reid Banks aloud with Sarah... that's the sequel to "The Indian in the Cupboard," which Sarah liked so much! She's also been reading a lot of non-fiction books about Native Americans, and after we're finished this book, we hope to start on "The Sign of the Beaver" by Elizabeth George Speare.

I’m grateful for…

My husband. Always. Not just this week, when we celebrate our anniversary, but every day. He's just such a good partner, a great friend, an amazing dad... I could not do it without him! (He will blush reading this and probably wish I hadn't given him a shout-out, but I can't resist. Hi, Topher!)

Revisiting our rec room and creating a craft room

Yesterday, I showed off the main floor of our house, where a lot of our learning and exploring takes place.

It is, however, a three-floor house. We have a finished basement and large second story, but unfortunately in a lot of ways, we don't make the most use of all those other spaces, or we haven't until recently!

Our upstairs consists of my mom's bedroom, a large room - with a walk-in closet, JEALOUS! - that used to be the master bedroom; that's to the left as you go up the steps. At the top of the stairs is a bathroom, then to the right and going toward the front of the house is Sarah's bedroom, which is small but cheerfully decorated with a birds and nature theme. At the end of the "hall" to the right is our master bedroom, which is huge but actually terrible to try to arrange. It's sort of L-shaped, with a full bath inside the "cut out" piece of the L, a horrible vanity with Hollywood lights, and almost no windows. It was created by the house's former owners by raising the roof over the garage, and it's ... well, it's a testament to why you should hire contractors for large projects, let's leave it at that. It has two TINY closets, and that's it!

The weirdest part, though, is the area outside Sarah's bedroom and ours. The hallway runs the length of our upstairs, but jutting off to the left as you go toward our room is a space about six feet by nine feet that's just completely open. Nice area with a window, but it's not exactly a "room."

We've never been exactly sure what it was supposed to be, so just about since we moved in, it's been Sarah's playroom, allowing us to store her toys outside her smallish bedroom. It's been more or less OK, but she hasn't recently spent a lot of time up there, instead bringing things she wants to do downstairs, so it's kind of been a very visible closet. (Ugh!)

This was the playroom at its probably nicest stage... right after we'd done some cleaning in maybe 2009 or 2010. Bins of stuff, even when organized neatly, still kind of looked like a room full of bins of stuff, you know?

Meanwhile, our basement has a large living room, complete with wood stove and couch (and our laundry area), as well as a bedroom and full bath. That bedroom, which we formerly rented out to different friends at various times, is now both our occasional guest room and the home to our online bookstore business inventory as well as Chris's burgeoning ephemera collection. Basically? Room of books and paper.

The family room had, again until recently, not been used very much. We stored our board and card games down there... did the wash... and had a table for my scrapbooking supplies and a table for my mom's sewing supplies pushed against one wall. No one really spent any time there, and it showed, because things would pile up all over the place and no one (read: me) seemed to care enough to do anything about it.

Well, then came Sunday's cleaning project... I kind of freaked out about the overwhelmingness of trying to straighten it up... and Chris and Sarah came up with a REALLY GOOD idea.

Sarah and her friends have started hanging out in the basement a lot. We can hear them, but they get to "feel like" they're more set apart than if they sit and talk in the living room. Not only that, it's got a fun couch, games... they really like it.

So we moved ALL of Sarah's playroom stuff down to the basement and went all-in on the idea of creating a rec room for Sarah and her friends to hang out in. The upstairs "bonus space" that was previously the playroom is now a nicely-lit hobby space for my mom's sewing and my scrapbooking. 

Here's a look at the mostly-finished rec room now. You can see our super-awesome couch, which is incredibly comfortable if a bit misshapen.

And here's a view as you come down the steps. Along the back wall there are our games, and to the right of that is the laundry space. Notice the big white thing at left?

That's Dudley. He was a "gift" from some "friends" in a white-elephant swap about six years ago. And by "gift," I mean "large curse" and by "friends" I mean they're LUCKY they're still my friends.

Dudley is REALLY big. Did I mention big? Finding room for him is a consistent challenge. That's one of Sarah's best friends and my so-called extra daughter Kayla at left, with Sarah at right, helping to model the poor beast.

This is my mom's former desk (from before she remodeled her bedroom, which she just finished!) This is where all of Sarah's cardboard tubes, yarn, wheels, spools, bottle caps and other building supplies are kept. The box at the top left is actually the computer parts she saved after tearing our old desktop apart, and Norman there is a zombie (from the iPad game Zombie Farm) that Sarah painted on Valentine's Day this year with her dad. Sweet! :)

And, if you remember the bins from the former playroom upstairs, they're still here... against the wall and behind the sofa. But now, they look like they belong, and they're easy to get to in a place where the stuff in them will be used.

Everyone wins... and my house looks better than it has in a long while! Well, except for those scrapbooking and sewing tables (notice, no photos of those yet!) But we'll get there!

The last day of sixth grade, and a look at where our "school" happens

Well, would ya look at that... I checked our calendar today, and guess what?

Day 180, baby!

In Pennsylvania terms, that means Sarah has now completed enough "learning" to be done with sixth grade. I'm not a big fan of that - but hey, I have the required boxes checked accurately on my portfolio-friendly calendar, so no worries, right?

(As an aside, the part that really annoys me is that we can't start counting our days toward NEXT school year until July 1. Why on earth can you not roll from one into the other - or at least say that you can start with whatever the next calendar month is, or something? How silly. Guess you can tell I'm a fan of learning all the time.)

But I digress. What I actually wanted to do today was share a look at our home, since, you know, we homeschool. Actually, we everywhere-school. We're antique-store-schoolers, library-schoolers, park-schoolers and car-schoolers, if you want to be precise. But we do spend a good amount of our time at home too, and we just this weekend completed a fun remodeling project that I kind of want to show off.

Plus, I love looking at OTHER people's houses - there was a super-fun set of posts in that vein on the Christian Unschooling Facebook group a few weeks ago, and I was in house-voyeur heaven, so I figured, hey, why not share my own!

Today, I'll show off the main part of the house, and tomorrow, you'll get a chance to see our remodeling project, so...

Come on in!

Look, it's the front of our house. You can't see it, but our flowers are pretty. We just painted the front door green (SPRAY-painted, actually!) We're THOSE people. Please admire our lovely roof. One of the reasons we could afford a house this size was that with a large house comes a large roof, and this one had never been replaced or repaired and had to be completely redone within a year of moving in. That was exciting.

As were the new heat pump, the new fence, the refinished-after-it-flooded basement and the new hot-water heater in the past seven years. Exciting, that is.

Dining room

This is View 1 of the dining room - which usually doubles as the "table we do stuff on and the piano that everything gets piled on so we can eat" room. Once a week or so it gets "reset" and we mess it up again. I can live with that. 

The storage cubbies toward the center, behind the table, with the plants on them - those are a gift. That's where everyone's stuff gets put during the week so it's not on my counter and so we don't lose library books! 

The piano has a great story - we got it for $50 plus the cost of tuning, basically a "gift" from the church where my mom, who lives with us, works as administrative assistant. YAY!

This is the dining room from the opposite side. The quote says "The fondest memories are made when gathered around the table." That sideboard is a total cheat - two base cabinets from Lowe's plus a piece of precut wood sitting on top of them. Drawer at right is all Sarah's notebooks and pencils and all that good stuff. The rest holds our silverware, dishes, napkins, pet-care supplies... whatever.

Living room and computer area

Here's the living room viewed from right inside our front door. (If you look left, you see this; if you look right, you see the view of the dining room with the sideboard visible, seen in the previous photo.) When we moved in, all the floor in these photos was PINK CARPET. No thanks. First chance we got to save up some money, in came the laminate.

Here you can see my daughter looking at her hamster, her cardboard stegosaurus on top of that piece of our entertainment center, and on the mantel you'll see her pride and joy, our model boat. That's where we display her current projects - all around this room! (Or, uh, on the piano, mentioned in an earlier picture). The random TV and other junk over there are things we have listed on Craigslist. In the back you can faintly see our globe.

This is our living room seen from the other end. Notice bookcase-as-end-table for sofa. This was ANOTHER attempt to get stuff not piled on my piano. It mostly worked. The weirdest part of our living room (besides its plethora of cats) is the "window" in it. You can see the doorway, but then that other piece is a "window" cut into the wall and opening into our entry hallway. See next picture for a look through the window.

Family photo wall! Don't judge that they're a little crooked. :) This is looking through the "fake window" in the living room - the stained glass piece was made by my mom, and we love having somewhere to hang it, even if it's kinda wack to have a window in the middle of a room.

This is our "desk," AKA our former kitchen table. This dining area is what you see when you look straight in our front door, and if you look at the living room pictures, you can see how this fits between it and the kitchen. We're laptop users, but this is where we tend to dock, where the printer sits, where the paper is, etc. That counter to our right is usually piled with junk. I had just done one of my every-so-often cleanups when I took the photo. Sorry, I'm not THAT honest :)

Kitchen

There used to be a cabinet hanging over that extended counter, with just a "pass-through" below it. VERY dark (all the cabinets were dark brown wood at the time, too, before we repainted) and very enclosed. 

One day, my husband came home from work to find me standing on the counter with a crowbar and my 70-something mom apparently going to "catch" the cabinet when I pried it loose. (He quickly decided to help.)

Also in this photo you can see yet more of our wall lettering; we're sort of addicted. The good thing about our kitchen is that it's large; the bad thing is, it's really inconvenient, the fridge and microwave are way down there in never-never land. In my dream world, we'd build a first-floor laundry room down there (to the right of the fridge is a full bath with shower, so there's good water hookups!) 

PS - Who builds a full bath off their kitchen??

Here's the main part of the kitchen. One thing you can't see real well is our "backsplash." It was horrible white linoleum (which the counters still are) but it was just gross. So, we came up with the only way we could afford to replace it... we stuck self-stick vinyl floor tile all over it. Yes, really. People compliment it pretty often. But it's floor tile.

That's all for tonight... make sure to check back tomorrow to see our basement "remodeling" project!

Washing the car, rearranging the house, time with friends, more Indians: Snippets from unschooling this week

It's been a particularly hectic week around here... and not looking to slow down any time soon!

This week, Chris and I are celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary with an out-of-town trip on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

When we come back, we're headed to a demolition derby with our best friends and a large group of other friends.

My father-in-law comes to visit... then my brother comes from Arizona... then my uncle comes from eastern Pennsylvania... and amidst all that, we officially "wrap up" what would be Sarah's sixth-grade year if she were in public school!

So what have we been doing?

***

1. Ah, Sculpey clay. This has been a passion of Sarah's since earlier this year in public school (remember her masks?) and she decided not too long ago that she wanted to make a baby dragon.

She wasn't sure at first how to go about it - but then she realized that, on her fairy-tale bookends, there is a sculpted dragon hatching from an egg! Winner!

She did all of this herself - I just had to help her shape the egg around the dragon.

This clay definitely wins as our favorite resource this week... possibly one of our favorite art resources this year, in fact!

***

2. Sarah is spending today with a homeschooling friend at Black Rock Retreat's Outdoor Education Day. It's likely raining there, like it is here, and they're going canoeing to see what birds they can spot from the water.

But she's with her friend Paige from 4-H (and Paige's grandpa), and hopefully the weather won't spoil their fun!

***


3. I've been busy putting our portfolio together for our upcoming meeting with our evaluator on May 29. I'm pretty impressed, actually.

First, I'm impressed at all Sarah's done and learned - to be fair, that includes both IN public school as well as since beginning our homeschooling journey.

Second, I'm impressed with myself! I kept good records, I have the appropriate amount of documentation - what's required, but not too much - across a variety of subject areas, and I'm not waiting until the last minute to pull it together!

***

4. Sarah decided - completely out of the blue the other night - that she wanted to wash my car and my mom's. So she got a bucket, a little bit of soap and some old washcloths and did just that!

She's nothing if not thorough... she even figured out how to get up and wash the roof! I followed up by washing the windows and vacuuming the insides, so now we have two nice cars, as close to being detailed as they'll probably ever come!


***

5. We sorted some more of Sarah's postcard collection this week, as part of a massive house-reorganization project. Sarah used to have both a bedroom and a "playroom" upstairs (the playroom being kind of a landing outside her room and ours), and my scrapbooking stuff and my mom's sewing stuff used to be in our finished basement.

But Sarah's craft supplies and collections were also in the basement.

So we consolidated... she now has ownership of a full-out "rec room" in our basement (our family room, where our washer and dryer are, complete with couch), and that's where all her stuffed animals, her desks, her Matchbox cars, her blocks, her art stuff, her building supplies, all of that is.

She and her friends from the neighborhood spend an awful lot of time hanging out down there anyway, so it seemed to make sense to move all her things there.

And the added bonus is that my mom's sewing projects and my scrapbooking supplies now have a very easy-to-get-to spot near our bedrooms, giving us more space and more motivation (and more sunlight!) for our hobbies.

As part of doing this, though, Sarah decided she wanted to sort out her large postcard collection a bit more.

My best guess is that she has more than 1,500 postcards from all time periods and all around the world. She loves to get them out and look through them, and has learned a lot by exploring the places pictured!

Her organizational system, though, is pure Sarah. Her categories include "Art," "Bible Art," "M*A*S*H*," "Kennedy Space Center," "York County," "Pennsylvania," "States," "Volcanoes," "Ireland and Australia," "Scenes by Water," "Cities and Buildings," "Scenery," "Animals," "People" and more.

Chris has a hard time helping her sort. I must think eclectically like Sarah does, though, because I can look at a postcard of a man holding a kookaburra in the middle of a crowded city and tell you right where it goes.

Any guesses? People? Animals? Cities and Buildings?

Well, it's "Ireland and Australia," of course. Because kookaburras and the kingfisher bird family, which are basically Sarah's favorite animals ever, are found in Australia, making it her favorite place ever.

You just have to "get" how she thinks. Then you can help sort the cards. I think it's kind of fun.

***

6. Our cowboys and Indians took a walk the other day with us to the former golf course near our house. Sarah wanted to set them up for a nature photo shoot - and we'd just read about Omri, the main character in the book "The Indian in the Cupboard," taking his cowboy and Indian outside!

Apparently they didn't mind standing on the edge of their equivalent of the Grand Canyon for a photo. And Sarah certainly didn't mind making up stories about what they were doing!

***

7. Speaking of the golf course, Chris found us some new friends there.

We stood and watched this ant colony (which was previously under a rock, before Chris, uh, disturbed them) for quite a while. These guys were hustling! We weren't sure at first if they were transporting their own egg sacs or some yummy grub food, but we're pretty sure they were eating grubs/larvae. Yum yum yum?

***

So that's a look at seven snippets from our unschooling life in the last week. What's going on in your world?

Also linking up today to Collage Friday, Moments to Remember and Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrapup.

Lessons from the Treehouse: A review

About a month ago, I received my first email from someone looking for me to review their homeschool-themed product here on Our School at Home.

Reviews are a funny thing - I like free stuff (obviously), and I like trying new things, and I like reading reviews of products I'm interested in. But I'm not always so keen on the idea of writing reviews, in part because I'm always secretly terrified I either won't like the product at all, and then that's awkward, or on the other hand, I'm nervous that I'll like it so much that I sound like a total shill.

And specific to homeschooling stuff, add into all of that the fact that we use very little "regular curriculum," and you realize I'm not exactly the type of reviewer lots of companies seek out.

So when I heard from someone who wanted to provide Sarah and me with a free copy of a new ebook to review BECAUSE we're more unschooly and don't use traditional curricula, I was pretty interested!

Carol J. Alexander, who blogs at Everything Home With Carol and Lessons from the Homestead, recently published a new guide, titled Lessons from the Treehouse, and my first thought was: We don't have "treehouse trees, thus no treehouse, thus how am I going to review this?"

But Carol said it'd work out, and I trusted her, and I'm glad I did.

The guide's activities walk through The Design Phase, The Building Phase, and The Enjoyment Phase. At each step, there are activities for a variety of age and skill levels.

Specific to my developing philosophies on education, it's NOT a "math book" or a "language arts activity book" based on the topic of trees or treehouses.

I've seen books like that - and all math in a pretty suit is still all math, in Sarah's mind.

Instead, this book basically opens your eyes to ways in which you can be intentional about learning on a variety of topics as you do something you enjoy - like building a treehouse. This really isn't a book about treehouses. It's a book about trees, and construction skills, and safety, and the Bible, and how you can take any topic and make it an intentional learning experience.

Carol doesn't get too deep into full lesson plans or any kind of requirements - her 17-page guide is more a framework to what you CAN learn. (For instance, "Plan a field trip to a tree nursery and learn everything you can from an arborist there.") For us, that's great. My challenge isn't in the learning parts - I don't need someone to write down all the "educational facts" for me - but I need to be reminded of all the places learning happens! 

Besides this new book, Carol is also the author of Lessons from the Seed Catalog, a guide to more than 50 lesson plans based around... wait for it... a seed catalog! She's also written Lessons from the Hen House, another book in the same style, and she graciously provided us with copies of those as well.

You can find out more about all three of Carol's guides at Lessons from the Homestead. 

PS - Sarah is patiently awaiting her free seed catalogs to arrive in the mail, and she really is interested in digging in to the lessons for that. She didn't look closely at Lessons from the Hen House just yet, but she did say, "So does this mean we can get chickens?" Oh, the people in our township office would LOVE that! (Not.) Thankfully, we can do a lot of those activities sans chickens, just like we're currently sans treehouse. :)

How to make a lion-style paper fortune-teller, courtesy of Sarah and Google Translate

Remember how Sarah loves Pinterest now?

Well, today, she pinned something she wanted to make. It was a "fortune-teller" that looks like a lion. (If you're not sure what a "fortune-teller" out of paper is, it's basically an origami thing that has little fortunes or messages inside it, and you wiggle it back and forth a particular number of times to reveal your fortune.)

Anyway, the fortune-teller was super-cute. But the instructions on how to make it? They were in a foreign language.


Sarah also loves her some Google. And, apparently, she knows how to make it work for her. I was working and not paying any attention to her, and she turns to me and announces the following:

"Mom, I found something I want to make, but the instructions were in Dutch, so I used Google Translate so we can read them."

She knew how to use the language auto-detect feature, converted the instructions to English, AND used the voice synthesizer to "read" the Dutch version so she'd know what it sounded like.

Here are the original instructions, with pictures.

But, to save you the translation, here is Sarah's version of the instructions, helpfully in English!

First, download the two-page PDF template here.

1. Print out both pages of the PDF, and cut out the square ("lion") piece.
2. Cut the diamond-patterned page into a square the same size. "If you don't know how to fold a square, take it and make a triangle, and then unfold it," Sarah says.
3. Take that diamond-patterned paper and fold it in half horizontally, then unfold it again.
4. Do the same thing vertically - fold the diamond paper, then unfold it again.
5. Take the diamond-patterned paper and put the back of it against the back of the lion-printed paper.
6. With the diamond side facing up, fold one corner (of both pieces) toward the center. (You'll see the lines on the lion side that show you where it should go.)
7. Repeat that for all the other corners.
8. Now turn the paper over, so that the plain blue side is up. Do the same thing back here - take each corner and fold it toward the middle.
9. Turn the paper over once more, and take the double layers at the corners and slide your fingers inside them, toward the corners, and fold them up. Your goal here is to make little "pockets" to put your fingers into.
10. Now you can make the lion open and close his mouth by using your fingers to move him back and forth! You might have to work at this a little; it's hard to get the hang of at first. Sarah is modeling both "open" and "closed" lion mouths here, and you can also check out the pictures on the original for a better idea!

Give it a try! We had fun making it - and using Google Translate!

Linking up today to Look! What We Did, Playtime Kids and Pinterest Link Party! We're also participating in Homeschooling on the Cheap and Money Saving Monday.

Our scrapbook: An evening at the tractor pull

Saturday night, Sarah and I went with my best friend and her son and boyfriend to Buck Motorsports Park (affectionately known as "The Buck") in neighboring Lancaster County, PA, to see the truck and tractor pulls.

I hadn't been to a "pull" since high school, and I'd never been to The Buck. (They're going to take my central PA license away, right?!)

We had a great time, and Sarah got to see something completely new to her! She was - and I was surprised by this - interested in the physics and the setup of the whole thing; she wanted to know how the sled, or the weight box, worked, and she correctly guessed that the tractors with small front tires had less weight in the front and were easier to get good distance with. (That was later confirmed by the announcer; let me just tell you I had no clue!)

This was pretty cool - we were in one end of the arena, and Sarah and Brayden were able to play down in front of the stands because there wasn't anyone to be walking past them! Though it's a little hard to see, they used some rocks and built a "campfire" - with the gravel making a circle around the larger rocks, which were the charcoal.

Even better, they decided to make "gravel angels" - yep, you read that right. Like snow angels. In the gravel. Glad I didn't let Sarah wear her new hoodie.

They raced several classes of vehicles - from modified "regular" farm tractors, to super-modified tractors with three or four engines, to 2-wheel-drive vehicles, to 4-wheel-drive trucks. Our favorites were the "regular" tractor class, which came first, and they were also the easiest to get good pictures of (less speed!)

Here are some of the highlights:

We had a great time - and yes, even here, we learned a lot. I'll tell you one thing I learned: At one point, someone's engine blew, and the announcer said it would a $100,000 repair.

Add that to the fact that there were some families there racing three or four tractors, and you think: Man, that's an expensive hobby! Glad Sarah is content just to watch :)

Linking up today to Happy Family Times and the All Year Round Blog Carnival: Summer Edition.

Gettin' social: Sarah learns Google+, Pinterest and Twitter

Though you wouldn't believe it from the amount of time I spend on Facebook and Pinterest, I'm not a huge advocate of social networks. I enjoy those two personally, and I use Twitter and Google Plus as well, and I'm on all of those plus some other networks daily for my various jobs.

That said, while they're a ton of fun and a huge boost to productivity and business relationships, I worry a lot because of things I see online. There are the "drama people" - you know the type - who post things like OMG IN TEARS *WHIMPER* and then 50 people ask them if they're OK. (My advice: Save the drama for yo mamma, folks.) That mostly borders on funny.

But I've seen relationships - friendships and even marriages - torn apart by things done and said via Facebook (and other social networks). While, granted, those relationships had much larger issues, of which the online drama was just a tiny piece, this has taught me a few lessons:

1. EVERYTHING is public. (As a side note - this is why I make no attempt to hide our identities on this blog; we are very much of the "if you think something's private online, you're deluding yourself" camp, and we're OK with that.) But in a social-media sense, this means don't post, Tweet, pin or plus anything you wouldn't share with your pastor. (And I have several pastors as Facebook friends!)

2. Facebook and teenagers don't mix. I do have several "friends" on Facebook who are younger family members, my daughter's friends, members of churches we attend, etc. I can think of two people out of the two dozen or so I know that age who are without drama (either of their own creation or someone else's), and the rest have had all sorts of issues, some incredibly scary and serious. Middle and high school are hard enough without that stress, and even if YOU at that age are old enough to be responsible, you can be seriously hurt by the many people who aren't!

3. A lot of the "problems" with social media could be solved if people treated it more like a social situation. If you would not announce something about your underwear at a party with 30 guests, why on EARTH would you post it to 500 "friends"? (True story - saw that, and from someone who works as a social media coordinator for a large company!) If you wouldn't say it to someone's face, why post it or message it to them? And so on.

So all of this is a very LONG preface to the learning that's been taking place in our house. We have been adamant so far that Sarah not create a Facebook profile. Among other things, Facebook's terms of use say you have to be 13, and I really don't want to encourage my kid to lie about her age, so that's been enough to hold her off.

But she is a huge devotee of All That Is Google, and as part of writing her own blog via Blogger, she does have a Google profile, which we said she could build out into a Google Plus account.

She LOVES it. She is on Google Plus all the stinkin' time. She blows up my feed - as I don't have a whole ton of friends who DO like to use G+! But she gets it. She has found who to put in her circles (Earth, Albert Einstein and Johnny Depp are among her favorites) and she goes happily about the Internet each day, "+1"ing her little heart out.

Her favorite thing to do is to +1 my blog posts or Chris's, and then tell us that she's helping us get traffic. She also figured out, entirely without any help, how to tag us in her posts, so she will share things that she thinks Chris or I will like and tag us. (She did that above - and she was really funny!)

We worried a bit when she learned how to start a "hangout" with video chat, but she was 100% OK with the idea that she only uses that to talk to our family members and some particular friends of ours who also use G+ and who I trust implicitly!

Well, then came Pinterest.

I've been on Pinterest since its beta, and I have to say, as much as Facebook is essential to big parts of my life, Pinterest is definitely my "network of choice." I'm not very complex - I like pretty things and happy thoughts and positive people. For at least 90% of its content, that's Pinterest.

So I've been pinning things like crazy, especially as we started planning our homeschooling/unschooling journey, and Sarah would sometimes sit down with me and find things for me to pin to my "Stuff for Sarah" board.

Once she had clearly mastered Google Plus, I started thinking: Hey, she could do Pinterest. I wouldn't have a problem with that. So I "invited" her.

Only issue is, you have to have either a Facebook or a Twitter profile to join.

Back to square one - no Facebook. At LEAST not for another year, til she's 13, and maybe not then.

So we started thinking about Twitter. My idea was, I'll set this up, she'll use it to log in for Pinterest, and then whatever. It can languish into Twitter Purgatory or whatever.

Nope. As you see, she chose a background, followed NASA and every English-speaking National Geographic brand there is (and her dad and I) and immediately learned how to retweet.

I am not kidding when I say I believe Sarah is gifted. She might not be gifted in a math-testing, essay-writing, science-fairing kind of way, but she is absolutely able to learn certain things at a rate that is MUCH higher than that of other people. And she doesn't just learn "how" to do this stuff. She gets why.

She has an intrinsic understanding of how to find what she's looking for on any platform, and how to know what platform will most likely have a particular type of material or welcome a post about the same. (In the past, I've met adults who can't always grasp this - some of them are rather fire-hosey; you know, like let's put the same thing in FIVE social networks at one time, because that makes sense.)

Well, anyway, after the mild Twitter distraction, we were on to Pinterest.

My absolute favorite part? Sarah's first question: "Is there a limit to how many boards you can have?" I cracked up. It was just a very Sarah question, and there again, she was building her plans for her profile and who she was following around the capability of the technology.

She set to work repinning, oh, I don't know, approximately every photo of the Titanic currently on Pinterest, as well as cats and butterflies. She added her second-favorite magazine (after National Geographic), Birds & Blooms, because she remembered reading in their editor's letter last month that they pin a lot.

So the coolest thing to me about all this is that Sarah taught herself all these things.

The second-coolest, though, is that she is open to talking about the ups and downs of social media and the best practices for using it - including that she shares what she posts with Chris and I and connects with us (and other adults in our world) across these networks.

I won't be surprised if she ends up with a Facebook account at some point in the next few years. But I feel like we're setting a good foundation based on making social networks fun, open, informative, productive and uplifting - and that makes me worry a lot less.

And, of course, since I am so big on the "everything's public" idea: If you'd like to join either Sarah's or my networks, here's where you can find us!

Pinterest: I'm pinterest.com/mssillyotto and Sarah is pinterest.com/awesomesaucer.
Google Plus: I'm here and Sarah is here.
Twitter: I'm twitter.com/definity and Sarah is twitter.com/sarahsunbeam (you do have to "request" to follow her, but that's because I don't want adult-video spammers following her and her clicking their links!)
Facebook: That's just me, but I'm at facebook.com/joanotto.

Hope you'll check us out - and if you feel strongly about your children and social media, I would LOVE to know your thoughts! This is 100% just what works for us, not by any means a dictate against what other families choose!

Cowboys and Indians

This post was dictated to me by Sarah about the way we spent our day - on a hunt for the Wild West, you could say!

I got interested in cowboys and Indians by the book "The Indian in the Cupboard." I really like the book, and when we finish Book 1, I want to be able to read Book 2, where the Indian in the cupboard returns.

Last night when me and my mom were reading "The Indian in the Cupboard," chapter 2, when we were done I jerked up and said "I want toy Indians and cowboys!" And so today, we went out and we found some, and I am very, very pleased.

We went out shopping for toy cowboys and Indians and we went to a lot of places. But some places we went to were Toys R Us, antique stores, and finally we found them at a hobby shop that also sold trains and an RMS Titanic model that I really wanted. But it cost a lot of money.

I got two bags of Indians and one bag of cowboys. My three favorite cowboys are my red cowboy that you see above, named John, and also one that I named Buffalo Bill (in a blue shirt) and in black, last but not least, Jedadiah. (Can you guess why I named him Jedadiah? You should put your guess why in the comments and I will tell you if you are right.)

My three favorite Indians besides the one that I think is like the character from the book, which we will talk about later, are my chief, named after the famous chief Sitting Bull, then two hunters named Soaring Eagle (who is wearing yellow pants) and Running Deer (wearing blue pants). I guess Indians didn't really wear shirts back then.

The chief has white eye makeup near his nose. He has white braids hanging from his headdress, and a fancy bow and a fancy rifle. He has a loincloth over his pants with a fancy design on it that I like.

When we got home, I set all the figures and the tepees up on the table. I separated the cowboys on one side and the Indians on the other. Don't put them together, bad idea. Then I took pictures in the "sunset." Which was really light shining into the dining room when it was dark.

But back to the book. Little Bear is the main character, well, actually, the boy (Omri) is the main character but he has the toy Indian named Little Bear who comes to life every night because of a special cupboard. So when I got my Indians, I looked through all of them and tried to find one that looked like the picture on the cover, of Little Bear. And Little Bear has a knife, and one of my Indians wearing blue pants has a knife. So I named him Little Bear. He also has an axe, but he's Little Bear anyway.

Here's my Little Bear and the book cover's Little Bear and you can see that they are almost alike!

I like putting the cowboys and Indians that have the plastic piece across the bottom over my fingers and flipping them upside-down in a circle. If these came to life like Omri's, I would be stabbed for doing that. And shot at, because the cowboys have guns. (Jedadiah has two guns, and he could easily shoot me and it might not hurt but I don't think I'd like it even though it was only a little teeny tiny bullet.)

We will be reading more of the book tonight - in fact, right now! And I hope to tell you more about it!

Linking up today to What the Kids Are Reading, Love Books and Read-Aloud Thursday, since this is our family read-aloud book, as well as to Playtime Kids!

Our trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Rocky and family time

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is about 3 hours from our home, is only about 15 minutes from my sister Carol's house in southern New Jersey, and this weekend marked the end of a special exhibit of Van Gogh's "close-up" paintings.

Sarah has loved for Van Gogh for years - for a long time, her bedroom was even decorated in a Van Gogh theme - and so when my sister said she'd like to see the special showing, Sarah (and I) jumped at the chance to go along!

This was our first view of the front of the building. Sarah says double-decker buses are awesome, so we were lucky to be able to include one in our picture!

Sarah says: "Well, you and Aunt Carol asked me if I ever heard of Rocky. And I think I said no. Then you told me that there were movies about him and that he was a boxer that basically went through training and that he ran up the stairs and threw his arms up because he was proud."

Indeed, and Sarah did a great job posing like Rocky! (More on this at the end of today's post, so keep reading!)

Sarah absolutely LOVED this fountain in the Impressionists' section, the first part of the museum we visited. Sarah actually went through this part twice - once with Carol, while I was working (yes, I worked in the museum lobby!) and then they took me back through it again.

My favorite Impressionist has always been Claude Monet (thank you, Cindy Snyder and Mom, for supporting that love!!), and this is one of his most famous works, "The Japanese Footbridge and the Water Lily Pool, Giverny," an oil painting from 1899. I think everyone has seen this painting or others from the same series in some form, but seeing the original was an entirely different experience from seeing it as a print - the texture, the color... it's hard to explain but it really does make a huge difference in your appreciation of the work!

This is "Moored Boats on Trees," an 1890 oil-on-wood work by Georges Seurat. Sarah and I talked about how, in Impressionism, the individual "dots" don't necessarily create a picture on their own up close, but when you step back, you get the "impression" of the picture. I, by the way, originally liked a tighter crop of the picture of this work, but Sarah was adamant that we show it on its wood frame, "because it's important that it's on wood, not canvas." So. Here you go. (I'm tempted to show her the scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where they look at another well-known Seurat work from various distances, but I can't get her hooked on that film just yet!)

Probably one of Sarah's favorite parts was this 1926-ish cast of The Thinker by Auguste Rodin. I admit this is in large part due to her seeing "Night at the Museum II: Battle for the Smithsonian," which happens to feature him going, "I'm thinking... I'm thinking... I'm thinking..." but still, she really loved seeing it.

One of the last items we saw before going into the Van Gogh exhibit was actually another Van Gogh work in the museum's collection, this oil portrait of Camille Roulin done in 1888 or 1889.

After the Impressionists, we veered toward modern art. I'm the first to admit that some of it is kind of beyond me... I like my art to look like something I couldn't make myself in 5 minutes. Sorry. I know there's a lot more to it than that, but... a black canvas with a white line across it, well, I'm not going to spend hours enjoying it.

Sarah, though found something she ABSOLUTELY loved. I wish I had taken a picture.

She was fascinated by the Brillo Boxes by Andy Warhol. Yep, the boxes he painted painstakingly to look exactly like real boxes with BRILLO stamped on them. (You can see them and read more about them here.) Sarah is definitely a "realist," and so to see that he could make them look exactly like real boxes, well, she was super-impressed. At first she thought he painted them to look 3D and then I explained that, no, he took REAL wood, made it into REAL boxes, and painted them exactly like the other boxes. So she started sketching an Avon jewelry box that my mom had laying around and trying to figure out how to "make" it. That was pretty cool!

Next, we headed to the Van Gogh Up Close special exhibit. No photographs there - but I can say that surprisingly, my favorite paintings of Van Gogh's now are not any of his more "famous" ones; one that I really liked was this view of sunflower heads up close and this one of a single tree in the forest undergrowth. These, too, it's almost impossible to get a true impression of via an online photo; when you see it in person, it's got so much depth that it's just amazing!

While we waited in line to get into the special exhibit, a wonderful fellow visitor took our picture; that's Carol at left, Sarah, and me.

Following the Van Gogh exhibit, we headed upstairs to ... arms and armor, at Sarah's request.

She LOVED this of a knight and his horse, both in armor. (She hadn't known that horses also wore armor, and we talked about why!) We also talked about the different styles of armor, and why it had to be in pieces (so that people could bend and move) even though that seems to leave weak spots.

You might remember that Sarah was VERY interested in Vikings earlier this year. Well, we found her an ACTUAL viking sword, the one at the left, which was from about 900 AD. It was pretty amazing - and Sarah loved seeing the other old swords too!

At the end of the day, we went back to Carol's house and met up with my niece, Colleen, and her daughters, who are younger than Sarah. Because I'm by far the family baby, we're kind of "off" a generation; my niece is actually just a few years older than me. Sarah loves her girls and is always glad to see them. (This photo, by the way, gave us a chance to look up what these girls actually "are" to Sarah - we thought maybe second cousins, but it turns out they're her first cousins once removed. Who knew?

Here you can also see Sarah modeling her gift from me, a $60 - yes, you read that right - hoodie with Van Gogh's Starry Night design all over it. At least she let me get it for her in a larger size, so she can wear it for quite a while. As her daily "uniform" almost always includes a hoodie, I know she'll get lots of wear out of it!

So I said earlier that there was a follow-up to this day's experiences, which were awesome. On Monday, after we got home, we went to the library, and guess what they had for rent?

ROCKY!!

We rented it, and we watched it as a family last night. Sarah was into it - for lots of reasons - and when she saw Rocky run up the art museum steps during his training, it was amazing; her face just lit up! It made a neat cap to our museum experience.

Linking up today to the Homeschool Field Trip Blog Hop.