Sharing our similes

As we were reading Life of Fred: Goldfish last night, one of questions at the end of our chapter had to do with similes.

Similes, in case you didn't know, aren't math. (But so much of Fred goes beyond math - which is part of what we love.) They're literary constructions that compare two things using "like" or "as" terminology.

The question asked us to fill in some possible similes. You know...

His eyes were red like ____________________.

Her smile was as bright as ______________________.

Reading is as enjoyable as ______________________.

We had a ton of fun doing those - and Sarah created her own page of similes in her bedside notebook!

"Similes are just so cool, because you can keep going and going with them. It's kind of like infinity. Or pi," Sarah said as we sat down to work on this blog post together. (This is her idea, by the way; I'm just typing!)

Our challenge to you

As we were brainstorming our similes last night, Sarah said, "We should put this on the homeschool blog! And then we should ask people to write their similes in the comments. And if they have a family, they can all do that, and the mom can comment and say, 'Here's what I came up with, here's what my daughter says, here's what my husband says,' like that. And then we can do another post and we can include people's comments."

(Can you tell she's being raised by blogger parents??)

So that's what we'd like you to do today: Come up with a great simile and comment here with it!

We can't wait to read what you come up with! I know I have some very creative blog-readers :)

What we're reading: Bookshelf rotation edition

This edition of "What we're reading" could more accurately be called "What we're finished reading and what our options might be for The Next Thing," but that's rather clumsy as a post title.

Since I shared about our biography addiction, we've finished several books as a family.

• The Neil Armstrong biography in the Sterling Biographies series
• Life of Fred: Edgewood
• Life of Fred: Farming
• Let's Find Out about the Moon (a 1965 hardcover written BEFORE we landed there, which made for a neat compare/contrast conversation)

I also finished two books I was reading on my own - Buzz Aldrin's autobiography, "Magnificent Desolation," and the autobiography of hacker Kevin Mitnick, "Ghost in the Wires."


We tend to do this fairly often - finish a bunch of things at once. The thing is, unless we're midway through a series, it often takes a little while before we start something new!

So what's next?

My tried-and-true trick to help us find something interesting usually goes like this:

• Attend used-book sale. Buy stuff.

• Bring home finds from used book sale. Pile them in stacks around various rooms. Wince when you knock them over while vacuuming.
• Look at all available family bookshelves. Wince again when stuff starts falling off as you browse.
• Try to motivate family members to part with no-longer-loved books (or at least store them away) using phrases like, "Hey! Do you guys want to go play Sort the Books?"
• Eventually get family members to take pity on you. Sort books using a multi-hour process that is as much family reading time as anything.
• End up with new book possibilities on everyone's bedside shelves!

Just did that over the weekend, to great results. We parted ways with many books, packed away a few boxes of Sarah's still-loved-but-not-currently-being-read collection, and now have some solid leads on possible next books (in addition to Life of Fred: Goldfish, which we started two nights ago!)

What's your family reading? I had previously run a family reading roundup link-up, but I'm pleased to say that the lovely ladies over at Christian Unschooling are doing one each month that I'm proud to support instead!

So if you have a post about what you've been reading, please go share it!

Sarah's poster about famous Wild West cowboys

Remember how Sarah has been excited about cowboys and Indians this year?

Well, while we were browsing at the craft store last month, we found the awesome "Cowboy" sticker above - in the clearance bin! It's 3-D and, yes, the scrapbooker in me thinks it's very cool. Sarah begged, I bought, and I thought, "What on earth are we going to do with this?"

So one day, not that long ago, I said, "Hey, Sarah, do you want to make a cowboy poster together with your sticker?" She was THRILLED. I had no idea what a cowboy poster might turn into - I was sort of figuring she'd want to draw, or to print a bunch of pictures.

She actually did some research - and came up with a theme of famous Wild West figures, including their dates of birth and death and quotes, their signatures where she could find them, and some notable facts! Since they're hard to read if you try to view the full poster, I'm including images of each block instead.

 Here's the only lady in the bunch - Annie Oakley. Sarah wrote Annie's name and dates of birth and death, then she found this quote and asked me to format it for her along with the picture!

 Buffalo Bill's image is a postcard of him on horseback. Since Sarah collects postcards, that's the image we had to use - and then she wanted to know what his horse's name was. Well, we weren't sure, but we found a list of most of his horses, which she rewrote for her poster!

 Pistol Pete was a cowboy we found by accident - but the funniest part is that there's an alpaca on our 4-H alpaca farm named Petey (short for Painted Spring's Pistol Pete), so that made him a keeper too.

Buffalo Bill actually got to appear on the poster three times - including in the section we showed earlier, on his own, and another, seen here, with Sioux chief Sitting Bull, whose biography we read earlier this year.

He also appeared in a photo with Wild Bill Hickock, who was one of Sarah's favorite Wild West heroes.

Finally, we finished up with Doc Holliday and his autograph (and Sarah's notes about her own favorite cowboy, albeit a fictional one!) I told her I wanted to write about her poster, and she said, "I hope everyone likes it and learns a new cowboy or Wild West fact!")

Linking up today with the Christian Unschooling Show and Tell Blog Hop and my friend Phyllis' History and Geography linkup at All Things Beautiful!

A family-created game

Meet the Otto family's unnamed un-game!

It kind of goes with the whole "unschool" thing - we don't always play by the rules, we like to be creative, and we're more concerned with having a good time and working together than with who wins by an arbitrary standard!

So when Chris got out the Sequence and Dicecapades games, dumped out the various pieces and flipped the Sequence board over, we got creative.

This game included everything from cards to letter, number and color dice to colored tokens to Lego people to a gigantic rock to a random ceramic cat (acquired on our honeymoon in Mexico, as it happens.)

There was no "win" or "lose" objective. We simply played, making up rules for what to do under certain circumstances, inventing as we went until we got tired.

At one point, we started making towers, which is what Chris and the Lucky Cat are doing above.

When we started, the general flow of the game was that we each picked a color of token (represented by our favorite Lego person in our corner), and on our turn, we flipped over a card. The color of the card determined what to do next - if it was a black card, you took the six black dice, rolled them, and added all the numbers. You could then steal that many chips from another player.

Red cards, meanwhile, led to "multiplication war." You took two red dice, and challenged another player to take two red dice. You rolled your pair, multiplied the two faces, and whoever had the higher product got to take chips from the other. (The number was based on the card you'd originally flipped over, since taking 56 chips was out!)

And finally, if you drew a face card, you got to roll the picture, letter and color dice and make up something about them. (We were making "number sentences," like "I have 8 cats and 6 unicycles in my 5 broom closets" - yes, the picture dice have a broom, a cat and a unicycle, among other symbols!) And sometimes, we simply tried to make a word from the letter dice!

We also exhibited some gaming generosity; Sarah got the idea to give BACK the number of tokens she should have taken when she got more of ours than we had of hers.

Let me be clear on one last thing: Sarah decided these were the things we should do. My "math-hating," "yuck to anything that looks educational" child made a math game with language adaptations with zero prompting from us.

Now that's a win!

Are these the droids you're looking for? Sarah's Androidify creations

Lest you think from our recent in-depth posts on things like The Phantom of the Opera and major nature-study trips that we're TOO productive here at the Otto house, I bring you something fun today, courtesy of Sarah's creative brain.

Thanks to her friend Nathan, Sarah discovered the Androidify app.

This is exactly as it sounds. You can create little customized versions of the (normally) green Android device mascot.

Sarah could do this. For. Hours. In fact, she has. She creates them, and then she tells me all about their back story and why they're dressed the way they are. I can't keep some of them straight, but she does!

Here are a few of her favorites.

The "Ready for Duty" collection

(I'm not clear on the use case for Bluetooth during martial-arts practice, but otherwise, we're all geared up and ready to go, including missiles!)

The "Urban Style" collection

(Sarah loves the parrot. And the tattoos. And, she says of the one on the bottom right, "Mom, his shirt is, like, a pun! Do you get it??" Sigh.)

The "Family" collection

 (Yes, this is me, and Chris, in Android style.)

 This concludes today's free advertisement for the Android platform. (But we do think it's pretty cool!)

We're linking up today with Money-Saving Monday!

The Phantom of the Opera is there... inside our minds

During our first couple of weeks of homeschooling, we had one of the best cases of learning-by-happenstance I could imagine.

Disclosure: This post has some affiliate links, which will make me a little bit of money if you choose to purchase any of the products I've mentioned through them. I only link to things we legitimately use and recommend, so if you see such a link, it's because we really do believe in the book or item!

We caught the 25th anniversary performance of The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall in London, thanks to our local PBS affiliate.

I've been a Phantom fan since middle or high school (and even was blessed to see it on Broadway, thanks to our amazing high school band program's trip), and once Sarah saw the performance this spring, she was hooked as well!

Even in the past two weeks, it's still nothing for us to come downstairs in the morning and find Sarah engrossed in Phantom performance videos from Youtube on her phone, or asking to hear the CDs from the New York performance in the car.

Even her ringtone is the sound of Christine and the Phantom singing together "The Phantom of the Opera is here..."

It's awesome! My friend Aadel was just talking the other day about how much you can learn from musicals, and it made me think that I should try to capture some of the great stuff we've found related to our personal favorite.

The book and the general story

If you're not entirely familiar with the Phantom of the Opera plot, Wikipedia offers one of the best summaries out there of not only the Gaston Leroux novel, but also how it compares and contrasts with some of the modern renditions.

We have a battered copy of the novel, and while Sarah hasn't made it the whole way through, I have read it in its entirety a few times, and Sarah's cherry-picked some of the best parts!

Much like when we got on a Shakespeare kick after we saw the movie version of Romeo and Juliet, it worked best in our case for Sarah to see the live performance first and THEN try to pick up the book. I think it not only made more sense, but she was more invested in trying to make her way through it!

At Sarah's level (she's 12, and in seventh grade), the original novel seemed the way to go. But more toned-down retellings of the story make it accessible to younger readers as well. There's a Stepping Stone early-readers' edition as well as an upper-elementary version from the Classic Starts series, and even a Phantom pop-up book!

There are also any number of what I loosely lump into the category of "retellings," "adaptations" and "sequels." All I'll say here is... there's a reason I'm not linking to any! I'm sure there are some that are interesting, especially to real aficionados, but most I've found to be just weird for the sake of being weird!

(Even better description: Sarah asked Chris for a plot summary of the sequel, which he described to her, and she goes... "That's messed up. It will end poorly." There you go.)

Movies, CDs and live performances

Our dream is to take Sarah to see a live performance, hopefully on Broadway, within the next two years. (She's campaigning for London, but, uh... that's probably a bit unrealistic.)

It's pricey, even for a touring show. I'm lucky enough to have seen the Broadway version in high school, as I mentioned, and one of the first trips Chris and I took together was to see a touring company perfomance in Baltimore; even that was a big gift!

If you can go, though, check out the official website, www.thephantomoftheopera.com, for details on shows in New York City, the United Kingdom, Las Vegas and more. Hint: Even if you don't think you'll actually get to a performance, the site is amazing!

We really enjoy our CD of the original cast recording. In fact, Chris and I both had copies when we got married, and we've worn them both down to the point of skipping, so we'll probably have to fork over for a third soon!

If you're just looking to introduce your family to Phantom, especially younger children, one of the best places to start is the vast collection of performance videos on YouTube.

I'm not a Netflix subscriber (yet; I think the day is coming!) but some friends have told me there's a good selection of Phantom versions to watch there as well!

If you're looking for a particularly good movie version, here are my three favorites, all very different and very worthwhile!

25th anniversary live performance at the Royal Albert Hall	1924 silent film starring Lon Chaney Jr.	2005 movie starring Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum and Patrick Wilson

Other good Phantom resources

Official study guide from The Really Useful Co. (an AMAZING resource - free!)

Ideas for further discussion (a companion to the study guide above; this is great if you'd like to dive deeper or adapt your study for older kids, especially)

Usborne English worksheet based on a young readers' edition of the book (the version they reference is one from their catalog, but it's appropriate for any of what I call the "standard retellings!")

Usborne's accompanying answer sheet and teachers' guide

Any other Phantom fans out there? What did I miss? Leave a comment; I'd love to add to this even more!

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This post is part of a loose series of posts good for unit studies. Here's another one that shares our favorite solar-system learning resources!

We also do an occasional series of "Family Field Trip" posts, combining our own adventures with resources we've found helpful. Many of these will work even if you can't visit in person!

In that series, we shared free resources to help you learn about Philadelphia, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell and others to help you learn about and make the most of a visit to Assateague, Md., and Chincoteague, Va. We also took a family field trip to Jim Thorpe, PA, and shared our favorite resources for that!

I'm linking up today to my friend Susan's Favorite Resource This Week and Look What We Did!

How my 12-year-old daughter encourages our whole family to be positive and grateful

Sarah has been on a big kick lately with saving images of positive quotes. I guess it's the "Pinterest phenomenon" or something!

She uses them as phone wallpapers, texts them to friends, puts them on Instagram... you name it.

Well, Sunday after church, she said she wanted each of our family members to type out a list of what makes us happy and that we're grateful for.

In turn, she took all four of our answers as well as one of her current favorite quotes and made a nicely-laid-out sign for our fridge! She said she's going to update it every couple of weeks.

It makes me smile every time I open the fridge. I couldn't be prouder of my girl - and of my mom and husband, who jumped right in with what they were grateful for as well!

We've also had a resurgence in a before-bed routine we started last school year, when things weren't going so hot in public school.

Sarah's counselor (and some other friends) had been really encouraging her to think about some of hte positives in her life. Sometimes, before bed, Sarah would ask me to help her make a list of good things so that she could remember them when she woke up the next morning.

Lightbulb... On the back of Sarah's bedroom door, I put up a quickly hand-lettered sign in shades of Sarah's favorite color, blue. We grabbed a pack of Post-Its and a pen, and started making a short list each night so that, before she left her room in the morning, she could see the reminder.

We don't do it every night any more - but occasionally, Sarah will grab the Post-Its before bed and make a list!

I just love that the youngest member of our family is the one encouraging all of us to new heights of positivity and gratitude. I love you, Sarah, and I'm thankful for YOU!

I'm linking up today at the Weekly Kids' Co-Op and Homeschooling on the Cheap!

Family field trip to Assateague and Chincoteague

In my snippets from unschooling post earlier this week, I mentioned we spent a few days last week in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

It's a great "home base" for a beach vacation, because you can drive up and down the Delmarva (that's Delaware-Maryland-Virginia, for those non-East-Coasters!) shoreline and see a bunch of great things, everything from the Cape May/Lewes Ferry that'll take you to New Jersey, smaller beaches like Dewey and Fenwick Island in Delaware, to Ocean City, Md., to Assateague Island in Maryland and Chincoteague, Va.

We've lately done most of our lodging through Airbnb, which is essentially a brokerage for private house or apartment rentals. We've stayed at some amazing places - for a fraction of the cost of hotels.

For this trip, we rented a two-bedroom apartment in Rehoboth, literally within view of Coastal Highway (Route 1, the main route down the coast).

And from there, it was about an hour's drive to Assateague Island National Seashore and then another hour down through Maryland and Virginia farmland to Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. (If you're planning a visit, this is important - there is no public road that goes from one end of the island to the other; you must return inland to travel to the southern end!)

These areas are most noted for being the home of wild ponies (and here's a good overview about them)... but there is so much more to see there! Here's a look at some of the highlights of our trip - and a list of resources available to you if your family would like to learn more about Assateague, MD, and Chincoteague, VA!

Assateague Island National Seashore

On our visit to the north end of Assateague Island (the Maryland side), we loved checking out the Assateague Island Visitor Center, where we spent a couple of hours (it's that good). Then, we took a driving tour of about 45 minutes around the island, looking for the wild ponies! We didn't see any up close, but spotted several birds (including the great blue heron seen above) and visited some wonderful areas of unspoiled beach.

And Sarah got to pet a horseshoe crab at the visitors' center! She could have stared at it for a half-hour easily.

Sarah also spotted a seahorse in another aquarium - probably the first I'd seen in person!

After leaving the visitor center, there is a fee of $15 to enter the main part of the island by car on the Maryland side, but the pass is good for seven days!

Here are some of the other cool Assateague things we found.

• The Assateague Foster Horse Program allows you to help support the care of the ponies of Assateague by "adopting" a horse of your choice for about $40. In exchange, you receive a fact sheet on your horse, plus a nice portfolio with an 8x10 photo and a certificate. Conveniently, you can see an example above - as we are now proud supporters of "Boots." (Boots, by the way, was the nickname of my mom's dog in high school!) One of the great things about this program is you can support the horses even if you're not able to visit in person - but we were lucky to be able to try to spot our horse while visiting! (No luck, but that's OK!)
• The foster horse program is run by a friends' group called the Assateague Island Alliance.
• The official National Park Service site on Assateague Island National Seashore is as thorough as I've come to expect from NPS! There's much there to recommend, so browse around, but I'll highlight a few of our favorite links here.
• The NPS brochure on The Wild Horses of Assateague Island is a great basic overview of the herd, in easy-to-read Q&A format.
• Here's a look at some of the birds you can see on Assateague.
• The Prince Georges Audubon Society offers a great map and links to other resources on the Assateague area.

Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge

We weren't sure what to expect, but were lucky to have a slightly closer look at the ponies here on the southern end of the island!

There is a fee of $8 per car per day to enter the island from the Virginia side; and, like with the northern end, there is also an option for a $15 one-week pass.

• While the ponies are the "main attraction" for many first-time visitors to Chincoteague or Assateague, we were just as impressed with the variety of birds we were able to see! Here's a guide to the birds of the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. We were amazed to be able to spot both a kingfisher and a bald eagle - and Sarah was the first to identify both! (You can see them above.)
• Speaking of ponies, though, here's a guide to some of them, along with photos. 
• There are two visitors' centers on the south end of the island - one operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the other by the National Park Service (that's the "Tom's Cove" visitors' center that you might read about in some of the links above.) Here's the Fish and Wildlife Service's page on Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. Not only was their visitors' center amazing, but the staff members working at it were too; they really enjoyed talking with Sarah about their projects and the wildlife of the area, including some interesting local squirrels!
• The Fish and Wildlife Service offers a great resource page of lesson plans on local animal tracks, invasive plants and more topics.
• The Chincoteague Natural History Association is a friends' group that supports Chincoteague; their website has everything from information on the lighthouse to a bald eagle cam!
• And, because I can't forget the obvious, the Misty of Chincoteague series by Marguerite Henry is a great realistic fiction acccount of the Chincoteague ponies!

The beaches on the Virginia end of the island are also beautiful; there, Sarah found the tail of a horseshoe crab!

Sarah took this photo of the trip from Maryland to Virginia - very colorful fall fields along the way!

One other, uh, interesting facet to the trip occurs just as you're crossing to Chincoteague Island. This was a first for me, and my photo isn't particularly clear, but...

The whole highway is a bridge. And then there's another bridge intersecting the main bridge, which you can see to the left! Bridge meets bridge... the first I've ever seen! (I'm not a huge bridge fan. So it was a little scary. Don't make fun of me.)

Other Great Delmarva Learning Resources

• The National Park Service has a set of teacher guides and student worksheets designed for groups visiting the both the Virginia and Maryland parts of Assateague Island, but I found them to be helpful even regarding things we didn't see on our visit! Here are the Maryland guides, and here are the Virginia resources! 
• A site called Teach Ocean Science offers a free oceanography curriculum for a variety of ages that I thought was great. Specifically to those interested in the Assateague area, there's a module on barrier islands and sea levels that's very relevant!
• One place we were amazed to pass in our travels was the NASA Visitor Center at Wallops Flight Facility. We didn't get to take the free tour because they were closed while we were there, but we did find a lot of info on research programs going on at Wallops and chances to watch rocket launches there. 
• Speaking of NASA, their NASA education home page includes a catalog of resources for educators. If you're interested in space, I've actually included more info on this in our list of best resources for solar-system study!

I can't say enough good things about this trip. We actually didn't know what to expect, but we were thrilled with what we found!

If you have any other suggestions for good Chincoteague or Assateague study ideas, please comment; I'll be glad to add them to the list!

Read more

This post is part of an occasional series of "Family Field Trip" posts, combining our own adventures with resources we've found helpful. Many of these will work even if you can't visit in person!

Earlier in the series, we shared free resources to help you learn about Philadelphia, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell!

I'm linking up today with my friend Susan's Favorite Resource This Week, All Boy HOmeschool's Field Trip Friday, Chestnut Grove Academy's Field Trip Friday, Fantastic Foto Field Trips, Science Sunday and Homeschool Science Share and Tell.

Painting on pumpkins: Meet Spooky and Lightning

We had a rather frightening crop of surprise pumpkins in our side yard this year, thanks to my spur-of-the-moment decision last fall to throw our rotting pumpkins on the compost heap.

These things were HUGE. They, along with two Attack of the Killer Tomatoes plants, took over a side of the house.

Well, we harvested them (finally) and came up with quite the showing of pumpkins and gourds! Until now, though, they'd all simply been sitting on our bench out front, not even particularly decoratively.

About two days ago, Sarah came in and wanted to know if she could paint a pumpkin. She had one all picked out - and named him Spooky.

Tonight after dinner, she set to painting. You can see Spooky, mostly finished, above. He's got a green scar and large, fang-like teeth.

Sarah says he has a green scar "because he was playing in the grass and he got a stain that never came off." There you have it!
After doing the first one, she thought she'd do another. This time, she first tried to write out a quote about happiness, but quickly realized that long quotes and small pumpkins aren't an ideal fit.

Thankfully, acrylic paint washes off of pumpkins! (Add that to the list of things Mom learned today!)

So instead, happy with how Spooky turned out, Sarah created a brother for him, this time named Lightning. (Because he has a lightning-like yellow birthmark.)

The best part, in my opinion, is that they both have a "mohawk." Sarah said she wanted to do something with the stem other than having it look like a stem, so she painted both and said, "Look, mohawks!"

Happy fall!

Linking up today to the Weekly Kids Co-Op, which focused on painting, and the All Year Round Blog Carnival's autumn edition.

Saying yes to The Avengers

Last month, my contribution to the "Saying Yes" linkup on Christian Unschooling was a big one - we agreed for Sarah to have her own cell phone.

This month's is a little less earth-shattering.

I said yes to watching The Avengers with Chris and Sarah.

They'd seen it already - and had wanted me to watch it with them, but I just hadn't worked up much enthusiasm for it. I'm not particularly into comics, or superheroes, but I was familiar enough with the storyline to follow along, and you know what?

Turns out it was pretty fun - and I loved, loved, loved the Hulk, who I'm told I sometimes resemble, usually at the grocery store.

(You know the type: "I need 8 rolls of paper towels! These come in packs of 6 or 12! Arrrrrgh!" To which Chris will say to Sarah, "Uh-oh, Mommy's hulking out again.")

JOAN SMASH...

Though I admit, I'd prefer to look like the Black Widow, especially at tae kwon do... I probably look much more like the Hulk fumbling around than I do the woman with mad kicking skills, but hey, at least I try!

How have you said yes this week? Link up if you're writing about it!