Mind Games

This week’s Muffin Tin Monday theme is CHRISTMAS SHAPES.

According to JediBoy, the shapes of Christmas are the star and the ball… so here’s this morning’s snack:

The bottom row has our Christmas balls: Berry Berry Kix cereal, slices of string cheese, and slices of banana.
The middle row has our Christmas stars: star fruit, stelline pasta, and stars cut out of deli ham.
The top row has our other symbols of Christmas: gingerbread men cookies, the Christmas Pickle (sweet midgets), and Christmas tree marshmallows.

The kids loved thinking about the shapes of Christmas! For more muffin tin ideas, visit Her Cup Overfloweth.

The Random Integer Generator has chosen Rebecca as our winner of the Prima Princessa Presents: Swan Lake dvd! Congratulations to Rebecca, who said:

Tutu wearers here, since I have 3 little girls, who would love this DVD.
Love reading your blog, and I shamelessly copy some of your projects.

I love shameless flattery! Thanks, Rebecca, and don’t be a stranger.

JediBoy has been practicing how to introduce himself at next year’s trick-or-treat.  He wants to be Thor, and Jody’s goats have been offered (by S., of course) to pull him in his chariot.  He is so totally thrilled with the idea of having actual goats pull him for trick-or-treating that he can’t stop talking about it.  I really need to record him saying this, so you can hear the Thor accent, but here’s his spiel:

I am Thor!  Son of Odin!  These are my mightiest goats, Toothgnasher and Toothcracker! 

I just get the giggles every time he says “mightiest goats.”

—

We had a nice day, sorting books (we do that a lot), then went out with Heather for haircuts, dinner & shopping.  JediBoy blew a large chunk of his saved allowance on a dvd of Scooby Doo (a season of the newer cartoon, I think).  Aunt R should be proud!

The kids are wound up tonight, climbing all over us and hooting and hollering.  They’re shouting variations of “Merry Christmas,” “Feliz Navidad” and “Mele Kalikimaka.”  (From BabyGirl: “Mismas!  Dida pidad!  Mingalaminga!”)

JediBoy turned to me in the middle of all this and said, “What do you think I’ll get for Christmas?”

I said, “Coal.  Isn’t that what naughty boys get?”

He rubbed his hands together maniacally and said, “Cool!  I love coal!  I can use it in my science experiments, I can look at it and science it and try to turn it into diamonds.”

He’s lucky that his Pappy is a coal chemist who just might be enticed to produce a box of coal samples this holiday.  ‘Cause he’s gonna science it!

We didn’t get the predicted storm as early or as hard as the forecasters predicted, but we did spend the day at home just in case, and watched the early-dismissal school buses trudge their way up our hill around lunchtime. There’s more stuff falling now, so tomorrow we might get our first real play-in-the-snow day.

JediBoy’s big discovery of the day was that there’s still a Clifford game installed on our old computer, so he spent a long time happily playing there with BabyGirl watching. We are also still working on our Perler bead Christmas ornaments, which turned out to be so much fun and so engaging than JediBoy keeps returning to them!

Instead of taking pictures of the slush, the computer or the Christmas happiness, I have spent the day thinking ahead. I opened my first quarterly report in order to alter it for the second quarterly report, which is due at the end of the month. Most of it could be filled in ahead of time. Since we “school” year-round, it’s easy to hit the 45-day, 225-hour mark for the quarter early on, and in most subjects, we’re still easily on track with what I guessed we’d do.

I was a little shocked, though, to realize that I did much, much, much more formal science in the first quarter than I did in the second (even counting our awesome electricity box that gets used frequently). When I sat back to think about it, I realized the difference. For the first quarter, I planned to cover local wildlife and nature, and I used the book Fun With Nature as a spine. I had a ton of books that were great for the topics, and in June, I threw together a week-by-week outline of books to read, projects to do, places to go, movies to watch, and so on.

I like to make plans, because I like to have some of my thinking done ahead of time. I like to be able to wake up on Monday mornings, glance at a list, and have something fun to do right away. “Hey! Cool! Let’s read about types of bird beaks and then make some different bird treats!” I’ve said before that I tread a line between totally child-led unschooling and simply relaxed homeschooling. I don’t think that plans are necessary or that it’s necessary to push the kids through those plans if they’re obviously not working.  But they work to give me a framework to the week, and remind me of good ideas that I had, once upon a time.

I do have a pretty good feel for what JediBoy will enjoy, what will catch his interest, and what will be engaging without being too hard. So I use that knowledge to create my lists of things to do, and most of the time we do them, because I’ve chosen things that are both appropriate and fun. When something isn’t working, I toss it and we move on. There’s no particular reason that JediBoy needed to learn about the different types of bird beaks in the year that he was six, but he enjoyed it.

So. One of the goals I’d listed on my forms at the beginning of the year was to discuss meteorology in the third quarter. I spent a nice chunk of the day picking books from the shelves and seeing how they went together, planning how much reading and how many experiments were reasonable for a week. I put some things together for January up until Valentine’s day.

For those who are curious, I’m using an old Singer Science Through Discovery text (AAUW booksale sticker, $1) as my spine for the first three weeks and a Silver Burdett & Ginn Science text for the next two weeks. I’m using a Bill Nye the Science Guy book (Big Blast of Science) for a couple experiments and a discussion of the greenhouse effect. I’ve got several Magic School Bus books, their book of experiments, and videos, as well as some miscellaneous picture books on the water cycle, weather and storms. I’ll also be pulling out the engaging Joe Kaufman’s About the Big Sky, About the High Hills, About the Rich Earth …and the Deep Sea. JediBoy has never done any long-term weather observation, so that will be a big part of our study. I’m not sure if we’ll record things on a wall chart, in a binder, a notebook, on the computer, or some combination of those. We’ll be putting together our own air thermometer, wind vane, rain gauge, anemometer, and barometer, but I’m going to look for inexpensive but sturdy store-bought versions as well to get us a little more accuracy in our data. Suggestions for any of our weather unit are always warmly welcomed.

It has been five years today since we lost my mom. I keep thinking she’ll turn up, at my door, on the other end of the phone, in my email inbox. She doesn’t, she won’t, she can’t. But she does turn up in the photograph of a flower, the inscription in a book, the blue eyes of her favorite grandson.

i put lasers in this picture. i am cam.

—

JediBoy learns to blog. How can I deny the use of his real name when that’s his favorite word to type?

He says he wants his own blog now, and that he wants to be called Victor Von Doom.

While on the phone with PisecoSis, I escaped from the kitchen (where BabyGirl had eaten, as a snack, in the fifteen minutes I’d been on the phone: five deli slices of roast beef, six slices of sandwich pepperoni, one string cheese, two cups of milk and one cup of applesauce, and she was still hungry) to the living room and glanced out the window into the gray and rainy day. I noticed a continued flash of gray and white in one of the neighbor’s trees and thought it might be a squirrel, flicking his tail over his head to keep out the rain. The view through my binocs told a different story:

Do you see what I see?

We believe it’s a Cooper’s Hawk eating his lunch.

These are just three crops of the same picture, taken with my longish-but-not-long-enough lens, in the rain, and since I was on the phone, holding binoculars, pointing the bird out to my kids, and taking pictures at the same time, I picked up some lovely detail of the raindrops on the trees, but the bird itself wasn’t in focus.

Still, I think the closest zoom reveals enough detail - the tail in particular - plus a little gratuitous pink from his meal. It may possibly be a sharp-shinned hawk, but it seemed a little small. I have a hard time telling them apart, especially from a distance.

JediBoy was thrilled, and commandeered the phone to discuss details with PisecoSis for a long time. He really wanted it to be a falcon (we do have peregrines in the small urban area about 7 miles upriver) but he was willing to accept hawk.

I promised to refill the feeders after the rain stops, to encourage smaller birds and mammals to hang around longer, in turn to entice the hawk to make more frequent visits.

JediBoy opens to the door to the playroom and calls out “Mele kalikimaka, Mom!”

I holler back, “Mele kalikimaka, (Boy)’baloney!”

BabyGirl chimes in, “Mingalaminga, Oneyoney!”

The theme for Muffin Tin Monday this week is Christmas books… the hard part was choosing which book! We have plenty of great Christmas books around here, including 24 that were wrapped and are being opened one per day. I peeked at my list of books to see what we’d be unwrapping today, and it immediately inspired me with a fun muffin tin lunch idea.

Today’s book was Santa’s New Suit by Laura Rader. In the book, Santa peeks in his closet full of red suits and sees that all of them are worn-out or too small. He goes shopping - this is the fun bit, of course! - and tries on a wild variety of outfits. He decides to buy a lovely purple plaid suit with matching cap… but no one recognizes him and the elves are aghast. Mrs. Claus kindly brings him a photo album, and he sees that he has always worn a red suit. He announces he’ll wear a red suit on Christmas Eve, and everyone is thrilled. (But when he goes on vacation with Mrs. Claus in January, you see they are wearing lovely matching purple plaid bathing suits!)

I decided to make a muffin tin that would encourage my kids to create new outfits for Santa.

I used a person-shaped cookie cutter to cut several bodies from bread. Then I used the same cutter to cut slices of Provolone and Cheddar cheese, pepperoni and roast beef - then cut those slices in half to make shirts and pants. I cut the scraps, some lettuce and some bell pepper into hats, stripes, and polka dots and added some sunflower seeds for extra decoration.

The kids loved it! Here are some of their creations:

We had a terrific time making and eating Santa’s New Suit! To see more themed muffin tins, head to Her Cup Overfloweth!