Showing posts with label homeschooling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homeschooling. Show all posts

Friday, March 8, 2024

Homeschool High School Honors World History: DIY Art History Artwork Cards

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times course uses an AP World History textbook, a college-level art history textbook, and all the other additional resources you'd want in order to flesh the study of ancient history out into a full-year high school honors course.

Among the other many resources I've compiled and DIYed for this study, one of my favorites is the new set of DIY artwork cards that I prepare for every new chapter of Gardner's Art through the Ages, which in turn I've keyed to the relevant chapter(s) in Duiker's World History

Artwork cards are a major component of a couple of different pedagogical approaches to homeschooling, and you CAN buy sets of them--Memoria Press is generally considered to have the nicest, if you're in the market. But if you buy sets of them you're not going to get exactly the artworks that you want in the sizes that you want, and depending on where you buy them, copyright can be an issue. 

Another option, one that I also use, is buying museum gift shop postcards. I LOVE my sets of artwork postcards, and it's nice because they're always high-quality, I know they're not pirated, and I didn't have to do any of the work of sourcing, printing, and cutting out the images. But they're hard to buy online, and they're pricey! I would NOT have the collection of artwork cards that I do if I was paying a buck-plus for each of them. I mean, geez, my kid is going through twenty or so of these cards per chapter in just her current study! And that's not even counting the separate political art or history of photography studies that we've completed fairly recently, yikes.

So you've got options, but if you want the highest-quality, cheapest, most bespoke sets of artwork cards, you probably want to DIY them like I do. 

Step 1: Go through the study materials and select the images you require. 

I always pre-read the kid's textbook chapters so that I can collect additional resources and set up extension activities anyway, so while I'm reading her art history textbook I also note the artworks that are referred to in that chapter. Occasionally, there are also a couple that her history textbook refers to that the art history textbook doesn't, or I might want to collect different types of images referenced there, like the cuneiform tablets from the Mesopotamia chapter, or the Neolithic stoneworks from the Ancient Great Britain section. 

Step 2: Find the images online and save them.

There are three ways to find good images online. First is just to do a Google Image search and filter the results for Large images:

This is a screenshot from when I was collecting images for our History of Photography study, but the process is identical.

You'll often come across pirated images this way, but you're not using your images commercially, so I'll allow it, ahem. 

Another good way is a Wikipedia search, especially for more iconic artworks. You won't get any pirated images here, but you WILL get some lower-quality images, as many will be photos that contributors took themselves of the artworks in their museum settings. 

And then ANOTHER good way is to go directly to the website of the museum that hosts a particular artwork. A lot of museums do offer free downloads of digital images of many of their artworks. My special favorite is the British Museum, which will often let me download an image so high-quality that I can print it life-sized--I've done that for both the Rosetta stone and for several cuneiform and hieroglyphic pieces, and it's so cool and useful for detailed study! 

Here's one list of museums that offer open-source images, but it's definitely not comprehensive because the British Museum isn't even on it. 

Here's the British Museum's image site; I usually download or request the super-high-quality images, because why not! Wouldn't some large-scale Greek vase images look so awesome framed and displayed in my future Life of Theseus-themed bathroom?

Here's the Metropolitan Museum of Art's image site. I like that if you're not looking for a specific artwork, but rather a time period or style, you can filter your results by open-access so that everything you see is obtainable.

The National Gallery's image site provides open-access images and also provides many of the Wikimedia images. 

Here's the National Trust images site. Only some of these images are free, but there are images that work very well with British history and geography studies. 

The Smithsonian's image site pulls from all its museums and holdings across genres, so it's a great resource not just for art, but also historical artifacts and even primary sources. 

Step 3: Print and cut.

I prefer to print my images with a laser printer onto cardstock, because I want them to look and feel nice. To make the artwork cards a standard size, I print them four to a page--


--then cut them on a guillotine paper cutter:


I label the back with title, artist, date, and, for these art history cards, geographic location, and currently I have them filed by textbook chapter.

My teenager is also keeping a comprehensive ancient history timeline, so I print another set of these images as thumbnails onto regular copy paper, and then she glues them into her timeline and labels them. 

Okay, so how do you actually USE these artwork cards? There are so many ways!

  • Flash cards. Memorize the artwork, title, artist, date, and geographic location to add to one's working knowledge of art history. Having a ton of artworks memorized will make it easier for you to slot future pieces into your memory, and allow you to build context and make better comparisons/contrasts, add to your understanding of social history, and write some kick-ass essays, etc.
  • Sort and organize. Having these visuals at hand allows you to easily make comparisons about style and other features of artworks that may be less noticeable when each image is trapped in the pages of a specific chapter of your textbook. How do the early Native American earthworks compare to Neolithic European ones? How does portraiture vary, and how would you sort portraits stylistically when the images are separated from geohistorical context? 
  • Order chronologically. We play a lot of history card games in which we have to try to put something in chronological order. We have almost all of these Timeline games, but you can play the same game with art, and not only is it interesting, but it builds a chronological understanding of art on a sensory level.
  • Display. Once upon a time, a worker who was doing emergency repairs on our old, poorly-maintained, homeowner's special home came out of the kids' bathroom after installing a new toilet and asked me if I homeschooled. I was all, "Yes?" I thought it was the weirdest, most random thing for someone to figure out about me with zero evidence! But when I told this story to the kids later, they were immediately all like, "Um, it's because you tape educational posters to the wall facing the toilet?" Because riiiiight... when I want the kids to memorize something but I don't want to go through the emotional torment of MAKING them memorize something, I just print that thing out onto 8.5"x11" paper and tape it to the wall facing their toilet. I also once put tape onto ALL our things and made the kids label them in French and that's all still around, and every once in a while I printed out and assembled a giant line map of someplace we were studying, made them label that, too, and then hung it in the hallway until I was ready to make them study some other place. I also use pushpins to make little clotheslines across our bookshelves and I have the kids clothespin these art cards to them, and sometimes I'll display them on our magnet boards. I thought I was being sneaky like this, but apparently I wasn't, lol!

I should probably act like, since these images cost only the amount of the paper and the ink, and they're just cardstock, I'll recycle them when my last homeschooling kid graduates in a couple of months, but you know I won't. I won't have the kids to label me new giant maps for the hallway, so perhaps I'll retire them all permanently on display there!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Monday, January 29, 2024

Homeschool History/Culinary Arts: Homemade Chocolate

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times study (2 semesters; 2 high school credits) is a LOT of work, because we're using two college textbooks as the spine for this DIY course:

This homemade chocolate project is relevant to Duiker Chapter 6, "The New World," and Gardner Chapter 14, "From Alaska to the Andes: The Arts of Ancient America." It also builds context with our study of Mesoamerica, and trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, from two years ago. We discussed the Ancient Maya's relationship to chocolate then--our local university's art museum actually has a Maya vessel that still has the dregs of ancient hot chocolate inside!--but we didn't do any hands-on chocolate-making projects during that particular study.

Yay, because it gives us something new to do this year!

This TED-Ed video about the history of chocolate is surprisingly thorough for being less than five minutes long, and since our study of chocolate is mostly contained to the Ancient Maya, it builds context by centering chocolate within world history:

If you'd rather your student read than watch, here's about the same level of content as informational text from the Exploratorium.

For our hands-on project, I bought this Make Your Own Chocolate kit from Glee Gum--the kids and I have actually done this exact same kit before, but since it was a whopping ELEVEN YEARS AGO(?!?!), I figured we might as well give it another go!

The kit is marketed to and suitable for young kids like my own long-ago wee ones, but it's actually quite suitable for this nearly-grown teenager and fully-grown me, as well--as long as you're a beginner chocolatier, I suppose. If you can temper chocolate in your sleep this kit probably wouldn't cover much new ground for you, but the teenager and I didn't find the instructions or the activity babyish or overly simplified. 

And look! We got to taste real cacao beans!


The kit is sort of like a Hello Fresh for chocolate-making, in that it provides the ingredients in the amounts needed, and then you heat and combine them as directed. I especially liked the sticker thermometer for easily taking the temperature of the chocolate. My teenager was more than capable of completing the entire project independently, so all I had to do was hang out, take photos, add weird mix-ins to the candy wrappers, and then enjoy all of the chocolate!


For mix-ins, we tried various combinations of candied ginger, dried unsweetened cherries, and peanut butter. The latter two in the same truffle was my favorite combo.

If you wanted to extend this activity even further, there are a ton of ways you could go:

If you live within driving distance, Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania, would be a fun, educational-ish trip. They mostly want to sell you things, but if you're thoughtful, you can make the things that they sell you work as enrichment. We didn't visit The Hershey Story on our own trip, but it looks much more legitimately educational, ahem.

If your kid gets really into the foodcrafting part of the experience, you can buy more of the same ingredients from the kit and make more chocolate from scratch. Kid-made homemade truffles or chocolate bars would be such a lovely Valentine's Day project or handmade gift!

Another super fun but low-effort chocolate crafting project is coating random foods in chocolate. Chocolate-covered gummy bears ARE surprisingly delicious, as are sour gummy worms, mint leaves, and, um... Ramen noodles.

If you're working with a young kid, and don't want to mess around too much with molten chocolate, you could make them a batch of edible chocolate slime for a fun sensory extension activity. Or make modeling chocolate, which sculpts well and is also delicious!

Here are some books that pair well with making your own chocolate:

  • The Bitter Side of Sweet. Pair this with any chocolate study to bring insight and empathy to the serious problem of child enslavement that plagues modern chocolate production. 
  • The Book of Chocolate. This is a very readable history for apt middle grades and up. 
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's not for the history buff, ahem, but it's perfect if you're doing the kit just to have fun with candy. If you've never read this book aloud to your kids, are you even a homeschooler?
  • Chocolate Fever. Yes, it's a children's book, but it's really, really good! Find an audiobook version that you can listen to while you do some of this food crafting, and you can probably get through the entire book in one session.
  • Making Chocolate: From Beans to Bar to S'more. This book is a completely excessive tome about making chocolate from scratch, but if you've got an older kid who's interested... well, you're homeschoolers for a reason!

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!

Friday, January 26, 2024

I Read Twelve Years a Slave, and Now I'm Going to Go Spit on Edwin Epps' Grave

I read a bunch of these one-star Goodreads reviews to the family, and we were simultaneously horrified and howling with laughter. People are so hilariously awful!


Twelve Years a SlaveTwelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My teenager and I have been listening to this book together as part of her AP US History study, usually listening for an hour or so at a time... but this last time, we listened to two and a half hours together, all the way to the end, in the audiobook equivalent of not being able to put it down because it was so exciting!

The teenager chose this book over both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other possible slave narratives because, frankly, it was the shortest. I'd never read it before, and neither of us have seen the film, so we both came to it fresh. I was interested to see what each of us thought about it, she who's read several children's fictional accounts (shout-out to Addy Walker!) and YA histories about US slavery but nothing this graphic or wrenching, and me who's read fairly widely on the subject, but almost entirely in college classes. We've taken a lot of road trips to Civil War sites, but shamefully few to sites where we could learn about the enslaved



Spoiler Alert: OMG this book is EPIC. It is INCREDIBLE. It is distressing, and action-heavy, and suspenseful, and sad. It has vivid characters who I can't get out of my head, villains whose graves should be spat upon, heroes who should have statues made and scholarships founded in their honor, and victims who bring to life the vile nature of enslavement.

Like, seriously. I was shocked at how good this book is! Because it's for my teenager's history course I was prepared to read it even if it was dry or boring or we just didn't enjoy it--I mean, it's school, that's kind of what it's known for! So I was shocked and thrilled that this book is genuinely good, genuinely exciting, genuinely interesting. I saw some people in other reviews griping about having to learn all about how to pick cotton in the book and they didn't like learning about it and thought it was boring. I mean, though... it's high-key NOT?!? If you don't pick cotton right, or don't pick enough of it, you get your ass kicked! And then get your ass kicked more the next day when you can't pick even that much on account of you're injured from getting your ass kicked! And if you're female, you're also getting raped on the regular, and then when the enslaver's wife finds out that her husband is serially raping you, you get your ass kicked for that, too. That... doesn't feel boring to me. It feels uncomfortable, which I'm guessing is what the negative reviewers are actually not liking about Northup's memoir.



Everyone should read this book, and I'd say that ideally they should read it in high school. It's pretty graphic, but the graphic scenes are terrible in the way that graphic scenes ought to be, in that they're in service of telling a very important story. It's not boring, unless you're just completely uninterested in learning about any type of life different from your own. And it's a living testament to the value of human life and the importance of those who give service to help others.

Under the theme of Some People are Incredible but Other People are Terrible, here is a gross bit of backlash to Northup's memoir: 163 years after the publication of Twelve Years a Slave, a person unaffiliated with any academics at all wrote and published a book (through the small press that she owns and serves as the editor, designer, and proofreader for) entitled 200 Years a Fraud, in which she claims that Northup lied about the events of the book? That does make some of the other one-star reviews that were a lot more racist, revisionist, and conspiracy theory-forward make more sense. Here's an excellent series of rebuttals to that very weird book, including some primary source evidence of its veracity.

I was so invested in this book that after the teenager and I finished it, I went on a deep-dive to learn more about Northup's life afterwards. Unfortunately, by all accounts, Northup did not cope well with his trauma upon his return to freedom. His mother had died during his incarceration, and the seven-year-old daughter he'd left greeted him as a 19-year-old woman who introduced him to the newborn son she'd named "Solomon." Northup spent time as a speaker on the abolitionist circuit, and, of course, helping author his book, and became famous enough that during the Civil War, Union soldiers who traveled through that Louisiana area sometimes sought the plantations were Northup had been held. They sent back news of this in their letters, so happily we know that Patsey, the woman who'd been repeatedly raped, and at least once beaten almost to death, by Epps, had left earlier in the war and so had at least survived long enough to achieve freedom. 

I wish we also knew what happened to the small child Emily, daughter of Eliza, who had also been held with Northup in Washington, DC. She wasn't sold onward to Louisiana but was instead retained to be forced into sex work. 

Census records tell that Northup and his wife often separated, and eventually official record loses track of him entirely. It was rumored that he suffered from alcoholism, and was likely often unhoused, as Anne Northup's obituary refers to him as a "worthless vagabond." I am so sad that this was not a happy ending!

This is a better ending: The Hollywood Reporter collected portraits of 46 of Solomon Northup's direct descendants. I LOVE this!

There are two more happy stories: that of Dr. Sue Eakin, the historian responsible for publishing a new edition of Northup's memoir and bringing his biography into prominent academic light, and that of Samuel Bass, the Canadian who successfully got actionable information to Northup's family and lawyer and was directly responsible for Northup's rescue. When my teenager and I listened to this book together, one of our favorite parts is when Bass is discussing why he'd put himself in so much danger to help Northup. He says that he wants to do this good deed so that later in life he can think about what he did and feel good about it. I mean... FAIR! 

We don't know what happened to Northup at the end of his life, but we know the entire biographies and final resting places of his enslavers (because of COURSE we do, sigh...). You can actually still visit the house that Northup was forced to help build for Edwin Epps--it's currently on the LSUA campus! I high-key love how people are using the memorial page for Epps' Find a Grave entry to roast him, and I'm definitely not NOT going to make a point of looking him up and spitting on his grave if I ever happen to be in the area, although I will probably gag myself trying and then end up barfing all over his grave because spitting is so nasty.

I guess barfing would be better anyway?

My teenager and I listened to this book together as inter-disciplinary work for her AP US History and AP English Literature and Composition studies. For a high school student, there are some excellent extension activities to add more meat and rigor for these studies, in particular. For students who need more practice writing about literature, or in using close reading as evidence for implications, I really like the reading/writing prompts at Edsitement

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries (where I promise I NEVER spit on graves!), handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Monday, October 23, 2023

A Snarky Dracula Literature Study Appropriate for Snarky High Schoolers

Out of all of the hundreds of audiobooks that my kids and I have listened to together, I think Dracula might be our favorite. It's got so much to offer, from its status as a classic of literature to its Gothic horror vibes to its vampire creation mythology to its depiction of some of the best characters ever to grace the pages of a novel, particularly my personal badass heroine, Mina Harker, a woman who can write shorthand, has memorized London's entire train schedule, is a loyal friend and wife, and is the only one of Dracula's victims who lived to tell the tale.

Here are some of the things that my teenagers and I did during our brief Dracula unit study. This was part of their high school English credits, although the cross-curricular art activities were also recorded as part of their Studio Art credits.

Audiobook Narrated by Gildart Jackson


The kids and I loved Gildart Jackson's narration, so much so that we've specifically looked for him when picking other audiobooks (he also does an awesome Frankenstein!). 

We also loved Dracula!

The trick when you read Dracula with kids, or really probably any iconic work of literature, is to remind them that once upon a time, Dracula wasn't iconic--it was just Stoker's newly-published book! There weren't a ton of vampire tropes or cliches to tap into, because he'd mostly just invented them. You literally start the novel thinking that you're going along on one of Jonathan Harker's boring work trips. Probably, you're just going to be reading an epistolary travel novel about the wonders of verdant Transylvania. I love imagining it, how the Victorian reader must have grown ever more suspicious of the mysterious Dracula, how they'd gasp in shock at the big reveal: Dracula is a VAMPYRE!!!


Other semiotically rich elements worth much discussion include everyone's shitty, misogynistic treatment of Mina, how even with her misogynistic depiction Mina is still the most badass of all the Dracula characters (how/why did Stoker write her to be completely disregarded but also the most efficient, practical, and intelligent?!? Did he do it on purpose or by accident?), and the absolutely hilariously bonkers depiction of Quincy, the "American." Like, he literally carries a Bowie knife--had Stoker ever seen one of those to know how impractical that is? The kids and I howled with laughter every time he had a line of dialogue.

To make some comparative literature analyses, pair with any other vampire novel ever written. Excerpts from the Twilight novels are fun because they're just so corny, or you could do something well-written like Interview with the Vampire or 'Salem's Lot. I'm currently reading The Historian, and I am VERY into it! For a quicker project, go for a Goosebumps book or even a picture book, or do a sub-genre like paranormal romance with Dead Until Dark. So many semiotically rich vampires!

1931 Dracula Film

This first (and best!) Dracula film has a lot to add to the study, and everything about it is ICONIC. 

I mean, come on: Bela Lugosi? Iconic!

This 1931 movie introduced conceits that you don't even realize are conceits, they're so ingrained. The "Transylvanian" dialect that Dracula speaks in? That's from here! Turning into a bat that talks in squeaks, and the vampire's subjects can understand those squeaks? Yep, that's from here, too. It's super funny to watch this film, then turn on just, like, the first ten minutes of Hotel Transylvania. 

For a deeper analysis, pair with any vampire movie that came afterwards. We watched The Hunger for a recent Family Movie Night, because David Bowie, and it had some interesting things to say about age, sexuality, and the power dynamics of romantic love. Funnily enough, Dracula ALSO has interesting things to say about age, sexuality, and the power dynamics of romantic love!

Art Experiences

I used to get the Dover Publications free samples weekly, and the kids LOVED them! These Dracula paper dolls from Dover are a good inspiration for artistic response, because kids can then create the costumes for them. They can go old-school vampire tropes, or Victorian fashions, or make modern reimaginings of the novel's characters. I want to see Mina Harker as a steampunk heroine!

My younger teenager is very into the art of the book, so I've been encouraging her to create book cover images and design book jackets for the books we read together. You can actually get those printed to fit your favorite books, you know!


Artistic kids who want to use the book for more cross-curricular explorations can also illustrate memorable scenes or quotations. If they need some inspiration, check out my favorite edition of Dracula, this one illustrated by Edward Gorey (there's also an Edward Gorey Dracula toy theater that I covet). Even kids who don't see themselves as super artistic can create memes; memes are one of my favorite student creations, because kids love them, they get to show off how witty and sarcastic they are, and the most successful memes show natural evidence of a sophisticated understanding of the book.

Place-based Studies

I'm not very excited about Romania or Bran Castle when it comes to a Dracula study, because I'm not convinced that Bram Stoker even knew of those places, or of Vlad the Impaler. He liked the name "Dracula" when he read it somewhere, and his inspiration for the novel was Whitby, England. We didn't visit there when we went to England this summer, but we DID make a point of collecting ourselves some Gothic vibes. Next time I visit England, which I hope will be soon, I want to go north and see Whitby!

But I mean, you know, if I was IN Romania I'd definitely go to all the Vlad the Impaler sites.

To add rigor and more composition practice to any of these activities, just tack on a writing assignment! Write an opinion piece about Stoker's depiction of one of these now-iconic characters. Write a compare/contrast essay with another vampire book or film. Write Dracula fanfiction that changes the ending or the setting or a key plot detail. Write a research paper on the history of the vampire myth, or Gothic horror, or Whitby Abbey. Write an essay explaining your artistic process and decision-making when creating the book cover or illustrations. Create a travel brochure for Dracula's Transylvania. There are so many ways to make high schoolers suffer!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, confrontations with gross men, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Heaven Will Be an Eternal Game of Bananagrams

 

There's this unschooling tactic called "strewing" that I started to follow when the kids were little. Basically, if there's a material you'd like a kid to explore, you don't hand it to the kid, or direct the kid to it--instead, you just leave it temptingly out on a shelf or a table for them to discover for themselves. And it's supposed to be okay if it takes days, weeks, even months for them to pick up that material, because when they do, it will be self-directed and self-motivated, and following their interests is how kids best learn.

Until I really discovered the true dimensions of our local university's library (Hint: filtering for Three-Dimensional, Mixed-Media gets you all the puzzles and toys and manipulatives!), this was mostly just a way for me to waste my homeschool budget on stuff the kids didn't touch. I mean, sure, they became obsessed with the Geomags and the Kapla blocks, eventually they spent entire weeks with the Perler beads and the Sculpey clay, listened to so many books on cassette tapes that I worried they would never do anything else, but the 3D pen? Nope. Nope to the Zometools for free play. Nope to the crystal growing set and the build-your-own maze set and the Snap Circuits and the Turing Tumble and the balloon animals kit and probably over a thousand dollars more of awesome kid crap over the years that I would have given a year off my life to have played with when I was their ages, ahem.

Anyway, became much cheaper to strew when what I strewed came from my local university's library, and since then, over the years, we've had logic puzzles and board games and STEM toys and math manipulatives and scientific instruments all enticingly placed on our family room bookshelves ready to be explored and easy to return.

Thanks to the library's infinite renewals, I can't even tell you how long we've had Bananagrams. I think we got it around the time we also got the giant poster of the Greek mythology family tree and the giant map of the Moon, and those have both gone back to the library, but Senet and the leaf identification kit are also still here, so maybe it hasn't been too ridiculously long. Although I'm pretty sure several sets of tessellation puzzles have come and gone in that time, as have the Proofs of Pythagoras kit and the French vocabulary flash cards, sooo...

Now that the kids are grown or nearly grown, though, it turns out that the person I'm maybe actually strewing for is myself. I was wandering around the family room the other day, aimlessly tidying while the teenager and I listened to The Haunting of Hill House (it's not translating as well as I'd hoped to audiobook; we're going to finish it, but we don't love it, whereas I LOVED this book when I read it a couple of Halloweens ago), when I noticed, for the first time in ages, the Bananagrams game sitting on the shelves where we keep our library materials, and thought, "Huh. I should play that and see if it's fun."

So I rallied the teenager, and we did play it:


And it IS fun!

You know how Scrabble is generally really fun, but it's also boring waiting for other people to take their turns, and it's terrible when you have a terrific plan for an awesome word to play but before you can do it another person takes your spot?


Bananagrams solves ALL of that. There is never any downtime. You make your own crossword grid that's all for you, so nobody can ever mess it up, and when you see a better play you can rearrange your own crossword however you like:

Teenager peeled an "I" and decided to turn "DOPE" and "DAMN" into "DOPAMINE." 

So, everyone draws the same number of letter tiles (every time I've played it's been with 2 or 3 players, and we always draw 21 tiles), and you each work on your own individual crossword grid.

Matt, our college student home for Fall Break, and I are playing at the kitchen table on a Saturday night, listening to the drive-in's broadcast of the Taylor Swift concert like a good old-timey family.

When you've all of your own letters in your own crossword, you say "Peel," and everyone takes a new tile from the pile and continues playing.


Sometimes you get a new tile and it's like an S or something, so you can just pop it onto the end of a noun. But sometimes you get a Q and you realize that your only U is already busy, so you have to disassemble half your grid to get it back and then figure out how to rebuild while continuing to take a new tile every time someone else says "Peel."


The game continues that way, with occasional breaks to look weird words up as a family or neg someone else's word choice or lore dump about Scrabble games of old, etc., until there are fewer tiles left in the pile than there are players. At that point, we declare that the next person to use up all their letters wins, and then we get in everyone else's business to "help" them finish their own crosswords, but you could also go by Scrabble points.

I think you could also play Bananagrams as a solitaire game, going by how much fun the teenager and I had one time simply turning all our tiles face-up and using them all to make one giant grid. We started off just trying to build the most emotionally unhealthy words we could, as a "joke," so maybe it's also a little bit therapeutic, as well!


Or you could just build words representing the biggest thing on your mind these days...


I'm now officially on thrift store/garage sale lookout for a set of my very own, although I'm also toying with the idea of DIYing a set. They're literally just letter tiles in a zippered bag, and the only requirements are that the letter tiles have enough chonk to be able to pick them up easily, and that they have two sides for facing them up or down.

I think it would be fun to take a set of blank wooden tiles and handpaint each one, maybe with little background decorations like an illuminated manuscript. Think how pretty your crossword grid would be!

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

I Read The Chalice of the Gods, Because the Scariest Adventure in a Teenager's Life is Applying to College



The Chalice of the Gods (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #6)The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When my kid and I read The Lightning Thief, she was ten, and Percy was twelve.

Last week, we each read this latest book in the series. Now, my kid is seventeen, and so is Percy.

Reading this latest adventure of my kid’s all-time favorite book character, the character she’s stayed loyal to even as she’s grown up, is bittersweet as hell, just like everything else about this last year at home before college. What happened to that little girl who wore an orange Camp Half-Blood hoodie (with "Daughter of Apollo" printed on the back) and wielded a wooden sword and a cardboard Spartan shield that she'd painted a Pegasus on? Where is the kid who made endless batches of slime one summer while listening to The Demigod Files on repeat on my old CD player? Could I please have another day with that small daughter who traipsed around Greece with her American Girl doll, petting feral cats and lighting Olympic flames?


Just like Percy, my own little demigod is almost all grown up.

I am not mad, then, that this particular Percy adventure is lighter fare than the usual magical mayhem he gets himself into. In this book, Percy's big adventure is obtaining one of the three godly college recommendations that he needs to be accepted to his dream school of New Rome University. In order to obtain a recommendation, he has to go on a quest. It's demanding and complicated, there are snakes, but it's no Battle of the Labyrinth, thank goodness. My gods, can you even imagine if my kid’s favorite book character who happens to be her exact same age in this book and is also going through college application bureaucratic nonsense just like her had DIED (RIP Jason)?!? Or was betrayed by a loved one or ended the book on the verge of an apocalyptic war or got turned into a tree or was the subject of an awful prophecy, etc.?

Ugh, just parenting/being a kid in their Senior year of high school is hard enough, thank you.

So, the plotline of this Percy Jackson book, and the next two, may feel trivial to many readers, but I, for one, find it comforting and validating that the mythology is barely metaphorical here, and instead, Percy’s difficult adventures are quite like the difficult Senior year adventures of many American kids. Asking for recommendations IS hard! Coming to terms with growing old(er) is hard! Preparing to leave your best friend is hard! Realizing that you’re going to miss a lot of big moments with your family in the coming years is hard! Moving away from young siblings is hard!

But to tangentially speak about the actual book for a moment, instead of just my own personal feelings ABOUT the book, I am thrilled to report that, unlike the hot mess that was The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure, The Chalice of the Gods is, happily, good! It felt like a way quicker read than what I remember from my other Percy Jackson adventures, but maybe that’s just because it was fast-paced throughout. I learned a couple of new gods, which is always fun, and enjoyed the deep cuts and callbacks to other Percy adventures.

The only bummer to the book is that I feel like we’re all just meant to ignore the fact that Ganymede is an honest-to-Zeus human trafficking victim. It’s very disturbing, and I didn’t really know what to make of the tone there. Lighthearted-esque, but clearly Ganymede is being held against his will. Zeus has one line of dialogue about Ganymede that’s not sexually explicit but you know what he means, and what he means is gross. Also, Ganymede is canonically a CHILD! He’s Percy’s age, if he’s even that old! Which means that he’s my kid’s age! I’m glad he got his cup back, but he’s still enslaved to his abuser, sooo...

Deeply troubling Zeus sex crimes aside, The Chalice of the Gods is beautiful and sweet, and I loved it. I’d have no idea what was happening or why if I came in cold, but if you read and loved the previous Percy Jackson books, surely you’ll love this one, too.

As for the rest of Senior year… well, my own kid is planning a completely unironic Percy Jackson-themed set of Senior photos, complete with her Camp Half-Blood hoodie, her sister’s Ren Faire sword, and a post-production chimera or two created by her graphic designer father. Over Christmas, she and I plan to buy ourselves a month of Disney+ so we can unironically watch the Lightning Thief reboot. And she has GOT to get her own set of college recommendations completed, even though at the moment she’s acting like this is a feat much more challenging than wrestling the god of old age.

When she and I read the next book in the series, she will, for the first time, be older than Percy. Stay tuned for my whole other set of tears on that day!  

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Thursday, October 12, 2023

My Girl Scout Troop Earned the Ambassador Photographer Badge on an Overnight Trip to Cincinnati

 

And we had such a fun time!

Back when my multi-level Girl Scout troop was younger and very actively earning lots and lots of badges, we followed the philosophy that not every activity got you a badge. Sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Brownies earned badges for, and sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Juniors earned badges for. It was always fun regardless, and there were always lots more chances to earn badges later.

I do NOT follow that philosophy with my older multi-level Girl Scout troop. Up until her graduation, my now-college kid was still pretty active in earning badges independently, but the rest of the troop isn't interested in badge-earning unless it's something that we all do together. And considering that we only meet once a month or so, and many of those meetings are for travel planning or service projects or day trips or Higher Award stuff, not badge-earning, I really want to make our few and far-between badge-earning opportunities count for everyone.

So on this overnight trip to Cincinnati, the Ambassadors AND the Seniors all earned the Ambassador Photographer badge (when we earn a Senior badge together, I find an equivalent badge, whether it's official, retired, or "Council's Own," for the Ambassadors to earn). I rewrote the badge activities to better support the activities we'd planned and the skills the kids would get the most enjoyment out of learning, and off we went!

Step 1: Explore photography resources.


The kids were NOT super excited when, standing in our meet-up spot of the grocery store parking lot at the crack of dawn, just after throwing all their gear into the chaperone cars and just before getting themselves settled in and falling asleep for the two-hour drive, I pulled a GIANT stack of photography resource books out of a tote bag and divvied them up. 

Just a little light reading for the trip to Cincinnati!

These were all library books, and I tried very hard to choose ones that would be interesting to the kids, so I don't think it was too tough of an ordeal to have to endure. Here are the books we explored:


The goals were to see plenty of beautiful photos on a variety of topics, to build context for the history of photography, to get curious about various photographic techniques, and to be inspired to take their own beautiful photographs!

Step 2: Take animal/nature photographs.



The Cincinnati Zoo was the perfect place to practice taking nature photographs! 

The kids who are already well-practiced in photography concentrated on taking interesting photos from interesting angles, but most of the troop really just seems to use their smartphone cameras to take pics of their friends and their cats, so they concentrated on taking well-composed, well-focused photos. It's more difficult than you might think to take a sharp photo of a far-away animal!


While at the zoo, one of my Girl Scouts borrowed my DSLR and took what is possibly my all-time favorite photo of me:


Just me hanging out in the turtle enclosure with my turtle pal!

Step 3: Take city/architecture photographs.




Cincinnati is MUCH bigger than our pokey little college town, and there were lots of interesting things to photograph as we walked around on our own and with our food tour. The nice thing about architecture is that it stands still for you, so all the kids could concentrate on sharp focus and interesting framing.

I like how my college kid, now official Troop Helper to our troop, picked this interesting angle for her shot:


Step 4: Take food photographs.



Is there a more important skill in today's society than that of taking beautiful photos of your food?

We upped our food photo skills on a guided food tour through downtown and Findlay Market, concentrating on taking appetizing, Instagram-able photographs of all the various small plate items we were served:


My own photography was helped by the fact that I quickly got WAY too full to actually eat all the delicious food I was served!

Step 5: Take river/bridge photographs.



At the edge of downtown Cincinnati, there's a pedestrian suspension bridge that crosses the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky. We walked it as a troop, taking lovely photos of the vista across the river and of the bridge, itself.

I don't think that I tend to take very nice vista photos, a deficit that I prefer to blame on my basic kit lens:


I found a weird sticker of a camel to photograph, though!


One of my Girl Scouts entered a photo contest using a photo that she took on this bridge, and it looks freaking amazing, all crisp lines and saturated colors and interesting details. You will not be surprised to learn that she won first place in her category with that photo!

Step 6: Embellish/display photos.


Yes, there are only supposed to be five steps to earn a contemporary Girl Scout badge, so just call this my insurance that even if a kid skived off of a step, she'd still do enough work to fully earn the badge.

Besides, we had a whole evening in our Airbnb to hang out, and there's nothing better when you're hanging out with your buddies than doing lots of craft projects!

My co-leader and I brought all the supplies that the kids needed to create photo stickers and magnets and embroidery floss-wrapped Mason jar lid photo ornaments. It was my excuse to get even more use out of my sticker maker!


Because we obviously wouldn't have our photos from the trip to work with yet (I've been eyeing portable photo printers but I just can't convince myself to pull the trigger on one), I'd asked the kids to upload 6-12 previously-taken photos to a shared Google Drive, then I got them printed and brought them with me to the Airbnb. 

The kids did a lot of baking and chatting and watching TV and playing games and snacking, but they still managed to find time to make themselves stickers and magnets and Mason jar lid ornaments!


If we'd had more time to play around with this badge, I would have loved to have the kids collaborate on a photo book of our Cincinnati trip. I love the idea of them incorporating all of their photos together to make one souvenir album, and I think something like that would be a sweet memento. But these big kids are busy, and after we got home from our trip they had to move onto all of their schoolwork and college applications and extracurriculars and part-time job. Instead, I encouraged everyone to upload their photos to our Shared Google folder so we could all see all the beautiful photos everyone took on our overnight adventure to Cincinnati!

Here are some more photo display and embellishment ideas that I have my eye on for future projects: