Virtual friends, virtual art: Video games for social skills and creativity

The adults in our family do all of our work – and most of our recreation – via laptop and phone.

My 80-year-old mom keeps up with friends and reading via her iPad.

While we don’t have the latest and greatest video-game systems, technology and especially gaming are a huge part of our lives. Is it any surprise that they’re a major part of our teenage daughter’s homeschooling experience as well?

We’re not just talking the standard “educational games” here. We firmly believe learning happens all the time, and we’ve had chances to discuss all sorts of concepts in popular games like the Assassin’s Creed series, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and more. We also believe in the value of apps for learning, in a traditional educational sense and beyond.

That’s why I took part in the iHomeschool Network’s “5 days of…” Hopscotch series with a look at 5 days of video-game learning.

Today, we’re talking about how some of our favorite video games have helped Ashar develop her social skills – and her creativity.

Video games for social skills and creativity

Maybe these two topics aren’t the first two you’d group together. They weren’t for me – until I started making two separate lists and realized that they overlapped ENTIRELY.

Disclosure: This post has some affiliate links. 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!

The interesting thing is, these are two areas we were told that many kids with Asperger’s (like Sarah) struggle with – social skills, and playing creatively. And at times, I see it. But other times, I don’t – like when Ashar shows me the way she “saved a tree” in Minecraft by putting walls around it, or writes nice notes for her virtual Moshi Monsters friends. And that, to me, is so much of why we value video games as a tool in our learning arsenal – because they are great ways to show off the best parts of Sarah!

Minecraft – I could write a book on this, Ashar’s new favorite game, which basically involves placing various material blocks to “craft” or make things. She has the Pocket edition for her phone, and we’re planning to buy the PC edition next week. The two operate similarly, but there’s one big difference – you can play the PC one with friends on a server, and the Pocket one is all individual. Ashar’s favorite thing to do is build in “creative” mode, where you just get unlimited materials and do virtual construction. In “survivor” mode, there are bad guys to avoid, and you have to work for the materials, so she only does that if she’s really feeling up for a challenge! She and her friends frequently share YouTube videos of how to build different things, and it’s been great to watch Ashar figuring out how to use various materials to make the things she wants! (And to see her and a friend at 4H this week excitedly saying, “Did you see the alien I made? Did you see the castle?”) The alien, by the way, is what’s pictured here. He’s crafted from a tree!
Moshi Monsters – This was one of the earliest web-based games Ashar started playing, and she still spends a lot of time on it. (It’s not just web-based; there are Moshi-themed Nintendo DS games as well, and possibly some for other platforms!) You have a monster. He plays mini-games, you can decorate his house, and you can make friends with other people’s monsters. Sounds simple, but amazingly, it’s home of a TON of amazing games inside, including one we’ll talk about later in this week’s series that’s – gasp – math-themed. The coolest thing here is how Ashar has friends who she gets together and plays with, while doing things like “creating” or “growing” Mooshlings, which are little pets for the monsters.
Webkinz – Another web-based game based on actual stuffed animals that come with codes to unlock their virtual counterparts. At last count, Ashar had almost 50 of them, and it’s been amazing to see her build the virtual world that they live in! She then gets out old shoeboxes and things and makes them “real-life” rooms to match, which is super-neat! Much like with Moshi Monsters, in addition to the creative play, this game has a lot of actual educational mini-games inside it!
Art Academy 3DS – This is on Ashar’s “wish list,” and she can’t wait to get it. It is a full drawing tutorial inside a 3DS game! We’ve been playing the demo version in the store and we can’t wait until we get the real thing.
Camera and sound recorder on 3DS – Yet another unexpected win for creativity: Ashar, who has a digital camera, loves the camera on her 3DS because she can then edit the pictures right on screen. You can even add sound and make them look 3D! She also likes recording sounds – like our dog barking – and editing them. She’s found out that speeding it up makes him sound like a little dog, and slowing it down… well, our dog can’t possibly sound any bigger, but she got the idea that if he COULD, he would with the sound slow!

I feel like our story with social and creative gaming is just beginning, despite all these favorites. I think it’s something that kids of any age can appreciate, but the older Ashar gets, the more she’s really digging into and embracing the idea of virtually hanging out with her friends – creating worlds full of stuff they love and challenging each other to be even more creative!

The rest of the series

Sunday: Why “All my kids want to do is play video games!” isn’t such a bad thing (introduction)
Today: Virtual friends, virtual art: Video games for social skills and creativity
Tuesday: Digital currency: Video games for math
Wednesday: Pixels and punctuation: Video games for writing and spelling
Thursday: Bringing the past to life: Video games for history and geography
Friday: Our fitness is pretty funny-looking: Video games for physical education

You can read all the posts here!

More five-day fun

This post is part of the iHomeschool network’s January 2013 “5 days of…” Hopscotch series.

You can see how some of my fellow bloggers are spending their five days here.

We’re sharing everything from tips and tricks for getting out of debt to using posterboard in your homeschool, from catapults to eating whole foods.

We sure are an eclectic group – I hope you’ll check out more!

And if you’re into the things we do in our family homeschool, check out my previous “5 days of…” series, 5 days of real-world math.

13 Jan

All my kids want to do is play video games – and that’s not bad

5 Days of Video Game Learning series introduction - All My Kids Want to Do Is Play Video Games isn't a bad thing

Have you ever heard “All my kids want to do is play video games” phrased as a complaint? Well, the adults in our family do all of our work – and most of our recreation – via laptop and phone.

My 80-something-year-old mom keeps up with friends and reading via her iPad.

That’s why I took part in the iHomeschool Network’s “5 days of…” Hopscotch series with a look at 5 days of video-game learning.

This series is for you if…

You don’t limit your kids’ screen time. We don’t limit Ashar’s, other than as part of some general family “things,” like not using our phones during dinner, that we all do. This has opened us up to a lot of criticism, and I’m sure if you’re a non-limit family, you’ve gotten that too. I’ll share some discussion points that worked to reduce that for us, and hopefully you’ll find those helpful as well.

You DO limit your kids’ screen time. We don’t, but that’s OK! I told my friend Judy in a comment the other week that our decision is the right one for our family right now. If I had 5 kids? If Ashar were 7? If I didn’t need to be on my computer 10 hours a day to do my various jobs? I don’t know. If you do have limits, though, I encourage you to take them out every so often and re-evaluate. Is what you’re doing still working for your family? Do age, interest or social needs change them? I hope this series will help you ask – and answer – those questions.

You’re trying to decide if you should limit your kids’ screen time, but aren’t sure what makes the most sense. Please, whatever you do, don’t set different limits for “educational” and “non-educational” games. That’s about the only thing I have a hard time supporting. But, as I mentioned, we’ll walk through the ways video games have helped us on our homeschooling journey, and whatever limits (or not) you end up with, you’ll be able to see what good stuff is coming from the screen time you allow!

What we’ll talk about

Today: Why “All my kids want to do is play video games!” isn’t such a bad thing (introduction)
Monday: Virtual friends, virtual art: Video games for social skills and creativity
Tuesday: Digital currency: Video games for math
Wednesday: Pixels and punctuation: Video games for writing and spelling
Thursday: Bringing the past to life: Video games for history and geography
Friday: Our fitness is pretty funny-looking: Video games for physical education

You can read all the posts here!

How to use this series to level up your homeschool

If you think, “All my kids would do is play video games!” when you hear someone talk about unschooling and child-led learning, you’re not alone.

When we talk about our unschooling approach, in which Ashar is not “required” by us to do anything, but rather we help her discover the things she’s most interested in, this is the response we most often hear.

It might be true. But from talking with unschoolers (and relaxed homeschoolers) across the country, I find that it’s generally not.

If I ignored my daughter for 18 hours straight, she would probably play video games or apps for about 10 of them. In good news, I don’t (ignore her, that is), and if you’re interested in reading this homeschooling blog, you probably aren’t the type to ignore your kids.

When you’re engaged as a family, no one routinely plays video games for 10 hours or more straight. Honest.

You want video games to be a tool in your arsenal, not a master. That’s my end goal for this series.

Maybe your kids have a half-hour a day of screen time. Maybe there are days where they’re in front of a device of some sort for 8 hours. Either way, that time is important.

By Friday, I’m hoping to give you several concrete ways to be intentional and purposeful about video games in your family – and share some of the awesome benefits we’ve seen in our own family’s learning journey.

That’s how you’ll level up your family’s homeschool – through this or any other series. By thinking about what your needs are, by picking the parts that work for you, and by being willing to let go of whatever isn’t working.

I can’t wait to help you “level up” like that!

More five-day fun

This post is part of the iHomeschool network’s January 2013 “5 days of…” Hopscotch series.

You can see how some of my fellow bloggers are spending their five days here.

We’re sharing everything from tips and tricks for getting out of debt to using posterboard in your homeschool, from catapults to eating whole foods.

We sure are an eclectic group – I hope you’ll check out more!

And if you’re into the things we do in our family homeschool, check out my previous “5 days of…” series, 5 days of real-world math.

07 Jan

To the moon and back: Best resources for space and solar-system study

Solar system and space unit study guide for homeschoolers and unschoolers

One of the “learning kicks” that kept Ashar’s interest for a year or more was outer space.

Ashar’s been a longtime Star Wars fan (and recently became interested in Star Trek). Then, when he caught a clip from the series “From the Earth to the Moon” at an event we attended, he started wanting to know more and more about lunar exploration.

So on one of our trips to the library, we checked out a Neil Armstrong biography and read it cover-to-cover together. That was over the span of a couple months, but Ashar’s interest didn’t wane.

Disclosure: This post has some affiliate links. 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!

So we started digging around for more solar system stuff, but Ashar kept beating us to the punch! The Mars Rover Curiosity’s trip was news to me – but not to Ashar, who’d started following the rover on Twitter. The same was true for the SpaceX Dragon mission – Ashar was the one who told me about it!

But with some help from Homeschool AV Guy, aka Ashar’s awesome dad, Chris, we found some great space resources, especially related to the U.S. moon missions.

Here’s a look at some of the many highlights of our study so far. I hope this will prove a great starting point – or diving-deeper point – for anyone interested in learning more about our solar system!

Books

Neil Armstrong (Sterling Biography series) – This was the book that started it all for us! It’s a great read for anywhere from a third-grade through an eighth-grade level.
Space: A Visual Encyclopedia – This is one of the DK Books series, and it’s great for browsing and researching.
13 Planets: The Latest View of the Solar System – A National Geographic title, which means of course Ashar loves it!
Solar System: A Visual Exploration of All the Planets, Moons and Other Heavenly Bodies that Orbit Our Sun – I’d actually browsed through another book in this series about the periodic table of elements, and this one looks even cooler. The imagery includes both photographs and computer simulations and is phenomenal. Kids will love it, and there’s detailed info for adults or older students to read.
There’s No Place Like Space! – Great for younger kids, this is a factual book from the Cat in the Hat Learning Library series.
Midnight on the Moon – This fictional book is part of the incredibly educational Magic Tree House Series (it’s Book 8, if you’re checking your library shelves). Accompanying it is Magic Tree House Fact Tracker: Space, a nonfiction companion. I can’t say enough about this series, which Ashar loved when he was younger!
This Place Has No Atmosphere by Paula Danziger – I read this fiction book when I was about middle-school age, and recently reread it. It’s a fascinating middle-grade or even high-school read – and surprisingly informative about what life might be like on the moon in the future!
Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography, Magnificent Desolation – This is a book more geared toward adults or older teens. It’s a fascinating read that I really enjoyed, more about Aldrin’s life AFTER the moon.

Movies/TV

From the Earth to the Moon – This is the HBO miniseries documenting the U.S. missions into space and particularly those surrounding the moon landings. It is phenomenal. Tom Hanks is executive producer and episode-intro narrator. (Also interesting: The episode intro for each includes audio of John F. Kennedy’s speech Sept. 12, 1962 speech promising we will go to the moon in that decade, which Ashar absolutely loves and has memorized parts of.)
Apollo 13 – I had never seen this from start to finish, believe it or not, but I’m incredibly glad I did. While there are a few notable liberties – like, you know, “Houston, we have a problem,” this is pretty close to the story of what actually happened. Watching this and then watching the accompanying episode of From the Earth to the Moon was a neat study in comparisons.
The Right Stuff – This film is based upon the first astronauts, the Mercury Seven team (including Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton and John Glenn). We’re slated to watch this next!
In the Shadow of the Moon – We picked up a copy of this incredibly cheaply at a book and movie outlet on our Rehoboth Beach vacation. It includes interviews with most of the astronauts who walked on the moon, though notably not Neil Armstrong. Seeing these men later in life is fascinating in its own right!
For All Mankind – This film from the Criterion series is a documentary about all 24 men ever to land on the moon, told in their own voices. We haven’t watched this yet, but Chris raves about it and it’s in our queue!
Cosmos – This is the Carl Sagan miniseries originally broadcast on PBS, probably one of the most noted pieces of space television ever aired.
The Planets – This is one of the BBC Films documentary series, and if you’ve never seen those, you’re missing out. We have several of their box sets and they’re fantastic; this one included.
A Trip to the Moon – This early science-fiction silent film imaged what it would be like to travel from the earth to the moon. Amazing to compare what was and wasn’t accurate!
Spacecraft Films – Here, you can literally get every minute of footage taken on the various space missions in DVD form here. GREAT for aficionados!

Toys and games

Ashar is saving up to try to buy some of the larger space Lego sets. Some of his favorites:

Lego Shuttle Expedition
Lego Space Center
Lego Education Space and Airport Set
Lego Space Shuttle
Lego Space Moon Buggy (This one wins the “in our price range” award, and in fact we have a couple!)

Another just-for-fun favorite has been I Spy Universe, a Nintendo DS game Ashar bought when he first got his 3DS.

Music

Many thanks to my friends on Facebook for a TON of great suggestions here! NOT all of these are appropriate for all ages, though Ashar has heard them all. Some are loosely about space, some use space as a metaphor for other topics, and some are factually-based “learning songs.” If you have 45 minutes or so, I really do recommend listening to the Holst orchestral suite, as that’s one I played several movements from in high school band and it really does speak to you about the nature of each planet as you hear them.

You might also like this 15-minute music lesson on music inspired by outer space, which offers a really cool look at a huge variety of space-related music!

Places to visit

NASA’s Wallops Island flight facility – You might remember we almost sort of visited this when we went to Chincoteague, Virginia, this summer. We hope to return in the spring for a tour! As I mentioned in that post, we’d found a lot of info on chances to watch rocket launches there.
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum – This was a big part of our summer visit to Washington, D.C. Even if you can’t go in person (and I highly recommend it; admission is free), there are great online tours via the website.
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport – We didn’t get to see this on our D.C. trip, unfortunately, but it is actually home to some of the larger space vehicles that don’t fit in the main collection. We’re planning to go back for this one!
Locations of the four decomissioned space shuttles – If you’re able to go to California, New York or Florida, you can see space shuttles Endeavor, Enterprise and Atlantis respectively. Space Shuttle Discovery is now at the Udvar-Hazy Center! (Each of those other locations has an accompanying space museum, not the least of which is the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Those are probably awesome, but I can’t speak to them as I’m more of an East Coaster!)

NASA Wallops Island Flight Facility

Online resources

Constellation Study Free Printables – Christine Zell from This Bit of Life has put together a super-cool set of resources for studying constellations in particular, including printable cards that can be used for identification, for fact-of-the-day reading or as flashcards!
Astronomy Calendar Connections – This resource over at 1+1+1+1 is something we used when Ashar was in middle school and loved. A fact a day about space!
How far away is the moon? This is a Veritasium video – an awesome science series!
Star size comparison – This video shows how our sun ranks among other celestial bodies and is pretty amazing.
Several space unit study boards on Pinterest – There are literally hundreds of great ideas here; I could spend all day sharing just those.
NASA eBook features – Generally designed for older students or adults, these are digital guides published by NASA on everything from shuttle re-entry to the development of pressurized space suits. They’re academic-style treatises, but incredible information from the original source.
NASA education home page – This includes a catalog of resources for educators, from CDs to DVDs and more.
The Project Apollo archive – Tons of photos and more here from the Apollo space missions.
Mars Curiosity Rover home page – This whole site is great, but their resources for students include a lot of especially cool things, like Rover free printables and help for research reports.
All about Pennsylvanian Pete Conrad – My friend and fellow Pennsylvania resident Judy shares a great look at this Apollo astronaut’s life and some facts I didn’t know about his struggles with dyslexia.

Have you studied outer space? Any ideas for good resources? Please comment and share; I’d love to add them to the list!

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 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’ve also been doing a loose series of posts good for unit studies. An earlier post in that series shared our favorite Phantom of the Opera learning resources!

03 Jan

What is it like to live with sensory processing disorder?

As I revisited our top 10 posts on this blog from 2012, I stopped and reread a lot of them. It’s kind of like past me giving advice to current me, which is cool.

One that really caught my attention again was 5 ways to constructively deal with your kids’ mood swings. I mentioned in the introduction to that post that I don’t often mention that Ashar lives with Asperger’s, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

This isn’t putting my head in the sand – we spent years “getting” those labels and, sadly, they’re not things that go away or get cured. But they are things that can be mitigated, and that’s been the essence of our homeschooling journey: Find ways to limit the things that cause a problem, and find ways to quickly nip rising problems in the bud.

I’ve read some great things recently by other bloggers on how to plan your homeschool for your special-needs student, and how to deal with holiday stress when you have a child with stress-related or stress-exacerbated challenges.

It’s hard for me to explain how hard the holidays are for us, specifically as it relates to sensory challenges. Since we returned home from the last of our Christmas celebrations, Ashar has slept 12 to 14 hours a night, and she’s STILL not back on a moderately even keel. (Excessive sleep is a major sensory-defense response.) She’s bitten her fingernails to the point that the nails are almost missing and they’re bloody and scabbed. (That’s a common OCD response to stress, which is in turn a common Asperger’s trait.)

Sleeping in other beds, sitting on other sofas, eating other foods, using different bathrooms… these are things you take for granted when you travel for the holidays. In our case, we do as much as possible of our celebration at places Ashar spends a lot of time – usually our house, but also at her Nana’s house and my best friend’s house, where she routinely goes and even stays overnight. The more familiar the place, and the closer it is to “home,” the more likely it is for Ashar to be able to process the events.

Travel happens. (Heck, we took a 2007 driving road trip looping a total of 10,000 miles across the United States, though that was before we knew all of what we do now!) But when we combine traveling, new “stuff” (like Christmas toys and clothes), colder weather (also a sensory “ick” for Sarah) and changes in routine, like getting up at different times, well… wow.

We don’t have the types of meltdowns we used to, but the signs are there if you know what to look for.

So our past few days have been as “NOTHING” as possible. We went to see the Hobbit, which Ashar was desperate to see – but we went during the New Year’s Eve overnight showing where there was no one else in the theater, save 3 quiet older teens. She slept in til 3 p.m. one day – and we were purposely quiet to avoid waking her. She hasn’t gotten dressed some days, or showered in… well, let’s not talk about that amount of time – that’s a subject for another post.

And it reminds me of this video, which I’d saved almost two months ago and wanted to share.

Please take the time to watch this – with the sound on, and as loud as you possibly can stand it and then some – and to read the accompanying NPR blog post, Mugged By Sound, Rescued by a Waitress.

This is our life when SPD overwhelms it. And I am so thankful to this video for showing everyone a glimpse at what that’s like.

02 Jan

Looking back at my first year as a homeschool blogger

I actually created my original homeschooling/unschooling blog, Our School at Home, on the day we filed our homeschooling paperwork: Feb. 29, 2012.

My intent was to make notes about what we were doing so that portfolio time was easier, and hopefully keep friends and family members up-to-date on this new life change with occasional photos and updates.

I’m not good at doing things a little bit. Maybe because I blog professionally (it’s the key part of both of my paying jobs), I wasn’t content with, “Oh, here’s a basic template and here’s a post.” I kept tweaking… reading other homeschooling blogs for ideas… working on graphics for posts…

And somewhere along the way, I made friends. I found a community of people who really “get” what it is that matters to our family, and how we believe learning happens.

And, bit by bit, I carved out my own spot, here, as a voice in this awesome community of homeschoolers online. I joined the iHomeschool Network. The local newspaper where I work part-time started including posts of mine about homeschooling in print and online.

It’s been a hectic year in so many ways, and I truly didn’t expect to add “managing a blog I’m not paid to manage” as part of my task list. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Today, I’d like to look back at some of my most popular posts in the past year, and look ahead at some ideas I have for the coming one! (Please note that these all originally appeared on a blog called Our School at Home, but everything there and then some has moved over here to Unschool RULES now, and that domain is now owned by a totally different homeschooling family with a very different style!)

What’s the blog plan for 2013?

Keep doing it, is the short version. I’d like to find a good balance this year between really meaty posts, like a lot of those above, and short updates on our day-to-day life.

The goal when I started was to post something daily about something we did or learned – and I kind of like that. Not because I have to be “perfect” at it, but because it keeps me focused on paying attention to what we’re doing.

Today’s the kind of day where I could easily be oblivious and say we didn’t “do” anything, but Ashar spent hours playing her new Titanic “Hidden Mysteries” game she got for Christmas, and downloaded Minecraft for her phone. That’s the sort of stuff I forget, but that is super-cool when you stop to notice it.

On a purely “I’m a geek” note, I did hit 50,000 total pageviews right around Jan. 1, 2013, which is, like, zilch compared with my main work blog, which gets more than that in a week. But I was proud of it, because I did it starting from zero, and I’d like to think that at the rate things are growing, I could hit 200,000 total pageviews by the end of this year!

Also, between Chris’s blog, Papergreat, and mine, we make enough money in Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate revenue to more than pay our operating costs, which is amazing – and something we want to continue to grow. My real dream is to have that blog and this one be our primary sources of income!

Anyway, here’s to our first full calendar year of learning at home, in our own way. I’m so thankful that you’re along for the ride, and I can’t wait to keep going.

01 Jan

The word I’m living by in 2013: Giving of the things it hurts to give

I didn’t think I was going to “do” a word to live by for 2013. I don’t do resolutions, really. I set goals, but in a more fluid and project-based way than a date-specific one.

I started reading all sorts of my blogger friends’ posts about their words – and they’re just amazing. Eloquent stories about how they’ve been led to something that will guide their lives for the year ahead.

And I didn’t have that. Instead, I had a feeling that I didn’t want to have. I didn’t like the direction I have been feeling led for the past several months, because I’ve gone past the easy part of it and am face-to-face with the hard stuff.

Give: A Word to Live By

I’ve been feeling called more and more to give. And you know what? For a while, I thought I was really doing great. We made a commitment as a family to give away the same amount of money as we spent on gifts for friends and family members at Christmas – and we succeeded, which was awesome. I’ve started taking part in a group on Facebook called Do One Kind Thing, which hopefully is pretty self-explanatory, and as part of that have been able to help some local families in need, have been inspired to pay for the meals of people behind me in drive-throughs, all that jazz.

But.

I’m in a different place in my life than I used to be. It used to be very hard for me to give financially. While we’re far from rich, we are fortunate in a lot of ways, and we are, I think, pretty good at giving financially without fear.

Last month, I heard a talk I didn’t want to hear on giving.

It was about giving sacrificially. Giving what it hurts to give.

And that, my friends, I was trying real hard not to hear.

2013 for me needs to be the year of giving. It will certainly involve giving money – possibly in bigger ways than I’ve yet imagined. But it’s going to involve some other giving, too.

It means giving my time. (Ouch. Not so great at that.) To my family, to friends, to anyone who needs it, and doing so unselfishly and un-grumbling-ly. Not putting off those people who I should call or visit or write a handwritten letter to.

It means giving my patience. Not a gift I give very often, sadly, and something I’m called on to give way more of, both to people close to me and to complete strangers.

It means giving myself. Putting myself out there. Being open. I tell people a lot that I’m an open book, and in a factual sense, that’s true. There isn’t much of my life that I don’t write about publicly, so, you know, I sometimes act like I’m “putting myself out there.” The fact is, I’m not, at least not always. I don’t show major pieces of who I am to a lot of people because they’re messy and hard to deal with.

It means giving TO myself. Especially in the past six months or so, I haven’t done as much as I should to fill my own cup before pouring it out, and that not-giving (to myself) is really starting to show its ill effects.

So that’s the Word I’m working to live by in 2013.

I’m going to GIVE.

In ways I want to, and ways I don’t. Writing this post is the first gift I’m giving to myself – I’m putting it out there and asking for you to hold me accountable in friendship and love, and I’m hoping you will give me that gift in return!

31 Dec

What we’re reading: Welcome 2013 edition

I can’t think of a much better way to send off 2012 and welcome 2013 than with a post about books!

We’ve been a bit here-and-there with our reading choices lately.

I’m hoping we’ll start another family novel sometime in January, but we’ve been doing shorter and more varied selections through the holidays, and that’s been nice too.

We did finish Life of Fred: Honey and have moved onto Life of Fred: Ice Cream. Only one more book after that in Fred’s elementary math series, and then it’s on to Life of Fred: Fractions, which we actually acquired a couple of weeks ago from another local homeschooling family! I should mention – while Life of Fred is described as a Christian series, we are a secular homeschooling family and haven’t had any problems using the fairly few spiritual references we’ve found as talking points about what different people believe, which we like to do anyway.

For Christmas, we found a couple of small, short books for Ashar that we thought she’d like. They’re called Unlikely Friendships: The Monkey & The Dove and Unlikely Friendships: The Dog & The Piglet, and they’re excerpted from a longer book, Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom. They’re all written by a science reporter who investigated stories of animals that formed, you guessed it, unlikely friendships. My favorite was the one about Muschi the black cat and Maeuschen the black bear, who lived at a German zoo together from about 2000 until the bear’s death in 2010.

These are both short books – you can read each one aloud in a sitting – but they’ve encouraged us to read more about some of the animals included, which has been neat. Plus, WOW, cute photos!

Ashar also received The 2013 World Almanac for Kids, which I expect will give her many hours of browsing pleasure.

Finally in the “gifts” stack of books for Ashar, there was one of her favorites, The Star Wars Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy. Chris’s mom gets Ashar one of the pop-ups from the series by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart each year, and this year’s was probably Ashar’s favorite yet!

And, in what I love about homeschooling, we’re interspersing these with a college-level text on the ancient art/science/religion of alchemy, which we found in a used book shop. Alchemy: The Great Secret is pretty cool (and filled with a TON of historic art). Ashar and I have been reading it together and she’s done a lot of research on its parallels with modern chemistry, as well as its ties to Roman mythology and, later, some of the modern religions. This is heavy stuff – but she’s not only grasping it, she’s fascinated! (And, no worries, she is not trying to transmute our kitchen counter into gold.)

On the parental reading front, Chris received for Christmas a copy of the Route 66 Adventure Handbook, and I got a copy of John Holt’s Learning All the Time, which I’d read before from our library but wanted my own copy of.

What’s your family reading?

30 Dec

A look back at our 2012 Christmas

We just got home from our “last Christmas,” with my husband’s mom and his sister and her family, and that officially wraps up the holiday for us for 2012.

Here’s a look at a few of our highlights from our many celebrations, mostly in photos.

Our one Christmas wish that we’re hoping to still make come true for ourselves is a new camera – we use ours for all sorts of projects, including our work-related blogs, and the little point-and-shoot we have isn’t cutting it! In fact, we missed capturing some of our most enjoyable Christmas moments this year because the only shots we got were un-view-ably blurry. So we’ll see what we can find that fits into the budget!

Family Christmas tree with gifts

Above is our tree, fully (and I do mean fully) trimmed, with packages underneath. Since we don’t do Santa in our family, it’s easy to get everything wrapped ahead of time. We actually have two full sets of ornaments that we alternate – this is what we call the “family” set, and we have another set that is all Irish-themed.

Joan and Chris opening an edible Christmas present

Here, Chris and I are opening our gift from my mom. This was one of the highlights of Christmas for me – it was all edible! (Mom knows that Chris and I are fairly minimalist and didn’t need a lot of stuff.) It included some of our favorites – beef sticks, prosciutto, special cheeses, gift cards to the local convenience store for work snacks, and even a gift certificate to our favorite sushi date spot. Awesome!! Ashar took this picture; she liked the “artsy” angle.

Uncle Wiggly book and KitchenAid mixer as Christmas gifts

Another mega-highlight for me was receiving a copy of Uncle Wiggily and His Friends by Howard Garis from Chris. I have an absolute love of the Uncle Wiggily stories, but the books are hard to find and long since out of print in their original form. This is an incredibly nice copy – which means it probably went for way more than I’d ever spend on myself, despite how much I love it. So it was the PERFECT gift!

At right above, Mom is opening her big gift – which was kind of a family gift. It’s a KitchenAid super-mega-mondo mixer. (Not a technical term.) She was thrilled! Our previous mixer was failing (and wasn’t capable of heavy doughs like bread any more), so it was great timing! And, we were able to give that one to a friend of ours who just needs an every-now-and-then mixer, so it worked out great.

Santa Claus on firetruck

Speaking of friends, my best friend’s husband is a firefighter with one of our local companies, and on Christmas Eve, he and another driver took two engines out with “Santa” on the top, driving all around their township. We went over to the station house to see them head out, and despite the snow and sleet, it was a super-cool way to do something local and fun!

Santa Claus on firetruck

Ashar did ALL of her own Christmas shopping this year. She was very clear on what she wanted to get for everyone, which was awesome.

The gift of Christmas ephemera

Here, she and Chris are showing off what I think might have been her finest purchase – a set of Christmas ephemera that he could write about for his blog, Papergreat, inside a 1940s-era box called a Tuckaway. She spent hours at a local antiques market picking out just the right things!

Hand-painted Christmas train

This was another holiday project of Ashar’s – painting her own train. One of our family goals for 2013 is to build a real train display, probably O-Gauge, in our basement, but for now, painted had to suffice! She worked very hard on this with my mom! The cutest part was that she had little toy animals riding in the train, and the cars were filled with a tree and packages. Well, on Christmas eve, she emptied the cars and set up a tree and gifts so that the animals would have a Christmas morning. It was super-sweet!

There are two “Christmases” I don’t have photos of – the one where Ashar went to my ex’s parents’ house for their family Christmas, where she got a remote-controlled car that she LOVES, among other cool goodies, and also the one with one of my best friends, Tracey, which involved gift-wrapping, briefly, our big mitten-toed cat, Mitts. Let’s just say it’s probably better that isn’t pictured.

Christmas at Grandma's house

Our final celebration was at the home of my mother-in-law, Mary. Here, you can see her and also Ashar opening one of her gifts – a fun animal-themed game called Hit the Habitat Trail that I think will be fun.

Ashar also got a soft blue LLBean winter hat… which she promptly put on, then topped with her TapOut baseball cap.

Funny hats at Christmas

Word, from our family’s Christmas to yours.

20 Dec

Collages from last year’s Christmas cards

Christmas collage made from recycled cards, Santa themed

When we unpacked our Christmas decorations this year, we realized we had three gallon-sized zipper bags filled with Christmas cards from the last couple of years. I’d saved them from a vague “art project” idea and, of course, done exactly nothing with them ever.

Yesterday night, Ashar took them upstairs to our scrapbooking room and said she was going to make something with them. I was writing (in fact, I was writing our Jim Thorpe post!) and I didn’t think too much of it.

When she came downstairs, she said that instead of making something with each individual card, she wanted to them together and make collages in groups. So she sorted the cards, finding, first, six or seven with Santa on them. She narrowed it down to the four she liked best, chose a background paper to match, and then used letter stickers to spell out “Santa says Merry Christmas,” and she wrote “Hope you have a happy holiday.”

You can see the finished product above! It was great – and just the start of her collection.

Christmas collage made from recycled cards, based around joke cards

Funny Times features Santa and his reindeer at the beach, over a town on a dark night, and in a snowglobe over a town! This one has a note that says “Hope you have a great laugh this holiday season,” and Ashar said she chose the background paper because it said “seriously,” and that went well to her with laughter. (It’s a pun? It’s irony? It’s cool, either way.)

Christmas collage made from recycled cards, penguin themed

Hi Penguin Style is probably my favorite. I LOVE penguins, and I love the message – “Rock your style this Christmas,” which Ashar said she chose because all the penguins were wearing scarves and hats. Technically, the top left penguin is not from a card (I think he was a gift tag), so keep that in mind if you’re making your own Christmas collage creations – don’t be afraid to keep things like interesting wrapping paper, gift tags and so on as well as the cards. And, in a proud Mom moment, Ashar explained that she wasn’t sure how to spell “penguin,” so she got her National Geographic Great Migrations book and went to the page for the Rockhopper Penguin to find out.

Christmas collage made from recycled cards, titled Don't Forget the Little Things

Don’t Forget the Little Things This Christmas, the next collage says! Ashar’s note says “Remember to have a great day on Christmas,” and at the right, it says, “Merry Christmas, everyone.” This one got its title because all the cards are small, Ashar said. She also said that some of the “odds and ends” of Christmas, like being with family or exchanging a gift with someone like a friend, it’s not a big thing compared to the true meaning of Christmas, but it’s still important. And she said that if you donate money or items, to remember that even if it’s a small gift, not to forget that you’re helping.

Christmas collage made from recycled cards, pet themed

This one, Ashar made tonight (after working for several hours on the others last night!) It says, “All the Pets You Have Say Merry Christmas!” Ashar said, “I had all these pet cards… and not a lot of people really focus on their pets at Christmas, so I was thinking that the pets wanted to say Merry Christmas in their own way!” Her note says “Have a wonderful Christmas with your family and pets this Christmas.”

(Ashar also wants me to tell you that the hamster with the bulging eyes, inside his card, says, “Have a Merry Christmas, or I’ll Put Some Sprinkles on Your Cookies.” Yep. Ashar also clarified that those are “not the kind of sprinkles that you want to eat.”)

Ashar says she hopes you try out this idea with your old Christmas cards instead of throwing them out! Her advice? “Be creative and take my idea and use stickers and make your own collage!” She also added that you could use printer paper or construction paper if you don’t have scrapbook paper like we do.

Merry Christmas, from our recycled cards! 🙂

19 Dec

Learning about Olympian Jim Thorpe and the Pennsylvania town named for him

Learn about Native American and Olympian Jim Thorpe in this unit study guide for homeschoolers and unschoolers When our family visited the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., back in 2012, one of the key exhibits we saw focused on Native American participation in the Olympics. And, of course, one of the focal points was decathlon- and pentathlon-winner Olympian Jim Thorpe.

In fact, Ashar’s souvenir from that stop on our trip was the Sterling Biographies copy of Thorpe’s life story! We started reading it right away, and finished it a little more than a month later.

And when Ashar planned out the places she wanted us to visit and the things she wanted to learn about for her seventh-grade year, Jim Thorpe made it onto both lists, in the form of the man AND his now-namesake town.

So one Friday in November 2012, on a rare weekday off, we decided to take a family field trip to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, just about three and a half hours away from our home.

Winter in the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

The town of Jim Thorpe (formerly Mauch Chunk)

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To be clear to anyone reading, Jim Thorpe the athlete never lived in Jim Thorpe. He didn’t go to school there (though he did attend the Carlisle School for some time, which is even closer to our home). He wasn’t originally buried there.

His remains – and a fairly not-prominent monument – are in the town that was formerly known as Mauch Chunk, in the middle of the coal mountains of Pennsylvania, because it seemed like a good idea back in the 1950s. Jim Thorpe had passed away in 1953, and his widow (his third wife, Patricia) was upset because his home state, Oklahoma, had no desire to put up any kind of monument.

Enter Mauch Chunk, which was merging with a nearby town and wanted to draw some attention to itself.

Statue of Olympian Jim Thorpe throwing a discus The town, which had grown a result of the anthracite coal boom (that’s a huge hunk of anthracite in the foreground of the photo above, by the way), was actually best known as the home of the gravity railroad. This attraction was kind of the roller coaster of its day, and continued running as a tourist attraction even after the need to roll coal down a mountain waned. Once cars became more common, though, people didn’t think it was so fun to take a trolley to Jim Thorpe and ride the gravity railroad, and the town needed a boost.

If you visit Jim Thorpe, it’s worth the $5 admission to visit the Mauch Chunk Museum and Cultural Center. You’ll get to see a 20-minute film about the town’s history, see a model of the gravity railroad system and even check out a small display about Thorpe the athlete.

The downtown is an interesting place to walk around as well – lots of small stores to visit, including a bookstore where we found Ashar’s current favorite book, which I’ll talk about in my next Reading Roundup post! Oh, and a wonderful tea shop/absinthe house (now there’s something you don’t get to say every day).

Other things to do in or around Jim Thorpe

Tour the mansion of industrialist Harry Packer, which supposedly might have been the inspiration for Walt Disney World’s “Haunted Mansion.”

See the Bear Mountain Butterfly Sanctuary. This would have been AMAZING, especially after our butterfly experience in Washington, D.C, but it was closed for the season by the time we went!

Ride the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway, where a narrated tour shows you why the scenic town was once called “The Switzerland of America.”

Plaque honoring Native American athlete Jim Thorpe on his tomb

Jim Thorpe the athlete

Jim Thorpe, who was born May 22, 1887, has been called the greatest athlete in the world – first by Sweden’s King Gustav after he won gold in both the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, but later by magazines, newspapers, sporting organizations and more.

Statue of Jim Thorpe playing football In addition to his skill in track – and you can see his amazing accomplishments there on the plaque above, which is seen at his memorial – he was exceptional in other sports, too.

He’s in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, and, in fact, was the first president of what would later become the NFL. He played six seasons of Major League Baseball – the cause of his Olympic victory dethroning.

The coolest Jim Thorpe sports fact I learned? Thorpe hit three home runs into three different states during one game. It was on the border of Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, and when he hit his home runs, one went over the left field wall into Oklahoma; another went into center field, which was in Texas; and the other went over the right field wall into Arkansas. OK, that’s pretty neat. (There are some more good Jim Thorpe facts here.)

You can read more about Thorpe’s career on his Wikipedia page, which has probably the best online bio I’ve found for him. (I really do recommend reading a good biography, which will go more in-depth!)

His former home in Yale, Oklahoma has now been preserved and is operated as a museum; while that’s a bit out of my travel radius, it’s certainly worth a visit if you’re in that area.

Jim Thorpe memorial in the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, formerly known as Mauch Chunk

The Jim Thorpe controversies

Posing with a statue of Jim Thorpe playing football Many who are familiar with Jim Thorpe are, sadly, aware of him for his notoriety – he had his Olympic medals stripped from him because he was found to have played professional sports (then a violation of Olympic Committee rules) because he’d been a semi-pro baseball barnstormer for a few months.

It wasn’t until 1983, 30 years after his death, that his family received new medals, reissued; no one even knows what happened to the originals, though they’re thought to have been stolen.

But there’s another controversy involving the town that now bears Thorpe’s name – it has since debated changing its name back to Mauch Chunk, because the renaming didn’t bring the promised fame or money.

Though it looks like it’ll stay Jim Thorpe, you get the feeling from visiting the town that there’s a mixed level of interest in the athlete; his memorial, for instance, is outside of the main tourist part of town, and not marked well on most of the visitors’ guide literature. Yet the museum had a good display of Thorpe items, and even the local high school continues its support – their teams are the Jim Thorpe Olympians, which was neat to see.

We did enjoy seeing the memorial – and Ashar liked posing like “Football Jim,” showing off yet another of the sports he excelled at.

12-year-old Ashar at the Jim Thorpe memorial

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 and others to help you learn about and make the most of a visit to Assateague, Md., and Chincoteague, Va.

I’ve also been doing a loose series of posts good for unit studies. An earlier post in that series shared our favorite Phantom of the Opera learning resources and we also shared our favorite solar-system learning materials!

This post is also part of the iHomeschool Network’s Best Homeschool Field Trips linkup. Click the image to read more!

And, if you’re interested, there are many more cool “May birthday” lessons from my fellow iHomeschool Network bloggers. Click the image below to check them out!