Our Christmas gingerbread village

While we were out Black Friday shopping, Ashar spotted this gingerbread village kit at Joann Fabrics. $9.99 on sale, and you could make four mini gingerbread houses instead of one big one! Of course we bought it!

(Don’t judge. I like natural foods and do-it-yourself projects as much as the next person, but I’m not baking house-shaped gingerbread. That’s my Christmas gift to me!)

Making gingerbread houses from a kit

Anyway, over the past couple of days, my mom and Ashar have been working on this as their holiday project. And they’re adorable!

There’s the Scalloped Cottage…

Scalloped cottage gingerbread house from a kit

The Awesome A-Frame…

A-frame gingerbread house from a kit

The Yellow Awning Cottage…

Yellow awning cottage gingerbread house from a kit

And the Pastel Perfect Suite! (My mother claims this bears some resemblance to an outhouse, but the poor thing is cute.)

Pastel perfect suite gingerbread house from a kit

And, since we have a sugar-loving large dog, these can’t sit out just anywhere. They’ve gone behind the glass doors of our entertainment center, which is a little unusual but certainly a good way to jazz up a DVD collection?!

Four gingerbread houses from a kit

We haven’t had time to pull off something cool like a fun Christmas activity EVERY day this Advent, but we’re doing what we can, and having a great time!

I’m linking up today to the All Year Round Blog Carnival: Winter Edition.

11 Dec

Around and around we go…

Today’s post is just for fun.

We’ve had an exhausting few weeks in our family – traveling, illnesses, the death of a friend, lots of work projects, company coming – some good things and some bad, but by the end of the night, I’m usually in NO place to sit down and talk about what we have or haven’t learned.

I have some great ideas for posts, a bunch of photos to show off of our recent travels, some linkups I’d like to take part in and more.

But for tonight, you get this cute video of Ashar, who is a hula hooping wizard. (I can’t hoop. At all. It’s pitiful.)

Post by Joan Concilio Otto.

As a fun aside, the hoop she’s using is made from recycled irrigation tubing and covered in fabric scraps in blue and green by my amazing friend Tiffy of Love, Peace and DYE. Tiffy is a local crafty lady who can make something cool out of anything. We ran into her at a recent craft fair and of all the awesome stuff she had for sale, it was the hoop that Ashar went for.

(I, meanwhile, got some adorable earrings made from buttons, and Tiffy worked up some adorable ferns for me out of recycled bicycle inner tubes!!)

Keep spinning, everyone. Things will slow down… eventually… but in the meantime, enjoy the hoop!

02 Dec

Ashar’s custom version of "The 12 Days of Christmas"

We recently spent a few great family days trimming our home for the holidays. This is a HUGE undertaking for us (just ask my poor husband!) and I’ll share more photos soon of how it’s gone.

But just as we finished trimming the tree, Ashar dug into our Christmas book tray and pulled out “The 12 Dogs of Christmas,” one of our old favorites. (I mean, like, as old as Sarah!)

She read it aloud to us, then we played the CD with its, uh, interesting rendition of the song, and then Ashar sat down with the book and a notebook and pencil.

I was still decorating, so I admit, I didn’t pay too much attention, even when she said, “I’m going to write my own ’12 Days of Christmas.'”

It was easily an hour or so later that she said, “Wow, Day 11, almost done!” And I thought… wait, what is she doing?

Well, this was it (click the image to see a bigger version!)

She wrote out each of the previous gifts with each day, and customized them to be things she likes, given by people we know.

The final tally?

12 castles
11 Xbox 360s
10 CDs
9 candy bars
8 chocolate bars
7 DS games
6 hundred dollars
5 golden cars
4 million dollars
3 lottery tickets
2 elves
1 hermit crab
… and a partridge in a pear tree!

(If you’re not from Pennsylvania, you might not understand why #3 would come to mind for a 12-year-old. Rest assured, no future gambling addicts here! We have a reallllllly long-running commercial to the tune of this song for the Pennsylvania Lottery, and I admit we were singing it right before she started writing this!)

She proudly handed over the finished product to my husband, who did a wonderful dramatic reading/singing presentation of it. Then, she handed it to me and said, “You can blog this!”

Done!

25 Nov

What we’re reading: Lazy days edition

One of the best things about homeschooling, and our incredibly relaxed approach in particular, is that holidays are no longer the rush-rush-rush of getting as many projects done as possible.

We’ve been able to slow down and really enjoy our Thanksgiving celebrations and to start our Christmas preparations without worrying about what we’re “accomplishing.”

Even our reading has been low-key.

We finished Life of Fred: Goldfish and have moved on to Life of Fred: Honey. As I like to say any time I mention Life of Fred, while it 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.

Chris continues to read many Ruth Manning-Sanders fairy and folk tales to Ashar when he’s home at bedtime; her favorite ones come from A Book of Ogres and Trolls.

And since Ashar’s interest in her American Girl dolls continues, she decided she wanted to read the start of Kit’s story, Meet Kit. Kit is 9 years old in 1934, so her story focuses on life during the Depression, which has been interesting as Ashar has started talking to my mom about her memories of growing up just a little bit later in the Depression.

Next, we’re going to see what other books in Kit’s series our library has to offer!

On the parental reading front, I’m reading a set of Christmas-themed romantic short stories (I told you – this is the lazy days edition!)

I just finished two incredibly interesting looks at other belief systems – Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Jantzen and Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage by Kody, Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn Brown.

I can’t say that I read either of these books expecting to agree with the viewpoints inside – and in large part I didn’t – but both were just incredibly interesting and helped me solidify some ideas in my own mind about my thoughts on marriage, family, faith and so on.

Chris, meanwhile, is reading Wired magazine at this exact moment. He also says he’s been most actively reading A Diner’s Dictionary: Food and Drink From A to Z in his before-bed browsing. (Let us just say it is a testament to our stomachs that we can both eat snacks while he describes uses of headcheese.)

What’s your family reading?

20 Nov

Saying yes to multi-colored rice (and multicolored hair)

My daughter has blue hair, and I have 10 more pounds of multicolored rice.

Yep, it’s another installment in a series of posts on how I’m “saying yes” to my daughter.

Last month, I agreed to watch The Avengers, and the month before that, Ashar got her own cell phone.

This week, Ashar got some blue and teal highlights at the hairdresser’s. That’s not something that’s hard for me to say yes to; in fact, I’m only disappointed that they don’t stand out more!

Saying yes to blue hair

As I said, this wasn’t hard to give a “yes” to. Possibly because this was actually my head at a point in the not-too-far past:

Pink and purple hair

That said, I did have a slightly harder time with something that was kind of silly in comparison.

We had made two sensory bins full of rainbow-colored rice back in March. We’ve messed around with them off and on since, but for the past month or two, they mostly sat untouched.

At the grocery store last week, Ashar saw the jumbo 10-pound bags of rice and said, “Can we make more rainbow rice, Mom?”

The thing is, in my head I’m going, “Why on earth would I buy 10 pounds of rice when we have perfectly good food-colored rice at home?” Which is, you know, kind of silly. Especially when I thought about how much fun Ashar had MAKING the rice the first time; that part was kind of the highlight for her!

So, you know, we bought 10 pounds of rice. And this week, we colored it, and made a NEW big tub and a NEW small tub full of rainbow rice. (The smaller one has red and green rice; we’re going to do a Christmas theme!)

And it was fun – well worth the cost of some cheap rice.

Have you said “yes” this month?

01 Nov

Cookies, cousins, crazy weather and hickory nuts: This month’s snippets from unschooling

As a blogger, I have a tendency to get overwhelmed in “mega-posts.” Do I have tons of photos? Do I have enough links? Did I make a nifty Pinterest graphic?

But that’s not our whole life. In fact, the best parts are our in-betweens, the things that don’t turn into major resources or treatises on educational philosophy.

Here’s a look at some of those in-between moments since my last snippets post.

1. My husband and Ashar are a little excited about the announcement of Star Wars Episode 7. How excited?

This photo shoot ensued the night of the announcement.

Later, they used their mad photo-editing skills (and a font I’d found them some time ago) to create this masterpiece.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Nerdpire strikes back.

2. Meanwhile, we’ve been collecting hundreds of hickory nuts from our neighborhood.

Chris has been collecting them in baggies on his walks home from work, and Ashar then artfully pours them into Mason jars to sit around as a fall decoration.

Hickory nuts

It was cool to be able to identify them as hickory nuts. It was NOT cool when we found them to be inhabited by hickory shuckworm larvae. (Though that did make for another identification project.)

Solution: I found a website that said roasting them in the oven at 350 degrees for a half-hour would kill anything inside. Since we didn’t care to eat them, only decorate with them, that suited us fine!

Fun with cousins

3. We had a surprise visit from some of our favorite cousins, also fellow homeschoolers! Ashar loved having a house full of new friends, and the four of them went absolutely crazy and stayed up til 6 a.m.

Having family members who are also friends – and who GET you, and who think like you do, and who have the same faith and the same dreams – that’s priceless.

4. I learned something new along with Ashar at our recent alpaca club meeting. We learned how to do needle-felting. (I didn’t even know what that WAS until last week.)

Needle felting project at 4-H Alpaca Club

You can see Ashar’s pumpkin (she’s working on his smile in this photo), and I made a smaller pumpkin with no face, but with vinelike green tendrils near his stem!

I don’t normally consider myself crafty in a yarn-and-fabric sense, but this was kind of neat!

5. Many of you know that our town was RIGHT in the path of Hurricane Sandy as it passed through the Northeast over the weekend. We were incredibly fortunate despite some rough parts, which I’ll actually share next week, but the dog absolutely did not deal well with the barometric pressure changes.

Cuddling the dog during a thunderstorm

So Ashar (wearing her new pajama pants, which she loves), decided to cuddle him and be kind of a “Thundershirt” for him.

Calmer dog, happy Sarah. Win!

6. Ashar decided to bake some sugar cookies and decorate them with a fall theme. We did the “regular” type, but then we had a bunch of dough left, and she was just adamant that she wanted to make one big cookie.

I figured, hey, what’s the worst that can happen? (Lest you think I’m doing TOO good of a job in the homemaking department, it was only store-bought sugar cookie dough, so I figured if it didn’t work out, no huge loss.)

Baking one gigantic cookie out of store dough

Here they are, in all their fall glory.(And they tasted pretty OK, too!)

7. Ashar has – and I can barely believe this – started to DO MATH FOR FUN.

This is big news. In addition to absolutely loving Life of Fred, and begging to do the rows of practice and the “Your Turn to Play” sections, she plays a ton of Moshi Multiply on Moshi Monsters, one of her favorite online games.

It’s basically a “times-tables drill,” and it’s scored based on how many problems you can get right in 30 seconds. Ashar has always struggled with timed tests (in a more complicated sense, that’s part of what led us down the path toward an Asperger’s diagnosis), so to see her able to get almost one per second right, well, that’s honestly amazing.

Multiplication facts practice with Moshi Monsters Moshi Multiply game

To me, that’s proof that our style of learning works. I love it.

So that’s a look at seven snippets from our unschooling life lately. What’s going on in your world?

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

31 Oct

Sharing our similes

Similes practice from Life of Fred math book

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

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

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

His eyes were red like ____________________.

Her smile was as bright as ______________________.

Reading is as enjoyable as ______________________.

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

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

Our challenge to you

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

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

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

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

Side note: 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. I like to mention this any time I talk about it, just to be clear!

30 Oct

What we’re reading: Bookshelf rotation edition

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

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

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

I also finished two books I was reading on my own – Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography, “Magnificent Desolation,” and the autobiography of hacker Kevin Mitnick, “Ghost in the Wires.”

As a side note, 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.

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

So what’s next?

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

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

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

What’s your family reading?

29 Oct

Ashar’s poster about famous Wild West cowboys

Cowboy poster as a homeschooling lapbooking project

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

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

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

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

Information on Annie Oakley from homeschooling notebooking project

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

Information on Buffalo Bill Cody from homeschooling notebooking project

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

Information on Pistol Pete from a homeschooling notebooking project

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

Information on Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Cody from a homeschooling notebooking project

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

Information on Wild Bill Hickock from a homeschooling notebooking project

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

Information on Doc Holliday from a homeschooling notebooking project

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

More great history resources

This post is part of the iHomeschool Network Massive Guide to Homeschooling History.

Make sure to check it out for tons of other great history resources, including links to a dozen more Unschool Rules posts!

25 Oct

A family-created game

Meet the Conciliottoman family’s unnamed un-game!

Creating a family board game

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

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

Creating a family board game

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

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

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

Creating a family board game

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

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

Creating a family board game

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

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

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

Now that’s a win!