Unschool Rules

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?

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