29Oct
13

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

Unschool Rules: Part of the iHomeschool Network Massive Guide to Homeschooling HistoryThis 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!

25Oct
9

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!