Ouch!

Here's a biology question for you. How do you look up a weird-looking thingmajig--make that a weird-looking thingmajig that stings to high heaven--if you don't know what to call it?

You google it, of course. (Am I the last one on the planet to find Google Images?)

Turns out the headless, legless "mouse" that nailed K-S awhile back is actually called a puss caterpillar, although it's sometimes referred to as a stinging asp and, in our neck of the woods, un perrito (a "little dog").

Also turns out the sting it delivers via cleverly hidden spines is bad news, with pain lasting for up to a couple days and implications for the unfortunate sting-ee's lymphatic system.

Poor K-S didn't get hit quite that hard, but she did complain of pain for hours after her encounter with Mr. Puss--and this is a kid whose pain threshold his so high that if she cries, it's 100% certain there's blood spurting out of her somewhere.

Not quite as Norman Rockwell an encounter as the nest full of cheeping baby birds we watched being fed by their mother yesterday morning--but then who ever said education is supposed to be painless?

Crafty us

Picture someone who thinks remembering to put paper towels on the table is "haute dining." (That's me.)

Now picture this someone giving birth to Martha Stewart in miniature (that's K-S).

I never got the whole "craft thing" before K-S came along. I mean, seriously, who in her right mind would spend an entire afternoon gluing crap to paper plates? Thinking up ways to adulterate egg cartons? Painting a bunch of perfectly good recyclables, just to throw them away a couple days later?

Well....(ahem)...as it turns out...me.

It's astonishing that it never occurred to me, before we Officially Declared Homeschooling Status, how much kids learn by making stuff. For example:

• Math. K-S draws, traces, colors, and cuts out two-dimensional shapes, such as circles and squares and triangles. She decides whether to make her shapes and drawings bigger or smaller. She constructs three-dimensional figures, such as boxes and cones, and sees in action concepts like volume and area (although I haven't introduced the nomenclature yet). She calculates the number of legs she still has to add to her insect, or how many eyes a "tomato ogre" should have. She counts the number of stitches she's sewn or knitted, and how many she still has to go to finish.
  
• English. Sometimes, K-S's drawings need dialogue balloons with short messages--and an artist's got to do what an artist's got to do. Other times, K-S's stuffed animals misbehave, so she has to construct signs that tell them to cut it out (for example, Don't Hurt the Sea Creatures). Before a neighborhood walk, K-S likes to take a paper bag and write on it all the things she hopes to find and put in the bag. These lists are sometimes accompanied by sketches.
• Spanish. Several of K-S's drawings (and stuffed animals) speak Spanish, apparently
  
• Biology. We don't do much in the way of formal copy work yet, although we'll get to that eventually. For now, K-S relies on the insects and plants and fruits and animals she's seen in the yard, on walks, in the zoo. Some days, it's important to her to get all the details right, so without any prompting for me she's gotten good at remembering and recalling the exact salmony-white of a green anole's skin flap and the precise, eery blue of a cicada's eyes. Easy crafts like adding food coloring to flower water demonstrate biological concepts (water uptake in plants, and by extension nutrition in humans).
• Social studies. Crafts are a natural choice for holidays and other cultural events, which opens the door to discuss stuff like religion (Easter), geography (Halloween in the U.S. vs. Mexico's Day of the Dead), civics (Fourth of July), ad infinitum.
  

All this in addition to the obvious fine-motor/language/science/self-esteem stuff kids learn by crafting, such as how to maniulate scissors, how to distinguish gradations of hue and saturation, how liquids and solids affect each other (homemade playdough and papier mache are good for this), and how to make something beautiful out of whatever's handy.

K-S was in the bathroom recently while I was replacing the TP roll.

Hey! she yelled excitedly. We can make something with that!

There was a time in my life when a reaction like that would have struck me as embarrassing.

These days?

Yeah! I yelled right back. Let's save it in the craft box!