Thousand Word Thursday - Friend Groups

Who says homeschoolers are unsocialized?! Mane is part of both of these groups on a weekly basis. Such fabulous kids!

Homeschool Group

Swim Team

Make your own Bubble Tea!

After a trek to two different Asian grocery stores, we came home to make our very own bubble tea! Mane was pining after some good bubble tea after standing out in the hot sun this morning. She's a particular fan of mango smoothies with lychees jellies and tapioca pearls. I'm not a fan of spending $4 for a beverage at the bubble tea place. So, we set out to have a cultural cooking experience and make our own!

Our first stop was Shuang Hur Oriental Market on Nicollet Avenue. (This is where we bought banana leaves to wrap the lembas for Mane's Lord of the Rings birthday party.) We found lychee jellies at Shuang Hur. Here's Mane dropping them in mango orange juice (not quite a mango smoothie, but still very yummy):

Clearly, we have enough lychee jellies to last us for quite some time! We could not find tapioca pearls at Shuang Hur, though. So, we headed over to United Noodles, right off Franklin and Cedar. There we found, not only tapioca pearls, but also a giant assortment of tea, Chinese herbs, sauce, rice noodles, incense, curry, etc, etc, etc... We came home with rice wine for marinading chicken, bok choy, ginger, and snap peas. Mango is planning to do some cooking tomorrow!

Multi-Colored Tapioca Pearls!

We are looking forward to visiting United Noodles again very soon! Shuang Hur was smaller and had a meat market that didn't smell so great. They are still totally the place to go if you need banana leaves or if you want to see a live lobster. But for a bigger, cleaner store, we recommend United Noodles, which smelled a lot like black licorice...

Niagara Cave and the Alohomora podcasts...

Over Memorial weekend we found ourselves in serious need of a daytrip. So, we took Mango to see Niagara Cave in Harmony, MN. Mane and I went on the cave tour last summer and thought it was great. We knew Mango would love it, and the drive was a good excuse to spend some time together without so many distractions.

We listened to Alohomora podcasts for part of the drive. We've gotten hooked on them over the past several months...while cleaning the house and doing puzzles and driving in the car. If you're a Harry Potter fan, you're sure to enjoy these podcasts. The hosts are conducting a "global re-read" of the series with weekly analysis of each individual chapter! They're currently reading Half-Blood Prince, but all the podcasts are available for download.

In any case, the rain stopped long enough for us to get a photo outside the cave:

It's awfully difficult to get photos inside:

It's like an underground canyon. Sometimes you can see the walls go up 150 feet overhead! The underground waterfall is amazing! The cave stays a steady 48 degrees Fahrenheit and damp all year. We especially enjoyed seeing the chapel, the echo chamber, and the mineral deposits that glow in the dark after you shine a black light on them. The tour is a mile long walk, covering 250 stairs. So, it's not for the faint of heart...or the claustrophobic. For those of us who had been sitting in the car for several hours, it was welcome exercise!

Game Schooling - Munchkin Quest

Looking for a fun, humorous, strategy game to play on a long, rainy evening? Munchkin Quest is your answer!  Be warned that it takes a while to learn how to play. And the game cards can be slightly inappropriate - in a medieval and/or renaissance fair kind of way. I wouldn't attempt to play with kids under 12. Having said that, it's one of our games of choice for a family game night. Players build the board as they go. Every time a player adds a new room to the board, a monster appears, and they have to fight the monster by combining dice rolls with the cards they have in play. As players defeat monsters, they move up levels until they return to the center of the board and fight the "Boss Monster" to win the game. Turns are long and can include adding new rooms, fighting monsters, running from monsters, dropping treasure, searching for treasure, scoring cards, and giving charity! (This gives other players plenty of time to eat all the snacks, get something to drink, and change the music!) It's a great game for practicing strategy and logic...and laughing a lot!

Tour De Nature Centers - Westwood Hills

Westwood Hills is a little nature center tucked in next to a residential area in St. Louis Park, MN. We were tired of the indoors and decided to go have a picnic with friends the other day.  We spread out our picnic blanket under the trees near the fort-building area and not far from the playground:

We walked the Children's Nest Egg path to discover the nest lined with shiny metallic "feathers" reflecting the trees and the sky:

Finally, we went for a walk in the woods, where a daddy goose was standing guard on the path. We stayed out of his way after he started hissing and walking straight toward the 3yr old!

Thousand Word Thursday - Swim Meet

Mane aged up to the 13-14 year old category after her birthday this May, and she made two new qualifying times at her meet last Friday night!! She started the swim team in November 2013. This is her "gym class" (4.5+ hours swimming each week). She swims at the YWCA with kids from all over Minneapolis, not just homeschoolers. Learning to get around the YWCA on her own, take care of her own stuff, and get to practice on time been a tremendous growth experience for her. Her team is made up of kids of all different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, and her experience with her teammates and coaches has been overwhelmingly positive. We are so grateful that she's found her niche in the sport of swimming and that she has the opportunity to continue to grow with such a great team!

Game Schooling - Storage Edition

Plastic soap containers or similarly-sized snack containers work great for storing card games:

I found these at the dollar store. I love that the lid clips to close the container. Now we can do away with rubber binders holding decks of cards together!

Dragon Box Algebra App

On Friday I mentioned Tech Time's list of the 15 Best Apps for Homeschooling.  I linked to the article on my facebook page, and a friend of mine posted a few days later that her kids were all over the Dragon Box Algebra app for ages 5+. She posted:

...its algebra for kids and the littles are obsessed with it. ... [My son] LOVED it. He finished the whole thing in 4 days. On the second problem, even though his age is all pictures, he looked at me and said "This is math. I like math." That in and of itself made it the best $5 I've spent in a very long time.

This is the app that sneakily teaches algebra while your children think they're just playing a game! Mane is finishing up pre-algebra this year and will be starting Algebra 1 over the summer or this autumn. I decided to give Dragon Box Algebra 12+ a try to help her approach algebra from another angle and to make conceptual sense of algebraic concepts. I believe alternate presentations of the same concept are essential to math success, and approaching math from different angles builds flexibility in the brain. This app does exactly that. From the website:

DragonBox presents the player with whimsical icons that must be manipulated until the ‘Dragonbox’, representing the unknown variable, is isolated on one side of the game board. ... Through the course of play, these icons are gradually replaced with numbers and variables until the player is solving real equations. The rules of variable manipulation are discovered through experimentation, and higher star ratings are obtained by manipulating variables more efficiently to isolate the ‘box’ in fewer steps.

Mane was dubious when we downloaded the app. The program does not present with rules. Players are expected to learn through play. This makes the rule-following child feel a little insecure...in a good way. She tried out the app with me and was quick to put it away. Later that day, however, when she'd been "forced" to find something to do while waiting for Mango to pick her up from swim practice, she took the time to explore and figure out the game, and now she's hooked.

Even better news? Dragon Box has a geometry App: Dragon Box Elements. We cannot wait to check it out!!