Read-a-thon

We did a week of Spring Cleaning before Easter, and every day after our work was done we chose a fun thing to do. One day the kids planned a "Read-a-thon"! It turned out so fun. We made some finger foods to snack on and cuddled up in the library with our blankets while the little kids napped. We read for hours, until dinnertime—I read a whole book and it was heavenly! I hardly ever get to read for fun anymore!

It turned out to be a grey, snowy day, so that made it even more fun and cozy inside. So nice!

Daisy made a festive sign

Junie was in her nightgown, because why not?

Snacks

Malachi joined us for a while

And when the little kids woke up, they joined us too! We had so much fun!

Bookfest

Many years ago we had our first "Bookfest" where we invited some friends over and gave presentations on our favorite books. It was so much fun, and we fully intended to make it an annual event, but like many of our best-laid plans, it ganged angly. :) On a Sunday at the end of our Book Unit, I suddenly took it into my head to try and have another one that very Tuesday, which happened to be relatively open for us. I texted a bunch of homeschooling friends and amazingly, lots of people could come! We quickly planned a little brunch menu, told people to bring their favorite books, and it was on!

Along with muffins and fruit skewers, Daisy had the cutest idea to make little egg salad sandwiches into "books." She found these boxes to be a "bookshelf" for them. I think they turned out so cute!

Amazingly, we found our old "Bookfest" banner, so we put that up!

We had a great group of friends and such a good time hearing about the books they all love! And we hope—really, this time—to have another Bookfest again next year! :)

Making Paper

I feel like paper making is one of those activities we've done a lot but don't really get tired of. As I was looking back at old posts, I discovered we haven't really done it that often, but we've talked about it a lot and have done it in different contexts (like for our Japan Unit, and for our Ancient Egypt Unit).

This time I decided to order a kit just to streamline the process a little. Last time I used a big tub for the pulp mix, and a homemade screen, but I threw all that stuff out when we moved! I settled on this paper making kit from Amazon and we were really happy with it.

With as little printing as was actually on our paper, it turned out surprisingly…greyish. But it was still pretty!

Making the pulp

Sandwiching the paper between the screens

Sponging the water out

Paper all laid out to dry. How fun!

Printing Press Museum Field Trip

As I was thinking about the Printing Press, I had a memory of visiting some museum in Provo with my mom (multiple times, even) where there was a model of the printing press and some moveable type. I looked it up—the Crandall Printing Museum. But it was gone, closed in the last few years sometime! I was sad.

But then my mom did some asking around and found that the Crandall had resurfaced in Alpine! Someone bought the stuff and was resurrecting the museum. They have a ton of cool historical items in their collection, like a Gutenberg Bible and the only working model of the Gutenberg Press! They also have a bunch of things related to the original printing of the Book of Mormon back in Joseph Smith's time, including a model of the Grandin Press. 

It turned out that the museum wasn't yet officially open in Alpine (the grand opening was coming up in a few weeks), but I got in touch with someone who worked there and she agreed to give us a tour! My mom came with us since she had so many fond memories of the original Crandall. :)

I was excited about the kids seeing the printing press model, but honestly, the tour was way better than I was even expecting. The lady who led it was interesting and fun, and I hadn't anticipated that we'd get to see every step of the process—including the way they poured lead into mold to make the moveable type! She actually showed us how that worked—heated the lead, poured it, and made some pieces of type for us to look at! It was fascinating!

See the little trail of liquid lead that hardened instantly into a wobbly line on the stone?

I was happy that Malachi ended up coming with us on this field trip, because he was fascinated and asked a million questions, and even ended up talking for a long time with the lady after the tour was over. They became great friends, apparently. She even let him take home one of the pieces of type as a souvenir!

There was definitely an art to the way they pushed the ink onto the type forms with a leather inkball. If you don't coat the whole form (it has a more precise name, but I've forgotten it…a case, maybe? a galley?) evenly with ink, you get empty spots on the finished page, as you can see we did above! Daisy and Junie got to help put the ink onto the type.

You also had to be very precise in the way you lined up the type over the page. Often they would do two printings for a page (if they wanted some of the text in red, for instance) and there was no room for error in pressing the second group down into exactly the right spot among the earlier group of words.

Malachi helped screw down the press mechanism to push the inked plates firmly down onto the blank page!

And then he hung up our finished pages to dry on a drying line!

And here is the Gutenberg Bible we got to see. I've only ever seen another in the British Library. They are so beautiful! I wish I had my own copy (in English, of course) :)

It was a wonderful field trip; one of the best. Just the sort of thing we love doing. I would totally go back and pay for another tour, now that the museum is up and running and they charge a fee for tours. We'd like  to do the tour where you learn about the Book of Mormon printing too!

Here's the information about museum tours if you, too, would like to go there!

https://www.thecrandall.org/tours

Potato Stamp Printing

It's been a long time…maybe since I was in grade school…since I've done potato printing! I might have done it with bars of soap when I was a Cub Scouts leader or something. Anyway, it's a classic art project every child should try at least once, don't you think? It's a great way to show the printing process and solidify the idea of how images and text transfer backwards onto the page.

We didn't do anything fancy! Just simple shapes in either positive or negative space. And tempura paint for the "ink."

I loved the pretty pictures the children printed with their stamps!

J. [hearts] piggies!

Book Unit and Lettering Samples

Click to enlarge!

I wanted to do a Books and Authors unit for Malachi's sake this year, because he's been so into writing lately (see here! and that isn't even his first novel—it's about his fourth. He is getting really good!) and it seemed like a fun "spine" into which many different areas could be connected! It turned out really interesting and fun. 

We started with an overview of the history of writing, then moved into paper making, bookmaking, bookbinding, printing, the printing press, libraries, etc.

Then we moved on to types of writing and story, and ended with an overview of a bunch of different genres, reading representative stories and, at night, watching a typical movie from each genre. So much fun!! I had Malachi teach us a class on story structure and it was amazing. He is a wonderful teacher! He made it so interesting and accessible. It made me resolve to have him teach more often!

Clementine loves to come sit on Malachi's lap while he's writing. He says, "Do you want to be my little helper?" and she happily snuggles in with him and pushes buttons and points at things and asks questions and just generally makes herself "useful." Ha! So cute.

We've been gradually adding built-in shelves to this room since we moved in, and it was fun that during this unit this whole wall got completed. We call this room the Library and now it really feels like one!

I asked my dear friend (and writing partner) Rachael to do a lesson for us over FaceTime as our Guest Author. It was so good! She's the best. She's written three amazing books about her ancestors, as well as our book, of course!

We did an activity where we learned about fonts and fancy lettering styles, and then tried to learn/copy some of them ourselves. The girls loved this! Marigold, especially, loves fancy calligraphy. I loved what she came up with!

Look at the tiny little bunnies dancing around that "Eve"!

Junie's beautiful lettering

Junie's Pig Alphabet (Pigphabet?)

Daisy worked a long time to get the letters in her name exactly right! They look beautiful!

Sam's Art Unit

Usually between Christmas and New Years, when Sam is mostly home from work, he teaches a unit to the kids on something he's interested in. This year he taught a general Art Unit. I didn't get many pictures, and I don't have his lesson plan, but he talked about a bunch of design principles and Gestalt theory and how these principles contribute to a pleasing work of art. These are just some pictures of the notes the kids took and some drawings they did, to remind us that we did this unit at all!

The kids love learning from Sam and several of them want to be artists, so this was a really fun unit for them!