I started taking ballet when I was three years old, and didn't stop until I was forced to in my senior year of high school due to some unrelated health problems. It was my activity of choice through most of my childhood, and there were years I spent 15-20 hours a week in the studio, fueled by passion and family problems at home. I was one of the best students of ballet at a small-town studio that swapped out terms like "plié" and "tombé" for "bend and straighten" and "fall," with the big regional ballet companies close enough to occasionally see in action yet far enough away to make professional-grade instruction geographically prohibitive. There were girls whose mothers shuttled them four hours a day to the closest big city to attend class, who spent summers at dance camps and weekends at auditions. As much as I loved to dance, I was not one of those girls. But I learned a lot of invaluable lessons through it - lessons in grace, concentration, determination, and self-confidence, among other things.

Having gained so much personally from ballet, I always knew that when I had children, I'd give them the opportunity to try dance lessons. Since we lean away from traditional teacher-student arrangements, Jeremiah and I waited until a month ago, with Z nearly five, to introduce her to any sort of formal lessons aside from swimming, which she adores, and Kindermusic, which is pretty freeform in its preschool curriculum.

Last week, Z started a ballet "camp" at a local dance studio. Over the course of the camp, it will introduce her to some basic ballet concepts and channeling some of her highly expressive energy into creative movement.

I bought her tiny pink tights and her tiny black leotard, per the studio's uniform requirement, and the other day we went to pick out her ballet shoes. One of my strongest memories from early childhood is that time just before school starts in the fall when my own mother and I would go to Brown's Shoe Store to buy me new ballet shoes and new tap shoes. At that time, you had to buy your tap shoes early enough to allow time to drop them off at the cobbler's shop to get him to nail the taps on. Ballet shoes came without the elastics so I would anxiously await and watch while mom sewed the elastic onto my shoes - excited to put both pair on for a quick spin around the house before lessons started in the fall.

I had these memories in my head as Z and I headed towards Brown's. As we walked in the door I instantly recognized that shoe-store smell from my memory. But fortunately I hadn't told Z her why we were going to Brown's, because the times have changed! Brown's now sells MBTs and Earth shoes and has nary a dance shoe in sight. I was too embarrassed to ask why they didn't sell dance shoes anymore (for all I know they stopped selling them 20 years ago) so we pretended to look around a little bit and then left.

I later did some looking around online and found a pair that I wanted to get Z, so we headed to a dance store connected to a studio (as far as I know, the only dance store in town). Not only did the not have the ballet shoes that I wanted, but the ones that we ended up getting for Z came with the elastic already sewn on! I was so disappointed - I had looked forward to a night of digging out just the right color of pink thread and sewing on the elastic in just the right spot, taking care not to break through to the surface of the shoe. Even the tap shoes came with the taps already on. No more reusing the same taps from year to year - although every studio I've been in has a bin of old shoes that you can dig around in in case you forget yours or need another rehearsal pair.

I'm going to order some ballet bun holders from Etsy tonight. At least they still make those!

Z is really enjoying her dance camp and wants to continue taking lessons in the fall, but it's just one of the activities we're gently easing her into over the next year or two to see what she's interested in. Because I'm fully prepared to accept that while ballet was my passion, it might not be hers. Yes, I might be a little disappointed if she ends up hating dance, but what I really want is for her to gain what I got from dance - confidence, concentration, and determination. If that comes from another activity that becomes a passion for her, I'll be right there to support and encourage her in it.

Monica, a former elementary school teacher, parent of a 2.5-year-old, and dear friend, turned us onto the idea of making butter in a jar. The process is simple and is a fun way to demonstrate to little ones what, exactly, butter is. It's actually pretty surprising even to adults: Shake heavy cream in a jar, wait as it whips, thickens, and separates into butter and buttermilk, drain the buttermilk several times, and press it out between a couple of cutting boards.

I've set up a Flickr photo set with 12 images documenting the process with step-by-step instructions. Your child will be amazed and will never forget where butter comes from.





This post from the ZRecs Archives was originally published on March 16, 2007. Z was, geez, about two and a half. It was Christy who got us thinking about this post again.

This evening Z, Jeremiah and I experimented with natural Easter egg dyeing.


We boiled enough different vegetables and other plant materials we were reusing our few cooking pots two or three times each. Beets, prickley pear cactus tuna, and blackberries for shades of red; spinach in hopes of a yellow or even a green; and yellow and red onion skins.




The onion skins we soaked, then wrapped around eggs, wrapping them afterwards in scrap fabric from an old sheet, from a great tutorial we found on Instructables. The wrapped eggs were then boiled


The rest of the plants were each chopped and boiled for about ten to fifteen minutes. For some things, this may not have been long enough.


The strained juices looked promising - that's the beet stock in the center, flanked by prickley pear and blackberry.


As you can probably see, the spinach stock didn't have much verve. At least, not after we accidentally dumped a bit too much vinegar in it (a dash of vinegar is supposed to help the color stick to your eggs). That mug isn't filled with anything you'd want to drink - it's a turmeric stock, which we'd hoped would make a nice yellow dye. It probably would have worked better if we'd boiled the eggs in it, but as a dye it was pretty pale.


Some early tears made it clear a fresh dinner needed to accompany the dyeing event...


Including, naturally, freshly boiled eggs. (The "not pretty ones," Z insisted.) She has eaten hard boiled eggs at salad bars, but this apparently was the first she'd seen unshelled before her very eyes. She was tickled.


The eggs wrapped in red onion skins were the most beautiful, followed by those left to steep for a while in the beet juice. We'd recommend beets over either of our other two red options, hands down.


With a light rubbing of vegetable oil after they had dried, the eggs were truly lovely.

If you've used natural pigments to dye eggs, let us know your tips! We'll definitely be doing this again next year, and will rotate in some other plant materials to try for some more strong colors. We'll also be wrapping a lot more in red onion skins...

The concept: A memory game in which players attempt to remember which two items make the same sound by picking up two cups and shaking each one. If a match is suspected, the player can turn the cups over to see if the images on the bottom match.

The inspiration: This is not our idea. In fact, it's an idea we got from a beautifully-constructed wooden toy by Guidecraft called Sound Cubes that performed very poorly. The blocks contained a number of beans, rocks or small bells and were intended to operate as described above, but four of the pairs were virtually indistinguishable - the sounds simply were not different enough for children to tell them apart, and we tested them on several adults too, all of whom failed to identify the "correct" pairs. Talk about a fun killer.

Time required: An hour with a toddler, or a little less without.


What you need: Twelve paper cups, construction paper (several pieces each of one or two colors), 6 pairs of matching stickers, tape, scissors, a bowl or cup a couple inches larger in diameter than the opening of the cups (for tracing the lids), and six different kinds of shakeable objects. We were pretty picky in selecting the objects to use based on our experience with the Sound Cubes game, and settled on six distinct sounds:

Pair 1: Jingle bells (one in each cup)
Pair 2: Paper clips (4-5 in each cup)
Pair 3: Barley (a small handful in each cup)
Pair 4: Dried garbanzo beans (any small beans will do)
Pair 5: A string of three linked plastic Mardi Gras beads (okay, you're on your own for that one)
Pair 6: Pennies (two in each cup)

We thought about lining the messy tape-construction paper seam with ribbon. We ended up going for the quick and dirty version in pretty much all respects.

Very simple instructions:


Divide each set of items in half, and make sure you like the sound they make in the cups. Use the larger bowl to trace circles on the construction paper and cut them out. Then trace the inner circle on each of them with the mouth of a cup, like this:


Cut notches around the outside of the circle, ending each cut at the inner circle:


Tape these covers over the cups and add paired stickers for each pair. We used dinosaurs - it was that or fluorescent happy faces.


Flip them over, shuffle them around, and play!


After we first published this tutorial in January 2007, anna kiss at sugar boot and weasel modified this task to use cups that come with lids. We've said it before, but it bears repeating: That woman is a genius.

We have a love-hate relationship with worksheets. On the one hand, we don't want Z's learning to be so structured that it becomes rote or boring to her. On the other hand, as a child, I absolutely loved doing worksheets (the ones that came from store bought books, not the ones that were sent home as homework) - they kept me entertained and engaged and I felt like I'd accomplished something significant when I finished a worksheet. So we try to take a very laissiez-faire approach to worksheets - we've written in the past about our love for Kumon workbooks - we show Z how you are supposed to interact with the worksheet then we step back and try not to "correct" her for coloring all the objects instead of the only the ones that start with the letter A.

True Learning has created a double CD set of over 3,000 worksheets in 4 developmental levels and 6 categories: Art, Literacy, Math, Motor Skills, Thinking, and World. The True Learning CD combines all the aspects of learning into one CD set. The ranking by category and then by level allows you to print, for example, a level 3 art worksheet, level 1 math worksheet, and level 2 motor skills worksheet for your child - in other words, to introduce (and print!) them based on your child's skill level and interest.

If you don't want to print out all the worksheets or if your child is in a calmer mood, you can open them on the computer and discuss them with your child without printing them out. This worked particularly well with the Thinking module which promotes cognitive skills like which is the longest/shortest, spot the difference, identifying objects by their shadows, above/below, and other concepts.

So what distinguishes these worksheets from the free stuff you can get online? Quality. Homeschoolers know how much time you can spend looking for good printable teaching aids and how much junk you have to sift through; what True Learning offers is a ready resource for quality materials. Working with a "program" rather than randomly discovered sheets also offers the opportunity to work your way through concepts in as systematic a manner as you like.

A few detail images from the worksheets follow. For some reason, all the ones I picked feature matching up items by drawing lines between them, but the sets contain a variety of activity styles.


from Math, Level 1


from a higher-level Math worksheet


from a Thinking worksheet

The graphics on the True Learning worksheets are fun and colorful and should engage your child, and with four levels of learning for each section, they will last a while. You can get the set of two CDs for $30 from the True Learning website.

There are a lot of alternative business access models True Learning could offer - the ability to pay for a certain number of printouts or a subscription service that sends out batches of worksheets in a scheduled release are just two examples - which might lure more homeschooling parents, who have a well-honed skill for keeping their out-of-pocket educational expenses in check. For the quality, quantity, and ease of use the package offers, however, this should be worth the cost to parents for whom such considerations are a priority.

We are slowly working our way through a stash of cigar boxes after wildly stockpiling them over a few trips to our local liquor warehouse, which sells them for a quarter to a dollar-fifty apiece. Some readers will remember our first cigar box display case, which consisted of imagined items from nature that were actually scraps of fabric, vintage buttons, or pieces of craft foam:


If you missed it, you can read about that project and see more photos in the Z Recommends archives.

I try to strike a very balance in these collaborations, guiding Z just enough to help channel her imaginative ideas into results that remain thematic. We frequently develop tangential ideas that I encourage her to think about for the next project. That way we don't end up with a dozen (or more!) boxes of equally jumbled ideas. But the driving force is hers.

A month or so ago we made this one, an elephant watering hole. Her idea.




Looks like a scene of carnage to me, but in fact (she will happily tell you) the elephants are swimming. She enjoys looking at it with her magnifying glass, which I'll blog about when it turns up. We searched a long time for a good one, and it was cheap, too.

Our next box was a while in the making, as we collected real natural objects (mostly) to be included in the box over a couple of months.


I cut down some 6x6" corkboard pieces we had lying around for a padded backing to help with pinning. I thought it would make a nice background, but when Z suggested adding paper I realized that the cork would probably mute the detail of some of the more interesting objects in the box. We used simple straight pins to hold the delicate items in place, and craft glue for the shells, glass bead, and skeleton hand. I had to angle the pins pretty sharply to fit them in the box.

Dried flowers or other plant material would have been a nice addition, but our process was simpler - if she found something, we grabbed it and popped it in the collecting area (another cigar box) until we had enough.


The fake skeleton hand was attached to a fake skeleton arm on a keychain from her grandmother, which I really wanted to include, don't ask me why - I guess I find such blends of real and surreal funny, because it is so descriptive of the way her mind works so well at the age of four. She wasn't interested in the arm but when I suggested we could break the hand free, she suddenly liked the idea very much.


The strange bug-shaped thing is the discarded exoskeleton of a cicada, which I found on a leaf of the wisteria I have been trying to kill intermittently for over a year. Cicadas emerge from them and the shells are fascinatingly contoured to the shape of the body that was inside. Still more amazing is that the cicadas split the back open and emerge without destroying the skeleton. Here, you can see the roughly two-hour process in a thirty-second time-lapse video:



Stunning, isn't it?

The butterfly we found (dead) in the grass. A rare thing. I didn't dare try to extend its wings any more than you see here, for fear of breaking it apart.