Every year, I try to put myself in the head of a middle schooler and figure out new ways to help them wrestle with geography and cartography. It’s no easy task to memorize drawing and labeling the whole world by heart. Some might even question the necessity (and sanity) of doing so (since let’s be honest, most kids are probably going to forget a lot of it anyway… and what are they going to use it for, answering a Jeopardy question at 40?), but I had to memorize and draw the world by heart as a young teenager, and not only did it make history and politics much easier to follow, it was also like an executive function super course. Taking a big project, breaking it down into chunks, and figuring out ways to remember everything is a huge skill that transfers over to so much of adulthood.
That said, there are certain “hacks” to help information stick in your brain…colors, novelty, music, pegging, mnemonics etc. I try to have my kids and students brainstorm with me, and so here’s this year’s fresh crop of new ideas. Homeschoolers these days have so many more creative tools at their fingertips than I did in the 90s. It’s not fair!
What we’ve come up with for helping to memorize Canada’s provinces and territories:
Big Alps Sing Many Quiet Old Nursery Poems Near Naptime to Young Northern Nomads. British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, Ontario, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.
Save, print, laminate, cut into cards, and keep around the table while you’re drawing and labeling. Try memorizing and chanting to jump rope, cups, clapping, hop scotch, tango dancing or…you get the idea.
So that helps with the visual working memory, but it doesn’t include the capitals. For that we need a good old fashioned sea shanty. Here’s a song with all of Canada’s provinces, territories and capitals, including Ottawa! (for some reason, kids seem to skip that one).
It very intentionally matches the same order as the acrostic mnemonic, but be careful! The Canadian provinces and capitals might get stuck in your head.
As always, you can find my other Cartography resources here:
Whether you’re an avid Charlotte Mason homeschooler, a die-hard Classical mom, or a free-spirited unschooler… we all want our children to spend more time outside, soaking in God’s nature, and of course the holy grail would be if they actually drew/painted and wrote down what they observed.
If you’re reading this and are thinking, yeah? What’s the big deal? My kids already do that. Then this blog post is not for you. But if you’re down here in the valleys fighting the monsters of “I’m hot and this is boring,” and “can we be done yet?” or the dreaded siren call of electronics, then know you’re not alone.
So if you have kids with ADHD, or who dislike writing/drawing, or who act like they’re allergic to being outside, here are some things that may help (or at least maybe baby steps in the right direction).
1) Set clear expectations. “We’re going outside for 30 min” is better than the abstract, full Sound of Music, “The hills are alive with the sound of music” vibe where you picture you and your children picturesquely traipsing through meadows with butterflies, sketchbooks in hand, and pencils ready to go.
2) If you have a perfectionistic artist, switch to a pen and tell them it’s a magic pen where mistakes are not only allowed, but encouraged. They don’t need to draw and erase five thousand times with a pencil while they get more and more frustrated.
3) If you have a child with dysgraphia, have them treat the outdoors like a rough draft. The messy handwriting, random keywords, and stick figures are great! Let them come in and trace and type later when they’re ready. If they saw a bird they thought was cool, have them trace a simple generic bird outline from the internet, and then fill in the details and colors on their own.
4) If you have boys or kids who like competition, turn it into a game. “Can you find a leaf you’ve never seen before?”, “Person who finds the craziest bug wins”, “Silent game and see who can hear the most bird calls”.
5) And last but not least, give them the freedom to research and sketch something crazy. Yes, you want them to be inside, but sometimes kids just want to research man-eating crocodiles in Australia, or a cute, nearly extinct red panda bear, and that’s ok too. I think sometimes we forget that the goal is to fan the flame of intellectual curiosity, observation, and research, and that doesn’t always fit into our idyllic homeschooling ideals.
It has space for both drawing and writing, and it’s formatted so your child can read their writing/notes, while their listeners can see their drawing.
If you need any other reluctant middle-school or Challenge A help (if you’re in Classical Conversations), you can find an ADHD friendly Latin workbook here. Or a traceable cartography workbook with drawing tutorials here. Or an anatomy workbook for kids who are strongly in the dialectic phase and like to argue and be opinionated here.
Meanwhile, I’m off to shoo my crew outside and pretend like we’re super chill about poison ivy and ticks! Ahem.
I should have done this a long time ago. I wrote a whole Anatomy Workbook/Curriculum! Between four kids who love science, a mom who is a nurse and loves human anatomy, and my years as a Challenge A Director, I’ve spent the last several months compiling all of my favorite experiments, dialectic questions, simpler drawings, and all the crazy memory hacks my mom used when I was little to help us memorize everything. It was one of those projects where I felt like I could have kept writing it forever, adding new interesting research and information I dug up, but I also wanted to make it doable. An independent, open-and-go curriculum with an easy answer key that wasn’t online and was screen-free. I also tried to tap into middle schoolers’ natural desire to form opinions and argue with everyone around them. Ahem.
You can find the printable digital version here. Or… You can find the printed and mailed-to-you version here.
And now, on to the thing that sparked this whole adventure. I think THE TALK is a universally dreaded conversation to have with your kids, and it always seems to be in capital letters in one’s head. And the worst part (at least in our family) is that when you finally muster up the courage to have the conversation, you forget that your kid has an auditory processing problem, and you make it so low-key and chill that they promptly forget the whole thing, leaving you to experience Groundhog Day. Good times. The internet is chock-full of all kinds of books, instructional material, and helpful advice, but it can be daunting and overwhelming, and thus we disassociate until another day and hope we don’t wait too long, or heaven forbid, give it too soon (where are my pearls to clutch).
So don’t take this as advice or a strong opinion, but if you’re looking for a plain, factual lesson, I’ve got you covered. For those who have visual learner kids, but don’t want something super graphic and are looking for a more science-friendly approach, here’s the Reproductive System Lesson from the workbook. A freebie science printable, as they say. You can hand it over, or do it alongside them, or edit it, or use it as a starting point to build with more information as they get older and more mature (or perhaps less mature in the case of middle schoolers). Enjoy!
Or you know, you can always go the super expensive route and buy a homestead and have animals, and then the reproductive education (mostly) takes care of itself!
Do numbers have personality and gender to you? Fueds, family trees, romances…sibling squabbles? Or are they just numbers?
This question came up in my Challenge A class, and out of six kids and a few adults, only one kid and one mom didn’t do this. Since I’ve done this for as long as I can remember…involuntarily with both notes/music notation and math/numbers, I sort of assumed everyone did it to some extent (except for Jim because he’s one of those weird spreadsheet people). Obviously, 0 is the patriarch and 1 is his firstborn son who’s been such a disappointment to him. 2 is the matriarch… 7 is the perfect child who drives his siblings crazy because he really shouldn’t be…etc etc etc.
Turns out that’s an actual thing called Ordinal-Linguistic Personification, which is a form of synesthesia. A large percentage of kids do it, but they usually outgrow it. Only 1% of the adult population has Ordinal-Linguistic Personification, so I guess Jim’s not the weird one after all. There are other types of synesthesia too! Some of them I’ve never even heard of:
Grapheme-color synesthesia – associating letters or numbers with specific colors.
Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP) – attributing personalities or genders to numbers, letters, or days of the week.
Chromesthesia – hearing sounds and involuntarily seeing colors.
Lexical-gustatory synesthesia – associating words with specific tastes.
Auditory–Tactile Synesthesia – Hearing a sound causes a feeling somewhere on your body.
So now I’m super curious about who else is a closet synesthete. 👀
But back to math, this whole number personification thing has made math discussions in class and at home so much more interesting. I was listening to the math map podcast and Dr. Gilpin recommended making your own number cards for quick arithmetic games…it’s hard sometimes to remember what numbers kings and queens are and if we decided aces were high or low. Plus, it would be nice if the cards went up to 15 like we do with skip counting.
Soooo, thanks to the power of the internet and a little late-night insomnia, here are some personified number cards for all your little creative math geniuses (or right-brained ADHD-prone kids). If you want four suites like regular playing cards, print two sets. (make sure you select “fit to page” otherwise your printer will chop off the color). You can make blue cards negative numbers and red cards positive numbers…you can add the red and minus the blues…or multiply and divide. The sky is the limit! (I included a whole list of quick, fast medieval-themed math games that will tempt even the most dysgraphic sensitive kid into doing math…perhaps even liking it) Enjoy.
(and if you’re looking for other screen-free homeschooling help like Challenge A survival Latin or Cartography, you can find them here.)
I’m loathed and embarrassed to even use such a clickbaity title, but I stumbled upon this method quite by accident and either it’s an anomaly for my kids/friends kids/students or it really is magical.
In all my spare time, I (try to) read books on neuroscience and listen to podcasts on all the latest cognitive strategies (hello Huberman), but there’s a difference between absorbing parasympathetic systems and dopamine receptors, and the real strategies for down-in-the-trenches help. So if I were to analyze this method dispassionately, I would say it’s the adrenaline and dopamine receptors that are kept guessing, that make this strategy so effective, but enough of the navel-gazing…. what is this?
A printable board game and a few dice. I’m not joking. I can literally get my kids and my cottage school kids to do anything with this game. Math? done. Latin? done. Spelling? done. If you only have one kid, you’ll have to play with them as you need at least two players. Sometimes I do their work alongside them to show that even moms have to do school too, and sometimes I have them assign me my own “school work” like switching the laundry or starting lunch. After all, fair is fair, and if I’m asking them to do half a math worksheet, then they can assign me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (little do they know, that I need the ADHD motivation hack too).
I named it “Via Triumphalis” which means “The Road of Triumph” in Latin. But don’t worry, you don’t need to understand Latin to play this game beyond knowing that “Proelium” means battle, and “Porta” means gate. You also need dice, and dry-erase markers (or a penny or something to move across the board…we use dry-erase markers). I have two versions, a simple one for younger kids, and a more complex one with character cards if your older kids get bored of the simpler version.
Word of caution though, don’t use it too much….act reluctant…only pull it out every two or three times they ask for it, otherwise (like with all things) the novelty wears off.
Don’t tell me if someone has already done this, but I finally drew an accessible world map. Straddling the GenX/Millenial line means I know how to use electronics better than a Zoomer, but not as well as a true dyed-in-the-wool GenX. Consequently, I have been struggling to find the perfect whole world map for nigh on 7 years now. You’d think it would be easy, but it needed to:
A) Be easily photocopiable and printable (you’d be shocked at how many maps have weird gray areas or water that don’t copy well). B) Have the longitude and latitude lines go OVER the countries. This is super important to be able to draw it using the grid method. C) Be the least garbled Mercator projection so the grids are in straight lines. D) Have nice thick, easily traceable lines so it could be put on a window or lightbox. E) Fit on a standard 8.5×11, but also be printable in bigger sizes.
It has been driving me crazy for years because I’m sure it exists somewhere and I didn’t need to draw one myself, but I couldn’t find one I liked. But I really didn’t want to make one myself because drawing the whole world takes time and effort…two things in short supply when you have 4 kids and a million other responsibilities and priorities taking up one’s time (like reading historical fiction till 2am…cough cough). I tried several times, but someone always spilled something on it, or I couldn’t get the perspectives and lines right. It was my own personal Sisyphean task…every time I worked on it, I somehow found myself back at the beginning.
So even though it feels rather anti-climatic at this point (faint drumroll), here is a fully traceable, fully drawable, fully expandable world map that may or may not be totally accurate. (I used Google Maps for the most up-to-date borderlines, but the world isn’t exactly stable and black and white right now):
There’s even a matching blank grid included. I think drawing and familiarizing kids with the world is incredibly important, especially these days. Once when I was working as a server, I had a table of customers who were from Kyrgyzstan. They asked me if I even knew where their country was. Not only could I tell them where it was, I could also tell them every country that bordered it. In all fairness, they didn’t realize how many years I’d been teaching middle schoolers how to draw the world by heart. But seriously, world news and issues make so much more sense if you have a working mental picture of the world.
I’ll get off my soap box now. I figure at the very least I made an exceptionally time-intensive free art page. Heck, you could even print it super large, paint it with your color scheme, and frame it… or color all the places with missionaries you pray for…or color in a new country every day and do a unit study…or…or… I’ll stop now.
I thought tutoring Challenge A this year was going to be easy because I’ve done it so many times. I remember the ol days when students circled typos in It couldn’t just happen, backline maps were in the back of the guide and the math map wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye.
Then I got a corneal ulcer from some sort of death ray staph/mrsa which in my imagination looks like the eye of Sauron erupting on the top left side of my left iris. It’s not only taken out a good bit of my vision, but it also makes my eye spasm like I’m on some sort of hellish carnival ride with strobe lights. All of my dreams for a smooth school start have come crashing down, but in some ways it’s good, the kids are all pitching in and my 3rd born may turn out to be my most independent Challenge A kid yet.
Of course if I could have chosen a year to have this happen, I wouldn’t have chosen The-Year-Of-The-Math-Map to be a director, but here we are. Our class is slowly sampling and nibbling at this advanced math feast, and I think good conversations and connections are being made. But holy wow, I cannot handle the math notation flashcards. I don’t know if it’s because I’m half blind, or it’s my ADHD or what, but my brain cannot handle the double-sided flashcards with the definition matching the opposite side. I look at it over and over, confusing myself even more and more.
In a fit of internal angst…over so many things, I made Grumpy Cat Math Notation flashcards. Since Math symbols can have a variety of definitions, I put the main on in the speech bubble, and all the extra information in Grumpy Cat’s thought bubble. First tour students can work on the speech bubble level, and more advanced folk can memorize the extra information.
Since It really is quite difficult to see (especially a computer screen…this blog entry is being typed with my eyes closed and shoutout to Grammarly), I only have the first 4 weeks done (15 pages total, so if you do one page a week you should have them memorized by Christmas and can start over and review in the 2nd Semester).
P.S. If you aren’t in Classical Conversations and have no clue what I’m talking about, thank your lucky stars. Although if you think it sounds fun to teach your child the definition of a radix point or the Greek phi (not to be confused with pi), then by all means feel free to include them in on the fun. Math is for everyone! We’re in our math era.
Printing tips: Print black and white and save ink and toner if you’re printing on thin paper otherwise you can kind of see the answers. Select “double sided” or “print on both sides” and then select “head to head” or “flip on long edge”. Make sure the orientation is set to “portrait” and hit print!
This expository is to remind future me: I started Scholarforge to help kids (and mamas).
When God was handing out brains and personalities, he gave me the one that gets very distracted by shiny things (in this case, shiny new ideas). I would totally have gotten lost if I were Hansel and Gretel. There would have been no trail of crumbs, or “scarlet thread” going through the Labyrinth. I probably would have gone all Swiss Robinson family and built a treehouse next to the witch’s candy hut and turned the minotaur into a pet (or more realistically perished in the process, but who’s counting?). Consider this me staking a flag in the ground to remind myself why I’m doing this.
I came up with the idea for Scholarforge because I really do love teaching and firmly believe every kid is just one step away from a breakthrough. Trying to build those bridges across rocky terrain is what gets me up in the morning. Whether it’s reading, writing, or executive function, I’m here for the front-row seat. I know it’s hard to watch kids struggle, and get frustrated…lash out in anger, and feel defeated, discouraged or dumb, but I can’t help but immediately start brainstorming ways to work through it all.
Sure I have lots of lofty aspirations. My goal someday is to have a reading program that is as simple to use as 100 Easy Lessons, as colorful as The Good And The Beautiful, and as in-depth as Spell To Write And Read/Writing Road To Reading. I’d love to make Latin accessible to everyone, churn out all kinds of helpful things to create solid spellers…oh and create a formal logic curriculum that treats anxiety and depression with truth tables, but I may need several lifetimes for all that. In the meantime, I still have four kids who can’t do half those things, but in umbra igitur pugnabimus (we struggle on regardless).
BUT… Even if I don’t have all the fancy glossy books published yet, I always have a sympathetic and listening ear available. And somewhere in the depths of my Canva and Google drives I also have spelling songs, countries and capital songs, fun mnemonic ways of remembering the Ten Commandments, and a whole host of other things, so feel free to hit me up if you need something. You can find YouTube geography tutorials here and how to remember the Latin Declensions here. Andria and I wrote a Latin Curriculum you can buy here that can be used by anyone anywhere but is especially helpful for Challenge A kids. I also drew blackline maps for the whole world so kids could trace/draw and color the world in peace without struggling with curved projections and bubbly confusing graphics (you can find those here).
I know it’s all a small drop in the bucket, and I totally understand that not everything will work for everyone.
Once upon a time, we took our Classical Conversations Challenge B class to Rome and it was life-changing.
As we were sitting in church tonight for our Good Friday service, something in the sermon reminded me of the Rome Catacombs (not to be confused with the Paris Catacombs…cough cough). So I’m reposting my blog/journal entry from that epic homeschooling field trip here. (maybe mostly to remind myself that I need to take the next batch of students to Rome).
Today was the last full day in Rome and each day I’ve thought was the best… so of course today was no different. At one point I was flying down the infamous Appian Way in a taxi listening to 70’s music, discussing the resurrection message we’d just heard deep under the earth in the catacombs, and I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
Jamie and I started out the day with cappuccinos and chocolate croissants like we always do. I kinda never want to see a chocolate croissant again, but the coffee I will miss. Not that we don’t have good coffee in San Diego, but our truly good coffee has to be sought out like the holy grail, whereas it’s on every street corner in Rome. …Actually, that’s how Rome is in general. Our most glorious basilica in the United States is copied and pasted a hundred times in Rome. In Rome, you’ll be walking around a church trying to take it all in and figure out which painting is the Raphael you’re looking for, when you find out the church’s relic is Baby Jesus’s manger. Jamie said he didn’t really picture the nativity with a manger of intricately wrought gold, silver, and jewels,…which is what it looks like… but the humble wooden manger is protected inside of it. (The jury’s out in the academic world on whether it really is the authentic manger).
The religious lines got a little wonky for me today. I’m a happy protestant who grew up Evangelical but appreciates the beauty of the more liturgical Presbyterian church. I used to be staunchly reformed and Calvinistic on all things (and I still am), but the older I get the more “big tent” Christian become. In some ways, I think of each type of Christian as a genus that’s entrusted with doing one thing (or a few things) well. The Roman Catholic church has the market on tradition, loyalty, and engaging all five senses.
We went to the oldest church in Rome and I could picture the early home church that started on that spot, and I could see its transformation through the ages, and I could witness people worshipping Christ today. Across the street from the oldest church, there are stairs where Jesus allegedly walked up to his trial (Constanine’s mother brought them from Herod’s palace in Jerusalem). The marble steps are so worn and sloped from thousands of years and millions of Catholics kneeling and praying on them, the steps have been closed for the last three hundred years. They’re open now. For a few months, you can pray on your knees up the twenty-some-odd steps. Even if they aren’t the real stairs Jesus walked on (I can’t turn off the rational part of my brain), it was a moving scene.
I didn’t think anything could top the manger, Herod’s stairs, and the oldest church, but the catacombs were the next thing on the itinerary. I was nervous because it had proved super challenging to get tickets for our group. The lines are long and limited everywhere (and for almost everything) in Rome. So in order to get 22 tickets for anything, we had to book them in advance. The Colosseum, Borghese, and the Vatican were all challenging in their own way, but the catacombs were most difficult on the front side due to the language barrier, specific rules, and lack of 21st-century technology in use to aid communication halfway around the world. After much angst and multiple tries (and being hung up on several times), all I had was an email that said “Your reservation is confirmed”. No order number, no mention of what that confirmation entailed. It worked out perfectly though. A sweet old Italian gentleman had our tickets reserved for us on his handwritten list (the couple behind us were from San Diego too!). All of the guided tours that go through catacombs (and aren’t third-party tours) are led by a priest. Ours was Father Tren. He didn’t look like a stereotypical catholic priest. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, was young, and had a dry sense of humor. He preached the gospel with such sincerity and passion: Though the catacombs are deep underground, dark, and filled with the dead, it is actually a place of hope. Hope in the resurrection. At the end, he prayed for us, that we would be encouraged and strengthened not to get discouraged. To remember those who came before us. To rest in the saving power of the cross. Even the atheist was moved. There are 500,000 Christians buried down there, with marble slates filled with Latin and Greek…lots of them with misspelled words and grammatical errors. The walls are filled with scratchings of messages “I miss you.” “We will see each other again.” “May God be with you”. Father Tren called it “Devotional Graffiti”.
We finished the last day with the usual three-hour dinner from 8pm to 11pm, we’ve got lazy our last few days in Rome and have been eating at the restaurant right next door. The servers gave us hugs tonight and told us to come back…which was big of them. I could never quite tell if they had a panic attack every time we walked in with 12-18 people or if they appreciated the business we brought. Jesse wins the prize for the most adventurous eater this trip with fried sheep brain for first place, and Ben is right behind with squid for second place. Honorable mention to a parent for the consumption of tripe. Jamie wins for most gelato consumed, and Hayley wins for most candy consumed. My favorite dish was veal and artichokes and I will miss being able to enjoy a glass of wine. It didn’t give me a migraine like it does in the States which makes me think it was all in my head in the first place (pun intended?). Maybe I should give wine another try, or maybe I’ve grown out of it.
Not ready to leave, but feeling like a homing pigeon who needs to set the course back for home. I’m not actually a very adventurous person. I don’t particularly love to travel, and I much prefer my own home and people. But my ideas get ahead of what my biological self prefers to do. Thus the conundrum of magical trips like these (but so worth it).
Taking uninterested children to museums and field trips is BRUTAL. On one side you tell yourself that your children need to be educated and cultured and have their horizons expanded, on the other side you have the students/children themselves who are loudly protesting how much they hate said field trip. And then you have all the older responsible folk who are all “when I was a kid, we didn’t complain about…”.
And while you’re trying to internally juggle all the things, you’re also trying to pretend that you have nothing else in the world to do than make everyone happy. You’re not also wondering how you’re going to grade papers, get dinner on, feed the dog, schedule the orthodontist appt etc. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I live for bridging the gap between cranky docents who think “children should be seen but not heard” and said children who are convinced the world is devoid of food and fun.
Now that I think about it, I’m not being sarcastic…that’s literally what I live for. I think I may genuinely enjoy bridging that gap between the old and the new.
But I digress.
I happen to so privileged as to live within bike-riding distance of where the Little House On the Prairie series was written. That’s right. The real Laura Ingalls Wilder herself, wrote the famous books not a stone’s throw away from my house. Consequently, my children have been once…or twice…or several…ok many times to the original homestead tours and museum. So when our CC group had a field trip there, I knew I was going to walk that fun tightrope between the out loud “of course we’re going!” and the intense hushed “yes we are going and you are going to be polite and listen to the tour guide and say “yes ma’am and thank you”.
As I was agonizingly doing math with the youngest beforehand, in an attempt to get school done “early”, I realized I was going to need a backup plan. Having been before, I was mentally imagining a bunch of elementary-aged boys (and girls) trying to squeeze into the tiny 120-year-old kitchen filled with priceless artifacts. AND they were successfully supposed to not move or touch anything. Lord have mercy. So I came up with a “scavenger hunt”.
Now granted, I know this is harder to do if you’re traveling and don’t know what you’re getting into, but I think it’s really a fantastic plan. Kids like goals. Kids like tangible things. Sometimes their brains are too underdeveloped to match the grammar with the rhetoric, so they need a bridge. The bridge in this case was an orange wet-erase marker and a laminated sheet of notebook paper. I scribbled down 15 things for them to find and answer, and I evenly divided the tasks between the exhibits and the museum. The reward was a stick of “Penny candy” that now costs 40 cents. Ho hum. Economics lesson aside, I would happily pay 40 cents per kid in order to not get permanently banned from a museum. Of course, the plan did backfire on me when the kids were SO EXCITED to see Pa’s fiddle and to see where Laura lost the money for her homestead, that they went in like a drove of invasive grasshoppers, and promptly got their butts set down by an elderly docent. By the time I sauntered in (a few moments behind them), she was already wrapping up the “don’t make noise, don’t touch anything, don’t breathe on anything” lecture and was ready to launch into the “how to be a responsible chaperone lecture.” What she didn’t know, was that I am happy to take one for the team, in fact, I’d be happy to have her come lecture my children every morning, but she didn’t seem interested in that. Shocking.
After the field trip was over, my kids said it was the best field field trip ever. So. much. fun.
The key really was the “scavenger hunt” (and maybe the presence of their friends, but who’s counting). Everyone needs a job or a mission, and I totally get it! When I was in Paris, I had a mental checklist of everything I wanted to see, and learn, and understand. Why would kids be any different? They just need a little abstract hand-holding.
I’m going to start doing this every time I find myself chaperoning a field trip where I know I’m going to be in over my head. However next time I’m going to have a chat with the Gift Shop Lady first, and I’m also not going to forget all my scavenger hunt stuff on the table. I’m wondering, should I go back and get my pens and paper? Cut my losses? Save face? or chalk it up to a good laugh?
Also, if you ever come to visit, I will happily show you where Laura and Almanzo’s secret cold spring is, and tell you all the “exclusive conspiracy theory” stories.
Scholar Forge 
