First Weeks in Review + Dungeon Crawl!

PBS Learning Media Storyboard for new school year

Friday and gave Chase a test and storyboard assignment this morning to review what we've learned so far.  I made my own storyboard to highlight a few of the things.  Just a good way to keep track of what we've learned.  Don't see anyway to embed these.  It is similar to the Glogster posters, though those you can embed.  However, Glogs take a long time to load, I think it is all flash or something.  This could also be used as a presentation for projects.  Though Windows 10 has a built in app that might work better.  It's called Sway.  I'll have to play around with it a bit to see how useful it would be.  The storyboards are simple, and that can be good enough.

In the afternoon, we did our first dungeon crawl.  Only made it to the first room of the Old Aqueducts, though.  We had a random encounter with 4 tiny scorpions and they kicked our butts because we couldn't hit them!  Hahaha.  Well, after Kai (Chase's fighter) fell into a floor trap that nearly killed him, we took on a huuuuge centipede and destroyed it.  Then there was lewts.  Emberlyn (my pirate/rogue) found some gold and split it (evenly, of course! ---- not!) and Kai found a glowing gem and a cool sword.  Our NPC, Asila, a second year Healer student, found a small silver ring.

That is as far as we got, had to have them take a short rest...  Guess we're combining 3.5 and 5 rules to try to simplify things.  Rather than make us spend the night in the dungeon when it should really take one night only.  We're exploring a tunnel under our school and they would probably have to send a search party after us if us first years didn't make it back.  But hey, we did sign the waivers that adventurer's school could mean our deaths!

Chase has no problem solving math problems on the fly as he rolls his saves and attacks.  He did well with the roleplay part, with a character afraid of bugs and our first encounters....  My character flaw has a fear of ghosts.  Kevin wanted us each to have a flaw to make our characters more interesting and have fun to roleplay with.

For our table, we bought a shower curtain as it is cheaper than a large vinyl mat, cut it to size and we're using overhead markers to write on it.  He made a dungeon map to go under it and drew on all the features and added tokens as encounters.

The DM notes and encounter tokens!

New miniatures for our characters from Reaper Mini.

The full table view of the dungeon.

Oops, just remembered, forgot to do school pictures today.  Well, maybe we'll take them on Monday.  We were still discussing what to do with them.  Last year it was Minecraft themed, where I used a green screen to superimpose him into a Minecraft scene he composed.  I think he wants to do that again, but after looking at the portrait of Benjamin Franklin with his favorite things to present himself as a person who believed in the Age of Enlightenment, he might want a tailored portrait.  Maybe styled as a painting.  Only my Wacom isn't compatible with Windows 10, plus I managed to lose my stylus!

Last year's pictures!  2015-2016 School Year - 3rd Grade

Character Portrait - Kai by Chase

Kai - Human Fighter

After computer lab and worksheets in the morning, we got to do a much more fun art class in the afternoon.  Chase got to design his character portrait for D&D.  We demonstrated how to use a stencil template that Kevin had made to speed up character sketches.  Then we measured out proportions of where all the facial features would be.  Kevin drew a few variances of character design using the same template.

My cell phone cannot handle the lighting.

Kevin demonstrating different characteristics added to same template.  The template was made from a plastic container, he cut it, ironed, cut out forms, sanded it smooth.  Originally from a peppermints bucket.

So, we had Chase start with some preliminary sketches until he was happy with his character.  Then he redrew that using the template, and inked it.  He's not really into coloring much, but we'll get him a program on his computer so he can color digitally if he likes.  

D&D School Has Begun!

The first day of D&D homeschool sessions has begun.  The hardest part, character creation.  Chase's character is a human fighter named Kai.  We started with character rolls, using 4 six-sided dice and taking away the lowest.  The other three numbers are added up for your Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence and Wisdom stats.  Looking at the Player's Handbook, we check the recommended builds for Fighter class, Strength and Constitution being the most important traits.  Chase chose to put his highest roll into Constitution to give his character more fortitude in combat.

Each roll is given a modifier, for example +3 on the roll of 17 for Constitution checks.

He did all the math himself.  Adding and modifying, customizing his character.  Moving on, we have Inventory after rolling for gold.  Our DM gave us some basic items to start with, but we bought the rest of our items, weapons and armor with our currency.  The Player's Handbook has a guide for the cost of each item.  Some items are only silver or copper, so the conversion works like this:  1 gp = 10 sp, and 1 sp = 10 cp.  Chase only bought his weapons and armor, but I spent nearly every coin my rogue had on adventuring trinkets to fill her pack.

Choosing skills and feats is the most time consuming part.  For this sets your character's abilities and will affect game play as we go on our adventures.  All told, the complete character creation process and a little bit of intro narration to place us in our setting, this took approximately 3 hours.  And he wasn't bored for a single second of it.  He sat in rapt attention as he did basic math, came up with creative stories for his character's personality and background and had quite a lot of writing to do.  He hates writing, but this was not something he hated at all.

Besides his character sheet, he also has a notebook, where he will be keeping track of his numbers, writing in notes about our adventures and adding background story for himself and other characters we encounter.  We're going to use his notes when we work on his school project, to build his own Role Playing Game (RPG) via RPG Maker VX Ace.  The story and characters from our D&D sessions will be featured in our game.

Not sure how long this will take us or how much we can finish, but perhaps we'll release the game for free at the end of it.  We'll be following tutorials to begin with.  RPG Maker Web has enough posted to give us about 11 weeks worth of lessons.  He can also earn badges for his progress via DIY.org, they have several categories for game design, character creation, and table top gaming.

I may make resources for this game engine, releasing content for others to use.  He may be doing a lot of the pixel art characters, but I may work on portraits and tile sets.  He should have no difficulty with the character sprites.  He really enjoys that style of art and can do it with most basic programs.  I think we have GIMP 2 on his computer, which he can use to work on this.  Any support for this project is appreciated.  I will be releasing content here and exclusives on Patreon.  Some resources may be released in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

We didn't unroll the map yet, that will be revealed next Friday.  Kevin made the map via Pyromancers, and simplified the textures for ease on our printer.  He had to use a program to do poster printing so the pieces would print actual size as our game mat.  Each square in the grid is 1"x1".  Then, he added texture with a crayon and I helped taping map pages together.

He made the cover for his notebook.  And he'll be adding pages in the Table of Contents as we go, just like all his other subject interactive journals.  Hopefully, his handwriting will improve.  It is pretty rough and we struggle getting him to write in proper case with legible spacing.  He loathes writing, though he loves to read.

This summer, he read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy after having read The Hobbit.  Currently, he is reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 'trilogy'.  I think he just started book 3.  I believe I own all 5 books, 4 are in a collection along with the short story Young Zaphod Plays it Safe.  His reading is on a high school level, but his maturity is on a juvenile level.  So, finding appropriate books is becoming a challenge.  Suggestions are always welcomed.  Our limits are on sexually mature content and darker themes.  A bit of violence is okay, but not too graphic or cruel.

For our upcoming art class, we will work on character portraits.  We plan to also select and paint miniatures.  Kevin plans to make tokens, which he may release on Roll20's marketplace.  So, there will be a lot of focus around gaming day this year.  Kevin isn't currently working, so we can maintain this for a while.  Plans will need to be adjusted once he does get a job and the baby is born.  For now, there will be plenty of motivation to keep school interesting.  Besides being cool, it is something we are all doing together.

I don't think we will be streaming game play.  One, our camera isn't very good and our lighting is awful.  The whole ceiling fixture doesn't work.  Secondly, Twitch has rules about underage persons appearing in a stream.  Even though I think there would be plenty of interest in D&D homeschooling, I agree that children should not be on that site.  We could use YouTube, but for the same reasons, moderation, etc...  Finally, there is Skype for the Classroom, however, we kinda hate Skype and it's a terrible program.

Homeschool DIY

This year, I want to focus more on project based learning.  Found a great website, DIY.org that gave us a head start on that goal!  Chase is super enthusiastic about it, doing challenges on his free time.  We're on Day 2 of the school year and he already has 5 projects posted and is about to upload another.

Yesterday, for our first back to school day, we created gelli printed covers for his new notebooks.  I had him create his own foam roller stamp texture tool and demo'd how to use the gelli plate.  We bought the Student Kit which comes with 2 stencils and a brayer.

Gelli Arts Student Kit

I had a few different types of paper for him to try and Kevin's old craft paints.  He chose his colors and began rolling.

The project ran a little long as he had 5 notebooks to make.  Next time, we'll have to do something a bit smaller.  He started getting bored after the first hour!  hahaha, poor guy.  Art is boring!  So, he liked the change of pace by picking his layouts and gluing them to the faces of his notebooks.  Then he got to label them all.  I used his left over gelli prints for his two pocket folders, which we're using for daily worksheets and print outs as morning busy work.  This morning, he had a great attitude and I'm feeling pretty good about this school year.

Craft paper from a package filler, mini watercolor paper from his pad, and the purple stars in a printed cardstock from DCWV.  We also used tissue paper from my Spoonflower order, trying to reuse packaging.

Lunch's project was chocolate covered strawberries.  Well, they turned out to be a fail as the chocolate burned in the microwave.  But no worries, they still tasted great and the DIY site has a Chef Fails challenge!  Because we learn from our mistakes.  I think it was our bowl, actually, that thing got super hot.  But this is the first time we've used the new microwave for melting chocolate.

Today's DIY Challenge, I wanted to use up the scrap paper from the new printer, so I cut each sheet into quarters and pre-cut a cover, spine and back board for a mini note pad.  Of course there is a Bookbinding Badge to earn, found the challenge to match our project and sent him an e-mail with directions.  I did the straightening and clipping part for him and made sure his glue wasn't too bulky.  While the glue dried, we uploaded all his other projects and he did a quick Minecraft challenge.  Pixel art from blocks.  He made a Creeper house with TNT.

Here's the scratch notepad, which he is now busy filling up with doodles!

It has a target sight on it.

(for some reason, it dropped all the pictures in out of order and I really don't feel like fixing it)

Members can follow Chase's stream by adding him to their favorite creators.  All submissions, comments, etc are moderated before they go live on the site, very kid friendly/parent happy website.  So, not all of his current projects are publicly visible.

DIY/XtroyX0r

Tomorrow's project is D&D School with Daddy.  Kevin has an adventure school planned out, made a giant floor map, which he has a game mat to cover.  He's been taping all the pieces together and filling in the texture of the map with crayons.  Chase has wanted to play D&D with us since we had a small weekly online stream going last year.  So this has been in the works for a while.  Kevin has adjusted the rules a bit and simplified some numbers and attributes.  Of course, Chase already knows 3.5 pretty well, as he has read all of the Player Handbooks!  He loves strategy guides, reads them like they're stories.  He is a bit game obsessed.  

So, gaming is actually going to be a core focus of this school year.  Friday is D&D/board games.  Tuesday is game design using RPG Maker VX Ace and incorporating our D&D sessions into the story line of the game.  RPG Maker Web actually has a lot of great tutorials which we will be going through together as part of the curriculum.

Oh no, Kevin said he has no story yet, but he has a map!  hahaha, D&D is tomorrow!  lols.