Sunday, November 14, 2010

More Thanksgiving fun...

One of the units that Blake has been working on in Home Economics is cooking. Baking to be exact.

So out come the pans and we set off to do an afternoon of baking.

We made 3 loaves of lumpy bread, but they tasted good. Two pans of cinnamon rolls and 3 pans of dinner rolls. Here is Blake rolling up the cinnamon rolls.

Here are some of their creations. Hali and Blake worked on these for quite a while. The end result was very yummy!

We gathered pine cones and other outdoor treasures at the beginning of the week. Here the kids are painting their pine cone swags. Next week we will hang them on the front doors. They turned out wonderful!

My lefty has to concentrate to make sure she get's the look she wants.

Fantastic!

While outside gathering pine cones we also gathered leaves in order to make leaf print place holders. Once the paint dried we added the names of those people we were spending Turkey day with.


Remember that stamping I told you about in the last post? Here is an example of how they turned out.
This is Robert Frost "The Road Not Taken".

And this one is John Keats "To Autumn". The kids are giving these away as gifts to their hostesses.

Every good home schooling mom has a good fail once in a while, right? Well... I came upon this awesome recipe that was INDIAN CORN. You were supposed to take corn puff cereal, marshmallows, dehydrated fruit and Fruit leather and make these really cute corn cobs with a stick in them. Suzie taught class this particular morning because I was called away on business. To say the least she was frustrated with both me and my recipe when I came home.
Total fail. But they sure tasted yummy according to Hali.
They just fell apart.

And this is what it became.

Moving on... These are my little Turkey day Mascots. They currently reside on my bookcase in the livingroom.

Left over Africa work

Abby did a monkey one as well that turned out very cute. I don't know where the picture has gone.

Jamestown Lapbook. Just in time. I had Blake and Hali do this project and told them they had less than 2 hours to finish it and get the mess cleaned up. You can tell they rushed through it.


I wonder why Blogger insists on turning my pictures every which way but right?



To start our Asia unit off, we made home made papers. We will construct a journal next month when we return from break.
Digging through the recycling box to find the colors they wanted.

Here you can see how they are drying the paper a bit on the frames before they start to remove it. They made green and Orange paper this time.

As part of our Antarctica Theme we did the blubber experiment. I couldn't resist since we covered both Whales and Penguins. The kids thought it was great fun to pressure each other into keeping their hands in the water. Hali made it 4 minutes without any blubber as protection.

I think that is is for my random posts of this week. I did want to mention that along with Frost and Keats we also studied Francis Scott Keys "The Star Spangled Banner". I thought it appropriate on Veterans day. What amazes me is that even though it is our national anthem, most Americans only know the first and last verse. Most don't know the story behind it.

What an amazing week!

We have had an incredible week here at the academy. I have lots and lots that I would like to share but as usual, very little time to dedicate to it. Since I have some larger posts that I want to do sometime tonight... I am going to just do a quick overview.

Starting this week out we had 17 hours of "extras" that needed to be completed. We also were planning to go to Liberty Memorial on veterans day. So 17 hours of extra work in only 4 days. We also had our regular work that had to be completed. I honestly didn't think that we would make it... But guess what? WE DID!

I am going to show you in another post what exactly we did with these. The two top cards they stamped using fall colors and they are making THANK  YOU cards for Turkey day. They have written words of gratitude on the inside. The large cream paper was stamped for a poem, as was the green one.
This one is Aaron's.
This one is Hali's
This one Blake's.

This one was Abby's.

All of these turned out very nice.

As you can see... Aurora is still enjoying her prime place on the dry erase board.

As is Jazmin. The girls made these a while back when we were doing our Africa Unit study. We think they are so adorable we are leaving them for the rest of the school  year.
Indian Corn Art

Aaron's


Hali's

We really got behind finishing up Antarctica. However we put the final touches on the Penguin lapbook so I can now share it with you all.

Cover





Lastly... Blake has been learning about Mesopotamia. My friend Rhonda whom I adore had her girls build the fertile crest out of salt dough. I loved it so much I had my own little people do it!

Chocolate Pilgrim Hats

When we took on this project I was thinking there was NO WAY the kids could mess this one up.

This week we have had SO MANY blunders it became a running joke. Abby has given counsel to Suzie when yet ANOTHER project did not turn out the way we had hoped. "Don't worry about it Suzie, it's just an experiment". Priceless advice from my 9 year old.

The first thing you do is melt Semi Sweet or Dark chocolate chips in the microwave. Make sure you used about 1/8 to 1/4 cup of oil to thin it down. Start with a smaller amount and add until it will smoothly coat.
Next, pierce a large marshmallow with a toothpick and cover the marshmallow in chocolate.
Place the chocolate marshmallow on top of a chocolate stripped cookie (bottom side up).
Let cool and then using yellow icing make buckle.

We doubled the recipe

Some look like leaning towers....

We tried using Milk Chocolate and the color was ALL wrong so we had to go back and re- dip.

I found this little guy waiting for me. Instead of having a buckle it had a heart... Because I am loved!

We are taking a box of these to my friend Carrie's house for Turkey day. They might not be beautiful but they sure are yummy!

Tree of Blessings

Thanksgiving is a time to be thankful for our blessings.
That has been our theme this last week.

My dear husband went out and cut me a nice branch from our Cherry tree.
We placed it in the middle of a coffee can (with colored paper covering the label) filled with rocks.

In order to make the leaves look crinkly we sprayed them with water and crumpled them up. Then we let them dry.

The kids then punched holes in them and added the things they were thankful for.

 Once the real leaves fall off we will still have our leaves of blessings.

Crinkled and drying

This would be Hali. That child has food on her mind ALL the time.





Aaron is such a wise boy =)

This would be Hali again....


This was a fun little craft that the kids enjoyed doing. It now is proudly displayed in the middle of our classroom table.