Aliens vs Flowers

We were writing letters to the young lady we sponsor through Compassion International. Toa of Boy had finished his letter and still had some space on the bottom of his page. I suggested (read "required") that he put in a cute and happy drawing at the bottom of the page. Like maybe some flowers or a rainbow or some hearts.

He said, "Do I have to draw flowers, Mommy?"

No, I said. Just make it something that will make her smile.

The little boy departed for his crayon box and school desk downstairs.

Sweetling looked at me and said, "It's going to be aliens shooting lazers, cause that's what makes Toa of Boy smile."

Heeding the wisdom of her words, I called down to Toa, "No guns!"

Silly Mommy. Lazers aren't guns!

"And remember," said I, "this is for a girl!"

Yeah, that's ok. Go ahead and judge me and my gender stereotyping.

Facebook Friday

Once again, don't read if you're already on Facebook. 

Jan 29
Many, many books are leaving my house. The Jedi is organizing and reshelving what is left (which is still, many, many books.)

Jan 29
Pop quiz.....what delicious chocolate treat do I want to make?
>>I went with whole wheat brownies. They need chocolate chips in them, but are still pretty yummy.

Jan 30
GOOO MEEE!!!!!! I made a blog banner ALL BY MYSELF! I didn't get help from Sweetling or the Jedi or anybody!!!

Jan 31
Dear Facebook Friends--
In the midst of all your preparations for the upcoming winter storm, let us not forget that Groundhog's Day is on Wednesday. It is not to late to mobilize! If we all work together and do our part, we can go a long way to ensuring that no groundhog anywhere sees its shadow.

Jan 31
Grocery list finished for this week. Thanks for all the tasty recipe ideas! I'm planning on making a new soup each week through the duration of winter. Take THAT nasty weather!

Feb 1
4.784 but i keep forgetting to stretch before I run.

Feb 1
I just want to point out that "Winter Weather System" and "Wintery Mix" seem far too benign to actually describe the frozen nastiness they usually contain.

Feb 2
ARRRRGGGG!!!!! I can't READ the crappy word verification letters!!!! ARRRGGGGG!!!!!

Feb 3
Very difficult to type status updates when one hand is clutched tight around a fistful of peanut m&ms.

Feb 4
Who can cook curry? I picked up vanilla yogurt from the store by mistake!!! If i use the vanilla in my chicken curry, how badly will that mess it up?

Feb 4
my curry was GOOD!

Feb 6
We aren't going to be packed for co-op cause I'm watching the superbowl and don't want to have the chaos of packing going on during it. Will I regret this tomorrow morning? yes. yes I will.

Feb 6
The Monday after Superbowl Sunday should be a national holiday. Just saying.

Feb 7
someone in this house needs to take one for the team and eat the last piece of chocolate pie. I guess it will just have to be me.
>>You know what I love about you? The way you are always sacrificing your wants and needs for your family. I admire you, my hero!

Feb 8
I have no clean dishes in my house. I have no clean dishes in my house, cause I have no Cascade. I have no Cascade cause even though I went to Walmart JUST FOR CASCADE yesterday i walked out with a $35 bill and NO CASCADE. I have no breakfast, unless I want to wash dishes by hand. I have no sink to wash dishes, cause both my sink and my dishwasher are full of dirty dishes. Here I sit, hiding in the basement, hungry.

Feb 8
Guess who just took the LAST box of Cascade off the walmart shelf? Oh yeah. I'm that wicked.


Feb 10
It's 12:30, and i'm still in my jammies. Hooray for Thursdays!

Feb 10
My roast beef is really tough. Do I cook it longer? Does it get more tender with more oven time?

Feb 10
Toa of Boy really thinks "burnination" is a word. I don't have the heart to tell him that it isn't.

Feb 11
I don't want to do either school OR laundry today, but guess what?


Feb 11
3pm, and only three large baskets of laundry stand between me and my weekend.... as Toa of Boy would say, "you are going DOWN, laundry!"

Feb 12
One can tell it's saturday by the collection of hot chocolate mugs near my desk

Feb 12
cannot get past annoying red hand of doom.....Curse you Link, move faster!

Feb 13
I have chocolate covered strawberries for my French class tomorrow. I don't have a lesson plan yet, but I think the kids will overlook that little detail.

Feb 14
From sunshine and no jackets yesterday, back to winter coats today. Boo hiss.

Feb 15
He is jealous for me, love like a hurricane, I am a tree.

Feb 15
Who has a t-shirt with a brain on it which I can borrow for game night tomorrow night?

Feb 15
here I go to make a t-shirt. Wish me luck. And, you know, tell me it looks like a brain, a cool brain.

Feb 16
Space Chimps 2 is like a train wreck....its aweful, and yet I can't see to stop watching.
--Just so I'm not alone in this....the movie ended with a time reversal, followed by a circus performance, followed by a dotson and guinea pig in a space suit chasing a miniaturized alien around a front lawn in Florida.

Feb 16
New word for the day..."adorkable" as in "you look adorkable". Thank you Sweetling.

Feb 17
What I've leaned in school today: Camels have *nasty* teeth.

Feb 17
I just poked out the bottoms of all the valentine's chocolates to find the one I wanted.

Feb 18
Guess who spent the afternoon at Krohn conservatory playing SuperMunchkin?

Feb 20
Once again, I am defeated by the computer. It's not enough to tell it to print and walk away, one must also tell it "ok" after it has just been told to print.

Feb 20
We were discussing how many languages a woman at our church can speak. This led to what I thought would be a touching, teachable moment. So I started talking about how God gives each one of us special gifts. Toa of Boy, very enthusiastically, interrupted me to exclaim, "I can play MarioKart Wii with ONE HAND!!!" Yes, onward Christian soldier.
--Toa of Boy is cool, too many people with gifts say they don't have any. Even the smallest gifts can be used by God in great ways. Ways no one else can.

Feb 21
Our Monday morning started out with no toilet paper in the house. How is everyone else doing?
--Is it with the Cascade?

Feb 22
DAFFODILS!!! That's right! The green leaves of the daffodils are up all over my backyard! WWWOOOO HOOOOO!!!!!

Feb 23
if i had any spaghetti sauce, i'd make bake spaghetti for dinner.

Feb 23
There needs to be a new word for tired. None of the words I can think of will fit my current state.

Feb 24
5.438, not good enough to overtake Toa's first place of 5.596. Toa's little legs go so fast on the trampoline that his Mii trips up and goes bouncing down the "road".

Feb 24
We're going to a friend's house to watch the first episode of this season of the Amazing Race. Toa of Boy is *complaining* that this is cutting into school time. Seriously??? Where did I go wrong with you, boy?

Feb 24
What evil person hides a lemon filling in the middle of a dark chocolate? Really, tha'ts just sick, twisted, and cruel. It was the last of the valentine's candy too :(

Feb 25
First sound I hear when Toa of Boy wakes up...the monkey scream of the flying monkey of justice.

Wordless Wednesday

Cincinnati Dayscapes: Krohn Conservatory

Who is ready for spring?

What if I told you spring is out in all its glory and its just a short drive away for anyone living in the Greater Cincinnati Area?

Friday, we packed up our art supplies and a card game, grabbed Tia Smurf, and headed out for the Cincinnati Krohn Conservatory.

The Conservatory is a favorite spot of mine to visit when I just have had enough of winter. This time, I was especially pleased to discover that the 'changing exhibit room' was resplendent with spring flowering bulbs.

It was warm, but not hot, and seemed sunny, despite the partly cloudy skies outside. The beds of bulbs wrapped around an open patio which held several small tables. We neglected our sketchbooks, sat down at a table, and played a card game for an hour or so. It was a beautiful mini-vacation.

Afterward, we wondered through the waterfall room, and hung out on the bridge near the waterfall.

We toured the Cacti Room, the Orchid Room, and the Bonsai collection. (My favorite thing to do in the Cacti Room is to look for little lizards. They are there, scuttling about, but I don't always get to glimpse one.)

In the Tropical Room, there was a "Puffball Tree". Honestly, that's what it's little sign said. It was full of bright pink puffball flowers. We found several flowers which had fallen from the tree and so we collected a small bouquet from the blooms that were lying among the large leafed plants under the tree. Sweetling gathered a perfect bloom for two of her friends at co-op, but sadly the blooms didn't last through the weekend. (We were stopped by two workers who asked if we had picked the flowers or found them on the ground. When we answered honestly that we had found them, they were fine with our bouquet.)

So, if you are tired of winter and ready for spring, head down to the Krohn! It's in full bloom!

Weekly Wrap Up.....The Middle East

Our study of the Middle East was interrupted by multiple trips to the dentist, and two afternoons at church building a giant Cranium Board. Giant being 16 sweet feet on a side.

I, being the awesome free-spirited teacher that I am, tried to tell Sweetling and Toa that building a Giant Cranium Board was applied geometry. 

(It was, I swear it was. We found the perimeter of our board, figured out how many rolls of black sheeting we would need to make the complete area, figured out how many rolls of each color duck tape we would need for the path, figured out the spacing of the path, did a ton of measuring and marking. And when I say "we" I mostly mean the kids. Standing in the hardware section of wal-mart, I couldn't think through any of this math to save me, so I'd ask the kids and they'd figured it out for me.)

Sweetling, however, wasn't buying my justification of the use of school time to build the Cranium board for the game night for our church youth group. In fact, she said, and I do quote, "This isn't school. This is pretty much just taping crap to other crap."

In fact, our study was so interrupted, that on the last Friday of this unit, as we were driving across town to have lunch with Smurf and head to the Krohn Conservatory, I felt guilty enough to check to see what they actually had learned. I asked them to each name five things they knew about the Middle East.

Toa went first. Here's what he said:

1. Iran had a war with Iraq.
2. Turkey is the most populated country.
3. Saudi Arabia is the largest country.
4. Israel is the smallest country. (This wasn't true, so we corrected it to: Israel is a small country.)
5. Many dessert animals are nocturnal.

Sweetling's list was:

1. Much of the Bible took place in the Middle East. 
2. Islam is one of the main religions of the Middle East.
3. Many people of Iran like Americans.
4. Mesopotamia was located in what is now Iraq.
5. The city of Jerusalem is a holy city for three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

So, overall, not too bad. We did our usual mapping, and our usual reading from Window on the World and assorted world atlases. Additionally, we watched the series Walking the Bible, because I thought it would really help their understanding of the region to see places that were associated with something they already knew. We also watched a one-hour Rick Steve's special on Iran.

We were planning on, and hope to still manage, a trip to the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati. We have very good friends who said they will take us on a private tour. But, so far, our Friday evenings have been booked up, so this is something we will do in the future.

Weekly Wrap-Up.....India

We wrapped this up like, nearly a month ago, but FlyLady says I'm not behind, just jump in where we are. So, I'm jumping in.

One Grain of Rice

This was a wonderful story with beautiful illustrations. 

We stopped reading the book halfway through, right after Rani asks for her reward....a single grain of rice today, two grains of rice tomorrow, four grains of rice the next day, eight grains of rice the day after that...and so on. She asked that for 30 days she be given twice the number of grains of rice which she had received the day before.

I asked Sweetling and Toa how much rice they thought that would be. Sweetling of course, was wise to this tale and had already heard a similar tale, so she deferred her answer to allow Toa to guess. Toa didn't think it would be very much. We adjourned to the kitchen table with a bag of rice and an empty egg carton. We marked the cups of the egg carton 1-12 and began counting. We put one grain of rice in the first cup, two in the second cup, four in the third, and so on. We made it to day 10 before we gave up on counting out rice and moved to paper and pencil to work the rest of the math.

I assigned Sweetling an extended activity of developing a spreadsheet that would compute the grains of rice for each day and then also find the total grains of rice Rani received from all 30 days.

NOT the Taj Mahal

This was another cool math activity. This one is all about the language of math. To begin, we gathered two sets of ten small objects from around the house. Both sets had to have the exact same objects and same number of objects. Then, we erected a barrier across the middle of the table. (We used the big family sized cereal boxes.) On one side of the barrier, one person constructs something out of her objects. When she is finished building, she must give instructions to the other person so that the partner can build the exact same structure. Neither partner may look at the other's structure. They can ask and answer questions, but they cannot peek or use any gestures to communicate.

 Here were our first structures--

For an example, the building instructions might have gone something like this--

"Turn your clear plastic container upside down. Put your orange cup right side up on top of that."

"So, the cup could hold water?"

"Right. Now place a skinny tan popsicle stick across the diameter of the cup, along the y axis if we were drawing a graph."

"So, vertically, right?"

"Right. Now, where that diameter intersects the circle, you are going to lay another skinny popsicle stick perpendicular to the diameter."

"Wait...what?? The diameter intersects the edge of the circle twice!"

"Oh yeah, you're going to put a popsicle stick at each intersection. Sorry. You'll have one at the top and one at the bottom. But they will both be perpendicular to the diameter and parallel to each other."

Here was the second structure we built. I scooted them together after they were completed for an easier photo shoot. (They are slightly skewed in relation to one another, because we were sitting across a corner of a table, not directly across from one another.)

 

And then Toa of Boy had to get in on the building action. He built the one on the left, and then talked me through building the one on the right. He got the container on the bottom and the cup, and then he got stuck on how to describe where to put the fat red popsicle stick.


I asked him to think of something he knew, that he could use to describe where the popsicle stick should be. (Remember, I had no idea where it should be, so my help was pretty vague.)

Toa of Boy thought for a minute, then looked at the clock on the kitchen wall and said, "If this were a clock, the red popsicle stick should touch the numbers 2 and 10."

I was SO proud of him and amazed that he came up with that analogy completely on his own. He talked me through placing the second popsicle stick by telling me it would touch the numbers 5 and 7 on a clock face. (Once again, the structures in the photo are rotated in respect to one another, because of how we were sitting in respect to each other.)

Fanciful Animals

We loved the over the top colors and the amazing patterns of the Indian clothing and art. We read Heart of a Tiger and decided to do our own brilliantly colored animal art.

To begin, we used a couple of How to Draw Animal books to practice our animals in our sketch books. Then I gave them each a 12x12 piece of black cardstock and a white conte crayon. They drew their animals on the black cardstock and then used tempera paints to fill in their animal and add a background. 

Finally, when the paint had dried, they used silver or gold oil pastels to add some details with a little bling. I got that idea from Deep Space Sparkle.

Elephant Ink Art

Another great art project from Deep Space Sparkle. Sadly, I failed to take photos of our pieces, likely because we did this on the last day of the unit, so the camera just didn't come out. But do check it out on Deep Space Sparkle.

Elephants, Elephants, Elephants

Sweetling loves elephants. I was amazed at the decorations and the painting that is done ON the elephants for the various festivals in India. I thought about getting out my face paints and taking turns painting cool designs on each others arms and legs. Had it been warm enough to wear shorts and short sleeves, we probably would have.

Sadly, we didn't come across this beautiful project till after we were finished with the unit. (And when I same come across, what I mean is that Patty from Deep Space Sparkle was kind enough to send me the link to another art blog that she loves.) They are cool enough that we're going to make Indian elephants in the middle of our Antarctica unit.

Wordless Wednesday

Behold the Awesomeness

Today's to-do list

I don't know why I feel the need to share this. Maybe cause its easier to share it than to , you know, do it.

In no particular order, here's what I need to do today:

• email Pastor A about lava lamps
• figure out where I can get Toa of Boy's glasses' prescription filled AND have them covered by insurance
• clean the bathroom
• clean the kitchen
• kick off the "Love Stories" series on the church blog
• start writing my 'weekly wrap up' for this blog
• call the dentist and schedule appointments for me in the kids
• unload and reload the dishwasher
• fold laundry
• email this week's French lesson to Cassandra
• make some yummy soup for lunch
• SCHOOL with the kids
• art with the kids, because I'll be hanged if we don' t do at least one art project with our India unit
• phone a friend tonight and schedule a Friday evening for a tour of the masjid her family attends
• do my devotions
• figure out whats for dinner
• run, which can't happen this morning, cause Sweetling got up early, ate breakfast with the Jedi, and got her morning list done so that she could play Zelda before school. I have to respect that and not kick her off the wii.
• make blueberry muffins from scratch with Toa of Boy

Wordless Wednesday