Cyan's turning 100!!

Today my daughter is turning 100. 100 months old that is!

We are celebrating by doing tons of crafts and drinking hot cider with cinnamon bread.

I love pictures like this...

My daughter, reading to my son. :)

Trip to the Almond Roca factory

Sometimes field trips turn out amazing... you get great experiences and learning opportunities, and the world feels like it opens up. And then you get the duds.

The Almond Roca factory was certainly a dud. Since 9/11 they don't actually allow tours anymore, they have NO pictures of the inside of the building or the process of making the candy (and I was told there was no way to find them except a tv show from the 70's), and they don't let anyone even look in the door. For a wonderful, local candy company to not even have a book of how the candy was made... well I was really disappointed.

The only thing we got was a tour through the Outlet building (which is only 11X11 ft wide, and filled with shelves of candy 'seconds') and a surly woman that liked to answer my questions, while interrupting me asking them. It was a very frustrating field trip.

But the prices on candy were good. We got some anyway.

Eat the candy. Don't ask questions.

The kids seemed ok with it.

Crafts for Dark Days

Many people ask me what we do with all of the children's art. Aside from their portfolios, and the recycle bin, we like to turn art into other art!

Check out my other blog for the instructions for this awesome Autumn/Winter project.

Kids in the kitchen

My kids love to cook. I don't know if this is because cooking is a daily (or more) ritual in this house, or if they have inherited the gene from me but all three of my kids will help whenever I ask. I have been reluctant to include Logan in this for he has more of a temper than my other kiddos and being as young as he is, I worry that he will hurt himself. Today, though, I found the perfect way for him to help.

Washing potatoes! I got these babies from the farmers market and so they still had quite a bit of dirt on them. For about an hour this evening my toddler, quietly and thoroughly washed 6 baker potatoes. He loved the job. He kept saying that he wasn't done and continued to scrub them with the veggie brush...

He was SO happy!

How do you include your kids in the kitchen chores?

Button Sorting

The first time we tried this activity was about 7 months ago. He liked doing it, but wasn't quite ready to do it on his own yet. This time was a whole new ball of wax. He loved it, and he was good at it. He knew all the different colors and where they went. He had a blast for about an hour sorting the different shades of colors from the button basket into this little paint palette.

When he was 'done' this is what it looked like. He kept moving the reds and dark oranges out of the smaller spots and putting them in the middle because there was a button that was too big for the small spot.

I barely coaxed him in this activity at all. He just wanted to do it this way. What a difference 6 months can make! I have even seen it in my older kids. Cyan and I had a lot of trouble reading, and so I completely laid off for about 6 months... and she started to read, all on her own. Alex was the same way. I think these mental breaks are so important for children. As adults, we don't learn equal parts of everything, all the time. Our interest and our ability comes and goes in spurts. I have found that my children work the same way... they learn in stages. In short, concentrated spurts where their interest and their abilities happen to match up some how. Then all I really have to do is sit back and watch the magic.

HALLOWEEN!

Alex - ie: Snake Eyes. Costume was well earned this year. He worked hard for the money to get the costume he wanted, and I was excited it wasn't a black Ninja for once... until we opened the package. lol... oh well. It isn't ONLY a black Ninja. ;)

Cyan was an Indian Princess complete with Sari. She looked beautiful! We did Henna for both of our hands and feet the night before. I wish we had tested it out sooner, as it was messy and we didn't have enough time to really let it sit on there long enough, but it was beautiful anyhow.

And, last but not least, Logan the Dragon. He was so cute! Still recovering from his foot injury, he has been slow moving lately... well slower than normal. He started limping about halfway through trick or treating and we carried him. But he seemed ok with it. Quote from this morning "I 'ike getting candy from houses, Mama."

Some action shots:

Fine Arts Class #11 ~ Claude Monet

This whole session I have wanted to dive into Monet. But honestly, I needed to set the ground work first. Before you can get into detail about artists and what make them great, you need to go over those each of those attributes that make a great artist. It is just the way of teaching.

This class was amazing. Completely amazing. The last two classes were great, but they lacked the enthusiasm of the classes before and I just couldn't put my finger on why. This one, that spark was back. The kids were interested, I was reading and they were bouncing up and down, wanting to see the pictures.

The class started out with a talk about rainbows. What is the difference between light colors and paint colors? Are there different names for them? Do they work differently? The answer of course, is yes to all. In paint, black can be made with a mix of all colors. In light, if you mix all the colors of light, you get white. We also talked about how colors were a cycle. I asked if anyone had ever seen a double rainbow... and if they noticed what was under Indigo and Violet. RED, of course! The cycle starts all over again. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, and then Red!

Then we talked about Primary colors. All of the kids knew these... so I wrote this on the board:

After I wrote "Primary Colors" I asked what the Secondary Colors were. Most of the kids knew these (and I think all if they would have known the term 'Secondary Colors' before). Then we went on to talk about Tertiary Colors. The ones that are between the Primary and Secondary colors. This was fun... my kids knew some of these from art lessons they had done with me, and also this Blue's Clues episode with Joe that has this song:



After this, we made our own color wheels by mixing the colors with our pastel pencils.

Mixing was fun. :)

We got to talking about 'warm' colors and 'cool' colors. Meet the Masters explains that the colors that look most like the sun are "warm" colors and that the colors that are most like the ocean are "cool" colors. On a color wheel that means that all of the colors on the orange/red/yellow color side are 'warm' and the other side is cool. It was easy to dive right into color moods again during this discussion and I asked the kids what color they would think of when they thought of being sad. Some said black, some said blue, but all the colors were 'cool'. I talked about the phrase 'feeling blue' and 'seeing red' and asked what they thought they meant. Then I had them do a sheet about color moods and descriptive words.

The words chilly, noisy, burning, quiet, joyous, and shady were all put into color. Each kid was very different about the way they pictured these colors. Alex thought that quiet meant lack of color (and so left it white) where Elias thought that quiet meant more of a dark feeling, and so decided to color his dark. I got to use these differences to point out again that everyone sees the world just a little differently from their neighbor, and this will make every artist unique.

Slowly but surely I led this discussion back around to the Impressionists. We had a quick review over the other Impressionists that we had studied (Cassatt, Degas, Renoir) and then talked specifically about Monet and his life a little bit.

After all this talk about mixing colors, I felt that the next best step was paint! I reminded them that the Impressionists made tiny brushstrokes which gave movement to their paintings, and so I wanted them to do that. We sat outside for a little while and watched the weeping cherry in the back yard with cups of cocoa. Then we were ready to paint our tree. (We did go back outside when we were painting just to look at how the tree was positioned too.)

Again, each person saw something different. Some kids painted the tree as it looks right now (yellow with hints of orange) and some painted what it would look like other times of the year, but all used tiny brush strokes and their beautiful imaginations.

I must admit to feeling some relief that the session is over. But at the same time, I am super excited to get into other art classes with these kids. They are amazing and I have LOVED teaching this class!

Fall books we love

In our storage box for the Autumn season we have a bag of cookie cutters that are shaped like apples, pumpkins, cats, and bats. We have a small wreath that we decorate with fall leaves each year for the front door. We have glass pumpkins that my husband made during his years as an artist. And the kids Trick or Treat bags I made them. We have a binder of ideas for Autumnal crafts and pictures of our nature table from past falls... and we have books.

I don't like to keep tons of books out all the time, but when I bring these books out just for the season it is such a treat to read them over and over again. Kind of like the first time you put on Christmas music in December. You look forward to the ritual and really enjoy hearing those tunes and listening to everyone in the house (even the avid haters of Christmas music) belt out the familiar but forgotten tunes. It is like this with our Autumn books.

Here are our favorites (all imgs from Amazon):

I am not sure why I didn't pull these out until tonight... but we read them all in one sitting. We read Owl Babies twice! I look forward to putting some more of the Autumnal box to work in the next few days making cookies and pumpkin pie for our Halloween celebration... but for tonight the giggles that came from: "'I want my mommy' said Bill" was enough.

Weekend getaway

I got away this last weekend with my homeschooling girlfriends. What a wonderful time it was! So nice not to have to worry about anything. I was really impressed with my husband while I was gone. He took the kids places. Which is a lot for him. When I got home, the house was even halfway decent. I feel very lucky to be able to do things like this. I am feeling recharged.

On another note, Logan fell off the couch yesterday and really hurt his foot. It is bruised on top, side and bottom and his instep is so swollen that it is flat. He has been walking on it, if favoring it a little bit. But he is very cranky and you can tell he is hurting.

More Logan quotes

"Mama, you need go hit Alex."

"What? Why?"

"Because he be rude to me. Alex talk RUDE to ME!"

"Buddy, I don't hit people for being rude."

"Harumph..." as he stomps out with his little hands on his hips.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Later that morning ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Mama! You need to talk Alex."

"Why, what's up buddy."

"He won't let me see eggs."

"Isn't he cooking your eggs?"

Husband comes in from shower "What's goin' on?"

Logan "Alex won't let me see eggs!" as I say "He's cooking them."

Husband "Why won't he let you see them? Come on... lets go talk with him about it."

Logan follows husband to the kitchen to 'talk' with Alex... all the way with his hands on his hips making little 'harumph' noises... and I sigh. Funny boys.

Apple = Tree

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(BTW, we don't hit. lol... just in case you were wondering about that.)

Oatmeal and teens

Teen accidentally drops a bowl of hot oatmeal. Bummer... Teen then thinks it is a good idea to dump the rest onto the kitchen floor and then clean it up with a mop... without even removing pieces of bowl or the oatmeal. Teen throws oatmeal covered rug into carpeted dining room. Teen puts oatmeal covered CSA box into living room. Teen then proceeds to mop the floor with oatmeal covered mop... before cleaning off the cabinets that are covered in oatmeal, or the counter... that is STILL covered in oatmeal. Now there is oatmeal in three different rooms... it isn't even 9am.

I am going to get Starbucks.