All in a Week's Work

So the children come up to me with the camera laughing so I take a look and find this. What on earth?! "Oh, we made Bilbo into a mummy." These are the things that happen when anyone in the houshold is studying Ancient Egypt. Those said students are now studying Ancient Greece. I promise there will be no pictures of the Olympics!! Let me re-phrase that.... there will be no Ancient Greek Olympics.

One of our projects this past week was to set up an art station. When you have 10 children and everyone likes to do art projects that makes for alot of supplies not to mention a certain boy is highly distracted by having every sharpie (of every color), every pencil (of every color), every bottle of paint (of every color). Of course after googling and seeing what just an art cart cost I opted to make my own. It is not fancy but it is great. All we did was use 2 short bookshelves, a rolling cart (that in a previous life was someone's tv stand but was our mixer stand). We had a piece of countertop from family who re-did their kitchen and oddly it was short and fit just right in one of our corners. We have the fabric to make a curtain to go along the backside so it looks pleasing from downstairs. and some fabric to make curtains to go over the short bookshelves. We took a couple bar stools for the chairs. (by "took" I mean we brought them up from downstairs we did not steal them... just needed to clarify)

So far Poppy has only taken almost all the stuff out but overall it has kept our supplies in one place.

Another project that was suppose to be done last September was this saint calendar for the little's history class.

I used the Saint stickers from Angelus Press. Because we are not delicate people I first took 2 sheets of the saint stickers back-to-back and put them in a laminating sheet.

Have I ever mentioned my love for a laminator? If I had to recommend a homeschooling necessity, even if not used all that often, it would be a laminator. After the page has cooled you cut a bit off the edges and the 2 sheets fall apart. The next step is to carefully remove the sticker backing and put it on Magnetic Printer Sheets. (I get these supplies from Staples because they deliver them to my door for free. Staples loves me.)

After you have laminated the sheets, cut the edges off, removed each sticker back and aligned it on a magnetic sheet then you simply start cutting it. I am also in love with my paper cutter. Growing up in a Catholic School and being a teacher in a Catholic School my memory of paper cutters is that they are rusty, they don't really cut, etc... One year I got this very paper cutter, in my early homeschooling years, as a birthday gift from Aragorn. We are very romantic as you can see.

I also printed up little numbers on the magnetic sheets and have some foam magnetic mosaic pieces coming. These will be for making a calendar patterns for math classes (those of you who use Saxon know this). My next plan is to make a little weather symbols on the magnetic sheets as well. An all-in-one calendar I guess. To be continued...........
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The next couple of pictures were taken with my cell phone-that-doesn't-take-good-pictures.

Sam Frodo started to take trumpet lessons this week from our next door neighbor. Of course our next door neighbor is about 1/2 mile away but how convenient! These are our everyone-should-have-neighbors-like-this neighbors. Sam is absolutely thrilled and did pretty well.

For Christmas we had some lovely ladies at our house for lunch and this little lady had a kitten on her wish list so Frodo sacrificed his kitten, Panther, to a good home. Panther is well taken care of and even has a little wardrobe of sweaters to keep him warm.... On this particular day he was Pink Panther since his sweater was pink. I have seen other colors on other days. I could not stop laughing, it is just a hilarious sight.
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And last but not least, I found out I'm a hero! Luann will tell you all about it! I would have like to post this comic strip but with this sue-happy society...................!!