School Stuff from February

Well, I have some fun stuff we did for school way back almost two months ago... first, we made a landform cookie cake!!  This is something I made up on my own back when I taught third grade... with my students, they'd make landform cookies after completing a study of landforms.  Each child got a sugar cookie and had to decorate it with at least ten different landforms.  So, with my own kids, I thought even bigger and went for a huge cookie cake to decorate with landforms!

We started out with a chocolate chip walnut cookie cake recipe that I modified slightly (subbing whole wheat flour and Sucanat).  I made it on our largest pizza pan (what, you don't have multiple pizza pans?  We have three - and I didn't buy a one of them!).  Once it had cooled, I cut the "shoreline."  Caroline gave me a diagram of how it should look after I explained to her that the cookie cake was like part of a large continent and the pizza pan was the ocean.  Then I whipped up some basic frosting (cream cheese, I think?) and tinted it with our natural food colors (which don't always work super-well, but they did nicely here... bright fake green for the land would look weird anyway).

Here's Caroline's plan next to the completed landform cookie cake.  I always had my students draw a plan first too, and then I took photos of their cookies to evaluate them later.  Nice thing about homeschooling: I don't have to fill out a rubric to give this project an actual "grade!"

Close-up: ocean, island, bay, mesa, peninsula

You can click on this to see it better... she ended up including lots of landforms.  In addition to the ones mentioned above, there were mountains, a volcano, hills, rivers, tributaries, oxbow lakes, regular lakes, a delta, an isthmus, a glacier, plains... and we talked about where the sources, mouths, and confluences of the rivers were.

And boy, was it yummy!!!

For about a week, his little guy visited our maple tree in the afternoons while we were outside.  He spent a lot of time on our neighbor's maple, too, and he made lots of holes.  We observed how wet the tree was around the holes he'd made and how the fresh sap attracted insects.

Here's a closer shot... we identified the bird as a yellow-bellied sapsucker.

The next week, we participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count.  By then, this guy had moved on, but we still got to identify lots of birds, including house finches, cardinals, crows, chickadees, tufted titmouses/titmice (?  they aren't even rodents, so I don't get their name at all!), mockingbirds, and a brown thrasher.  We now know the scolding call of our mockingbirds quite well, and even Cecilia will say, "There's Mocker!" upon hearing it, without even seeing the bird.  We have been reading The Burgess Bird Book and learning lots of interesting things about birds this year!

Here are the girls at our nature club one day...

one of the few days it was actually cool enough for long sleeves...

And now for cute baby photos... she's much older now than she was in these photos!

between 4.5-5 months, I think closer to 4.5

hmm, a bit over 5 months, I think?

and these were taken the day she turned five months.. now she's over 6.5 months!

Celebrating the Year for Priests

To celebrate the Year for Priests (declared by Pope Benedict XVI, from July 19, 2009 - July 19, 2010), I thought it would be a good time to make our own little priest and vestments with which we can learn about the colors of the liturgical year. The priest wears different colored vestments for different occasions, and this looked like a fun way to display the color of the day in our home (our little priest will be kept on our family altar/prayer table, which is in the works, and which I cannot decide which of the two names to call it... opinions?). I found the idea here. I also used this one as a reference.

To make the priest's body, I bought two dowel rods from the craft store along with a wooden base. I had hubby drill a hole in the base for the thicker dowel, and then we had to figure out what to do about the arms. The arm dowel is much thinner, but drilling a hole completely through the thicker dowel didn't work - it kept splitting. So we opted instead to carve a little niche on each dowel, making a flat, smooth surface, and then using the glue gun to attach them. I don't know how long this will work, but it has held up for a few days so far!

Here is the chasuble in white. I just freehanded an oval-like shape (hence the lack of complete symmetry!) on a piece of paper and then cut it out and used it as a template. Then I used Fabri-tac to attach the gold ribbon. I kept the design simple because the glue is a pain to work with!

Well, I had planned to just make chasubles and stoles, and maybe a cincture, although tying it around a skinny dowel rod would be a little odd-looking (not that it is visible at all when the chasuble is on, but anyway)... then my brother, Seminarian Tim, told me I had to make our priest a cassock and an alb, too, and maniples in each color as well. I thought, "Hmm, why not?" Although the point of the colors is made with just the chasuble, if I was going to make stoles and a cincture, why not make all the vestments so it could also be a lesson in what the priest wears when celebrating Mass?

Okay, so the cassock's just not going to happen - sorry, Tim! The alb was challenge enough, in that I didn't even consider how I was going to get it on the little priest before I over-excitedly began sewing it. Halfway through, I realized I'd have to cut it down the back because it wouldn't fit over his head. Then I realized that little dowel rod people don't bend their arms at all, making it quite the struggle to get the sleeves of the alb over his arms! I still am not quite sure how I did it - maybe I ripped a few stitches in the process - but I got the alb on him, and it's not comin' off again! Therefore, no cassock! The cassock wouldn't have been visible at all under the alb anyway, not to mention I'm not crazy about the idea of putting 33 tiny buttons on it...

So, here he is, wearing his alb (pretend there's a cassock underneath), cincture, stole, and maniple. Caroline can easily switch out the stole, maniple, and chasubles according to color. She dressed him in white this morning for the Memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

So, what more could our priest need?

A face, of course! We predicted Caroline would be distressed at his facelessness. So I drew on a very simple face, since the intent is not the person but the vestments and colors. Here he stands, completed, next to our vocations prayer card and prayer for priests, which we will say throughout this Year for Priests.

I told Caroline she could name him. She decided, after pondering it for a few hours, to name him Father Ketter, after a priest at my parents' parish. No idea why she chose him - we've been to a Mass where he was the celebrant once, maybe twice, and Tim got him to give the girls a blessing after Mass once. That must have made an impression on her. That and I think she's got some sixth sense about Catholicism and knows a good priest when she sees one! So, our apologies to Father Ketter that you now have a dowel rod named after you, but I assure you it is meant kindly!

Special thanks to Tim for explanations of each of the vestments... I learned some new things with this project!

Another thing we found (actually, I won one!) for the Year for Priests is this lapbook. We've never done a lapbook before, but it looks like a fun project! it will be neat to have something to remember the year by down the road, too.

Anyone else have a fun idea for celebrating the Year for Priests in your home? I'd love to hear it! I'd also love to hear whetehr you think it is called "The Year of the Priests" or "The Year for Priests." I have been seeing it written both ways!

Wordless Wednesday: A Fairy Tree House for Caroline

(please ignore all the clutter on the table behind the tree house!)

A fun, quick activity

Making a big pile of bubbles in the sink...

Fill the sink with water and a squirt of dish soap. Get a plastic drinking straw and instruct child to blow (BLOW, not suck!!) through the straw. Child will inevitably suck in some of the soapy water in the process of making bubbles.