Happy Wednesday!

This people...is how I start my day.  It's quiet.  It's peaceful and it's beautiful.  

And here's my other view:

Those little feet kicking out make me smile.  We have a great walking route where I live that's about 2 miles.  It's full of really steep hills which I run up to get an added workout.  I've learned that I am not a gym girl, not a class girl (unless it's yoga) but I need to get a solid cardio blast every day in order for my body to feel good.  So...this is it.  When Winter comes I'll be doing T25 in my living room when it's too cold to walk.

We started our day today with the pledge!  I feel that it's an important ritual for our family.  I feel that not only does it display patriotism and love of country to my children, it's a nice starting point to the day. 

It literally brought tears to my eyes when they said the Pledge with such enthusiasm and gusto.  We moved onto our morning yoga stretches and then calendar review time!

We always do art journaling in the morning and today's questions were as follows:

*What kind of ancient civilization would you live in?  Describe and illustrate your civilization

*Would you wear make-up, fancy clothes or jewels?  why or why not?  Illustrate how YOU would look.

Here's what they came up with:

his the land of Sapia

hers - Fantasyopolis, what else!??!

After journaling we have ELA (handwriting, spelling, grammar, reading).  These topics today kept us quite busy so we were at it until about 11:30am.  

I decided it was time for a break and since the baby was up we met up with some home friends at a local park.  It was a great 3 hour recess!  The kids had a blast.  

she'll build sandcastles anywhere she can

goose goose

such goofballs!  they were giggling the entire time!

she melts my heart

I absolutely LOVE how dirty she is!!  

reading the enormous amount of Halloween catalogs that come in the mail this time of year

After our "recess" we got back to it with math, art, science and music!  For art we made glittered ombre papers.  It's a technique that I learned long ago from Jennifer McGuire (for all my crafty friends) and it's super easy.  We used Peel and Stick adhesive - which is basically large pieces of double sided tape.  We stuck it to heavy cardstock and then coated each piece with Martha Stewart fine glitter.  

Once the glitter is on the sticky paper I taught the children how to "burnish" the glitter into the adhesive with their finger.  (this means rubbing and pushing the glitter into the adhesive to get it stick really well)  This is in anticipation of the next step.

They each got to create 3 pieces - small, medium and large.  They can keep these as is or cut them up and use them in a project if they so choose!

The next step is to pick 3 colors within the same family - a dark, medium and light.  You must used alcohol based markers, here the children are using my Copic markers.  The color from the alcohol marker will adhere to the glitter & adhesive but will not ruin the marker tip.  After they were done the children wanted to laminate their pieces to keep any excess glitter from falling off.  

All done!!  They look SUPER cool in person! And the kids had a fantastic time doing them.  It was great to see them together trying to figure out what colors to choose to make them blend and create the Ombre look (dark to light).

Next up was science!  Today we created glitter globes with rubbing alcohol and vegetable oil.  We've done this before with just water but the effect of the oil and alcohol is SO much cooler!  We learned about density - why the alcohol floats on top of the oil.  We also used food coloring which intensifies the effect visually.

I pulled out an old bag of beads and let the kids pick through it to find shiny baubles to add to their globes.  We also sprinkled glitter into the mixture before sealing it up!

The kids played with their globes a LOT last night!  (insert thumbs up here!)

Last up for the day was music!!  I will fully admit that I cannot read music.  Both kids want to learn piano and guitar so we're working on that but until then I can teach music history and some theory.  But what I definitely CAN teach with ease is songs and lyrics. Today we started with Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land".  I printed the lyrics out and we read them through.  We talked about how music is similar to poetry and we talked about what the lyrics mean.  We're huge Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seegar fans in this house so I played them some of their songs and explained that Woodie is Arlo's father.  The kids seemed fascinated by that fact.  Then we sang it 2 times through loud and proud.  I have to say, something about this song and my kids singing it got me choked up and I cried!  It was just SO sweet.

He HATES bibs - and I don't mind doing laundry sooo it works out for us! ha!  I just threw this picture in so that there was evidence that he's with us during the day!  This was a messy dinnertime for sure!

I've worked into our schedule something called "evening specials".  In PS the kids had "specials" which consisted of art, music, gym, science and computer.  One night a week each child can pick which parent to have an "evening special" with.  Which means they get an hour and a half of dedicated time with one of us and pick anything they'd like to do.  Thankfully the baby goes to bed REALLY early so it affords us the ability to do this!  They can pick anything; board games, pretend play, taking a walk, reading in our bed, watching a show, going to a store (if we need to run an errand), a Landcruiser ride with Daddy (one of their favorite pastimes!).  Pretty much anything within reason.  Last night was K's turn and she chose to color with Mommy.  She wanted to use colored pencil and a Mo's Digital Pencil Image.  I kept working on an image that I've been at for a while from Saturated Canary.  She wanted me to work with her on her shading and making her images look more realistic.  We used my Prismacolor pencils, Sansodor (a blending solution) and paper blending stumps.  I must say, I was impressed with her result!  And it was so fun to sit with her with no distractions!!  The side benefit is that the other child gets quality time with the other parent!  T and Daddy decided to do connector straws!  (so cool)

It was another great day!!  Can't wait for tomorrow!