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I don’t typically give the children written “tests” to assess what they’ve learned in home school. Usually I ask them to teach their daddy what they’ve learned, or narrate back what they’ve read. Sometimes I use lapbooks. Here are the kids’ lapbooks for our Rocks and Minerals unit.
Brad:
Brian:
Brooke:
Brooke bought a set of bunkbeds for her Liberty doll. I didn’t take a “before” shot, but they were uncushioned, covered in a red calico print.
Brooke added a 2″ thick foam cushion and used a pillowcase to re-cover them.
Aren’t they just adorable? You can see how we just wrapped them like Christmas gifts on the ends. We could have taken a little more effort to match up the stripes on the ends, but I wanted Brooke to be able to do this by herself without getting frustrated.
She wanted to add pillows, but we didn’t have any pillow forms. So we made them ourselves out of felt and leftover toulle. She liked the crisp white look so much, she didn’t even want to make a pillowcase for them.
I’m so proud of how she’s learning to create beautiful things herself.
We’re loving the book we’re using this year, Dannah Gresh’s Secret Keeper Girls: The Gift of True Friendship.
May’s theme was BFF’s (best friends forever’’s). I’m happy with what good friends the Sonflower Sisters have become over the past four years.
They crafted–their favorite part of the gatherings–cards to other friends, letting them know how special they are to them.
We finished up with a group brithday party. What fun!
What a blessing we have in our Sonflower Sisters BFF’s.
The boys were completely clueless after receiving a plastic grocery bag as a clue to the theme of their bedroom.
The girls were excited to reveal the new theme…can you guess yet?
I managed to catch their initial reaction
to their new MILITARY room!
Their daddy was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, and the plastic bag was a makeshift parachute. In this photo you can see him during a jump.
If you look closely in the photo above with the girls, you can see him in the jungle. The boys LOVE having photos of their dad and his army gear all over their bedroom.
Brian wanted a teddy-bear theme. We managed to make him happy with this pilot teddy bear.
I think it’s safe to say they’ll enjoy this room for years to come.
Talk about giddy! We were too excited to wait until after breakfast to reveal the new bedrooms.
The boys made hearts out of hot pink hawaiian leis to greet the girls.
Look at what else greeted the girls:
and this
and this.
Look at this cute shelf.
I changed up their closet drapes with a little RIT dye
and some pretty fabric (necessary when I dried the drapes in the machine and they shrunk.)
The girls were so surprised! They really didn’t know what to expect.
Brooke went straight to her desk/crafting area. It was the one thing she wanted in her bedroom.
Even though Brea cried when we took out her crib, she was thrilled to meet her new trundle bed
and find her own stash of books nearby.
She invited us all, and I mean all, to join her.
Didn’t the boys do a FANTASTIC job?!
The kids worked really hard on each other’s rooms.
Brian and Brad sanded a $2 from the county school system.
You can really see the difference in their personalities here. Brad is very intent and detail-focused and Brian’s a big-picture kind of guy.
The boys put together a really cute hot pink chair from Ikea for the girl’s desk area.
They were really wishing they had space for their own spinny chair–only not in pink!
In the meantime, the girls were hard at work on the boys’ decor.
And helping a very stressed Mama
take care of the mounds and mounds of JUNK that were cleared out of their closets and from under their beds. Ugh!
After hours and hours of grueling work you don’t see on that daggone TLC show, we were ready for bed. In a clean living room. Aaaaahhh.
Stay tuned for the Whipped Cream Pie Throwing challenge and the Clues.
We finally made the cake I’ve been obsessed with. This is a shot of it I found on Megan’s whatever blog. She’s great!!
I took on the challenge.
Instructions:
Whip up two boxed white cake mixes like normal (and threaten to take away the beaters and the bowl for licking if the children can’t stop arguing over them).
Divide the cake mix evenly into six bowls and add GEL food coloring (not drops or your cake will turn out pastel and too runny) to make: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.
When the color is thoroughly mixed in, pour the colored batter into six different floured cake pans
and bake.
Of course, you MUST let the children lick the bowls…
When the cakes have cooled, take a long knife and slice off the rounded tops
and give the children more sugar!
Stack the layers–purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red–on top of one another, “gluing” the layers together with white icing.
[I think it's hilarious you can see the ingredients I bought to make my own clothes washing soap in the background.]
Cover the entire cake with a thin layer of white icing–I chose to use canned white icing with rainbow chips already in it to go along with the theme–and put it in the refrigerator to harden. (This helps keep crumbs from spreading as you ice the cake…thank you, Megan!)
[The beer left over from my birthday steamed crab bash seems a little out of place.]
Add another layer of icing and you get this beautiful surprise rainbow cake!
The real surprise is that we won’t be cutting into it ourselves. Our neighbors just won full custody of their grandchildren (a blessing!) and we’ll be helping them to celebrate with this yummy cake! God is soooo good.
Recently a few of us gathered together to make special t-shirts to wear in our local Tax Day Tea Party civil tax protest.
We made these fun fingerprint flags:
with a few stars up in the corner.
Then we left our shirts out in the rain, and had to toss them. Then it rained all Tea Party day. So we almost had t-shirts for the Tea Party we almost attended.
