Lent

It's Lent?  Really?

Here's a link to all our past Lent plans.

And my favorite Lenten video:

Valentine's Day

 What do you do when Valentine's Day falls the very day after Ash Wednesday?

Celebrate it early!

We celebrated on Monday, so our week is: Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday, then the feast of Sts. Cyril and Methodius.

We had valentines, of course, and heart balloons, and a big jello heart.  Those are hot pretzels with hearts drawn on with pink frosting. 

The roses, balloons, and decorations are from the Emperor!

I printed heart packets from Enchanted Learning.

 We made strawberry cupcakes.

We had a treasure hunt to find valentine candy.

And we finished off with Pink Burping Cows...of Love!

Fun Easy Math

Hand prints!  Choclo, Oob, and I made dozens of hand prints with red and gold paint. 

Now we count them by 1s (number of hands), 2s (pairs of hands - we mostly did red on one hand and gold on the other), 5s (fingers), and 10s (fingers on hand pairs).

Poetry

We've been doing more poetry this year, partly because I've had my own love of poetry renewed and that spills over to sharing great poems with the kids.  We are reading poems frequently, but once a week, I wanted to go at a poem more intensely.  The Emperor came up with this schema for us to look at poems more deeply. 

Poetry

11.      Write the author and title of the poem, using proper capitalization and punctuation.  Titles of poems always go in quotation marks.  Titles get capital letters for their first and last words and for every conjunction or preposition that is 5 or fewer letters.

22.      State two literal observations about the poem.  One should be about the form of the poem, and the other should be about its topic or its plot.

33.      State one personal reaction/reflection that you had when you read a particular statement in the poem.

44.      State what you believe to be the central message of the poem.

55.      State one question that reading the poem inspires.

This has been a lot of fun!  We are tapping in to The Emperor's stash of short and interesting poems, like: Stephen Crane's, "I Saw a Man."

I Saw a Man

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
"It is futile," I said,
"You can never -- "

"You lie," he cried,
And ran on.

 

A Stupid Joke

Did you hear that they are opening a home for retired yaks?

They can't get any publicity because everyone says it's just old gnus.

Further Adventures of Gilwell

 Gilwell, the Tiger Cub mascot is back with us this week!

We took him to the Udvar Hazy Air and Space Annex.

This was our first time back since they got Discovery, the space shuttle that spent the most time in space.

We were amazed at how different it was than Enterprise, the shuttle prototype which used to be displayed here!

For starters, it seemed much larger, and the engines were very different, and it looked much more... used.  It was very, very cool!

We also showed Gilwell the Enola Gay. 

And went up into the control tower to watch the planes take off and land at Dulles.

Choclo's favorite part, however, was the array of different aircraft engines, which I totally forgot to photograph!

Wordless Wednesday: Warm Winter Walk

Metalworking

 We've shifted the focus from knights and the ruling classes over to artisans.

What I would have loved to do was do some real smithing, but, lacking a forge, anvil,  and the ability to melt metal, we felt this project, combined with You Tubes of actual smiths, was good enough!

I collected cans, filled them with water, and left them on the porch to freeze.  This touched off three days of fine weather with temps reaching 70, but, last weekend, they finally froze.

One kid at a time, each Zoomlian picked a can and drew a simple design on the outside with a water based marker. Gloves can be helpful here.

 They then hammered a nail through the can (into the ice) to form a pattern of holes along their design.  The key thing here is to rotate the can so that you are always hammering the nail straight down into the can.

Once the design was complete, we removed the ice with a quick soak of the can in warm water.

 Because the water had been in the can for several days, the dissolved air (which mixes in from the pressure in the water system) had dissipated, leaving the ice crystal clear.  You can do this with ice cubes by boiling the water before putting it in the trays, and, indeed, the "solid" ice was slower to melt than our usual "cloudy" ice.

Smaller kids needed more help, including heroic nail holding by a nervous adult.  But they all came out nicely, and no fingers were lost in the making of this project!

We put candles inside our completed lanterns, and ate dinner by candle light.   

It wasn't actually this dark in the dining room!




 By a happy coincidence, we ended up doing this craft on Candlemas (which you may call Groundhog Day), the traditional day for blessing candles!

Gingerbread Castle

On the first real snow, we make a gingerbread house. 

This lovely custom has a very practical purpose: it almost never snows before Christmas, and thus the perennial craziness of making a gingerbread house is separated from the perennial craziness of Christmas prep.

This year, for some reason, we decided to do a castle!



Our castle is a triangular keep with a triangular curtain wall.  This is in keeping with the architectural reality that such a structure will have six walls and the historical reality that I have six children.

As someone who has made (or assisted with) a lot of gingerbread houses, here's the secret: decorate the walls before you construct the house!

That way you can decorate on a flat surface, allow the decorations to dry in their correct positions, and then glue it all together with royal icing (supported in their upright positions by canned goods).


If there is another trick I know, it would be: let it dry overnight before you add a roof or try to move your structure.  I no longer try to fudge that one.

This one wasn't going further than the kids, so I didn't bother with roofs and so forth.  Actually, I found that none of the kids thought to put a door on their wall, which is one way to make your castle impregnable, I guess!

Reasons NOT to Teach Your Five Year Old to Write

It does not  say "Do not come in because of zombies."

No, no. 

It says, "Do not come in because I am busy."

He put it up and promptly wandered off, leaving his (very polite) room mate unwilling to intrude on the (empty) room.