Finger painting at school!

When we got back from the field trip, Katie got to create her artwork folder…which necessitated finger painting. She had a blast! And I’m glad she gets to do it at school because the thought of that mess at home makes me cry. 🙂

Then we saw Owen coming back from recess:

And just because there wasn’t already enough paint…another color!

And then I made the mistake of telling her to make a handprint. Well, she smacked her hand down and this happened (except about four times as many dots):

Anne (our friend who works in Katie’s class) assured me it was washable, but when a baby wipe—generally known to clean most anything—didn’t work, I got concerned. I found the label:

You see that? Washes out of most surfaces and fabrics. Egads. Of course that would be my luck with my brand new coat. (That said, I washed it as soon as I got home and thankfully it did come out.)

And the final product! I can’t wait to see the finished (dried) folder they make out of it!

Potato people for Gramma Jean

I had to ship something to Gramma Jean in Florida so I asked Katie if she wanted to draw a picture to send. I got an immediate and emphatic YES!! She raced to the drawing table and did this.

As she drew the first body, she says “A potato!” 🙂 Then she continued drawing and talking: “Two eyes. Two ears. Two arms.” It was so cute.

“Another potato!”

And if you look closely you’ll also see belly buttons. 🙂

I really REALLY wanted to. But…I just can’t. This is hell.

It’s MUCH easier to create things if you’re not searching for colors. But they come like this (cheaply):

perler

So I tried. I really did. Because I really like organization and making things easier…but it just takes F-O-R-E-V-E-R. The completely full bins were colors bought separately. The other beads are the ones I sorted. What you see is about 15 minutes of work.

perlertimememe

Owen’s thank you to the Mythbusters

We watched a recent Mythbusters with the kids. Owen drew a picture and wrote a thank you to Adam and Jamie and wanted me “to send it to them in California.” I told him I’d take a picture and tweet it to them. I briefly thought about asking a friend for insider info to get it directly to Adam (they’re acquaintances) but figured I’d save any potential favors for something a bit more…serious. 🙂

So I tweeted three different times:

2016-01-21owenmythbusters

And a few hours later, we got this:

How cool is that?! Owen was super excited!

Unfortunately, we haven’t “heard” anything from Jamie yet, but we’re still crossing our fingers. 🙂

Star of the Week project

So, aside from printing the pictures he wanted/needed, I decided I wasn’t going to help Owen at all on his Star of the Week. I mean, it’s his project and he should be able to handle it. Except after a mere 10 minutes, I was getting jittery just looking at it. 

  

And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let it go. Yes, it was his work, but I knew he could do better if he took more than a haphazard attitude. 

I asked if he liked it and was proud of it. He said yes. I asked him to get last year’s and see which he liked better. Once he saw them next to each other he realized he didn’t like his first effort at all

So all I did was gently guide him and suggest he place everything first—in groups—before gluing. 

And now we’re both happy. 🙂

  

Pony Painting

Tom stole a Melissa & Doug painting Kit in the white elephant gift exchange at the party last night since there wasn’t really anything else we needed (or could steal). We knew Katie would love it. (On a side note, who puts a kids gift in an adult exchange? Really?! The other part of the gift was a huge rubber duckie…which the kids also got.)

   
 

Another shot at Santa

Our community clubhouse had cookies and activities with Santa this morning, so we thought we’d try with the kids again—just in case we got a better picture (since I could dress the kids up).

But first, the at-home pictures:

2015-12-12kids001

2015-12-12kids003

2015-12-12kids004

2015-12-12kids005

2015-12-12kids006

2015-12-12kids007

2015-12-12kids008

2015-12-12kids009

2015-12-12kids010

2015-12-12kids011

2015-12-12kids012

2015-12-12kids013

2015-12-12kids014

2015-12-12kids015

And then while waiting for Santa, they did some crafts and coloring:

2015-12-12kids016

2015-12-12coloringkatie

2015-12-12coloringowen

Katie wanted NOTHING to do with Santa, so it was just Owen!

2015-12-12kids017

But she did make more rings to put on the tree!

2015-12-12kids018

2015-12-12kids019

2015-12-12kids020

2015-12-12kids021

A quick visit to Owen’s classroom.

Long story short, he had been missing his daily folder (we’d looked everywhere) so since I had to drop off some stuff at the school, I took him to school and had him search his classroom. We didn’t find it, but he enjoyed showing me a few things in the room.

The treat bag they all decorated—they get small treats at the end of the day if they had good behavior.

I liked this and am going to start using it at home—it’s one of Owen’s major issues when writing!

They had to do an acrostic poem:

Oreos are my favorite
West Virginia football team is not my fav
Eating chicken is my fav
New Years Eves is my fav
Hugs are my favorite
U_____ is cool (he doesn’t even know what this is)
Duny [Dunia] is my friend
Summer is fun
Olives are not my favorite
Nuts are yummy

Cookies with Santa

The local high school hosted a huge craft fair that I wanted to check out (we missed it last year) and they also had a “Cookies with Santa” portion that we wanted to take the kids to. We got to the North Pole shortly after it opened so we didn’t have to wait too long. While daddy held our place in line, the kids worked on bead candy canes:

Can you guess which was Owen’s and which was Katie’s? 🙂

2015-12-08 18.58.26

Santa! (They had someone taking pictures, but it wasn’t anything really posed or official—she was just off to the side snapping so we had NO idea what we would get. I was taking pics the whole time.) Katie wasn’t eager to sit with Santa, but she didn’t turn away…and she talked to him but didn’t get excited about the hug.

2015-12-05kids013

2015-12-05kids021

Owen’s turn! He’s too big for Santa’s lap!

2015-12-05kids022

At the end we had Katie go back up. I snapped about six quick pics and this one actually turned out great!

This was one of the ones the student elf took—I was impressed that it turned out as well:

2015-12-05kids026

On the way out, Katie decided she wanted to make antlers:

2015-12-05kids034

Painting snowflakes

Art night ceramics at school! I was clueless as to how to decorate my snowflake…until I finished it…at which point my mind flooded with ideas, all of which I liked better than what I did. The kids’ are great, though you are only seeing the boring back side because they were still drying. And Tom’s impressed me, too…the only one that looks like an actual snowflake! A fun night!

       

Anyone else hate doing art projects with their kids?

Owen’s pieces usually start out decent enough but then he keeps adding stuff and adding stuff and adding stuff and soon it’s unrecognizable. I realize a first grade project isn’t a big deal but my OCD can’t handle it.

This is disguising Tom Turkey so the farmer can’t find him for Thanksgiving dinner.

  

  • There was one zig-zag string of lights and it was perfect…and then he just off and scribbles on another zig-zag strand on the side.
  • I thought the yellow star on top was good…then he decided to color it green.

Maybe I need to start drinking wine again…

Veteran’s Day

We all went to the Veteran’s Day Assembly at Owen’s school. It was very nice, and each of the grades performed either a song or poem. During one of the songs, every child who had a military family member stood up and waved a sign that said “Thank you, Service Members!” (This is a photo from a random person on Facebook.)

2015-11-11vetdaysigns

We were a bit too far back to see well, so it wasn’t until afterwards we learned that Owen didn’t stand up…because he was shy. Poor kid. It wasn’t like he was the only one, either—there were probably (conservatively) 50 other kids standing up, too.

This was what he brought home from school:

2015-11-11vetdaypic

Owen’s classroom tour

I had to drop off the table signs for the fall festival and a bag of odds and ends containers to the STEAM class…so just took Owen to school. Since we had extra time before school actually started, I had him show me around his classroom. I learned more about his days in that 15 minutes than I have all year. 🙂

Hallway art:

Color: Blue
Food: Pizza
Animal: Cat
Book: Stop the Bot

  • I will look for [I can’t tell and he couldn’t remember]
  • I will look for ink for writing
  • I will build a house for living
  • I will discover Spain
  • I will discover America
  • I will find fresh water
  • I will find gold and food

I joked with him, asking if that was really his handwriting because it was SO much better than what I get from him at home. 🙂

In his classroom:

I had him walk me through what happens when he comes in every morning.

First, the coat gets stuffed in the box (behind his knees), the lunch box goes across the room to the big lunch bin (the teacher carries it down at lunchtime because they go straight from recess to lunch), the Book Baggie goes in a specific numbered basket (each kid has their own number), and the homework folder goes in a bin.

Some of the book bins:

Owen’s hopes and dreams: to learn to write. 🙂

Some of their daily schedule:

Work centers—he had to point to each column and read all the names and activities:

This picture was sitting on the teacher’s desk and he pointed it out saying “Look! I’m wearing my Minecraft shirt!” Not what the picture was for or when it was taken, LOL. I asked and he said “just because.” I’m guessing maybe it was the first say of school because I know that’s what he wore that day. (The teacher wasn’t in the room so I couldn’t ask her.)

Then he told me about a bunch of other stuff in his room…poetry center where you grab a sheet from the basket and read it, how when they read to self they grab a book and a pillow and can sit “anywhere in this section,” etc. He was so proud and so full of information! I told him THAT’S the stuff we wanted to know when we asked him about his day. 🙂

Lastly, when his teacher came back, I spoke with her separately for a few minutes to update her on his GI issues. We told her he had a change of clothes in his bag and we just recently put his underwear in a separate ziploc bag in case he had to change them during class and didn’t want to be obvious about it. We also let her know that it’s okay to tell him to go change if she notices anything, and maybe she can take special care to let him deal with it after everyone has left for recess or lunch or whatever so that the other kids don’t know. She was very nice about everything.

Workhouse Art Festival

There was lots of gorgeous stuff, but it was all very expensive. We saw some glass birch tree pieces we liked—but at $2400 for the set, it was just a bit out of our price range.

So we had lunch from the food trucks instead. This one caught my eye.

I posted the pic on Facebook and a local friend said he’s seen that truck in DC with lines 30-40 long! Woohoo! We had no line!

Everything on the menu sounded appealing but as soon as I saw Lobster BLT I knew that was it. YUM.

Tom had meatloaf/mac and cheese sliders from another food truck…which were really good, too.

Then the kids did an art project—coloring luminaries for an upcoming art installation in Richmond.

Black text: Bownis = Bonus
Dark pink text: Go away
Silver text: 150 poites = points

Kindergarten Artwork

I’ve been working on Owen’s kindergarten Shutterfly book and found these. I love them all.

Water sticks nuts squirrel day moon dad 

(This is Owen sitting on the couch in front of our TV playing xbox with daddy behind him.)

Tree flower house stairs house (not sure what done is—maybe down as in downstairs?)

Me and my mom play Robot Turtles. The flowers are blue purple yellow.

I am at the pool after dinner.

(More Xbox—that’s our entertainment center and the colored letters on the Xbox controller.)

If I had a tall black hat I would keep Legos in it.