I still cough a little, but I feel like myself again, and I got a lot done last week.
Last week was mostly getting ready for the play. I made TONS of costumes! I was seriously behind my sewing machine more than anywhere else. Here's my helper with John Darling's top hat:
I didn't have to sew every costume, but I had to make sure everyone had a costume. This meant a lot of time on Amazon, finding the perfect look. I was also on the phone for hours with all the moms finding out who had what costumes ready or who was able to share a costume they already had.
After all that work, everyone looks great:
I have to brag a little: We decided Tiger Lily needed to look fancier than the other indians, so we ordered her costume on Amazon. My HORRIBLE post office said it hadn't come in even though my computer said it was there. I panicked and made a costume for her. I later called the post office and asked if it had come in "no."I gave them my tracking number "oh yah, here it is." URRGH! Finally I was able to give Tiger Lily her costume, but she said she liked the one I made better than the Amazon one!
I was a little worried in the middle of the week when it took FIVE hours to go through the play once, but now everyone has it down to 1 1/2 hours, so things look promising.
As far as school goes, we didn't get as much reading, writing, and arithmetic in as we should have, but hey, you do what you can, right?
We did do science, which felt so good. I haven't done science for like a month. We studied earth's moving plates, which included earthquakes and volcanoes.
We had a lot of fun experiments. I even made a sample of the earth's crust:
And we made our own mentos and coke volcano:
But first, we ate the sugar crystals we made a month ago. They got this big in two weeks, and then stayed about the same size. Yummy and educational.
For geography, we studied Ukraine. We talked about the revolution going on there right now, and how the McKays came from Ukraine (our last name should be Kostyniuk.) We read this awesome book "Enough" by Forchuk, that showed the political struggles in Ukraine. We also read "The Bird's Gift" which tells about Ukrainian Easter eggs, and since we decorated them for our ancient history year, I thought I would record it here. We made Matryoshka dolls out of different sized cups as our activity.
We also studied Romania. Um, we kind of studied Vampires instead of studying very much about Romania. Romania= Transylvania= Dracula= Vampires----- um yah. My boys had fun. We read this book that kind of freaked Daniel out; "Transylvania" by Von Finn, which was all about Dracula legends in Romania. We did lots of vampire fun for our activity. I got my ideas from here.
We made cupcakes that had been bitten by vampires:
Made vampire bats from balloons:
And drank blood with vampire straws:
Last but not least, we had another geography fireside. I have really loved these firesides, and have learned so much.
Some of my best friends, the Walshes, are refugees from Zimbabwe. They came to talk to us about living there. Randomly, I have another good friend from Zimbabwe, although he is not a refugee. He was too busy to prepare anything, but he and his family still came.
The Walshes have some wicked awesome stories. Like having to take guns with them wherever they went as children because of war, having a spitting cobra living in their stable eating all their rats, and having friends save and save to travel 12 hours to the temple and converting others on the way.
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