Bluebonnets 2011

Tonight, we met our friends Chera and Cassidy at the JC Penney headquarters to take some bluebonnet pictures. These are my pictures. Chera's will be WAY better!

Nasher Homeschool Class

We had one of our favorite events this week....the Nasher Sculpture Center. They always have amazing exhibits and their educational staff does a phenomenal job of make it accessible to the kids.
The class this time was about Conservation of art.
The kids are examining this painting to look for things that might have happened to it since the artist painted it.

Here, the kids sketched out one of their shoes and did a damage inventory of it.

We also talked quite a bit about before and after in art. The kids sketched out drawings to make their projects, which were shrinky dinks.

Joseph's was quite involved. :p (It didn't look like this when we shrunk it.)

One of the pieces of art that is on exhibit is a room that is half filled with balloons....all yellow. It is meant to be interactive, so they let you go in the room. There were 3,000 balloons in the room. I learned that it is difficult to take pictures of people when you are surrounded by balloons. :p

Chinese Commercial

Since Caroline has been taking Chinese now for two years, I started researching language immersion camps. Ha! There is no way that she will be doing that is THIS lifetime without being adopted by Donald Trump. I did find Concordia Language Villages who offer contests and scholarships to help send potential campers to camp.

Caroline decided to do an entry for their Commercial Contest. The commercial is supposed to be in a language other than your own and in the style of the target country. It is also supposed to be about a Chinese product. We didn't exactly fill that requirement, but all of the Chinese products that we could find commercials for were American things (like McDonald's and Coke). There are some really funny ones out there for American things in Chinese. And we got quite an education in Asian commercials. They are very different than American ones.
The company that we are imitating did this commercial during the Beijing Olympics and they helped pioneer the Asian style of repeating things three times in a commercial.
Here is the commercial that we imitated.

Here is their original commercial which is really kind of painful to watch.

 And here is our version.

 Keep your fingers crossed for her!!

Girl Scout Day at Dallas Heritage Village

This is another "girl" weekend here. Ken and Joseph are on their second Boy Scout camp out and Alex has been busy working.
Today was the annual Girl Scout Day at Dallas Heritage Village and there was a Laura Ingall's theme. We are all over that one.
I made the girls dresses and bonnets and their dolls dresses and bonnets with fabric that I had laying around the house. They looked pretty stinkin' cute!

All of the activities directly related to the Little House books.
That afternoon, when Carrie was asleep, Ma beckoned Mary and Laura. Her face was shining with a secret. They put their heads close to hers, and she told them. They could make a button string for Carrie's Christmas!
Making button strings....

 Washing clothes on the washboard. They each earned a penny for their hard work which they then went to the general store and used to buy a piece of chalk for school.

Then Mary saw a red bead and Laura saw a green one, and they forgot everything but beads. Pa helped them look. They found white beads and brown beads, and more and more red and blue beads. All that afternoon they hunted for beads in the dust of the Indian camp.

Writing on the slate with our hard earned piece of chalk. 

Hand "tinting" photographs

Churning butter

Mary sat beside Ma and sewed another block of her non-patch quilt, but Laura mixed another bucketful of mud.

Listening to music from the Little House books.

Trying out the plow (with a little help!)

Is it just me, or does Caroline look like she is dancing with the hoe? ;)

Tuckered out. It should be noted that it is the first week of April and she was "hot". It may be a long summer.

 A picture of the girls and their outfits.

Blog Pirate

Since the kids all got netbooks about a month ago, I helped Libby set up a blog on my account. She has been surprisingly good at updating it and it has been pretty amusing to read. Then I realized that she had gone into my profile and changed the picture to HER and the description to HER and the signature to HER.
I am still trying to figure out how I can get her an account so that she can have all of that without completely derailing my blog. :p

Zoo Birds

This past week, it was homeschool day at the Dallas Zoo which we were supposed to attend. However, on Monday we had a thunderstorm when we woke up, followed by very chilly weather and gale force winds. We decided that we would wait and go on Tuesday when the forecast was sunny, warm and light breezes.
We had a great day! We spent a lot of time at the Children's area with the birds.

Nature Challenge-Trinity River Audubon Center

Nature Challenge - Windows Live

We have started doing the Nature Challenges again. On St. Patrick's Day, we headed down to the Trinity River Audubon Center to check it out. It's a haul from McKinney, but it was totally worth it!
The facility is beautiful and we had a beautiful day for it.