Snow Art

Those of you who have ready mt sporadic posts here have likely seen some of the art work created by  my children. I probably feature my daughters work more because she simply creates more than my son. Today I'm featuring  another one of my daughters' works. This particular scene was inspired by Eric Carle's book Dream Snow. The story features a farmer preparing Christmas presents for his animals, piling them around an outdoor tree.

We didn't have the book this past season as our new library doesn't have it, but I guess it has made an impression on my daughter. (I believe it is also written more for the preschool set.)



Her picture is created with slick sticks from Crayola. These are somewhat chunky sticks that are a cross between crayons and oil pastels. The color goes on smooth and thick, yet they aren't messy on the hands due to their plastic case.

A Lego Story

This fall my 9 year old son has enjoyed writing Lego stories using the prompts from Mary at Homegrown Learners. The other day when he was making his own Lego creation he decided he needed to write his own story to do with what he built.

This is what he wrote:

Jack goes to work in a lab at Lego University in Brickville. Jack has altered the flavor of vegetables so kids will eat them but with the same nutrition. Nowadays Jack is trying to make a serum that will kill cancer but not the body. Jack made a serum yesterday, but it was too radioactive. Jack, while he is waiting for that serum to decay is making another one. His new serum, sadly, is not correct. Just when he is about to give up, Jack sees the diagram of a cancer cell. Now he knows how to kill cancer!  "I got it! I got it! The serum to kill cancer!" And sure enough it could kill cancer but nothing else. Jack then won the Nobel Prize and retired to the countryside.

A look back at 2013 in pictures.

The pictures in this post are some which I took throughout 2013 but never made it here to a blog post.

In January I made my husband a half cake to celebrate his half birthday. I usually make a decorate cakes for my kids, but because his b-day falls in July I hadn't made him one for the last several years. It was just too hot to bake. Turned out this was the only birthday cake he got in 2013 as we ended up moving for his birthday.

For most of the 2012-2013 academic year my son studied the solar system, planets, etc. He decided he was going to make a poster featuring what he learned about.

Snow people my children made.

From our big March storm. Snow came down at the rate of about an inch an hour. In total we ended up with about 18 inches of snow in this one storm.

After we moved my children were finding words in the packing peanuts as boxes were emptied. It was amazing how many different words they could find. This activity kept them busy for hours.

I also tried my hand at making brownie pops. I don't think they turned out so badly.

Early fall we had the opportunity to see replicas of two of Columbus' ships.

This was at a rest area in Mississippi. The various tiles on the stone name the official things of the state of Mississippi. I took the picture because I thought it was a cute idea.

Early fall we had the opportunity to go to the New Orleans area for a couple days with my husband when he went to an Orientation meeting for work. One evening we went to Bourbon Street and had 'Louisiana' food for supper. These are the crab cakes I enjoyed.

Another field trip we had in the fall was to a cotton gin. The upper picture is of one of the pieces of the gin. The lower picture shows the cotton in various stages in the ginning process. If I remember correctly the first pile is before it goes through the gin, the second is the cotton and the third is the seed.

Another interesting tidbit for 2013- I increased my number of states visited by 4, for a total of 23. I think.

So some photo highlights of 2013.