Disney School - Pinocchio

It is day 3 of our home school and day 2 of our Disney school.  Today we focused on the movie Pinocchio.  I will admit, this is not one of my favorite movies.  When I was little I couldn't understand why the boys were so naughty, and I was terrified of the whale.  But it did offer some good inspiration for school today.

We started, as usual, with math sheets from school.  If you are looking for inspiration that is more on theme, maybe make some word problems with how many fish monstro will eat, how many of Gipetto's clocks are working or not working, or how many boys were turned into donkeys.

We then watched videos about Italy.  I will be honest, the history ones we watched were a little boring.  I finished it up with a Ultra HD tour of Florence.

Animated history of Italy part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y16QLJOVP6s

Tour of Florence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfW-Tn231Sk

Next we moved to science.  I took my inspiration off of Monstro the whale.  We did this whale blubber experiment to show how animals can keep warm even in freezing water.

https://sciencekiddo.com/how-arctic-animals-stay-warm/

I thought that I had some crisco at home, however I was mistaken.  Instead we used some play-doh.  It worked pretty well, except my daughter's nails kept ripping a hole in her play-doh.  My son's however, worked perfectly.  He went from holding his finger in the water for 18 seconds to holding it in the water for over a minute.

My daughter really wanted to work on our craft next, so instead of spelling we did art.  Of course we made marionettes.

https://www.doodlecraftblog.com/2013/04/easy-silly-bird-marionette-diy-tutorial.html

My daughter chose a pink body and head with white feet.








My son went with all yellow. 

This was a fun craft, even though there was a lot they couldn't do in terms of the gluing.   But once they were done, the kids loved playing with them.

By this time we all needed a break, so they had recess in the basement, followed by lunch.  We started watching the movie Pinocchio on Disney +.

After lunch, the kids did their assigned spelling and English work.  My daughter is able to do her work on the computer, and my son enjoys the cutting and pasting project he got from school.

Writing was next.  My son was asked if he could have an animal conscience, what would his be and why.  He chose a dragon because it could protect him and they could play together.  My daughter was given the choice between this assignment or writing a short puppet show.  She chose a puppet show and wrote a fun show involving frogs and candy.   We finished the day by reading a bit of the original Pinocchio story.

I hope you enjoyed this installment of our Disney School. We will be taking the weekend off, but will start back up with Bambi on Monday.  Thank you for following along!

Disney School - Snow White

So just like everyone else, my kids are home for the next few weeks.  We are huge Disney fans, so we've decided to go to Disney school.  What does this mean, you may ask?  Well, each day, or activities are based on a different Disney movie.  Today was day 1, so we are doing Snow White.

We started our day with math.  The kids already have math sheets that the school sent home, so I have them do one a day.  If you are looking for ideas, do some counting with apples, dwarves, diamond shapes, basically anything that has a snow white vibe.  My daughter is currently working on units of measure, so we could have done some interesting conversions of weight for the jewels, or distances to get to the mine.

We followed this up by watching a few videos on YouTube about the black forest.  We enjoyed this one that follows a family around the black forest area.  It doesn't cover the importance of the fairy tales, but it still made my kids want to visit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5HE94YtjBU

Next was our craft time.  We made caramel apples in honor of the poisoned apples of the evil queen.  We melted caramels on the stove.  I removed the stems and put a stick in each apple.  The kids then rolled the apples around in the caramel.  We tried adding chocolate, but it didn't work that well.  Finally the kids added M&Ms to the outsides.  We let them cool and then ate them for our lunch dessert.  They may not have been very pretty, but they were very yummy.

We went back to school sanctioned work and had the kids do their assigned English and spelling work.

We then took our recess and lunch break.  The kids got to eat their apples.  As I said, they were very yummy. During lunch we watched the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.  We've seen it a ton of times, but since we were dedicating the day to it, I thought it was important to watch the movie.

Science was next on our list. I took inspiration off of the queen making her poison.  We followed this web page to make our own baking soda potions. My son really liked this one.

https://www.messylittlemonster.com/2018/09/baking-soda-magic-potion-science-experiment-kids.html

Next was creative writing.  This is one of my favorite lessons.  My children are in kindergarten and fourth grade, so they each have different needs.  For my son, I had him write about his favorite dwarf, and what his favorite things were.  My daughter got the harder, but more fun assignment of writing the story from the evil queen's point of view.

Our last activity of the day was reading.  We read the original Brothers Grimm version of Snow White.  It's a little darker than the cartoon, but I honestly believe the kids need to see where the movies originated.

Overall, the day went pretty well.  I am planning on doing a movie a day as long as the kids are in lock down.  Feel free to follow along on our adventures and hopefully get inspired for your own "Disney school."

First Week of School

So this week, both of my darling children went off to school.  Yes, my youngest started kindergarten this week.  As a Mom, I wanted to take my darling child to class the first day.  Of course, my child decided to ride the bus with his sister.  I tried to be a supportive mom and allowed him this new level of independence, but I got to tell you, I was dying inside. Not only did I send my youngest to Kindergarten, I sent him on a bus! 

After a few little tears, I went home.  I had decided to get my house in order.  For the last 10 years, it had gotten wildly out of control, and I gladly allowed the chaos to take over.  NO MORE!  I was going to tackle the clutter and the dust.  I had already done a decent job cleaning up the main areas of the living room and the kitchen, but I had a few areas that were still disasters. 

Of course, as soon as I came into the house, planning on tackling the beast areas, my pets realized the kids were no longer in the house and demanded attention.  My dog climbed into my lap and chose to camp out for a while.  If I stopped rubbing his ears, he would pick up his head and look at me as if to say, hey, you aren't done yet.  He finally had enough after about 10 minutes and moved over so he could take a real nap.  As soon as he left, one of the cats decided it was his turn.  He first climbed in my lap, then decided that nuzzling my leg was better.  He clamped one leg on the top of my leg and another around the bottom and hugged me for probably another 15 minutes.  Definitely not how I planned to start my day, but not the worst way either. 

So I finally have satisfied pets, and can continue to clean.  My family has acquired many buckets over the years.  Most of them have accumulated in one area, and almost all of them have small toys in them.  I had no less than 10 buckets filled with stuff that needed to be put away on top of any other clutter and junk that gathered around them.  Most people would ask, why do I have so much stuff?  I asked myself, why do we have this many buckets?  After contemplating the bucket takeover, I started clearing the entire place out.  I planned to vacuum the space, however as soon as I turned my back a cat had settled in the new, fun spot and fell asleep. 

So since I couldn't vacuum, I decided to put all the junk away, bucket by bucket. I completed this daunting task in way more time than I had planned.  Then I threw out all the buckets that were broken or missing handles.  This ended up being 2 regular buckets and 5 Halloween pumpkin buckets .  Why do I keep these things?  I really don't know.  I still have a pumpkin bucket running around, and about 6 more stacked neatly in an out-of-the-way location.  To finish off, I scared away the cat and vacuumed.  I felt a huge sense of accomplishment.  One beast down. 

The kids came home that night, and they had a great time.  Everyone was happy to be back at school, and to be honest, I think we are all better for having some time away from each other.  It makes our time together so much more fulfilling.  We'll see how next week goes!

Enchanted creatures birthday party

My daughter just turned 9. Of course she wanted a unique theme. She chose enchanted creatures so she could have unicorns, dragons, mermaids, and fairies.  Needless to say, you can't find all these at party city.

I started with the invitation. I recently got a new tablet with the airflow app, and I love it. I was able to draw up the invitation, then dropped it into photoshop to add the text.

Then it was time to decide on decorations. We decided that each area of the house would represent a different creature. Our living room was for unicorns, our kitchen was the fairy forest, the outside was a mermaid grotto, and her room would be for dragons.

Unfortunately I ran out of time to do all that I wanted. I made a simple forest background for the cake table and had unicorn balloons in front. We hung unicorn dangles in the hallway. I would have liked to have done some other unicorns in the windows but I ran out of time. We also got the giant unicorn balloon from party city. The kids loved it.



The fairy table turned out great. I made a fairy house for the kitchen table centerpiece.  I started with a milk carton and cut it the way I wanted. Next I hot glued aluminum foil to the milk carton, and once it looked the way I wanted,  I covered it in paperclay. I let it dry then painted it. I also made a bendy doll fairy.

Our kitchen table sits in a bay window. I covered the edges in crumpled brown paper to look like trees, and added green tablecloths to the top for the leaves. I used my cricut to cut out butterflies that spelled out happy birthday. I laminated them and hung them under the trees with fishing line.

The other two areas also suffered from too many ideas and not enough time. We did hang clear balloons to resemble bubbles, but it got so hot we didn't go out there much. I also wanted a beware of dragon on my daughter's door, but ran out of time.

The girls invited to the party each chose a creature to be. Once they arrived, they got accessories that helped them get into character. The unicorns got horn headbands, the fairies got wings, and the mermaids got sea shell headbands (they wore their own tails from target.)  No one wanted to be a dragon.


Our first activity was to use "mermaid waters" to make shirts. For each child I had cut a silhouette of their creature out of freezer paper and ironed it onto a plain white shirt. Then we mixed the tie die colors and put them in spray bottles. I bought a kit with blue, pink, teal, purple, and black. The girls then squirted the colors onto their shirts. There was a little color bleeding, but overall they really came out great.

Next we came in and got our faces painted, then made unicorn dreamcatchers. I bought 5 inch hoops and wrapped them in white cord. I cut a large length of rainbow cord and taught the girls how to weave a dreamcatcher. Finally we added touches such as the tail, horns, and ears.

Our final activity was a dragon egg pinata. It was made by paper macheing a 12 inch balloon then painting it with metallic paint. The gift bags contained a unicorn horn lollipop and a rock candy lollipop.  Then they had all their candy from the pinata and their crafts.

The party was a lot of fun, and everyone really seemed to enjoy themselves. This week I get back to work on some murals and I'll be starting Halloween preparations. See ya soon.

Valentine's Day boxes

So today is Valentine's day.  Luckily, my son is too young to need a handmade box yet, however, my daughter had very clear instructions on hers.  As a crafty mom, I go overboard on these kind of things for my kids because I feel it is the one thing I can really do right.  My kids seem to see my weakness and love to exploit it.   So this year, my daughter comes to me with her sketches of what she wants to see on her box, and we brainstormed until we came up with the perfect idea.

She is currently obsessed with Moana, so of course this was our theme.  She wanted Moana and Maui on one side, and Tomatoa and the Kakamora on the other (we had a mailbox)  She also wanted Hai Hai and Pua on the back.  She knew that she wanted Te Ka, but wasn't sure where, so we made the front of the mailbox Te Ka, and when you opened it, Te Fiti was on the inside.  Once we had the design, I got to work.

I started with the sides.  I painted an island background, then printed out Moana and Maui.  I cut them out and mod podged them over the background.  I had thought about painting them, but I was afraid I couldn't get Maui's tattoos perfect, so I took the easy way out.

Next was Tamatoa and the Kakamoras.  I painted this side, then added gold glitter to Tomatoa to make him look authentic.  I put a layer of mod podge over everything when I was done to hold in the glitter.

My next step was to make Te Ka and Te Fiti.   Both were painted since I couldn't find a picture that fit well on the box.

Finally I printed out my daughter's favorite picture of Pua and Hai Hai, cut it out, and mod podged it on the back, and I was finished.

She really loved her box, and since her party was last week, she is now using her box to hold small things on her desk.

I also have a habit of making a few extra boxes each year for students who may forget to bring one.  This year I made three of them:  a mickey and friends one, a princess one, and a batman one.  These are very simple to make.  I simply pick out a decorative scrapbooking paper, mod podge it on the bottom half, and then mod podge a matching paper to the top.  Finally I add stickers to the top.  They look really cute, but don't take a lot of time or effort.  I hope you like the pictures!

Teacher Survival Kit Christmas Gifts

So now that the holidays are out of the way, and I have had some time to get everything back to normal, it's time to get back into blogging!

Today I thought I would share my favorite teacher Christmas gift.  Every year, I make each of our teachers a personalized teacher survival kit.  I start with a jar and I paint it with something personal for that teacher, then I paint their name.  Finally I fill the jar with winter necessities. This year I added a pack of travel Kleenex, a tube of chap-stick, a pair of Christmas socks, a travel sized hand sanitizer, an individual pack of hot cocoa, and a wooden hot chocolate spoon covered in chocolate, peppermint flakes, and marshmallows. It is always a hit with the teachers.

This year we had 6 teachers to gift.  I started with my daughter's teacher.  Her class is known as the bookworms, so I painted the jar with a bookworm on one side and the teacher's name on the other.

The other jars were for my son's school.  We started with his class teachers.  He is in the duck class, so I painted a cute little duck on both of their jars.

Then I worked on the presents for the principal and vice principal.  I painted the school logo on their jars.

Finally I made a jar for his music teacher.  I painted a few music notes on hers.

Everyone seemed to love their gifts, and they can be reused as candy jars for the rest of the year.  I bought these jars at hobby lobby, and the paint is folk art enamel.  I followed the directions on the paint bottle for curing them in the oven, and now they are top rack dishwasher safe.

This is a fun project that doesn't take very long but always has a positive impact.  Hopefully this gives you a few new ideas around Christmas time.  Thanks for reading!

My Nursery Mural

I've decided I need to give this another try.  I wrote a few posts in the beginning, then life got in the way.  I never stop working on some kind of art or project, but I have not been good about taking pictures or posting about them.  I'm going to try and do better.  I am going to try and post at least once a week, both on current and past projects.

This past week was Thanksgiving.  I really enjoyed the family time, and the turkey, but I spent most of my time painting a mural in my niece's room.  I realized that I had never shown off any of my work on here.  So I thought I would start by showing you some of my early work, in particular, my daughter's nursery.

I have painted a few murals before this, but I don't have many pictures.  My first mural was based on Fantasia, and was painted in my dorm hallway.   Several of the people living on my floor submitted mural designs.  We spent an entire semester painting.  We had Fantasia, Simpsons, Toy Story, and Gummy Bears.  We were all very proud of ourselves.  Two years later, we moved out of the dorm.  When we came back for a visit, we found out the university had painted over all of them.  Suddenly they were worried about copyright infringement.

My second mural wasn't much, and hardly anyone saw it.  I was working at Walmart and they wanted me to paint a scroll with our pledge on it.  It took me a few days, and it stayed there until the building was torn down about 4 years later.  I was quickly learning that my works don't seem to last long.

Next was my daughter's nursery.  I made a cross stitch blanket that had a teddy bear laying on the moon.  This became my inspiration.  I found a bedding set that had a similar design, then painted the nursery to match.  My husband helped paint the other walls, the border trim, and helped with the sky.

I started with a mural on the main wall. We then added a border along the other walls.  I painted the characters of the mural into the border of the longest wall and stars on the shorter walls.  The room took a couple of weeks to finish.  Both kids have really loved it though.  When they were babies, they would talk to the characters right above the changing table.

We got a valance in our bedding set, and I made a set of curtains from blackout fabric.  We also hung up a net for stuffed animals.

We painted two constellations in the sky, Gemini and Canus Major, to include our dogs Gemini and Sirius. 

The bunnies and the sheep came from our bedding set.  They rounded out the picture perfectly and added some character.

  This room will always be a turning point for me, and I have always been proud of it.  This was a large project that I was able to complete and that made me feel like I might actually be a bit of an artist.  The colors were perfect for a nursery, and both of my kids have loved the animals around the room.  We taught them about the constellations and why they were important to us.  I hope the next person who lives in this house loves it as much as we do.