Slices of Life

 After breakfast, I settled the boys down and we started math.  We've been sprinkling in some fun Thanksgiving themed lessons to go along with our traditional schoolwork.  Today I had hoped to finish up everything. I really hadn't found anything exciting and all that interesting for Evan to work on and he was having fun playing with our new colored ball point pens drawing pictures, lines, and making up his own dot to dot so I just let him be. The older two boys, however, had this fun Thanksgiving Logic Puzzle to work on.  They needed a bit of help, though mostly I just assured them that they were reading the clues right and were on the right track.  In no time at all they figured out all of granny's kids favorite Thanksgiving foods.  Good thing too as they were working with pen today instead of pencil and if they had made any mistakes we wouldn't have been able to erase and start over.  I warned them before we even started that they had to ma...

 We were making coffee filter turkeys today. The boys used brushes, watercolors and coffee filters to make the turkeys' colorful plumage feathers. We used liquid watercolors to completely color in a coffee filter then we set them aside to dry. Once the coffee filters dried we glued construction paper bodies and wings onto the front, added some cute googlie eyes, yellow paper beaks, red waddles, and long accordion folded legs.  Then we had a wonderful collection of birds. I love how they look hanging in the windows.

Once everyone finished their school work for the day we worked on making some yummy Thanksgiving treats. We always have lots of pies and my kids are not big fans of pie.  They like cookies so when I saw these adorable pilgrim hat and acorn cookies on Pinterest that only required a bit of assembly I thought they were perfect. Hard at work... so serious!  We started by unwrapping lots of Hershey Kisses and Reece's Peanut butter Cup Miniatures. While the boys were unwrapping I prepared three pastry bags of frosting (though you could use a sandwich bag with the corner cut off or even a knife with the frosting).  Once they were ready I quickly demonstrated how to make one of the Pilgrim hats. We took a fudge stripe cookie and a peanut butter cup and "glued" the peanut butter cup onto the backside of the fudge stripe cookie using  a dot or two of frosting.  They were easy and adorable and all the boys had fun making them. Pilgrim hat cookies ...

Laid up with a bum foot and a horrible night of sleep I spent the day on the couch.... well, for the most part anyway. I think it's just about impossible to spend the whole day on the couch when you're home with three boys by yourself. All three boys asked if they could build another fort in the middle of the living room.  I agreed and they soon set to work dragging in kitchen chairs, blankets galore, and clothespins.  They worked together and had a wonderful fort set up in no time.  They soon applied lots of problem solving skills when the fort caved in or the blankets couldn't stretch far enough apart.  They figured out how to make the most of the space inside the fort and keep all the blankets in place. They brought down most of their stuffed animals, lots of pillows and blankets to put in the fort and started playing.  It wasn't long before they asked to play with the Kindle, DS's and watch TV/Movies.  I said sure.  Pretty much anything ...

 Ian asked if he could do one of the art projects he picked out on Pinterest the other day.  I had planned to do a project today anyway and was thrilled that he was so interested. He ended up picking the same project I was thinking about doing today! We painted birch trees. We followed the directions of the Doodle All Day website  using liquid watercolors and the sunsets were quite vibrant. I love how they came out! First we put masking tape where we wanted our trees to be and then we drizzled rubber cement where we wanted some wasps of white in the sky.  Once the rubber cement was dry we used the liquid watercolors to add in our green grass and our colorful sunsets. While the watercolors were still wet we sprinkled salt on them for a fun speckled look. Once our backgrounds were dry we rubbed the salt and rubber cement off. Then we used a plate to spread some black tempera paint on and then used an old credit card to practice scraping on the ...

We went on a field trip today to the Mashentucket Pequot Museum .  I have never been there, nor had any of my kids and I thought it was the perfect field trip to take right before Thanksgiving. Our trip was made even better since my sister and her boys joined us and I had a Groupon that saved us all money.  We learned SO much! We got to learn about the ice age, glacier, and extinct animals.  We saw the tools native American's used, food they ate, replicas of their houses and villages.  It was amazing!  We had such a great time.  The museum has wonderful interactive TV's that drew the kids in.  There were movies to watch. Walking through the village they give you what look like old flip cell phones and you can listen to stories about the village, the people in it and the jobs they do. My boys were dreading this field trip and they had such a good time.  I love when we can make history lessons really come alive-- they're so much more memorabl...