Easing Back In

So we have wrapped up out first week back to school and it was a success overall! Yay! As I said before, we started out with half days (so only about two hours a day) to transition everyone from Summer Mode to School Mode.

I already covered our first day in a previous post. On Wednesday we went to the library on post. This is where I have to make a "bad mommy" confession - this was the first time we'd gone to any library in over two years! Eek! To be fair, we have TONS of children's books in the house and are constantly adding new ones to our collection but still...

We got there in time for Story Time...where my kids were the biggest and oldest of the bunch since all the others were in the 2-3 year range but they had a good time and everyone picked out some books.

We continued our "All About Me" project with a page on Favorite Things and Favorite Foods during the rest of the week. Aside from drawing and coloring, they each had to try to write the words as they sounded them out.

Fridays are usually our quiz day (spelling and math) and then fun art projects or music. As we didn't have any spelling words this week - we were left with art mostly. We made Monster Marks (corner bookmarks), which I found here on Pinterest. Lots of cutting and gluing and folding involved but pretty simple and painless. Plus it's easy to offer lots of options to make the monsters full customizable. 

J's is the pink pig monster. I's is the leopard monster. A's is the orange thing that makes me think of Animal from the Muppets. The Purple critter is mine. I helped with some of the cutting and the instruction but they picked out the features and assembled their creatures. 

Fifty Nifty United States

I found this on Pinterest and really wanted something similar for our school room.

Source: theberry.com

So I set out to recreate it...at least somewhat. Managing the overall shape of the United States was easy enough, I printed a line picture from the internet, cut it out and traced the edges. Then I decided to free hand the states inside instead of cutting and tracing each individual state...

As you can see, that didn't work out so well. Particularly New England, which is full of teeny states with weird borders.

I set the map aside and figured I would reevaluate later. I'd seen another map that used scrapbook paper for the various states and thought I might combine the two ideas to finish the project.

Unfortunately, I didn't have scrapbook paper on hand (because I'm more of a digital scrapbooker) but I recalled the sticky sided foam we had from projects last year! In hindsight, scrapbook paper would have been easier because I could cut it with scissors!

By this point, my fingers hurt from using the hobby knife to cut a long the edges but I was over 50% done and not giving up now!

Still needs some finishing touches (like a frame) but I like the end result! And New England doesn't look like a hot mess anymore!

And for fun, a blast from the past (or mine anyway):