Busy Hands

I love to do fun, hands-on projects for school, but it can be tempting to blow them off when you are only doing them for your own family, or when schedules get busy for the older kids. I'm determined that I am not going to neglect the fun things, especially for Gordon this year. I want him to experience all the great hands-on projects I did with Elise and Claire the first time we studied ancient history.

Here we are on the first day of school, doing an archaeological dig right in the middle of our kitchen. We found evidence of a civilization that obviously fought in a lot of wars, given all the helmets and swords and breastplates we unearthed (what can I say? The only Playmobil stuff we own is Knights & Castles!). And no, that is NOT sugar; it's salt. If it WAS sugar, Gordon would have been eating the "dirt!"




The girls also made Egyptian bracelets during our first week. (Another antidote to blowing off projects -- invite your good friend and cousin over to do school-related crafts!)

The girls each filled 50 small safety pins with beads, which I then strung onto stretchy elastic. They were cracking me up, because anytime they started to laugh, the little beads would go flying out of their hands and bounce all over the kitchen. I'll be finding them for years!


Here are Claire and Nicole's bracelets:


And Elise's: