The Combs Krewe

Today the boys each made a pilgrim couple out of toilet paper rolls. I'm not sure the pilgrims clothes are approved colors especially Ryland's pilgrim ladies blue hair! Tomorrow we will be talking about Squanto and making some Native American crafts.

This week instead of our regularly scheduled schooling the middles (namely Jathan and Ryland) and I are studying about Thanksgiving. Jathan and I have already been reading a great historical fiction series about the Pilgrims called The American Adventure. Book one tells about life in England and Holland as well as the treacherous journey to America. Book two is centered around the experiences of the two main characters, siblings John and Sarah, in their new home, Plymouth.  Today we used the Abeka book Thanksgiving flash-a-cards to talk about how the Thanksgiving story began focusing on the Mayflower. After reading we got crafty! I had taken an empty orange juice container and cut off one side. Jathan cut strips of brown construction paper then glued the "boards" into place on his ship.  Later we cut sails from white construction paper and hole punched them at the tops and bottoms. We slid them onto a dowel rod and secured it to the inside of the boat using a piece of clay. T...

I have signed up to participate in the 2012 Holiday Market at NOBTS and am so excited! Today I did a practice run setting things up since I have a *few* things and wanted to make sure they'd fit nicely on the table there. Want a sneak peak of what I will be selling tomorrow night? 5 different types of items on that table were made from things you probably would have thrown away! I wanted to do this craft show because it's (hopefully) our last year here and this event has always been fun to attend. I also LOVE crafting! Oh and because I love a good bargain, I priced everything as low as possible, starting at just a quarter! In fact, there are 12 different types of items $5 or under. So, please stop by the HSC tomorrow night at 6 p.m., eat some Chick-fil-a, and visit my table. See you there!

Over Fall Break we took a little hiatus from our usual school work and studied the arts Halloween style. The little kids each had a monster face a day to design. First we did jack-o-lantern mosaics.    Next they painted Frankenstein's monster and used buttons, stickers, and yarn to make him a face.    The boys painted their witches hat and face then glued on eyes, noses, and mouths cut from magazines (also a very fun thing to do on real pumpkins!). Very Picasso, don't you think? For Dracula, they went freestyle and drew on faces with crayons. The little kids worked on learning a poem together. We chose, "Five Little Pumpkins." To help we did a craft to go along with the poem. First we gathered a few acorn and painted them orange. I made a gate out of craft sticks. When the orange paint was dry we drew Jack-O-Lantern faces on the acorns. Then we used our gate and acorns to act out the poem as we said it. Here Jathan is being the wind and th...

One of my Pinterest boards in entitled "Sew Crafty." This week I actually got around to making a few things from that board as well as my second ever pattern project. The boys got new superhero capes made from men's t-shirts that I got from the SWAP shop. Super duper easy and cute even if you leave them un-embellished. Of course, you could always applique their favorite superhero symbol on the back. This was my pattern project...a new skirt for me! The pattern was $1 from Walmart and I'd gotten the fabric for free so this was a really great, frugal project. I was even happier that it came out well because this skirt has POCKETS which is an awesome thing in case you didn't know. I had a good bit of fabric left over so I decided last minute to make Piper a little pillowcase dress to match Mommy's skirt. Didn't we look cute Sunday morning? = ) Piper got to wear her new dress on her very first day in the big girl class at church! ...

I like to go all out for every holiday so I planned some fun for Cinco de Mayo. First we all watched an educational video about the Mexican holiday. You know the one--from the 80s. The same one we watched on the TV that had to be rolled into the classroom. Ha ha. It actually wasn't half bad! Then we made some paper mache maracas! Here's how we made them. First we made our paste out of flour and water. Jathan stirred. Then Ryland and I tore newspaper into small pieces and Piper threw every piece within her reach onto the floor. When our newspaper and paste was ready, we used a funnel to put beans into water balloons. This step later proved to be useless so don't do this step! Next we spilled half our bag of beans but Ryland thought it was great fun to pick them up and put them in a bowl so it all worked out just fine. = ) I blew up the water balloons and tied them off. Then I folded a piece of paper into a handle shape and used masking t...