Mom, I need an Egyptian costume TOMORROW!

First of all, I don't sew! I have a really nice sewing machine that my mom bought for me several years ago when I hoped to learn how to sew.... but never got around to learning. This urgent plea from my son last Tuesday made me get out that intimidating machine of mine and I tried my best to sew an Egyptian costume for him using a white sheet. Ivy had to help me - she's had lots of experience with her play sewing machine and she was a big help! After getting the machine threaded (which took over half an hour!), the rest was not too difficult, considering I was totally new at sewing!

Our church had a Family Fall Fest on Saturday for the elementary aged children and their families. Twelve countries were represented in the large gym at church with the youth group dressed in costumes from each of the countries. Children were to visit each of the countries and play a game or activity at each one. Joel represented the country of Egypt and that's why he needed a costume. However, it was needed several days early to be approved first by the youth staff - so I had really short notice! But I think it turned out fine. Here he is with Jaden and you can tell Jaden was having a great time!


Joel didn't want his picture taken, but I really wanted to get a picture of this costume that I worked so hard to make!

Measuring Noah's Ark

Today we finished week 4 in our TOG year 1. Our theme this week was Creation through Noah's ark. What an interesting week! Today, we went to a park with several soccer fields and lots of open space so that we could measure the actual size of the ark. WOW! It was huge! I thought I had a good picture in my mind of how big it was, but it was much larger than I thought.

Picture Joel, Ivy, and I each holding an 18 inch of twine (one cubit). We stood next to each other with our twine strings touching. We put a lid of a rubbermaid container at our starting spot. The person on the end moved to the other end and so we counted all the way to 300 cubits to measure the length of the ark! It took a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time and I know we looked VERY odd and peculiar! We had a small crowd of people watching us from a distance wondering about such weird homeschoolers and what in the world we were doing!

We then put down another lid to mark the corner and measured 50 cubits for the width. By then Jaden about had it with us! "Stop counting!!!" "No more counting please!!!!! I want to go to the playground!!!!!!" This was a very long activity - litterally. It takes a long time to do this and it's a long area to cover! Of course, we could have used another method to measure out 450 feet (300 cubits) by 75 feet (50 cubits) but the point was to do it cubit by cubit. And it made us understand how it would have taken over a hundred years for Noah to build that thing! The total square feet of the 3 floors of the ark would be about four and a half football fields!

In the picture above, maybe you can strain your eyes to see two tiny little specks of red in the distance. Those are actually Joel and Ivy standing at each of the side corners of the "ark". I was standing oposite Joel at the other side of the "ark" when I took the picture.

Salt dough map

Ivy painted her salt dough map today - the colors look different in the picture for some reason. It really was more green! She did a good job showing some different geological features in her map of her imaginary island country! This was our first hands-on project with Tapestry of Grace.

Hands-on projects of the week

Jaden had fun playing with salt dough while Ivy worked on her salt dough map of an imaginary country. She labeled her map with several geological terms that she learned during the week, such as archipelego, arroyo, summit, plateau, fall line, etc. Her map will be painted this week. It's been challenging keeping the cats away from it!

Here is Joel working on his first experiment in his Apologia General Science book.