My Domestic Train Wreck: 2014

Igloos and palm trees were on the menu for us the past two weeks for school. Kai wrapped up her MBTP unit for The Cay and The Living Seas, and Koa learned all about The Arctic and the Inuit culture while "rowing" the book The Very First Last Time.

I don't know if you're like me, but I always start off a new unit with schemes of grandeur. You know, the schemes that are swirling around with the dust of baby unicorns. Well, this unit started off the same way. I decided that Koa and me were going to tackle the infamous.......sugar cube igloo. It looks easy enough, right? Well let me tell you, and consider this a warning, it's not as easy as you think. Building a structure made out of tiny little cubes of refined sugar will test your patience, architectural skills, and your will to live. No joke. I strongly suggest having a glass of wine handy, or a bottle of vodka, or a picture of Boris Kodjoe...you know.....whatever takes you to your "safe place"......you're going to need it to lower that blood pressure. This project evoked a level of OCD I never knew I had. There is a fine line between letting your child express his creativity and make mistakes, but this project wasn't one of them. I found myself in the late hours of the night, undoing everything that he had done to redo it so that it wouldn't topple over in the middle of the night. Here's a fun fact, kids. It takes the average Inuit hunter 30 minutes to make an igloo made of snow and ice. It takes a 7 year old and his incapable mother one week to make one out of sugar. Just take a moment to think about that.

I used a few different directions from varies websites, but they were all a flop so I'm not going to link them up. I will say that the this recipe for royal icing was awesome and definitely did the trick. I cheated towards to end with hot glue but after a week I was a broken women. What can I say.

Have you ever seen a flat roofed igloo.........BAM!!!!!!! There you go. Not really your traditional igloo but it's a great place to hold a Transformers council meeting, launchpad for a lego rocket, or just hold a cup of coffee. Versatility.

Koa watched this great video about Inukshuks, and why they are so important to the Inuit people. He also made a few of his own. :)

He made his own soap carvings. This is CLEARLY a walrus floating on a piece of ice.

He also learned about traditional Inuit throat singing. We found several videos on Youtube with examples. They were very different than anything we had seen before, but it was awesome showing Koa a different culture and what they found beautiful. You can see the videos here and here. I'm not going to lie, I maybe considered flexing my throat singing skills at random people in Walmart.

The BBC has a great documentary that we found, A Boy Among Polar Bears, and Koa really enjoyed watching them build an igloo. Theirs couldn't balance a coffee cup. Just saying.

The illustrations in The Very First Last Time are beautiful. We took the art concept of pointillism from the book, and made our own Valentines art with a project from Deep Space Sparkle. This picture was pre-Krakken attack. AKA.....Jax decided to add to it while we were letting it dry.

We finished up the unit and made Tyler Florence's recipe of Steamed Mussels with Leaks, Garlic, and White Wine. We were just happy we didn't have to find our mussels like they did in The Very First Last Time. Koa gave them a thumbs up!

All in all, it was a great unit!!!! Koa even asked if he could learn about all the animals that lived in the arctic. Other then Koa utilizing his new vocab words, and threatening to throw Jax out into the TUNDRA, we had a lot of fun. :)

Here are some other books we tied into out studies.

We are doing some experimenting with Kai's MBTP units, and are going to attempt to scrapbook her final projects. I'm hoping it will work and we can keep all her work in a nice, tidy scrapbook. We shall see!

She was suppose to make a monument to Timothy, so we decided on a mosaic wall made out of foam shapes that we put on a 12 x 12 piece of scrapbook paper.

I think she did a beautiful job! When she finishes her project pages for science I will share those as well.

Well, there you have it. Igloos and palm trees, or palm trees and igloos.

This song was playing in my head all week. Appropriate? Nope. Annoying? Definitely. But what WAS appropriate was how much fun Koa had doing his Five in a Row study with the book Night of the Moonjellies.

This was our first time "rowing" this book and it was awesome! homeschoolshare is an amazing resource for lapbooks, and even though we do more of a scrapbook style than a lapbook, it still is a great place to find printables.

Because the story takes place in Connecticut, Koa learned where in the U.S. it's located. He also learned a little bit about New England. His only complaint about New England.......the Patriots, but can you really blame him?

Koa is doing great with his print and is working really hard on his letter size, spacing, and how neat his letters are.

This was a fun art project we found at Deep Space Sparkle.

We printed the jellyfish lapbook from Homeschoolshare and made these pages for our FIAR scrapbook.

We even made our own jellyfish in a bottle!!!

Is he wearing puppy pajamas you ask? Affirmative. ;) You can find the instructions for this project here.

And what better way to round out our Night of the Moonjellies study then to stuff our faces by making our very own Mar-Gra's Restaurant!!! Koa wanted to make his own 50's diner, so he decided on burgers, tator tots, and milkshakes. YUM. We put on some oldies, fired up the grill, and let the GOOD TIMES ROLL.