Eating with chopsticks is fun!

Another LEGO ART class

Mini World: Cabin by a lake

The arts council asked me to teach another LEGO class. This time for 12-18 year olds instead of 5-7 and 8-11. I honestly did my favorite 10 projects last year and think its great for any age, but they requested different more advanced stuff, hoping that something unusual would entice the older kids to sign up.

So instead of basic bricks, I had somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 various LEGO pieces of every imaginable type. The last day I brought a scale and each student got to take home 2 pounds (about 600 pieces) of LEGO, whatever they wanted from the class set. I called it Pick-a-Brick day, that was a big hit.

The projects were much more complex and visually less impressive than the bright basic Lego brick sculptures of last year, but they loved the challenge of building with so many special LEGO elements. One student said the last day, "this is a pricey class but definitely worth it" All the other students agreed. Yay, just what a teacher likes to hear.

Technic Thing-a-ma-jigs


LEGO vignettes




Miniland size 3 1/2 inch figurines:
Ninja



Planets Day: We built Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, the international space station, and Pluto which is not a planet (therefore didn't take many LEGO bricks, heh, heh).




Spaceships and Planes (a LEGO art project back by popular demand):


Youth Arts Festival, Artist Reception

Creative Dance Class

This was such a fun class, she misses it so much now it is over. On the last day the girls dressed up and all the parents came.

Birthday

Happy Birthday J!
He had a great day, we did Arts Festival all day long, had a pizza picnic for lunch, macaroni for dinner, an angry birds cake with edible playdough on it for the treat, and a puppet show in the park (despite the pouring rain. The rain was good, we found AJ's long lost retainer in her jacket pocket.) I let the kids pick their birthday menu, they never tend to pick quinoa and salad, I wonder why?

Family Nativity 2010

We got a Mac in August and I'm just barely starting to learn how to use it. So now I know how to export slideshows.

This was the family Christmas party with Uncle M and his soon to be fiance A. Sorry about the picture where the shepherd attempts to beat up the angel with his walking stick. He got confused, isn't that a different story!?

Gluten Free Poptarts

A few days after DH had to stop eating wheat and dairy, the kids had a Dad's and donuts reading activity at school. He was sad that he wouldn't be able to have milk and donuts with the kids. I sent a lunchbox with homemade poptarts (gluten free) instead. They were almost good. I made my own jam filling since we don't normally have jam at our house. Then I used a gluten free flour mix and a gf pie-crust recipe. I didn't actually use any sugar in the jam or pastry, just xylitol, but it was waaaaay too sweet. I'd do it again using 1/4 the sweetener or none in the pastry.

Anyway they all got eaten even if they were a bit too rich. By the way, pastry dough without gluten in it is way easier to roll out, heh, heh.

Look at my book club Mom!

I go to book club once a month and my kids have always had funny ideas about what a book club actually is or does. This was my favorite yet. Little AP said "Look at MY book club mom!" Yep I can just imagine all the moms getting together and building stuff out of books. Now that really would be fun!