Happy May! Let's Catch Up on April

I used to blog on Friday mornings, but I haven't been home the past few.  So once again, I've gone longer between posts than I intended to.  

My Easter/spring bulletin board.  Students made the butterflies, using watercolor on coffee filters.  

Gotta take pictures of the bunny on Easter, right.  

I feel like it's been a while since I showed Tuzi.  

I was requesting books about Native Americans, in preparation for a discussion of the original inhabitants of the lands we'll be passing through on our summer trip.  The NA craft book caught my eye and I added it to the batch with an evil smile.  I'm not sure why they hate it so much, but I really feel like it's good problem solving practice for the girls.  Pictured above is Hannah's twig horse (deer?) that refused to stand on it's own.  

And here's Katie's project.

It reminds me a little of a Swedish Dala horse.  It's fascinating to me that cultures around the world have similar crafts.  Someone shared Italian papercutting on Facebook recently, and I was reminded of papercutting in both China and Mexico.  

I was not delighted to place this order.  Uniform buying with 8 weeks of school left is not my favorite.  But Katie had either lost, destroyed, stained, or outgrown most of her unis.  The way things usually work, if she managed to keep these nice to the end of the year (the tan skirt is already stained) she'd have a huge growth spurt over the summer and not be able to wear them next school year anyway.  :sigh:  

Tried something new!  I made white bean/chicken chili, and we liked it.  Yeah for a new menu item in our boring repertoire.  

I know I missed pictures of at least 2 library piles.  

We had an anniversary.  

Josiah was going for "bird nest" cupcakes, which we've made with jelly beans in the past (and green coconut).  But the only jelly beans I found were red, so they turned out looking more like holly/Christmas cupcakes.  

The weather has been beautiful, so I took Grumman out for a stalk in the back yard.  

I don't think I have a shot of the finished product, but we made hermit crabs in ocean scenes (it was a 2 week project), and one of my first graders called his "Scrachy" for some reason, which tickled my funny bone.  

Processing some new books for the library.

At some point we'll have a biography of every president.  That day is not today.  Tomorrow's not looking good, either.  

I was struck by the size difference between Fiona (left) and Grumman (right).  He's so much taller and longer than she is, yet they're the same weight.  

I picked up some new snapdragons to fill in the hole between the middle yellow section and the right yellow section.  There's some babies growing there from seed, too, so it should fill in a bit soon.  I'm concerned we're going to lose the plant on the right this year, though.  They last about 3-4 years here, which is great, but they've started to look withered and dry, and they're not bouncing back.  

We read dinosaur poems for poetry month so I wore my dino skirt.  

Paul had Katie pull some weeds as a consequence for an issue at school.  

I took Tuzi's cage outside to give it a good cleaning, and Grumman was so offended that I was outside, and the bunny was outside, and he was stuck in the house.  

Fiona availed herself of the opportunity to check out the bunny cage, since the lid was open.  

Fortunately, Tuzi was still outside in the playpen when she did that.  

Not to be outdone, Grumman had to weird out over the playpen box.  

This is where I'm going to split the post so it doesn't end up being a mile long.  More pictures tomorrow.