Edublog Awards

One of my other websites, My Audio School, has been nominated for Best Educational Use of Audio in the Edublog awards! Voting ends TONIGHT, December 16th. If you haven't voted yet, please take a second to click the badge and cast a vote for My Audio School!

Melting Snowman

When I saw this adorable Melted Snowman project on The Devine Home, I knew this would be perfect for our Georgia home.  My four year old and I had lots of fun making it! 

First, pour a couple cups of sugar onto a domed cake platter.  Then pick out 5 black and 1 orange button for the eyes, nose and mouth.  Add twigs for arms, and pop on the dome.  For a hat, we used an old Christmas tree ornament from Texas.  A camouflage scarf tied around the cake stand base completes the look!

I purchased some snowy window clings for this project, as you see in the original (at the link above), but of course I lost them (and the matching buttons!) somewhere in our Christmas shuffle.  We were able to find enough buttons in our button box, but the window clings will have to wait for another day.  Maybe when I start wrapping gifts I'll stumble across them!

Home-Spun Holiday Traditions

This post is part of the Home-Spun Holidays blog carnival, which is being held at Mentoring Moments for Christian Women.  The theme of the carnival is to share the simple, inexpensive things you do at home to make the Christmas season memorable.  On my Counter-cultural Mom blog, I've shared some of the ways we celebrate Christ's birth during this season. This post is about some of the things we do just for fun.

There are lots of things we do for fun during the holiday season right here at home.  I do a lot of my shopping online, and once the holiday packages start arriving, the kids enjoy making box robots.  They have lots of fun constructing the robots and then playing with each other in their new costumes.

Every year my husband sets up a little Christmas village and a train around the base of the tree. We all love to turn the lights out and light up the tree and the village, and watch the train chug around the track. It's so relaxing and fun. The boys can often be found sitting by the tree watching the train. This is one of our favorite traditions.

Our boys love to drag their bedding out by the Christmas tree and have a "sleepover" together.  They put Christmas music on and fall asleep to the sounds of the season and the twinkling of the tree lights.  I sneak in once they are asleep and turn off the music and the lights.  I snapped this picture last weekend.

It seems almost too silly to mention, but one of the kid's favorite things is to hide army men in the Christmas tree!  They love to pretend these army men are spying on me during the Christmas season, and they take it on as a challenge to hide them so well that I can't find them.  When I pull the tree out every year I find army men that have spent the winter in the tree, never having been found.  The boys love that, because it means they did their job right.

Making Gingerbread houses is another beloved tradition. I'll be writing more about that later this month.

My younger boys still enjoy setting up the Nativity set. We have 4 different sets and two stables, and I put them all out at once. When I am reading aloud to them, they like to play with the little figures and set up the scene.

What do you do to celebrate the Christmas season?  If you blog about it, please link your post to the Mentoring Moments blog carnival.  It will run from December 6-12th.

Art: Studying the Masters

Pieter Bruegel's painting The Land of Cockaigne depicts a legendary place, where food and drink could be found in abundance.

As we read about an artist, I like to have the children work on a project which helps them gain some insight into his work. Often they do a work of art using the style or technique of the artist we are studying, such as a watercolor painting or a plaster of paris fresco.  Sometimes, though, I like them to do a work of art based on the subject of a chosen painting.  We did this recently with Pieter Bruegel's painting The Land of Cockaigne.

First we read the beautiful book The Fantastic Journey of Pieter Bruegel.



This book is written like a diary account, imagining what may have happened on Bruegel's real-life two year journey through France and Italy during the 16th century.


We gathered a little more information about this particular painting in the book What Makes a Bruegel a Bruegel? before the boys began their own drawing of "The Land of Cockaigne".

They enjoyed imagining what foods they would place in their own legendary worlds, where cotton candy clouds rained M & Ms and slices of pizza grew up out of the ground. When they were done drawing, they labeled their work "The Land of Cockaigne".  This fun activity is a simple way to help children remember an artist and one of their famous works of art.

Twelve Days of Christmas 2009

December brings big changes to our schedule. And it is finally here! I'm so excited.

We'll be working hard to finish up any outstanding work from this semester so that we can phase in our favorite Christmas-related projects. This year, instead of making our traditional Gingerbread Houses we plan to do Gingerbread Castles (we are studying the Middle Ages, after all!) Copywork will take on a Christmas theme. I'm looking forward to baking, decorating and reading by the fire.  Advent starts in full swing tonight, too.

Plans for this Christmas season have been in the works around here since October! That's when work began on the annual Mentoring Moments 12 Days of Christmas articles. I put this year's content together, so I got a sneak peak at everything our writers submitted.  It is going to be a wonderful series, so I encourage you to head over there and subscribe so you don't miss a thing!  Christmas party ideas, thoughtful devotions, crafts for kids, recipes, decorating tips and much more round out this series.  We'll be posting several new articles daily for the first 12 days, and one more article daily for the rest of the month.

Today's content includes my article about holding a Gingerbread House party for kids, a yummy punch recipe,  a wonderful idea for creating a Goody Basket for each day's Christmas-related activities courtesy of Brenda (from The Tie that Binds and Joyful Holidays) and my devotional thoughts about finding spiritual refreshment during this hectic season.

I hope you'll check it out!  I also wanted to give a heads up to you fellow bloggers!  Mentoring Moments will be hosting a blog carnival which begins December 6th, titled Homespun Holiday Traditions.  To participate, please write a post on your blog this week about something simple and inexpensive you do at home to make the season special.  Head on over to Mentoring Moments on the 6th and add your post URL to the MckLinky at the bottom of the post.