Basketball Repair

The afterschool program where I work has a playground area that's basically a big parking lot. It has no swanky, expensive playground equipment. So when the basketball goals are broken and need repair, it's a sad day. Those boys LOVE to play basketball. We have over 130 kids in our program, so those two goals get a lot of use.
Adam volunteered to try to fix the situation. We had one stationary goal without a rim (needed to be welded back on) and a broken-out backboard.

We had another mobile goal (with the heavy plastic base), but it's backboard frame was rusted, mangled, and beyond use:

So Adam took the base of the mobile goal,

And he attached the pole and backboard from the stationary goal to it, after putting on a "new" wooden backboard.

Then he attacked the rim from the mobile goal to that backboard.

He worked so hard for most of the day with rather indifferent materials, so that the kids could have something to play ball on.

Most days, I'm enjoying my job these days and am thankful for a chance to participate in these kids' lives. I'm very grateful to have a supportive husband who even volunteers his labor, tools, and time to help ... plus, he has dinner ready for me every evening when I come home from work. Isn't that nice?

Two More Craft Activities for 6th Graders

Sparkly painted pine cones.

You need lots of craft/tempera paint.

And some thin wire, or some other means of making a loop or hook on the bottom of the pine cones.

And, of course, lots and lots of pine cones! These were donated by a staff member at work. She was glad to be rid of them. Many still had stems attached, and we wound the wires around these. It's useful to hold the cones by their wires, and later that's how you hang them as well.

I had some small boxes already destined for recycling. Students put a piece of stiff craft paper in the bottom of the box, squirted some paint colors in, and them shook the pine cone gently in there, getting paint all over it.

Next I had some small plastic bins with sparkly craft sand, and they rolled the paint-wet cones in the sand for a little sheen.

The last step is to tip a few of the cone points with glitter glue. That gives a nice effect.
This project was pure chaos with 18 6th graders, I'll admit, and they used up lots of paint and almost all the glitter glue. That's 6th graders! That was our craft before Thanksgiving.

This next project we did this past week. I wanted to teach some interested students (about 8 of them) how to do a wax resist. Basically, wax resist is applying wax to paper before painting, so the paint soaks in everywhere except where the wax is, leaving it white. I tried using waxed paper (no luck), and crayons (no luck) to get the wax on the paper. What worked best was a candle, for goodness sakes!
This is generally what I was hoping to accomplish with the students: wax underneath, star stickers applied, paint wash, sprinkling of salt, remove stars, a little glitter glue. I wrote "starry" with the candle first.

The only old candle in my house, which seems quite hard to believe!

I bought supplies because the leftovers we had at work we woefully inadequate to this task.
Glitter:

Watercolor paper (essential!), wide brushes, and glitter:

Yet more glitter glue:

Lots of craft paint:

I impressed on the kids that the paint had to be quite watery to achieve the washed look, but they kept wanting to paint with it.

These are some of their best. You can see that the wax resist method did not work -- the only reason you can read their words is because they used a gray crayon. The candle-written words did not show.

 But they had a great time, and the star-removal part worked well.

 And honestly, glitter makes everything good.

Salt Watercolor Art

I've been meaning to share an art project I did with my 6th graders a few weeks ago. I found it at this website. I needed plenty of school glue and lots of salt.

And some good stiff paper -- paper that will remain straight and firm if you hold it only at one corner.

The students wrote on the paper with the glue. They wrote their own names, little messages, a friend's name, a parent's name. It was sweet.
Then they carefully brought the paper to the salt table. There, we liberally shook salt onto the glue until it was well covered. Then we firmly tapped the residual salt away, into a big bin.

At the next table they sat and dabbed liquidy watercolor paints onto the salt. This is the fun part. I looked for liquid watercolor paints, but they were hard to find. So I used tempera paints with water added, and this worked just fine too. We had six colors.

I did my love's name, of course.

Even the boys who initially moaned, "Ugh! We have to do a stupid art project?" later did multiple pages because they enjoyed it so much. Success! With sixth grade boys!!
One student who had a momentary spelling lapse, did this one:

The instant I saw it, I asked if she wanted it. (She didn't.) So I asked if I could keep it. Because something weird and inexplicable appealed to me about this simple message. Keep Clam. Keep tight. Keep yourself contained. Keep happy-as-a-clam. Something a little seaside about that one. "Keep Clam and Love." Not sure why I liked it SO much, but I did!

Small Wonders

I love autumn trees and their dying leaves. I found this one at the church last week. A pear leaf, I believe.

So many colors in there! After it sat on my dining room table for several days, it turned solid brown.

And speaking of colorful, last Friday we decorated cookies in our class at the afterschool program.

Those 6th graders thoroughly enjoyed piling icing, candy, marshmallows and sprinkles on big, flat sugar cookies.

I made that bottom one, in the photo above.

Most of them made one for their moms, which was sweet. And they made them for teachers and siblings. How simple it can be to make others happy! The dough was a slice-and-bake dough from WalMart. I baked them at home. The decorations were easy and bright. How happy they were making them and giving them. If you want a great activity for some kids (of any age ...), here it is. Bake them ahead of time; that's the boring part. Set it all out on a table and let them do what they want. This is another activity we'll do again this year.

Homemade Play-Dough

I feel like such an elementary teacher (which I've never been, except at home), but here's yet another typical teacher post about a good craft product. A teacher at work shared her recipe for homemade play-dough. I made it, and the kids love it. It turns out pale.

Here's the recipe:

The mixture, which I made in my stand mixer, is nearly a liquid, very gloopy. I recommend putting the food coloring in while it's liquid before you cook it.
I recommend cooking it in a skillet on the stove top on low heat. It thickens quickly; stir it faithfully.
My friend said to use icing color, and it worked well, but it's hard to find in lots of colors (at least at our WalMart).

We already had red at home. I bought green and brown as well.

Very nice texture.
The icing color is a sticky paste. The second time I made this play-dough, I used regular liquid food coloring in the plastic bottles, and it worked very well too. That gave me yellow and blue too.

I put the balls in ziplocs. The kids have been so happy to play with it. I gave them plastic knives and some other pressing tools. They loved making fake food. They even "cooked" for me :)

Spin Art

What happens when you mix paper plates, 15-year-old tempera paints, and a salad spinner?

Oh, and about ten kids ...? Well, the paint bottles were a bit worse for the wear when we finished.

And I don't think my salad spinner will ever be the same. It did wash up nicely, but it was mighty tired of spinning.
Here's some of the art the kids made. Glop lots of paint in the middle of the plate, put it in the spinner, and spin away ...

Some added sparkly craft sand to their plates. You can punch a hole in the edge, put a ribbon through, and hang them up too.

You can visit the website where I found this idea -- here.

This was a very fun, if messy, activity, but tempera paints clean up very well. They loved it.

How the Week Is Going

Right now? It's gully-washing outside. So much rain. This makes us nervous because our contractor repaired the bad spots in the ceiling at the farmhouse, but we don't think he's repaired the roof yet. Seems a backwards way to do things, unless he put some buckets in the attic, which he may have done. If the roofer he chose didn't show up, he said he'd do it himself. Maybe he did and we didn't notice? Hmm. Getting a house worked on is nervous business.

It's Thursday. We must, must, must be out of this house by Monday evening, and somehow -- how? -- be "living" in the farmhouse by then. It seems nearly impossible. I shifted around all the stuff (boxes, bags, junk, etc.) in the storage building so that Anna's bed can fit in there, so she'll have a clean, private place to sleep. We'll move the futon from the front bedroom to the office for Julia, and vacuum/dust the office for her. It has a thin layer of drywall dust on everything. Then only Adam and I need a place to sleep. I think we'll throw our mattress on the floor in the front bedroom. It's rather frightful in there -- more drywall dust from the sheetrock work in the living and dining rooms. The contractor said he would do a good clean-up. Here's hoping so! We told him our deadline. I hope he understands that starting Tuesday morning, his worksite will have a family of four with two dogs, living in it.

My new job is going okay. Monday was average. Tuesday was good. Yesterday was a bit stressful. It helps that I've worked with middle schoolers before for years, and worked with troubled kids. In a group of 20 kids, you're certain to have some who've had bad days (or bad lives), sadness at home, are bullies, are whiners, are struggling academically. It's a juggling act, and managing 6th graders is a bit like herding cats. I expect it to smooth out with time. It is a challenge to find activities for them that they enjoy and are enriching, and to fit it all into the bigger schedule.

Julia had a slightly better week with her math class, thanks mostly to her brother Peter who has been tirelessly Skyping her most evenings, walking her through it. But honestly, that's not a doable situation for him for the whole semester. And she's been doing that at a friend's house where she really enjoys being in the evenings -- a house a bit calmer than ours right now. We have minimal furniture left in the house, no pictures on the walls, hardly any food in the frig -- typical emptying house scenario, but it adds to her stress, which is high. She needs the comfort of home to cope with the coursework, and right now home isn't very comforting.

Adam is managing. He has so many balls to juggle in the air -- hefting furniture, working with the contractor, taking care of a dying congregant and her family, helping drive Julia to New Bern, trying to get his Jaguar running so he can drive it to the farm, comforting me as I start a new job, cooking dinners for us, managing his own stress. It's a little overwhelming right now.

Anna flits in and out. She has only a mattress on her floor, poor thing! She works long hours waiting tables and rests much of the remainder of her time, when she's not helping us tote stuff to the farm. She's been losing weight because she's on her feet so much, they don't feed her at the restaurant, and we have minimal meals here right now, in the middle of our chaos. I'm hoping, so hoping, that things will settle back into a normal routine soon. We are all quite weary with the weight of the constant state of discomfort.

But -- we have much to be thankful for, and I don't want to forget that! I'm working to adjust Julia's class load so she can manage it herself. The farmhouse is coming along. We seem to have moved adequate amounts of furniture thus far. I don't hate my new job - haha! (Some people do find themselves in that situation!) Life is manageable, as long as we don't have to do it like this too much longer. As Julia said last night, she realized at one point that her whole life had somehow changed, and she didn't know exactly how that happened, and she doesn't like it.

I understand. Sometime in early June life started to unravel for us, and we have not found ourselves able to knit it back together into the happy state we had. Too many stressors have occurred simultaneously for all of us, so we can't support each other well, although we try. Have you ever had a time in life that became dark and scary, when the thunderstorms rolled in, the sky became black and gloomy, and you wondered where the sunshine went? August is my least favorite month, and I think this August is my least favorite of all the 52 Augusts I've known.

Okay, enough whining! By this time next week, I hope to tell you that we are living on the farm. Exactly what that will look like, remains to be seen. I hope we're not eating our meals under a film of drywall dust.

First Day!

With great fear and trembling, this afternoon I entered a classroom again (after about five years' absence), this time with sixth graders. This is HeartWorks! My colleague and I have 23 kids on our roster, but today only about 15 came. Here's our classroom:

The building is an old car dealership, so the classroom area is one LARGE space (where they worked on the cars), now separated by partitions. So the space is rather noisy at times.

We had a nice snack, drew some zentangles, listened to a read-aloud of Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (chapter one), talked a bit about setting and characters, played outside, learned a couple of games (rather half-heartedly), and eagerly went home. This was the kids' first day of school (before coming to our program in the afternoon), so they were pretty exhausted. Most days we'll spend time on their homework, but they had none on this their first school day.

It's a hard line to walk -- making the environment enriching and supportive of their academics without making it just three more hours of school, after a long day of school already. We don't want that. But we want far more than babysitting. I feel if I get in something substantial each day that contributes to their education, I've done well. And I'm a big fan  of unstructured play time, which they get for about 30 minutes outside each day.

It's strange to be working again, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. It's odd getting off at 6:00 and home at 6:30. That's late!