Grade 5/6 totem poles

These are my favorite kinds of assignments - ones with loose guidelines, and tons of creative freedom. I wanted my students to explore mixing mediums, using a wash of a solid color of watercolor (in this case, brown) and then using pencil crayons to add detail, dimension and visual interest. I went with a totem pole theme, because in grade six, we are studying First Nations peoples. However, I encouraged them to stray away from typical totem poles, instead making totem poles based on things they loved - animals, TV shows, monsters, whatever inspired them. Some found reference drawings online, and others worked completely from their head. I adore them!!

3-D Mother's Day Letters (filled with flowers!)

I've been wanting to post this since Friday but waited just in case I have any moms from my class reading! For mother's day, my students made 3-D letters which they filled with dollar store flowers (a project I adapted from here.) Using the first letter of their mom's name, students made their 3D letter (using card stock and lots of tape!) Then, they filled them in with wet floral foam.

The last step was to fill them with flowers!

Beautiful, right? I made one for my mother in law, and one for myself as well! They'd look super cute hanging in the middle of a frame wall.

Hope everyone had a great mother's day!

What you can make with 2,000 sewing pins and a lot of patience

This is a project I did a few months ago. The only reason I haven't shared it yet is because its so difficult to photograph! All of the little pins cast shadows when I take the pictures, so I'll never be able to get a totally accurate-to-real-life photo. But at any rate - here's what you can make if you too have thousands of sewing pins and a lot of patience!

Here's a simple breakdown of the process - pretty self explanatory. I pinned the letters onto a foamy poster board, which I painted first using acrylic paint. Then, I printed out my lettering and cut it out, the pinned all around it.

Very time consuming, but easy to do in front of a TV. All in all, it took me probably about 10-12 hours to complete. It's crazy how much patience I can have for certain projects, while having so little patience for other things!

I should mention that I saw the idea for this online about a year ago, and can't locate the original.. it was executed differently and had different text, but was the same basic idea. If you have seen it, feel free to link me to it so I can source it!

Grade 1/2 portraits

These are some adorable portraits that I did with grades 1/2, to give to their mothers for mother's day. Portrait drawing is such a good activity for kids of any age. Kids in grade 1/2 reeealllly need all of the direction possible, as it's often one of the first times they've drawn a portrait of themselves. the only thing I'll change next time is to explicitly show them how to make their portraits smile!

Once they had finished their portraits, they cut them out and glued them onto scrapbook paper. Kids with extra time cut out paper hearts and decorations for their portraits.

I love how these turned out - I think they're absolutely beautiful, and really hope the moms love them!

Egpytian glue portraits

Sorry for the absence! I've been sick for the better part of the past week, and with that came a pounding headache and light sensitivity. The last thing I wanted to do was spend time editing photos for my blog! I have so many projects to get to, though.

Here's a fun project I did with my grade 5's.They are currently studying ancient Egypt, and I wanted to do a portrait study with them.

Students used a computer period to do a study of ancient Egyptian profile portraits. They sketched out an idea that they were happy with, and then we did a guided draw of the facial details once we were back in class.

Once students had finished their drawing (in pencil), they used glue to outline their drawings. The next day, they used chalk pastels to fill them in. The finishing touch was a few jewels, which they glued on as accessories. They're beautiful!!

The big kitchen reveal - Our $2300 entire kitchen renovation!

I am so, so excited to share with everyone our kitchen reveal!I have been posting for weeks about the little updates that we have been doing since we moved in, but we are now finally at the point where everything in the kitchen is finished (for the most part - there will always be little updates!)

I'll start with a few before and afters, as I love to see the difference! My favorite parts - the floors, and the white cabinets (previously cream and black..ugh!)

This is my favorite view in the whole room,  the view I get every time I walk into the kitchen from the main hallway. It's where I see the most of my floors, plus our beloved picnic dining table (passed down to me by my parents - my dad even had it shipped here from cross country from Edmonton!)
 

You also get a great view of the light fixture Joel made using reclaimed wood and mason jars.

 

Isn't that little ladder cute? My neighbor was throwing it out last week and I grabbed it! I want to find something to put on top of it, but can't decide what, yet.

Here's a better view of the floors. I still can't get over them! I'm so relieved that Joel loves them as much as he does, because I sort of dumped the idea of doing herringbone floors on him, and they ended up being a LOT of work.

Here's what we see when entering the kitchen from the living room. This is around where the picnic table is:

Here's the floating shelves that we made. They've held up really well so far, and are so much more convenient than closed shelves!

 And finally, one more shot of the sink area.  The apron front sink has been one of the best changes that we've made in the kitchen. It's huge and lovely and it cleans up so easily. 

I am so happy to be finished our kitchen. This was a long project. We worked for months on almost all aspects of our kitchen, including:

• building wood counters from doors ($100)
• installing an apron front sink ($250 on kijiji)
• changing our cabinet orientation (free!)
• painting the cabinets ($150)
• installing new hardware ($70)
• building floating shelves (sponsored by Lowe's)
• ripping up our ceramic floors (free, but annoying!)
• installing hexagonal backsplash (about $150 including tiles, grout, and tile nipper tool)
• installing herringbone hardwood floors part 1, part 2, part 3 coming soon! ($750 for the flooring from Seaway Cabinets and Flooring, plus another $400 or so in equipment rental, stain, verathane, and other random expenses, for a total of $1150)

and many other things that never even made the blog (painting all of the baseboards, painting the door frame, installing potlights, buying a new faucet, etc.), the expenses of which totaled about $400.

I'm really proud of us for doing this all for $2300. With the amount of things we want to do in our house, it just isn't reasonable for us to spend a lot of money on renos. Doing our kitchen so cheaply meant we had to work slowly, using what we had, or waiting for sales (or kijiji deals.) Things like buying flooring took us weeks, as we scoured for deals and worked out every possible way for them to be the least expensive possible. But in the end, the patience was so worth it!


And now, we are on to the next projects! Joel's busy working on a huge, beautiful new lighting project for our TV room. He came up with this one all by himself, and I am so excited to see it finished! I'll make sure to post pictures when he's done.

Have a great week!