Cold Weather Projects

I mentioned in a previous post how cold days are challenging for me because people get cooped up.  Cooped up leads to even more bickering and squabbling than usual.  Add this to the fact that cold days always seem to happen on my teaching days AND on days where Dr. Peds is magically scheduled to work days, which leaves me teaching about half of my students who still want to come to their piano lesson (that makes me happy) and balancing four cooped up kids.   On unexpected cold days when school is cancelled, I have gotten in the habit of having a medium sized list handy of educational and artistic activities for each person.  I tell them they have to choose a certain number of activities to complete in the morning when I’m not teaching.  This really shortens the amount of time when people are wandering aimlessly, looking for things to do, and we mostly have our afternoon routine down to coincide with my teaching schedule and everyone stays a bit more happy and sane.

Here are just a few glimpses of some things that we worked on over the several cold days off from school these past few weeks.  There were so, so many more projects that I didn’t manage to photograph.

YaYa holed up in her bedroom with her sewing machine.  She read a kajillion books about sewing, and created for hours straight.  She made a doll, doll clothes, headbands, mittens, doll pillows, pillow cases, doll sleeping bags, and I’m not even sure what else.  Fabric makes her very happy.  She gifted me with this lovely monster iPod case.  My iPod spends a lot of time sitting near the piano so that I can use it to record students, and they get quite a charge out of its new case.

The Banana has been loving dolphins and painted this lovely picture.  I tried to draw a dolphin.  She looked at me with a disappointed face and told me it looked like a shark.  Her dolphin, however, looks great.

The Banana used the castle building blocks to create a “castle playground.”  

Mr. SP created this rose garden and pineapple tree.

At one point in the afternoon various kid lets were begging for additional screen time.  I was wearing down, and the prospect of non bickering kidlets passively entertained and out of my hair was incredibly irresistible.  However, I did tell them they had to write a story or set of poems first.  This girl set right to work writing a story about a girl named Hannah whose mother throws away all of her jewelry when she’s not looking.  Hmmmm.  I haven’t thrown away any jewelry recently, I don’t think.

This was my favorite creation by The Banana.  I totally stole the idea from somewhere online (if I remembered where, I’d tell you.)  I glued on the goggly eyes and told her to draw any creature she wanted.  I love the stripy guy on the right.  

We learned about the geography of South America and Australia, and we did some fun math activities too, even though I’m not a math person.