MFW-ECC - Week 27/28 - Japan, painting, origami, and kimonos

Our Week in Review

These past 2 weeks have been super busy. This whole month has been super busy :-{  I'm hoping, with basketball ending, things will start to slow back down a bit.

Art/Music

The kids had a lot of fun making origami animals...or should I say mom had a lot of fun. I mean, they helped (at first) with the simple ones, but the more intricate designs they picked out the more I found myself being the one to do all the folding. 

Sorry, no pics. We were at Granny's the day we made these and I forgot my camera. Anyway, we made a tulip w/stem, a penguin, a dog, a cat, a sitting wolf, and a few more I am having trouble remembering.


We ended the Japan study by painting our very own cherry blossoms and plum trees using a technique in which you blow paint around through a straw. It was a very simple, easy, and fun way to paint trees. Here is another blog with some awesome pictures about this technique. 

We used a small cup for our sun outline.

When you paint around the cup, it creates a beautiful backdrop for your tree.

After the blue dried, we used watered down black to "blow paint" our trees

Once that dried, we added in the purple plum blossoms and pink cherry blossoms.

The kids said theirs looked more like coral reef, but they still had a lot of fun :)

Here is my and A's attempts at making kimonos for our Japanese ladies.

Aleeya thought hers needed spicing up a bit, hence the animal print flannel coat to go along with the kimono. And yes, there is a lady underneath. The scarf is wrapped around her head.

This blog has some more great examples. You can print your own free templates for this activity here.

Science

Science was fun. We learned about fish, beaches, shorelines, oceans, and estuaries. Not really anything in the way of experiments though :(  The kids enjoyed looking up some strange creatures on the internet found in the deepest parts of the ocean though. Some of those things are just freaky!

Geography

We ended the "trip to Japan" by having dinner at a local Japanese restaurant.

Just checkin' to see if it was too hot ;) 

I'm gonna have to look up the recipe :) The onion soup was quite tasty! 

Jase wanted the cooked shrimp tempura rolls. He liked the 1st one, but had his fill after that.  He helped his sister eat her dinner instead.

A wanted the shrimp hibachi plate. After J and A ate on this, we STILL had leftovers to bring home.

Bible

We finished up the Gladys Aylward book. This story was full of action and excitement from cover to cover. We actually (for once) finished a book ahead of schedule. Each time the chapter would end right on a good part and the kids wanted to keep going. She was an amazing woman. Each of the missionaries we have read about this year have amazing testimonies of faith and perseverance. The way God worked in and through their lives was absolutely incredible!