Martinmas Tissue Paper Transparencies

Our transparencies were beautiful, and one great thing about the blog post containing the original pattern being taken down is that we could be inspired by it but still create our own unique designs. Leah made two and is using one as her illustration for the story of St. Martin. Natalie is currently making a second one from the square black pieces cut out from the frame backs, so that they aren't wasted. The craft is definitely for middle school age or older. It took us hours, but they were very happy hours. Prepare to have supplies spread all over your living room floor.

Alongside Leah's transparency / illustration for St. Martin, we are putting a verse from the Chandogya Upanishad, found in In Every Tiny Grain of Sand: A Child's Book of Prayers and Praise

I am stunned to see how inexpensive this book is used on Amazon... it's one of the most beautiful and reverent books of poetry we own.

Highlights of today? Well, it's 1 pm and dinner is already done (Slow-Cooker Sausage Lasagna), Natalie finished her MLB pages for Antarctica -- including an AWESOME krill swarm -- and is beginning Australia and Oceania, Leah put her Elzeard Bouffier summary in her MLB and heard the story of Werburgh and the Troublesome Geese, and Zac got his third tooth!

Our MLB spreads aren't always traditional -- Natalie used a picture I found on Pinterest to inspire her construction paper collage krill - penguin - leopard seal - killer whale food chain illustration -- but I think they are fabulous.

our inspiration

Natalie's version

Natalie has never studied World Geography before, so instead of purely doing the 8th grade world geography with a focus on world economics, we are having to do a quick-and-dirty political map plus biome map plus a hot button topic (i.e. current events). Her hot button topic was a New York Times article Warming Oceans May Threaten Krill, a Cornerstone of the Antarctic Ecosystem from 10/19/2015. We focused on the krill food chain in our illustrations, creating a krill swarm as the background to her article summary as well as creating the above collage of an example food chain.

We've invested in the map legend stamp; the colors Waseca uses for each biome are found here. We are using the following Prismacolor pencils:

desert - 918
grassland - 1034
temperate forest - 912
tropical forest - 908
wetland - 903
mountains - 932
polar regions - 938
ocean - 904

Although we can't afford the Waseca puzzle maps right now, I do want the large canvas biome map of the world... and we can look at their images online to see how to color in our small versions in her main lesson book.

Leah used colored pencil to draw a large acorn and wrote her summary of The Man Who Planted Trees in gold pencil in beautiful cursive inside the heart of the acorn. We also did a watercolor painting inspired by one of Kelly Morrow's Old Testament paintings. Whole page yellow, then blue across the bottom for grass, lift up the blue with a dry brush or a sponge in one diagonal part then put down blue again darker to be the river, then a small red dot by the river to be an acorn planted on the bank, then bring the red up and up as the tree grows to create a large branching oak tree.

I guess a picture really is worth a thousand words, isn't it...

I am leaning towards a series of blog posts with pictures of our main lesson book pages. I also am leaning towards creating a page on the website for each block's notes and updating as we do them. With both a blog and a website I had originally planned on my "this is what we did today" stuff on the blog and then summarizing and creating a nice pdf of lesson plans and posting that on the site for people to download. But reality is that we are on our fifth main lessons of the school year and the only tidy PDF I've completed is the first one Leah did, Fables. So I think that making notes in real time is my best bet when it comes to recording and sharing. Plus now that Zac is crawling I will have less time on the computer than ever before!

Transparency notes:
We cut our white, yellow, and blue tissue paper squares to 6.25 inches square. We cut our black paper squares to 7 inches square. For the back frame piece we measured a border of .75 inches all the way around and then cut out the inside. Cutter Bee Scissorsare a must for the tiny details!