Weekly Wrap UP 2/5/16 The dog ate the Spanish homework!

Does this face look innocent to you?

This is our dog Luna, we left her alone while we went to the see the movie Stars Wars.  

We came home to the destruction of my son's Spanish homework project.  She had never done this before, so we never thought leaving the project on the coffee table would be an issue:(  Luckily I was able to save a few things, but my son and I had to rebuild a great deal of his project:(

My son and I built a paper city using this link.    This was an assignment for his Spanish class to learn vocabulary words.  After building the city, he needed to label all the buildings and structures in his city.

MarioFan cut out most of the straight lines while I did more of the intricate cutting 

He colored some items, which he hates, so I found most things that did not need to be colored

He assembled some of easier pieces  but I did assemble the harder buildings

His rabbit cube which we put in his city's sculpture garden 

We painted the background of a trip-fold cardboard

He wanted to make a rock wall for the city park, so he painted a foam block and we added beads to make the hand and foot holds

Using popsicle sticks and foam we made a play ground 

Gluing down all the pieces

Overview of his city project, he still has to add people and trees 

I have to say I actually enjoyed building some of the more complicated buildings.  The train tunnel was by far the hardest to build-- Here are the police station, fire station, and gas station

all the vehicle are made of paper as well-- the school 

playground next to the school -- which includes a merry go round, rock wall, slide, swings, monkey bars and see-saw, which MarioFan built out of popsicle sticks, foam and chenille pipettes 

he included stop signs and even traffic lights--here he included a hospital, flower shop , convenience store and house

we even included a lake with a fountain in the middle-- Mario Fan made the fountain out of white sculpty clay

This tunnel was the hardest too build and I wasn't happy when the dog ate the first one, which meant I had to build it all over again the next day:(

The fountain is supposed to be shown with water coming out of it:)

Everything labeled and people, trees and bushes added to the city:)  Whew a lot of work went into this

We completed this project in a week and that includes redoing about a third of it due to the dog's naughty behavior:(.

While MarioFan worked on his project, Firedrake had her own Spanish project to complete.  She was doing a presentation on theAztecs.  She choose to do the majority of her time on the Aztec Creation story which she found fascinating if not somewhat bloody.

She decide to sculpt a replica of the Aztec Sun god and found a pattern on the internet.  It was pretty intricate so she had to decide what to leave in and what to leave out--you know take artistic license with the creation :)

carefully cutting out the shape and then adding the various pieces

the Finished piece which I thought wasn't too bad.

Next she painted it

The Aztec Creation story is quite interesting and Firedrake research it on the web and while there are several versions they all had a similar theme and she decided to use a poster to help explained the different worlds.  

The Aztec's believe there were 4 worlds created by the Gods before their civilizations came to be--each world represented a different time
The first world is the void with 4 children who became the four directions of N,S,E,W--every time they created something the monster would eat their creations
The second world -- Humans were created but became corrupt so they turned into monkeys and had to be blown away by a God
The third world is the world of fire
The Fourth World is when two gods became jealous of each other and created a flood
The fifth and final World  is when there became night and day and the Aztec came to be.   The Aztec's believed that in order for the sun to move across the Sun God required human sacrifice.

Next Firedrake presented in front of her class which I was able to sit in.  I thought she did pretty well and I was really please to see her do all of the research herself.  I only guided her through the art portion of the assignment as she doubts her talent too much.

Her presentation concentrated on the Aztec Creation story.  She loves all mythology 

There is about 20 students in this coop class

At the end of her presentation she wrapped up 3 items that the Aztec introduced to the Spanish for the first time, popcorn, gum and hot chocolate and read off clues to the class to see if they could guess what the items where.

Kids and I also went to a show this week--We saw the theater performance of the NEWSIES!  It was fabulous and such fun, also this is a topic we recently studied in our history lessons!

This was organized with a local homeschool group so we were able to get discounted tickets--always a plus:)

Our seats weren't bad!  Kids loved the performance!

Another crazy busy week but aren't they all:)