Greetings from MorningStar!!: We're Baaaack!

Yesterday was the first day of school here at MorningStar!

We started off the day with Mickey Mouse head pancakes...what first day of school would be complete without those? And, while this doesn't sound like it would be a big deal, it was for them because I only get the Mickey Mouse waffle iron out about every 3 years!

I've changed the decorations in the school room a little bit - nothing major, but I wanted it to be different from last year. I put a new border on the bulletin boards and made new "days of the week" to be put up. I also got some things to decorate the walls and the windows.

We started out with a prayer, which we do every morning, and then Bear put the day of the week and the weather up on the calendar. After that, we mainly did review of things from last year. She did some writing and we reviewed skip counting by 5's and 10's. I want to make sure that we haven't lost everything that was done last year!

The most fun thing that we did was after lunch. We made GUM! I had purchased a kit from Love To Learn and it contained all the things that we needed to make our own gum and The Kids had a great time. We started by heating the chicle (which is the gum part of gum!) in the microwave until it was gooey and then added corn syrup and powdered sugar. You knead that and knead it until it gets a bit harder and divide it into two parts ao that you can add the peppermint flavoring to one half and the tutti frutti flavoring to the other part. This was a neat exercise because not only did we get to make gum (who wouldn't love that?) but we also learned about where chicle came from and how, if only companies would use real chicle in their gum instead of synthetic, we could help little Eduardo from the rainforest buy food and clothe his family. (The literature that came with the gum was a little but tree-huggy for my taste but, oh well, Bear and Deco liked it) It was a good day and we topped it off with homemade chocolate icecream made by my own two hands!