1st Grade Community Day
A month or so ago N's 1st grade class had a "community day." This is where everyone in the class is tasked to build a shoe-box-sized community building - a store, a bank, a fire station, etc. After a week or so to work on them with their parents, the kids bring them all to school on the same day and they turn their classroom into a little town.
N was assigned a movie theater. It is a fantastic school project and N and I had a ton of fun playing around with it. We even let Mommy and L help out (a little).
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N had to decide what movie would be showing at his theater. That was easy - he picked Star Wars with little hesitation. He then got to pick out the "Also Playing" and "Coming Soon" selections to put on the posters on the theater walls. Our theater seems to be more of an oldie-but-goodie place, preferring classics like Mary Poppins, Cars 2, and The Little Mermaid over more recent releases.
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| Only the finest films of the 60's, 70's and 80's! |
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| Somehow "AMC" became "AMO," but we loved it anyway. |
We spent an afternoon painting the box - black walls inside gave it a much more theatrical look. Mommy help sew some screen curtains and L cut us some nice rugs for the aisles. The hard part, or fun part, depending on your perspective, was installing the theater seats. We found some little pasta shells ("orecchiette," according to the package) that, if mounted on their sides, made for passably comfy seats. N, L, and Daddy took turns with Mommy's glue gun doing the he-man job of installing a hundred or so of the chairs.
I took a late morning getting to work on community day so I could take N and L to school. It was tons of fun to see all the different projects coming in and being set up. The creativity was rich and clever and you could tell the parents had as much of a blast as the kids did working on the displays. There were hotels and hospitals, carousels and police stations. They were all mounted on the kids' desks, which were arranged to be all interlocking in the classroom. Little paper roads with plenty of matchbox cars were providing the community infrastructure to make the town come to life. I don't know how much teaching got done that day, but a whole lot of fun and learning did.
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| The local bakery. |
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| Police HQ! |
A few days later Stacy used up the remaining orecchiette in a soup. L and N couldn't stop giggling over having theater-seat soup for dinner.
Time for Soup
Speaking of soup, L has been getting braver and more adventurous in the kitchen. She's getting to be a fine little cook and now that she can read, she's starting to use cookbooks and make things with very little supervision. She's made a few things in recent weeks that have come out well enough that we kitchen supervisors are inclined to let down our guard. One evening she decided to make corn chowder - a soup she had made before and that had turned out to be remarkably good for coming out of a kiddie cookbook. Knowing we were on familiar ground, we pretty much turned her loose.
Things went pretty well, with one small exception. Some times, when you're in a rush to get dinner on the table, a 1/4 tsp of thyme can look an awful lot like a 1/4 cup of thyme. Consequently our resulting soup was a trifle too "herby" for our tastes this go-round. And needless to say, thyme was added to our shopping list for the next week.
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| When L says "Thyme for dinner," she means "Thyme for dinner!" |
1 comment:
When I was close to L's age I got to cook for an entire week at my great-aunt's house. And do the grocery shopping. I'd walk to the store, buy ingredients, come back and make a mess.
I needed cinnamon to make gingerbread and for some reason the grocery store didn't have any ground, all they had were sticks. I figured I could cut up a stick with a knife and it would be close. Needless to say we were all picking pieces of wood out of the gingerbread :)
But, you have to have some adventures in the kitchen before you get better. Remind me to tell you about how I blew up the microwave (seriously) another time :)
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