Recent school stuff... and extracurricular artwork

For the kids' presentations at Classical Conversations the last few weeks, we've had fun doing some projects...

One of weeks we made Hoplite shields like ones some of the soldiers in Ancient Greece used...
Here they are presenting the information to their respective classes:

And then the following week we were learning about the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World (which ended up being pretty fascinating!) and we made a model of the Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria:

This lighthouse was the tallest building of its time -- other than the Pyramids-- 380 feet tall, which is pretty impressive. And there is a great story about Sostrates, the clever builder of it, and how he ultimately tricked the Egyptian ruler who commissioned the project and wanted full credit. (Strider had fun demonstrating that element to his class)

And then this past week we made collages of vertebrates and invertebrates. Rayna had a ball just cutting and gluing away, finding all kinds of creatures.... ...But Strider decided to make his full of only "gross" animals. And he sure found plenty -- which seems like evidence to me that God has a lot of "guy-ness" in him. Here is part of what he came up with:


This week we had no big project planned... but while Strider and Rayna were supposed to be upstairs doing their homework this afternoon, they decided to take it upon themselves to create "artwork" -- body artwork. When they emerged from the room, they were covered in marker ink. Rayna's entire face was scribbled black -- entirely. And their arms and legs were full of all kinds of colors- - even the bottoms of their feet were colored. To my great distress I discovered, after I shoved them into the showers, that these markers were not washable!

So, I spent a long, long time scrubbing and scrubbing at Rayna's face... make-up remover, mineral oil, rubbing alcohol... and still can't get it all off. (I also spent a long, long time yelling) And I'm not even going to be able to attempt much on their limbs... I had so, so many things I needed to do today and this was not one of them.

Strider kept insisting I needed to take a picture because his whole purpose in doing this artwork was to send it in to "Guinness Book of World Records" to try and get the "Most colored skin record." I was so irate I couldn't even bring myself to get the camera, so he will have to do without that record to his name. Maybe tomorrow I'll try to get some shots of the remaining effect (not for Guinness -- but maybe for his wedding slide show)... but probably not. I'm still too mad.