Halloween Night
"I give to you this cape of light, 
All the kids made thier own cute dragon breads using Tasha Tudor's White Bread Recipe (made with half whole wheat flour, and goat milk of course!)
They really were too cute to eat! But we did eat them, with delicious Daddy-made potato soup.
Robin spent two days making an amazing dragon pinata. He used a rocket balloon, paper mache, paint, and tissue paper. All the kids took turns fighting the dragon with Saint Michael's sword, and upon it's demise were showered with golden butterscotch candies.
The field for the shooting star throw was carefully marked in 20 foot increments.....
...using stakes artfully adorned by Jesse with sunflowers.
Finally the courageous angels were ready (just look at those characters!)
Stars were flung, capes swirled, and everyone cheered!
After all the outdoor excitement, we were treated to an exciting rendition of "St. George and the Dragon" starring Jesse as the noble St. George, Robin as the ferocious dragon, Elsa as the brave princess, and Jill as the wise queen. We then sang "A Boy's Resolve" and happily agreed that Michaelmas is definitely an awesome festival!
No, really, I mean a ton! Enough for a whole sunflower forest, complete with secret tunnel...and that's not even showing the huge sunflower plants that have grown up in my garden and various other places in the yard.
So...Michaelmas is coming, and we have been charmed by the idea of dying our own golden capes. Trouble is, we don't have any marigolds. Hmmm. Would sunflowers work? We decided to experiment. 
We started with a whole bunch of whole sunflower heads...
which resulted in this lovely yellow-green, but not really what we were going for.
Then we tried sunflower petals mixed with Mexican Bird of Paradise blossoms and buds.
The pot looked beautiful, the water was kind of murkey, but turned a lovely orangy-pink when I stirred in a sprinkle of citric acid. But when we added the wool, it just didn't seem to be holding the color. We boiled for quite a while, but it just turned out light beige....hmm...
Finally we decided to try just sunflower petals. Just the petals! Nothing else! So tons more flowers were picked. This time we decided to put in a silk scarf too. It was looking very promising, I added a little sprinkle of Tumeric for some intensity....
Now that is color!!! Wow! I couldn't believe how bright it turned out! Now, I don't know how much is sunflowers and how much the Tumeric, but I had a whole pot of sunflower petals and maybe a 1/4 tsp. of tumeric, if that. Anyway, the result is definitely sunflower yellow!
Here are the results, left to right: Sunflower petals and tumeric; onion skins (I only had a tiny bit, so we just did one little pot. It turned out a gorgeous golden color!); sunflower petals and Mexican bird of paradise; sunflower heads.
Robin made this fun tool that makes different patterns for the different numbers. Above is the 3's. He sanded the wood and pounded the nails all on his own. I wrote the numbers.
We actually spent most of the week last week on J. I was under the weather with a bad cold and just couldn't seem to focus on academics. We told the story of "The Water of Life" and illustrated the jug and fountain in our MLBs. We made strawberry jam, but I couldn't find clay I liked so we didn't make our jugs. We did have tons of fun dying silk and wool with flowers from our yard - more about that in another post! We also spent a lot of time with our goats and our new neighbor- a little calf named Sassy...
We did all of B on Monday of this week. Well, actually, we were talking about B all weekend as we observed the bees in our garden, thought of all the B words we could think of, baked bread, and talked about butterflies. Elsa was very ready for the two stories on Monday, and was very happy to finally enter her picture in her MLB.
The highlight of our B lesson was making a little Hummy Bee using our sunflower dyed wool and the instructions in Sigi's Hummy Bee story. So cute!!! Elsa loves her little bee and has been taking very good care of her.
We also started the butterfly from Sigi's Flora Flutterbye story (downloads free on the Kit'N'Tales website!) But this morning Elsa discovered that her wings needed a little more color so she had to repaint them. We will finish that one before bed tonight.
These multiplication clocks were very fun to do. I had Robin draw the circles freehand (also covering form drawing for the week!), then he figured out the numbers and I wrote them. We colored them together and hung them on the wall.
Last May on a visit to Grandaddy & Gramie's cabin, Elsa picked up all these rocks. We were on a little hike, and she saw so many pretty rocks. I told her she should only pick up what she could carry herself and she ended up with her whole skirt full! We brought them home, and she has used them for all kinds of creative play.
To go with our lesson about H and Houses, Elsa built a fairy house. She was so excited to use her rocks from the mountains to make a house for the fairies.
She wrote a little note to the fairies, and sure enough, they wrote back! They thanked her for the beautiful house, and obviously they danced all night as there was fairy dust sprinkled everywhere!
