I'm Melting!

The first day of our celebration of NLSW went very well!  Mr. D's devotion was a hit, we got the school sorted into country teams for the Winter Olympics, and everyone signed up correctly!  Not to mention the country banners look great too.  We still have a few groups that didn't finish yet (they're actually trying to draw their flag correctly).  The countries represented in this year's Olympics are: USA, Canada, Mexico, China, Spain, France, Germany, and England.


Most of my class has finished their positive/negative space art project.  Quite a few are taking them to the Fine Arts Fair (or part of the project... either the positive space or the negative space).  Now we just have to mat them.  Still not sure if I should do them all or see if I can make them do it... I think our week is packed enough there won't be time to do it! 


And the weather is throwing a wrench into the mix.  We're supposed to get 1-3 (to 5) inches of snow tonight.  The wind is supposed to pick up tomorrow at 9:00am... with gusts up to 45mph.  Yay.  Not early enough in the day to call off school.  Not late enough to avoid it.  Although, word on the street is that MVL is going to call off school tonight.  I doubt we'd be so lucky.  Still, there is a backup plan in place for our NLSW activities just in case we don't have school.  The dads brought tables and chairs over from church today for our meal on Wednesday (we were going to do that tomorrow... but better safe than sorry).  We can do our tie blanket-making activity on Thursday (See? I knew there was a reason I procrastinated planning Thursday's activity so long!).  Lots of plan Bs and Cs and Ds.


My class has been making table decorations for Wednesday.  Mrs. E lent us colorful flowerpots with paper flowers in them (Bible verses are the yellow centers), but there were a few pots missing flowers.  So the girls have been cutting out more and gluing them together.  The only way to get the flower to stay attached to the pipecleaner stem is to hot glue them.  But.  Halfway through we ran out of glue sticks... or the small ones at any rate; big ones are aplenty.  Using their problem-solving skills, the girls took a pen and were about to use it to shove the remaining stick all the way through when they realized it would probably melt.  So they used a pencil.  The funny thing is, the pencil melted too!  The tip of the pencil squished back on itself, kind of like when you press the top of a Hershey's kiss down on those kiss cookies fresh from the oven.  The lead was still normal, but pencil itself could be bent without breaking.  Science time!  Why is the pencil doing that?  Does wood usually bend?  No?  Then what do we know about what the pencil is made of?  Probably plastic.  It was a pretty cool teachable moment.  Here's a picture: