Creative Period

Hey guys!  It's been QUITE a while.  I can't believe we only have 33 days left of school!!!  We finally have Spring Break this week and so tomorrow's the last day this week. I'm just about as done with school right now as my kids.  Sound familiar?  Well, in order to preserve my sanity I have done zero grading this past week and instead have focused my efforts on my creative talents!  We recently read a book about dependability.  Remember those old "Standin' Tall" books about various topics?  Well, we listened to it on tape!  I love this book and the way its read and sung on the tape.  My only problem with the book is that the incredible illustrations are all in black and white!  Who does that??  So, I fixed it! :)  I began coloring in the illustrations in my personal copy and when it took me nearly two hours just to do the characters in the first page, I decided that I would leave the background black and white and just color the characters in the picture.  Here's some of my favorite pages:

 Professor "Un" and his henchmen

 Oh no!  Professor Un has locked Reggie & Katrina out in space!

Don't worry!  Captain Dependable will help to save the day!

Fun, right?  RIGHT!  For those who know me, they know that my stress reliever and all time favorite past time is reading, followed closely by COLORING!  This has been such a fun project!  I really enjoyed thinking about the perspectives, lighting, shading, etc.  What a good chance to develop my artistic skills.

But, wait?  There's still one more day to Spring Break.  How, you might ask, will you manage another day with this project completed?  Well, let me tell you!  My awesome fantastic, incredible, fun, amazing, perfect team and I have started working on getting our books together for next year.  We were looking at the cursive book today and are reworking what pages we want in it for next year and looked at some of the pictures on the pages.  After much laughter, we realized that while some of them are adorable, some of them are just weird.  Now my team knows my love for art and turned to me.  "Becka, would you fix these pictures and make a cute cover?"  Do I even need to tell you my answer?????  I came home and immediately started working on them.  The cover's not quite finished, it still needs the title but you can see the cute turtle I used.  We found this on one of the pages that we would not be using in the book but LOVED the turtle so I thought it would work well on our cover!

 The original monkey's weird, right?  

 Does that look like an x-ray?  I really struggled with that one!

Here's our cover turtle.  It'll say:  "Racing into Cursive!"

Apparently, I'm not the only one who's been feeling crafty.  I had one of my girls come in with her mom yesterday morning and brought me a gift.  She had painted this adorable little mug for me...and of course its an owl!  :)

Before I sign off, here's a little chuckle I had the other day:  Our classes were getting ready to switch (the morning class was going to Chinese and my afternoon class was just leaving and coming to me) which normally involves quite a bit of chaos.  This day was no different and as the morning class filed out, I caught a bit of one boy's thinking process.  I'm not sure where this thought came from because we had not been talking about the topic AT ALL that day and he wasn't having a conversation to anyone, he just was talking to himself.  I heard him say, "I don't think it was fair that Cinderella went to the ball."  He said nothing else, and just grabbed his backpack and tote tray and walked out.  I know we're not supposed to have favorites, but I seriously think he is mine this year!  He's the cutest kid, so full of energy, enthusiasm, cheer, and is so completely RANDOM!! :)