Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Hope you had a wonderful and blessed Christmas and New Year celebration! We have recently moved to Charlotte, NC and took the month of December getting settled into our new home. We really love it here and are glad to finally get back to a 'normal' life...whatever that looks like.

I love beginning the new year with the Tournament of Roses Parade...I've watched that since I was a little girl. It amazes me how much they put into all the floats...the structures covered in beautiful flowers, seeds and natural items. Just amazing...and I can only imagine how wonderful the frangrences are as the floats come rolling by.

Like most things in life for a homeschool mom...it sparked an idea for a project with the children. I've actually had this art project in the back of my mind for years, just never had the opportunity to put it into action. The parade this year brought this idea out of my head and into a tangible format. I didn't want to bombard the kids with heavy schooling right off the bat but rather do something fun to ease us back into the routine, so we started with 'bean art'. Yes, bean art. If you google bean art, you will find a lot of posters and photos of beans...which are pretty cool. Someone even created a portrait of Larry King...all with beans! Amazing.

Usually when I present projects like this to the kids, they grumble, but then go along just to make me happy. They get into the project for a while, but get bored quickly and end up not finishing what we started and then I'm left to clean up the mess. Yesterday was a total surprise for me. They started the project and LOVED it! My 13 year old even said at one point, "mom, this is a good lesson in patience." I also heard them complimenting each other on their work. (Words to warm a mother's heart...lol) The other lessons in this project included planning and art design because we drew a design with pencils before we added the beans, plus all the other eliments of art. The girls created smaller pictures, while I worked on a large one. (I've realized if I do a project with them, they enjoy it more and stick with it longer than if I just assign it and let them go it alone) I thought they would do one and quit, but they enjoyed it so much they each ended up with 3 finished pieces. I found little 3.5" x 3.5" frames at the Target dollar spot...a package of 3 frames for $2.50. So they did pieces to fit these frames. My girls are also into photography, so the photos you see here are all ones they took. Who knew beans could be so beautiful?
After this project was complete, we learn how to quick boil beans and make bean soup...yum! And they also made a bean identifying chart, looking up on the internet the different kinds of beans and writting about the characteristics of each one, including what they taste like and how to best cook them.

One last note. I started this blog this past summer, got busy and frustrated with uploading pictures and quit blogging. I realized yesterday that my 16 year old daughter is old enough to help me...and she enjoys working on the computer. So part of her schooling for this year will be to help me keep our blog updated. Maybe we will get more on here this way. Take some time out this week to try bean art. Frames $2.50, a bag of 15 bean soup $2.50, some poster board and glue...a great art piece for $5.00.