Thursday, June 7, 2007

Back in the saddle again...

It's been a busy two weeks! In no particular order of importance...

My friend Tracy posted on her blog a week or so ago the challenge of "helping" your child do their school projects without actually doing the project yourself. We had the same dilemma in our house last week. Alexa, along with every other fourth grader at Maple West had to do a project with an oral report on something having to do with New York State. The parameters were pretty wide and the rubric was fairly easy to follow. Alexa chose the Empire State Building(ESB) as her subject. When asked what she wanted to do for the project part she chose to make a model of the ESB. Out of what? - Styrofoam. So off to JoAnne's, Michael's and ACMoore we went to find the one store with all the pieces that fit. As we started to build the model in the store aisles to see what pieces we would need, the ESB grew, not only in height but in $ spent!

We brought everything home and started "construction" with city approved, structurally compatible supplies - otherwise known as a glue gun, Styrofoam spray glue and toothpicks. We finally got the basic structure built - and the 'we' gets a little sketchy here because Alexa is afraid to use the glue gun, over sprayed the adhesive, and spilled the toothpicks. So, Mom (with no patience) built the ESB to Alexa's demanding specifications and vision!

Once totally built, we needed to add windows and spray paint the exterior. To make the windows we (again, Mom with an assist from Dad) used the wooden rectangle end of a small rubber stamp and forced it into the Styrofoam to the tune of over 1600 windows - if my math is right. To be honest, my hand was so sore and I had a HUGE blister on my right thumb that is now a huge callus - that I didn't count the windows at the time, I'm guesstimating. In Alexa's defense on this point, she did not have the strength to press in all those windows (Norman and I barely did!) Finally, we spray painted the entire building 'Silver Champagne' - with 7 cans of spray paint! Then the night before the project was due, I drilled holes in the wooden base (that Alexa painted) and glued dowels in the holes and Norman and I lifted the ESB and attached it to the base. I put on the sticker letters (because Alexa was afraid she wouldn't get them all on and even) and here is the result...

As a post script, Alexa gave her oral report on Tuesday (dressed to the nines) and it went very well. The ESB was a big hit - in more ways than one! It drew a lot of 'oohs' and 'aaahhs' and a few, "Wow, how did you make that!" from a number of students and teachers. We are very anxious to see how 'we' did come grade time!

Also happening last week was Creating Keepsakes Convention (which I did not attend for the 2nd year in a row). My store, Buffalo Stamps and Stuff http://www.buffalostamps.com/ had a booth and I spent some time doing demos for display.


Lastly, I didn't attend the show because the Sweatshoppe Girls - you know who you are ;-), had a summer weekend crop retreat at the Watson Homestead down toward Corning. We had a blast - as always, and are planning to do it again. Here's a photo of Suzanne, Amy, Lynn and Penny working away.


That's about it for last week. This week, we saw cousin Karen from California. We have the 'shed guy' coming tomorrow to layout where our new backyard shed will be going and the 'fence guy' should be calling any day now for when they are coming. Can someone tell me how I did all this stuff when I worked full time?


3 comments:

Chiara said...

oh my!1 That is some ESB. Great work to you all. Hope you had a blast at your crop.

Anonymous said...

Having worked as a teacher at the elementary level all the teachers were saying "look at how hard the parents worked on the project". You should have seen the log cabin Brion made out of toothpicks one year for Joe. What are we thinking????

Tracy said...

OMG, woman! Look at that ESB!]
I always try to persuade my girls to create a scrapbook as a school project whenever possible. Heck, I always have suppplies on hand for that...