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Fort San Domingo in Taiwan is hosting outdoor concerts on weekend evenings. Not only can you hear great bands, but you can play with the glowing rocks.
The Think! project this week was to carve an apple with your teeth or toothpicks. I was quite pleased that it was simple because with my schedule this week I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to participate. However, this was a fun project to do at breakfast. Jaylene wasn’t interested in carving, but instead poked the toothpicks in to create an airplane and played with it for a long time, flying it around.
To my surprise, after I mentioned it was time to take the photo of her airplane, she quickly bit into it to give it some more airplanish details. I was surprised because she follows the Taiwanese tradition of not eating apple peels. I was even more surprised when after the picture she finished eating the peel, along with the rest of the apple. I played along too and made a little hedgehog.
I gave Jaylene the Illustration Friday topic, “Repair”, and this is what she came up with. (The crumpled effect is courtesy of Jayden, he wanted to participate too.)
She cracks me up! Road construction, because they are *constantly* repairing roads here. Sometimes I think the first few lines of their national song translated into English would be, “Dig it up, rip it out, do it all again. And again, and again.” My friend tells me that after three months she stoped counting the amount of times they tore up the road in front of her house. She was already at 14. Ahji pointed out to me that they repave the roads every time there is a municipal election coming up.
Mine is just a quick cartoon because I have started my Masters of International Education and I’m in the midst of my first two week intensive course (Classroom management and discipline with a focus on differentiated instruction). It’s been such a long time since I was a student that my study skills are a bit rusty and in need of repair.
M C Escher was born in The Netherlands and died in 1972. He was a famous graphic artist and created numerous symmetrical designs, among other art forms. After viewing many of his designs, we decided to make our own tesselations. Tesselations are shapes that completely fill the page with no gaps and no overlap. We wanted to make tesselating ghosts.
Materials: Thin cardboard for the template, paper, pencil and markers.
Draw a wavy line across the top of your cardboard, this is the ghost’s head. Cut it out and trace it along the bottom of the cardboard. This is the bottom part of the ghost.
Now draw a hand near the top of the ghost on the side. Cut it out and tape it to the other side near the bottom. When your ghosts connect, they’ll do so on an angle. If you want them to be side by side, make sure your second hand is directly across from the first.
Use your template to draw the tesselations.
With a marker color in your ghosts, alternating between colored ghosts and ghosts with only an outline. You might want to make a light tick with a pencil on the ones you need to color in fully because it can get confusing after coloring for a bit.
The end result should look like a checkerboard full of ghosts. Jaylene made hers all different colors, they’re a rainbow ghost family. We’re interested in seeing if anyone can come up with tesselating pumpkins or witch’s hats or other holiday designs. Be sure to let us know if you make some.
We went to the annual Trick or Treating party at Angie’s house yesterday. She lives on a pedestrian only street and convinces her neighbors to hand out candy (that we provide). It’s an authentic experience for kids growing up in a country that doesn’t celebrate Halloween, and it’s fun for the neighbors.
These were our costumes, both last minute picks. Jaylene decided a week ago to be a supergirl, Firegirl to be specific, and for the first time in her life wasn’t a princess.
Jayden has an adorable dragon/dinosaur costume but the weather was too hot so we patched together a pirate costume (with no pirate accessories as he abhors anything touching his head).
Jayden quickly got the hang of the treating part of the festivites. He was zooming down to the marked doors faster than anyone else in the family. And sometimes he even had to be carried away, triumphantly clutching his goodie.
Jaylene discovered the fun in the tricking part. Here she is with her friend Jade, trying to get the pumpkin bucket on their new friend, Nicholai’s head.
We had tremendous fun hanging out with so many friends.
For more pictures click on over to my Flickr Set. Happy Halloween! May you get treats not tricks!
I have a million and two deadlines but what do I do? Add a fun project to our mix. I’ve been getting Illustration Friday prompts for a loooong time now, but haven’t acted on them, nor has Jaylene shown any interest in the prompts. Lately she’s been really keen to draw, so when I saw that Brenda and Heather had hopped on the IF bandwagon, I thought I’d give it another try with Jaylene. She was eager to try and after she had thought a bit, she came up with this:
It’s about a little girl who is still playing when the garbage truck comes by at 12:00. Her mom wants her to go to bed (and her dad is playing computer games). It cracks me up because it is *so* representative of our house, except in the drawing the mom is smiling! Jaylene is supposed to go to bed at 9pm (which is pretty early for kid bedtimes here) but if she’s still up when the garbage truck comes at 10 she needs to drop whatever she’s doing and hop into bed. Garbage trucks come around everyday and play Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” to let the people know when to bring their garbage to the street. Usually there are no garbage dumpsters or cans, but our community pays the security guards to take cans out which means we can drop off our garbage earlier.
This is my attempt, a wee pirate has missed the boat.
We received these lovely beaded wax star ornaments as a gift from Emily and I’d always been meaning to make up some of our own. (check out her site, she makes incredible pottery).
With a little help from the instructions on how to make Halloween Candle Appliques and a few more tips from How to make a floating rose candle I felt confident enough to start our wax project.
Basically you melt wax (I used a nonessential bowl in my rice cooker) and then pour it out into sheets and use cookie cutters to make your shapes. Attach some beaded wire and add some glitter glue and you’re done. Here’s what Jaylene made.
We had a lot of leftover wax so we decided to make a wall hanging.
Materials:
wax candles (and crayons if your candles are white)
a tin lid with a rim
goodies to stick in the melted wax
glitter (of course!)
hair dryer or heat gun
Instructions: Melt the candle over the tin lid until you have a good puddle of melted wax covering the surface. BE CAREFUL, melted wax is *hot*! Melt your crayon in if you need color and let the wax harden a bit. Start adding your collage elements and glitter. If something is too heavy and sinks to the bottom you can always melt your wax again and start over. It’s a very forgiving medium. Just watch your fingers! Add a ribbon to the back and hang it on your wall. I think these would make lovely Christmas gifts. We’re on the hunt for some more lids.
Julie K in Taiwan 