Many years ago we had our first "Bookfest" where we invited some friends over and gave presentations on our favorite books. It was so much fun, and we fully intended to make it an annual event, but like many of our best-laid plans, it ganged angly. :) On a Sunday at the end of our Book Unit, I suddenly took it into my head to try and have another one that very Tuesday, which happened to be relatively open for us. I texted a bunch of homeschooling friends and amazingly, lots of people could come! We quickly planned a little brunch menu, told people to bring their favorite books, and it was on!
Along with muffins and fruit skewers, Daisy had the cutest idea to make little egg salad sandwiches into "books." She found these boxes to be a "bookshelf" for them. I think they turned out so cute!
Amazingly, we found our old "Bookfest" banner, so we put that up!
We had a great group of friends and such a good time hearing about the books they all love! And we hope—really, this time—to have another Bookfest again next year! :)
It felt like the end of this school year deserved a good celebration! But I also didn't want to do anything that took too much preparation…prep time being rather a scarce resource around here. So we didn't do anything very fancy. Still, we had a fun time!
One activity we did was building Robot Arms like the one on the International Space Station. (Shown in this video, for example.) The children did this in teams, and there were moments of frustration…but they worked through them.
The parameters we used for this activity are found here (these Design Squad activities are always fun). The goal was to build a robot arm that could lift up a paper cup.
They did it!
The children enjoyed paper marbling so much during our Marbled Jupiter activity that they really wanted to do it again. This time we had three different color schemes to make Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth. (Instructions are here.)
It was definitely a more committed craft project than I'd attempt on a regular day—but this was a celebration day, so…I guess it was worth it. :)
When I found this "Build a cardboard rover" activity I knew we had to try it for the sake of our Rover-loving Teddy. I don't know what it was, but when we learned about the Mars Rovers, he just fell in love. He plays that he is a Rover, and he says he wants to go to Mars and take care of the Rovers when he grows up. He especially loves Curiosity, and still asks me almost daily if Curiosity is still working and going around up on Mars! (So far, the answer is yes!) We are pretty excited to watch the launch of the new Mars Rover in July.
The instructions for this "cardboard rover" are here. (Basically, it's just a rubber-band-powered car, with square "all-terrain" wheels.) It's really simple to make…though somehow walking several children through a project manages to be quite an involved process no matter how simple it is…sigh. Once we had our Rovers assembled they really liked iterating on ways to make them go faster or longer. Hard surfaces worked best!
Daisy made the cutest little mini robot arm to go on her Rover. It was jointed and moved just like our big robot arms!
Here's the robot arm in action!
We made these simple paper rockets, found here at Rising Wonder.
I had the bigger kids help me make these little "jet-packs," just for fun, for the little boys. (We didn't have enough 2-liter bottles for everyone, and we knew the little boys would have the most fun playing with them.) I don't even know where the original idea came from; these were everywhere when I searched "space party ideas." I didn't find written instructions but just looked at a picture and figured it out. Basically, you spray paint two two-liter bottles silver, duct tape them together, glue on some felt "flames," and attach straps like a backpack. Easy. The girls really loved helping spray paint and glue, and then presenting the "surprise" to Ziggy and Teddy with great fanfare!
I found a 9-pack of these planet necklaces for $12 on Amazon, so I ordered them and let the children divide them among themselves. They are really pretty!
I also thought it would be a really fun activity to make planet bracelets like this one. I ended up just ordering a couple because I didn't want to go to the craft store for beads during quarantine. But I still think it would be great to make your own—search for beads to represent each planet, and then string them together on bracelet elastic. Part of the fun is that it just looks like a cute bead bracelet—but YOU would know that it represents our Solar System. Fun!
Picture of the Solar System Goldie drew (I wish you could see all the little details)
Teddy's meticulous solar system. Note Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Saturn's hexagonal storm, and the tiny Mars Rovers (Curiosity and Opportunity) on Mars!
These various activities took us ALL DAY and were actually a lot more work than I was anticipating, interspersed with nursing Gussie and trying to keep the house from falling apart! But on the upside, it did really feel like a Day Of Fun!
After we got all the activities cleaned up, we ended by making mini pizzas for dinner—Jupiter pizzas, of course!
It was actually pretty hard to keep a Jupiter-ish striped-cloud look after the pizza was cooked. Our nice lines of cheese all melted together! Luckily…they tasted great anyway. :)
This celebration was so much fun. While planning it, I found so many awesome ideas that I DIDN'T want to do (complicated/expensive/time-consuming)—elaborate parties like this—but I had a lot of fun browsing around anyway. And luckily, I was able to compile enough fairly simple things from those resources, that we were able to have a great time! You can find a lot of the ideas we didn't use on my Pinterest Board.
The children dressed up in Egyptian costumes and wore all their jewelry (well…the girls did, anyway). And here was our menu (complete with totally inauthentic "hieroglyphs" and lame "Papyrus" font):
We love hummus and I make it fairly often, but anytime I run out of tahini, it takes me a long time to get again since I often don't see it at the regular grocery store. So, I was happy to find this recipe for hummus without tahini. I think I just needed…permission, or approval, or something, to do this. Because it's perfectly fine without tahini! Really good, in fact! I put in some sesame oil to see if I could get some of that sesame taste back, and I think a little peanut butter might also be good…or even sesame seeds!
The "yogurt Thoth" is just a joke for the older boys because they always joked that the god Thoth sounded like someone trying to say "sauce" with a lisp. Really it was labneh (sort of like a really thick yogurt cheese?), which we love almost as much as hummus with our pita bread. Or naan. Yum!
And Pie of Horus! My own invention! Not the pie, just the name. I had been wanting to make a pink lemonade ice cream pie and this celebration night seemed just the time. I was very pleased with myself for calling it Pie of Horus, as it seemed to strike just the right note. Ha ha.
It really was a most lavish feast! And I even got gold plastic plates for the occasion. So fancy!
But the very BEST thing I did for this party was have Abraham (my 14-year-old) be in charge of a treasure hunt. I knew we should have some sort of hunting-for-ancient-treasure activity, and Abe is so great with that sort of thing! He made it so fun, with coded hieroglyphs and riddles in the clues, and the younger kids LOVED it.
Hunting for treasure!
Totally clueless. But thrilled.
Abe hid the treasure-filled sarcophagi in the shed.
Inside, I had wrapped up stuffed animals like mummies, in toilet paper. (This was quite fun to do. You have to be really gentle with your wrapping or it will tear, but I found it strangely satisfying.) I drew faces on the front of them, like you'd find on a sarcophagus.
Each person's favorite animal! Oh…you can't tell what they are? Ha ha. I should have had Sam draw them. Penguin, elephant, monkey, bear, pig, owl.
I had used a gold-foil tablecloth to wrap up these "sarcophagi" made from cardboard boxes, with appropriately dire warnings for those who disturbed the treasure. If you can't do this during your Ancient Egypt Unit, when CAN you do it? One of the boxes was also filled with gold chocolate coins, and other candy "jewels." The children thought it was all so exciting and fun!
And then we watched "Prince of Egypt" while we ate our pie. It was a great end to our Ancient Egypt Unit!
At the end of our unit, I decided we ought to use a few of the MANY cute ideas I'd seen online, and have an insect-themed celebration. It always seems like a lot of work to do these things, but since it's for school and the children like it SO much, I usually manage to muster up the motivation.
For decorations, we made these cute pleated butterflies. We worked on them together while we were watching some insect video (I think it was this one) earlier in the day, and they went really fast and took relatively little effort. You don't even really need the template, once you get the hang of it. And they looked really cute fluttering around on the windows. It would have been cute to put them on some sort of garland, but the way they were weighted made that seem tricky.
I would have also liked to make these butterfly balloons my friend Tia made for her daughter's birthday—but somehow I never got around to it!
We had a Honeybee-themed dinner to go along with one of our units a couple years ago, and we honestly could have just made all the exact same foods this time and been happy! (I think this Honey Panna Cotta was our favorite.) We decided we wanted to try some new things anyway, but you can find some more bee-specific ideas at this Pinterest board.
Here's what we ate at our celebration.
The caterpillar skewers were just fruit on a skewer. I drew in the eyes and antennae to give the general idea, ha ha. You could obviously make this better by using frosting or chocolate chips or what have you to make actual faces, but my kids mostly just wanted to eat theirs.
Here's how to make the little Babybel cheese ladybugs. We used a paring knife to trim the red wax into the right shape, and then an edible-ink pen to draw on spots. We also did some spots by punching out holes with a tiny straw, which I thought looked quite cute:
And then we stuck in toothpicks for legs. Seb also made probosces on some of his. :)
We made an Italian pasta salad using butterfly noodles, and then to go with that, we made these little mini corndogs which I liked because they were such a good model for a moth or butterfly. The hotdog is like the caterpillar; then you cover it with batter which is like the cocoon. When you deep-fry it, it hardens (again like the chysalis or the cocoon). Then to serve it, you stick some triangular chips into the side and it becomes a butterfly! :) Cute!
I ended up burning myself pretty severely while Abe and I were deep frying these, which rendered my hand useless for the rest of the evening, but luckily most everything was made by then and the kids could do the rest. I've never made corndogs from scratch (? well, not the hot dog part of course!) before, but it isn't hard. Just a quick stir-together corn batter and then the deep frying (use caution! Grabbing the wrong end of the tongs was my downfall). There's a recipe here.
These pretzel butterflies were really fun to make, although they didn't turn out nearly as smooth and nice as the ones we copied! We just melted white chocolate wafers (with a few drops of food coloring to color it), stirred, and poured into a squeeze bottle, then squeezed the melted chocolate into the spaces of the pretzels. They hardened quickly and they were really yummy. Here is another similar idea using fruit roll-ups that we considered.
We have liked Italian Sodas ever since we discovered them several years ago, so it was a simple matter to call them nectar sodas and add them to the menu. :) I wish we still had those rose and lavender syrups we made back then!
Abe took a picture of the final spread (as my hand was otherwise occupied in a bag of ice at that time) and it did look quite nice! I had ordered these edible crickets from Amazon in three flavors, so we ate those too. Everyone quite liked them, even Teddy, who kept yelling "KIKKET! More KIKKET!" with great enthusiasm. They don't really taste like anything except just the flavoring that's on them, and you get a nice little light crispness as you crunch into them. Not bad at all. And after dinner we watched "Valley of the Lost Ants" (though it could just as well have been "A Bug's Life") and we all considered it quite a satisfactory ending to this Insect Unit!
Many years ago we had our first "Bookfest" where we invited some friends over and gave presentations on our favorite books. It was so much fun, and we fully intended to make it an annual event, but like many of our best-laid plans, it ganged angly. :) On a Sunday at the end of our Book Unit, I suddenly took it into my head to try and have another one that very Tuesday, which happened to be relatively open for us. I texted a bunch of homeschooling friends and amazingly, lots of people could come! We quickly planned a little brunch menu, told people to bring their favorite books, and it was on!
