Bright Ideas

I got tired of reminding the kids over and over about their different chores, so now we have a jar with marbles in it. Each marble is worth a certain amount of money. For each thing they don't do a marble is taken out- or more, depending on the infraction. They get whatever is left over at the end of the week. We believe in repentance marbles, so if they do something extra on their own then they get one back. This has caused all kinds of help to come out of the woodwork. I have had people sweeping the floors and running down the stairs to set the table as fast as they can. To help them remember exactly what their chores are, we are making these chore boards. I saw the idea from Liz H. at the Pink Christmas website. Of course ours aren't quite as cute. I couldn't find nice big boards like she had. Besides that, boys don't do cute! The boards will have hooks in them and then I will modpog some coordinating paper onto those wood swatches you can get at Home Depot and then put on them what their chores are and hang them on the hooks.

Emma found this idea to make fish out of water bottles in an American Girl magazine. The boys and her had a lot of fun making them.

I have found this is a good way to store some of my ribbon. I string them on the rod in my craft closet. It is sort of a curtian of ribbon. I am also going to hang up two curtain rods in my guest room that I will put spools of ribbon on. It will be a wall decoration also!

Here are my last two sets of cards for card club. The one card says, "Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but... she did it backwards and in high heels." The other one is a mother's day card and someone asked me how I made the ruffled cardstock at the bottom and I gave a general answer that really didn't say anything. Basically, you get a piece of cardstock that is twice as long as the card you are putting it on, then you score it at alternating intervals. The one I saw, said at 1 inch and 1/2 inch, but that was too big of a ruffle for these cards so I did mine at 1/2 and 1/4. Then you fold. Looking at the first set of scores, you fold the farthest one from the end so that the right sides are together, then you fold it out again on the one closer to the end. On the next set of scores, you do it exactly opposite. Continue on down the line. If you need pictures with this quick tutorial, let me know and I will take some.

These are for Teacher Appreciation. I got some of the ideas from Executive Homemaker. Some of them, I came up with on my own. Each item is tied with a tag that says something like: You are Extra, Extra, Extra special on three packs of gum. Thank you for quenching our children's thirst for knowledge on the pack of Crytal light. You are out of this world on a Milky Way. You are Souper on a can of soup.Thank you for your illuminating smile on a smelly candle. We give you top marks on a book mark. You are the apple of our eye on the apple. I got the baskets at Ikea and figured they could use them to put all kinds of things in at school. I took all afternoon to make them last week, because I thought I had missed the entire week of Teacher Appreciation week. I had worked the night before and hadn't gotten a nap, so I was working on 5 hours of sleep. I didn't get a rest and had to work that night also. I made it, without too many problems, thank goodness, but Emma informed me that Teacher Appreciation is this coming week, not last week. Bummer!

For Sharing Time today, I talked about the need for family units and how God created it like his, because it was the best way to get back to him. I had them try and pick up a book with just their fingers and not their thumbs and see how well they did. Then we talked about our hand being like the members of a family : We need a father, Mother, Children, Extended family and the Godhead to make a successful family. I did comment that this was the ideal and that there are lots of families out the there that are not this ideal and that they still worked, just like picking up the book. Many of them were able to do it, but it wasn't as easy. Then we talked about what each member of the family did. What do mother's do? What do father's do? In Senior Primary we almost had a health lesson going when someone mentioned that Mother's have babies and then Sam said, "yes, but they can't have babies without the Dad's. Dad's help make the babies. Then another person piped up to introduce the whole sperm thing. I had to quelch that health lesson right then and there. Afterwards, I had a few people come up and we talked about traditions in their families and then I asked them why we had traditions- to remember! Remember our families and the love they have for us. Father in Heaven sent us here with the tradition of Families like he has, with prayer and scriptures and the sacrament all to remember his love for us. Finally we made these houses out of paper and had the Junior primary draw pictures of their family inside the doors and the senior primary write some traditions inside. It went really well! Hope you all had a bright idea week as well!