Saturday, January 21, 2017

Noah's Ark Out of Cardboard Step-by-Step

This post contains affiliate links to the materials I actually use for homeschooling. I hope you find them helpful. Thank you for your support!


New recipes on the horizon:


Obviously, the lentil stew is for our final story of our Old Testament II Block! I am choosing this as our stopping point because I always get Jacob and Joseph messed up and I think it's easier to have some time pass before the next chunk of stories. Obviously, not everyone will stop here. :-)

We worked HARD to make a Noah's Ark out of corrugated cardboard and I wanted to share all of the pictures of this awesome project here! We used Noah's Ark in Paper and Card by Charlotte Gerlings for the Ark template. It's printed in graph paper on a 1/4 inch = 1 inch scale. Happily, we have a huge (36 inch long) pad of one inch graph paper, so we copied the patterns square by square, cut them out, lay them on large pieces of corrugated cardboard (thank you, Weber grill people), cut them out with a box cutter, and proceeded to assemble. We used a stapler to staple the sides together. The decks were wedged in and stayed in place on their own. The roof was made of a white box and so we could paint it to look like tiles. The house was covered in 12 x 12 sheets of cork from the craft store. The Ark was covered in 12 x 12 sheets of scrapbook paper in a "weathered barn siding" print and looked like it was filled with hay from "hay stack" print paper covering the lower deck. We painted the waves blue and painted the door on the house brown. I covered a coffee table and an end table with a long beautiful mottled silk that could look like grass or waves depending on what you wanted (thank you, BeneathTheRowanTree) and we made a parade of animals two-by-two. Modeling beeswax snakes, wool sheep, etc. Then we hung up a long rainbow silk over the Ark. We placed the tables in front of the "stained glass window" from our Middle Ages block and at first I thought I would have to take the stained glass window display down, but actually now it looks like the Saint in the design is God looking down on the wickedness below and ordering the flood. A Happy Homeschooling Co-Incidence!!!


Becca's latest addition: the snails

and you can see Zac was thoughtfully feeding some dried pinto beans
to the beeswax snakes -- he loves the Ark and the animals!



So there you have it!

This weekend we have about a million things going on... a trip to the accountant (not much fun)... a baby shower (a lot more fun)... the Women's March here in town... a Science lecture on the global importance of fresh water (this will serve as the bridge into our Geology Main Lesson)... teaching a Creativity Workshop... my horseback riding lesson... a women's support group I'm going to for the first time...

Whew! Somewhere in all of this I'm going to find time for my new hobby, reading Momma Skyla's entire blog in reverse chronological order. I have never in my life read someone's entire blog but I just love this woman! She's an eclectic homeschooler so some things are Waldorf and some are not, but she has some cool ideas I've never heard of before (like showing a distractible child how to use a little bell as an auditory cue, helping him/her learn to self-regulate) and I'm having fun pinning things to Pinterest.

And I have to say. Something about watching someone's kids get younger and younger, instead of older and older, makes you realize just how fast they change. It's a pretty profound journey, and it is making me very sentimental. And the way she writes about her family and her kids, and how much she just flat out adores them, has helped me to take more time to step back and look at my four little and not-so-little ones in a really appreciative way. I am loving reading this blog. And so that's my fun this weekend!

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