3 December 2017

On Monday Becky drove around town and delivered the final projects her service elective class made.  One bag is full of fleece blankets for homeless teens, one bag has baby quilts for the hospital and three bags are full of Christmas gifts for low income senior citizens.  The service class was time consuming, but it was time well spent.

For the past 6 weeks, Helen and Gibson's class has been working on buddy projects with a younger class.  The theory was the older kids would teach the younger kids how to research a topic they are passionate about.  In reality the younger kids chose topics like video games, the teacher tweaked the projects to make them educational and then the older kids did all the work.  Gibson and his buddy, David, did a project on why too much screen time is bad for your brain.  David is probably looking glum in the photo because he doesn't care one bit that video games might hurt your brain.  He just wants to play his favorite game, Roblox.

Helen's buddy, Nahkya, chose drawing horses and then got bored with her topic in about one day.  Helen researched how expensive horses are and how a kid could pay for a horse.  Tuesday night the classes held an exhibition and invited parents and school district leaders to view the projects.  Helen got to answer questions all night about why she wants a horse (she doesn't want a horse) while Nahkya skipped around the room.  Helen had a clever name for her project, "Pricey Ponies." 

Abe created a stop motion video for his history class about the pilgrims arriving in America.  Our family room looked like this for most of the week.  Abe used the stack of books as a tripod for his iPad that he used to make the video.  Lily, the turtle, liked basking in the light Abe set up.  She was out of range of the camera so he left her alone.

For mutual this week the young men finished up another Eagle project, making record boards to hang in the high school gym.  This board shows the cross-country records.

This board shows the boys track and field records.  Another board lists the girls track and field.  The plethora of eagle projects in our ward lately has meant a lot of high quality service projects for the boys to do for activities.

There was no school on Friday and Helen asked if we could make sugar cookies and give them away to start our Light the World celebration.  Here's a link to the Light the World page which has wonderful videos, scriptures and ideas for celebrating Christmas.

Here's Helen's Christmas dalek.  Because nothing says Christmas like a creepy robot that says, "Exterminate!"

Helen's violin group played at the annual Festival of Trees celebration.  She is standing on the far left.

Here's a photo of Helen waiting to go on stage.  Many of the trees tried hard to be original this year, including the Trolls themed tree behind Helen which is unrecognizable as a Christmas tree.

 Becky's favorite tree was more traditional.  She loved how cozy this looked.

In fact, she liked it so well that after we got home, she rearranged our family room to move an armchair next to our tree.  This is now a favorite spot to sit.