Celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving

This afternoon we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving in Maddison's class.  Another Mum and I were on the schedule to tell the kids about what it was all about, do a craft with them and provide snacks.  I have found some awesome things on Pinterest lately, like this paperbag turkey (filled with popcorn) (from here).

Chocolate cake looking like a pumpkin (from here).

 And a cool handprint turkey (from here).

So yesterday afternoon I got to work baking the cakes ... I had left over mixture so had some extra's ... but they didn't turn out that flash!

and one of the bundt cake cracked on me :-(  Thankfully I was able to salvage it.

In the evening I worked on the paper bag turkey.  I couldn't find plain brown grocery bags, so I asked for some paper bags at a coffee shop one day when I was getting a drink.  But do you know how difficult it is to turn a paper bag inside out without tearing it?  Nigh on impossible!  It wasn't really long enough either.  So I sat and looked at the bags and thought about what else I could use that I already had and remembered I had some large brown envelopes and also some letter sized envelopes.  I decided to make them work!  I folded and hot glued in the bottom corners.

So far so good!

Yay for Martha Stewart fringe scissors that made cutting the white paper so easy!

Drumsticks done and stuffed with coffee shop bags that were too big.  :-)

This morning once the kids were all at school I popped the pop corn and got to work on shaping the rest of the turkey.

Then the problems started!  I had several rips that just weren't possible to hide.

I nearly felt like taking my turkey like this!

Finally though (3 envelopes later) I got it working and filled it with popcorn.

Hot glued up it's "bottom", glued on it's drums and ta-dah, all finished.

Next up was assembling and icing the cake.  I put the cracked one on the bottom and the good one on the top.  Mixed up my icing and poured away.  I cut the leaves using Tim Holtz's tattered leaves die.

The stem of the pumpkin was an icecream cone covered in green icing.

Thanksgiving feast ready to go in class.

"Carving" the turkey!

Kids were really excited to find it was popcorn inside heheee

Of course it didn't last long!

And by 3pm the cake looked like this.  I left it for the teachers :-)

The craft was fun too.  Here's my sample.

And Maddison's. (I think the turkeys should have their legs swapped hehee)

I laughed when I saw she had written she was thankful for turkey!  So typical of her to be thinking of food hehee

Thanks for visiting.

School Trip to KL Butterfly Park

On Friday morning last week I went with Aaron and his class to the KL Butterfly Park.  (I was glad the bus trip was only half an hour because the NOISE of 40 kids on the bus was incredible!!!)

Big camera and little camera ready to go :-)

We went with another Grade 2 class and they started in the butterfly park and we started in the museum.  The kids had a sheet to fill out, answering various questions and drawing pictures as they went around. Here's a couple of pics Aaron took.  So interesting seeing their perspective of things (at half our height!).  :-)

 These were green frog beetles.

Here's a close up picture I took.  They were such an amazing colour and so shiny!  They were enjoying some fresh cut pineapple.

 Aaron taking a picture of his favourite butterfly :-)

 Again, the colours were amazing.

 I looked after these two young men.  :-)

After we finished going around the museum we had a snack and then headed into the park.

There were questions at the start of the sheet to count how many different species of butterfly's they saw, how many were flying and how many were sitting!  Well ... you can imagine the cheating that was going on heheee (had to have the highest number you know!)  ;-)

 A lot of them had damaged wings.

 There were also some tanks that had snapping turtles, bull frogs, fish, lizards, etc.

 Checking out all the different chrysalis'.

 There were several feeding stations around the park.  Some had flowers like these hibiscus.

Others had fruit like this one.  From a distance I thought this station was covered in leaves!

But when I go closer I saw they were actually butterfly's.

One flew off and landed on Aaron's hat.

They might not look much from the outside, but inside they had such beautiful colours (this one had damaged wings too).

As we were walking out we spied this dragonfly.

Fun trip :-)  Sure was interesting going with a bunch of 7-8 year olds rather than on my own!  heheheee

Thanks for visiting.  I will be back hopefully in the next day or so with some more updates.  I am off to Maddison's class this afternoon to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving with them :-)  (I have cake to decorate and a paperbag turkey to stuff with popcorn so I better get going!)  :-)

Teeny Tiny Mini Albums

Excuse the photo overload ... but I promised the lovely ladies in my teeny tiny mini album class at Scrap-n-Crop on Saturday that I would post some pictures of my albums I've made.

The first one was for Maddison ... it included pictures of her sleeping from birth to age 4 and a half.

 I want to do some journalling on the blank page ... just haven't got there yet!

 And the tags.

The second album was for Aaron with pics of his Birthday Cakes from 1 through to 7.

 Same goes here ... a page for me to journal!!

 Only two tags in this mini (due to a minor cutting error hehee ... was fixable, just meant I couldn't put a tag in that spot!).

 And the reverse of the tags.

I made one to include pics of family photos we had taken when we were in New Zealand.

 I can only show you one page on the inside :-)

I've also made one for Samuel with some pics of his first 2 swim lessons, but I haven't completed the cover.  When I have done that I will blog some pics.

Thanks for visiting.