School Program 2013- Outer Space

This year's school program was a lot of fun to work on.  The children added music with instruments which was a great addition.  It will now be fun to see how they improve with their instruments each year.  The theme for this year was Outer Space.  We wanted to recreate the solar system for our guests and travel to each planet.  Upon arriving, Josiah gave each of our guests a gold star badge that they had to wear in order to enter our space shuttle. 

Then when they entered the house, the girls met them and checked to make sure they had their badge on.  They were then escorted to the space shuttle (home school room) where it was set up with chairs, planets, and a stage area all under black light.

All of the guests were loaded on our space shuttle.  Let the show begin!  Josiah started out with our introduction.  He is always so shy about talking infront of people, so I gave him this job to help boost his courage.  He did great!  He informed everybody that they needed to buckle their seat belt, put on their helmets, and stay on the space ship at all times or something bad could happen.  :)  He also passed out hand fans since our first stop was going to be the sun.  We didn't want people getting too hot.

We made our fans just out of white paper which really stood out in the black light.  It was fun for everyone to see the colors really pop on clothes, on the fans, and then throughout the program.

First stop is the sun!

Then onto the other planets.

Sorry the pictures aren't great quality.  The black light was a little tricky to take with.  The children made their planet boards.  Some were salt dough, tissue paper, and some were just painted.  They did a great job making them and having fun with different art styles.  As they held up their board they shared information about that planet.  Just a handful of facts and then onto the next planet.

After our travel through space, the children shared Scripture they had memorized that talked about the sun, moon, stars, earth, etc.  Next was the music.  Jonathon played his guitar while the children sang a song called Praise the Lord from the Heavens.  They did great and Benaiah went up there and stood with them.  I tried to get him to memorize some Scripture to have a part in the program, but he is a one of a kind little guy and I decided it would be easier to just not give him a part and keep his siilyness out of it.  Hopefully next year he can have a purposeful part, because he did end up joining in this year.  It was good and controlled though.  : )

Onto the instruments!

Josiah played Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on his guitar and did a fabulous job!

Diella also played Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on the ukulele, but she sang along while playing.  It took some encouragement for her to agree to sing along.  But she did a wonderful job and sounded great!

Alegra played the ukulele also, and played Steal My Show.  She does such a great job playing and singing.  She's been blessed with a gift.  We are excited to see where the Father takes her talents. 

After the program we had some food.  The food was all named after space things.  We had fun thinking of foods to go along with our theme.  We had Venus Veggies, Asteroids (meatballs), Meteorites (grapes), Sun Oranges, Crescent Moon chicken salad sandwiches, Milky Way candy bars, Moon Pies (oatmeal cream cookies), Star shaped cookies, Moon Phase Cookies (dipped oreos decorated like the different phases of the moon), and Shooting Star Lemon Pudding Shooters.  And Rocket Fuel to drink.  It was all so delicious!

 

Onto our guest pictures.  We have always made sure that we get a picture of all of our guests with the children.  It's a fun way to end the day.

Grandpa Ron, Grandma Linda, Aunt Mandi and the children.

Grandpa Dan and Grandma Deborah and the children.

Phil, Casie and their children and all of our children.

                          

Silly picture!

And then our great, little family!  The many stages of getting a decent picture...if we even did. : )

And I forgot to mention that the children decorated their shirts for the program.  We found some fabric paint and got our solar system juices flowing to create some pretty cool space shirts.  Their individual likes really showed in how they decorated their shirts.  And of course I made Saphira's.  We decided that she is our shining star, so we had to give her one big star on her shirt. 

My parents always bring something along to surprise the children.  This year they created this super fun photo prop.  It was a hamburger space ship that glowed in the dark.  Below they are trying it out with our good friends the Troyers. 



How cool does that look in our planetarium room?  We got some good pictures with it.



We had to play with the lighting a little so we could see the faces in it.  I think we are going to see if we can arrange the boy's room so this will fit.  It would make a really cool night light for them.

And then some extra fun with the black light.  I had wanted to find a black light special for this party but didn't really want to buy one.  After Grandpa Murphy passed away, we were going through his basement and Jonathon found one in a box.  And the bulbs were still good.  I was so excited to have it and have it be a contribution from Grandpa since he couldn't join us this year.  Was a special blessing to have it be a part of our show.  The children thought it was so neat how it lit colors up.  And especially how it made teeth look.  What fun with friends!

For party favors we made these rocket ships filled with candy.  They were fun and easy for the children and were a nice gift to send our guests home with. 

Another school year over!   Thankful for the summer!  Time to teach them outdoor things like gardening, mowing, building forts in the woods, wildflower identification, uses for herbs, and hopefully we'll be getting baby chicks in the next couple days to teach them about that.  They are due tomorrow, so we'll see if we had a faithful mama hen or not.  

Other than the typical every day stuff that our children learn just by living, we are hoping to spend our summer in the garden a lot.  We have a rather large space at the farm that we are wanting to get mulched, so we will be working on that throughout the summer.  Looking forward to it really!  We have also been considering what we should do with the extra land we have here.  Right now we are thinking about planting a bunch of blueberry bushes to be able to sell organic blueberries.  That will happen over a few years time of planting and letting the bushes have time to produce, but that is something we are thinking about and trying to figure out.  We certainly won't be using the whole field, but even a small portion of it will hold many blueberry bushes.  We also have plans to go to the SouthBend Zoo with Christi's parents, several Celebrations planned, and hopefully some spur of the moment day trips to other zoos, parks or beaches.  We'll see.  We don't have too much on the calendar for the summer, so we'll see how our days get filled up.

We hope you all have a fabulous summer!  I'm sure you'll be seeing our summer unfold as the days go by.  Hoping it goes slowly.  : )