Lunch Time

We have lunch from 11-12 every day.  That's correct.  The children walk home and eat lunch since we have no cafeteria.  It is also our time for prep so Mr. Finn and I eat at the school and then do a little school work until 12:00 when we ring the ancient school handbell.  It's straight out of the 50's. Well, the other day we heard a commotion out on the playground.  The kids often scarf their food down in ten minutes and run back to school so they can play for a while.  I looked out the window and this sight greeted me.  They were all groaning and screaming hysterically as each new kid descended the slide to cram into their backs.  Hilarious.

Woods Capture the Flag

Firemen

Can you even stand how cute this is? I'm dying, I tell ya, from the cuteness.
The older boys I'm not allowed to call cute. They are manly men....all business, very nonchalant about being fully decked out in official Frenchboro Fire Department gear.
We did pause in our work to admire the view from our new picnic tables, though!
Cadin as "pump man". Mr. Finn had been figuring out how all the equipment works so he could teach all the kids. It was so awesome seeing them learning the ins and outs of the special wrenches, hoses, pumps, etc.
It was teamwork all the way. You ready for the water? Thumbs up!

Everybody got a shot at the helm.
It's always good to have a backup man as the water pressure really kicks.

Thanks to Becky for getting all the gear ready and for letting us use it. What a great afternoon!

Demo Work

Mr. Finn and I have lots of demolition work that needs to be done over in our house in Cherryfield. Maybe I'll hire these guys. Cadin might have bowed out after his close encounter with the crow bar, but the rest of these kids were loving taking apart the tables.

Eastern Beach Bound

Since the picnic tables were finished we had to load them down to Eastern Beach to drop them off. We had also arranged to burn the old tables that are falling apart, and why don't we throw the wetu in there, while we're at it? Burning Down the House would be the theme music for the day.


Those suckers are Heavy!

Voila!

Picnic tables? Fini! All that was left to do was sign them and take them down to Eastern Beach.





Taaaa Daaaa!
The kids did such a wonderful job on these tables. We're sure folks will be enjoying them for many years to come.

Blind Contour

We haven't done work in our sketchpads for a while, so we broke them out and did a refresher on blind contour drawing. If you've never read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, you should as it helps boost your artistic ability no matter where you start. One of the wonderful "assignments" is to do blind contour of your hand. The idea is that we have sort of an archetypal idea of what things look like, say "a house" or "a car" and we learn to draw in a rote sort of way using the more lingual side of our brains instead of the more creative side that doesn't worry about naming things, but seeing them as they truly are: lines, shapes, shadows, colors, etc. A quick way to get into the right brain is to do blind contour. You don't look at the drawing at all, you look at the object you are drawing and draw every single detail you can see. It doesn't matter that it doesn't "look" like the object when you are finished, it's the concentration and seeing part that you tap into that is powerful. In fact, every time I do these sorts of exercises with the kids, they fall completely silent. After they finish with the blind contour, their next drawing will be much more accurate and detailed, so we might do a potted plant or a lacrosse stick on the table to try our hand at next. I've been really impressed with the changes I've seen in their art since we came four years ago. Hopefully they'll all enjoy painting, sculpting and drawing their whole lives.