"Fungus, Styrofoam"

My first graders have been obsessed with the song, "Lean On" lately, and thankfully have parodied their own lyrics. In place of:

"Blow a kiss, fire a gun
We need someone to lean on"

They prefer:

"Fungus, Styrofoam, 
All I need is somebody to lean on"

I totally hear it!

They just finished a science unit on animal adaptations. We talked about behaviors, teeth and beaks, feet and fins, fur and feathers, and camouflage. I wanted to wrap up the unit with a creative art project so I found this awesome idea from Anne Farrell at Use Your Colored Pencils. I cut a stencil of a chameleon and then they chose a pattern they liked out of our scrap magazines. The assignment was to camouflage the chameleon into an environment where its body could be hidden. I thought they did pretty well!

The top left is a viperfish and the bottom is a display of purses. Afterward we talked about the different elements of art that each portrayed whether it be lines, pattern, value or variety. Super fun!

Dulce Domingos

Here at Last Palmas we've adopted a tradition of baking sweets on Sundays and naming the day, en Espanol, "Dulce Domingos". It's a bit of happiness to keep the "Sunday scaries" away. Last Friday night Jon hosted his famous Smoked BBQ Beef Sandwich night and we had a bunch of sandwich buns leftover. Naturally, a french toast casserole would be the best idea. So I found this Tiramisu recipe through pinterest from A Spicy Perspective. The great thing about baking is that we have our own fresh eggs from the hens, or "the girls" as Jon calls them.

Not only that, but for this particular recipe we have Nicaraguan coffee to add, from which Jon concocted a liquor to replace the bourbon, dark rum, or kahlua that was called for.

I substituted walnuts for almonds for the topping, added some semi-sweet chocolate chips, and it came out fantastically.

Unfortunately, we were so caught up dealing with well/water issues this morning that I completely forgot about the whipped cream topping! On a positive note, with the calories we saved we can feel less guilty about the Smoked BBQ Beef Nachos we'll be eating later!