A Belated Congratulations on your Graduation, Amanda!

So, I have to take a minute to brag about my super smart little sister who just graduated this past weekend! Congratulations! I'm so excited for her to start high school next year-- Amanda, it's some of the most fun times at school you will ever have.
So following tradition, the graduates' parents make a memory board with pictures of their life thus far. Seeing as my parents have very little time and creativeness in the realm of scrapbooking and sorts, my mom employed me to make this memory board.

First, I started with a foam poster board, crazy cut scissors, stencils, and a papercutter.

Then I took a trip to Hobby Lobby to buy mounting squares, decorative paper, Big Letter stickers, little letter stickers and some other decorative stickers.

Big Letter Stickers

Little letter stickers

In terms of paper, I bought four different patterns. First, I picked out the base pattern and picked up four sheets of that. Then using the colors of the base pattern, I selected three different acsent papers (one of each pattern).

Then, when I got home, I started going through pictures. I used probably a little more than 30 pictures total. I kind of picked a couple from the different ages.

Baby Pictures, etc.

 So First I started by cutting the background paper in half and spacing it out in rows on the foam board.

Then I added the name in bubble letters, staggering the letters.

On either side of her name I added a school picture -- one from kindergarten and one from eighth grade and I used some acsent letter to label the grades.

I cut some of the pictures into different shapes like ovals and rectangles with rounded edges. Then I mounted some, using my wonderous mounting squares on some of the acsent paper.

I started laying everything out on the board before I officially mounted it down.

I picked some pictures to be higher than others with my thicker mounting squares.

Some of the pictures I added words to in the acsent letters, and by some I added flowery stickers.

6 feet and 9 inches of mounting tape later (which is a lot considering that each mounting square is a little more than a centimeter in length) I came up with the finished product.

Here's my memory board that I did approximately 3 years before as another example of what one could look like.

Enjoy!

Answers to Quads' T-Shirts!

So I think it's finally time to give the answers to the questions posed on the back of the quads' t-shirts.
1) Cameron must read 9 pages per day
2) Reid ran 477 km. And if you're an over-achiever, Cam ran 159 km.
3) Brady has 330 yellow trucks. And if you're an over-achiever, he has 165 blue trucks
4) Trey traveled 4 miles.
Hope everyone did well! Happy Thursday!

May Make-Up

So when I got home today, I had planned on getting the mail since it was such a nice day outside, but since my grandparents are here visiting for my sister's graduation, my grandma had already gotten it. Theere was some magazine my mom gets, and I looked through it, and I saw how they advertised make-up. It wasn't near as cool as the make-up ads I had in my Seventeen-Magazine though. They always do a really cool job, but the May edition with the use of flowers was really neat. There cutest ones were for soft colored spring nail polish, but of course I also had to cut out the coral colored lip stick.





Nail Polish:
Orly Nail Laquer in Snowcone $8 at orlybeauty.com

Nail Polish:
Revlon Top Speed Fast Dry Nail Enamel
in Jaded $6, drugstores

 


And of course the coral:
Lip Stick:
Revlon Matte Lipstick
in Smoked Peach $8, drugstores

 Get started on your spring look, with these make-up ideas. Happy Wednesday!

Tea Time

After another busy week (I literally stayed after school until at least 5 everyday, some days being more like 9), here we are again. Last Monday, was the Junior Senior Tea, where the juniors girls host the senior ladies and their moms for the last big event between the classes. Junior girls make their senior date a tea cup to remember the event, so I thought I'd show you how I decorated mine.

I started with the tea cup (obviously) and paint pens. You also can use ribbons and other decorative things, just remember it's got to stick to a ceramic cup.

First, I put the event and the year on the tea cup with a little decoration to get me started.

Then, because I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to do the other side of the cup, I did the inner rim with an Irish blessing, "The Lord Bless You and Keep You" because it's the song we sing in choir to send the seniors away with, and since my senior and I are both in choir I thought it had special meaning. 

While I was working on the inside of the cup, I went ahead and put a flower on the bottom for decorative flair. It got some ideas going for the rest of the tea cup.

With the flowery, bubbly theme, I typed in my senior's name in word, changed the font to something fun and curly, and transcribed the words on the screen to the cup.

Finally, I filled in the white areas with little flowers and added a grass edge around the bottom.



Once it all dried, I filled the tea cup with star bursts. On the day of the tea I wrapped it all in tissue paper so it wouldn't break at school, and put it in a cute gift bag. She loved it!

Happy decorating, and now as my year starts to slow (slowly slowing down...) I'll try to give you awesome ideas more often. Happy Monday!

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to everybody, especially all you mothers out there. I had a fantastic day with my mom, going to the doctor's for my sinus problem. :)
I did though, help her make a class example of this cook book her third graders made for their moms.

The kids were assigned to copy a family recipe onto this paper. Then the three third grade teachers put all the recipes together, and had copies made.

The kids got to decorate the covers, which started as blank printer paper. Since Eat, Pray, Love is a pretty popular book right now, the teachers made a little spin on it, calling the cookbooks, Eat, Play, Learn. Here's my title.

Then the kids could decorate them however they thought their mom would like it. I drew a picture of my mom and me. 

After hole punching all the pages and sticking brads in the holes to hold the cook book together, you have a finished product.

Enjoy making good recipes with your mom and this Mother's Day cook book. I'm pretty sure it'll never happen in my house, since my mom rarely cooks, but it's the thought that counts. Happy Mother's Day!

Busy and Babysitting

Okay, sorry it has been like a week, but my life has been totally crazy with school among other things... and I have got this miserable cold that I think I picked up last week baby sitting...
Speaking of which, Last weekend I went to babysit my four favorite kiddos, The Gerwer Quads. I walked in and the little monkey of the family, Reid was just sitting there motionless, so I knew something was up. Apparently by Monday, they were all down for the count. But, I think I got my sniffles and such from their Aunt Amy, who I was helping babysit with.
Anyways, the last time I had gone over, I gave the kids these little shirts I had decorated. They were a little big, but super cute.

My mom got these free t-shirts from Raytheon, and they said Math Moves You on the front.

Since the kids' Grammy and Aunt Amy are both Math teachers, I took four little t-shirts to give to the kids. Just to give them some extra flair, I put a word problem on the back of each shirt, personalized for each kid.

See if you can answer all these word problems. Answers will be posted on a future blog post.

Parent Functions

From the title, you may be thinking, the function of my parents. No. The social functions my parents attend? A definite no, because they don't really have any to go to. I'm talking about Pre-calculus Parent Functions, because I just got my project back with a 105 for my test grade!! This may seem like kind of a lame subject for a post, but I like to suggest things to help you, and if you are taking pre-calculus/calculus, plan to take calculus, or work with pre-calculus/calculus, this may just be the thing for you.

Get a note card ring to start, and I decorated mine for extra credit, but mainly just make sure you label what it is. (Sorry it's sideways; I'm still trying to figure out blog spot and its picture settings)


Then skip the first lined page (I had to put my name there anyways) and on the first white page draw your first graph (list of functions we used below). This is my tangent graph, which wasn't my first graph, but looks really cool, even if it is sideways on here. I also put spiffy graph down (it's like a sticker of graph paper), but you don't have to do it, or you could glue/tape some graph paper in if you really wanted to.

On the lined page opposite your graph, write the information about the function. We included the equation for the parent function, the domain, the range, roots, symmetry (x-axis, y-axis, origin, or none), even/odd/neither, the period if it had one, one to one?, and points of discontinuity.

So in the end you get all your information on a parent function in one glance.



Absolute Value Function

Here's a list of the parent functions we were to provide info and graphs on:
f(x)=x
f(x)=x^2 quadratic function
f(x)=x^3 cubic function
f(x)=|x| absolute value function
f(x)= [x] greatest integer function
f(x)=sinx
f(x)=cosx
f(x)=tanx
f(x)=2^x
f(x)=log2x (log of x base 2)
f(x)=1/x
f(x)=1/(x^2)
f(x)=√(x) square root function
f(x)= √(a^2 -- x^2) semi-circle function

For extra credit, and for extra help later on, I included a bunch of extra things, like transformations of graphs, trig identities, formulas, laws, etc.

Reflections in the Transformation of Graphs

 Because this is on parent functions, all other functions you will encounter are based off of these, so this book should really help. Have fun, and Happy Wednesday!