Much Math

ALL A BOARD:  One of the ongoing volunteer art projects we've been involved in for a year plus is designing, making and installing a bulletin board that features students' birthdays once a month.

Even though we're not officially enrolled at a local learning center any more, we volunteered to take on the bulletin board for September.

We had been wanting to do a Pac Man-themed one for awhile. This month, we finally made that happen.

It's a great learning project because it involves lots of planning, math, and artistic elements. This month, the first step was scaling it all to fit the 47-by-47 inch bulletin board.

CJ and I pieced the black background together. Annabelle used the amazing Cricut to produce all of the pixelated ghosts and Pac Men.

We used blue painter's tape to make the maze lines. That took a lot of measuring and careful planning, so that things would match up.

 We laid pennies out on the background to figure out placement of the pellets Pac Man eats.

Then we picked up the pennies and applied round stickers in their place.

Lastly, we took it to school and hung it in the entryway. We were all really pleased with how it turned out.

FYI, the students' birthdays are written on the ghosts. I blurred them out for this blog post.

PUT TO THE TEST: This morning, we three (CJ, Annabelle and I) toiled toward a test. A  pretest, quiz and then the UNIT TEST (insert dramatic music here). This Khan Academy algebra unit featuring graphing lines, computing slopes and stuff seems to have lasted forever and a day.

There were tense moments and a couple of tears (not naming names), but in the end, a couple of us got perfect scores and the other one had a solid B. Yay, us.

We celebrated by having ice cream for lunch (well, at least just Bee and CeeJ). Beings that it's August 31, Baskin-Robbins had a scoop sale ($1.50 per). It was a sweet treat after hard work.