So on Parents' Night, your kid has a 45-minute work period (as opposed to the ordinary 2-ish hours) in which to show you their favorite works, and then we circle up (or, as the teacher says, "form the ellipse") and do some singing.
This is chalk work. It's a free-draw with little artist's chalks on paper, and Will says, "Momma, this is my most favorite work!"
We spent a long time on this one--I'm all, "Ooh, an art project!" You choose an animal silhouette to stencil with your choice of colored pencil onto a little piece of paper, and you can color your animal. Then you look for the card that has your animal on it, and you copy the name of that animal, written in lower-case letters, onto your paper. When you have several animals done, you can put a piece of wallpaper sample on top, staple them all into a book, and stamp the date on the back.
I kept spreading all my stuff all over the table, and Will kept cleaning up after me, gently insisting, "It's important to keep a clear work area, Momma." Huh.All the materials needed for your work are stored together on a tray, which you put back on the shelf where it goes.
In this numbers work, which is done on the floor and requires the laying out of a work mat, you put the big wooden numbers in order, then put the felt numbers on top of the wooden numbers, then arrange the appropriate number of wooden blocks in front of each number. As soon as Will and Syd had finished laying down the last wooden block, I started to say, "Wow, that's--", but Will was already starting to put everything away again.
This is a seasonal work, in which you basically arrange everything in numerical order again and lay out the appropriate number labels.
This is the counting penguins work. There are a lot of them, and the number changes slightly every day--Willow claims this is due to magic.
This is the handwriting work, done on a little desk that you can get from under a shelf and put on the carpet instead of a work mat. This work, the stencils work, and the chalk work are three that Willow brings home to us almost every day.
Then the teacher rang the bell for clean-up time and played classical music at us until we'd finished and circled up on the ellipse. We sang the community song, which requires hand-holding, and then we played the "Little Bird" game. Each age group had a turn, so first the kindergartners stood up in a circle, held hands, and raised their hands high to be the windows. Then, while the teacher and I lustily sang (I have this sort of savant-thing in that I know every song, ever) "Little bird, little bird, come through my window," etc., the middle groupers, who were the birds, ran in and out of the circle. Ultimate joy ensued.
The school that I went to as a kid, it sucked.
P.S. I have a tutorial for my denim buntings up on Crafting a Green World today.
The best part for me? This is all stash!
I used a well-fitting fleece romper of Will's as a template to create a new romper pattern with this black-and-white stretch jersey that a friend gave me a while ago. The zipper is from some I bought at a garage sale for about a nickel a piece this summer. 
The zebra's mane is cut from a boa that lives in the kids' dress-up bin; unfortunately, it doesn't sit very straight when the hood is being worn, but whatever.
--while finishing up Joan of Arcadia Season 2 on DVD (Adam Rove, to think how much I loved you, and you are awful! An awful person!); I washed another gazillion pounds of this--
--while making beer bread savory muffins with dill and two cheeses with the baby--
--(along with the dinner I cooked out of cabbage, potato, onion and nutritional yeast, it was delicious--when I do have to cook, I tend to just throw cheese or veganaise or nutritional yeast at my food until it tastes good); and Matt, much more slowly than I think he needed to, built--
--the most awesomest bookshelves in the known universe: 
I upcycled pages for this banner from an old and really boring encyclopedia--I first tried out using glossy magazine pages, but they were pretty slippery and I dislike fiddly activities.
--I have this habit of looking for crafty children's books. Here's what I found this morning:
--and then drop to her doom--
--over and over and OVER again, in the afternoon we chilled down in the playroom.
--if by industrious you mean that they tore up a bunch of my scrapbook paper and then drew on it and then taped it to the wall with the carpet tape that Matt was supposed to use to tape down the flooring four MONTHS ago and then fought over the same square inch of a six-foot-long roll of butcher paper.
We frolicked outdoors in the autumn chill.
From my digital collection of artwork that depicts breastfeeding!
WordArt of the girls' names, and some of their own original artwork!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer tats, and tats from my own original photography!
Oh, and the tattoos with my cell number in case the girls get lost in a crowd:
Gangsta, right?
Then, by popular demand, I created this adult-sized T-shirt transfer for a few good friends:
Oh, dear--have you lost all respect for me now? Mind you, I can see that this is a problem. I mean, this is supposed to be my creative sanctuary, my workspace, my mental clearinghouse, and my mental clearinghouse looks like...THIS? So yeah, I dig to the bottom of my big blue bin of fabric, dumping stuff out on the floor so I can see better, and when I find what I need I don't exactly put every piece of fabric back in the bin. The girls spend the morning coloring on construction paper and don't exactly put every piece of paper away when they're finished. Will didn't put her abacus back on its shelf after doing some math work. The grocery bag is full of paper for the recycling bin. That big grey backpack is my teaching stuff. Some of the other stuff is just...stuff.
We did not go to the wonderlab for storytime, we've not gone to play in the leaves or over to the park, we've not made beer bread or peanut butter cookies. Hell, the girls aren't even dressed. But the study's a little cleaner, especially the closet and the bookshelf, which you can't see, and the lockers, and the cubbies on the left, which I want to move out of the room completely.
2:00 pm. As I uncover additional layers of stuff, I'm having to vacuum periodically, now. The fabric from the big blue bin is now stacked neatly in the lockers where it's supposed to go, the stuff from the lockers has been moved to the closet where it's supposed to go, I've reclaimed an entire level of the bookshelf from toys to books, and gotten rid of a LOT of recycled fabric that instead needed to be dishrags or just somebody else's fabric, frankly. What I have not done is read a single book to a single kid today, encourage anyone to eat a vegetable, wash anyone's hair, or, my personal favorite activity, MAKE anything today.
