75

Back at school today and brrr is it cold! Actually I should say that yesterday even though we had no school, she read Straight Hair, Curly Hair by Augusta Goldin to T and then they spent what seemed like a couple of hours testing her hair's strength by weighing various objects on the kitchen scale and suspending them from a single hair (T got to break them off of her head, which was a big thrill, apparently). They spent AGES on this--it always amazes me how long children can spend doing the same thing, over and over and over again. Anyway, this morning we got up and officially started school again. I read Pluto by Larry Dane Brimner, (an older book, which gave us the opportunity to talk about how scientific knowledge is always expanding and so you should always read science books as "what is known at that time"--Pluto is now a dwarf planet) and we read about the canceled Pluto-Kuiper Express mission and the replacement New Horizons mission on wikipedia. We also read a chapter from Owl At Home by Arnold Lobel, and North America by David Petersen. We started our study of American Indians with Aliki's Corn is Maize, E did her math, and then she answered questions about Pluto in her notebook. Finally, we read Caves and Caverns by Gail Gibbons and did a demonstration of limestone cave formation with sand, water and sugar.