83

This is E's recipe for "A really yummy drink!" that she wanted to make first thing this morning. So I got down the things she couldn't reach and let her at it. Frankly, the "Green Shuger" made it look a bit ghastly, but she was pleased as punch and she and T drank it down happily. Which gave me some time to make chocolate pancakes without starving children pestering me, so she can make her "yummy drink" any time she likes for all of me!

Since it's Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday today, we started out with David A. Adler's A Picture Book of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Martin's Big Words, by Doreen Rappaport. Then T wanted me to read The Amazing Animal Alphabet Book by Roger and Mariko Chouinard. This is a fabulous, super-fun book. It's out of print, but in a just world everyone would have at least one copy. This is my favorite page:



I wish I had a poster of it. This is another good one:


Don't even get me started on the "Kangaroos kissing in kayaks" and the "Frog feeling forlorn". The whole thing is brilliant.

After that fun interlude, we read The Warrior Maiden: A Hopi Legend by Ellen Schecter, and Air is All Around You by Franklyn M. Branley. Then E did her math. After lunch we did a bunch of fun air experiments from 101 Great Science Experiments by Neil Ardley, and E did a Draw Write Now page.

I want to start doing more with poetry, and E really needs to work on her handwriting--she hates it and so whenever she has some writing to do it takes an eternity. So I got a book of fun poems by Jack Prelutsky called The New Kid on the Block, and I used the Handwriting Worksheets Wizard to make handwriting practice sheets of some of the poems. I figure I'll read a poem, have her read it, have her trace it out on the worksheet, copy it again on lined paper, and memorize it. Maybe one a week. If we can, we'll start tomorrow with "Cuckoo!":

The cuckoo in our cuckoo clock
was wedded to an octopus,
she laid a single wooden egg,
and hatched a cuckooclocktopus.

There's some great vocabulary to be found in the poems, too.