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Much better day today, helped no doubt by the fact that I had my act together and we started in good time... It's Michelangelo's birthday, so I read Mike Venezia's biography, Michelangelo. Then Explorers of North America by Brendan January, and we searched for a Northwest Passage on the globe. E wanted to know why they didn't build the Panama Canal sooner. Our poetry form for the day was the cinquain. I didn't particularly care for the example in Paul Janeczko's A Kick in the Head, so I found some more (google "cinquain") and printed them up to read to her. I chose this one, unfortunately unattributed, from this site for her copy work:

Moonbeams
Lighting the sea
On a still cloudless night
Illuminate the seaponies
At play

This is another good cinquain site.
She needed to look up and define "illuminate" and I explained to her that the seaponies were the foam on the waves, not seahorses as she originally thought! Then she did her math--much more expeditiously today, so after lunch I let her go over to G's to play for the afternoon. This evening she gifted us with her first real cartwheels!