27-28

This week has been a mess with caring for my parents' (ailing) dogs and our neighbors' dog...but here goes:

Monday: Celebrated Johnny Appleseed's birthday (even though it was actually last Friday) -- read The Story of Johnny Appleseed by Aliki, and assigned E to read Who Was Johnny Appleseed? by Joan Holub on her own. I also baked an apple pie. This was meant to be a shared experience but, let's face it, peeling and coring a dozen apples lacks the allure of cooking a full multi-course Indian meal. So I did almost all of it myself, but for the eating of course! I read selections from the January '08 issue of Calliope magazine, "Spark Along the Indus", and E went through this neat interactive virtual adventure at Mohenjo-Daro. She did her math on the way to my parents' vet to pick up their doggies.

Today I read the chapter on India in What Your Second Grader Needs to Know by E. D. Hirsch Jr., and then Scott Russell Sanders' The Floating House. Then we made a model of a canal lock from Carol A. Johmann's Going West!: Journey on a Wagon Train to Settle a Frontier Town
(my advice: do the demonstration in the bathtub...it leaked) and I played and sang "The Erie Canal" which I found in From Sea to Shining Sea by Amy Cohn. After taking a break to take care of the neighbors' dog (during which T let him out and he ran away) I read How's the Weather? by Melvin and Gilda Berger, and gave E a weather map reading activity sheet I found, um, somewhere on the internet. After lunch, spelling and math. I was hoping to build a barometer with the kids this afternoon, but went out to catch the neighbors' dog instead. Sigh.