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Tuesday: In preparation for our camping trip next week, read It's a Hummingbird's Life by Irene Kelly. Then we went over some of the reasons people went West that were covered in Araminta's Paint Box, and I told them there were some people who went unwillingly, then read The Trail of Tears by Joseph Bruchac. It's a good thing for Andrew Jackson that he's already dead, or E would have his head! And former slaves went, too, for their own reasons, as we learned reading Wagon Train: A Family Goes West in 1865 by Courtni C. Wright. Spelling and math, and then I read The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks by Katherine Paterson. Very rainy--we recorded 1.5" at our Weather Station.

Wednesday: Piano lesson and library.

Thursday:Read Calendar by Myra Cohn Livingston and Apple Farmer Annie by Monica Wellington to T. Read some more of ...If You Traveled West in a Covered Wagon by Ellen Levine, and Wagon Wheels by Barbara Brenner. Spelling, and picked out Japan on the world map. Read Jim Haskins' Count Your Way Through Japan, The Stonecutter by Gerald McDermott, and Ina R. Friedman's charming How My Parents Learned to Eat. Then they colored Japanese flags and made little paper Japanese lanterns, and we went to mom's house for E's first sewing lesson. Currently E is reading on her own The Song of the Water Boatman by Joyce Sidman.

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Busy day today. With T I read My Apple by Kay Davies and Wendy Oldfield and the ingenious The Turn-Around, Upside-Down Alphabet Book by Lisa Campbell Ernst. Then we read Japan ABCs by Sarah Heiman, The Terrible Eek by Patricia A. Compton, and I Live in Tokyo by Mari Takabayashi. After a break we read from ...If You Traveled West in a Covered Wagon by Ellen Levine and Araminta's Paint Box by Karen Ackerman, which manages in the course of an interesting story to cover many of the various reasons people had for heading west. After spelling and math we did an experiment to make a cloud in a jar, which I found in The Ben Franklin Book of Easy and Incredible Experiments from the Franklin Institute Science Museum and we are now the proud possessors of our own home-made barometer, which we learned how to build in How the Weather Works by Michael Allaby.

On her own, E's been reading The Ordinary Princess by M M Kaye, The Kid Who Named Pluto by Marc McCutcheon, and The Toad on Capitol Hill by Esther Wood Brady.