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Today E had her piano lesson, then she did math. After lunch we read Big Bang! by Cinami DeCristofano, and The Magic Leaf by Winifred Morris and watched the DVD Pioneer Life for Children: Westward Expansion in the U.S. E also worked on her drawings that she's giving for Christmas gifts.

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Since last time I posted:

E had her final 2 art classes, and a sewing lesson, piano lesson, math and spelling. Read The Fourth Question by Rosalind C. Wang, The Empty Pot by Demi, A Time of Golden Dragons by Song Nan Zhang, Mei-Mei Loves the Morning by Margaret Holloway Tsubakiyama, A to Z China by Justine and Ron Fontes, Celebrating Birthdays in China by Cheryl L. Enderlein. We also watched the DVD "Families of China" and Disney's "Mulan" (ok, not so much Chinese as...not. E has the story of Mulan in a book and she kept saying in a wondering voice "But that's not in the book...". Hey, they enjoyed it anyway--at least she's not a "princess") On her own E has read/is reading The Mystery on the Great Wall of China by Carole Marsh and Day of the Dragon King by Mary Pope Osborne. We also finished Ellen Levine's If You Traveled West in a Covered Wagon and Going West by Jean Van Leeuwen. And she and T did this online activity about electricity. I also out of curiosity had her start taking the sample test in Get Ready! For Standardized Tests, Grade 2. She's done about half the test so far and gotten all of them right except 2 questions which asked which part of the word was the suffix--we've never talked about suffixes so of course she didn't know.

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Thursday: piano lesson and sewing class (mostly interrupted for park time as it was a gorgeous day)

Friday: art class.

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Yesterday E had her piano lesson, then we went to the library and then out to lunch at a new sushi bar, where the owner of the restaurant complimented her on her mad chopsticky skillz!

Today we said sayonara to Japan, reading The Samurai's Daughter by Robert D. San Souci, Little Fingerling by Monica Hughes, Grass Sandals: The Travels of Basho by Dawnine Spivak, and Hokusai: The Man Who Painted a Mountain by Deborah Kogan Ray, and we looked at some great stuff our neighbor's parents brought back from Japan. Then we went to Grandma's house for E's sewing lesson.

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Wednesday: Piano lesson and play dates with friends

Thursday: Grandpa showed us slides from when he was stationed near Japan in the Korean War and E had her sewing lesson with Grandma. E also did math this day.

Friday: art class and general moping about.

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Read Pumpkin Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington and How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? by Margaret McNamara, Leonardo and the Flying Boy by Laurence Anholt, Suki's Kimono by Chieri Uegaki, and A to Zen by Ruth Wells. Also read Vote! by Eileen Christelow, and E read If I Ran for President by Chatherine Stier while we were out and about. The art museum has an exhibit of some Da Vinci drawings from the museum in Turin, so we went to see those and looked around at some other art while we were there, especially the sculpture garden, and we went to the library, where the librarian told E they were going to have to order more books if she keeps reading so many. ;)

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Thursday we went to see the Symphony Orchestra's "Building the Orchestra" show, then E had her sewing lesson with Grandma. Today she had art class and we watched "Families of Japan".

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Friday: art class


Monday-Wednesday: we took a "field trip" down to the Gulf Shores, where we camped for two nights, played on the beach, observed the banding of migratory birds (E got to hold and release a hummingbird!), visited (and climbed around on) the "Mystery Ship" washed ashore by Hurricane Ike, and toured Fort Morgan. E fished (and was very very excited when she caught one all by herself) and we had a great time. On the way down and back she read 4 books: The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck, Molly Pitcher: Young Patriot by Augusta Stevenson, The Mystery at Mt. Fuji by Carole Marsh, and Facing the Lion by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton.

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Thursday: Read Demi's Gandhi in honor of his birthday, and started Japan with Look What Came From Japan by Miles Harvey and Japan by Karen Jacobsen (a rather disappointing entry in the usually valuable New True Book series). Spelling and math.

Friday: E had Art Class

Tomorrow I'm taking both the kids to see Rapunzel at the Children's Theatre, and in the evening E is going to see Barrage with her dad.

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My computer's been acting up.

Wednesday: piano lesson and then we went to the beach for a "not back-to-school party" with other area homeschoolers. Lots of fun!

Thursday: should have gotten more done, but I was in a very very bad mood due to the computer. Started Westward Expansion with The Amazing Impossible Erie Canal by Cheryl Harness, and E did spelling and math. We also watched part of an extremely lame movie about ancient India. Very disappointing.

Friday: art class for E and tumbling for T, then in the afternoon E and I made an elaborate and yummy Indian dinner.

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E had art class, T had tumbling, and I have a sore throat. We watched a (fairly lame) video about animal migration, and E played this game about the Lewis and Clark expedition.

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Today E had her first art class at the art museum! It's a 3 hour class that meets every Friday. They spend an hour or so in the galleries, looking at representative works and then go into the studio to study and produce their own works. This particular section is focusing on modern art. E had a lot of fun. T got to go to a sort of tumbling/play gym thing at the library, which he enjoyed, too, and he did some amazing acrobatics! After lunch we watched a video "Families of India". E will do her life cycle presentation tonight after dinner.

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E's piano lesson, and she read the Lewis & Clark magazine while I did stuff with T. We went over her math mistakes and corrected them, and made stained glass butterflies. She also did a page of her handwriting book.

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Yesterday: Read Sisters of Scituate Light by Stephen Krensky, By the Dawn's Early Light by Steven Kroll, and The Star-Spangled Banner illustrated by Peter Spier. Then Count Your Way through India by Jim Haskins, India by Elaine Landau, and Helen Cowcher's Tigress. E had a spelling lesson and did a review in her math book so I could see what we need to freshen up on before plunging into multiplication. All the butterflies have emerged and we have seen them eating with their proboscis'.

Today: went over the math problems E missed and then did an art project, making caterpillars out of egg cartons. E is looking up two words from yesterday's spelling lesson (bout and rout) and writing the definitions in her notebook.

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Monday: read The New Americans by Betsy Maestro, E did math, we looked at the results of an experiment left over the weekend (celery stalk sliced vertically and left soaking in red and blue colored water).
Tuesday: read Roanoke: The Lost Colony by Jane Yolen and Harry Houdini: Escape Artist by Patricia Lakin. Learned about clerihews in Paul Janezcko's A Kick in the Head, and E did a worksheet on this one:

Edgar Allan Poe
Was passionately fond of roe.
He always liked to chew some
When writing anything gruesome.

E. C. Bentley

The only word she needed to look up was roe. I gave her The Houdini Box by Brian Selznick to read on her own. She did math.
Wednesday: (today) E went with her Daddy to see an iron pour at an old iron foundry. She and her dad got to make little sand molds which had iron poured into them and became plaques. Very cool. T and I played several games, including Max the Cat and Harvest Time and he also played with the legos.

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A few days there I was just too lazy to post. And then we took a week's worth of days off for spring break, partly because of my laziness! and partly because we were taking care of E and T's cousin who was on spring break from her school. We finished learning about explorers and did math and some art on GeeArt, and music, too. Umm, also some poetry, from A Kick in the Head by Paul Janeczko. Today, we did a bunch of experiments with water, from Graham Peacock's Water and from Neil Ardley's 101 Great Science Experiments. Oh and one from 365 Simple Science Experiments by E. Richard Churchill et. al. Then E started learning about measuring length with metric units in math, and they helped their Daddy do yard work. Tonight E starts her first real job, taking care of a neighbor's dog while he is out of town--she is very excited.

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Today we read Michelangelo, part of Ernest Raboff's Art For Children series. Then about a third of Where do you think you're going, Christopher Columbus? by Jean Fritz. E practiced piano, did math, and did an art lesson on GeeArt. It's Ravel's birthday, so I'm playing a CD of his music.

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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!

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We felt like taking last Friday off, so we did!

Today is Jackson Pollock's birthday, so I started out by reading Jackson Pollock by Mike Venezia, and then I showed E the picture of Lee Krasner, his wife, which is on the "women doing cool things" collage I made for her when she was 3. Then, since yesterday was Mozart's birthday, I read Ann Rachlin's Mozart, and Mike Venezia's Mozart, and we listened (and danced and sang to) "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik". To kick off studying the Plains Indians, I read Bonnie Shemie's Houses of Hide and Earth and Powwow by George Ancona. Then E did her math while listening to some more Mozart. After lunch we looked at the poem she memorized last week: "I Do Not Like the Rat!" by Jack Prelutsky. She picked out the end rhymes and I pointed out the internal rhymes to her. Then we read about couplets in Paul B. Janeczko's A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms, and I found some couplets in a book of poetry and showed her how they are often used almost like a punch line to a poem. Now we are going to Dance and Tumbling for the last time.

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I couldn't post yesterday because my modem was down. I was getting pretty jittery without my internet fix! Yesterday we took an easy day since it was MLK Jr. Day. I read My Dream of Martin Luther King by Faith Ringgold. Then since last Sat. was Cezanne's birthday, I read Mike Venezia's biography, Paul Cezanne, and we looked at some pictures in a book I have about Cezanne. We made Bull Roarers (More Than Moccasins, Laurie Carlson) and played and sang "Song of Happiness" in From Sea to Shining Sea by Amy Cohn. Then we went to Grandma and Grandpa's house for lunch and played Fast Track (Games for Math, Peggy Kaye).

Today T picked When the Sky is Like Lace by Elinor Lander Horowitz. (E read it to T last night too. Last night the sky really was like lace! And with the full moon, it was perfectly bimulous. But too cold to go outside barefoot in our nightgowns, though I did let them go out in their coats and shoes for a bit, after checking to make sure they weren't wearing any orange, not even underneath.) Then I read the first chapter of The Mystery of the Mammoth Bones by James Cross Giblin, and If You Lived with the Indians of the Northwest Coast by Anne Kamma. E did her math, and T played with the Cuisenaire Rods. They both watched Peep. E started memorizing a new poem, "I Do Not Like the Rat!" from The New Kid on the Block: Poems by Jack Prelutsky:

I praise the hippopotamus,
I celebrate the bat,
I hold the bream in high esteem--
I DO NOT LIKE THE RAT!

I cotton to the octopus,
I tolerate the gnat,
I dote upon the stately swan--
I SHUDDER AT THE RAT!

I value the rhinoceros,
I venerate the cat,
I quite salute the simple newt--
I CANNOT STAND THE RAT!

I gave a suitably dramatic reading, then gave E a Handwriting Worksheet Wizard worksheet with the first verse on it, to copy over. I also asked her which words she didn't know (bream and esteem) and had her write them with their definitions on the back of the page.