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Friday I read some more of Platt's Castle Diary and If You Lived in the Days of the Knights by Ann McGovern, E did math and had basketball practice. Saturday we went to the Chinese New Year Festival downtown, and E had a basketball game.

Today dawned grey and rainy and we didn't feel like school. E did her theory page for piano and some math, then we went to the IMAX and saw Blue Planet, which was pretty good and covered lots of earth science.

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Today is Louis Braille's birthday, so we read about him in A Picture Book of Louis Braille by David A. Adler, which has a page with a tactile Braille alphabet in the back. I read Caves by Larry Dane Brimner, which was much better than the Gail Gibbons book. E did her math and an extra page of work on her addition facts. She's having some trouble with her numbers, so I made up a handwriting page to practice them at this neat site which allows you to design your own handwriting worksheets. She labeled a blank outline map of North America, and read on her own Mae Jemison: Astronaut by Garnet Nelson Jackson. She also had basketball practice today and we practiced with her note flashcards for piano.

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Back at school today and brrr is it cold! Actually I should say that yesterday even though we had no school, she read Straight Hair, Curly Hair by Augusta Goldin to T and then they spent what seemed like a couple of hours testing her hair's strength by weighing various objects on the kitchen scale and suspending them from a single hair (T got to break them off of her head, which was a big thrill, apparently). They spent AGES on this--it always amazes me how long children can spend doing the same thing, over and over and over again. Anyway, this morning we got up and officially started school again. I read Pluto by Larry Dane Brimner, (an older book, which gave us the opportunity to talk about how scientific knowledge is always expanding and so you should always read science books as "what is known at that time"--Pluto is now a dwarf planet) and we read about the canceled Pluto-Kuiper Express mission and the replacement New Horizons mission on wikipedia. We also read a chapter from Owl At Home by Arnold Lobel, and North America by David Petersen. We started our study of American Indians with Aliki's Corn is Maize, E did her math, and then she answered questions about Pluto in her notebook. Finally, we read Caves and Caverns by Gail Gibbons and did a demonstration of limestone cave formation with sand, water and sugar.

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Ok well it's been a very long time since I blogged but I've just been struggling with the blues, a cold, T being 3 1/2 (that was the worst), and all the busy Christmas season stuff. We did do school every day, so I'm going to just write it all in no particular order. E did math most days and has finished level 1B. She'll start the 2A book next semester. E went to see the Nutcracker with Grandma and Grandpa. We did several Christmas-y things. I finished reading Galen by Marissa Moss and read all of Julius Caesar by Richard Platt. E and T went to Dance and Tumbling class. E went to piano class and had a piano recital (she was great!). She also went to basketball practice and had a basketball game. We watched a lot of Peep. In honor of Beethoven's birthday last Sunday we read Ludwig van Beethoven by Mike Venezia and listened to the 9th Symphony. We made igneous rock out of melted chocolate, ate sedimentary Snickers bars, and made metamorphic rock (rice crispie bars--heat and pressure, don't you know). We did scratch tests and streak tests on our minerals, and also tested them for magnetism and put several of them into vinegar (calcite bubbles). All these activities are from the great book How the Earth Works by Michelle O'Brien-Palmer. I read Growing Crystals by Ann O. Squire and we looked at crystals of calcite, iron pyrite, quartz and amethyst. We also looked at crystals of salt, sugar and ice, and saw how a single line viewed through a piece of calcite seems to split into two lines. We made borax snowflakes. I read Comets and Meteor Showers by Paul P. Sipiera and we looked at some animations of comets. E answered several questions about Neptune in her notebook. Tomorrow E has her final piano lesson of the year and then we'll add Neptune's main moon Titan to our solar system wall and call it done! Vacation here we come!

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Read a little more from Galen by Marissa Moss, then Neptune by Larry Dane Brimner and Judy Hawes' What I Like About Toads. Then I read Let's Go Rock Collecting by Roma Gans, and gave them the starter rock collection I got from rocksandminerals.com. They have a set of rocks, minerals and fossils that goes with activities in the book How the Earth Works by Michelle O'Brien Palmer. We labeled the rocks and minerals and I let them play with them and the info cards (from the O'Brien Palmer book) till lunchtime. After lunch, E did her math and several grammar pages, and then we went to Dance and Tumbling classes.

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This has been a terrible week for getting anything done. Oh well, bound to happen. Yesterday was a wash--the only thing we got done was making E's ornaments to give everyone. Today I read from Galen by Marissa Moss, and then Hannibal and His 37 Elephants by Marilyn Hirsh, which I would not recommend (it's really twee and light on the history) but it was all I could find on Hannibal at the library for this age group. I can recommend the next book I read: The Pebble in My Pocket: A History of Our Earth by Meredith Hooper and Chris Coady. Then in preparation for Daddy's little cotton unit tomorrow, I read Cotton by Chris Oxlade. We checked out some animations of different kinds of tectonic faults, and got some info on Uranus' moons. Then E made little drawings of the 5 biggest ones to add to our solar system wall, and I printed out a list of all of the known ones to post beneath. E did her math, made some felt bracelets from a kit as presents for her friends and cousin, and is working on a Draw Write Now page. And of course they both watched Peep.

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Sore throat today, but we soldier on. Armed with aspirin and oj, I read Uranus by Larry Dane Brimner, then Earthquakes by Franklyn M. Branley. We played with a model seismograph from our Nature Lab kit, and E did math and T watched Peep. Now E is completing some workbook pages on punctuation and then we'll go to Dance and Tumbling classes.

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Today we got a late start, but once we got going we did ok. I read The Best Book of Ancient Rome by Deborah Murrell, and then we went online to this site about Pompeii and Vesuvius. We also checked out Nova's site about the Roman baths at Caracalla, and then we visited this supercool virtual volcano. It has lots of info about the different types of volcano, and a neat thing that lets you design your own volcano and watch it erupt. We did that for a while and then we went outside and erupted our own baking soda/vinegar volcano (several times). Then E did her math, T watched Peep, and I fixed lunch. After lunch E answered several questions about Jupiter in her notebook, and we watched some videos of the Great Red Spot and Jupiter's atmosphere. Then she took notes on the sizes of the four Galilean moons at this site, and made little moons for our solar system wall. We printed out a list of all the known moons (a ton) and taped that below for reference. Now E and T are downstairs at the art table playing with some modeling clay she got for her birthday.

I should add that something really cool happened yesterday. Ever since the middle of her kindergarten year (at public school), she has hated writing. I mean, really hated it. I don't know why or what happened in school to make her feel like this. Very concerned about spelling and just freaked about having to make up anything to say. So I've been taking it really easy with the writing, having her practice handwriting with the Draw Write Now books (which give her easy text to copy) and write short answers to questions in her notebook, but not much else. Last night, all on her own, she decided to start a diary! I was so delighted, I nearly fell over myself in my haste to find her a blank notebook to keep it in. (Actually, I played it cool, not to scare her off) It's only been one entry so far, of course, but she seems intent on keeping up with it and I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

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Today E narrated parts of "Felicia and the Pot of Pinks" from Lang's Blue Fairy Book. Then I read Atlas of the Earth to T, and Volcanoes by Franklyn M. Branley and Volcanoes by Seymour Simon to both of them. E did her math, T watched Peep, and after recess and lunch I read Destination: Jupiter by Seymour Simon and a bit more from Marissa Moss' Galen. E is currently finishing her Draw Write Now page, and then we're done.

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What a busy day today. I'm exhausted, and it's only 7:30. This morning E read Fox in Socks to T, then I read from Galen by Marissa Moss and Spend the Day in Ancient Rome by Linda Honan. We started on volcanoes today with Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld's How Mountains Are Made and Hill of Fire by Thomas P. Lewis. Then E did math and everybody watched Peep. After lunch E barely had time to begin a Draw Write Now page before we had to go to Dance and Tumbling, and when we got home from that we barely had time for Kid Cuisines before she had to go to basketball tryouts. And she got 3 baskets! Yay E! That's one more basket than she got all last year! I think she may do really well this year.

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I had every intention of doing at least 2 days of school last week, but E had her birthday on Monday and felt sick on Tuesday, and that plus general laziness meant we didn't do much but play. We did a few things here and there though, so I'm going to list them and call them about one day's worth of school. E and T had dance and tumbling class Monday. I read Geysers by Larry Dane Brimner, and we went online to watch a video of Old Faithful erupting and an animation of how geysers work and looked at some cool infrared photos of Yellowstone. On her own, E read Danger--Icebergs! by Roma Gans, Get Ready For Robots by Patricia Lauber, Amazing Grace: The Story of the Hymn, by Linda Granfield, and countless chapter books (why the Cul-de-Sac kids are so cool, I'll never know). We watched Peep several times. We gathered a basketful of leaves and made a wreath for our door, writing something we are thankful for on each leaf. E did a GeeArt lesson. We also made paper turkeys out of a footprint and several handprints and gave them to Grandma and Grandpa. E and T worked on the ornaments they're making to give as Christmas presents. E's are like this, only she's making them out of colored paper decorated with glitter glue. T's are made from small rectangles of craft foam to which he added sticky craft foam cut-outs. Alarmingly, they show a very nice grasp of composition. E did a copper embossing project from Klutz's Book of Artrageous Projects that she got for her birthday, and she wrote and illustrated a thank you note to her godmother.

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Yesterday E had a great piano lesson, and then we went to the library for about an hour--they were having storytime and we all checked out books. E wanted the librarian to request a book for her, but the librarian ended up trying to show her how to do it herself on the computer. Not sure how much of it stuck. Then E did a Draw Write Now page and after lunch she had her Habitats class at the zoo.
Today we went first thing to the orthodontist, so I wasn't sure how much school we'd get done, but we actually got back about the time we usually start school. I had E "narrate" from the story she'd been reading in the car, about Jason and the Argonauts from Collier's The Junior Classics Book 3, Myths and Legends. Then I read Gravity is a Mystery and The Beginning of the Earth, both by Franklyn M. Branley. We looked at some cool graphics of the breakup of Pangaea in National Geographic's pop up/moveable book The Earth Pack, and also a cool animation of the same. Then we did an activity called Egg Tectonics, using the shell of a hard-boiled egg to demonstrate the movement of the tectonic plates, and then we cut up the egg to show how it resembles the earth's crust, mantle and core. We also looked at a moveable of how the Himalayas were formed by tectonic action in Rocks & Minerals by Dougal Dixon. All this takes almost longer to type than it actually took to do.
I read a bit of Galen: My Life in Imperial Rome by Marissa Moss, and also the beginning of Spend the Day in Ancient Rome by Linda Honan, and we broke for lunch and Peep. Then E did her math lesson and helped me finish building a paper model of the earth, with a cutaway to show the core (T has already managed to dent it, much to everyone's dismay). Now she is finishing her questions about Venus, and then we're either going to stop or make bullas, a project in the Honan book. So, a pretty full day after all!

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Today we had a tiny bit more of Ancient Greece, because I got a great book from the library about Eratosthenes: The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Kathryn Lasky. I read "Rumplestiltskin" from Lang's Blue Fairy Book, and E narrated part of it. Then we read Who Were the Romans? by Phil Roxbee Cox, taking a break midway through (it's a thin book, but packed) for E to do math and T to watch Peep. Then we read about Venus in the book by Larry Dane Brimner, and to kick off our study of the composition of the earth, we read The Magic School Bus Inside the Earth by Joanna Cole and How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World by Faith McNulty. Then we set up experiment 18 "Grow a Stalactite" from Neil Ardley's 101 Great Science Experiments (and the fact that the book plainly states that it will take several days for the stalactites to grow has not stopped any of us--me included--from checking it several times an hour). E made a thank you card for our neighbors who gave us all the great Let's Read and Find Out Science books, and did a TINY bit of weaving on her round mat, now destined to be a Christmas present for Grandma and Grandpa.

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E did a lot of reading on her own today--a couple of chapter books, Volcanoes by Franklyn M. Branley, and Fossils Tell of Long Ago by Aliki. I read One Grain of Rice by Demi, and then she narrated another Heraclean task, the Stymphalian Birds, from Amery's Greek Myths for Young Children. From the same book, we read some more of Odysseus' adventures: Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Helios' cattle, and Calypso. (Incidentally, one of our pumpkins this year is a Cyclops--E's choice) In the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, we read about Europa and Cadmus, & Tantalus and Pelops. Then I read Saturn by Larry Dane Brimner, which she chose because "It's the prettiest planet". She did 4 pages in her grammar book, and 1 1/2 lessons in her math, then on her own she went ahead and did the review! T played with the animal tangrams, and watched Peep, although for once he didn't want to watch it more than three times. The part where Chirp is encased in dry mud scared him, even when he knew what was going to happen next. They had Dance and Tumbling today too, and I started cleaning house for the Halloween party (I got my room dusted--at this rate, we'd better have the party after New Years)

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Began today reading Feel the Wind by Arthur Dorros, then E narrated another of Heracles' tasks, the Golden-Antlered stag, and we read more from Amery's Greek Myths for Young Children, Bellerophon and Pegasus, King Midas, and the adventures of Perseus (which was cool because she was just asking about Medusa yesterday). Then in the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, we read about Eos and Tithonus, who got eternal life without eternal youth and turned into a grasshopper, Helios and Phaethon, Selene and sleeping Endymion. She wrote in her notebook, answering 9 questions I posed about Mars, and did her math and watched Peep with T. She also started weaving a round mat, an activity from Laurie Carlson's Classical Kids, and we got in the mail a Magnetic Mosaics kit, so she and T played with that as well. T is getting great at puzzles, even jigsaws, and he also played with Play Doh and the Lego Simple Machines set. E also finished her Draw Write Now page. And tonight Alan finished reading The Amazing Adventures of Ulysses by Vivian Webb and Heather Amery to her.

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Today went a lot better than it should have, given that I stayed up till 2 with a book (Emma Bull's Territory) and then had allergy issues the rest of the night. And I did wake up cranky and tired. However, chocolate pancakes with fruit syrup cheered everyone up, myself included. And the kids were so enthusiastic about their new chore rotations (hey, I don't get it either...) that it was hard to stay grumpy. E, in her new guise as "Laundry Helper" gathered all the sheets and towels for me and put the new towels out. T, as "Dog Feeder" was so proud to show me how he could go up and down the stairs carrying Sheila's dish. I'm enjoying the bliss now, because of course by Wednesday these chores will have lost their glow, I'm sure. We started about a half hour late, but we pretty much made up for lost time. We started out reading Maisy's Morning on the Farm by Lucy Cousins at T's request. Then I read Ducks Don't Get Wet by Augusta Goldin because it was one of the free science books we got yesterday and Quack the Duck is T's favorite character on Peep. Narration was the story of Demeter and Persephone from Amery's _Usborne Greek Myths for Young Children, which was really neat because we just recently read Gail Gibbons' _The Reasons for Seasons_ (I didn't plan it, I swear--just dumb luck). Then I read some more chapters from _D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths for Children_, about Aphrodite, and Ares, and Athena (including the story of Arachne, which tied in nicely with the spiders we've been observing and reading about--luck luck luck). Then we talked about how the Ancient Greeks were some of the first people to really scientifically study the world around them, and I read How We Learned the Earth is Round by Patricia Lauber, and then some pertinent sections from Laurie Carlson's Classical Kids. We looked at the Greek alphabet, and triangular numbers, and magic squares (which she's already encountered in Singapore math) and then we tried the Sieve of Eratosthenes (all this is from _Classical Kids_) and then we took a break, during which they got out the play doh and (I am not making this up) rolled it out and started inscribing the Greek alphabet on it as though it were a clay tablet (which I guess actually it is). This was so great for me--at last, my kids did one of those brainy things homeschooled kids do! I'm in the club! I'm in the club! All right, just kidding, though I was really pleased. After break we started making paper models of the 5 Platonic bodies from patterns in Carlson's book (and T just cut and pasted his little heart out). She got through the pyramid and the cube. We'll do more tomorrow, because then it was time for lunch. She worked on her math review after lunch until it was time for Dance and Tumbling, and then finished the math when we got home. A busy but satisfying day, especially since I thought when I woke up it was going to be a total wash.

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Today I just did NOT want to do school. But yesterday was pretty much a wash, so I had to. I couldn't do many things I had wanted to because I hadn't done any prep work last night (teach me to be lazy) so today was mostly just me reading and some worksheet stuff. Narration today was "Pandora's Box" from Heather Amery's _Usborne Greek Myths for Young Children_ and then we read a few chapters from the D'Aulaires' Greek Myths book. Then I read Sightseers Ancient Greece by Julie Ferris. There are some intelligent quiz questions at the end and E did pretty well, only missing a few. She did her math review and watched Peep with T. After she corrected the problems she missed, I read Too Many Kangaroo Things to Do! a MathStart book by Stuart J. Murphy, and two books about nouns by Brian P. Cleary: A Mink, a Fink, a Skating Rink: What is a Noun? and A Lime, a Mime, a Pool of Slime: More About Nouns and then she did the last page of her noun worksheets. I read The Reasons for Seasons by Gail Gibbons and now E is working on a Draw Write Now page.