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So much for keeping up! oh well. Yesterday we continued learning about life cycles and butterflies with From Tadpole to Frog by Wendy Pfeffer, The Caterpillar and the Polliwog by Jack Kent, and Are You a Butterfly? by Judy Allen and Tudor Humphries. I read Latitude and Longitude by Rebecca Aberg and we looked up some locations on E's world map. We went downstairs to start her new spelling program, AVKO Sequential Spelling, and while we were at the blackboard I wrote up a chart comparing the life cycles of birds, frogs and butterflies, with input from her. She got so excited about this that she had to come up to the blackboard and draw her own life cycle circles. She did a few grammar pages, and T did more preschool stuff.

Today we read Pumpkin Circle by George Levenson, the really cute Farfallina and Marcel by Holly Keller, and Waiting for Wings by Lois Ehlert. Then we started learning about the Constitution with A More Perfect Union by Betsy and Giulio Maestro and We the People by Peter Spier. More spelling and grammar (she loves spelling but hates grammar--I may try to find a different grammar book). More preschool for T, I think I'll only mention what he does if it's something out of the ordinary.

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We are easing back into school today, and hopefully I can keep up with the blog better--I really let it lapse at the end of last year. We started out with First Flight by George Shea and Plane Song by Diane Siebert in honor of Orville Wright's birthday and National Aviation Day today. Then we started in on our study of life cycles with First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger, and A Nest Full of Eggs by Priscilla Belz Jenkins. Then I was curious how much of her geography from last year E remembered, so I gave her a blank outline map of the world and asked her to label the 7 continents and 4 oceans. She did great! She missed Australia and the Arctic Ocean but got everything else. While she was doing that, T and I went over how to draw the capital letter A, and he did several pages in his book of Preschool Basics. Then we all went to the zoo to see the new baby giraffe.

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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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Yesterday E and I and her friend G went to hear the Amadeo Modigliani string quartet. They were wonderful players, but not so good educators and they had very thick French accents, which made them a little hard to understand. But the music was wonderful. Today I read The Sad Night by Sally Schofer Matthews and The Discovery of the Americas by Betsy and Giulio Maestro, and E labeled a blank outline map of South America.

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Yesterday E had her piano lesson, then we went to the library. After we got back, I read How To Be an Aztec Warrior by Fiona Macdonald and Technology in the Time of the Aztecs by Nina Morgan, and E did her math.

Today we cleaned our rooms (a Herculean task, in E's case), then I read South America by David Petersen, and The Inca by Patricia McKissack, and E did her math.

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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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Piano lesson and zoo class today. E also finished answering her questions about Uranus and labeled an outline map of Australia.

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Today E had a review in math; she did very well. She also answered questions about Uranus that I wrote in her notebook. Mom and Dad came over to watch the kids while I went to the dentist; Dad read Australia by David Petersen and numerous other books, and Mom and E made red and green paper chains to count down to Christmas. Now E is off with her friend G and her dad to play soccer for a few hours.

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Yesterday we went to the Tannehill Native American Festival and learned about Native Americans, (and I bought a choker and headband for when we study them over the New Year) and then we went to Oktoberfest and learned about beer. No, really we learned about German culture! And today our neighbor came over with about 30-40 books for the kids that her kid had outgrown. There's always a big danger of getting a load of crappy Disney books when someone says they want to give you a bunch of kids books, and there were a few of those, but the vast majority (about 20-25) were Let's Read and Find Out Science books! Many of which are on our curriculum plan for this year! Yippee! Now I have to enter them all into LibraryThing...

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Piano first thing today, then we went to Grandma and Grandpa's house to make costumes for the dollhouse dolls. They are very scary! E followed our route on the map as we went there. That's really all we accomplished though.

Geography unit for 1st grade

I worked up this unit to teach my daughter first grade geography. I'm using Rebecca Rupp's excellent Home Learning Year By Year as my curriculum guide, and the phrases in quotes are from that book. I got all the books at the library and almost all the rest of the materials free online. ( I had to buy apples for the pie!)

"I. Know the uses of maps and globes. Understand the meaning of a map's key and the use of map legends and symbols."

Read Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney

Make maps of her bedroom, house, and neighborhood like the girl in the book.

Do the lesson plans and activities in Map Adventures on the USGS website (these include learning about map grids, legends, and symbols).

"II. Know the cardinal directions."

Read North, South, East and West by Franklyn M. Branley (an excellent book unjustly out of print--I got ours at the library and used copies are available cheap online)

Do the activity in the Branley book where we outline our shadows at various times of day to determine where each of the cardinal directions lies.

I had her work on a free printable sample page from a Teacher Created Resources Map Skills book. (Follow the link and click on sample pages).

Do the free Treasure Map lesson from www.homeschoolscience.com. We had a lot of fun with this. I downloaded some fun free pirate fonts and symbols and printed the directions on marbled paper which my husband burned around the edges. We hid a shoebox full of chocolate coins and little toys for them to find.

"III. Be able to identify the world's major oceans and continents, the equator, the northern and southern hemispheres, and the North and South Poles. Kids should know the locations of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans, and some basic information about each. In studying the continents, kids should be introduced to notably prominent continental features, such as Mount Everest, the Sahara Desert, the Amazon rain forest."

Read Blast Off to Earth! by Loreen Leedy--this is a fantastic book!

Label the continents and oceans on a world map (available here.)

Learn to sing Do You Know the Continents? and Earth's Four Oceans songs. I found these here. (Follow the link, scroll down about halfway to American: Early People and Civilizations (Maya, Inca, Aztec), click on Maya, Inca, Aztec and Ancient Civilizations (2000) and scroll down to page 17 of the pdf file)

Read the Continents books by David Petersen (Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America)

I had her label major landforms and features on blank outline maps available free here and here.

(We tied in some of the continents to our history study--for instance we did Africa right before studying Ancient Egypt, and I'm saving North and South America for next semester when we do American History.)

Read the Oceans series by Anne Ylvisaker (Antarctic, Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific)

We interspersed the Oceans books among the Continents books. There are some little activities you can do at the end of each of the Oceans books.

Read How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman

Make an apple pie, of course!

Read Somewhere in the World Right Now by Stacey Shuett

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Today our regular teacher (Me) was sick, so we had our substitute teacher (Sick Me) teaching. Unfortunately, she was too lazy to be bothered to follow the detailed lesson plans laid out for her. She skipped narration and went straight to finishing the USGS Map Adventures packet--winding up with learning about map grids and scales. E got the grids right away--less so the scale--but then I don't think I've ever used the scale on a map anyway. Then E was dispatched to math while T watched Peep and Mom had a lie down. Post math, E did some more of her zoo homework while T beat Mommy with two balloons. Lunch, and then a scavenger hunt in the backyard. One of the items to find was "Something with words on it" for which she impishly handed me back my own list ("See, it has words on it, Mommy!" Indeed.) Now they are "washing" dolly clothes, which has got to count for some kind of educational whatsit, I dunno. They're having too much fun and getting along with each other too well for me to break it up now, even though I threatened to make them clean up the mess in the basement today.

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started with narration: Damon and Pythias from _50 Famous Stories Retold_. Then we did some more lessons from the USGS Map Adventures packet and E drew a map of our house. Then I read The Sun by Allison Lassieur and looked at the sun in various wavelengths, then watched some animations of 3 kinds of solar eclipse. We had lunch and E worked on her homework from her Habitats class at the zoo (which included some drawing and handwriting), then she watched Peep with T and did her math.

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Today was so much better than yesterday! E really has had a good attitude since our little talk yesterday. Once or twice I've actually seen her visibly restrain herself from a sigh or "Awww!" when I ask her to do something. What a great kid! We started out with a narration of "The Sword of Damocles" from James Baldwin's 50 Famous Stories Retold (available free online) then I read Gail Gibbons' Stargazers to kick off astronomy. E did several pages on nouns from a grammar book Jennifer got me at a yard sale for 50 cents (and about an hour of erasing!) The book is pretty much your typical worksheet crap, but I wanted to make sure she has a solid understanding of nouns, verbs and adjectives, and she speeds right through the pages (and gets to practice her handwriting). We sat down on the couch again and did the first few lessons from Map Adventures, a free Teachers' Packet about using maps from the US Geological Survey. Then I read Me On the Map by Joan Sweeney and had E draw a map of her room like the girl in the book. After recess (Yes! We got all that done before recess!) we had lunch and then E did her math while T watched Peep (he is seriously addicted, but it is a really great show). Then since Sunday is Grandma's birthday, I gave E a choice between two craft kits I got at the thrift store for 99 cents each and she chose to make some foam flowers.

26--party!

Today we had our Ancient Egyptian party. We set up a table with all of E and T's projects and also her math review and Draw Write Now notebook. We made Barley bread (from Avery Hart's Pyramids!) and put together plates of cucumber sticks with yogurt and pita bread with hummus. She dressed up in the Egyptian dress and wig from last Halloween's costume and wore her "faience" necklace. T wore a "loincloth" (diaper) and his bead necklace. While waiting for Grandma and Grandpa, I read Germs Make Me Sick! by Melvin Berger, and the rest of Dewey's _Antarctic Journal_. Grandma and Grandpa loved the feast and the exhibits, and I was really proud of how she was able to answer them when they quizzed her, even though I don't really support the whole concept of quizzing. She played the piano piece she's memorizing, and they took us out to lunch. Dad took tons of pics and said he meant to make himself a false pharaoh's beard to wear but didn't get to it. He promises a toga for Greece, which should be a sight to see. I'll bet good money we won't get Mom in a toga this lifetime.

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Started the day reading The Skeleton Inside You by Philip Balestrino and Use Your Brain by Paul Showers. Then more from the ever-popular _Egyptian Diary_ by Platt, and we paged through and read bits from Judith Crosher's Technology in the Time of Ancient Egypt. Was planning to build a model shaduf (from Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors by Marian Broida) but it needed a little more prep than I could do this morning. So we'll try that tomorrow. But we did start making "faience beads" (painted ziti) for our Egyptian necklaces (The Egyptians by Gillian Chapman) I read to them from Dewey's _Antarctic Journal_ while they painted the beads. The painting resulted in baths for everyone. E did her first Review in her math book and got 100%. T watched Peep while she was doing that. Now she's doing a Draw Write Now page till it's time to go to Dance/Tumbling. If we do hieroglyphics tomorrow, and Hatshepsut on Wednesday, that gives us Thursday and Friday to work on our Egyptian Feast. Then on to Greece!

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This morning E and T were playing so nicely together, I just couldn't break them up. So they got out all their winter gear and went outside to play winter (it was about 75 degrees out there, but what the heck...). I got some cooking and laundry done, and if E didn't learn much, T did. A big sister is the best preschool teacher around, if you ask me, and he just loves to learn everything she wants to share with him.

Then finally it was time to come in and dress more appropriately to the weather, and I read some more of Platt's _Egyptian Diary_, then we put together a mummy case (I got the pattern from The Egyptians by Rachel Wright). E is going to decorate it with markers and hieroglyphic stamps (from the Ancient Egypt Treasure Chest) and then we'll "mummify" a doll I got at the dollar store and stick her in. During lunch I read the last chapter of Lacey's _What's the Difference?_ (turtles and tortoises) and a few more sections of Dewey's _Antarctic Journal_. E finally finished her math, (with help from her cuisenaire rods) and then she baked cookies, doing all the recipe reading and figuring herself.

I let T watch Peep and the Big Wide World on the computer (E watched too) Now she is downstairs hopefully finishing the Draw Write Now page from eons ago. Finishing not a big priority with this girl.

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This morning E was busily reading Osbourne's _Mummies and Pyramids_ before school even started! She also read I Am the Mummy Heb-Nefert by Eve Bunting. So we started with a narration of "The Knee-High Man" from the Hirsch book--I broke the reading into two parts and had her narrate each part. Then I read Tut's Mummy: Lost...And Found by Judy Donnelly, and we did her music note flashcards (with much bellyaching). Then I read Aliki's Mummies Made in Egypt, informative but a touch on the long side, and had her label a map of Antarctica (with only 3 things--not much in Antarctica, really). Then recess, which ended with her and G in great disgrace and grounded from recess this week. After we got through all that, she did her math (more bellyaching, but she seems to be getting the concept) and then lunch, during which I read a chapter from Lacey's _What's the Difference?_ about the pinnepeds: seals, sea lions, and walrus'. She was still eating so I read several chapters from Antarctic Journal by Jennifer Owings Dewey and then we all settled on the couch for more of Platt's _Egyptian Diary_ which is so excellent, in its coverage of various aspects of Ancient Egyptian culture and its interesting storyline and its gorgeous illustrations--really a great book. Now she is (hopefully) finishing the Draw Write Now page from Friday, and then we'll go to Dance/Tumbling. After which she must finish her math. What a day. Tomorrow should be more fun--maybe we'll start on our sarcophagus.

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Today started out s...l...o...w... E was is full dawdle mode and didn't get her room ready (in fact it still isn't ready) till 10:30... So we skipped narration, because sullen, just-yelled-at kids very rarely have much in the way of concentration, I've found. Instead I read Petersen's Antarctica, and then I read the first three sections of Egyptian Diary: The Journal of Nakht by Richard Platt. After that I read Your Skin and Mine by Paul Showers, and we did some of the activities in the book ie looking at our skin and fingerprints with a magnifying glass. E sat down to do her math (from yesterday) and went back into dawdle mode, occasionally asking me such questions as "Mommy, what's 25 + 1?" Now, I don't mind helping, but she knows darn well how to add 1 to something, so she got some chewing out and I sat on her till she finished, then told her no reading today, since she wasted so much time NOT doing her math. While she finished lunch, I read the next chapter of Lacey's _What's the Difference?_ about Octopuses and Squids and other cephalopods. The kids really like this book and ask for it often--too bad it's OOP. I'll have to see if I can find it at a library sale or used book store sometime. After she had lunch, we watched the first episode of A&E's "The Greatest Pharaohs". Dad taped it for me from the Cable in the Classroom version. E's verdict: better than the classification video, but still boring--not as good as the Great Pyramid video. Not helped by very poor sound quality on the tape Dad made for me. But she wanted to watch it through. She wants to see Tutankhamen, her favorite. I told her he'd come later. I want to see Hatshepsut. Hopefully the show will perk up a little, though it doesn't seem likely. After that I forced them outside to play ( AM a mean Mommy today) and when they came back in I gave E a new Draw Write Now book that dealt with the Polar Regions, since we read about Antarctica today. She's working on it now, then I will probably have mercy on her and tell her she can call G to play or read or make the paper model pyramid with me if she wants to.

T played with Legos and Play Doh, and requested a reading of _Your Insides_ by Cole.