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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.

17-18

Monday: Watched two short video clips from Discovery Education about clouds and the water cycle. (We get this service free through our public television station) Then read India ABCs by Marcie Aboff, The Children of India by Jules Hermes, and Savitri by Aaron Shepard. E had a spelling lesson. After dinner she presented her interpretive dance of the life cycle of a flower, which was fun. That night after the kids were asleep, I put up a Weather Station in the hall. Right now it has a page for each day, with little pictures of the three main types of clouds (cirrus, cumulus and stratus) and the different types of precipitation and weather conditions (wind, snow, rain and sun). The pictures are velcro-backed so they can stick to the pages for each day, and the kids can put up the weather conditions for that day. We'll be adding to it as we get more into weather.

This morning (after playing with the new weather station!) we read We Hate Rain! by James Stevenson and Where Do Puddles Go? by Fay Robinson (I should say that E had already read this book and yesterday after viewing the videos, she ran into the kitchen to show T how to prove that air has water vapor in it (put a glass of ice water out and watch the condensation form). Then Water, Water Everywhere by Mark J. Rauzon and The Cloud Book by Tomie de Paola. After this we went outside to look at the clouds (and hang up laundry). The kids were having so much fun outside (our first beautiful fall day) so I let them play for a while. When they came back in, we got back to India with This is My Faith: Hinduism by Holly Wallace, Sacred River by Ted Lewin, and The Monkey and the Crocodile by Paul Galdone. We had a spelling lesson and a math lesson after lunch and then we went to the library. I also gave E Jinny Johnson's Maps and Mapping to read on her own.

16

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.

12

On Saturday we found one of the butterflies dead at the bottom of the cage, so we spent a good long while looking at various parts under the microscope, which was cool. On Sunday, we found another one dead so we decided it was time to set them free. It was really neat to see them fly out and really stretch their wings, and we saw a couple of them later at some of our flowers, so the kids didn't feel so bad about it.

Today we finished off life cycles reading Bobbie Kalman and Jacqueline Langille's What is a Life Cycle?, and I gave E a "homework assignment": she has to present or demonstrate the life cycle of an animal or plant or insect (but not the butterfly) in any medium she chooses, to be worked on in her own time, due Friday. I figure "homework" is kind of an oxymoron in homeschooling, but she will likely have such assignments some day, so I plan to throw one at her occasionally so she can get the hang of them. We also read On the Same Day in March: A Tour of the World's Weather by Marilyn Singer, and the rather long but beautifully illustrated Taj Mahal by Caroline Arnold. After her spelling lesson, she did the "A" page in her new cursive handwriting workbook, and after lunch she worked a page of math problems dealing with "addition with renaming".

7

Read some more of the Bergers' Where Did the Butterfly Get Its Name? and started weather with Weather Words and What They Mean by Gail Gibbons. Then Patricia Ryon Quiri's The Supreme Court. E had spelling and did a grammar page, and after lunch we went to the science center, where they have a new shark hatchery. They have backlit the egg sacs so you can see the embryos swimming around inside.
They also had a new tank full of jellyfish and a docent was there who let the kids touch a live starfish, spiny urchin, and sea snail.

5-6

Yesterday we read The Butterfly Alphabet Book by Brian Cassie (excellent), Isabel's House of Butterflies by Tony Johnston, and I Wish I Were a Butterfly by James Howe. We started learning about the branches of the US Government by reading Congress by Patricia Ryon Quiri. E had a spelling lesson and we measured our caterpillars and added to the growth graph. Then we watched "The Birth of the Constitution" on the DVD This is America, Charlie Brown, and on their own the kids chose to watch the segments on the Wright Bros and the Space Station. Then we went to the library.

Today we read some of Where Did the Butterfly Get Its Name? by Melvin and Gilda Berger, and The Life and Times of the Honeybee by Charles Micucci. Also The Presidency by Patricia Ryon Quiri. E had her spelling lesson, and when we came upstairs, one of the caterpillars was pupating! So we watched that for a while. After lunch I'm going to have E do some grammar pages while I work with T and then maybe we'll play a game of Fast Track.

The kids have been looking through Egg: A Photographic Story of Hatching by Robert Burton on their own.

4

Read From Egg to Butterfly by Shannon Zemlicka, Gotta Go! Gotta Go! by Sam Swope, and The Bill of Rights by Warren Colman. I also gave E Shh! We're Writing the Constitution by Jean Fritz to read on her own. E had a spelling lesson and did several grammar worksheets, and we made a bar graph to keep track of the stupendous growth of our caterpillars (which arrived Friday). I am using some activities and worksheets out of The Life Cycle of Butterflies Teacher's Guide from the Smithsonian Institution's National Science Resources Center (got it for 25 cents at the library book sale-yay!) Maybe we'll play some more Fast Track to freshen up E's addition facts this afternoon.

2-3

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.

1

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.