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We took Monday off to clean house. Yes, the whole day. No, my house is not clean yet.

Tuesday: read about Chinese New Year with The Great Race by Dawn Casey and Lanterns and Firecrackers by Jonny Zucker. This site has lots of activities, crafts, and printables. Watched Life in the Middle Ages: The Serf. E did math

Wednesday: E had piano and dance lessons and did math.

Thursday: Read from Castle Diary by Richard Platt and If You Lived in the Days of the Knights by Ann McGovern, and E did math, took a spelling test, had a Spanish lesson, and went to Grandma's house for her sewing lesson.

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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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Monday we had a really good day, which is a relief because it looks like the rest of the week is mostly a wash.

Monday: read You Wouldn't Want to Be an American Pioneer! by Jacqueline Morley, then did a bunch of experiments/fooling around with electrical circuits, wires, bulbs, making a nail into an electro-magnet, and so forth. Got some of the ideas from All About Electricity by Melvin Berger (note to self--a stack of nickels and pennies won't make a crude battery any more...not enough real nickel or copper in them!) and Experiment With Magnets and Electricity by Margaret Whalley. Spelling and math, then read Count Your Way Through China by Jim Haskins, The Seven Chinese Brothers by Margaret Mahy, The Cloudmakers by James Rumford, and The Empress and the Silkworm by Lily Toy Hong.

Tuesday my parents were taking care of my niece who had the day off from school for Veteran's Day and they absconded with E to keep her company. So I took T to see the model train exhibit at the hands-on museum and we played with a friend of his in the neighborhood.

Wednesday was piano lesson and library day, and we went to have T's "school picture" done.

Today I'm feeling under the weather, so instead of school I think we'll clean our rooms and clean house and play until it's time to go to Grandma's house for E's sewing lesson.

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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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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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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.