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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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Mondays are always kind of tough because we have Dance and Tumbling class in the afternoon, so I can't plan on having any time for experiments or fun projects. But we read If You Lived With the Hopi by Anne Kamma, and a Hopi legend, "Coyote Helps Decorate the Night" in From Sea to Shining Sea by Amy L. Cohn. And I read Zoom Away! by Tim Wynne-Jones for T. E is finishing her grammar workbook today. If we have time and energy this afternoon after class, we'll play Fast Track for math.

69-74

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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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.

59

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 we read about Jason and the Argonauts in Amery's Greek Myths for Young Children, and about Theseus and the Minotaur, and Oedipus in the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. Then I read A Greek Theater by Peter Chrisp, and E did her math while T watched Peep. Then we went to Dance and Tumbling.

46

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)

41

Narration today was another one of Heracles' tasks, the 9-headed Hydra, from Amery's Greek Myths for Young Children. Then, as the end of our Greek unit beckons in a couple of weeks, I read ahead in that book, the stories of Echo and Narcissus, and Daedalus and Icarus. Then from the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, we read about Dionysus, and the Fates, and again the story of Prometheus and Epimetheus and Pandora, and then the myth about Deucalion and the flood, which I was unfamiliar with. Very interesting, all these cultures thereabouts have legends of a great flood--it must have been a doozy, indeed. And finally we read about Aeolus and the four winds. Then I read You Wouldn't Want to Be a Greek Athlete! by Michael Ford, and we had recess, math, two grammar pages (verbs) and Peep. Then E went down to start a new Draw Write Now and after lunch we read Mars by Larry Dane Brimner, and E made two little moons with labels to put on our solar system wall. Then we went to their Dance/Tumbling classes.

36

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.

27--The bad attitude monster strikes again!

Well, yesterday just started out bad. I was sick, for one thing. Then I discovered not one, not two, but three secret caches of toys, dirty clothes, and general STUFF that E had hidden instead of putting away when she cleans her room (probably been going on for at least a week). It was all put into a giant trash bag, which she was made to put away later, on HER time. She was also grounded from reading for a day, which you would have thought she was going to call Child Protective Services about, she wailed so loud. (I've since come up with a better punishment, and I told her if she failed to pass inspection on any given day, {and I'll be looking for the secret caches} she would have to clean her room AND T's room the next).

Needless to say, after all this she was rather uncooperative and balky, and was just not listening to the story for narration. So I lost it, and told her if she'd rather go to public school she could. After I calmed down, I said to her "You know, when you were a baby, I fed you everything you ate. But now you're a big kid, and you feed yourself. I buy the food, fix it, and put it on the table, but you are responsible for eating it so you don't starve, and no one forces you to eat. It's the same way with your education. I can't force you to learn. I can gather knowledge and try to present it in a fun, interesting way, but it's up to you to learn it. You can make your education happen, or you can starve your brain and be ignorant, but it's your education and you have to participate if you want to get anything out of it."

After this little speech she was a lot more cooperative and even (somewhat suspiciously) enthusiastic. But we didn't have much more morning left at that point, so I had her do a leftover Egyptian math sheet, and had her write some numbers in arabic numerals and Egyptian numerals to show her the benefits of our system (99 in Egyptian is something like nnnnnnnnniiiiiiiii). Then I read Why Do Leaves Change Color? by Nancy Ellwood and Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert. Then they colored leaves and made leaf men of their own, an activity I found at the book's website. After lunch, we went to their dance and tumbling classes.

22

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!

12

This morning we had to go do our grocery shopping, as I wasn't able to yesterday, due to the party. Jen: "You can make it an educational experience!" Me: "I just want to get the shopping done!" So it wasn't educational. Then home for recess at G's house and lunch, then fortunately for me to not have a total waste of a day, the Early Simple Machines II kit arrived from Lego. As I was sorting through, counting pieces to make sure it was all there, E came in and asked about it. I told her it was a new toy for her and T to make machines and cool things with. I said "You can play with it until it's time to go to your dance class" She said, "What about school?" I said "This is school today." E: "Wow. It sure doesn't look like school." Me: "That's kind of the point"

So there you have it, a little socialization, a little engineering, and some dance and tumbling. Whew!