Monday, March 31, 2008

-The girls worked on their memory verses.
-We locked ourselves out after going to buy milk and bread and had to treck about the neighbourhood to track down a key to our house.
-They played with paper dolls and other things. They pretended to be Laura and Mary Ingalls dealing with a pack of wolves. Astrid set up a tea party.
-Yesterday at the "Green Up" festival we ran into our friend, Andrew and he gave the girls a book called "50 Things Kids Can do to Save the Planet" We read some of it. We are already doing most of what we read today, but we learned some interesting new things. The girls, for example, were very surprised to learn that glass is made out of sand. And we were all surprised to find out how much energy is saved by recycling since you usually just hear about how recycling is not such a good idea since it uses so much energy.
-I read the girls a chapter of "Little House on the Prairie" and the rest of the section on baby animals and the section on Spring planting in "A Pioneer Story".
-They played outside.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

-Went to church. Astrid drew a beautiful picture of a goat in Sunday school.
-The girls played while I made lunch (and set my recipe book on fire!)
-We walked down to Queen's for the "Green Up" festival. We looked at a few of the booths and then went to the children's room. The girls got to look at skulls of different animals and guess which animals they belonged to. They also got to look at and touch a stuffed beaver and things made by different insects (a hornet's nest, trails made in a piece of wood by bark beetles, bug homes in goldenrod, cocoons, etc...) The woman working there was very good at interacting with the kids and sharing information with them. They then made little seed pots out of old toilet paper rolls which they decorated and planted sunflower seeds in. They got to do a few activities surrounding sustainable energy such as power fans by peddling exercise bikes, shine lights on little cars made of solar panels to make them go and take readings of different light bulbs by hooking them up to a little device which measured how many watts they used.
-We walked home again and then went over to the Baetz's for dinner and a visit. The girls played with Jonah and Sammy.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

-We all went to the sugar bush and got to see how maple syrup has been made over the years, starting with the way Natives made it by placing heated rocks in a trough of sap, to how the pioneers (such as we've been reading about in Laura Ingalls Wilder's books as well as others) made it in giant cast iron kettles over fires to the various ways it's been done in modern times. We got to taste maple sugar, maple taffy made by pouring syrup on snow and pancakes with fresh syrup - mmmm!! The girls also got to saw a log.
-We saw an owl and talked about what owls eat and how they are nocturnal and we are diurnal.
-Muirgen took a walk with me to deliver dinner to friends who just had a baby.
-The girls played.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

-The girls worked on their memory verses.
-Astrid finished up a word search she started earlier. The hidden words were from her last spelling list.
-The girls drew a scene of construction workers at work on the front window with their new window markers. They then decided to put on a play about construction workers using the window as their back drop. They spent all morning preparing it and then performed it for August and me. August found it quite funny when they would pop up from behind the couch. They each played a role in the play and used hand puppets to fill in the other characters they needed.
-They had a conversation about what the term "based on" means. Muirgen was using it to say that their play was based on a woman named Maria and Astrid asked her if she knew what it actually meant. They both had a very good grasp of the meaning.
-They washed and dried the dishes while I put August down for his nap.
-Astrid completed the last two pages of a math test she's been working on. It's a placement test to see what level she'd be at in the Miquon math curriculum. It had a few questions about money on it.
-She then counted out the change we'd saved up in a jar over Lent.
-I read the girls part of the section called 'Baby Animals' from 'A Pioneer Story'.
-We read the first section 'The Beginning' in the book 'Discovering Canadian Pioneers' by Marlene and Reginald Gutsole. It included tables of weather patterns in London, England and Toronto, Ontario. We made bar graphs to show the average number of snow days during the winter months in each location and a line graph to show the average low temperatures for the winter months in each location. We talked about what the graphs showed us and how it was easier to compare the information in graph form than in table form. We talked about why the pioneers had a difficult time during their first winter in Canada given the weather they were used to in England and the weather they experienced here.
-Astrid read herself a bunch of simple story books.
-Muirgen went to ballet with Jason.
-I read 2 story books from the library and a book about interesting animal facts to Astrid.
-They did their tidy up without too much hassle (last night we had a big fight about it)!

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

-Muirgen completed three pages in her counting workbook. She is still struggling to hold her pencil the right way, but will do it if I really encourage it. She now recognizes numerals 1-10, often mixing up 6 and 9.
-Astrid completed five pages of addition sums in her math workbook.
-The girls worked on their memory verses for Awana.
-We filed some of Muirgen's papers into her binder. She looked through it.
-The girls unpacked their suitcases from our weekend at their grandparents' places for Easter.
-They helped me organize the crawl space on the third floor.
-They played with their paper dolls.
-Astrid read herself about half of a storybook she received for Easter.
-I read two chapters of 'Little House on the Prairie' by Laura Ingalls Wilder to the girls. We recently read 'Little House in the Big Woods' and 'Farmer Boy' also by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The girls have been enjoying them immensely. They particularly like that they are true stories. They've been learning a lot about the life of the early settlers from these books and are fascinated by how different their lives were from ours. They spend a lot of time pretending to be characters from the books and creating imaginary scenarios for them.
-Muirgen helped me make baked oatmeal for supper.
-The girls went to Awana.
-We had a conversation about what would happen if various parts of our bodies were cut off (this came out of singing the song 'Three Blind Mice'.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

I'm going to see if I can resurrect this blog. I'm feeling a bit more on top of things again now that August is almost a year old (so hard to believe!) It's not that we didn't do anything over the past year, it's just that I didn't have time or energy to record it.

Yesterday we went to the library with our friends, the Peters', who then came over for lunch. The kids dyed Easter eggs and spent the afternoon playing together.

On to today:
-We read the section in "A Pioneer Story" by Barbara Greenwood on maple sugaring and did an experiment that involved freezing two cups of water; one with sugar added to it. The point was to see what the purpose of sugar is in maple sap. The experiment did not seem to produce the desired results.
-We delivered fliers to houses in our neighbourhood giving information about all of the events going on at our church this coming weekend - Easter. We studied the map which had the route marked out on it, found where our house was and planned which directions to go in in order to complete the route most efficiently. This was particularly exciting for Muirgen whose dream, at present, is to be a mail carrier when she grows up. Last week we met a mail carrier in the grocery store and stopped to talk to her. She told Muirgen that when she was a little girl, she always wanted to be a mail carrier, too. She encouraged Muirgen to go for it, telling her it's the best job she could imagine, she loves it and it's good money, good exercise, and so on. She told us a bit about what her job involves, besides delivering mail. Muirgen was in awe of her!
-The girls listened to the first installment of 'A Little Princess' by Frances Hodgson Burnett on tape. Muirgen wasn't all that interested in it and Astrid listened to all of it, but told me after that she thinks it's meant for kids who are a little older than her, so I don't know if they'll finish it at this time.
-Since it's Lent, we've been going through a little Lent devotional after lunch every day. We light a candle and open and close our devotion time with the same prayers each day (which the girls memorized fairly quickly). I read the devotion for the day to the girls and we sometimes do a little activity to reinforce what we read. Today we only read and discussed it. These have lead to some really good discussions.
-We read another section of 'A Pioneer Story' which was about what school was like for Canadian pioneers in the 1800s. It talked about different ways they learned to measure things given that most families did not have measuring implements such as tape measures or meter sticks like we do. We measured our arm spans with lengths of string and compared them to the length of our bodies. The girls were quite surprised to find that the two lengths were about equal on all of us.
-Muirgen made shapes on the floor using the length of strings we'd cut for measuring.
-Muirgen washed dishes and Astrid dried and put them away. Astrid unloaded the dishwasher.
-Astrid baked cookies with me. She is almost to the point where she could bake cookies without any help from me. She can read the recipe herself now and find the right measuring cups and spoons. She can measure out the ingredients and crack the eggs. Soon I might encourage her to try it all on her own.
-Jul, Clover and Oakley came over for a couple hours to play and had supper with us.
-We watched a National Geographic documentary called 'The Incredible Human Body'.