Tuesdays with Tiffany....on Wednesday

...and a spotlight on Isaac's obsession, Geography!

Isaac's first "State Journal Page"...Objective is for him to draw the state, put a star on the capitol, and write a simple sentence about the state.  He has to make up his own sentence.

Pennsylvania: The Keystone State. And, yes, he even knows what a keystone's job is.  At my last inquiry of him about what a keystone is, he answered  very matter of factly, "It keeps things from falling apart, like Jesus keeps my heart from falling apart!"

New Jersey. He didn't write a sentence here, but he did make sure to draw Thomas Edison and the light bulb!

Georgia: The picture to the far left is a peanut plant, next  to it a peach tree, then a peach and peanut.  The train you see is the "state train of Georgia" called the "Peach Glider".  He didn't draw a star for Atlanta, but who knows why?!

This is his first time to come up with such a "real" sentence!  "Peaches and Peanuts grow in Georgia!"

Connecticut: It is the Nutmeg State.  I know the river is mislabeled, but I just wrote what Isaac told me. He's so rarely wrong about these things, that I took his word for it!  There really is a river though that divides the state in half!

Massachusetts: It is the Bay State.  This is his first time doing the copying without some amount of guidance. A few misspellings, but altogether, not bad for a 4 year old!

We haven't gotten to this state, yet, but Isaac made the landscape of Arizona. The cross looking things are cacti, the "wood floor" is the dessert sand, and the circle train track is going around the Grand Canyon!

We can't do Geography without trains!

This is a fabulous site called Sheppard Software.  It has great games and activities from pre-school to high school!  We'll skip a few things on their site, but overall, we love it!

 This is a video of Isaac playing one of the geography games. He gets the general outline of the United States, and then has to click on the space the state that they tell him is in!  He does a really good job with this!

When Mom's Away

Muffin Tin Monday

This week marks our first Muffin Tin Monday! The basic idea - food in a muffin tin. It's intended to change up the mealtime routine (what routine?) and can be breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, dessert, whatever!

The theme this go-around is Pumpkins, so here's our entry.

Clockwise from the left, we have a Happy Pumpkin bologna sandwich, three mellocreme pumpkin candies, a stack of mandarin oranges with an onion sprout stem, homemade pumpkin bread sticks, and yogurt with pumpkin purée. Of course, Isaac started with the candies.

Apples, carrots, and now pumpkins. Don't you just love fall?

They help you see in the dark, don't they?

The weather this past week in Southeast Michigan has been absolutely gorgeous. Cass Lake weather, we would call it - sunny and mid-60s/70s in the day, 40s and high 30s at night (good sleeping weather). It's this type of weather that makes me miss being in an office all day *so much* </sarcasm>

Anyway, so I took advantage of the day and did some fall clean-up around the garden beds. As I was pulling dead leaves and weeds out of the raised bed, I found some of the carrots that we planted (at Isaac's behest, though he won't eat carrots to save his life) back in the late spring. Not expecting much, I tugged at the tuft of green and found a tiny little carrot, about half as long as my pinky and not much bigger around.

Yay, a carrot! That I grew! Nobody famous once said, "Food never tastes so good as when you have raised/grown/cooked it yourself." Or they should have, at least.

Continuing with the garden cleaning, I pulled up the netting that we had placed over the sown carrot seeds to deter little munchy creatures from going all Peter Rabbit on our garden. If you ever want to harvest carrots easily, install plastic netting over them when you sow. The tops grow up through the netting, and when you pull it up, zzzzipp!, up come all the carrots at once!

But Zeb, I didn't know you could grow pre-sized baby carrots? Yours are so cute!

I will confess that I have always been apprehensive about growing things from seed - too high of a failure rate after the seedlings get to be about 2 inches tall. With that in mind, when we saw a plethora of tiny carrot sprouts, I was so overjoyed that they were growing(!) that I couldn't bear to thin them out. What if I plucked the good one and the rest of them failed?

As you can see by the photos, none of our carrots grew very large, because they were overcrowded. But we did get carrots, by George! Who knows if we'll try again next year?

Esther continues her agricultural exploration

Just to tie this to home education, Isaac worked on a file folder game later in the afternoon. And what should appear out of the bag, but a carrot counting game! Isaac breezed through it like a champ. Counting 1-5, check!