Homeschool in September

Cormorants 

Gathering some mugwort for her little pillow project.

Wiggly hermit crab.

Lots of little things in the tidal pool.

Bigger crab.

Stuffing her pillow with wool she found at a farm at some point and saved.

Off to dance class!

Ready for ballet!

Ready for tap!

Lining up tons of toys to represent all of Pings family.

Working on sorting sizes.

Illustrating a part of the story Ping.

Cutting, her favorite thing to do right now.

Buoyancy experiment.

Making a paper Ping.

Doing some math outside with sidewalk chalk.

Lots of homeschooling done in pajamas over here!

The first book we started on this year was The Story About Ping. I was still recovering from surgery, so we were mostly at home, with one little walk down to the water. We made flags of China, found China on the map, drew the Yangtze River on a map of China - I was really surprised at how much Penelope remembered about China from last spring when we studied China for International Night with our homeschool group.

We learned about cormorants, watched a fascinating movie about them fishing for people on boats just like in Ping - they can count! They are pretty smart birds. Then we walked downtown to the water to look at the cormorants we have here. We discovered a tidal pool that kept the kids very happy for a long time and there was lots of crab catching going on.

We studied the illustrations in the book and did some drawings of water with reflections in it and used ripples to show water moving and things moving through the water. We also learned that Penelope can not stand the word ripple, which caused Violet to figure out a way to incorporate the word in nearly every sentence for a week. We also made some cute paper plate Pings.

We did some outside math in the driveway and also used toys to represent Ping and his family. Penelope was able to figure out exactly how many were in his family by doing this. There were a lot of little ducks on that tiny wise eyed boat!

Of course we had fried rice for dinner one night. We did a buoyancy experiment where the girls gathered a pile of things they thought would float and a pile of things they thought would sink. We were all surprised by some of the items doing the opposite of what we predicted. We also discussed water safety and how the little boy wearing a barrel was just like Violet wearing a floaty when she swims.

The girls also began dance classes. They love dance, they have been waiting so long to try it. It was a great first week of homeschool!