Butterfly Gardening

Here are some pictures of the new additions to our butterfly garden. First, there's Mary helping plant milkweed. Audrey loves using the watering can. She even watered the insides of her boots! They were very squishy when she was done, even after dumping the water out. When we went out to water the plants tonight, we found two caterpillars on the milkweed, a big one and a tiny one. We brought the big one in for closer observation. Pretty soon we'll have a monarch butterfly.

Spider eats dragonfly

Yesterday morning when I went out to get the paper, I saw a dragonfly stuck in a spider web. Mary and I watched the spider climbing around on its prey for a while. This morning, there wasn't much left of the dragonfly, and the spider had rebuilt its web.

Making connections in Greek

Today we were listening to this week's new vocabulary words, and the first one was biblion, meaning book. Mary said, "Hey, that sounds like the Spanish word for library!" It's neat to see her make connections like that. And it's amazing how many words that came into English (or Spanish, obviously) from Latin, came into Latin from Greek. Studying Greek instead of Latin makes me feel like we're looking back further into the history of language. I'm still convinced our word dowry is related to the Greek word doron (gift) from last week's vocabulary. I can't find a direct link in any online etymology site I've visited, but it seems they both come from the same Indo European root.

operation habitat

We finished our microscope unit in science, and now we're trying to get our yard certified as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat. This week we surveyed our yard to see what it offers in the way of food, water, shelter, and places to raise young. We've got a lot of good plants already and some dense shrubs. All we need is a birdbath, and we'll be ready to certify! I'd like to get one that's a fountain, so it doesn't become a breeding ground for mosquitos. Some wildlife we don't want to encourage! Mary wrote a haiku about our backyard:

Firespike is dense
Hummingbirds like its nectar
Butterflies do too.

Need more art

We haven't been doing much art, except for little craft projects that Audrey can do with us (does Play-Doh count as art education?) I liked the books I bought, but pulling all the resources together has been too time-consuming, and we haven't been making time to actually do any of the projects I've planned. So I went ahead and ordered the second Artistic Pursuits K-3 book. We enjoyed their lessons two years ago, and Mary looked forward to art every week. Now art can be a grab-and-go subject.

Drip by drip

Charlotte Mason advocated short, focused lessons, and that's what we're doing here, not on purpose, but because that's all the time Audrey allows us. We're not reading or writing as much as I think we should, but Greek, math and Spanish are touched on every day, or nearly so, and piano happens pretty regularly, even if it's only a playing one short piece a couple of times. When I think we're getting nothing done, I look ahead to the end of the book to see what all these little drips will add up to by the end of the year. Dripping water can drill a hole in rock or build stalactites and stalagmites, one drip at a time.

Greek Everywhere

Now that Mary and I are starting to learn Greek, we're discovering Greek words everywhere. The classical homeschoolers always point out how much English vocabulary comes from Latin, but there's much less mention of how much Greek we have. I would have guessed it was just all those -ology words, but there are so many more Greek-based words in our language. For example, the other day we went to the children's museum (museum comes from Greek). In the painting area, Mary wondered why there was only red paint set out. Another mom sitting next to her said, "I don't know, but do you know what it's called when you paint with shades of just one color? A monochrome."
"Hey," I thought, "I'll bet that's Greek!"
So when we got home we looked it up, and sure enough, mono (one) and chrome (color) are both Greek. We found lots more mono and chrome words in the dictionary. We've started a collection of Greek-based words we come across. Now that we're aware of them, we'll be noticing lots more.