First week of school

This actually happened a couple weeks ago: Mary and I decided to turn some of her commemorative T-shirts into drawstring bags and pillow covers.



This week, Audrey wanted to try the sewing machine. She did a good job of keeping the fabric straight while she tried the various stitches the machine can do.



We built some crazy creatures with our Zometool kit. I bought a pack of lesson plans that have topics in math, engineering, science, and art. Pretty soon we'll try the bubble lesson plans and make cube-shaped bubbles!



We started our school on Monday. Audrey is doing school for the first time. Here's what they're studying:

Audrey (5 1/2)
Math (Right Start B) - we're skimming over and through the first several lessons. This was a hand-me-down from Mary.
Spelling (All About Spelling Level 1) - again, skimming and skipping. She already knows consonants and short vowels well
Reading - whatever beginning books we have around the house or get from the library. Last night we sorted out the "too easy" books from the "just right" and "too hard" ones.
Writing (Handwriting Without Tears) - we reviewed the capital letters, learned the numbers she didn't already know (4 and 8 are tricky). Today she copied our address and phone number (always good to know).
Other subjects: read-alouds, geography (basic map skills, continents and bodies of water, land and water forms), science (looking at interesting things with jeweler's loups or under the microscope), art (haven't done any lessons yet, but I have Artistic Pursuits from when Mary was little, and she draws a lot on her own)

Mary (10 1/2)
Latin (Latin Alive Level One) - she likes this a lot so far. She enjoyed Greek, but there wasn't a Greek program at the appropriate level. We started with Elementary Greek, but the readings, which made her eyes light up, only came every five chapters, and the rest was grammar charts. All scales and no music. We tried Athenaze, but it's meant for high school or college students, so the readings got too long too fast, and it didn't have all the nice hand-holding things, like recordings to show you how to pronounce the vocabulary words, that you get with courses aimed at younger students. And we had to adapt the grammar exercises to fit an 8-year-old's attention span, so she wasn't getting as much grammar practice as she needed. Latin Alive is aimed at middle school students, so the pace of instruction is very comfortable for Mary. I bought the DVDs, so she watches the lesson and follows along in her book. The written exercises are pretty short so far. The readings start with a few short sentences, ramp up to a couple short paragraphs, and by the end of the book she'll be reading close to a page in Latin. Each unit has a reading with questions in the style of the AP or National Latin Exam, so if she wants to take either exam when she's older, she'll be familiar with the format.

Math - I didn't buy a math curriculum this year. We are going to use a combination of Life of Fred, lesson plans from Zometool, Mythmatical Battles and other card games, books like "The Number Devil", and Singapore 5B, which we have left from last year. I did buy an interesting book called "Is Democracy Fair? The Mathematics of Voting and Apportionment" which we probably won't use until the 2012 election, assuming I can still find it then. The math in it looks a little advanced for her right now.

Writing - A lot of her academic writing skills (note-taking, writing paragraphs and essays) will be done through her history studies. She writes lots of fiction on her own, and I'm sure she'll want to do NaNoWriMo again this year. For mechanics, I have a book on homophones and some diagramming resources that we can pull out from time to time. Before NaNoWriMo starts, I'll need to remind her how to punctuate dialog.

History - Mary wanted to find out all about everybody who came to America, and when they came and why. Right now she's reading a great book called "Before Columbus" by Charles Mann. I found a good Smithsonian website on Viking settlements
and we'll get into some European history as we learn about the early colonists and the big wave that came through Ellis Island. She and Scott are going on a field trip to an archaeological dig site of an inland Spanish settlement.

Science: she's taking a physics class for homeschooled middle-schoolers through the university's Carolina Center for Educational Excellence.

Other stuff: piano, maybe some logic, Movies as Literature, reading good books, Girl Scout badges and her Bronze Award, and whatever else comes up.

The last unicorn

Last Sunday, we visited an unusual place nearby. The Last Unicorn is a cross between an antique store, outdoor sculpture garden, and junkyard. The owner has been collecting interesting wrought iron and stained glass for decades, and displays them in his five-acre wooded yard. There are cottages with walls made entirely of stained glass windows, themed areas such as Narnia Forest.

Audrey enjoyed going over the troll bridge. The owner enjoys putting together creative displays of his antiques, and combining pieces in interesting ways. Scott was impressed that he managed to get "The Last Unicorn" as his URL. He figured the Rankin-Bass movie would have scored thelastunicorn.com.

Beach vacation

For Scott's "company picnic" this year, we spent a week at a beach house. It was our first trip to one of the Carolina beaches, and we had a great time playing in the sand:





And surf:


Mary mastered boogie boarding:


We saw baby sea turtles make their way into the surf. This nest had 125 eggs. We watched them crawl down the turtle racetrack and into the ocean.



For a change of pace, we caught the ferry to Bald Head Island one afternoon. Old Baldy is the oldest lighthouse in North Carolina, dating from 1817. Yes, the light is off-center.


It's a bit tight at the top:


But there's a pretty view of the tidal creeks:

Garden critters

I saw this butterfly puddling on a mound of dog poop. Rich in nutrients, I suppose. This is some kind of swallowtail, possibly pipevine swallowtail, or a black form female Eastern tiger swallowtail, or spicebush swallowtail. The tails aren't very prominent. It hung around for a really long time, until Lucy came over to see what I was looking at.

More butterflies, maybe Pearl crescent, although it looks more like Phaon crescent to my untrained eye. Here's my source for North Carolina butterflies.

Lucy's determined to catch a frog. She's caught squirrels, voles, lizards, bugs, bunnies, and chased a big ole deer out of the yard.

A rare sighting of the elusive red-shirted ice cream eater!

We tried out the Crayola 3D sidewalk chalk. It's fun to see the pictures float off the driveway. Red flowers, like our lonely canna, float off their stems, as well.

Summer Garden

My friend Charlotte asked How does your garden grow? in her blog. Here's what's growing in my garden.

The beets managed to beat the heat. And there are some teeny tiny carrots.



Parsley and sage, above. But no rosemary or thyme, so you can stop singing, Mom. The oregano, below, looks a bit scraggly, but still tastes good. On those 100 degree days, you can smell it baking in the sun as soon as you step out of the garage.


The basil looks healthy. I think these seeds came from a box of Triscuits.

One sad gladiolus, above. A few others bloomed earlier in the summer. One canna, below.

Lots and lots of this flower. I finally found out its name: Cleome or spider flower. We've been calling it fireworks flower. And this gigantic weed below. Princess tree (Paulownia tomentosa).

And lots of poison ivy. Not actually in the garden, but there's plenty of it all around the yard.

That's it for plants. I think I'll save the critters for another post.

Finally moving in

We've been living in our house for two years now, and we're finally moving in. There are no more books in boxes. Now there are books in the computer niche in the basement...


... in the other niche created by load-bearing walls in the basement...


... and on bookcases in the storage room in the basement.

It looks like "the stacks" in the music library at Northwestern. The main part of the music library was a beautiful historic building, but the stacks were in a dimly lit, temperature and humidity controlled underground concrete room. They probably didn't keep their furnace and water heater and leftover construction materials in with the books, though.

The girls have their bookcases up in their bedroom, as well. I moved Audrey's bookcases out of the playroom because no one could get to them there. Now she's rediscovering some old favorites, most of which she's grown out since she last read them.

Finally moving in also means putting holes in the walls. Scott hung up some shelves in the dining room, and now we have a place to display some pottery. There's a piece by a local potter, a candlestick Mom and Dad brought back from Hungary, the tea set from our trip to Singapore, things Scott's mom collected, and pieces the kids have made in classes and camps.


Before, our knick-knacks were hidden in the hallway. Now the cookbooks live there.


Getting all those cookbooks off the kitchen counter made a lot of room for the stuff that won't fit in the baking supplies drawer. The counter's still cluttered, but not like it was before. The oils and boxes of breadcrumbs came all the way to the edge, before. It was hard to reach the knives.


I think we were holding off on finally moving in because we were waiting until we finished renovating the rest of the house. But we've decided we're done renovating for a while (probably a long while). So, it's time to just enjoy living in our house.

I cleaned the guest room

Hey, Mom and Dad, I'm getting ready for your visit! All the stuff we moved out of the rest of the basement during the renovation was piled up in the guest room, but now it's ready for guests.