Homeschooling on a Baseball Sort of Day

It's Opening Day here in Baltimore and there is a definite buzz in the air here at our house.  Both the Brians, Jr and Sr, took the day off of school and work to go to the game and Dakota and I will be watching on TV.  I let Dakota enjoy the morning hanging out with his brother and going to the dump, a very coveted trip!, with his dad.  We didn't get started til after lunch and Dakota wasn't really feeling ready to school since no one else was working, so I tickled his fancy with a few baseball books I had gotten out of library last week on baseball, including Dad, Me and Jackie Robinson.  This was a very good book told from the perspective of a young boy in 1947 who's deaf father knew nothing about baseball, but became a huge Jackie Robinson fan and, after a visit to a Brooklyn Dodgers game, asked his baseball loving son to teach him the game.  This gave us a chance to talk about baseball, but also about segregation and revisit our lesson on Rosa Parks and how the Negro people were segregated in our country not all that long ago.  This must have gotten his interest because he wrote about it in his journal today and he also told his dad how he learned about Jackie Robinson and retold the book to him.  Afterward we did our math and a spring Scholastic news before going in to watch a video on Good Manners that I thought would take a good half hour.  Should have watched it first because honestly, it didn't take five minutes!!  Okay, so much for mopping the floor while he watched that video!  Last on our list today was music and science, combined this time in the song The Rainforest Grew All Around from the book of the same name.  We did this echo song, talked about a fun way to incorporate it into our co-op class on Thursday and then went back and read the information in the book about the various rainforest animals and did the activities in the back on animal adaptation.  There was also a recipe for Rainforest Cupcakes, using ingredients we get from the rainforest and Dakota and I decided that it would be the perfect thing to do for tomorrow when we don't have anywhere to go and it's supposed to be rainy and gray yet again.  Now we have the O's game on but we've decided that our deck is calling to us to clean it and ready it for spring so we are heading out to clean and scrub and put our swing and deck furniture together.  Maybe by next weekend we'll get another warm day (surely haven't been many of them so far!) and we'll be able to take our homeschooling out to the deck and listen to the birds and feel the breeze!  Sounds like heaven.