Rainy Days at Home

Today, the first day of spring, was a bit cool with cloud cover and a bit of drizzle.  It was the perfect day to be at home.  We took advantage of the day inside and did lots of reading.  Dakota started the day with the new Play and View from the library.  It's a small handheld device that plays movies adapted from children's books.  He watched The Mouse and the Motorcycle, a book I haven't been able to get him to read, and seemed to really enjoy it.  Afterward, we got his warmest fuzzy blanket from his room, cuddled in the chair and read three chapters of our Magic Tree House book, Dragon of the Red Dawn. After a slow start, these chapters were exciting and had many references to things we could talk about.  We answered our comprehension questions, looked up Mount Fuji, colored pictures of Japanese people in traditional dress and then did some suminagashi, which is an ancient Japanese technique for decorating paper with inks.  Instead of using ink, however, we took an idea from Pinterest and used milk and food color.  It worked okay, though not as good as I would have liked, but it got a "Cool" rating from Dakota, so I guess that will be sufficient :-)


Next up today was math, adding three digits in the form of money, and language arts, a compilation of spring fun worksheets and a silly book called Punctuation Celebration.  For science we looked through some of a very large book called Encylopedia of Endangered Animals and I sent him off to take his lunch break in his room with some very cute "learn to draw" pictures of endangered animals from www.enchantedlearning.com.  


For social studies today, we did a report on Carlton Fisk for tomorrow's co-op.  He is a famous Vermonteer, and that is it's relevance, but it is also the start of our upcoming baseball unit that we will begin next week.  We also got on www.funbrain.com and played a game called Math Baseball with subtraction.  I have decided to let him play a game on FunBrain at least twice a week.  They are fun and educational.  To wrap up our day, we did history in the form of a movie.  We are talking about immigration and I think An American Tail is a cute movie that is relevant.  


The rest of this week is not looking very well homeschooling-wise.  Tomorrow we have co-op and Dakota will get in a small bit of work afterward, but not much.  Thursday morning is a bust for him because he is going to his MomMom's while I work at Brian David's senior breakfast at school and Friday is the circus.  I wanted to do circus themed stuff this week, but it looks like next week it will have to be.  Oh well.  No matter how much you try, you can't do it all