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A Different Kind of Summer

Tuesday is August first and I am waist deep in homeschool planning, which is nothing new.  I am also planning for three classes that I now teach at a homeschool tutorial so that's a bit different, but the biggest change I would say is that this summer not only am I learning what it's like to be off work for a few months and home again every day, but I also do not have any daycare kids in the house.  I think for just about the first time in almost 30 years I do not have any little people coming to spend the day with us for fun in the sun.  The good thing about that is that there is no alarm clock most days, Dakota sleeps in and I get much more work done.  It's quieter.  The hubby isn't on me for daycare chaos and I don't have to plan activities to keep anyone busy.  The bad thing is also that I don't have to plan activities to keep anyone busy.  Gone for now (until my granddaughters are a bit older) are the "summer camp" days of Koda and his friends doi...
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Benjamin Banneker Day

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Today we continued our studies on Black History Month and learned about the inventor/scientist Benjamin Banneker.  We read a short biography on him that came with a cloze activity from www.edhelper.com and talked about what it meant to be a slave and what it meant to be a free black man during the colonial time period.  Benjamin Banneker was known for his work in astronomy, for making a working wooden model of a clock that kept perfect time for 50 years, for his work in mathematics and for his almanac.  Dakota thought that the idea of writing the facts you have discovered in a book and asked for a new spiral notebook, on the front of which he wrote in big letters, Dakota's Almanac.  Then he went back to the chapter we read in Story of the World and pulled a few facts from there to start his book.  He enjoyed the chapter we did today on the Shang Dynasty and made some really interesting pictographs of his own.  Math went off without a hitch, as did literatu...
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Leaping into Third Grade....Literally!

Thursday was our last work day of second grade and to our surprise and delight, Dad brought home a bucketful of tadpoles Wednesday evening!  I decided, as any true homeschooler would, of course, to use this as a stepping stone for a day spent learning about frogs.  We finished our math book for the year and Dakota got his reading done on his chapter book and then we set up the aquarium for the tadpoles.  We learned about what they need to survive and why.  We read books, did cloze activities, looked at an anatomy model, did a lifecycle puzzle, made a craft tadpole with a template and brads and watched two magic school bus videos, one about swamps and one about cold blooded animals.  By days end, we were frog aficionados! Friday saw us at our county review early in the morning. It went smoothly, as always, but Natalie was a beast and I was feeling stressed by the time we left.  We dropped our frog learning things off to a friend who was also gifted tadpole...
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