Cindy's Life as She Knows It

Today is Halloween and we had a full and fun day. We started out with Social Studies, making a poster for manners and doing a few other homework assignments from our Cub Scout handbook.  We had an early detour in our plans when Natalie wasn't feeling well and had to be taken in to the doctor.  Poor baby has walking pneumonia!  I am glad we got her in early and caught it before she got really sick.  After that we visited the Arbutus library to take back a bunch of books and to get a new stack for this coming week, including some new drawing books by Ed Emberley that are Dakota's new favorites.  He as a "creation" book now for all his writings and drawing. We came home for lunch and then I let Koda do a little reading before he and I read a stack of Halloween books.  We read Stellaluna, Charlie Brown and more.  We then continued our Digestion lesson for Science and Health by watching Bill Nye the Science Guy and then did our math.  We h...

Today was our annual trip to Clark's Farm in Howard County.  I've been going there for many years now, since Brian David was little.  I remember some of my friends with their babies, who are now older than Dakota!  Today I had my baby boy, who is almost too old for the attractions, and my daughter with my granddaughter, who was really too young this year to enjoy it.  We met three of our favorite families there along with some other homeschool friends and spen the morning feeding the animals, going on a hayride and picking an itty bitty pumpkin.  My favorite part of the day was going with our friends to the evergreen maze and watching Dakota and his seven little friends running with each other through the maze, laughing and chattering with each other while we mommies tried to keep up.  I am so glad that Dakota and I have found close friends who we see at most events and that our group is slowly growing to include more wonderful women and their awesome kids....

Yesterday was a really busy day.  We are working on bones and the skeletal system right now for Science and Health. We are having fun with that, making pasta skeletons and reading fun books.  We also started reading A Good Night for Ghosts, a Merlin story in the Magic Tree House series.  I love those books and I'm glad that Dakota does now too.  This one is all about New Orleans in the early 1900's and they go back to find a young Louis Armstrong and set him on the right path to becoming the King of Jazz.  Not only was I able to pull a great music lesson out of there, introducing Dakota to both jazz and Armstrong, but we are also adding to our vocabulary with alot of words he is unfamiliar with from the time period like streetcars.  He had no idea what they were until we saw some great drawings in the book.  Every kid has their hot button....the one that will make them do just about anything to receive it.  For some kids it's M&Ms.  For...

After a day off for Columbus Day, another day off because I couldn't get enough done on our day off and then co-op and a game day playdate on Wednesday, we finally got back to the routine today.  WWe started working on the human body for Science and Health....talking about skeletons around Halloween seemed too perfect to pass up!  We are going to continue learning about bones and the human skeleton for science and go through the systems of the body for health.  Everything came together for geography/social studies/history.  We read a few different sections of 100 Explorers and talked about Columbus and then Magellan and Drake.  We had previously mapped Columbus's route on a world map on the wall and today we added the route around the world for the other two.  We talked about how their adventure and success traveling around the globe convinced the rest of the world that the Earth was indeed round!  Then we read a great book about maps and globes and di...

Today was the observed holiday for Columbus Day and since my older son had the day off I decided ot give Dakota and I the day off too.  We had covered Columbus in great depth (for a first grader, that is) last week.  We read books, mapped his route, talked about his ideas, did some fun papers and then on Friday we made stand up replicas of the Nina (that Koda pronounces "Ninna"), Pinta and Santa Maria and of good old Columbus himself.  Our day started with friends stopping by early.  We ladies had coffee on the deck and the kids played inside.  After they left I decided to tackle the rest of the move towards getting all Dakota's toys into his room and making Natalie's room the nursery with a homeschool cabinet and closet.  It took me about 90 minutes to clean Dakota's room and finish squeezing the last of his little toys into the remaining nooks and crannies while he did a lite brite sheet.  The hubby came home for lunch so we stopped for a lit...

Today I had dozens of things that needed doing, but when Dakota woke up he was eager to get his school day started.  It was a laid back day, sort of fly by the seat of your pants.  We started out with science and continued learning about the layers of the Earth and volcanoes.  I put up a poster with wonderful visuals of the inside of a volcano and we talked about that.  We did part of the SchoolExpress Earth packet and then got out our Oriental Trading compass craft and used a hot glue gun to put that together.  Dakota really liked this part!  Afterward he watched a Magic School Bus video MSB Blows It's Top.  For literature today we read Little Quack's Bedtime and Ping for pleasure and then got into a lesson on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Ugly Duckling.  Koda liked the story, but completely missed the lesson learned.  We talked about beauty only being skin deep and loving everyone for who they are, no matter what they look lik...

Last night my husband and had a date.  This doesn't happen often this time of year when time is short, work is piled up and football is in full swing.  We used to go to the Ravens games all the time many years ago, but when our older son got to be 7 or 8 it became the thing to do for father and son and I rarely went.  Then, as the son got to be a teen, I was no longer enough fun to take to the games.  I didn't yell loud enough or often enough, wouldn't paint crazy things on my skin or tolerate stupid behavior from intoxicated people. So I stayed home and really, I didn't mind.  The little son came along and he and I hang out on Sundays, although he's starting to want a little more fair sharing of the tickets!  So anyway, last night my husband asked me to go on a date with him to the Sunday nght game at M&T Bank Stadium between the Ravens and the Jets.  He even made reservations at Nick's Fish House for appetizers and we arrived at 5:00 an...