Daddy worked night shifts recently,
so we gave him peace & quiet by
picking up donuts and spending a
Saturday morning at a local park.

Science Topics
Recent time at a park and on a rec trail have led to some fun local wildlife sightings. We've seen a turtle, a large yellow mushroom, a snake, tiny crabs, hundreds of snails (clinging to the grass in the photo at left), and watched a garden spider catch a bug in its web, wrap it, and carry it across the web.

We've also recently experienced a huge amount of rain--enough that the local school district closed for a day due to flooding. Fortunately, our house was fine, and we had good discussions about why "the clouds aren't running out of rain" and why some areas flood and others don't even though the same amount of rain falls.

Good rainy day activity: watching Bill Nye the Science Guy. We watched (and discussed at length) episodes about gravity and volcanoes/plate tectonics.

Go! Go! Go!
We're a couple of weeks into the running club and P.E. class. The girls love them, and we've all had the opportunity meet some other local homeschoolers. The only complaint I've heard is that Lion says the little kids group at running club doesn't get to run enough. She was particularly disappointed that the announced "timed half mile run" turned out to be an untimed quarter mile run for their age group. (She did note, however, that she crossed the finish line second, beaten only by a boy who was at least a head taller than her.)

Since the girls get credit for physical activity outside of club meetings--and double mileage if a parent exercises with them--we've gone on a couple of runs with our whole family. Both times we've gone to a rec trail about 30 minutes away. It's a two-mile straightaway with no off shoots. With Daddy and I both running the trail and keeping an eye on the girls this gives them a chance to run their individual pace and practice some independence by taking off on their own.

We've gone swimming a couple of times, too. Miss D invited us to use her pool until the end of the season. We got in one awesome swim day at her place, but relocated to the indoor pool at the Y the next week when the girls deemed it a bit too chilly to go jumping into an outdoor pool.

Pirates & Presidents
We've just finished our study of the U.S. presidents themselves, and now we're moving on to the how our government works and the election process (the very, very basics). My plan is for our study to wrap up around election day.

By popular demand we've also been studying pirates--specifically the female ones. We've been reading a book called Sea Queens that records the tales of pirate women from around the world as far back in history as ancient Greece, and I recently found a documentary about an Irish pirate from the 1700s that we'll be watching.

While neither a pirate nor a president, we also watched a documentary about one of the women who may have inspired Mulan tales. Since Mulan is one of the girls' favorite Disney movies, they were very curious about a possible history behind the story. This one involved the daughter of a washer woman who grew up to lead an army of 20,000 against an oppressive imperial government about the time of the American Revolution (she eventually lost, but's a pretty inspiring tale).