First Haiku from a First-Grader

I love my wallet.
I love my bunk bed today.
I love my toy too.

Earth Day Week in Review

Earth day was a great theme for us! Some highlights were taking care of our earth by cleaning up the trash at a local and sadly neglected park. Look at all the trash we found!

We also made some homemade paper. As an after thought Gracie added some petals on the wet paper, but they didn't really adhere. Next time we'll put petals into the wet pulp before we press it dry.

Gracie raided the recycle bin to repurpose a cardboard box into a beautiful treasure box!

We went to an earth day fair at the library where we saw a great puppet show. The most amazing thing about it was that all the puppets were made from repurposed or reused materials. There was a fish from an old sushi mat and simple little butterflies made from tiny pieces of plastic bag tied to the end of an old metal clothes hanger. So simple, but such a cool effect!

Our caterpillars arrived! They just began forming their cocoons yesterday. Very exciting to see the changes right before our eyes!
Our paper mache globe started out great, until little brother tried to throw it around like a ball. We've done some repair, but in our house, the earth IS flat...at least partially. I think that project is officially over.

We made blue and green earths with coffee filters and watercolors. Amaryllis is always proud to show off her work!

On an un-Earth Day note, Gracie was excited to finally get to play with the tangrams from our Saxon math manipulative kit.


We printed out some tangram puzzles that should keep Gracie busy for quite a while.

We finally finished our Jackson Pollock artist study. Read more about that here.
Gracie learned "to not use much electricity or there might be a fire. It's good to take care of the earth."

This probably seems like a lot for one week. Well, it wasn't. We spend 2 weeks on a theme, so this is a review of the last TWO weeks. I am NOT supermom. You can see plans for this theme here.

Food & Nutrition Week in Review

We finally settled down to some normalcy and finished up our food and nutrition plans. It was great fun, especially since Gracie did a lot of the cooking this week! Pretend Soup was the perfect cookbook to use for a beginning reader and cook. Each recipe has a grown-up page of directions and then a kid page of directions with pictures to make it easy to follow. We did some other things besides cook (you can see the plans here), but really, the food was the fun part! Here's our lunch of Pretend Soup and Noodle Pudding along with the proud chef! Amaryllis enjoyed all the participating (eating) she got to do in school this week! Here's Bright Pink Fruit Dip. Yes, that's really the name, and yes, Gracie chose it because of the name!

Gracie was proud of the Salad Bar she created. Can you tell her mom is a blogger?

A great story we read was One Grain Of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale. We acted out the first week that happens in the story, and then we just couldn't keep up anymore! Gracie also loved Strega Nona .

We played with our food a bit by making a food mosaic using beans, lentils and colored rice.

Gracie says, "I like to cook. My favorite was Oatmeal Surprise without raisins. And I like Peekaboo Muffins. Strawberries are my favorite food." (Both those recipes are also from Pretend Soup.)

Chinese New Year: Show and Tell

Gracie says, "It's handmade. I cut to make it. Chinese New Year dragons are not scary. The eyes are sequins. (When folding the paper) it's like they're fighting to be on top."

Martin Luther King Jr.: Show and Tell

Here are some belated pictures of our African-American history quilt that is mentioned here. Gracie says, "It has famous people. It's black and white. It's kind of like a book. It has string on it to tie it together. The pictures are glued on."