amandaspace1330

Last week we read the story Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. This beautifully illustrated story tells the story of a life lived to it's full. The story begins when Alice Rumphius is quite young and continues through her many adventures of life. The story ends with a new beginning, as Miss Rumphius passes her wisdom on to the next generation. Our vocabulary words this week: Chandler, Prow, Figurehead, Wharves. We learned about the Dewey Decimal system, and looked at the numbers on the books we had out of the library. We were excited to find a nice assortment of books in our "book bench". For Math we learned about the bushel as a unit of measurement. We proceeded to calculate many different conversions between a bushel and other, more familiar, units of measure. A bushel is about 32 quarts, so from there we could find how many 2 quart pitchers would make a bushel, how many gallons, and how many pecks, etc. In geography, we learned about all the geographical regions of th...

A few Saturdays back, we visited Hopewell Furnace National Park. We happened upon the Civil War reenactment day. Reenactors from multiple states came together to run the town like it was mid 1800's. It was super cool! Live animals, families with little children, blacksmith, a man fixing an old wooden fence by hand, women stitching, horses pulling sleds and even a man painting. It was a beautiful day, and Hopewell Furnace has a neat history. It was cool for us to happen upon this site on a special day. I was most impressed that this site was one of the first places in America that gave women equal wages and work. There is record of a woman logging the same payload as her male counterparts. Wow! Inspiring.  The next Sunday, the big kids and I ventured out to The Daniel Boone Homestead for Sheep Shearing day. It just happened to be a gorgeous 80 degree afternoon and we were all happy to be outside (Anastasia may have just been happy because she...

As mentioned previously, Anastasia turned four years old last month. She wanted her Snow White figurine on her birthday cake. Since I am a theme party sort-of person, I made this a Snow White party. There aren't party kits for Snow White, so I pulled ideas from a couple of different places to put the whole party together. I share the ideas here, hoping someone else can benefit from my research. Our party stretched over a couple of days, beginning on her birthday and ending after the grandparents came to celebrate with her. On her birthday morning, we woke her wearing dwarf hat/beards that I made out of felt. She enjoyed waking up to dwarves singing the birthday song. Then later that day, the kids had a treasure hunt. I hid gold wrapped candy and ring pops in the living room, and they pretended to be mining for treasure. The kids really enjoyed this game. I had a mirror craft ready at hand, but we never got to decorate mirrors, there were too many other things going on. The kids lov...